Lenin: A biography

At times the Bolsheviks had very considerable funds at their disposal, some of it legitimate in origin, some of it not. Some came from local Party committees in Russia, who in turn gathered it from their members and supporters: on the eve of the 1905 revolution, there were probably 10,000 paid-up members of the Party altogether. In his memoirs, the former Bolshevik A.D. Naglovsky wrote that in the summer of 1905 he was sent by the Kazan committee to Geneva to hand over 20,000 roubles to Lenin and await instructions.136 In fact, the origins of such money were tortuous. Lenin himself frankly admitted after the revolution: ‘The old Bolshevik was right when he explained what Bolshevism was to the Cossack who’d asked him if it was true the Bolsheviks stole. “Yes,” he said, “we steal what has already been stolen.”’137

At the 4th Congress of the RSDLP in 1906, at which the two factions were meant to have reunited, a fierce struggle took place between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks over whether such ‘expropriations’ in the interests of the revolution should be countenanced. The Bolsheviks proposed that armed raids on banks be allowed. The Mensheviks opposed this vigorously, and succeeded in passing their own resolution. Nevertheless, the robberies continued, with Lenin’s knowledge. Krupskaya, who was well informed on the subject, wrote frankly that ‘the Bolsheviks thought it permissible to seize tsarist treasure and allowed expropriations’.138 At the centre of this bandit venture stood the Bolsheviks Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin) and Semyon Ter-Petrosyan (Kamo). The operation was run by Leonid Krasin, a highly qualified electrical engineer.

The biggest ‘expropriation’ took place at midday on 26 July 1907 on Yerevan Square in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia. As two carriages carrying banknotes to the bank entered the square, a man in an officer’s uniform jumped out of a phaeton and starting shouting orders. From nowhere, a gang of ‘expropriators’ emerged, throwing bombs and firing shots. Three people fell dead by the carriages, and many more were wounded. Sacks containing 340,000 roubles were rapidly thrown into the phaeton, and in three or four minutes the square was deserted.139

The stolen banknotes were of large denominations, and the Bolsheviks were not able to convert them all even by the time of the revolution. Those who attempted to do so, as Krupskaya recalled, were arrested. ‘In Stockholm they picked up Strauyan of the Zurich group, in Munich, Olga Ravich of the Geneva group and Bogdasaryan and Khodzhamiryan who had just left Russia, and Semashko in Geneva. The Swiss burghers were terrified to death. All they could talk about was the Russian expropriators.’140 The Tiflis operation was the most ambitious of all those carried out by the radical wing of the RSDLP. Other ‘expropriations’ included the seizure of large sums from the steamship Nikolai I in the port of Baku, and the robbery of post offices and railway ticket offices. Officially, the Bolshevik Centre was not involved, but part of the loot was sent by Dzhugashvili and Ter-Petrosyan to the Bolsheviks,141 and Lenin paid small ‘Party salaries’ – sums ranging from 200 to 600 French francs – to the dozen or so members of his inner Party nucleus, the Bolshevik Centre.142

There are many unpublished documents in the Lenin archives concerning financial affairs, some of them requiring careful deciphering. One thing is clear enough, however: Bolshevik money was under Lenin’s control. He taught himself to handle money and to keep all kinds of bills and invoices, and detailed lists of his own expenses, often of trivial amounts. There is, for instance, a ‘personal budget’ for 3 July 1901 to 1 March 1902, running to thirteen pages.143 Money figures in much of his correspondence with the family. His earnings from the pamphlets and newspaper articles he wrote for the revolutionary press formed a small, if not negligible, part of Lenin’s income, as his literary output was of interest to only a few people. It was his family and Party ‘injections’ taken from the donations of rich sympathizers that supported him.

Formally, Lenin stood aside from the ‘expropriations’, preferring, as in many of his ventures, to remain off-stage. His speeches and editorials, whether published in his own weekly, Proletarii, founded in 1906, or in other revolutionary organs, however, reveal a more ‘balanced’ position on the ‘expropriations’ than a simple prohibition. For instance, six months after the 4th Congress, which had condemned ‘partisan actions’, he wrote: ‘When I see social democrats proudly and smugly declaring, “We are not anarchists, we’re not thieves or robbers, we are above all that, we condemn partisan warfare,” I ask myself if these people realize what they are saying.’144 He had earlier stated that the combat groups must be free to act, but with ‘the least harm to the personal safety of ordinary citizens and the maximum harm to the personal safety of spies, active Black Hundreds, the authorities, the police, troops, the navy and so on and so forth.145 The Black Hundreds were ultra-rightist organizations, with such names as the Union of Russian Men, the Russian Monarchist Union, the Society for Active Struggle against Revolution and Anarchy. Rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Western, they organized virulent press campaigns, as well as violent physical attacks, against the liberal and socialist movements.

In 1911, Kamo (Ter-Petrosyan) was in Lenin’s sitting-room in Paris, eating almonds and recounting the details of his arrest in Berlin in 1907, when the authorities had caught him trying to transport explosives and weapons. He had spent the last four years in prison in Germany, feigning insanity. Krupskaya recalled that ‘Ilyich listened and felt so sorry for this selflessly brave, childishly naive man with such a burning heart, willing to do great deeds … during the civil war Kamo found his niche and again performed miracles of heroism.’146 Kamo did not know that he and his ilk were merely blind tools of the Bolshevik Centre, needed to acquire money ‘for the revolution’ by whatever means. For the Bolsheviks violence and ‘exes’ were part of a wide range of methods to be used as the need arose. It is likely, however, that the ‘exes’ were one of the main sources of the Party’s pre-revolutionary funds, under the control of Lenin’s trustees Krasin, Bogdanov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Ganetsky and a few others. This explains how his mother’s ‘injections’ into her son’s personal budget were regularly topped up by his ‘Party salary’, which though not great, was no less than the average wage of a European worker. According to Valentinov, the maximum Party salary for the Bolshevik leaders was fixed at 350 Swiss francs.147 This was the amount Lenin stated he received every month, while not declining the money his mother went on sending him right up to her death in 1916.

A major source of funding, both to the Party coffers and for Lenin’s personal needs, came from private benefactors. At the turn of the century the Russian social democrats, like the liberals, enjoyed a certain degree of sympathy, not only from sections of the intelligentsia, but also from a number of industrialists, who looked to the revolutionaries for liberation from the conservative attitudes of the autocracy. The relationship sometimes took on bizarre form. The ‘N. Schmidt affair’, for instance, sometimes seemed like a detective story, and even now aspects of it are unclear, as the papers relating to the case were carefully concealed for many years. The official version has always been that the ‘affair’ took place for the good of the Bolshevik cause. In Krupskaya’s words, the funds which came from this source provided a ‘sound material base’.148

The Schmidt affair began with the millionaire Savva Morozov, the head of a large merchant dynasty in Moscow. His relatives were known as patrons of the arts and social enterprises. One was a celebrated collector of ceramics, while another collected rare Russian and foreign paintings. Both collections ended up as Soviet state property. The Morozovs built hospitals, founded courses to eradicate illiteracy, supported theatres. The well-known newspaper Russkie vedomosti (Russian News) depended on Savva Morozov’s largesse for many years. At the beginning of the century, under the influence of Maxim Gorky, he gave money to publish the social democratic paper Iskra and to help social democratic organizations. His motivation was probably less social than religious or spiritual, expressing a desire to support not only culture but also the oppressed. A somewhat confused individual, his mind haphazard and unstable, he was terrified of going insane, and in Cannes in May 1905, in a moment of deep depression, he killed himself. Through Gorky, he left a large amount in his will to the Bolsheviks – 100,000 roubles, according to some sources.

Savva’s nephew, Nikolai Pavlovich Schmidt, owned a large furniture factory in Moscow, and also supported the social democrats. During the armed uprising in Moscow in December 1905 he was arrested for supporting the ‘insurgents’, and in February 1907, aged twenty-three, he killed himself in prison in suspicious circumstances. It is still unclear why he should have done this, just before he was to be released on his family’s surety. In any event, he left part of his estate to revolutionary causes, although not exclusively to the Bolsheviks. According to the law, his estate should have gone to his two sisters, Yekaterina and the sixteen-year-old Yelizaveta, and a younger brother, but then two of Nikolai’s young Bolshevik acquaintances, Nikolai Andrikanis and Viktor Taratuta, entered the scene.

It seems that these two had been deputed to ensure that Nikolai’s money came to the Bolsheviks. Their assignment was to court, conquer and marry the girls, nothing less. Taratuta, whom Lenin knew well, and his comrade performed their rôles to perfection, and both girls were swept away by the romance of ‘preparing for revolution’ in Russia. Soon, however, Andrikanis began having second thoughts about handing over the inheritance to the Party. Lenin wrote (the text in the archive is in the hand of Inessa Armand) that ‘one of the sisters, Yekaterina Schmidt (married to Mr Andrikanis), questioned giving the money to the Bolsheviks. The conflict was settled by arbitration in Paris in 1908, with the good offices of members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party … The judgment was that the Schmidt money should go to the Bolsheviks.’149 In 1909 the two newly married couples arrived in Paris.

Andrikanis, however, would only part with a small amount. When it was decided that he should be ‘tried’ by a Party court, he simply left the Party, which had to be content with the crumbs ‘Person X’, as he was codenamed, had deigned to cast its way.150 In order to act before the funds of the younger sister, Yelizaveta (who was still a minor, and whose financial affairs were in the hands of a trustee), were also cut off, a session of the Bolshevik Centre was held in Paris on 21 February 1909. Zinoviev, who took the minutes, recorded: ‘In January 1908 Yelizaveta X told the Bolshevik Centre … that in carrying out her brother’s will as correctly as possible, she considered herself morally obliged to give the Bolshevik Centre the half-share of her brother’s property that had come to her legally. That half, which she inherited by law, includes eighty-three shares in Company X and about 47,000 roubles of available capital.’ The document is signed by N. Lenin, Grigorii (Zinoviev), Marat (V. Shantser), V. Sergeev (Taratuta), Maximov (A. Bogdanov), Y. Kamenev.151

It was agreed that the money should be transferred after sale of the shares. In November, Taratuta and Yelizaveta came back to Paris and handed Lenin more than a quarter of a million francs. By now the Bolsheviks had received more than half a million francs, as documents written and signed by Lenin indicate: ‘In accordance with the decision and calculations of the executive commission of the Bolshevik Centre (plus the editorial board of Proletarii) of 11 November 1909, I have received from Ye. X. two hundred and seventy thousand nine hundred and eighty four (275,984) francs.’152 He issued a receipt to Yelizaveta and Taratuta, stating: ‘We, the undersigned, acting in the matter of the money with power of attorney from Comrade Vishnevsky, in concluding the case conducted by the entire Bolshevik Centre, and in taking over the remainder of the money, accept before you the obligation to answer to the Party collegially for the fate of this money. Signed N. Lenin, Gr. Zinoviev.’153

This was not the end of the affair. After various vain attempts to reunite the Party, the Mensheviks raised the question of uniting the Party funds. The question was, who was to control the capital, which of course contained more than just the Schmidt inheritance. After long and heated argument, it was agreed in 1910 that the Party’s resources be handed over to three depositors, the well-known German social democrats Clara Zetkin, Karl Kautsky and Franz Mehring, and in due course a substantial part was deposited in a bank under their names. But the reunification turned out to be a fiction, with the Party carrying on its in-fighting as before. The trustees found themselves pressured and accused by both wings of the Party, as only they had the authority to disburse the money. Lenin demanded they hand all the money back to the Bolshevik Centre. Kautsky replied, on 2 October 1911: ‘Comrade Ulyanov, I have received your letter. You will receive a reply once I have consulted Madame Zetkin and Mr Mehring. You probably know that he has retired as a depositor owing to illness. As a result of this, the depositors can take no decision if there is a difference of opinion.’ He added a postscript: ‘My work is suffering from the great waste of time and energy spent on this hopeless matter. Therefore I can no longer continue my functions. With Party greetings, K. Kautsky.’154

Clara Zetkin tried to break the deadlock by suggesting that all the money be returned as the property of the entire Party. A tug-of-war ensued, involving lawyers, long drawn-out correspondence, and caustic comments addressed to the depositors. In a letter to G.L. Shklovsky on Zetkin’s position, Lenin wrote: ‘“Madame” had lied so much in her reply, that she’s got herself even more confused …’155 The case went to court, and a typical letter from Krupskaya, written on 23 May 1912 under Lenin’s instructions, to their lawyer, a certain Duclos, reads:

Sir,

My husband, Mr Ulyanov, has left for a few days and has asked me to acquaint you with the enclosed documents. A letter from the three depositors dated 30 June 1911. A memorandum from the manager of the National Bank’s agency in Paris dated 7 July 1911 concerning the despatch of a cheque to Mrs Zetkin for the sum of 24,455 marks and 30 Swedish bonds. A decision of the RSDLP of January 1912 concerning the sum held by Mrs Zetkin.

Signed N. Ulyanova.’156

Zetkin held her ground, handing out some money for various meetings, and the row only subsided after the First World War had intervened. The money at issue, however, was the smaller part of the Schmidt inheritance, the greater part having remained all the time in the hands of the Bolshevik Centre, i.e. Lenin’s, as the chief controller of the Party’s finances. In August 1909, for instance, he sent an order to the National Discount Bank in Paris to sell stock held in his name and to issue a cheque for 25,000 francs to A.I. Lyubimov, a member of the Bolshevik Centre.157 Thus, the true ‘depositor’ of the Party funds was Lenin himself, and to a great extent the Bolsheviks in emigration depended financially on him.

The Mensheviks, fully aware of the murky background of the Schmidt affair, tried to depict Taratuta as a ‘Party pimp’ who was securing Lenin’s finances by sleazy methods. When Taratuta complained about attacks on him by Bogdanov – another member of the Bolshevik Centre, but by now Lenin’s rival – Lenin secured a special resolution of the Bolshevik Centre, amounting to a Party indulgence and emphasizing that what had happened ‘in no way evokes the slightest weakening of the trust the Bolshevik Centre has in Comrade Viktor [Taratuta]’.158 After 1917 Taratuta continued to enjoy Lenin’s trust and confidence.

Lenin had other sources of funds beyond Morozov, Schmidt and Gorky. In 1890, for example, he had met A.I. Yeremasov, a young entrepreneur from Syzran in the province of Simbirsk, who had been involved with local revolutionary circles.159 At the end of 1904 Lenin asked him to help fund the Bolshevik newspaper Vpered in Paris.160

There were many others. The relationship between Lenin and Maxim Gorky was a special one. Gorky, who was internationally famous before the revolution, for his play The Lower Depths (1902), his novel The Mother (1906) and his three-part autobiography, gave the Bolsheviks much material help. This did not not prevent him from taking an independent position at critical moments, as the essays he published in 1917–1918 in his own newspaper, Novaya zhizn’ (New Life), show.161 Their correspondence was voluminous, and there is hardly one letter from Lenin in which he does not complain about money. Among other things, he asked Gorky to donate some of his royalties to supporting this or that Bolshevik publication, ‘to help drum up subscriptions’, ‘to find a little cash to expand Pravda’, or nudged him with such hints as, ‘I’m sure you won’t refuse to help Prosveshchenie’, ‘hasn’t “the merchant” started giving yet?’, or ‘Because of the war, I’m in desperate need of a wage and so I would ask you, if it’s possible and won’t put you out too much, to help speed up the publication of the brochure’.162 While Gorky helped the Bolsheviks with both money and influence, in November 1917 he could still refer to Lenin darkly as ‘not an omnipotent magician, but a cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honour nor the lives of the proletariat’.163

From the little we have so far seen of Lenin’s financial affairs, it is plain that he was not in need, although he was always ready to raise the issue. Biographers have frequently quoted his letter from Zurich to Shlyapnikov in Stockholm in the autumn of 1916, in which he wrote: ‘As for myself, I need a salary. Otherwise we’ll simply perish, I mean it!! The cost of living is diabolical, and we’ve nothing to live on. You’ve got to drag the money by force out of [Gorky] who has two of my brochures (he must pay, now, and a bit more!) … If this doesn’t happen, I swear I won’t make it, and I am really, really serious …’164

Perhaps the death of Lenin’s mother in July 1916, which had so shaken him, explains the dramatic tone of this letter. He was, after all, still controlling the Party finances, which, though depleted, were accessible to him. Furthermore, before the war broke out Krupskaya had inherited money from an aunt in Novocherkassk, Lenin’s sisters Anna and Maria were still sending occasional remittances, and even when they returned to Russia in April 1917, Lenin and Krupskaya were not without funds. The fact is, Lenin, whether in Russia or abroad, was never short of money. He could decide whether to live in Bern or Zurich, he could travel to London, Berlin or Paris, visit Gorky on Capri, or write to Anna, ‘I’m on holiday in Nice. It’s sheer luxury here: sunny, warm, dry, the southern sea. In a few days I return to Paris’.165 Doss-houses and attics were not for him. He wrote to Anna in December 1908 on arriving in Paris, ‘We’ve found a good apartment, fashionable and expensive: 840 francs plus about 60 francs tax, and about the same for the concierge per year. Cheap by Moscow prices (4 rooms, kitchen, larder, water, gas), but it’s expensive here.’166

Lenin was punctilious about keeping accounts and planning his budget. He kept notes of what he had spent on food, train fares, mountain holidays and so on,167 and carried these slips of paper around with him from country to country, city to city, long after their ‘expiry date’, until he finally ensconced himself in the Kremlin, whereupon he handed them over to the Central Party Archive.

He loved dealing with financial matters. In June 1921 he ordered 1878 boxes of valuable objects to be brought into the Kremlin.168 Perhaps it made him feel more secure. On 15 October of that year the Politburo ordered that no expenditure of the gold reserve was to take place without its – i.e. Lenin’s – authority.169 He loved holidays in expensive resorts, and he often went to the theatre and cinema. All this was perfectly natural behaviour, especially for the hereditary nobleman Lenin described himself as,170 and there was no need for him to make a big secret of it. What remains a mystery, however, is not the financial details of his everyday life, but how he, like his comrades Trotsky and Stalin – none of them ever having worked for a living, and none of them having anything in common with the working class – could think they had the right to determine the fate of a great nation, and to carry out their bloody, monstrous experiment.

* For decades the Party archives also concealed evidence that both Marx and Engels fathered illegitimate children – Marx by his housekeeper Elena Denmuth.101

2 Master of the Order

At the turn of the century, Russia was entering a period of turbulence. Peasants rioted against a system which piled debts on them and taxed their basic necessities excessively; workers went on strike for better conditions and wages and against police harassment; students were demanding autonomy for their universities and civil liberties for everyone; the professional classes – doctors, lawyers, teachers – were becoming increasingly vociferous in their demand for representative government; and the national minorities in the empire’s borderlands were organizing liberation movements. In 1904 the country stumbled into a war against Japan over control of Chinese territory in Manchuria, 6000 miles from European Russia, and by the middle of 1905 Russia’s resources appeared exhausted, and humiliation seemed certain. The whole of 1905 was consumed in strikes and demonstrations, and mutinous action in parts of the army and navy, and by the autumn Tsar Nicholas II was ready to concede reform: the creation of a State Duma, or parliament, and various promises of social legislation.

It was against this background of rising political activity that Lenin emerged from his exile in Siberia and threw himself into reorganizing the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party as a revolutionary body, prepared to overthrow the existing order. To justify the rôle of those who were to do the overthrowing, he created the idea of the ‘professional revolutionary’. In his extended essay What is to be Done?, a title he took from Chernyshevsky, he wrote that an ‘organization of revolutionaries must chiefly and above all include people whose profession is revolutionary activity’,1 one of his main arguments being that it was ‘far harder to catch a dozen clever people than a hundred fools’. By ‘clever people’ he meant professional revolutionaries.2 Published in Stuttgart in 1902,3 What is to be done? was Lenin’s grand plan to create a conspiratorial organization. Advancing the idea of an ‘all-Russian political newspaper’ as the basis for such a party, he envisaged a ‘network of agents’ – or ‘collaborators, if this is a more acceptable term’ – who would provide ‘the greatest certainty of success in the event of a rising’.4

He would certainly succeed in building his strictly disciplined organization, but after it had seized power he would find it difficult to discern where the Party ended and the security organs began. In April 1922, for instance, it was the Politburo that gave the state security organ, the GPU, the power to shoot bandit elements on the spot. In May they ordered that Patriarch Tikhon, the head of the Orthodox Church, be put on trial for allegedly obstructing the expropriation of Church property, and in the same month this élite of ‘professional revolutionaries’ sentenced eleven priests to be executed for the same reason. In August 1921 it was Lenin who initiated the creation of a commission to maintain surveillance on incoming foreigners, notably those involved in the American famine relief programme.5