Lenin: A biography

It was here in Switzerland in March 1915 that Krupskaya’s mother died. As Krupskaya recalled, the old lady had wanted to return to Russia, ‘but we had no one there to look after her’. She had often quarrelled with Lenin, but on the whole they had maintained a civil relationship. ‘We cremated her in Berne,’ Krupskaya wrote. ‘Vladimir Ilyich and I sat in the cemetery and after two hours they brought us a metal jug still warm with her ashes, and showed us where to bury them.’111 Yelizaveta Vasilievna nevertheless found her way back to Russia eventually: on 21 February 1969 the Central Committee Secretariat arranged for her ashes to be taken to Leningrad.

After Inessa had left for Paris, she and Lenin conducted a lively correspondence. He signed himself variously as ‘Ivan’, ‘Basil’, or sometimes even ‘Lenin’. Apart from their personal relationship, Lenin had come to rely on her in Party affairs to a considerable extent as well. In January 1917, for some reason, he decided Switzerland was likely to be drawn into the war, in which case, he told her, ‘the French will capture Geneva straight away … Therefore I’m thinking of giving you the Party funds to look after (to carry on you in a bag made for the purpose, as the banks won’t give money out during the war) …’112

In 1916 and 1917, up to the time Lenin left for Russia, he wrote to Inessa more often than to anyone else. When he heard about the February revolution, it was to her that he wrote first, and she was among those who left Switzerland for Russia, via Germany, in the famous ‘sealed train’. Her children were in Russia, and it was of them she was thinking as the train from Stockholm to Petrograd carried them on the last leg of the journey.

The revolution soon took its toll on Inessa. She had never been able to work at half-steam, and in Petrograd and later in Moscow she held important posts in the Central Committee and the Moscow Provincial Economic Council, and she worked without respite. In 1919 she went to France to negotiate the return of Russian soldiers, and she wrote for the newspapers. Her meetings with Lenin became less frequent; he was at the epicentre of the storm that raged in Russia. Occasionally, however, they managed a telephone conversation. His address book contained her Moscow address, which he visited only two or three times: 3/14 Arbat, apartment 12, corner of Denezhny and Glazovsky Streets, temporary telephone number 31436.113

Sometimes he rang or sent a note, such as the one he wrote in February 1920: ‘Dear Friend, I wanted to telephone you [the polite form] when I heard you were ill, but the phone doesn’t work. Give me the number and I’ll tell them to repair it.’114 On another occasion he wrote: ‘Please say what’s wrong with you. These are appalling times: there’s typhus, influenza, Spanish ’flu, cholera. I’ve just got up and I’m not going out. Nadia [Krupskaya] has a temperature of 39 and wants to see you. What’s your temperature? Don’t you need some medicine? I beg you to tell me frankly. You must get well!’115 He telephoned the Sovnarkom Secretariat and told them to get a doctor to see Inessa, then wrote again: ‘Has the doctor been, you have to do exactly as he says. The phone’s out of order again. I told them to repair it and I want your daughters to call me and tell me how you are. You must do everything the doctor tells you. (Nadia’s temperature this morning was 37.3, now it’s 38).’ ‘To go out with a temperature of 38 or 39 is sheer madness,’ he wrote. ‘I beg you earnestly not to go out and to tell your daughters from me that I want them to watch you and not to let you out: 1) until your temperature is back to normal, 2) with the doctor’s permission. I want an exact reply on this. (This morning, 16 February, Nadezhda Konstantinovna had a temperature of 39.7, now in the evening it’s 38.2. The doctors were here: it’s quinsy. They’ll cure her. I am completely healthy). Yours, Lenin. Today, the 17th, Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s temperature is already down to 37.3.’116

Volume 48 of the Complete Works contains a letter from Lenin to Inessa from which the following was cut: ‘Never, never have I written that I respect only three women! Never!! I wrote to you [familiar form] that my experience of the most complete friendship and absolute trust was limited to only two or three women. These are completely mutual, completely mutual business relations …’117 It seems certain he had Inessa and Krupskaya in mind. There had been other women, of course, who had left a fleeting trace in his heart: Krupskaya’s friend Yakubova, the pianist Ekaterina K., and the mystery woman in Paris with the pension from the Soviet government. The relations between Lenin, Krupskaya and Inessa were, as we have seen, both of a personal and a practical nature.

The revolution inevitably distanced Inessa from Lenin, although their feelings for each other remained strong. She was worn out by the privation, the burdens and the cheerless struggle. Not that she lost her revolutionary ideals or regretted the past, but at a certain point her strength began to flag. Lenin gave support occasionally, telephoning, writing notes, helping her children, but she felt he was doing so from habit. The Bolshevik leader no longer belonged to himself, or to Krupskaya, still less to her; he was completely possessed by the revolution. Sometimes his concerns were extraordinary, considering his Jacobin priorities: ‘Comrade Inessa, I rang to find out what size of galoshes you take. I hope to get hold of some. Write and tell me how your health is. What’s wrong with you? Has the doctor been?’118 He sent her English newspapers, and several times sent physcians to see her. By 1920, however, Inessa was utterly exhausted. She wrote to Lenin: ‘My dear friend, Things here are just as you saw them and there’s simply no end to the overwork. I’m beginning to give up, I sleep three times more than the others and so on …’119

An invaluable insight into Inessa’s mental state during her ‘restcure’ in the North Caucasus is provided by a diary which she kept in the last month of her life, and which by a miracle survives in the archives. The last, fragmented, hastily pencilled notes tell us more about their relationship than a thousand pages of Lenin’s biography:

1 September 1920. Now I have time, I’m going to write every day, although my head is heavy and I feel as if I’ve turned into a stomach that craves food the whole time … I also feel a wild desire to be alone. It exhausts me even when people around me are speaking, never mind if I have to speak myself. Will this feeling of inner death ever pass? I hardly ever laugh or smile now because I’m prompted to by a feeling of joy, but just because one should smile sometimes. I am also surprised by my present indifference to nature. I used to be so moved by it. And I find I like people much less now. I used to approach everyone with a warm feeling. Now I’m indifferent to everyone. The main thing is I’m bored with almost everyone. I only have warm feelings left for the children and V.I. In all other respects it’s as if my heart has died. As if, having given up all my strength, all my passion to V.I. and the work, all the springs of love have dried up in me, all my sympathy for people, which I used to have so much of. I have none left, except for V.I. and my children, and a few personal relations, but only in work. And people can feel this deadness in me, and they pay me back in the same coin of indifference or even antipathy (and people used to love me) … I’m a living corpse, and it’s dreadful!

The devastating sincerity of this self-analysis, this confession, almost suggests Inessa knew she had only three weeks to live. The little diary contains only four more entries. On 3 September she voices her concern for her children:

I’m weak in this respect, not at all like a Roman matron who would readily sacrifice her children in the interests of the republic. I cannot … The war is going to go on for a long time, at some point our foreign comrades will revolt … Our lives at this time are nothing but sacrifice. There is no personal life because our strength is used up all the time for the common cause …

On 9 September she returned to the theme of her first entry:

It seems to me that as I move among people I’m trying not to reveal my secret to them that I am a dead person among the living, a living corpse … My heart remains dead, my soul is silent, and I can’t completely hide my sad secret … As I have no warmth anymore, as I no longer radiate warmth, I can’t give happiness to anyone anymore …

On 11 September, just two weeks before her death, her last diary entry dwells once more on love, her favourite and eternal theme, and shows the influence Lenin had had on her life. They loved each other, but he had managed to persuade her that ‘proletarian interests’ took priority over personal feelings. She wrote:

The importance of love, compared to social life, is becoming altogether small, it cannot be compared to the social cause. True, in my own life love still occupies a big place, it makes me suffer a lot, and takes up a lot of my thoughts. But still not for a minute do I cease to recognize that, however painful for me, love and personal relationships are nothing compared to the needs of the struggle …’120

If there were other entries, they were either lost or censored. There is evidence that some pages were torn out of the diary.

It was some time before Inessa’s body could be brought to Moscow, and the archives contain a file of telegrams between the capital and Vladikavkaz. The Central Committee became involved, and Lenin himself demanded that the body be sent to Moscow as soon as possible. There were no suitable goods vans. A death was nothing unusual at that time – people were being buried without coffins. But Moscow was demanding a railcar and a coffin. As long as the local authorities were not threatened with revolutionary justice, they could not find a railcar. Inessa died on 24 September 1920, but her body did not reach Moscow until 11 October.

In a large, ugly lead coffin (not open, as she had been dead for some time), she lay in state in a small hall in the House of Soviets. Only a few people came. Some wreaths had been laid, including one of white hyacinths, with a ribbon inscribed ‘To Comrade Inessa from V.I. Lenin’.121 At the burial at the Kremlin wall the next day, Lenin was almost unrecognizable. Angelica Balabanova, a Comintern official and seasoned revolutionary, was there: ‘Not only his face but his whole body expressed so much sorrow that I dared not greet him, not even with the slightest gesture. It was clear that he wanted to be alone with his grief. He seemed to have shrunk: his cap almost covered his face, his eyes seemed drowned in tears held back with effort. As our circle moved, following the movement of the people, he too moved, without offering resistance, as if he were grateful for being brought nearer to the dead comrade.’122 Witnesses recalled that he looked as if he might fall. His sad eyes saw nothing, his face was frozen in an expression of permanent grief.

Lenin saw that Inessa was given a proper, if modest, tombstone. Inessa’s family now had no one, and to Lenin’s credit, as long as he was healthy, he (and Krupskaya, when he too was dead) did what he could to get Inessa’s five children back on their feet. In December 1921, for instance, Lenin cabled Theodore Rothstein, a former émigré who had returned to Russia in 1920 after twenty years in England, where he had been involved in forming the Communist Party of Great Britain, and was now a Comintern official: ‘I request that you do something for Varya Armand [Inessa’s youngest daughter] and if necessary send her here, but not alone and with a warm dress …’123

Inessa had died tragically early, but she had been prepared for such an eventuality. In February 1919 she went with a Russian Red Cross delegation to France to work among the remnants of the Russian Expeditionary Corps being held there. She wrote to her elder daughter, known as Little Inessa (Inusya):

Here I am in [Petrograd] … We spent the night here and are now moving on … I’m enclosing a letter for Sasha, another for Fedya [her sons] and a third one for Ilyich. Only you are to know about this last one. Give the first and second ones to them straight away, but keep the third one yourself for the time being. When we get back I’ll tear it up. If something happens to me (not that I think there’s any special danger about this trip, but anything can happen on the journey, so just in case), then you must give the letter personally to VI. II. The way to do it is to go to Pravda where Marya Ilyinichna [Lenin’s sister] works, give her the letter and say that it’s from me and is personal for V.I. Meanwhile, hang onto it … It’s sealed in an envelope.’124

Inessa returned to Moscow in May 1919, and the contents of that letter to Lenin has joined the other secrets of their relationship. Whatever they may have been, we can say with certainty that Inessa had been perhaps the brightest ray of sunshine in his life.

Financial Secrets

Some ‘professional revolutionaries’ lived quite well. One would search the Soviet sources in vain for any account of where Lenin and his family found the money to live on after their father died, yet they could travel abroad almost at will, and lived in Germany, Switzerland and France. For seventeen years Lenin lived in the capital cities of Europe and stayed in some of the most congenial resorts. What was the source of the funds that he needed not merely for his activities as leader of the Bolsheviks, but also for ‘doing nothing’?

The Bolsheviks had a rule that only the highest Party authorities should know the details of the Party’s finances; often only the General Secretary himself. Millions of Communists – as they called themselves after October 1917 – dutifully paid their dues without the least notion of where their money was going. Not even the government knew how much was being spent on ostentatious Party occasions such as congresses, support for foreign Communist Parties and illegal groups, and funding Comintern right up to 1943. The Central Committee reviewed the budget for Comintern annually. For instance, on 20 April 1922 the Politburo accepted a forecast budget of 3,150,600 gold roubles for Comintern activities for the year. There was no discussion, despite the fact that other complex matters of state expenditure were on the agenda, such as reparations which Soviet Russia had agreed to pay to Poland under the terms of the Treaty of Riga, and the allocation of gold to the intelligence services for special purposes.125 A week later, Zinoviev, as chairman of Comintern, tabled a paper on the budget, and the previous week’s forecast was revised upwards by a further reserve of 400,000 gold roubles as a first instalment. Zinoviev explained that he needed 100,000 gold roubles at once ‘for agitation among the Japanese troops’.126 The passion for financial secrecy was, however, born long before, and it extended to the official account of Lenin’s early life as well.

Hired in January 1892 as an assistant to the barrister A.N. Khardin, the young Ulyanov stuck the job for barely eighteen months. He acted as defence counsel in a few cases, mostly of petty theft – personal items from a merchant’s suitcase, bread from a warehouse – in his own words barely enough ‘to cover the selection of court papers’. At the time of the revolution of 1917, Lenin, aged forty-seven, had spent all of two years in paid work. How was the impression formed in the Soviet public mind that, contrary to the ‘materialistic philosophy of history’, questions of Lenin’s everyday life and existence counted for nothing alongside the worldwide issues of the revolution? The first historian to raise the question of Lenin and money was the émigré and former Bolshevik and Menshevik Nikolai Valentinov, who based the various accounts he published, mostly after the Second World War, on first-hand knowledge and scrupulous research.

After the death of Ilya Ulyanov, his widow, as the widow of a State Counsellor and holder of the Order of Stanislav First Class, received a pension of 100 roubles a month. This compares with the eight roubles a month that Lenin received from the state as an exile in Shushenskoe, and that he found adequate for rent, simple food, and laundry.127 Could all the Ulyanovs have lived on their mother’s pension, even though it was a good one by contemporary standards, and study, travel, go abroad? She went abroad herself three times, to Switzerland, France and Sweden, on two occasions with her daughter Maria. And Maria in addition went abroad five times, sometimes for lengthy periods. The elder daughter, Anna, also went abroad several times, staying in Germany and France for almost two years. Tickets, hotels, food, purchases and unforeseen expenses on long trips, all took considerable funds, certainly more than the pension would stand. Anna and Maria and Lenin’s wife all testified that they lived on the mother’s pension and on what their father had managed to save in his lifetime. But this does not square with the reality, and Krupskaya herself says so: ‘They are writing about our lives as if we were in penury. It’s not true. We were never in the position of not being able to afford bread. Were there such people among the émigrés? There were some who had had no income for two years and got no money from Russia, and they really starved. We were not like that. We lived simply, that’s the truth.’128

Neither in Russia nor abroad did Lenin suffer deprivation. He lived on his mother’s resources, his ‘Party salary’, the donations of various benefactors at various times. Pamphlets and articles printed for illegal distribution inside Russia earned precious little, while the émigré market for such works was scarcely more rewarding. His mother owned part of the estate at Kokushkino which the family had put at the disposal of a certain Anna Alexandrovna Veretennikova, who paid Lenin’s mother her admittedly not very large share of the rent regularly. The sale of the estate helped to fill the family’s coffers. In February 1889 Lenin’s mother acquired a farm at Alakaevka in Samara province. Her agent for the purchase was Mark Yelizarov, Anna’s future husband. For 7500 roubles the family had acquired just over 200 acres, much of it non-arable. The original intention had been to carry on a farming business, with Vladimir in charge, and in fact in their first year they acquired some livestock, and sowed some wheat, buckwheat and sunflowers. But Vladimir soon became bored as ‘farm manager’, and began, in Nikolai Valentinov’s words, ‘to live on the farm like a carefree squire staying at his summer home. He would ensconce himself in the lime-tree avenue and prepare for the state exams at St Petersburg University, study Marxism and write his first work, an article called “New Economic Movements in Peasant Life”.’129 The article describes the exploitation of peasants and land, criticizes many of the ills of capitalism in the countryside, such as money-lending, leasehold, the increasing number of ‘kulaks’, or rich peasants. Yet when Lenin was put off by his own experience of farming, the family leased out land to a kulak, one Mr Krushvits, who paid rent to the Ulyanovs for several years, substantially supplementing their income.

There may have been another reason for leasing out the land. The peasants of the region were extremely poor, and those around Alakaevka especially so. Numbering thirty-four households, together they had about 160 acres of arable, roughly the same as the Ulyanovs. Farming in the midst of such appalling poverty may have been felt by the budding Marxist as an uncomfortable moral position, especially as he himself had sued his peasant neighbours for letting their cattle wander onto his crops. None of this prevented the family from summering at Alakaevka every year, reminding Krushvits of his responsibilities, and collecting their rent. Eventually it was decided to sell the farm, and a document composed by Vladimir in his mother’s name shows the sale having been made to S.R. Dannenberg in July 1893.130

Maria Alexandrovna had evidently decided it was better to realize her assets and keep the money in the bank, together with what she had been given by her late husband’s brother, and live on the interest. Meanwhile, no one in the family was earning anything. Vladimir soon gave up legal practice, and Anna, Dmitri and Maria were long-term students, and showed no inclination to supplement the family income. As Valentinov wrote: ‘the money deposited in the bank and converted into state bonds, together with the pension, constituted a special “family fund”, which Lenin’s very thrifty mother capably managed over many years. They all dipped into this fund … They certainly were not rich, but over this long period there was enough …’131 Enough, for instance, for Vladimir to be able to write to his mother from Geneva: ‘I had hoped Manyasha [Maria] would come … but she keeps putting it off. It would be good if she came in the second half of October, as we could pop down to Italy together … Why can’t Mitya [Dmitri] also come here? Yes, invite him, too, we’ll have a great time together.’132

Such a secure material environment must have played a significant part in Lenin’s intellectual development, enabling him to run his own life, decide for himself where to live, where to go, what to do. Had he been the ‘proletarian’ some authors would have liked him to be, his position among the leaders of the Russian social democratic movement would have been immeasurably less important. He would not have had time for self-education, literary work or Party ‘rows’.

After the failure of the 1905 revolution, when revolutionaries – including Lenin – who had returned hopefully from Europe now had to retrace their steps, an important source of support for Lenin and Krupskaya in their various stopping-places was the Party fund, a source that was never revealed in published documents, but whose existence Lenin himself confirmed in a letter to his mother in 1908: ‘I still get the salary I told you about in Stockholm.’133 In fact, references to money abound in Lenin’s voluminous correspondence with his mother and sisters, usually reporting that he had received a draft, or asking for money to be sent urgently, and so on.134

Another, and rather more bountiful, source of income was the Party. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was set up, rather shakily, at its First Congress in 1898 by a handful of provincial organizers. It was quickly decimated by the police, but its name remained as the banner for whoever was capable of gathering revolutionary-minded workers and intellectuals for the purpose of building a large and powerful revolutionary party. In February 1900, as soon as he had completed his term of exile in Siberia, Lenin departed for Europe, where he launched a newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), and began recruiting his own agents. These he sent back into Russia, both to distribute his message via Iskra and to obtain the allegiance of local forces.

By 1903 it seemed Lenin and his closest comrades had gathered sufficient backing to hold a new Party Congress, called the Second, for the sake of keeping the already well established name. This took place in the summer of 1903 in Brussels, moving to London when the Russian secret police proved too intrusive. Far from consolidating the Party’s forces, however, the Second Congress witnessed their split into Leninists and anti-Leninists, or Bolsheviks (Majorityites) and Mensheviks (Minorityites). These new labels came about as the result of one particular vote which gave Lenin a minuscule majority.

In the period following this fiasco, with the resulting contest for various resources and Party assets such as printing facilities and, especially, money, Lenin had to devote a great deal of attention to establishing his own, Bolshevik, fund. He needed it to maintain his ‘professional revolutionaries’, to conduct meetings and congresses, support his own publishing activities, and finance agitation inside Russia. The ‘professional revolutionaries’ of course knew about this fund, which in the final analysis Lenin personally controlled, since he was the creator of the Bolshevik wing of the Party, as well as its ideologist and chief organizer. For instance, Lev Trotsky, who was then on very bad terms with Lenin, wrote in June 1909 to his brother-in-law Lev Kamenev, who was Lenin’s right-hand man: ‘Dear Lev Borisovich, I have to ask a favour which will give you no pleasure. You must dig up 100 roubles and cable it to me. We’re in a terrible situation which I will not describe: enough to say that we have not paid the grocer for April, May, June …’ Kamenev left it up to Lenin to decide whether or not to provide Trotsky with the money, but there is no indication of the outcome.135