Distant Sources

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin did not appear fully fledged on the scene as the leader of the radical wing of Russian social democracy. At the end of the nineteenth century, when he was not quite thirty, he was merely one among many. Julius Martov, who collaborated closely with him in St Petersburg and Western Europe between 1895 and 1903, recalled that Lenin cut a rather different figure then from the one he was to present later on. There was less self-confidence, nor did he show the scorn and contempt which, in Martov's view, would shape his particular kind of political leadership. But Martov also added significantly: ‘I never saw in him any sign of personal vanity.’¹

Lenin himself was not responsible for the absurdly inflated cult that grew up around his name throughout the Soviet period, although he was not entirely blameless. When in August 1918, for instance, it was decided to erect a monument at the spot in Moscow where an attempt had recently been made on his life, he did not protest, and only a year after the Bolshevik seizure of power he was posing for sculptors. In 1922 monuments were raised to him in his home province of Simbirsk, in Zhitomir and Yaroslavl. He regarded all this as normal: in place of monuments to the tsars, let there be statues of the leaders of the revolution. His purpose was rather to affirm the Bolshevik idea than to glorify personalities. Everyone had to don ideological garb, the uniform of dehumanized personality, and Lenin and Leninism were the main components of the costume. The deification of the cult figure was the work of the system which he had created and by which he was more needed dead than alive.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov began to use the alias and pseudonym ‘Lenin’, probably derived from the River Lena in Siberia, at an early stage. His very first writings, in 1893, appeared, unsigned, in mimeographed form. He first used a signature, ‘V.U.’, at the end of 1893, and then a year later he signed himself ‘K. Tulin’, a name derived from the town of Tula. In 1898 he used the pseudonym ‘Vl. Ilyin’ when reviewing a book on the world market by Parvus (Alexander Helphand), translated from German. In August 1900, in a private letter, he signed himself ‘Petrov’, a name he continued to use in correspondence with other Social Democrats until January 1901, when he signed a letter to Plekhanov with the alias ‘Lenin’. He seems not to have settled into this alias straight away, and still went on using ‘Petrov’ and ‘V.U.’, as well as his proper name, for some time. He also adopted the name ‘Frei’ for part of 1901, and in 1902 ‘Jacob Richter’ vied for a while with ‘Lenin’. But from June of that year, it appears he became comfortable at last with the name by which the world would one day come to know him.

It is difficult to imagine Lenin as young. We are familiar with the photograph of the chubby little boy and high school student with intelligent eyes, yet he seems to have stepped straight from his youth into mature adulthood. Alexander Potresov, another early collaborator, who knew him well at the age of twenty-five, recalled that ‘he was only young according to his identity papers. You would have said he couldn't be less than forty or thirty-five. The faded skin, complete baldness, apart from a few hairs on his temples, the red beard, the sly, slightly shifty way he would watch you, the older man's hoarse voice … It wasn't surprising that he was known in the St Petersburg Union of Struggle as “the old man”.’²

It is worth noting that both Lenin and his father lost their considerable mental powers much earlier than might be thought normal. I am not suggesting a necessary connection, but it is true that both men died of brain disease, his father from a brain haemorrhage at the age of fifty-four, and Lenin from cerebral sclerosis at fifty-three. Lenin always looked much older than his years. His brain was in constant high gear, and he was usually having a ‘row’ with someone, ‘row’ being one of his favourite words. It may not be a sign of his genius, but the fact is that, even when he was relatively young, Lenin always looks like a tired old man. Be that as it may, let us look at his origins, his antecedents and his background.

Genealogy

Simbirsk, where Lenin was born on 23 April 1870, was the small leafy capital of the province of the same name. At the end of 1897 it had a population of 43,000 inhabitants, of whom 8.8 per cent were of gentry (or noble) status, 0.8 per cent clergy families, 3.2 per cent merchants, 57.5 per cent ordinary town-dwellers or lower middle-class, 11 per cent peasants, 17 per cent military and the remaining 2 per cent unclassified. It had two high schools, one each for boys and girls, a cadet school, a religious school and seminary, a trade school, a midwifery school, schools for the Chuvash and Tatar minorities, several parish schools, the Karamzin Library, and the Goncharov Public Library. It had a vodka distillery, a winery, a brewery, a candle factory and flour-mill. There were a number of charitable institutions. Founded on the high side of the middle Volga in 1648 as a defence against nomadic raids, the town was soon transformed into a typical, sleepy, unhurried provincial Russian town.

In time Simbirsk became a Bolshevik shrine, renamed Ulyanovsk. A local historian, Z. Mindubaev, has written that the transformation of the ancient town into a ‘grandiose Leninist altar’ was accompanied by a ‘huge pogrom’ which flattened everything. With astonishing mindlessness, the ‘builders’ tore down ancient churches, cathedrals and monasteries. Even the church where Lenin was baptized was razed, as was a house in which Pushkin had once stayed early in the nineteenth century. The cathedral which had been erected at about the same time in memory of the fallen of Simbirsk in the war of 1812 was cleared in the 19205 to make way for a monument to Lenin. Streets were renamed after Marx and Engels, Liebknecht, Rosa Luxemburg, Plekhanov and Bebel. At the height of the famine of 1921, when the Volga region was ravaged, the local authorities allocated funds for a statue of Marx. The cemetery of the Pokrovsky Monastery was bulldozed to make way for a cosy square, leaving only one grave—that of Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, with its cross removed.³

The twelve-volume ‘Biographical Chronicle’ of Lenin's life, while it attempts (with little success) to catalogue every fact and account for virtually every waking moment of his life, is extremely laconic about his birth and background: ‘April 10 (22 New Style⁴) 1870 Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was born. His father, Ilya Nikolaevich, was an inspector and later the director of the province's schools. He came of poor town-dwellers of Astrakhan. His father had been a serf. Lenin's mother, Maria Alexandrovna, was the daughter of a doctor, A.D. Blank. The Ulyanov family lived in Simbirsk (still called Ulyanovsk in late 1994), in a wing of Pribylovskaya's house on Streletsky Street (now Ulyanov Street) No. 17a.’⁵ Other information about the family has to be gleaned in fragments from the twelve volumes, most of which consist of references to Lenin ‘making plans’, or ‘destroying his opponents intellectually’, reading, writing or making a speech. Consisting of several thousand pages, it is a chronicle that presents the portrait of a political robot, not a human being.

Similar information is to be found in the official biography of Lenin, compiled by a brigade of scholars under P.N. Pospelov. All eight editions of this work, beginning with the first in 1960, can be found in any Soviet library, but it is doubtful if any have ever been consulted voluntarily. The people may have resigned themselves to believing assurances that the Party was in the hands of ‘outstanding leaders of the Leninist type’, but they always retained the lingering suspicion that this idea was exaggerated. Most people were therefore rather indifferent to the official image of Lenin. Only a few individuals, perhaps while preparing for an exam or writing a dissertation, were actually required to pore over a volume of Lenin's works. As for Party leaders themselves, the majority of those I have known never read a word of Lenin beyond the ‘Party minimum’.⁶ What was regarded as the proper Leninist text to read was laid down in directives and confidential letters from the Central Committee. They were all being led by a Lenin they did not know.

In order to establish Lenin's genealogy, we have to resort to books published in the 1920s, as well as to foreign publications and a range of Russian archives. The large Ulyanov family had many branches. Lenin's parents married in 1863 in Penza, capital of the province of that name to the west of the lower Volga, where Lenin's father was working as a teacher of physics and mathematics. After a spell in Nizhni Novgorod, in the centre of European Russia, the family moved to Simbirsk. There is almost nothing in the official biographies about Lenin's grandparents, especially their ethnic origin, not that this would tell us anything about his intellectual capacities, social position or moral qualities. But there has been a great reluctance to discuss the Ulyanov family tree, no doubt because it was felt that the leader of the Russian revolution must be a Russian.

The Russian Empire, however, was a crucible of the most varied national and racial ingredients, as was to be expected in so vast a territory. I dwell on this aspect of Lenin's biography because his ethnic background was carefully covered up to make sure that he was seen to have been, if not of ‘proletarian’, at least of ‘poor peasant’ origin. But if the ‘Chronicle’ was able to show—as it does—that his father's father had been a serf, why was it not possible to reveal the background of his father's mother, and his mother's parents?

Lenin's mother, Maria Alexandrovna, was the fourth daughter of Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, a doctor and a baptized Jew from Zhitomir. He had taken as his patronymic the name of his godfather at his baptism, Dmitri Baranov, dropped his original patronymic of Moishevich, and adopted the Christian name of Alexander in place of his original first name, Srul, the Yiddish form of Israel. According to research done by David Shub and S.M. Ginsburg, Lenin's grandfather was the son of Moishe Itskovich Blank, a Jewish merchant from Starokonstantinov in the province of Volynia, who was married to a Swedish woman called Anna Karlovna Ostedt.⁷ Shub asks how a Jew could have become a police doctor, and later the owner of an estate. Referring among other things to the archives of the Holy Synod, Shub concluded that conversion to Orthodox Christianity removed many barriers to a career in state service. ‘There were,’ he writes, ‘baptized Jews in the reign of Nicholas I who occupied far higher positions than police doctor … Many such Jews were ennobled and thus achieved all the rights and privileges of that class.’⁸

In St Petersburg, Alexander Blank married Anna Grigorievna Groschopf, the daughter of prosperous Germans. The Blanks were evidently well off, since they were able to make several trips to Europe, notably to take the waters in Karlsbad in the Czech part of Austria-Hungary. Alexander Blank worked in various towns and provincial capitals of the Russian interior, for the most part in the Volga region, as district physician, police doctor and hospital doctor, finally occupying the prestigious post of hospital medical inspector of the state arms factory in Zlatoust, in the province of Chelyabinsk, Western Siberia. In 1847, having attained the civil service rank of State Counsellor, he retired and registered himself as a member of the nobility of Kazan, a major city on the Volga and centre of Tatar culture in the region. There he bought the estate of Kokushkino.⁹This had been made possible by the large dowry his wife had brought with her. Anna Grigorievna never learned to speak fluent Russian and never abandoned her Lutheran religion. In Kokushkino she would raise five daughters: Anna, Lyubov, Sofia, Maria (Lenin's mother) and Yekaterina.

Kokushkino was not the ‘smallholding’ of the official biographies, but was rather a small landowner's estate where, until 1861, Blank owned serfs. This normal feature of the time was something Soviet historians were never allowed to mention. It was a busy, well populated place, and Blank was evidently a strong-willed and rather impulsive man. He was obsessed with the idea that hydrotherapy was a panacea, and wrote a book on it, stating that ‘water inside and out’ could sustain everyone in good health. He used to make his tearful daughters wrap themselves in wet sheets for the night, with the result that they couldn't wait to grow up and marry to escape their father's crazy experiments.

Anna Groschopf died young, and after her death her sister, Yekaterina, came to Kokushkino to take on the job of raising the children. She was an educated woman, and it was from her that Lenin's mother acquired her ability to play the piano, to sing and to speak German, English and French. A frequent visitor to Kokushkino was Karl Groschopf, Yekaterina's brother and a senior official in the department of foreign trade. His visits would occasion musical evenings, and the Blank girls were much attracted to their educated and exuberant uncle. Life on the estate was very much that of a typical, moderately well-off landowning family, with a strong German cultural tinge, thanks to the Groschopf connection. Unlike his Soviet biographers, Lenin never tried to hide his ‘landowner’ origins; indeed in April 1891 he signed an order inscribing his mother in the gentry register of Simbirsk province.¹⁰ And at the end of his exile in 1900, when he applied to the police department to allow his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, to serve out the remainder of her own term of exile in Pskov, he signed himself ‘hereditary nobleman Vladimir Ulyanov’.¹¹ Lenin's origins on his mother's side were far from ‘proletarian’, a fact which underlines the absurdity of the Bolshevik practice of evaluating a person by their social class. This criterion reached grotesque proportions in the 1920s and 1930s, when people even committed suicide on discovering a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘landowner’ skeleton in their past. The Party leaders were, of course, excused as a ‘revolutionary exception’.

Lenin's paternal lineage was plainly plebeian, and the ‘Biographical Chronicle’ makes much of the fact that his grandfather had been a serf. But this was not actually true. Lenin's grandfather, Nikolai Vasilievich, was a Russian town-dweller¹² of Astrakhan who earned his living as a tailor. He was the son of a serf, but at an early age had been released to work away from the village, and had never returned home, becoming a town-dweller—as distinct from a peasant, merchant or nobleman—by social status. It was Lenin's great-grandfather, Vasili Nikitich Ulyanov, who had been a serf.¹³ He had remained single until he turned fifty, and it was only then, having saved up some money, that he married. His bride, who was almost twenty years his junior, was Anna Alexeevna Smirnova, a baptized Kalmyk, whose ethnic origin was responsible for Lenin's somewhat Asiatic appearance. Five children resulted from this late marriage: Alexander, Vasili, Ilya (Lenin's father), Maria and Feodosia. Ilya was the youngest child, and was born when his father was already past sixty and his mother was forty-three. His father died in 1836, leaving his wife, the five-year-old Ilya (Alexander had died in infancy), and his two daughters to his seventeen-year-old son, Vasili, to look after.

Vasili rose to the occasion and displayed exemplary enterprise, becoming a salesman for Sapozhnikov Brothers, a large commercial firm in Astrakhan. His willingness to work and his loyalty earned his employers' trust, and he was able to look after his mother and younger brother, supporting Ilya through his studies at Kazan University until he became a teacher of mathematics, sending him money ‘for settling down’, ‘for the wedding’, ‘for the move’ and so on. Vasili, a bachelor all his life, and a diligent and enthusiastic salesman, may also have sent his cash assets to Ilya shortly before he died at a date historians have been unable to establish.¹⁴

It would not be worth dwelling on the Ulyanov family tree had the official picture not been so obscured by a mass of unnecessary trivia and painted in the colours of ‘class consciousness’, and had so much not been passed over in silence, distorted and blatantly falsified. A brief account, however, may suffice to show that Lenin's background reflected the face of the entire empire. He had a general idea about his origins, but, although he was Russian by culture and language, his country was not his highest value—not that he particularly felt himself to be a German, a Swede, a Jew or a Kalmyk. He may have described himself as a Russian when filling in forms, but in his outlook he was an internationalist and cosmopolitan, for whom the revolution, power and the Party were to be immeasurably more precious than Russia itself. It is only important to clarify this matter because the Bolsheviks found it necessary to suppress evidence of the perfectly natural mixture of nationalities in Russia in order to present their leader as ethnically ‘pure’.

Lenin's antecedents were Russian, Kalmyk, Jewish, German and Swedish, and possibly others, symbolizing Russian history, as it were: a Slavic beginning, Asiatic expansion, a Jewish accretion to the national intellect, and German or West European culture. Genetic selection in history is spontaneous and mysterious. But here a digression is called for. When Lenin died, the Central Committee Secretariat commissioned his elder sister, Anna Yelizarova, to collect all the materials she could find and to write a definitive account of the Ulyanovs. Anna, who was one of the founders of the Lenin Institute, set to work, and soon discovered what I also found: namely, that there was a mass of material in the St Petersburg police department archives about her mother's descent, as well as other materials which M.S. Olminsky, chairman of the Commission for the Study of the History of the Party (Istpart), helped her locate. Some eight years later she had still not divulged her discoveries to anyone. But in 1932, two years before she died, she suddenly revealed her findings to Stalin, and said she wanted to publish them. She knew that her grandfather, Moishe Itskovich Blank, had been born in Starokonstantinov, that his two sons, Abel and Srul, had converted to Christianity and changed their names to Dmitri and Alexander, and that in 1820 both had been admitted into the St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy, from which they graduated in 1824.¹⁵

In her letter to Stalin, Anna wrote: ‘It's probably no secret for you that the research on our grandfather shows that he came from a poor Jewish family, that he was, as his baptismal certificate says, the son of “Zhitomir meshchanin Moishe Blank”.’ She went on to suggest that ‘this fact could serve to help combat anti-semitism’. Paradoxically for a Marxist who believed in the primacy of environmental over inherited factors, she also asserted the dubious proposition that Lenin's Jewish origins ‘are further confirmation of the exceptional abilities of the Semitic tribe, [confirmation] always shared by Ilyich [Lenin] … Ilyich always valued the Jews highly.’¹⁶ Anna's claim explains, for instance, why Lenin frequently recommended giving foreigners, especially Jews, intellectually demanding tasks, and leaving the elementary work to the ‘Russian fools’.¹⁷According to General A.A. Yepishev, former chief of the army's main political directorate, who heard it from Stalin's personal assistant Poskrebyshev, Anna's sister Maria handed the letter to Stalin and waited while he read it carefully. His response was categorical and fierce: ‘Absolutely not one word about this letter!’ But a little over a year later, Anna approached Stalin again, asserting that ‘in the Lenin Institute, as well as in the Institute of the Brain … they have long recognized the great gifts of this nation and the extremely beneficial effects of its blood on the progeny of mixed marriages. Ilyich himself rated their revolutionary qualities highly, their “tenacity” in the struggle, as he put it, contrasting it with the more sluggish and unstable character of the Russians. He often pointed out that the great [attributes of] organization and the strength of the revolutionary bodies in the south and west [of Russia] arose precisely from the fact that 50 per cent of their members were of that nationality.’¹⁸ But Stalin, the Russified Georgian, could not allow it to be known that Lenin had Jewish roots, and his strict prohibition remained firmly in place.

In November 1937, the writer Marietta Shaginyan published an article in the Moscow journal Novy mir as the first part of her research into the genealogy of the Ulyanovs. Somehow the article went unnoticed, but in 1938 she published her work as a novel based on fact, entitled The Ulyanov Family, and dealing with the origins of the family up to the birth of Lenin. The reaction was harsh. The book was first read by a small group of senior members of the Soviet Writers' Union, who condemned it as an ‘ideologically dangerous’ work of ‘petty bourgeois’ character. A month later, on 9 August 1938, the presidium of the Union convened and passed a resolution which declared that ‘in applying pseudo-scientific research methods to Lenin's so-called “family tree”, M.S. Shaginyan gives a distorted representation of the national character of Lenin, the greatest proletarian revolutionary, a genius of mankind, who was raised up by the Russian people and who is its national pride’.¹⁹ Those responsible for writing, publishing and distributing the book were dealt with severely. In 1972, all documents on Lenin's origins, 284 pages in all, were transferred from the various archives which held them to the Central Committee special collections, where they remained.

The German branch of Lenin's family tree is also interesting. According to Leonhard Haas, the Swiss historian and former director of the Swiss Federal Archives, the Groschopfs, all of whom were wealthy bourgeois, came from northern Germany and could boast several notable personalities throughout German history: Lenin's great-grandfather, J.G. Groschopf, was a representative of Schade, a German trading company. Other ancestors and descendants of Lenin's forebears include I. Hoeffer, a well-known theologian; Ernst Curtius, the tutor of Kaiser Friedrich III; and Field Marshal Walter Model, who earned the title of ‘the Führer's Fireman’ as an audacious commander in the Wehrmacht's assault on Moscow in 1941.²⁰ The Swedish branch, who were mostly artisans—wigmakers, hatters, tailors—issued from a rich jeweller, one K.F. Estedt, who lived in Uppsala and supplied the court of King Gustavus IV in the late eighteenth century.

Having settled in Simbirsk in 1869, the Ulyanovs lived the life of most civil service families or bourgeoisie of the period. Like most provincial towns at that time, social life in Simbirsk was not especially stimulating. Trade and commerce were the dominant activities, while various educational and cultural establishments provided spiritual and intellectual nourishment. Both Ulyanov parents, however, had high aspirations for their children, and their efforts left their mark. Vladimir, who was born in April 1870, had two brothers and three sisters: Anna (born 1864), Alexander (1866), Olga (1871), Dmitri (1874) and Maria (1878). Another brother, Nikolai, born in 1873, died in infancy, and another sister, also called Olga, died at birth in 1868. (The second Olga died at the age of twenty.) Lenin's mother did not attend university, but was nevertheless well educated, thanks to the efforts of her aunt, Yekaterina Groschopf. Much has been written about the education of Lenin and his siblings, some of it accurate, but also much that is sugar-coated and exaggerated. Some authors have almost suggested that Lenin's genius emerged while he was still in nappies. I do not intend to recount the domestic life of the family in detail, but to pick out some salient features that are sometimes missed.

The young Vladimir—invariably known in the family as Volodya—was a gifted and capable child, qualities enhanced by the comfortable, supportive atmosphere of the home, thanks to his father's successful career. The family lived in a good house, the three eldest children each had a room of their own, there was a cook, a nanny, and servants to deal with the domestic chores. Lenin himself recalled that the family lacked for nothing. An outstanding teacher and advocate of state education, his father rose to become director of the province's schools in a few years. He was well regarded by the authorities and was awarded several decorations, including the Order of Stanislav, First Class, finally achieving the rank of State Counsellor, corresponding on the Table of Ranks to the title of general. Having become a hereditary noble through his service career, he thus conferred the same privileged status on his family. The Ulyanovs' life was stable and secure—until, that is, Ilya Nikolaevich died in 1886, and, out of the blue, the eldest son, Alexander, was arrested and hanged in the following year.

Volodya was always top of his class, but he showed none of the ‘revolutionary free-thinking’ described by many of his biographers. It is surely one of the most striking ironies of modern Russian history that the headmaster of his high school should have been Fedor Mikhailovich Kerensky, father of the future ‘hero’ of the February revolution of 1917 who was to be the last obstacle to the Bolshevik seizure of power in October. Kerensky père often publicly expressed his admiration for the ability and diligence shown by Volodya Ulyanov. Volodya, meanwhile, was acquiring a strong intellectual foundation as a result of family support and encouragement from his teachers. He was also acquiring deep self-confidence and a sense of superiority over his peers. He was the family favourite, accustomed to being the centre of attention. Not that he was vain, but neither did he conceal his moral ‘right’ to the primacy he believed was his, and even at that early stage he seems to have shown intolerance of other people's views. One of Alexander's school friends, V.V. Vodovozov, recalled that he realised, after visiting the Ulyanovs, that it would he impossible to become a close friend of Vladimir, whom he thought rude in argument, excessively self-confident and self-important, and puffed up by being thought a genius within the family and an infallible authority outside it.²¹

Vladimir and Alexander

Lenin's intellectual and political self-definition still lay in the future, but one of the most decisive landmarks along the way was the fate of his brother Alexander. The age difference of four years between Alexander and Volodya meant that, as children, the younger boy very much looked up to his elder as a superior being, a hero figure, a rôle which Alexander evidently played with relish. Alexander, moreover, as the eldest child, and perhaps the brightest, also set a pattern of behaviour and activity at home that was bound to encourage his juniors to do their best intellectually: in his teens he edited a family weekly to which everyone was expected to contribute.²² The sudden and traumatic removal of such an admired and loved member of the family was bound to have a powerful effect on the lives of the others.

The execution of Alexander was a tragedy that struck at the entire family. In the young Lenin, it sparked a surge of rebellion, although it was not as literal and direct as post-revolutionary myth would have us believe. It was customary among Soviet historians to quote the words he is reported to have uttered to his sister Maria, then aged all of nine, when news of Alexander's execution reached the family: ‘No, we will not go that way. That's not the way.’²³ According to the official accounts, the fate of Lenin's brother ‘reinforced his revolutionary views’.²⁴ He may well have spoken those words to his little sister, but the fact is that at this age he held no revolutionary views whatsoever, and he could not have distinguished one revolutionary ‘way’ from another.

The death of his father, undoubtedly a major tragedy and economic disaster for the family, has also been depicted in official Soviet literature as an event of ideological significance in the life of the young Lenin. Most writers followed Nadezhda Krupskaya's clumsy assertion of 1938 that Lenin's father's views exerted a revolutionary influence on his children: ‘As a teacher, Ilya Nikolaevich read Dobrolyubov with particular interest. Dobrolyubov conquered the honest heart of Ilya Nikolaevich and defined his work as schools director and as the mentor of his son, Lenin, and his other children, all of whom became revolutionaries.’²⁵ This is far from the truth.

A well educated, cultivated man of his time, Ilya Ulyanov was also deeply pious and rather conservative. His eldest daughter, Anna, recalled that he ‘had never been a revolutionary and wanted to protect the young from that way of thinking. He much admired Alexander II whose reign, especially its first phase, was for him “a bright period”.’²⁶ The 1860s had been a period of ‘great reforms’, when the serfs had been emancipated, a measure of local self-government introduced in the provinces, the judiciary allowed to become a free professional corporation, universities and schools expanded and given greater autonomy: in a word, Russia had been launched on a path of reform in the general direction, if not of liberal democracy, then at least of social modernization. The climate of reform, combined with the government's fear of going too far, too fast, also gave rise to a revolutionary movement, whose members—mainly students—felt that nothing would change fundamentally for the better unless the whole political structure was demolished, or at least the tsar was removed. To support the reformist trend was to be progressive, to oppose it reactionary, and to dismiss both sides of the argument revolutionary. Ilya Ulyanov definitely belonged to the first category.

Ilya's youngest daughter, Maria, also attested to his civic loyalty: ‘[He] was not a revolutionary, and we don't know enough to say what his attitudes were to the revolutionary activities of the young.’²⁷ It would, however, be safe to assume that, as a teacher with a profound sense of vocation, he did much to create a democratic, humane atmosphere in the household. The harmony between husband and wife, their concern for the children, the equality between the siblings, the culture of hard work and diligence, all helped to form an extremely favourable soil for the seeds of free thinking, should they fall there. Ilya Ulyanov, in other words, created the preconditions for his children, above all Alexander and Vladimir, to be receptive to radical ideas. Ilya Ulyanov did not make Lenin a revolutionary; he and his wife merely cultivated in their children the ability to change, to feel the need for change. When Lenin's father died in January 1886, Vladimir was not yet sixteen.

Even before she had buried her husband, Maria Ulyanov applied for a pension for herself and her children, and a little later asked the Kazan schools district for a special grant. From now on she would live only on her pension and the rent from Kokushkino, of which she was a joint owner. In September 1886 the Simbirsk district court confirmed that Ilya's estate should pass to Maria and her children.

In April 1887, when Lenin reached the age of seventeen, he registered for military service,²⁸ but as he was now the eldest son and potential breadwinner, he was exempted.²⁹ He was not in fact the family breadwinner. On the contrary, thanks to his mother's pension, and with her strong encouragement, he pursued his studies.

If it was the family culture that created the preconditions for Lenin to become radically minded, it was the fate of his brother Alexander that provided the catalyst. It is doubtful if Alexander's tragic end changed Lenin's revolutionary direction, since there was none to change. Vladimir's supposed words to his sister on hearing of his brother's execution also raise a question. ‘No, we will not go that way.’ Why ‘we’? He belonged to no secret society or circle. Perhaps Maria misremembered his words after so many years, or perhaps the heavy weight of Soviet experience suggested the words to her mind. In any case, it is hard, in purely human terms, to believe that Vladimir's response to the news of his brother's death would prompt him to pronounce the slogan that would make him forever a ‘proper’ revolutionary.

Alexander was a gifted youth, as the gold medal he attained on graduating from high school indicated. At school he had shown an interest in zoology and acquired three European languages, and at St Petersburg University, which he entered in 1883, he quickly became one of the top students. A month before his father's premature death he won the University gold medal for work on annelid worms. Nothing indicated that he had been seized by the forces of social protest.

In his first years at university, Alexander was indifferent, if not sceptical, towards the political circles, but he became more involved when friends introduced him to the writings of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov. For them, Marxism emphasized the need for violence to change the existing conditions. One of the more radical members of the group, P. Shevyrev, declared that only by the removal of tyrants could life be reorganized on just principles. At first Alexander, who was wrapped up in his scientific plans and discoveries, merely listened, but gradually he was won over by the apparent logic of his friends' radicalism, and came to feel it was morally unacceptable to stand aside from ‘the ideas of progress and revolution’, as they put it.

While Alexander was at university his contacts with Vladimir were sporadic, limited to the occasional letter with greetings to all. And when he came home on vacation, there was no particular intimacy between them. They were a close-knit family, but the children tended to pair off, and Vladimir was closest to his sister Olga, though he deferred to Alexander's intelligence. Anna, the eldest sister, recalled once talking with Alexander after their father had died, and asking him: ‘How do you like our Volodya?’ Her brother replied: ‘He's obviously very gifted, but we don't really get on.’ Anna was intrigued, but Alexander refused to explain.³⁰ This may be the only hint in all the apologist literature that relations between the siblings might not have been entirely flawless.

The 1880s in Russia were a time of harsh reaction against the assassination in 1881 of the ‘tsar-liberator’, Alexander II. Students in particular were more closely watched and harassed by the police than ever before, and Alexander's entry into a group of conspirators who were planning the assassination of Alexander III is commonly explained by the violent dispersal by the police of a student demonstration in memory of the radical thinker Dobrolyubov on 17 November 1886. The arrest and deportation to Siberia of several student friends confronted Alexander with the moral question of how to behave in such circumstances. According to Shevyrev's view: ‘When the government takes our closest friends by the throat, it is especially immoral to refuse to struggle, and under the present circumstances real struggle with tsarism can only mean terrorism.’ Of this dilemma Nikolai Valentinov, an early Bolshevik who knew Lenin well during the time of his first period abroad, between 1900 and 1905, and a valuable historical source in himself, wrote: ‘Painfully sensitive to suggestions of immorality, Alexander, after agonizing hesitation, began to share these views, and once he did so, he became an advocate of systematic, frightening terrorism, capable of shaking the autocracy.’³¹

The group of conspirators under Shevyrev's leadership grew. Their watch on the tsar's route from the palace to St Isaac's Cathedral began on 26 February 1887, but they were utterly inexperienced, and when on 1 March the police intercepted a letter from one of them, the entire group was arrested. The Ulyanov family was devastated, but placed their hope in the emperor's clemency. Alexander's mother rushed to St Petersburg and handed in a letter to Alexander III which said, among other things, that she would purge her son's heart of its criminal schemes and resurrect the healthy human instincts he had always lived by, if only the tsar would show mercy.

The drama caught the attention of society, and received much publicity. Maria Ulyanova's entreaties failed, however, not only because of the tsar's intransigence, but because Alexander refused to ask for clemency. Those who found it possible to do so had their death sentences commuted to hard labour. The trial was very short, lasting only from 15 to 19 March. Five unrepentant comrades were sentenced to hang. Even when Alexander was saying goodbye to his mother there was still the chance of salvation, but he told her in a quiet, firm voice, ‘I cannot do it after everything I said in court. It would be insincere.’ Alexander's lawyer, Knyazev, was present at this meeting, and after the October revolution he recalled that Alexander had explained: ‘Imagine, Mama, two men facing each other at a duel. One of them has already shot at his opponent, the other has yet to do so, when the one who has shot asks him not to. No, I cannot behave like that!’

Alexander had proved himself to be extraordinarily brave. His last wish was that his mother should bring him a volume of Heine to read. On the morning of 8 May 1887 the prisoners were told they were to be hanged in the courtyard of Shlisselburg Fortress in two hours' time. This was their last chance to appeal for clemency, but even now these young people, misguided as history may judge them to have been, proved themselves morally worthy of the nation's memory. They were not fanatics, they believed that their country's future could only be altered by revolutionary acts against tyrants. Alexander's group seemed then and seems now naive, but it is impossible not to admire their willingness to sacrifice their lives in the name of freedom.

The day Alexander was hanged, Vladimir was doing his geometry and arithmetic exams, for which he got his usual top marks. The family still believed the widespread rumour that the death sentence would be commuted at the last minute. His mother's last words to him were, ‘Be brave, be brave.’³² She was in deep mourning for a long time, comforted perhaps by the fact that, as she told her children, before his execution Alexander had bowed before the cross and so would receive God's forgiveness.

Vladimir Ulyanov was shaken by his brother's death. Later he would learn that Alexander had had a hand in formulating the programme of the Narodnaya Volya (People's Will) terrorist faction, a document bearing the stamp of Marxist influence, but simplistic and ‘barracks-minded’. Still reeling from the shock of the family tragedy, Vladimir was, however, less concerned with the young terrorists' ideas than with the stoicism and strength of will they had shown. The sharp turn that now took place in his mind was not about methods of struggle—terror or a mass movement. He still had no views on this issue. But, somewhere in the depths of his mind, the soil was now prepared for the notion that nothing would be achieved on the way to revolution without radicalism, plus the will to succeed, and it was this that became the nucleus of his outlook. His remark ‘We will not go that way’ meant—if he said it—that he realized it was not necessary to be a bomb-thrower oneself, like the unfortunate Alexander, nor was it necessary to man the barricades oneself, or put down rebellion oneself, or go to the front in a civil war oneself. And he never would do any of these things himself. The action of individual units was not important. The main thing was to command huge, virtually unwitting masses. It was a more effective way, if less noble than Alexander's.

The Forerunners

The list of those who have been proposed as Lenin's ideological precursors is long, and it starts with the radical nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Arrested in 1862 for seditious agitation, Chernyshevsky was to spend the next twenty years in prison and in Siberian exile, where he served seven years of hard labour. Before his deportation from St Petersburg, however, he managed in 1864 to write his novel What is to be Done? and to have it smuggled out and published. It was to inspire an entire generation of Russian youth with ideas of self-emancipation and the duty to bring knowledge to the peasants. Other suggested early sources of Lenin's revolutionary awakening include various Populist thinkers and Plekhanov's Marxist ‘Emancipation of Labour’ Group. It is interesting to note what Lenin himself thought of the origins of his political thinking. In an essay on Lenin in 1933, Karl Radek, a brilliant pamphlet-writer and juggler of paradoxes, wrote: ‘When Vladimir Ilyich once saw me looking at a collection of his 1903 articles … his face lit up with a cunning grin and he said with a chuckle, “Interesting to see what fools we were.”’³³

The sources of Lenin's political outlook were complex, and there can be no argument about the formative effect of his brother's death, which sent a ray of white light through the prism of his mind, a ray which, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, was refracted by that prism into red.³⁴ The ‘prism’ was in fact a constellation of circumstances. The first of these was the government's treatment of Vladimir and his family. When Lenin entered Kazan University in 1887, he went with a glowing testimonial from his headmaster in Simbirsk, Fedor Kerensky, who wanted to protect him from adverse association with his brother's notoriety: ‘Neither in school nor outside did Ulyanov ever give occasion, either by word or deed, to arouse an unfavourable opinion among the school authorities or his teachers.’³⁵ Even when Lenin was expelled from the university in the December of his first year for taking part in a student demonstration, Kerensky, both to defend the young man and to justify his confidence in him, wrote: ‘[Vladimir Ulyanov] might have lost the balance of his mind as a result of the fatal catastrophe that has shattered the unhappy family and, no doubt, has also influenced the impressionable youth disastrously.’³⁶ But on the first occasion when Lenin attended a student meeting, during his first term at the university, he had already been ‘marked’ by the authorities.

The administrator of the Kazan educational region noted that, two days before the demonstration took place, ‘Ulyanov was up to no good: he was spending his time in the smoking-room, chatting and whispering …’ It seems that the ‘demonstration’ amounted to little more than running up and down a corridor,³⁷ but in view of the fact that he was the brother of a condemned ‘state criminal’, Ulyanov was not merely expelled but also sent away from Kazan to the family estate at Kokushkino.

By labelling him as unreliable and suspect, the expulsion effectively excluded the young Lenin from the state educational system altogether. When his mother applied for him to be reinstated at Kazan, the Director of the Police Department in St Petersburg, P.N. Durnovo, noted, ‘We can scarcely do anything for Ulyanov.’³⁸ The Director of the Education Department was more emphatic: ‘Isn't this the brother of that Ulyanov? He's also from Simbirsk high school. Yes, it's clear from the end of the document. He should certainly not be admitted.’³⁹ By thus ostracizing him, the tsarist authorities were steadily narrowing Lenin's range of choices. His solidarity with his dead brother became more firmly fixed. The letters he wrote, in which he respectfully requested ‘Your Excellency's permission to enter the Imperial Kazan University’, or had ‘the honour most humbly to request Your Excellency to allow me to go abroad to a foreign university’, and which he signed ‘Nobleman Ulyanov’, were at first unsuccessful.⁴⁰ The spirit of protest grew as the regime rejected him.

Expulsion did not mean Lenin now had to earn his living as a docker or shop assistant, like his grandfather. He was ‘exiled’ to Kokushkino, and the family then moved to their farm at Alakaevka, about thirty miles from Samara. His mother acquired the property of some two hundred acres in early 1889 for the sum of 7500 roubles. Lenin now immersed himself in reading a wide range of Western and Russian social-political literature, including Marx's Capital. The police kept their eye on him, but he gave them no trouble. Apart from attending an illegal meeting and occasionally seeing some Marxists, it is difficult to find any evidence of the so-called ‘revolutionary period in Samara’. It would be more accurate to describe this time as one of intensive preparation for the examinations to enter St Petersburg University as an external student. By the time he reached the age of twenty-two, Lenin had acquired a first-class diploma from St Petersburg and been accepted as a lawyer's assistant on the Samara circuit. He was not destined to succeed at this profession and he soon cooled towards the busy life of a defence attorney. The few cases he was given to handle were only petty thefts or property claims, and he accomplished even these with variable success, although he did defend his own interests twice, winning on both occasions. In one case he sued his peasant neighbours for damage to the Ulyanov estate, and, much later, during a period of residence in Paris, he sued a vicomte who ran him over when he was riding his bicycle. His legal career was not something Lenin was ever keen to recall.

Returning to the question of his revolutionary roots, the time at Kokushkino was one of intensive study of the widest range of ideas. In conversation with Valentinov in 1904 in Geneva—one of the many European cities where he spent seventeen years as an émigré, with a brief interval back in Russia during the 1905 revolution—Lenin recalled reading non-stop from early morning until late at night. His favourite author was Chernyshevsky, whose every word published in the journal Sovremennik he read. ‘I became acquainted with the works of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov,’ he stated, ‘but it was only Chernyshevsky who had an overwhelming influence on me, beginning with his novel What is to be Done?. Chernyshevsky's great service was not only that he showed that every right-thinking and really decent person must be a revolutionary, but something more important: what kind of revolutionary, what his principles ought to be, how he should aim for his goal, what means and methods he should employ to realize it …’⁴¹

Valentinov suggests that it was Chernyshevsky, who had in Lenin's own words ‘ploughed him over’ before he had read Marx, who made the young man into a revolutionary. It is a view contested by the Menshevik writer Mark Vishnyak, who pointed out that Lenin read Chernyshevsky a month or two after the execution of his brother, and therefore ‘the soil was ready for ploughing over’, and it was the news of that event, Vishnyak claimed, that gave Lenin the charge he had needed, not Chernyshevsky's ‘talentless and primitive novel’.⁴² These two views boil down to the same conclusion, namely that Chernyshevsky was Lenin's John the Baptist thanks to the tragedy of Alexander.⁴³ Chernyshevsky, whatever else Lenin took from him, made it possible for the young man to absorb a profound hostility towards liberalism, as one of his earliest works (1894) shows. ‘Who are the “friends of the people” and how do they fight against the social democrats?’ was published (unsigned) in mimeographed form in St Petersburg, and in it Lenin repeatedly cited Chernyshevsky and called his judgments ‘the foresight of genius’, while the ‘loathsome’ compromise of the ‘liberals and landowners’ could only hamper ‘the open struggle of the classes’ in Russia.⁴⁴ He wanted to use Chernyshevsky's writings in his attacks on the liberal bourgeoisie, particularly in order to expose the existence of ‘an entire chasm’ between the socialists and the democrats.⁴⁵

In effect, Lenin used Chernyshevsky to ‘russify’ Western Marxism, which had too much of the liberal and democratic and too little ‘class war’. The split that was to take place among the Russian social democrats would be precisely over attitudes to democracy, to legal, parliamentary means of struggle, to the place of political parties in a democracy and the strength of liberal persuasion. Lenin's forebears were, thus, those thinkers who fostered notions which reinforced the coercive, harsh, class elements in Marxism. It would therefore be true to say that Lenin was guided by pragmatic considerations in becoming a revolutionary. While worshipping classical Marxism, he could borrow concepts and ideas, arguments and rebuttals from Chernyshevsky, Peter Tkachev, Sergei Nechaev, Mikhail Bakunin, Carl Clausewitz, Peter Struve, Peter Lavrov and Alexander Herzen. He reinforced his ‘mainline’ Marxism with everything that made that teaching uncompromising, harsh and radical. Recalling the first weeks of the Soviet regime, Krupskaya wrote: ‘Closely studying the experience of the Paris Commune, the first proletarian state in the world, Ilyich remarked on the pernicious effect of the mild attitude of the workers and proletarian masses and the workers' government towards their manifest enemies. And therefore, when speaking about struggling with enemies, Ilyich always “tightened the screws”, so to speak, fearing the excessive mildness of the masses, as well as his own.’⁴⁶

The presence of Nechaev among the names of Lenin's sources should give pause. Both Marx and Engels had condemned Nechaev's doctrine of individual terror—just as Lenin himself would on numerous occasions. But Nechaev was more than an advocate of terror, he was synonymous with conspiratorial politics, entailing secret plans for the overthrow and merciless extermination of hated authorities and governments. In the terminology of the time, such tactics were called Blanquist, after Louis Auguste Blanqui, a radical activist in France during the 18305 and 18405. While condemning this approach, Lenin would unhesitatingly resort to it at decisive moments. As Plekhanov wrote in 1906: ‘From the very beginning, Lenin was more of a Blanquist than a Marxist. He imported his Blanquist contraband under the flag of the strictest Marxist orthodoxy.’⁴⁷ The Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich recalled Lenin discussing Nechaev, who had been depicted by Dostoevsky in his novel The Possessed, which fictionalized the murder of a student by Nechaev and his ‘Secret Reprisal’ group: ‘Even the revolutionary milieu was hostile to Nechaev, forgetting, Lenin said, “that he had possessed a special talent as an organizer, a conspirator, and a skill which he could wrap up in staggering formulations.”’ He also approvingly quoted Nechaev's reply to the question of which of the Romanovs should be killed: ‘The entire House of Romanov!’⁴⁸

Vladimir Voitinsky, an economist and active Bolshevik in 1905, recalled discussing Lenin's abandonment of liberalism in conversations at the time. Lenin used to talk about the need to combat ‘liberal pompous triviality’. ‘Revolution,’ Lenin would say, ‘is a tough business. You can't make it wearing white gloves and with clean hands … The Party's not a ladies' school … a scoundrel might be what we need just because he is a scoundrel.’⁴⁹ Nechaev's famous dictum, ‘Everything that helps the revolution is moral. Everything that hinders it is immoral and criminal,’ was echoed by Lenin at the III Congress of Communist Youth in 1919 when he said that everything is moral that promotes the victory of Communism. In 1918 he declared to Maria Spiridonova, the doyenne of terrorists and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, that there was no room for morality in politics, only pragmatism.

Lenin adopted Marxism as a weapon, ‘freeing’ it of its ‘liberal’, ‘democratic’ trivialities, because the steel fist of the proletarian dictatorship had no need of gloves. Following the Bolsheviks' forcible dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, Plekhanov, ‘the father of Russian Marxism’, could write in his last article: ‘The tactics of the Bolsheviks are the tactics of Bakunin, and in many cases those of Nechaev, pure and simple.’⁵⁰ The question of who were Lenin's ideological forebears, therefore, is answered simply: he used anything and anyone if it helped him achieve his aim.

The Discovery of Marxism

There may be many reasons why Lenin became captivated by Marxism. In my opinion, his powerful and already extremely well informed mind was searching for a universal explanation of human existence. In any event, some time on the eve of 1889, when the family was still living in Kazan, he got hold of the first volume of Capital. It must have been a revelation simply in terms of the scale of its grasp, regardless of its rôle in history. Hegel once remarked on the ‘attraction of the distance’, and for the young Lenin, with his radical outlook, Capital's historical distance captured his imagination, seeming to lead to the solution to all of life's eternal and ‘accursed’ questions of justice, freedom, equality, oppression and exploitation. But who introduced Lenin to Marxism?

At the time he was expelled from university, there was a convinced young Marxist, called Nikolai Fedoseev, living in Kazan. Lenin was to meet him only once, nearly ten years later, when they were both on their way to exile in Siberia. Fedoseev had compiled a reading list for social democrats, and Lenin told Gorky in 1908, when they were together on Capri, that ‘it was the best reference book anyone had yet put together’, and that it had helped him find his way through political literature, opening the path for him to Marxism.⁵¹ Lenin's first known writing was a piece written in 1893 called ‘New Economic Movements in Peasant Life’, in effect a review of V.E. Postnikov's book The South Russian Economy.⁵² The article, which was unsigned, read like a schoolboy's attempt at Marxist analysis. There is little of Lenin's own ideas in it and it was rejected by the journal, Russkaya mysl'. He had greater success with a second review-article, also written in 1893 and similarly unsigned, called ‘On the So-called Question of Markets’, in which he contrasted Marxist and Populist (Narodnik) ideas on the development of capitalism in Russia, in effect arguing that ‘class’ and impersonal historic need had replaced the ‘critically thinking individual’. This article was also not published, but Lenin read it at a meeting of Marxist students in St Petersburg in the autumn of 1893, and received the praise of the engineering students present.

Lenin soon went beyond the guidelines of Fedoseev's catalogue, and it is evident from his earliest, as well as his later, works that two main ideas in Marxism dominated his thinking: classes and class struggle, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. No other Marxist theorist took these concepts as far as Lenin, despite the fact that Marx had said very little about the dictatorship. As a social democrat, Lenin did not limit himself to commenting on and recapitulating the interpretations given by Marx and Engels, but formulated his own ‘classical’ definitions. For instance, on rural poverty, he asked, ‘What is the class war?’ and gave the answer, ‘It is the struggle of one part of the people against another, the mass of the rightless, oppressed and toiling against the privileged, oppressing and parasitic, it is the struggle of the workers or proletarians against the owners or the bourgeoisie’.⁵³ Like so many other thinkers and revolutionaries, Lenin would fall into the trap of thinking that it was only necessary to take everything from the ‘haves’ and redistribute it ‘fairly’ and all would be well. It was the eternal mirage. As the philosopher Nikolai Berdyaev observed: ‘Many times in history the lower orders have risen up and tried to sweep away all hierarchical and qualitative differences in society and to install mechanical equality … But class is quantity and man is quality. Class warfare, elevated to an “idea”, conceals the qualitative image of man … Thus the idea of class kills the idea of man. This murder is carried out theoretically in Marxism …’⁵⁴

The context in which Lenin acquired his Marxism was the debate with romantic Populism. In one of his early works, ‘What is the Legacy we are Rejecting?’, he rightly criticized N.K. Mikhailovsky, one of the leading exponents of liberal Populism, for the Populist refusal to accept capitalism in Russia and for the Populist idealization of the peasant commune.⁵⁵ One can already detect in this article echoes that will soon become a hallmark of Leninist usage—‘rubbish’, ‘slander’, ‘trivial trick’—often as a substitute for real argument. It seems never to have occurred to Lenin to ask himself whether the dictatorship of the proletariat was compatible with the justice Marxism cherished as a fundamental idea. By what right should one class unconditionally command another? Could such a dictatorship achieve priority over the highest value, namely liberty?

Such questions did not trouble the young Lenin. When he accepted Marxism it was finally and irrevocably. He never questioned the sociopolitical concept of the doctrine, which was based in the last analysis on coercion as the solution to all contradictions in the interests of one class. He was never troubled by the viciousness and narrowness of this way of building the new society. It was not therefore surprising that when he became the ruler of that new society, his main preoccupation was with the punitive organs, the Cheka (the political police) and the State Political Administration, or GPU. Indeed, reading the minutes of Lenin's Politburo after the seizure of power, it quickly becomes clear that there was scarcely a session that did not review measures for tightening the dictatorship of the proletariat—that is, the dictatorship of the Party—by widening the powers of the punitive bodies, legislating terror, ensuring the immunity of the new caste of ‘untouchables’ and the class ‘purity’ of its members. Thus, on 14 May 1921 the Politburo, with Lenin's active encouragement, adopted a decision to widen the powers of the Cheka ‘in the use of the highest form of punishment’, i.e. the death penalty;⁵⁶ in January 1922 a further step was taken to strengthen the punitive function of the dictatorship and the guarantee of the ‘class line’ by the creation of the GPU, whose chief task was to struggle against counter-revolution using the widest range of physical and psychological force. And the courts ‘must include people chosen by the Cheka’.⁵⁷

As for the way these bodies were to act, Lenin himself set the style. When a cipher arrived from the Red Army in the Far East in August 1921 announcing the arrest of Baron Ungern von Sternberg, one of the leaders of the White forces in the Trans-Baikal region, Lenin personally raised the question of a trial at the Politburo. Naturally there were no objections, and he merely had to dictate the Politburo resolution as that of the highest Party tribunal: ‘The accusations must be sound, and if the proof is conclusive and beyond doubt, then a public trial should be set, conducted with the greatest despatch, and [Ungern] should be shot.’⁵⁸ So much for a ‘trial’!

Nikolai Fedoseev could never have dreamed that the young man he met briefly in a station waiting-room in Siberia in 1897, as their paths into exile crossed, would turn out to be a major figure in twentieth-century history. The correspondence between the two men leaves no doubt that it was Fedoseev who had, however imperceptibly, given Vladimir Ulyanov another shove in the direction of revolution. When Lenin heard in the summer of 1898 that Fedoseev had killed himself at Verkholensk in Eastern Siberia, he was genuinely saddened. The death of the exile was embellished by romantic tragedy when his fiancée, Maria Gofengauz, living at Archangel in forced settlement, and with whom Lenin was acquainted, also killed herself. Lenin often recalled Fedoseev warmly. Gorky wrote that on one occasion, when Fedoseev was mentioned, Lenin became animated and said excitedly that if he'd lived, ‘he'd no doubt have been a great Bolshevik’.⁵⁹

For Lenin, Marxism meant above all one thing, and that was revolution. It was the revolutionary message of the doctrine that attracted him in the first place. He absorbed its ideas and propositions as a convinced pragmatist, and was less interested in the early humanistic writings of Marx and Engels than he was in those concerned with the class struggle. He plunged into the Marxist world of categories, laws, principles, legends and myths, and regarded Plekhanov with reverence, which may explain why the ideas he drew from Marxism were free of a purely ‘Western’ vision of historical evolution. He was entranced by Plekhanov's On the Monistic View of History, published under the pseudonym of N. Beltov, a book in which, Potresov wrote, the author ‘brought the ten commandments of Marxism down from Mount Sinai and handed them to the Russian young’, and, as Nicolaevsky echoed, ‘introduced the Russian intelligentsia, above all the students, who were the avant-garde of the revolutionary army at the time, to undiluted revolutionary Marxism’.⁶⁰ Plekhanov wrote that ‘Chernyshevsky never missed an opportunity to mock the Russian liberals and to state in print that … he … had nothing in common with them. Cowardice, short-sightedness, narrow views, inactivity and garrulous boastfulness, these were the distinguishing features he saw in the liberals’. Plekhanov had taken as the epigraph for his book an extract from a letter Chernyshevsky had written to his wife in October 1862 when he was in the Peter-Paul Fortress in St Petersburg: ‘Our life together belongs to history: in hundreds of years from now our names will still be dear to people, and they will remember them with gratitude …’⁶¹ Lenin must have felt an affinity with these words. He was not vain or ambitious, he simply believed in his historic mission. Plekhanov's works brought Lenin still closer to Chernyshevsky, and finally led him to the social democratic Bible, the works of Marx.

Plekhanov and Lenin would part in due course for reasons usually ascribed to differences over organization. I believe that this was a secondary cause, and that the real reason for their split was over attitudes to liberty. As early as the end of the century, Lenin, like Chernyshevsky before him, was already defining the main enemies of the working class as liberalism and so-called ‘Economism’, a sort of Russian trade unionism which encouraged the workers to organize and fight for a better economic life, while the intelligentsia would struggle for their political and civil rights. In Lenin's view, and that of his followers, the liberals and ‘Economists’, by leading the workers away from political struggle, were denying them the opportunity to aim for socialist revolution. The Marxism preached by Lenin and the Bolsheviks had no place for liberalism and ‘Economism’, which in fact held the key to democratic change in Russia. To the end of his life, Lenin was therefore sympathetic to the early Plekhanov and openly hostile to the later one, who was to call Lenin's 1917 policy ‘delirious’. It is interesting to note that when in April 1922 the Politburo discussed the publication of Plekhanov's works, Lenin insisted that only one volume be compiled, and only of his early, ‘revolutionary’ writings.⁶²

If Lenin was not fond of late Plekhanov, he positively hated the Plekhanov of the revolutionary era. Plekhanov had seen through Lenin, he understood the essence and the danger of his line. In his 1910 article ‘Comedy of Errors’, published in his Dnevnik sotsialdemokrata, he wrote that ‘only Lenin could have gone so far as “to ask myself in which month we should begin the armed uprising …”’. Lenin's plans, which boiled down to a seizure of power, Plekhanov called utopian.⁶³ And indeed, as soon as the Bolsheviks had power in their hands, they quickly forgot many of their slogans and promises. Power for Lenin was the goal and the means to bring about his utopian designs.

While absorbing Marxism from the writings of the doctrine's founders, Lenin also took up ideas from a wide range of thinkers and writers, a fact suggesting perhaps a developed ability to comprehend and, by applying his own ‘ferment’, to absorb, digest and make those ideas his own. He was, however, never able to assimilate the ideas of the liberals, who proclaimed the rule of law, or the ‘Economists’, who wanted the workers to flourish, or the Western democrats, who put parliamentary government above all else. Lenin's ‘discovery’ of Marxism was thus extremely selective; he saw in it only what he wanted to see. Even Trotsky, who after October 1917 and to the end of his days described himself as a Leninist, criticized Lenin at the turn of the century for his lack of ‘flexibility of thought’, his belittling of the rêle of theory, which could lead to a ‘dictatorship over the proletariat’.⁶⁴

By the turn of the century Lenin had acquired the conviction that, as far as his opponents were concerned, his theoretical position was unassailable, and henceforth he exhibited a rare hostility to everything that would not fit the Procrustean bed of his preconceptions. In a letter to Maxim Gorky in 1908—the famous writer was a major benefactor of the revolutionary movement and had a close, if complex, relationship with Lenin after 1907—on the philosophical work of the Bolshevik Alexander Bogdanov, Lenin wrote: ‘After reading it, I got into a rage and became unusually furious: it became clear to me that he has taken an arch-wrong path.’ He went on: ‘I became frenzied with indignation.’ What had made him so angry was that the Bolsheviks might draw their teaching on the dialectic ‘from the putrid well of some French “positivists” or other’.⁶⁵His Marxism was, however, plainly one-sided, Blanquist, super-revolutionary. Like a man ‘with the truth in his pocket,’ Viktor Chernov, leader of the Socialist Revolutionaries, wrote, ‘he did not value the creative search for truth, he had no respect for the convictions of others, no feeling for the freedom that is integral to any individual spiritual creativity. On the contrary, he was open to the purely Asiatic idea of making the press, speech, the rostrum, even thought itself, the monopoly of a single party which he raised to the rank of a ruling caste.’⁶⁶

Marx and Engels were theorists. Lenin turned their teaching into a catechism of class struggle. As the writer Alexander Kuprin observed: ‘For Lenin, Marx was indisputable. There isn't a speech in which he does not lean on his Messiah, as on the fixed centre of the universe. But there can be no doubt that if Marx were to look down from where he is on Lenin and his Russian, sectarian, Asiatic Bolshevism, he would repeat his famous remark, “Excuse me, monsieur, but I am no Marxist.”’⁶⁷

Nadezhda Krupskaya

Russian social democrats subordinated the moral side of their political programmes to the practical interests of the moment. Vera Zasulich, a leading member of the Russian social democratic movement, once remarked that Marxism had ‘no official system of morals’.⁶⁸ The proletariat and everyone who called themselves socialists valued above all solidarity and loyalty to the ideal: ‘Whatever serves Communism is moral.’ The Communists—the author of these lines included—saw wisdom of the highest order in this precept, not a fundamentally immoral approach which could be used to justify any crime against humanity along with the most trivial political malpractice. Such justification was made not only in the midnight of the Stalin era, but in the earlier years of the Soviet regime, and the later.

In November 1920, at the height of the civil war in Russia, the head of the Cheka, Felix Dzerzhinsky, informed Lenin that ‘403 Cossack men and women, aged between fourteen and seventeen, have arrived without documentation in Orel from Grozny to be imprisoned in the concentration camp for rebellion. They cannot be accommodated as Orel is overcrowded.’⁶⁹ Lenin was not moved to halt the crime against ‘men and women aged between fourteen and seventeen’, and merely wrote ‘For the archives’ on the document, thus establishing the tradition that, no matter how callous, cruel and immoral an act of the regime might be, it would be recorded and stored in the archives for a history that would never be written as long as that regime lasted. The doctrine of force as a universal means was sufficient justification for such laconic gestures. From an early stage, Lenin had surrounded himself with people who were receptive to such an approach, energetic, bold and capable people whom he taught to be morally indiscriminate. The domestic Lenin was, however, rather different. Alexander Potresov, who saw him at close quarters between 1895 and 1903, wrote that ‘at home Lenin was a modest, unpretentious, virtuous family man, engaged in a good-natured, sometimes comic, daily war with his mother-in-law, the only person in his immediate environment who could stand up to him’.⁷⁰

Throughout his life, Lenin's family circle consisted mostly of women: mother, sisters, wife and mother-in-law. In the absence of any children of his own, he himself was the constant object of their care and concern. He differed from his Party comrades in his puritanical restraint, steadiness and constancy, and would have been a model husband, had it not been for the ten-year relationship he began in 1910 with a lively woman revolutionary called Inessa Armand.

In none of the mass of writing about Lenin is there any mention of an affair of the heart in his youth. It appears that his preoccupation with books and revolutionary dreams left no room for the normal feelings that usually occupy the mind of any young man. There is no broken first marriage, no stormy romance, no love at first sight, no unhappy love affair. Yet there was something like an undying love. When he returned to St Petersburg in January 1894, Lenin established contacts, legal and illegal, with the local Marxists. With little to do, he was free to spend time with his new acquaintances. One day in February, at the apartment of an engineer called Klasson, a group of Marxists gathered in the cosy sitting-room, among them two young women, Apollinaria Yakubova and Nadezhda Krupskaya. At first, Lenin spent time with both of them, then he started visiting Nadezhda's home on the Nevsky Prospekt on a more regular basis. Nadezhda lived with her mother, Yelizaveta Vasilievna, the widow of an army officer whose career had been cut short when he was cashiered for reading Chernyshevsky and Herzen, and who apparently belonged to the revolutionary organization Land and Freedom. He had been dismissed and even put on trial, then after several years of indecision was exonerated, but banned from public service. When he died, the family had moved to St Petersburg, where they lived on his pension. Nadezhda taught at a Sunday evening school for workers.

Her mother made tea while the young people talked about Plekhanov, Potresov, the book the young man—who was already quite bald—was writing, the need to establish contact with European social democrats. We do not know what Yelizaveta thought of her future son-in-law, except that she remained independent of him all her life, and was known to have been openly critical of ‘people who don't do any real work’.⁷¹ The clever young man kept appearing at the apartment, but he seemed more interested in politics than in Nadezhda.

Lenin was also friends with Apollinaria Yakubova, and sometimes the three of them would go out together. When he was arrested in December 1895 for being part of a Marxist propaganda circle—an almost routine event for men of Lenin's cast of mind at the time—both young women tried to visit him at the pre-trial prison on Shpalernaya Street. Lenin wrote Nadezhda a coded message, saying they should walk past the prison at 2.15 so that he could catch a glimpse of them through the window.⁷² It is difficult to establish the nature of the relations between these three young people, especially as the almost hundred-year-old ‘conspiracy’ about this area of their lives has destroyed almost any trace.

Apollinaria was a teacher, like Nadezhda, and a Marxist, and Lenin apparently proposed to her, but was rejected in favour of K.M. Takhtarev, the editor of the journal Rabochaya mysl'.⁷³ Also like Nadezhda, she was exiled to Siberia in 1896. She and Lenin maintained a correspondence, notably when Lenin was in Munich after 1900 and she was in London, in which he reminded her of their ‘old friendship’,⁷⁴ and they met several times in London in 1902 and 1903, where he was then living and working on his Party newspaper, Iskra. There is some evidence that, before Lenin became acquainted with Inessa Armand, he had an affair with a Frenchwoman in Paris. When Viktor Tikhomirnov, a researcher from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, met the ex-Bolshevik émigré G.A. Alexinsky in Paris in 1935 to discuss some Lenin documents, Alexinsky showed him letters of an extremely personal nature that Lenin had written to a woman writer, and which the recipient preferred not to send to Moscow as long as Krupskaya was still alive. She was then living on a Soviet pension which she had been receiving via Dzerzhinsky and later Menzhinsky, successive heads of the Soviet secret police.⁷⁵ The letters remained in Paris and their whereabouts are now unknown.

Exile to remote parts of Siberia was the usual punishment for a wide range of activities regarded as seditious by the government, whether taking part in a Marxist study circle or fomenting a strike and joining a demonstration. After a series of interrogations in prison in the capital, therefore, Lenin was exiled for three years to Siberia under police surveillance in February 1897. He soon began to correspond with Krupskaya. At the same time, his mother launched a campaign of requests to the police on her son's behalf, starting with an application to allow him to travel at his own expense, because of his poor state of health, followed by one asking them to delay his departure from the capital, then for him to stay in Moscow for a week as she herself was ill, then to extend his stay there, and so on. She also wrote to the governor-general of Eastern Siberia asking him to ‘allocate Krasnoyarsk or one of the southern towns of Yenisei province’ as her son's place of exile, again because of his poor state of health. Lenin reinforced her efforts on his own behalf, advancing the same reason.⁷⁶ All of their requests, except one, were conceded by the ‘blood-stained tsarist regime’.⁷⁷ Lenin would not be so lenient when he came to power, even where former social democrat comrades were involved. In a note to Stalin dated 17 July 1922, he proposed that a number of them, including Potresov, be expelled from the country forthwith: ‘… several hundred of such gentlemen should be put across the border without mercy … Get the lot of them out of Russia.’⁷⁸ He believed in general that ‘repressions against the Mensheviks should be stepped up and our courts should be told to do this’.⁷⁹

How his attitudes had changed! Exile in Shushenskoe had been little more than an enforced three-year vacation. He had thought it normal to request a nicer place to live ‘in view of my poor health’, nobody made him do any work, he was under no restraints. Many other exiles, Julius Martov, for instance, thought it beneath their dignity as revolutionaries to beg for favours or a nicer place. Lenin, however, for all his ‘poor state of health’, wrote home to the family that ‘apart from hunting and swimming, most of my time is spent on long walks’.⁸⁰ He was also sleeping ‘extraordinarily long’, and although it was ‘impossible to find [domestic] help, and unthinkable in the summer’, he was ‘satisfied with the apartment and the food’, had ‘filled out and got a suntan’, and was living ‘as before, peacefully and unrebellious’. He compared his present abode favourably with Spitz, the Swiss resort where the family was then on holiday.⁸¹

The life of a political exile under the tsar was immeasurably easier than that installed by the Soviet regime, whose prisoners first had to build their own camps and then fill them. The tsar's exiles—we are not speaking of prisoners, but of those expelled from European Russia and made to remain in a designated place for a period—could pay each other visits in different locations, arrange meetings, write books and political programmes, entertain their relations and even start families. In July 1897, for example, Lenin received an invitation to attend the wedding of his friends V.V. Starkov and A.M. Rozenberg, the sister of the Marxist organizer G.M. Krzhizhanovsky. Perhaps it was such an event that prompted the correspondence between Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya, who by then was herself in exile, for the same offence, in Ufa in the southern Urals. In January 1898, Lenin applied to the police department to allow his ‘fiancée’, Krupskaya, to continue her exile in Shushenskoe. Krupskaya recalled that she also requested transfer to Shushenskoe, ‘and for that reason I said I was his “fiancée”’.⁸² While a large number of Nadezhda's letters to Vladimir seem to have been preserved, his letters to her appear not to have been.

At the beginning of May 1898, after a long journey by rail, boat and horse-drawn transport, Krupskaya arrived in Shushenskoe with her mother, who would accompany the couple wherever fate despatched them. According to Lenin, his future mother-in-law had barely set eyes on him before she exclaimed, ‘They really wanted you well out of the way, didn't they?’⁸³ He wrote to his mother that Nadezhda had ‘imposed a tragi-comic condition: if we don't get married right away(!), she's off back to Ufa. I'm not at all disposed to go along with this, so we've already started having “rows” (mostly about applying for the papers without which we can't get married).’⁸⁴

There were a number of formalities to be observed. Lenin applied to the Minusinsk district prefect and then to higher provincial authorities for the necessary papers, but old Russia had more than its fair share of bureaucracy, and nearly two months passed before the papers arrived. Nadezhda's mother insisted they have the full religious ceremony, and despite the fact that Lenin was by now twenty-eight and Nadezhda a year older, and that both of them were long-standing atheists, they felt compelled to submit. Lenin invited a few exile-friends to the wedding, and on 10 July 1898 the modest ceremony took place, witnessed by two local peasants called Yermolaev and Zhuravlev. Congratulatory greetings arrived from Apollinaria, who was in exile near Krasnoyarsk. Also, on the very day of the wedding, the couple received a letter from Y. M. Lyakhovsky with the news that Fedoseev had committed suicide in Verkholensk, and had wanted Lenin to know that he had done so not with disappointment, but ‘wholehearted faith in life’.⁸⁵Another letter arrived soon afterwards with the news that Fedoseev's fiancée had also killed herself.

The Ulyanovs' marriage, a union of two mature people, was itself mature, practical, quiet and devoid of either passionate love or emotional upheavals. Unlike her mother, Nadezhda was an obliging, even-tempered and balanced woman. Exceptionally intelligent and hard-working, she at once assumed her rêle as assistant to the man who was working hard, through his writing and contacts, to establish himself as a dominant force in the Russian Marxist revolutionary movement while still in Siberian exile. After the wedding, the couple moved from the house of a certain A.D. Zyryanov to that of a peasant woman called A.P. Petrova. Lenin's work on his first major book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, began to make more rapid progress. Between jaunts on the river, hunting and walking in the forest, he consumed a vast amount of economic, philosophical and historical literature, which was sent to order by his mother, Potresov and Pavel Axelrod, a close associate of Plekhanov's. The first book he read in Shushenskoe was The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis by Alexander Helphand, who wrote under the alias of Parvus, and who would emerge in a far more significant rêle in Lenin's life in later years.

Nadezhda settled straight away into serving as her husband's workmate, helping him select material, rewriting passages, listening as he read her some of his chapters, though rarely offering critical comment. They were destined to be childless, though neither apparently ever confided their disappointment to anyone. Perhaps there was a clue in the letter he wrote to his mother from Pskov, having left Shushenskoe and Nadezhda temporarily: ‘Nadya must still rest: the doctor found, as she wrote to me a week ago, that her (woman's) illness requires sustained treatment and that she must rest for 4-6 weeks (I sent her more money, I got 100 roubles from Vodovozova), as the treatment is going to cost quite a bit.’⁸⁶ Later, when they were abroad, Nadezhda contracted exophthalmic goitre, or Graves' Disease, and had to undergo surgery. Lenin, again writing to his mother, reported that ‘Nadya was very poorly, very high temperature and delirium, and it gave me quite a scare’.⁸⁷ It is worth noting, perhaps, that between them, all of the Ulyanov siblings produced only two children—Dmitri had a son and a daughter, Olga, who is still alive at the time of writing (1994). Nadezhda says nothing about this in her memoirs, although occasionally she allows the pain of her personal unfulfilment to break through when describing the lives of others. She commented, for instance, that Vera Zasulich, with whom she was extremely close and who lived alone, missed not having a family: ‘She had an enormous need for a family. One had only to see how lovingly she played with Dimka's fair-haired little boy.’⁸⁸ ‘Dimka’ was Lenin's brother Dmitri, the sole parent of his generation of Ulyanovs.

Krupskaya's prominent place in Soviet history is, obviously enough, explained by the fact that she was Lenin's wife. It might be argued that she also played a part in her own right, as witnessed by the eleven editions of her collected writings on education that were published by 1963. But all of her ideas on Communist education were based on her husband's comments, and do not merit special attention. Her memoirs, however, do have historical value, especially when she is dealing with Lenin's last years and his illness. Her notes entitled ‘The last six months of the life of V.I. Lenin’, read together with the memoirs of Lenin's sister Maria, give the fullest account of that fateful period, and draw aside the veil on many hitherto unknown details, though neither of these women could reveal everything they knew, and their most informative reminiscences remained under lock and key in the Party archives.⁸⁹

The marriage which began without strong love became closer over the years, but Nadezhda was in effect Lenin's shadow, her life having meaning only because she was linked to him. When they went abroad, she soon adapted to the leisurely pace her husband set, as the letters Lenin wrote to his mother between 1900 and 1914 indicate: ‘I still follow my summer style of life, walking, swimming and doing nothing’; from Finland he wrote: ‘The rest here is wonderful, swimming, walks, no people around, nothing to do. Having no people around and nothing to do is best of all for me’; from France: ‘We're going to Brittany for a holiday, probably this Saturday’; from Poland to his mother in Vologda: ‘It's already spring here: the snow's all gone, it's very warm, we go without galoshes, the sun's shining especially bright above Cracow, it's hard to think that this is “wet” Cracow. Too bad you and Manyasha [Maria] have to live in that miserable dump!’⁹⁰

Inessa Armand

The telegram lay on the desk in front of Lenin, but he seemed unable to grasp its message, and had to read it several times: ‘Top priority. To Lenin, Sovnarkom, Moscow. Unable to save Comrade Inessa Armand sick with cholera STOP She died 24 September [1920] STOP Sending body to Moscow signed Nazarov.’⁹¹ The shock was all the greater because earlier that very day Ordzhonikidze, his emissary in the Caucasus, had told him that Inessa was fine, when Lenin had asked him to see that she and her son were being taken care of. Nor could he forget that it had been at his insistence that she went to the south for a rest. She had wanted to go to France, but he had dissuaded her. It was so absurd, so senseless. Why hadn't the doctors been able to help? Why cholera? He was shattered. As Alexandra Kollontai, a senior Bolshevik who knew them both well, said later: ‘He could not survive Inessa Armand. The death of Inessa precipitated the illness which was fatal.’⁹²

Lenin had no close friends. It would be hard to find someone, apart from his mother, for whom he showed greater concern than Inessa Armand. In his last letter to her, around the middle of August 1920, he had written:

Dear friend,

I was sad to learn that you [he addressed her formally as Vy] are overtired and not happy with your work and the people around you (or your colleagues at work). Can't I do something for you, get you into a sanatorium? I'll do anything with great pleasure. If you go to France I will, of course, help with that, too: I'm a bit concerned, in fact I'm afraid, I'm really afraid you could get into trouble … They'll arrest you and keep you there a long time … You must be careful. Wouldn't it be better to go to Norway (where many of them speak Engish), or Holland? Or Germany as a Frenchwoman, a Russian (or a Canadian?). Best not to go to France where they could put you inside for a long time and are not even likely to exchange you for anyone. Better not go to France.

I've had a marvellous holiday, got tanned, didn't read a line or take a single phone call. The hunting used to be good, but it's been all ruined. I hear your name everywhere: ‘Things were all right with them here,’ and so on. If you don't fancy a sanatorium, why not go to the South? To Sergo [Ordzhonikidze] in the Caucasus? Sergo will arrange rest, sunshine, interesting work, he can fix it all up. Think about it.

He signed off conventionally as ‘Yours, Lenin’.⁹³

Lenin had been hearing Inessa's name everywhere because he was close to the Armand family estate in the village of Yeldigino in Moscow province. What there was to hunt in August is unclear.

On the same day he wrote, as head of the Soviet government: [To whom it may concern] ‘I request that you help in every way possible to arrange the best accommodation and treatment for the writer, Comrade Inessa Fedorovna Armand, and her elder son. I request that you give complete trust and all possible assistance to these Party comrades with whom I am personally acquainted.’⁹⁴ He also cabled Ordzhonikidze, asking him to put himself out over Inessa's safety and accommodation in Kislovodsk, and ordered his secretaries to help see her off to the Caucasus. Although Russia was still enduring the civil war, the Bolshevik leadership were accustomed to frequent holidays. Hence Lenin could insist on the fateful trip.

For a decade, since they had met in Paris in 1909, Inessa Armand had occupied an enormous space in the life of a man whose dedication to the Great Idea left little or no room for anything else. She had succeeded in touching chords hidden deep in his near-puritanical heart. He had felt a constant need to be with her, write to her, talk to her. His wife did not stand in their way. As Alexandra Kollontai recalled in the 1920s, in conversation with her colleague at the Soviet legation in Norway, Marcel Body, Krupskaya was ‘au courant’. She knew how closely ‘Lenin was attached to Inessa and many times expressed the intention of leaving’, but Lenin had persuaded her to stay.⁹⁵

This appears to have been one of those rare triangles in which all three people involved behaved decently. Feelings of attachment and love do not readily lend themselves to rational explanation. If Lenin's life was filled with the turbulence of politics and revolutionary activity, on the personal level it had been monotonous, flat, boring. Inessa entered his life in emigration like a comet. It is pointless to speculate what it was about her that attracted him. She was extremely beautiful, elegant and full of creative energy, and that was perhaps enough. Also, she was open and passionate about everything she did, whether it was caring for her children or the revolution or the routine Party jobs she was asked to do. She was an exceptional person, emotional, responsive and exciting. For all his old-fashioned views on family life, Lenin was unable to suppress the strong feelings she evoked in him. For the historian, however, it is as difficult to write about feelings as it is to try to convey in words the sound of a symphony.

In her later memoirs, Krupskaya often refers to Inessa, but usually in passing and in another context: ‘Inessa's entire entourage lived in her house. We lived at the other end of the village and ate with everyone else’; ‘Vladimir Ilyich wrote a speech, Inessa translated it’; ‘all our people in Paris were then feeling strongly drawn to Russia: Inessa, Safarov and others were getting ready to go back’; ‘It was good to be busy in Serenburg. Soon Inessa came to join us’; ‘Our entire life was filled with Party concerns and affairs, more like student life than family life, and we were glad of Inessa.’⁹⁶ To Krupskaya's credit, having once decided the tone of her relationship with Inessa, as a Party comrade, she never changed it. Inessa's presence was an inevitability which she accepted with dignity. Occasionally, she abandons her own conventions and writes in greater detail: ‘For hours we would walk along the leaf-strewn forest lanes. Usually we were in a threesome, Vladimir Ilyich and Inessa and I … Sometimes we would sit on a sunny slope, covered with shrubs. Ilyich would sketch outlines of his speeches, getting the text right, while I learned Italian … Inessa would be sewing a skirt and enjoying the warmth of the autumn sunshine.’⁹⁷ It was perhaps during such walks that Inessa would talk about her origins, her parents and the dramas in her life.

She was born, according to the register of the 18th arrondissement, in Paris at 2 p.m. on 8 May 1874 at 63, Rue de la Chapelle, and was named Inessa-Elisabeth. She was the daughter of Theodore Stephan, a French opera singer aged twenty-six, and an English-French mother, Nathalie Wild, aged twenty-four, of no profession. Her parents were not married at the time of her birth,⁹⁸ but they legalized their relationship later at St Mary's parish church in Stoke Newington, London. Inessa's father died young, leaving his family of three small daughters penniless. Her mother became a singing teacher in London. The turning point in Inessa's life was a trip to Moscow in 1879 with her grandmother and aunt, who taught music and French, and who together were capable of giving the girl a good education. The archives tell us little about her life, and the best Russian account so far to emerge is Pavel Podlyashchuk's Tovarishch Inessa, first published in 1963 and revised with new material in 1987. This has been superseded by Ralph Carter Elwood's Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist, published in 1992.

A gifted young woman, fluent in French, Russian and English, and an excellent pianist, Inessa became a governess. She took after her handsome father in looks, attracting the attention of a good many men, and in October 1893, at the age of nineteen, she married Alexander Evgenievich Armand, the son of a wealthy merchant. The wedding took place in the village of Pushkino, outside Moscow, in the presence of members of Moscow's business élite, to which the Armands themselves belonged.⁹⁹

Everything seemed as it should in a successful, wealthy family. Inessa had a handsome, good husband, children, trips to the South and abroad. In the course of eight years she gave birth to five children, three boys and two girls. Despite her preoccupation with her family, she managed to read a great deal and was drawn to the social and political writings of Lavrov, Mikhailovsky and Rousseau. By the late 1890s she had also become seriously concerned with feminist issues, an interest she retained all her life. To all appearances, she was living in harmony with her husband, when suddenly, on the eve of the 1905 revolution, she left him, taking the children with her. She had been consumed by passion for another man, her husband's younger brother Vladimir.

Everyone suffered in this great family drama, yet there were apparently no dreadful scenes, mutual recriminations or arm-twisting. Inessa was exercising her commitment to the principle of ‘free love’. Two weeks before she died in 1920 she would confide to her diary: ‘For romantics, love occupies first place in their lives, it comes before everything else.’¹⁰⁰ By this time she had come to see love with different eyes, but she was recalling herself as a younger woman, when her dramatic departure from the marital home shifted her life onto a completely unexpected course.

Her life with the young Vladimir did not last long. Since 1903 she had become involved in illegal propaganda activities on behalf of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Moscow, and in 1907 she was arrested (for the third time) and exiled to the North above Archangel. Vladimir followed her, but he soon developed tuberculosis and went to Switzerland for treatment. There was, however, no cure to be found, and two weeks after she had fled from exile abroad to join him, at the beginning of 1909, he died.

With the financial help of her ever-tolerant husband, who was also caring for the children, Inessa, now aged thirty-five, enrolled to study economics at the New University in Brussels. In the same year, in Paris, she met Lenin, whose name was well known to her, as a member of the Party since 1903, and thereafter for a decade she occupied a special place in his life, as the voluminous correspondence between them shows. The official version has always insisted that their friendship, although personal, was essentially one of Party comrades, lacking any suggestion of intimacy. Unofficially, it was always believed that Lenin was simply ‘obliged’ to love only Krupskaya, and would never have lowered himself to the rêle of adulterer.*

We have already seen that the Party leadership learned in the 1930s that there was a female acquaintance of Lenin's in Paris who possessed a number of his intimate letters to her, which she would not consent to have published while Krupskaya was alive. This woman had been receiving a generous pension from the Soviet government, thanks entirely to her earlier friendship with Lenin.

While many of Lenin's letters to Armand concerning Party matters have been published, those of a more intimate nature appear either to have vanished or to have suffered cuts at the hands of his editors. The following lines were removed from a letter he wrote to her in 1914: ‘Please bring when you come (i.e. bring with you) all our letters (sending them by registered mail is not convenient: a registered letter can easily be opened by friends. And so on …) Please bring all the letters, come yourself and we'll talk about it.’¹⁰² In this letter Lenin used the familiar form of address, ty. This period was the peak of their friendship, and it is most likely that he wanted Inessa to bring him the letters so he could destroy them. Inessa's Western biographer, Carter Elwood, is of the opinion that Lenin may have wanted her to bring the letters because they contained potentially embarrassing comments about fellow Bolsheviks.¹⁰³ Whatever the reason, there can be little doubt that theirs was a uniquely close friendship.

Krupskaya was Lenin's loyal comrade, his uncomplaining wife and dedicated helper. As well as Graves' Disease she had a weak heart, which was perhaps one reason why she was childless. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg is reputed to have said: ‘One look at Krupskaya, and you can see that Lenin wasn't interested in women.’ This was not so. It is quite possible, moreover, that what Ehrenburg found unappealing might have brought Lenin warm comfort. In any event, once Lenin met Inessa, they were virtually inseparable. She followed the Ulyanovs everywhere, always finding lodgings nearby and meeting both Lenin and Krupskaya frequently. She became almost an integral part of their family relations, and, as Alexander Solzhenitsyn has noted perceptively, Krupskaya saw her task as ensuring Lenin's peace of mind by always giving Inessa a warm and friendly reception.¹⁰⁴

Lenin and Inessa shared a deep feeling. They had their secrets, as Inessa herself wrote from Paris in December 1913 in a letter which, naturally, remained hidden in the archives as utterly unsuitable for the Party's propaganda purposes. The Ulyanovs had been living in Cracow in Austrian Poland since October, remaining there until May 1914. The letter was a very long one, and we reproduce only extracts from it here. She uses the familiar form throughout:

Saturday morning.

My dear, Here I am in Ville Lumière and my first impression is one of disgust. Everything about the place grates—the grey of the streets, the over-dressed women, the accidentally overheard conversations, even the French language … It was sad that Arosa was so temporary, somehow transitory. Arosa was so close to Cracow, while Paris is, well, so final. We have parted, parted, you and I, my dear! And it is so painful. I know, I just feel that you won't be coming here. As I gazed at the familiar places, I realised all too clearly, as never before, what a large place you occupied in my life, here in Paris, so that all our activity here is tied by a thousand threads to the thought of you. I wasn't at all in love with you then, though even then I did love you. Even now I would manage without the kisses, if only I could see you, to talk with you occasionally would be such a joy—and it couldn't cause pain to anyone. Why did I have to give that up? You ask me if I'm angry that it was you who ‘carried out’ the separation. No, I don't think you did it for yourself.

There was much that was good in Paris in my relations with N.K. [Krupskaya]. In one of our last chats she told me I had become dear and close to her only recently … Only at Longjumeau and then last autumn over the translations and so on. I have become rather accustomed to you. I so loved not just listening to you, but looking at you as you spoke. First of all, your face is so animated, and secondly it was easy for me to look at you because you didn't notice …

In the last part of the letter, marked ‘Sunday evening’, Inessa writes at length about a forthcoming lecture she is to give, and asks:

When you write to me about business matters, give me some indication of what the KZO [the Committee of Russian Social Democratic Party Organizations Abroad] may talk about and what it may not …

Well, my dear, that's enough for today, I want to send this off. There was no letter from you yesterday! I'm rather afraid my letters are not reaching you—I sent you three letters (this is the fourth) and a telegram. Is it possible you haven't received them? I get the most unlikely ideas thinking about it. I've also written to N.K., to your brother, and to Zina [Zinaida Lilina, the wife of Zinoviev]. Has nobody received anything? I send you a big kiss.

Your Inessa.¹⁰⁵

The tone, eloquence and content of this letter leave little doubt about the nature of Inessa's feelings. Her remark that she would be satisfied if she could just see Lenin, and that ‘it couldn't cause pain to anyone’, places a question mark over Lenin's reasons for leaving Paris in June 1912. Plainly Inessa's presence in the Ulyanov family orbit had at first met Krupskaya's natural resistance. The fact that the three-cornered relationship was not a simple one is evidenced by the frequent cuts in the letters made by various Soviet editors, tasked with maintaining Lenin's purity. Many of these excised parts have simply vanished. Not all of them, however.

Lenin's letter to Inessa of 13 January 1917, when he was still in Switzerland, was published in volume 49 of the fifth edition of his works. Following the words, ‘Dear friend,’ the following lines were removed: ‘Your latest letters were so full of sadness and evoked such gloomy thoughts in me and aroused such feelings of guilt, that I can't come to my senses …’¹⁰⁶ The letter goes on in the same vein. Plainly, Lenin the puritan found the bond, which went well beyond platonic friendship, a hard one to bear. For Inessa too, accustomed as she was to yielding completely to her emotions, the secrecy and deceit were unbearable.

There are many such cuts in the ‘complete’ works. A week after the above letter, on 23 January 1917, Lenin wrote again:

Dear friend

… Apparently the lack of reply to several of my latest letters indicates—in connection with something else—a certain changed mood, a decision, your situation. At the end of your last letter a word was repeated twice. I went and checked. Nothing. I don't know what to think, whether you are offended at something or were too distracted by the move or something else … I'm afraid to ask, as I know you don't like questions, and so I've decided to think that you don't like being questioned and that's that. So, I'm sorry for [the questions] and won't repeat them, of course.¹⁰⁷

This rigmarole could only be understood by the two people concerned, and plainly they had to take Krupskaya's presence into consideration.

Lenin's sojourn in Cracow was terminated on 26 July (8 August) 1914 when he was arrested in Nowy Targ on suspicion of spying. The authorities quickly released him, however, when a number of social democrats, notably Victor Alder in Vienna, but also Feliks Kon and Yakov Ganetsky, interceded, explaining that he was a sworn enemy of tsarism, with which Austria was now at war. Lenin's two weeks in Austrian police custody became in Soviet historiography an act of vast revolutionary importance, for he was alleged to have spent the time ‘reflecting on the tasks and tactics now facing the Bolshevik Party; talking to imprisoned peasants, giving them legal advice on how to expedite their cases, writing requests and statements for them and so on’.¹⁰⁸

The Austrians did not yet realise that Lenin would become their ally. He hated both tsar and Kaiser, but, as he wrote to one of his trusted agents, Alexander Shlyapnikov, in October 1914, ‘tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism’.¹⁰⁹ Yet even what they already knew about him prompted the Austrian authorities to cable the Nowy Targ prosecutor to ‘free Vladimir Ulyanov at once’.¹¹⁰ Within a couple of weeks Lenin and Krupskaya were in Zurich and shortly after in Berne, where Lenin was soon reunited with Inessa. According to the official version, he suggested she give lectures, ‘work to unite the left socialist women of different countries’, helped her prepare a publication for women workers, and even ‘criticized her outline of the brochure’, appointed her to take part in the International Socialist Youth Conference, and gave her a host of Party missions to perform. This version does not, however, report that she was a frequent visitor at the Ulyanovs, that they often went for walks together, that she played the piano for Lenin, and that she joined the couple on holiday in Serenburg.

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 absolutetrust 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 physicians 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 ‘rest-cure’ 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 wann 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 Vl. Il. The way to do it is to go to Pravdawhere 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”.’¹²⁹The 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

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.¹⁵⁷Thus, 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