TLS on Lenin

on Lenin

Just when you thought there was nothing left to say about Lenin, along comes a fine book that represents him afresh by concentrating on his life before achieving power. Vladimir Ilyich and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya spent seventeen years leading a parlous nomadic existence as underground agitators before their return to Russia in March 1917. Helen Rappaport treats her subject as “a rather inconsequential-looking man . . . with his dowdy wife” pursuing a secret goal. Whether his politics were right is not her concern. This is Lenin for a new generation of readers who can afford to look dispassionately on his human story.

The result is a dramatic, atmospheric tale, about a dogged little fellow, bald with a red beard, who came off his bicycle when his tyre got wedged in a Geneva tramline, and was twice again knocked down in France cycling back from air shows, for which he had a passion. He sent his London landlady a picture album to mark his and Nadya’s happiest year anywhere, in digs near King’s Cross, in 1902–03. Four years later, in Finland, he leapt from a train into deep snow to escape the tsarist secret servicemen, the Okhrana. A network of Finnish sympathizers got him out of the country over ice that cracked so ominously that even the atheist muttered a prayer. His British Museum ticket was in the name of Dr Jacob Richter, LL.D. In Geneva, he registered as a reader at the Société de Lecture as “W. Oulianoff, gentilhomme russe”. The conspiratorial couple moved in the longer term to Geneva from their beloved London after the board of the underground journal Iskra voted to relocate. Via stints in Capri with the well-off Maxim Gorky, and London again, the Ulyanovs arrived in Paris. “Why the hell did we go to Paris?”, Vladimir Ilyich lamented. Two interim enemies were the reason. While the Swiss authorities cracked down on Russian underground activity, the Mensheviks, with whom Lenin still worked, and who wanted to legalize their efforts to reform Russia, had more supporters in Paris. Lenin probably caught the syphilis that killed him in Paris, resorting to prostitutes after Nadya fell ill. If Lenin’s cause had been a noble one, this drama could easily have been rewritten as a tragedy.

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His professional life had a double focus. He strove to assume total control of the Russian Social Democratic and Labour Party for his Bolshevik faction, which dwindled to a membership of one. He kept up a deluge of unswervingly Marxist articles on Russia. Those articles and the books What Is To Be Done? (1902) and Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) were written in a jargonridden style that blended scientific pretence with merciless obloquy, and helped poison a short century of Left–Right politics across the world. Everyone who didn’t agree with Lenin was a shithead. He was a self-conscious Jacobin, a deliberate oversimplifier, dictatorial and bureaucratic, who knew what it took to gain power and keep it. An ideological hardliner, he was ready to fudge even the issue of nationalization when his Bolshevik colleagues objected. Call it the people’s ownership, he suggested.
As Helen Rappaport observes in one of her occasional judicious comments – one feels she must once have admired him – Russia for Lenin was an abstraction. It was a problem that could be solved scientifically. He further assumed that this wayward country could be controlled in much the same way that he disciplined his own life. Here again one senses a tragedy in the making, of which, dead in 1924, he would never know. It is also the reason why conservative Russian critics of Lenin like Solzhenitsyn hated him most, because he forced a Westernism on a country whose spiritual self-identity was elsewhere. Words like konspiratsiya, which covered the rules of underground procedure, from the codes and invisible writing (in milk, made visible by immersion in hot tea) that Nadya spent hours deciphering, to the use of false passports, were par for the Leninist course. Though he had admirers everywhere, it was, curiously, the love and immediate support of women that sustained this apparent machine of a man: Nadya, Nadya’s ailing mother and above all his mistress, the French-born Inessa Armand.
The drama inherent in this compellingly well-written narrative climaxes when the sealed train leaves Zurich, with half the crowd cheering Lenin on and the other half booing a deal with Germany. Ironically, that deal had been the idea of Yuli Martov, the Menshevik leader about to be plunged into terminal obscurity by Lenin’s triumph. What happened to the various Lenin-in-exile memorial sites that flourished in the Communist era reflects a wider, still untold story. The French museum closed in 2007; the Finnish one is still open. The Poles desecrated the Lenin shrines they had had forced on them. London, insured by distance against real contact with Leninism, put up plaques but had to shield a commemorative Lubetkin bust, the product of Britain’s wartime alliance with Stalin, from Mosley’s fascists. It can still be seen in the Islington Museum, as its object recedes into history as a trace.

Helen Rappaport
CONSPIRATOR
Lenin in exile
373pp. Hutchinson. £20.
978 0 091 93093 6
US: Basic Books. $27.95.
978 0 465 01395 1

Lesley Chamberlain is the author of Motherland: A philosophical history of Russia, 2004, and The Philosophy Steamer: Lenin and the exile of the intelligentsia, 2006.