Lenin Read online

  Also by Victor Sebestyen

  Twelve Days: The Story of the 1956 Hungarian Revolution

  Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire

  1946: The Making of the Modern World

  Copyright © 2017 by Victor Sebestyen

  All rights reserved. Published in the United States by Pantheon Books, a division of Penguin Random House LLC, New York. Originally published in hardcover in Great Britain by Weidenfeld & Nicolson, an imprint of the Orion Publishing Group Ltd., London, a Hachette UK company, in 2017.

  Pantheon Books and colophon are registered trademarks of Penguin Random House LLC.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Name: Sebestyen, Victor, [date] author.

  Title: Lenin : the man, the dictator, and the master of terror / Victor Sebestyen.

  Description: New York : Pantheon, 2017. Includes bibliographical references and index.

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017008076 (print). LCCN 2017012234 (ebook). ISBN 9781101871645 (ebook). ISBN 9781101871638 (hardcover : alkaline paper).

  Subjects: LCSH: Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1870–1924—Influence. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1870–1924—Political and social views. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1870–1924—Relations with women. Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, 1870–1924—Psychology. Revolutionaries—Soviet Union—Biography. Dictators—Soviet Union—Biography. State-sponsored terrorism—Soviet Union—History. Soviet Union—Politics and government—1917–1936. BISAC: BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Historical. HISTORY / Europe / Russia & the Former Soviet Union.

  Classification: LCC DK254.L4 (ebook). LCC DK254.L4 S34 2017 (print). DDC 947.0841092 [B]—dc23

  LC record available at lccn.​loc.​gov/​2017008076

  Ebook ISBN 9781101871645

  www.​pantheonbooks.​com

  Cover art based on an image from Corbis/Getty

  Cover design by Oliver Munday

  v4.1

  a

  In Memory of C.H.

  Contents

  Cover

  Also by Victor Sebestyen

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  Maps

  List of Illustrations

  Introduction

  Prologue: The Coup d’État

  1 A Nest of Gentlefolk

  2 A Childhood Idyll

  3 The Hanged Man

  4 The Police State

  5 A Revolutionary Education

  6 Vladimir Ilyich – Attorney at Law

  7 Nadya – A Marxist Courtship

  8 Language, Truth and Logic

  9 Foreign Parts

  10 Prison and Siberia

  11 Lenin Is Born

  12 Underground Lives

  13 England, Their England

  14 What Is to Be Done?

  15 The Great Schism – Bolsheviks and Mensheviks

  16 Peaks and Troughs

  17 An Autocracy Without an Autocrat

  18 Back Home

  19 ‘Expropriate the Expropriators’

  20 Geneva – ‘An Awful Hole’

  21 Inessa – Lenin in Love

  22 Betrayals

  23 A Love Triangle – Two into Three Will Go

  24 Catastrophe – The World at War

  25 In the Wilderness

  26 The Last Exile

  27 Revolution – Part One

  28 The Sealed Train

  29 To the Finland Station

  30 The Interregnum

  31 ‘Peace, Land and Bread’

  32 The Spoils of War

  33 A Desperate Gamble

  34 The July Days

  35 On the Run

  36 Revolution – Part Two

  37 Power – At Last

  38 The Man in Charge

  39 The Sword and Shield

  40 War and Peace

  41 The One-Party State

  42 The Battle for Grain

  43 Regicide

  44 The Assassins’ Bullets

  45 The Simple Life

  46 Reds and Whites

  47 Funeral in Moscow

  48 The ‘Internationale’

  49 Rebels at Sea and on Land

  50 Intimations of Mortality

  51 Revolution – Again

  52 The Last Battle

  53 ‘An Explosion of Noise’

  54 Lenin Lives

  Principal Characters

  Notes

  Select Bibliography

  Acknowledgements

  Illustrations

  MAPS

  Detail left

  Detail right

  Detail left

  Detail right

  List of Illustrations

  1 Vladimir Ulyanov as a baby (PA Images)

  2 The Ulyanov family in 1879 (Sputnik/Alamy)

  3 Alexander ‘Sasha’ Ulyanov (Sputnik/Topfoto)

  4 Anna Ilyinichna (Interfoto/Alamy)

  5 Maria Ilyinichna (Interfoto/Alamy)

  6 Nadezhda Krupskaya, age twenty-one (TASS Photo Chronicle Photos/Tass/PA Images)

  7 Vladimir Ulyanov police mugshot (PA Images)

  8 Julius Martov (Jakov Vladimirovich Shteinberg/Bridgeman Images)

  9 Leon Trotsky (Heritage Images/Getty Images)

  10 Nadezhda Krupskaya, age twenty-six (Sputnik/Alamy)

  11 Inessa Armand (ITAR-TASS Photo Agency/Alamy Stock Photo)

  12 Grigory Zinoviev (Hulton Deutsch/Getty Images)

  13 Lev Kamenev (Granger Collection/Topfoto)

  14 Joseph Stalin (ITAR-TASS/Topfoto)

  15 Lenin in hiding (ITAR-TASS Photo Agency/Alamy)

  16 Lenin in Red Square (Granger Historical Picture Archive/Alamy)

  17 Felix Dzerzhinsky (Laski Collection/Getty Images)

  18 Lenin’s last days (ITAR-TASS/Topfoto)

  19 Lenin in state (Interfoto/Alamy)

  Introduction

  On one side of Moscow’s Red Square there remains a sight familiar to anyone who knew the late Soviet Union in the Communist years. Every day, long lines of people queue patiently for a ticket to visit Lenin’s mausoleum, set within a huge marble plinth erected in the late 1920s. The wait can last an age; the tour itself just moments. Visitors enter a basement and walk along a bare corridor for a few metres in eerie semi-darkness, before reaching the coffin. Powerful lights illuminate the embalmed body which has been lying in this tomb on plush red velvet for more than ninety years. There is such a crush of people that they are given a maximum of five minutes to pay their respects – or simply to gawp. A few of the visitors are foreigners. The vast majority are Russians.

  It is a macabre place to go sightseeing in the twenty-first century, whoever is entombed there. But two and a half decades after the collapse of the USSR, it seems the strangest of anachronisms that Vladimir Ilyich Lenin can continue to draw such crowds. Everyone knows the havoc he wreaked; few people now believe in the faith he espoused. Yet he still commands attention – even affection – in Russia.

  The present Russian leader, Vladimir Putin, has no intention of getting rid of the tomb. Rather, in 2011 he authorised vast expenditure to repair the mausoleum when there was a danger it would fall down. The Lenin Cult survives, if in an altered form. Putin’s grandfather, Spiridon, was Lenin’s cook after the Russian Revolution, but it is not the current President’s family sentiment that has kept Lenin’s remains in situ. The clear signal is to show historical continuity, the idea that Russia still needs – as it has always needed – a dominant, ruthless, autocratic leader, a boss, in Russian, the Vozhd. Lenin’s tomb once symbolised an internationalist ideology, world Communism. It has since become an altar of resurgent Russian nationalism.

  It is not just Lenin’s body that was embalmed. His character has been ‘preserved’ too; his personality, his motivation and intentions, have
rarely been reassessed over the last generation, even in the light of a mass of new information about him since archives began opening up in the former Soviet Union. In the USSR all biographies of Lenin were hagiographies, required reading in Russian schools where children were taught to refer to the founder of the Soviet state as Dyedushka (grandfather) Lenin. Even the last Communist Party chief, Mikhail Gorbachev, used to call him ‘a special genius’ and quoted him frequently. Lenin was the pillar of Bolshevik rectitude in all ways.

  In the other camp the opposite was true. The line tended to be that he may not have been as bad as Stalin, but he nonetheless created one of history’s cruellest tyrannies – and a state model which at one point was copied by nearly half the world. More often than not – there are some shining exceptions – biographers were on one side or the other in an ideological divide, at a time when the Cold War mattered. Those theoretical disputes became outdated from the moment the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed.

  The Communist world that Lenin formed, very much in his own ascetic image, may have gone into the dustbin of history. Yet he is highly relevant today. At the end of the Cold War, neo-liberalism triumphed, along with the idea of democracy; socialism and its variants were entirely discredited. There seemed to be no alternative to the political and economic solutions offered by globalised markets. But the world looked a different place after a banking crisis and recession in 2007–08. There was a loss of confidence in much of the West in the democratic process itself. For millions of people, the certainties that two generations accepted as basic assumptions, the facts of life, were altogether less certain. Lenin would very probably have regarded the world of 2017 as being on the cusp of a revolutionary moment. He matters now not because of his flawed, bloody and murderously misguided answers, but because he was asking the same questions as we are today about similar problems.

  Millions of people, and some dangerous populist leaders on the Left and Right, are doubting whether liberal democracy has been successful in creating a fair society and sustained freedom and prosperity, or can deal with gaping inequality and injustice. The phrases ‘global elite’, and ‘the 1 per cent’ are now used in a decidedly Leninist way. It is unlikely that Lenin’s solutions will be adopted anywhere again. But his questions are constantly being asked today, and may be answered by equally bloody methods.

  —

  Lenin seized power in a coup, but he did not operate entirely through terror. In many ways he was a thoroughly modern political phenomenon – the kind of demagogue familiar to us in Western democracies, as well as in dictatorships. In his quest for power, he promised people anything and everything. He offered simple solutions to complex problems. He lied unashamedly. He identified a scapegoat he could later label ‘enemies of the people’. He justified himself on the basis that winning meant everything: the ends justified the means. Anyone who has lived through recent elections in the supposedly sophisticated political cultures of the West might recognise him. Lenin was the godfather of what commentators a century after his time call ‘post-truth politics’.

  Lenin thought himself an idealist. He was not a monster, a sadist or vicious. In personal relationships he was invariably kind and behaved in the way he was brought up, like an upper-middle-class gentleman. He was not vain. He could laugh – even, occasionally, at himself. He was not cruel: unlike Stalin, Mao Zedong or Hitler he never asked about the details of his victims’ deaths, savouring the moment. To him, in any case, the deaths were theoretical, mere numbers. He never donned uniforms or military-style tunics as other dictators favoured. But during his years of feuding with other revolutionaries, and then maintaining his grip on power, he never showed generosity to a defeated opponent or performed a humanitarian act unless it was politically expedient.

  He built a system based on the idea that political terror against opponents was justified for a greater end. It was perfected by Stalin, but the ideas were Lenin’s. He had not always been a bad man, but he did terrible things. Angelica Balabanova, one of his old comrades who admired him for many years but grew to fear and loathe him, said perceptively that Lenin’s ‘tragedy was that, in Goethe’s phrase, he desired the good…but created evil’. The worst of his evils was to have left a man like Stalin in a position to lead Russia after him. That was a historic crime.

  Lenin is often depicted as a rigid ideologue, a Communist fanatic, and this is true up to a point. He spouted Marxist theory constantly – ‘without theory there can be no revolutionary party’, he famously said. But a point he made far more often to his followers is frequently ignored – ‘theory is a guide, not Holy Writ’. When ideology clashed with opportunism, he invariably chose the tactical path above doctrinal purity. He could change his mind entirely if it advanced his goal. He was driven by emotion as much as by ideology. His thirst for revenge after his elder brother was executed for an assassination plot against the Tsar motivated Lenin as powerfully as did his belief in Marx’s theory of surplus value.

  He wanted power and he wanted to change the world. He retained power personally for a little over four years before failing health rendered him physically and mentally incapable. But, as he said that it would, the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917 ‘turned the world upside down’. Neither Russia, nor many places from Asia to South America, have since recovered.

  To a biographer, though, the political is the personal, as Lenin would also sometimes say. He was a product of his time and place: a violent, tyrannical and corrupt Russia. The revolutionary state he created was less the socialist Utopia he dreamed of than a mirror-image of the Romanov autocracy. The fact that Lenin was Russian is as significant as his Marxist faith.

  Lenin as a person was seldom allowed to emerge in the Cold War versions of his life. Neither side wanted him to appear human, as that would not fit neatly into their ideological baggage. He was not icy, logical and one-dimensional as he is often portrayed. He was highly emotional and flew into rages that almost crippled him.

  He wrote a large number of texts about Marxist philosophy and economy, many of them unintelligible now. But he loved mountains almost as much as he loved making Revolution, and he wrote lyrically about walking in the Alps and through open countryside. He loved nature, hunting, shooting and fishing. He could identify hundreds of species of plants. His ‘nature notes’ and letters to his family show a part of Lenin which will surprise people who imagined him a distant and unfeeling figure.

  One of the surprises while researching this book was to find that nearly all the important relationships in Lenin’s life were with women. It will show another little-known side to him: Lenin in love. His wife Nadezhda – Nadya – left a sanitised and dull memoir about their life together; but, in the light of new material, and by piecing together a narrative from other sources, she emerges as far more than the household drudge/secretary she is usually made out to be. Lenin would never have achieved what he did without her. For a decade he had an on-off love affair with a glamorous, intelligent and beautiful woman, Inessa Armand. Their ménage à trois is woven throughout nearly half this book as it is so central to Lenin’s emotional life – and to Nadya’s. It is a rare example of a romantic triangle in which all three protagonists appear to have behaved in a civilised fashion. The only time Lenin visibly broke down in public was at Armand’s funeral, three years before his own.

  Back in the days of the USSR, while on an assignment in Moscow as a journalist, I was given a private tour of the Kremlin office and rooms once occupied by Lenin. They were preserved just as they had been in his day, or so I was assured by the senior Communist Party apparatchik who showed me around. It struck me how ordinary the surroundings were, how banal, how bourgeois, and – undiplomatically – I blurted out exactly those words. Oddly, as Party hacks in those days rarely uttered heretical thoughts, he said, ‘Yes, I have always wondered how he could have done such extraordinary things.’ I have never forgotten the conversation. This is an attempt at an answer.

  Victor Sebestyen, London
, October 2016

  Prologue

  The Coup d’État

  ‘Insurrection is an art quite as much as war.’

  Karl Marx, Revolution and Counter-Revolution in Germany, 1852

  ‘There are decades when nothing happens – and there are weeks where decades happen.’

  Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, The Chief Tasks of Our Day, March 1918

  He was fretting about his wig, a wavy silver-grey mop which kept slipping off his shiny bald pate, threatening to spoil his disguise. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov – better known by the pseudonym Lenin – had struggled his entire adult life for this moment. He was on the brink of seizing absolute power in Russia and sparking a revolution that would change the world. But here he was clutching that ridiculous hairpiece, holed up in a pokey second-floor flat in a working-class suburb of Petrograd, while history was being made by others a few kilometres away in the centre of the city.

  He could stand the frustration and uncertainty no longer. Lenin knew that he and his small group of fanatical socialists, the Bolsheviks, had limited popular appeal in Russia’s capital, and even less in the rest of the country. Their one chance for greatness was ‘to take power from the street’ now, by insurrection against a weak government that could claim even less support. Timing was all, as Lenin used to say with monotonous regularity. He had declared that the coup must take place by Wednesday, 25 October 1917 or his enemies would seize their moment to thwart him. He was forty-seven, no longer in prime health, and if he failed his chance might never come again.

  It was now the evening of Tuesday the 24th and Vladimir Ilyich had no idea if any of the plans his comrades had made for the insurrection were actually being implemented. He was a leader cut off from his General Staff and his troops. He had appointed a ‘Military Revolutionary Committee’ to work out the tactical details of the coup, but it was based on the other side of town at Bolshevik headquarters in the Smolny Institute, a grand building which had formerly been a school for daughters of the nobility.