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  It was not love at first sight. She was put off by his cocksure manner, acerbic tongue and sarcasm. The conversation got round to the important work of the recently launched Committee for Illiteracy and she told him she was a great supporter of its efforts to teach working-class children how to read. Vladimir laughed – ‘It seemed to me a very harsh, even cruel laugh,’ she wrote later – and said, ‘Well. If anyone wants to save the Fatherland through the Committee for Illiteracy, we won’t stop them.’ He made it clear he didn’t think it was what serious radical socialists needed to do to bring down the autocracy.

  She was offended and grew nervous: ‘I felt as though people could become uncomfortable under his fixed gaze.’ Nevertheless, he walked her home along the Neva and she grew more at ease around him. She talked with enthusiasm about her work as a teacher in the Sunday schools established for working men in the poorer quarters of St Petersburg. He talked about the inevitability of the coming world revolution as predicted by Marx and the role he wanted to play in it. Unusually, as he seldom mentioned the subject outside his close circle, he told her about his brother and his bitter ‘anger at a regime that could kill a passionate idealist who had barely reached the age of majority’. They parted at the entrance to Nadya’s apartment building on better terms. But this was not the beginning of a whirlwind romance. They did not see each other again for around six months, and would face separation many more times before their work as revolutionaries together would begin.1

  * * *

  The name Nadezhda means ‘hope’ in Russian.*2 More than love, more than money, more than a career or personal glory, more than a faithful husband offering domestic security, Nadezhda Krupskaya hoped for a socialist revolution in Russia and the downfall of the Tsarist autocracy. She was as fanatically devoted to the cause as was Vladimir. When Nadya is described by biographers as a drudge or the skivvy to a man who often took her for granted – true, up to a point – the important thing she always said about herself is missed: that she was a passionate and intense true believer in socialism. She made many sacrifices for her demanding husband, and for the Revolution in her motherland, but there is no evidence she regretted them. Many men tell their future wives that they will change the world. Some may even believe that they will. Very few deliver.

  Nadya was born on 26 February 1869 and was a year older than Ulyanov. Her father, Konstantin Ignat’evich Krupski, was an army officer from the minor nobility who had a successful career as a soldier until he was despatched to Warsaw to help pacify Russian-occupied Poland after a pro-independence revolt had been crushed in the late 1860s. But he fell out with his superiors, who believed he was too soft on the Polish rebels.*3

  When Nadya, an only child, was five Krupski was cashiered from the army, with no pension, for overseeing alleged financial irregularities in regimental accounts. He appealed and won his case, but he could not get his commission back and nor could he hold down a job afterwards. He tried estate management, was a factory inspector for a brief period, and wandered around Russia looking for regular employment, with little luck. He died when Nadya was fourteen, leaving his widow and daughter in straitened circumstances. Nadya always felt a bitter personal grudge against the regime for the unjust way her father was treated.

  Her mother, Elizaveta Vasilyevna Tistrova, also came from a noble, but landless and almost penniless, family. She became a teacher and made some modest earnings as an author of children’s books, but at times both she and Nadya were forced to take in lodgers in their genteel but down-at-heel rooms in St Petersburg, where they settled when Nadya reached fifteen. Mother and daughter were extremely close throughout their lives. A pious Orthodox Christian, Elizaveta Vasilyevna was entirely uninterested in politics and far from being a revolutionary, though she believed sincerely in education for women – a conviction from which Nadya benefited in practical ways.

  Though by no means a brilliant scholar, Nadya was highly intelligent, diligent and learned quickly. A school friend from the girls’ Gimnasium they attended, Ariadne Tyrkova-Vil’iams, remembered her as a shy, quiet girl who didn’t flirt with the boys, behaved decorously, thought with deliberation and had formed her convictions at a young age. ‘Earlier than any of us, more unyieldingly than any of us, she had defined her views and set her course. She was one of those who were for ever committed, once they had been possessed by their thoughts or feelings.’ She ‘burned with idealism’, said Vil’iams.2

  She qualified as a teacher and in 1891 found a job at an evening school established by philanthropic factory owners for their workers. It was in a miserably poor working-class district of St Petersburg and it opened her eyes to the realities of life for the urban poor in Russia. She taught basic literacy to adults, as well as history, arithmetic and Russian literature. She loved the work: ‘It was my university,’ she said in later years. This was when she joined the political underground – a serious-minded and passionately devoted young woman in search of a great cause. There is something charmingly naïve, yet chilling, in her admission that at first she found reading Marx tough going, but when she came to the lines in the first volume of Capital ‘The knell of capitalist private property sounds. The expropriators are expropriated,’ her ‘heart beat so that it could be heard’. She repeated this story many times in later years and there’s no reason to doubt her. Her view was simple and never changed: the capitalists were, quite simply, ‘the enemy’. For all her romantic idealism, ‘the enemy’ is a phrase she used almost as often as Vladimir did.3

  Most of the male biographers of her husband decry her looks and describe her at best as plain, though it has to be said that few have been as nasty as her future sister-in law Anna, who once said ‘she looks like a herring’.*4 Photographs of Nadya as a young woman tell a different story. ‘Physically, there was much in her favour,’ one (male) Russian historian observed. ‘Had she been an aristocrat, a princess involved in stylishly shocking escapades, writers probably would not have called her a rare beauty, but might have referred to her arched eyebrows, fine, high cheekbones, and firm jaw – all conveying a sense of feminine challenge. They might have mentioned her slightly over-full lips, presuming them sensuous, and her intense eyes, which photographs taken at the time [including the mugshot taken by the police] show…As it was, she wanted to look like the opposite of a frivolous princess, while still retaining an air of middle-class respectability. Her dress in those years was invariably a dark, long-sleeved affair, with very little shape except for slightly puffed-out shoulders and upper arms and a collar that pretty well covered her throat. Her luxuriant hair, parted a little off the middle, was drawn straight back, both neat and austere. Far from seeming drab…it seems fair to guess that her conservative style was just right for [Vladimir’s] taste. Here was a young woman whose obvious disdain for frivolous display bespoke her devotion to more important things.’

  She showed little interest in men or anything as skittish as flirtation or a love affair. At twenty-two, soon after she started work at the school, she began seeing quite a lot of a young man, a radical engineer in the same illegal underground discussion circle that she had joined. But he suddenly left the group, saying he was wary of the level of Okhrana surveillance he was receiving. On at least one occasion she went alone to the theatre with him, which caused a row with one of her comrades. Lidia Knipovich, who was even more austere and severe than she was, ‘flew at me’ when she heard of the assignation, Nadya recalled years later. She said, ‘When you work together, it is sufficiently silly to go to the theatre with a man.’ Nadya replied sharply, ‘What business is it of yours?’ But afterwards Nadya turned yet more ascetic and convinced others that she wasn’t interested in ‘bourgeois personal relations with men’.

  She was a highly practical woman. She took another job, part-time, as a copyist for the state railway administration, with the valuable perk of free travel so she could conveniently get to illegal revolutionary meetings. It was an easy, mechanical job which she recommended to others in the same pos
ition, as it left plenty of time to ‘work for the cause too’. She wrote to a comrade, ‘If money is needed you can get a job with some railroad. There at least you’ll be able to work off the necessary number of hours and have no cares. You can be as free as a bird…all this pedagogy or medicine and so on absorbs people more than it should for the good of the cause.’4

  Theoretically, men and women were supposed to be equal in Marxist circles and in the Populist cells. But the reality was altogether different. Women were allowed – encouraged – to distribute propaganda leaflets, smuggle samizdat literature, teach workers or peasants to read and write, open soup kitchens, shoot provincial governors and generals and nobly die on the scaffold. But they were not supposed to have ideas. The realm of writing articles in learned journals or books about ideology – broad policymaking – was strictly the domain of men. Nadya had heard the story of the ‘scandal’ created in 1870 by one of the earliest and cleverest of the ‘radical’ Russian women, Ekaterina Breshko-Breshkovskaya, who embarrassed the men in her ‘discussion circle’ by describing the shock and horror she caused when she ‘dared to speak out against the opinion of a male comrade’. The fustiest of male-only clubs or societies in St Petersburg ‘society’ could not have created a more chauvinistic stir.

  Nadya wanted, above all, to be of use and, as she said, she sensed she could be of great service to the cause with Vladimir Ulyanov, who ‘could never have loved a woman with whose opinions he totally disagreed and who was not a comrade in his work’. They met again in the autumn of 1894 at a clandestine discussion group where he read his anti-Populist paper ‘What the Friends of the People Are’, and ‘How Do They Fight Against Social Democracy’, and began to see each other regularly. He called at her apartment often, on the pretext that he was interested in the factory workers at her school, which he occasionally visited with her. Nadya knew much more about the working class than he did, and he listened to her, taking her seriously.

  One other thing Nadya knew about Vladimir was that he was ‘available’. He had no romantic relationships with women until he arrived in St Petersburg the year before, not even, as far as we can tell, innocent adolescent crushes. But before he met Nadya he had fallen for one of her good friends and was nursing a bruised heart. Apollinaria Yakubova was tall, auburn-haired and ‘a real beauty’ according to one of the comrades in the revolutionary group she and Nadya belonged to. Like Nadya she worked as a teacher in a factory Sunday school for workers and was a committed Marxist. Vladimir proposed marriage, but she rejected him in favour of Konstantin Takhtarev, a qualified doctor who would later become editor of the socialist newspaper Rabochaya Mysl (Workers’ Thought). They remained friends and their paths would cross several times in the future when both couples lived in European exile.5

  It has been described as ‘a very Marxist courtship’, but it did not run smoothly: politics and the secret police would intervene to separate the lovers and erect obstacles to this revolutionary romance.

  *1 The name most inhabitants of the city called St Petersburg, and after it was renamed Petrograd well into the Soviet era.

  *2 Vladimir, of course, means ‘ruler of the world’.

  *3 Soviet biographers claimed that Konstantin Krupski was a revolutionary, and showed socialist solidarity with the downtrodden Poles of the Russian empire. But Nadya always denied this. He was a mild liberal by the standards of the Tsarist army of the time, but certainly not a socialist. He helped those few Russians who wanted to build some schools for Polish children, which landed him in trouble. But at no time did he express any revolutionary sympathies, according to his daughter.

  *4 In later years of European exile one of Nadya’s code-names in the underground was ‘The Fish’.

  8

  Language, Truth and Logic

  ‘In politics there is only one principle and one truth: what profits my opponent hurts me, and vice versa.’

  Lenin to Angelica Balabanova, 1904

  The Ulyanov style of argument and debate was formed early and did not change significantly over the next two decades. He became better at winning his point, more confident and masterful. But he was nearly always domineering, abusive, combative and often downright vicious. He battered opponents into submission with the deliberate use of violent language which he acknowledged was ‘calculated to evoke hatred, aversion, contempt…not to convince, not to correct the mistakes of the opponent but to destroy him, to wipe him and his organisation off the face of the earth’.1

  From his first days in the dissident salons of St Petersburg he worked out a method that marked him as different from other radical agitators; almost single-handedly he changed the language on the revolutionary Left, which followed the coarse and aggressive pattern laid down by him. For generations throughout the Communist world, harsh invective and abuse characterised political debate among so-called comrades – let alone between ideological opponents. The exchange of insults was justified on the grounds that this was how Lenin had done things. It was the Soviet way, inspired by the founder of the state, who created so much of the USSR’s language, its lifestyle and political ‘culture’. His successors well after the Stalin era adopted this method of derision. Communist Parties everywhere, even following the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, learned that it made sense to play the man, not the ball – and how to do it with ruthless efficiency. It was one of the principal lessons of Leninism: ‘The harshness of polemics became settled Bolshevik practice,’ as one of his chief critics put it, ‘and the translation of words into corresponding action, physical violence to complement verbal brutality, was no more than a logical end to the process…It was a manner of argument peculiarly suited to Vladimir Ilyich’s personality.’

  Partly, the furious sound of the debate was indeed a reflection of Vladimir’s fiery and competitive temperament. But much of it was calculated and deliberate, a tactic that served him well in the endless intra-party squabbles within the revolutionary movement that would last throughout his lifetime and beyond.

  Those who disagreed with him were ‘scoundrels’, ‘philistines’, ‘cretins’, ‘filthy scum’, ‘whores’, ‘class traitors’, ‘silly old maids’, ‘windbags’ (one of his favourite epithets, found frequently in his writings) and ‘blockheads’. Often he would resort to the obscene, in language rarely used in the St Petersburg society of that era – his opponents were invariably ‘shits’ or ‘cunts’. He would deliberately pile on the invective. ‘He does not reply to an opponent,’ recalled Moishe Olgin, a long-time comrade who saw him operate from the early days as a young revolutionary making his way in the Russian capital. ‘He vivisects him. He is as keen as the edge of a razor. His mind works with an amazing acuteness. He notices every flaw in the line of argument. He disagrees with, and then he draws the most absurd conclusions from, premises unacceptable to him. At the same time he is derisive. He ridicules his opponent. He castigates him. He makes you feel that his victim is an ignoramus, a fool, a presumptuous nonentity. You are swept by the power of his apparent logic. You are overwhelmed by his intellectual passion.’2

  His opponent would either have to deny he was a ‘treacherous scoundrel’ or a ‘piece of shit’, or simply shrug his shoulders and leave the field of battle open for Ulyanov. This was an entirely new kind of contest within the radical Left and came as a shock to the comrades. Russian intellectuals were traditionally polite and when they disagreed – which was often – they did so with courtesy. In personal relations with individuals, he nearly always behaved with impeccable manners and decency, never forgetting how well brought up he had been. But in politics, in the smoke-filled conspiratorial meeting room, he was merciless. Many others less passionate, committed and ruthlessly ambitious than he were neither prepared nor equipped to trade blow for blow and left the movement or joined rival groups where they would rarely have to meet him face-to-face and put up with his abuse. This is what Ulyanov wanted. He won many fights because his opponent was too exhausted or disinclined to clash with
him.

  It was a calculated tactic, as Vladimir Voitinsky, a future senior Soviet official and an old comrade from the turn of the century, saw clearly. ‘Vladimir Ilyich was perhaps the most unemotional man I have ever met in politics. No hate, no compassion, not even irritation against his opponents. His ruthlessness in argument never stemmed from a personal grudge – each word, even each slanderous innuendo in his writings, was coldly calculating.’3

  On the other hand, he could also use more traditional debating methods. Vladimir was brilliant at explaining his ideas in simplified, direct ways. Never a man of the people himself, he learned how to speak effectively to an audience using the force of his intellect. Maxim Gorky often heard him speak but never forgot the first time. ‘His guttural “r” made him seem a poor speaker, but within a minute I was as completely engrossed as everyone else. I had never known anyone who could talk of the most intricate political questions so simply…no striving after eloquent phrases, but every word uttered distinctively and its meaning marvellously clear. I had not imagined him that way. I felt there was something missing in him…he was too plain. There was nothing of “the leader” in him. His arm was extended, with the hand slightly raised, and he seemed to weigh every word with it, and to sift out the remarks of his opponents…The unity, completeness, directness and strength of his speech, his whole appearance, was a veritable work of classic art; everything was there and yet there was nothing superfluous, and if there were any embellishments, they were not noticed as such, but were as natural and inevitable as two eyes in a face, or five fingers on a hand.’4