Lenin Read online

  6

  Vladimir Ilyich – Attorney at Law

  ‘Few concepts are as contemptible as that of…bourgeois justice.’

  Lenin to Nikolai Valentinov, 1904

  Vladimir’s career in the law was less than glittering, not least because he hated lawyers: ‘One must rule the advocate with an iron hand and keep him in a state of siege, for this intellectual scum often plays dirty,’ he once told a comrade awaiting trial.

  He couldn’t practise immediately after qualifying. He had to get a certificate of loyalty and good character from the Interior Ministry, which he eventually obtained at the end of 1891. The Okhrana had been keeping close tabs on him in Samara, but could not see that he had done anything wrong. He found a position as an assistant barrister with a friendly and liberal-minded lawyer, Andrei Khardin, with whom he used to play chess by correspondence when he was living in Kazan three years earlier.

  The two got along well, but Vladimir made very little money and was supported almost entirely by his mother. He worked on fourteen minor cases at Samara Circuit Court and lost all except one. They included defending a gang who had stolen 300 rubles from a peasant in the same village; a group of hired hands who had tried to steal grain but were caught red-handed; and one peasant who had committed four small thefts. One case might have given him some ideological satisfaction. He defended a tailor accused of blasphemy, who according to the indictment had ‘cursed the Blessed Virgin, the Mother of God, the Holy Trinity and also the sovereign Lord the Emperor and his heir apparent’, saying that the Emperor managed his affairs badly. The tailor asked him just before the trial whether he had any chance of getting off. ‘Oh, no, none at all I am afraid.’ The tailor was sentenced to a year in prison.

  The case he won was a personal dispute he pursued with characteristic zeal and single-minded determination, bordering on obsession. It was a legal battle with a rich Syzran merchant, S. Arefev, about the rights to cross the Volga. In the summer of 1891 he and his soon-to-be brother-in-law, Mark Elizarov, hired a boatman to row them at a crossing point on the river not far from Samara. The merchant owned a steamship and claimed a monopoly on the crossing routes. He sent his steamer to block their passage and take the two young men aboard his boat. Vladimir complained: ‘It makes no difference that Arefev has rented the river crossing. That’s his business, not ours and it doesn’t give him the right to act lawlessly on the Volga and detain people by force.’

  He made a formal complaint against Arefev to the authorities, and the legal case dragged on for months at great expense in time and money. Syzran was eighty kilometres from Samara and Vladimir went twice to attend court hearings. Most young people, ‘especially Russians, would have dropped the whole business out of inertia and indolence’, said his brother Dmitry. But he wouldn’t let go.

  His mother tried to persuade him to calm down. ‘Let go of this merchant,’ she told him. ‘They will postpone the case again and you’ll be travelling there in vain…Bear in mind that they…[the authorities] have it in for you.’ She was worried that he was too intense about things and had little sense of proportion. Nevertheless, for the third hearing he took an early-morning train and arrived just in time for vindication. To almost everyone’s surprise Arefev, despite his pull as a well-to-do local dignitary, was found guilty and sentenced to a month in jail. It was the high point of Ulyanov’s career as a barrister.1

  —

  The only political campaign he was involved in during his Samara years revealed a great deal about his methods: his rigidity, his self-assurance, use of cold logic to the point of cruelty and his strategic vision. For Ulyanov the end always justified the means – and he kept the end in sight. He was willing to be unpopular.

  Famine hit the Volga region in 1891–2, though it contained some of the best agricultural land in Russia. There had been intermittent famines in the region for centuries, but this disaster was the worst for generations. More than 400,000 people, almost all of them peasants, starved to death, or were victims of typhus and cholera. Government incompetence was held to blame by much of the middle class, even those who generally supported the Tsarist regime. The famine was reported widely in the foreign press, which brought the autocracy under international scrutiny as never before. Russia’s reputation was severely damaged.

  The central government did almost nothing to help the millions of starving peasants who poured into the towns begging for food. Bodies were left unburied by the roadside, hospitals couldn’t cope. The novelist Lev Tolstoy launched a famine relief campaign, supported by other writers like Anton Chekhov, a trained doctor who established soup kitchens and volunteered at first-aid relief centres. Large sums of money were raised, but still the supply of food was totally inadequate.

  Most radical and liberal opinion saw the famine as another example of the miserable failure of a regime whose bureaucracy was too slow and inefficient to save the Russian population from starvation – and too callous to care how many died. Vladimir Ulyanov, though he had lived all his life around the worst-hit famine areas, would have nothing to do with relief or charitable work to help the dying peasants. For him the important thing was that the famine would weaken the autocracy and might further the cause of the Revolution. The thousands of people who died of hunger were simply unfortunate casualties of a war against Tsarist oppression. He argued that capitalism, by definition, hurt most people and killed many. The famine was simple proof.

  He was an isolated, almost lone voice among the revolutionaries. Even his family could hardly believe his unsentimental, apparently cruel attitude. His elder sister, Anna, raised money for food and visited the sick to distribute medicine. His other sister, Maria, was appalled by his hard-heartedness. One of the very few times she ever allowed herself to criticise him was in a paragraph in which she compared Vladimir with his elder brother. ‘Vladimir Ilyich, it seems to me, had a different nature from Alexander Ilyich. Vladimir…did not have the quality of self-sacrifice even though he devoted his whole life indivisibly to the cause of the working class.’

  He would shrug off accusations that he was inhumane, using an inflexible logic and a cold interpretation of Marxism which Marx himself would never have countenanced. ‘He conducted systematic and outspoken propaganda against the relief committees,’ as Trotsky said later. Ulyanov was convinced that the end of the autocracy would be advanced if the government’s incompetence and brutality were exposed. ‘It’s sentimentality to think that a sea of need could be emptied with the teaspoon of philanthropy,’ he said. ‘The famine…played the role of a progressive factor.’2

  —

  In August 1893 Vladimir moved to St Petersburg. On the recommendation of his Syzran employer, Khardin, he found a job with the successful lawyer Mikhail Volkenstein, a bluff, generous man with progressive views, who made few work demands on his young junior assistant from the provinces. Vladimir never appeared in court in the capital, though he did occasionally give advice to clients in litigation cases. His energy was taken up with making a name for himself in the revolutionary movement as a writer, journalist for obscure illegal publications, speaker at clandestine meetings and lecturer – the career he was to pursue for the next twenty years.

  He settled easily into the city, as he told his mother: ‘I’m in a good room, or so it seems; there are no other lodgers and the landlady has a small family; the door between my room and their drawing room is papered over, so that sounds are faint. The room is clean and bright. There is a good entrance. Since…it is not far from the centre (only some 15 minutes to the library) I am quite satisfied.’

  But at first he made slow progress. He was a provincial among the more sophisticated St Petersburg radical set. ‘His appearance…then was simple and modest,’ Gleb Krzhizhanovsky, an old comrade who would take high positions in the Soviet regime after 1917, recalled on first meeting him. ‘Short of stature, he could easily have passed unnoticed in any factory district. All you could say of his appearance was that he had a pleasant, swarthy face with
a touch of the Asiatic. In a rough, country coat he could just as easily have passed himself off in a crowd of Volga peasants.’ Many others would also comment on his ‘Mongol’ looks, with high cheekbones; ‘and those eyes were unusual, piercing…a dark, dark brown’. He had a habit throughout his life of screwing up his eyes when he was trying to concentrate on something or someone – the result of being short-sighted, which was never diagnosed when he was a child. ‘His eyes are narrow and the rapid glances beneath the eyebrows gives him an occasional squint and perhaps a look of cunning…his hands are short and ugly,’ the writer Alexander Kuprin thought. ‘His eyes were dark, small and very unprepossessing,’ according to Valentinov. ‘His face was very mobile, capable of a whole range of changing expressions: watchful attention, thoughtfulness, mockery, biting contempt, impenetrable coldness, extreme fury. In this latter mood his eyes, to put it rather crudely, became like those of a furious wild boar.’3

  He started losing his reddish hair young, as had his father, and most of it was gone before he was twenty-three. Once, when he was still living in Syzran, on the advice of his sister Maria he tried a quack treatment in an attempt to restore his hair. He was not entirely surprised when it failed. Alexander Potresov, who was close to him for years but like most people became estranged because of politics, met him towards the end of 1894 at a meeting in a St Petersburg suburb, in the Okhta quarter. ‘Vladimir Ilyich was only young according to his identity papers. Face to face one could have taken him for at least thirty-five or forty years old. The face withered, the head almost bald except for some sparse hair around the temple, a thin reddish beard, eyes that observed one from the side, craftily, an un-youthful, coarse voice. A typical merchant from any north Russian province – there was nothing of the radical intellectual about him…No trace either of the service or noble family from which he came…It was for good reason that at the time…this young man in years was called “the old man” and we often joked that even as a child he must have been bald and looked old.’

  There was nothing bohemian about him. He was never a dandy, but he usually dressed quite smartly within a modest budget. His suits were always pressed, his shoes clean. If he lost a button on a shirt he sewed a new one on himself. He was never slovenly or careless about appearances, as the archetype of the Russian revolutionary from the pages of, say, Conrad was supposed to be. He was extremely well ordered and tidy, nearly to the point of obsession – the adjective ‘anal’ as commonly used today might have been coined for him. Every morning he would dust his desk and bookshelves before he settled down to work and ensure every pencil was sharpened to a fine point and in the right place. This was a routine that he adhered to strictly, whether he was in cheap lodgings in St Petersburg, a boarding house in a provincial city in Western Europe, or in later years as the ruler of a vast empire from an office in the Kremlin.4

  * * *

  What people could see straight away, from his first days as a revolutionary ‘agitator’, was a single-minded man of iron discipline and unshakeable belief that he was right: ‘he glowed with a force, not charm exactly, not charisma, but an intellectual energy…he personally identified with the cause in a way that was magnetic’, said Pyotr Struve, once a socialist collaborator of Ulyanov, but later, like so many former friends, an enemy.

  Ulyanov became a fluent writer who learned as a journalist to produce copy fast and efficiently. He was never a brilliant, effervescent phrasemaker like Marx or Trotsky at their best. But on his day he was clear and persuasive and he could adopt irony with great effect. He used a battering ram rather than a rapier, but in his finest work he can be powerfully convincing in his reason, logic and intellectual force, albeit often from the starting point of a fundamentally flawed premise. He wrote and published more than ten million words in his lifetime, not counting thousands of letters to family, friends and comrades. It is an astonishing output, but he made a halting start. His early articles were spiked for being too boring and dense, even for a theoretical journal of philosophical thought. His first offering was a long article he titled ‘New Economic Trends in Peasant Life’, a Marxist interpretation of current statistics about agricultural production in Russia. He sent it to the liberal periodical Russian Thought but it was rejected with a terse note saying it was not up to their rigorous standards.*1

  His first published piece, written in a sharper journalistic style, was ‘What the Friends of the People Are’, a bitter attack on the Populists, and, interestingly, on the use of terror as a tactic to bring down the autocracy such as Sasha was hanged for attempting. He no longer believed in individual acts of violence, not through principle but on practical grounds: ‘We shouldn’t reject terror completely as a method of struggle, but does it help attain our desired ends, or on the contrary divert from them?…Individual acts of terrorism create only a short-lived sensation and lead in the long run to an apathy…and the passive waiting for another “sensation” to happen.’*2

  He gained an entry into the leading radical ‘salon’ in St Petersburg, frequented by some of the sharpest leftist thinkers in Russia, at the home of Stepan Radchenko. If he was slow to succeed as a journalist, he quickly built a reputation as a clever and sharp debater who could demolish an opponent’s argument with forensic skill. This was one of his great talents. He was a hard man to argue against, as his friends and critics acknowledged. So too did the Okhrana. Both he and the revolutionary group he had joined, the Union of the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class, were kept under surveillance. In one of the first Okhrana reports mentioning his name, in January 1894, Vladimir appears as a speaker at a clandestine debate in St Petersburg making the Marxist case against a Populist. The Okhrana snoop at the proceedings was impressed. ‘The case for Marxism was taken over by a certain Ulyanov (allegedly the brother of the hanged Ulyanov) who then carried out the defence with a complete command of the subject.’5

  At this point in his life, he had made almost no personal contact with the working class in whose name he proposed to lead a revolution. For most of the middle-class Marxists in St Petersburg drawing rooms, the ‘proletariat’ were theoretical. But unlike many of the other leftist intelligenty, he set about meeting workers and trying to understand their way of life so he could find a voice with which to speak to them. He volunteered as a lecturer to newly literate workers interested in politics. The talks couldn’t be held at schools or factories, so lectures often took place at the homes of wealthy supporters of radical causes. One student, Ivan Yakovlev, recalled that on Sundays he would trudge into the centre of the city from the poor working-class district where he lived and worked in a factory. Vladimir taught under the pseudonym Fyodor Petrovich.

  At first he would simply read to a handful of student workers from Marx’s Capital, which annoyed Yakovlev intensely: ‘I could have read it myself.’ But over time Vladimir, who became a famously good lecturer, learned ‘how to explain socialist ideas in simple terms that related to Russian life’. For hours after the lecture he would talk to the students about their experiences, so he could – at least vicariously – learn about the real conditions of life for workers. One Sunday Yakovlev didn’t turn up and the following week Vladimir was angry with him. His student explained that he had been in an altercation with a policeman and had spent three days in jail. Vladimir told him that he was a lawyer and had Yakovlev asked he would have defended him. ‘Would it have made a difference?’ asked Yakovlev. ‘No. The result would have been the same – but we could have had the pleasure of abusing those scoundrels.’6

  He was also starting to progress from talk to action. When textile workers at the giant Thornton factory on the outskirts of St Petersburg went on strike for higher pay and improved conditions – in one of the first outbreaks of major industrial unrest in Russia’s history – Vladimir met the strike leaders and wrote a powerful propaganda leaflet on their behalf. When he raised money for the support of the families of the scores of workers who had been arrested, the authorities began to view him as a
more serious irritant. He asked permission for an extended visit to Western Europe, as a tourist and to seek treatment at a spa. Like his sisters and younger brother, he suffered from stomach and indigestion problems throughout his life. The real reason for the trip was to meet Russian radicals who were living in exile, including some of the big names in the revolutionary movement. The authorities gave their approval immediately, eager to see the back of him.

  *1 Almost nothing Vladimir wrote until the October Revolution was under his own name. But after his death some of his early pieces were eventually published. It is easy to see why they were rejected: it took him a while to develop a voice and readable style. He was not a natural writer.

  *2 He could nonetheless be enthused by the odd assassination. When, a few years later, he read about the murder by a twenty-one-year-old student Socialist Revolutionary, Stepan Balmashov, of the Interior Minister Dmitry Sipyagin, he calmly whistled through his teeth and exclaimed, ‘Neat job.’

  7

  Nadya – A Marxist Courtship

  ‘Thy lot is hard, a woman’s lot.

  A harder lot can scarce be found.’

  Nikolai Nekrasov (1821–1877)

  On the afternoon of 13 February 1894 Vladimir attended an illegal Marxist meeting disguised as a Shrove Tuesday pancake party, at the St Petersburg home of the engineer Robert Klasson, a well-known supporter of radical causes. Most of the listeners applauded appreciatively after the guest speaker, a scientist specialising in new technological methods in industry, read out a long, discursive paper he had written, ‘On Markets’. The discussion that followed was polite and uncontroversial and brief – until, typically, Vladimir brusquely laid into the scientist’s talk and pointed out, in minute detail, where he had gone wrong and had shown a limited grasp of the subject. After the meeting broke up, as the group of revolutionaries were taking tea, Klasson introduced Vladimir to a shy-looking, modestly dressed twenty-four-year-old teacher of his acquaintance: Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. She knew who he was – ‘The Marxist from the Volga who had been making a name for himself in Peter’*1 – and was very keen to meet him. He knew nothing about her.