Nadya was worried about his state of mind. ‘Those weeks and months of waiting for answers to his letters, constantly expecting the whole thing to fall through, that constant state of uncertainty and suspense were anything but congenial to his character,’ she wrote. ‘His letters to Russia were full of requests to write punctually, to act promptly. He did not sleep at night after receiving a letter from Russia saying that “Sonya is silent as the grave” or that “Zarin” did not join the committee in time or “We have had no contact with the old woman”. I’ll never forget those sleepless nights.’
She was troubled by other thoughts: that the game of hide and seek with the Okhrana was a waste of effort, drama for the sake of it. No one knew better than Nadya how amateurish so many of her husband’s espionage ploys were in practice. ‘All those letters about handkerchiefs [passports], brewing beer [propaganda shipments via Scandinavia], warm fur [illegal literature], and all those crude code-names for towns, beginning with the same letter – Osip for Odessa, Terenty for Tver, Petya for Poltova, Pasha for Pskov, those substitutions of women’s names for men and vice versa – all this was transparent in the extreme.’*1, 6
*1 But they did score some big successes. Twelve Iskra agents were arrested in Kiev in February 1902. They were held at the Lukyanovsky Fortress in the centre of the city, supposedly under tight security, and they were due to appear in a big show trial against ‘terrorists’ planned for the spring. A few days before the trial was due to start they all escaped in a mass prison breakout organised right under the noses of the guards and senior Okhrana officials. This was a major propaganda coup for the Social Democrats.
13
England, Their England
‘As a rule the only thing known in England about Russians is that they take lemon with their tea.’
Olga Novikova (1840–1925)
Late in the morning of 14 April 1902 Lenin and Nadya disembarked at Charing Cross Station after a two-day journey from Munich. They were immediately engulfed by fog, a typical London ‘pea souper’ where visibility was practically zero. ‘My first impression of London: hideous,’ he wrote the next day to Pavel Axelrod in Geneva. He hated London, and the English, for the first few weeks while they stayed in a pokey and dirty bedsit in Sidmouth Street, in the working-class district of Somers Town.
Their first big problem was the language. ‘We found that we couldn’t understand a thing, nor could anyone understand us,’ recalled Nadya. With the help of dictionaries they had translated the Webbs’ book on trade unionism and various treatises on economics. But speaking was a different thing. Both of them had particular difficulty understanding the ‘cockney’ spoken by the London working classes. In time Lenin learned to like London, admire the English and became fluent in the language.*1 Neither got used to the food, though, which they both agreed was appalling: ‘We found that all this ox tails, skate fried in fat and indigestible cakes were not made for Russian stomachs,’ Nadya said.
They were happier when they took two small rooms on the first floor at 30 Holford Square in Clerkenwell, a respectable neighbourhood, where they were soon joined by Nadya’s mother. Under the alias of a German couple, Dr and Mrs Jakob Richter, they were lodgers of Mrs Emma Louise Yeo, a recently widowed dressmaker in her late forties, her daughter and four sons, three of whom were in the printing trade.
They had settled in comfortably when, after a fortnight, Mrs Yeo noticed that ‘Mrs Richter’ wore no wedding band and she threatened to turn them out. But old friends who spoke decent English came to their rescue. Lenin’s erstwhile flame Apollinaria Yakubova and her doctor husband Konstantin Takhtarev, who had been living in London for some time, assured the landlady that their new lodgers were definitely married despite Nadya’s ringless state. Mrs Yeo also disliked the fact that they put up curtains in their room – something respectable Londoners did not do – but she was persuaded that this was ‘normal for Germans’. She softened towards him when Lenin, who throughout his life loved cats, gave her spoilt pet a warm reception. ‘They were good, quiet tenants and always paid their rent on time,’ Mrs Yeo’s son Leonard said many years later. ‘They were completely unused to English ways, but always respectful. Mrs Richter was a sweet, kind lady. He had a face alive with great intelligence but for the most part he seemed a most ordinary little man. It’s amusing that such a quiet, good-natured fellow would become such a world-shaker.’*2
Lenin’s mother was disturbed by a letter she had received from an old family friend who visited London in November 1902, which suggested that her son’s living arrangements were not entirely satisfactory. She wrote to her daughter Anna on 3 December: ‘She described her small flat which has considerable drawbacks. In all they have two small rooms and one of them, that of Elizaveta Vasilyevna [who had joined them in the summer] serves both as kitchen and dining room. Water and coal…are both downstairs and have to be brought up; the washing-up water has to be taken outside and so on…they had first of all thought of looking for a larger place but Nadenka added that she and Volodya have become like cats which get used to a particular spot.’1
Throughout their married life Lenin and Nadya lived modestly and frugally in unostentatious if not entirely spartan style. Nadya, with her mother’s help, learned the basics of housekeeping and their lodgings were always spotlessly clean. But by her own admission she was a terrible cook and never managed to improve. Fortunately Lenin was not interested in food – ‘he pretty submissively ate whatever was in front of him and never complained’. Occasionally, in a gentle way, he would joke with his mother-in-law or good friends about Nadya’s efforts in the kitchen. He learned how to find food stored in the larder and fend for himself, though the drawback, as she admitted to his mother, was that ‘he eats out of turn, not at proper times. Whenever he comes in he starts eating.’*3
But Lenin did demand privacy. He was determined, as he said, to keep himself apart from ‘the squabbling mass of émigrés with nothing to do except drink and gossip’ – those, as Boris Pasternak put it in Dr Zhivago, ‘who talk, talk – in the way only Russians can talk’. He wrote to Grigory Alexinsky, an RSDLP activist he had known from St Petersburg, that ‘over there, in exile, you are frightfully out of touch with Russia – and idleness and the state of mind that goes with it, a nervous, hysterical, hissing and spitting mentality, predominate…There is no real live work, or an environment for live work to speak of.’ He saw no point in staying up all night debating with people he fundamentally disagreed with; it was a waste of the time he could use for valuable work. He insisted on a separate apartment, unlike many Russian revolutionaries who preferred to live in communes.
Lenin loathed the very idea of a commune – all the more so after he visited the rooms in a near-derelict house in King’s Cross shared by Martov, Vera Zasulich and assorted young revolutionaries who popped in and out of the building at any time of the day or night. Tidy and ordered in his habits, he was appalled at what he found. Martov and Zasulich were notoriously messy, so he had some warning. But nothing prepared him for the chaos he encountered. Their living room was wreathed in smoke. Martov’s pipe ash found its way into the sugar bowl. Zasulich’s roll-your-own cigarettes settled on window sills, tables, teacups, herself, and occasionally on the person she was talking to. Her cooking methods were unorthodox even by Nadya’s standards. ‘I remember once how she cooked herself some meat on an oil stove, chipping off pieces to eat with a pair of scissors,’ she recalled after one visit. ‘Someone asked her how long the meat would take to cook. She said, “If I am hungry and in a hurry ten minutes, if not maybe three hours.” She wasn’t joking.’
Lenin said, ‘it is impossible to live in a house where the windows and doors are never closed, where they are completely open to the street and where every passer-by considers it necessary to look in and see what you are doing. I should go mad if I had to live like Martov and Zasulich. This was not a home, but more a public thoroughfare. Martov could be with people all day. I simply can’t…everyone has a corne
r in his life which should never be penetrated by anyone, and everyone should have a special room completely to himself.’
Ivan Babushkin, a young Social Democrat newly arrived from Russia after he had escaped from jail by sawing through the bars of his cell, took one look at the mess in the Martov ménage and cleaned the place up for them, saying with a sigh, ‘The Russian intellectual is always dirty. He needs a servant as he is himself incapable of tidying up.’2
* * *
London had one big advantage for the work of destabilising the Russian empire. In Munich, the German police were beginning to take notice of Lenin’s activities, prompted by the Okhrana’s warnings of dangerous subversives in their midst. The British authorities were altogether more relaxed. There was a tradition of radical exiles seeking asylum in London from the 1840s onwards. Marx, Engels, Herzen, the Hungarian nationalist Lajos Kossuth and the father of Italian unification Giuseppe Mazzini had been made welcome in England, as had the anarchist writer Prince Pyotr Kropotkin, once labelled by the Tsarist regime ‘the most dangerous man in Europe’. The Society of Friends of Russian Freedom, based in London, had a long list of liberal-minded and wealthy backers, who gave money to find homes for Russian émigrés after they had served time in Russian prisons and Siberian exile.
In London the police on the whole took little interest in Lenin and ‘all those foreign scalliwags who congregate in Britain’, as one senior officer described them. The Russian authorities would every now and then alert the Metropolitan Police Special Branch that a terrorist was about to arrive from the Continent. But as Detective Inspector Harold Brust of Scotland Yard explained, the Russians invariably exaggerated. ‘A wholly false and perfectly dreadful catalogue of crimes would be tacked onto a man’s record with a view to earning him disfavour with the British police…[We] attached not the slightest importance to what they said.’
Occasionally the police would monitor potential Russian troublemakers, but often it was in a comic PC Plod or Buster Keaton kind of way. An officer once told Harry Pollitt, who became head of the British Communist Party in the 1920s, that at some point around 1902 as a young copper he had been ordered to hide in the Crown and Woolpack pub in St John Street, Clerkenwell, where Russian émigrés often met, and report on what was going on. According to Pollitt the report to his superiors read: ‘The meeting was conducted entirely in Russian and as I know nothing of the language I was unable to report on the subjects under discussion.’3
The move to London had been agreed by the Iskra editorial board principally because it would be easier to produce the paper there. Through Martov and Nikolai Alexeyev, a Russian socialist who had lived in London for many years, Lenin was given an introduction to Harry Quelch, the editor of the British Social Democratic Party’s organ Justice, printed at a small workshop owned by the Twentieth Century Press at 37a Clerkenwell Green, very close to his lodgings.
The building had long links with radical movements of various kinds: it had been used as a meeting place for Chartists sixty years earlier. Its small press had printed pamphlets by Marx, Engels, Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel. Quelch, a cheerful and friendly figure, agreed to print Iskra and Lenin found the atmosphere congenial, though space was cramped. ‘A corner was boarded off at the printing works by a thin partition that served as Lenin’s editorial room,’ said Potresov. ‘This corner contained a very small writing table, a bookshelf above it and a chair…there was no room for another chair.’ Lenin had happy memories of the place. When Quelch’s son, Thomas, visited Moscow in 1920 and met the leader of the Soviet regime in the Kremlin, one of Lenin’s first questions was: ‘And how is everyone at Clerkenwell Green?’
Lenin spent afternoons at the Iskra ‘office’. But every morning, when it opened, he would be at what he agreed was ‘the richest library in the world’ – the central domed Reading Room of the British Museum – where Marx had spent so much of his life. He was given a letter of introduction for a reader’s ticket by Isaac Mitchell, General Secretary of the General Federation of Trade Unions, and applied saying he had come from Russia ‘to study the land question’. He was issued – or rather Dr Richter LL.D was – with reader’s card A72453 on 29 April.*4 The library was his lifeline, away from the noisy and ‘squabbling émigrés who would pester me…in the Russian fashion at all hours’. They exhausted him and got on his highly strung nerves; ‘What do you think they are here for – a holiday?’ he would regularly ask.
Nadya zealously guarded his privacy. She always answered the door; he never did. When ‘confronted by an intruder she stationed herself at the entrance with a “they shall not pass” expression and would intone “Vladimir Ilyich is not at home” or “he is at work”. Sometimes that didn’t stop the most determined characters, though, and he would have to see them,’ one young visitor from Russia who repeatedly descended on them in London recalled. At times Lenin could be gregarious and welcoming, but he exerted his authority through a mixture of aloofness and good cheer, as Nikolai Valentinov remarked: ‘Lenin kept everyone at arm’s length. I never saw him put his hand on anyone’s shoulder and nobody among his comrades would have dared, however deferentially, to do so to him.’4
* * *
He was determined to improve his command of English, so he placed an advertisement in The Athenaeum magazine: ‘A Russian LL.D (and his wife) would like to exchange Russian lessons for English with an English gentleman or Lady.’ Three people responded: Henry Rayment, who worked for the publisher George Bell; Mr Williams, an office clerk; and Mr Young, a worker. Over the months Lenin used all three, but his favourite was Rayment, an intelligent and educated man around the same age as he was.*5
Partly to help with learning English, he and Nadya went often to the theatre – and surprisingly, Lenin became fascinated by the working-class music hall, which reached the height of its popularity in the Edwardian era. ‘It is the expression of a certain satirical attitude towards generally accepted ideas, to turn them inside out, to distort them, to show the arbitrariness of the usual,’ he wrote enthusiastically to Gorky after one performance in which he wrestled with the English sense of humour. ‘It is a little complicated but interesting.’
Lenin took an interest in a way of life new to him and a city much bigger than St Petersburg: ‘We began to look around this citadel of capitalism with some curiosity,’ said Nadya. They regularly went to Speakers’ Corner in Hyde Park on a Sunday, which he held up as a remarkable example of freedom in Britain. As Nadya recorded in a letter to Lenin’s mother following a visit: ‘One man – an atheist – tried to prove to a group of curious listeners that there was no God. We particularly liked one such speaker – he had an Irish accent which we were better able to understand. Next to him a Salvation Army officer was shouting out hysterical appeals to Almighty God, while a little way off a salesman was holding forth about the drudgery of shop assistants in the big stores.’
Lenin saw more of London than most émigrés, walking around the working-class areas and seeing ordinary life in England for himself. His favourite haunts were north of Holford Square, towards Primrose Hill and Hampstead Heath. It was a sixpenny bus ride from Clerkenwell to Highgate Cemetery, where he often went to Marx’s grave and took a short walk up the hill to enjoy the panoramic vista of the whole of London below. He was as content in England as in any other bourgeois foreign country and he grew to ‘appreciate the special features of English history and English life – the high development of democracy, the absence of militarism, the enormous strength of organised trade unions, the growing investment of English capital outside of England, which weakens the antagonism between the English employers and workers’.5
He attended leftist meetings with British socialists, and when his English was good enough he spoke to groups of British radicals.*6 On May Day in 1903 at the new Alexandra Palace, in north London, he made the same speech to three groups of socialists in English, Russian and German.
But Lenin’s great source of joy was getting out of London and exploring
the countryside. At weekends he and Nadya, sometimes with Elizaveta Vasilyevna, would take a train or bus to as remote a spot in the British Home Counties as they could find and walk in the South Downs, the Chiltern Hills or the Kentish Weald. ‘Nadya and I have often been out looking for the real countryside and we have found it,’ he wrote to his mother after eight weeks in England. A few months later he described one of these jaunts. ‘We took sandwiches with us instead of lunch and spent the whole of one Sunday ins Grüne (quite unintentionally we are taking to foreign ways and arrange our outings on Sundays of all days, though that is the worst time as everywhere is crowded). We had a long walk, the air went to our heads as if we were children and afterwards I had to lie down and rest, as I did after a shooting trip in Siberia. In general we do not miss a chance to go on outings. We are the only people among the comrades here who are exploring every bit of the surrounding country. We discover various rural paths, we know all the places nearby and intend to go further afield.’6
* * *
At dawn one morning in early October 1902 a series of knocks was heard at the entrance to 30 Holford Square. A dishevelled-looking – but still strikingly handsome – young man with a mass of tousled curly brown hair, pince-nez and an air of jaunty arrogance stood at the doorstep. This was the first time that Lenin met Leon Trotsky.
‘With signs and gestures – because I saw others doing so – I managed to engage a cab which took me to an address given me, probably in Zurich,’ Trotsky recalled later. ‘This was Vladimir Ilyich’s home. I had been told in advance to knock on the door a prescribed number of times in a certain definite way. Nadezhda Konstantinovna opened the door for me. I had dragged her out of bed with my knocking. It was very early in the morning. Any sensible man, more familiar with the ordinary conventions of life, would have waited an hour or two at the station, instead of knocking at a stranger’s door at the crack of dawn, but I was full of excitement. Vladimir Ilyich was still in bed and he greeted me with justifiable surprise, but kindness. It turned out he knew who I was already when I explained my pseudonym. That is how he greeted me. He said to Nadezhda Konstantinovna: “Look, Pen has arrived.” She gave me tea and a makeshift breakfast while Lenin got dressed.’
Lenin Page 16
