Lenin to Inessa Armand, 5 December 1916
Lenin settled down to Swiss exile again, though he was bored by Berne and, worse to his mind, it had no decent libraries. He was studying Hegel’s dialectics to get a firmer philosophical grasp of Marxism, Aristotle (in the original Greek), and trying to write a major book, which would eventually appear as Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. But he lacked much of the material he needed and he became deeply frustrated.
Life returned to the way it had been before the war. They found a small apartment on the outskirts of town, near some charming woods. ‘Across the road lived Inessa, five minutes’ walk away the Zinovievs’. We would wander…the three of us for hours along the forest paths,’ Nadya recalled. Pravda had been closed down early in September 1914 as it came out (under Lenin’s direction) firmly against the war, but he produced a copious amount of journalism elsewhere. He lectured tirelessly in Switzerland and occasionally France. And, as always, he feuded bitterly with opponents in the revolutionary movement – the real enemy, as he saw things. Though he had some fame on the European Left, he was almost unknown in his own country outside the revolutionary movement. Even the reading public in Russia was not particularly interested in him. Two years before the war began a St Petersburg publisher, Mikhail Kedrov, brought out three volumes of his collected works. There were only 200 subscriptions. He had produced a print run of 3,000 but fewer than half were sold within a year and the rest were remaindered as waste paper.
In the first years of the war, and as he reached middle age – he was now in his mid-forties – Lenin was becoming increasingly impatient, irascible and difficult to deal with. As usual when he was under stress, he was plagued by insomnia, bad headaches and stomach cramps. The intemperate ‘rages’ described by Nadya occurred with more frequency. He quarrelled with almost everybody, even his sister Anna, one of the very few times there were cross words within his family. After a letter from him in the autumn of 1915 complaining harshly about something she had written along the lines that the war was going badly, Anna, deeply hurt, replied, ‘Volodya…I feel I am being terrorised by you…to the point that I am scared of making any incautious expressions.’ She had always supported him, worked for him ceaselessly and happily performed whatever task he had asked of her, yet he muttered to Nadya and close comrades that his sister had ‘never made sense in politics in any case’. Anna heard of his remarks and suggested that perhaps her brother ‘can’t control himself’. They made up soon afterwards, but the incident showed the febrile state he was in.1
It was only with his ménage of Nadya and Inessa that he could reveal his true feelings. ‘Watching him closely…he had become more reserved, more reflective, and when interrupted in reveries…one caught a glint of sadness in his eyes,’ said Nadya. He wasn’t on the whole prone to self-pity, but he could be mournful in his letters to Inessa. ‘How I weary of this fetid back-parlour of revolutionary politics,’ he told her. ‘I am tired of meetings; my nerves are weak; my head aches; I am absolutely exhausted.’
The endless internal battles wore him down, even though he admitted, at least to Inessa, that often he was the cause of them. He could unburden himself like this only to her: ‘Oh, how these “little matters of business” are mere fakes of the real business, surrogates of the business, a real obstacle to the business in the way that I see the fuss, the trouble, the little matters – and how I am tied up with them inextricably and for ever!…That’s a sign that I am lazy and tired and in a poor humour. Generally I like my profession – and yet I almost hate it.’ He treated each slight, each disagreement or small setback as a personal insult. During the war when he was removed from the editorial board of the German Social Democratic magazine Vorbote he raged in a letter to Inessa: ‘Anyone who forgives such things in politics is a donkey or a scoundrel – impudent, insolent, stupid – and I shall never forgive…[them]. For such things you punch a man’s face or turn away. To grant equality to little pigs and fools – never. But of course all this is entre nous and I can’t write otherwise when I am speaking frankly, though perhaps the bad language might pass.’2
The death of Nadya’s mother was a blow to their comfortable, if dull, life in Berne. Elizaveta Vasilyevna had been ailing for some time; she had shrunk to a dangerously small size and low weight, and had been suffering from dementia for several years. In early spring 1915 she came down with influenza, and was too weak to recover. On the night of 20 March she died, in her sleep, with Nadya beside her, aged seventy-five. She had wanted to return to Russia to die but it was impractical. ‘We had no one there to look after her,’ Nadya said. She and her son-in-law had quarrelled occasionally, but had lived together on generally good terms for nearly twenty years.
Nadya asked for her mother’s body to be cremated, then a relatively novel practice and legalised in Switzerland only at the turn of the century. ‘Vladimir Ilyich and I sat in the cemetery and after two hours they brought us a metal jug still warm with her ashes and they showed us where to bury them,’ she told a friend.*1, 3
A month later, deep in mourning, Nadya suffered a painful, recurring outbreak of the toxic goitre, Graves’ Disease, which was supposed to have been cured by surgery two years earlier. The symptoms were familiar: heart palpitations, a swollen neck and luridly bulging eyes. She looked and felt awful. Doctors told her she must go on a rest cure and though she loved the Alps, she wrote to her friend Alexandra Kollontai, in exile in Scandinavia, for an alternative recommendation. ‘I must go to the mountains…between 1,100 and 1,300 metres. Do you know if there are such mountains in Sweden or Norway? I’d be glad to get out of Switzerland; it’s a sort of sleepy backwater here. Ask someone please if there are such mountains…and if living there is cheap.’ But they could not reach Scandinavia. Geography was against them. How different might the history of the Revolution have been if Lenin had managed to find exile during the war in Norway or Sweden? He would not have had to make a pact with the Germans that almost destroyed his reputation in his homeland, and might have cost him his life as an alleged traitor.4
The quaint revolutionary threesome settled for the Alps instead and went on regular breaks to the Bernese Oberland. On one trip during the war, Lenin, Nadya and Inessa were gone for nearly four months to a resort at Sörenberg, between Berne and Lucerne. One visitor remembered watching Lenin working in the garden of the guest house where they were staying, while Inessa played the piano in the living room. He would stay in touch with Zinoviev and other revolutionaries with a phone call every morning at 8.30 a.m. In the afternoons they walked, usually the three of them. They would ‘return in the evening with bouquets of rhododendrons and wild flowers and baskets of mushrooms. We were comfortable there…all around us there were woods and high mountains – and there was even snow on the peak of the Rothorn. Mail arrived with Swiss punctuality. We discovered that even in such an out of the way village it was possible to obtain free of charge any book from the Berne or Zurich Public Library.’ Once Lenin was spotted swimming in the nude in the River Kleine Emme.5
Nadya regained her health amid the mountains. But then came another family bereavement. Lenin knew he would almost certainly never see his mother again, but when she died on 25 July 1916 aged eighty-one following a series of illnesses, he was distraught. Maria Alexandrovna had been a constant in his life, though he had seen little of her in the previous twenty years. He was miserable that he couldn’t have been there at her death, or go to her funeral at the Lutheran section of Volkovo Cemetery in Petrograd. The pallbearers were his brother-in-law Mark Elizarov and Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich, a family friend and staunch Bolshevik who became Lenin’s personal secretary when he returned to Russia.
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Lenin’s uncompromising stance against the war seemed like a risky mistake to many of his loyal supporters. Party activists, particularly in Russia during the early euphoria over the war, believed it made the Bolsheviks look extreme and unpatriotic. Support drifted away and ‘the consequences are very serious f
or us’, a loyalist from Petrograd warned Lenin. Even Inessa, who loathed German and Austrian imperialism, didn’t agree with Lenin about the war – and frequently told him so.
Lenin was unapologetic. In the short term he accepted that the Bolsheviks would pay a price. But strategically Lenin was right. In the long run his consistent line against the war was a crucial factor in helping him seize power – and keep hold of it. When the mood changed in Russia and war-weariness started growing, support for the Bolsheviks increased. Lenin could plausibly argue that as he had always been against the conflict, he and the Bolsheviks could bring peace. It was the main promise to the people in 1917.
Lenin’s line was simple. He wanted his country to lose the war; defeat would be a spark to revolution. ‘Tsarism is a hundred times worse than Kaiserism,’ he told Alexander Shlyapnikov, one of the leading Bolsheviks in Scandinavia, who ensured that the statement was smuggled from Sweden into Russia. ‘From the point of view of the working class and the toiling masses of Russia, the lesser evil would be the defeat of the Tsarist monarchy and its army.’ He wasn’t a pacifist – far from it. ‘That sort of talk about peace is for clergymen and philistines.’ He wanted to turn the war between nations into a class war against the capitalist oppressors. ‘The entire essence of our work (persistent, systematic, maybe of long duration) must be to turn the national war into a civil war. When this will happen…isn’t clear. We have to let the moment ripen – force it to ripen…but we are duty-bound to work, for as long as it takes, in this direction.’
The following month he made the same point to Alexandra Kollontai in Sweden. ‘Turning the present imperialist war into civil war is the only proper proletarian slogan.’ The socialist movement, he added, would benefit from the war; it would be ‘purged’ by the conflict. ‘The European war has done a great service to international socialism in that it has clearly revealed the whole state of rottenness, baseness and swinery of the opportunists…thus giving a magnificent incentive towards cleaning up the workers’ movement and ridding it of the filth which has accumulated during the scores of peaceful years.’6
The Left, including the Social Democrats, split into three groups with different positions on the war. The Defencists supported their own countries ‘in defence of the Fatherland’. The Internationalists were neutral and maintained what had been the traditional socialist argument that workers shouldn’t be killing each other for the benefit of the capitalists. The Defeatists wanted their own country beaten as the lesser of two evils because ‘victory’ would strengthen their own capitalist regimes and delay the Revolution. Lenin was the arch-‘defeatist’, but would also support the Internationalists when compromise with them made tactical sense.
Throughout the war he was in bitter conflict with the Defencists – ‘vermin who have betrayed socialism’, he called them. His opponents were mostly the usual suspects – Mensheviks and ‘bourgeois liberals dressed up as socialists’. The chief traitor was Georgy Plekhanov, who said at the start of the war that ‘if I wasn’t old and sick I would be a volunteer and join the army. To run through the German comrades with a bayonet would give me great pleasure.’ Lenin wrote a terse reply: ‘It must be the primary task of Social Democrats in each country to combat their own nation’s chauvinism.’ They were hardly ever in direct communication again, though they argued incessantly in the press throughout the war.
There were repeated efforts to unite the Left, but it proved impossible. There could be no compromise between Lenin, Plekhanov and the German Social Democrats. At one key conference in September 1915, at a Swiss mountain resort, Trotsky (an Internationalist) drafted what became known as the rousing anti-war Zimmerwald Manifesto – ‘Working Men and Women! Mothers and Fathers! Widows and Orphans! Wounded and Crippled! To all who are suffering from the war, or as a consequence of the war, we cry out over the frontiers, over the smoking battlefields, over the devastated cities and hamlets: WORKERS OF THE WORLD UNITE.’ Lenin supported it, but it was defeated by a combination of the Mensheviks and the Germans. Lenin was not surprised. He had never taken the conference seriously anyway, knowing he would be defeated. He spent much of it outside the meeting room playing with the dogs of the owner of the Zimmerwald Hotel, where the proceedings took place. At Kiental, another Alpine resort, seven months later Lenin was defeated again and there was no outright condemnation of the war. But the Manifesto became the Bolsheviks’ battle cry.
Lenin wrote scores of articles about the politics of the war, and what it would mean for the Left. But he barely mentioned the human dimension of the conflict, the industrial scale of the slaughter taking place. He argued that the outcome of each individual battle did not matter. Declaring a victory at any given moment for one side or the other, ‘for one set of thieves, against another group of thieves’, was irrelevant. That it was Europe’s working class who did most of the dying was a bloody reality about which he seemed to care little. Martov was a pacifist, neutral in the war, and he was fighting his own internecine battles with Lenin, but he was right when he told a group of friends that Lenin ‘wasn’t interested in…peace or war. The only thing that interests him is the Revolution. And the only real revolution for him is the one in which the Bolsheviks have seized power.’7
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Inessa and Lenin had tempestuous rows, which always mixed the personal and the political. During a conversation in Berne soon after the war broke out he told her that he had close friendships and respect for only ‘two or three women during my life’ – clearly implying, though not saying explicitly, that she was one of them. He heard nothing more about the comment for several days, but then out of the blue received an indignant letter back accusing him of ‘extreme arrogance’ by saying he knew only two or three women who deserved respect. Lenin was affronted and wouldn’t let the matter drop. He told her she had wilfully misunderstood his point. ‘Never, never have I written that I value only three women. Never! What I wrote is that my unconditional friendship, absolute respect and trust are dedicated to only two or three women. This is a completely different thing.’
Soon afterwards they had another serious disagreement which clearly crossed the line between socialist theory and their own relationship – on the issue of ‘free love’. Following a long discussion about love and marriage with her daughters Inna and Varvara early in 1915, Inessa began work on a pamphlet she wanted to write about women’s rights under the law – marriage, divorce, love and sex in the new age of revolution. She wrote a synopsis, which she was anxious to show Lenin, assuming he would be as enthusiastic about the subject matter as she was and would give her encouragement. Instead the response she received was cold, harsh, rude and pedantic – like a lecture on Marx he might have given at Berne Rathaus, rather than to a woman with whom he had been on intimate terms. Her synopsis covered a range of feminist topics, but he picked up on only one area – her call for women to have ‘freedom of love’. Freud would no doubt have as much to say as Marx about why he concentrated on this subject, but his thoughtless comments wounded Inessa deeply. The free love demand, he told her dogmatically, was politically incorrect – a bourgeois concept, not a proletarian one; ‘you should consider the objective logic of class relations in matters of love’. Besides, a self-interested and ‘immoral pursuit of love at any cost’ would result in promiscuity and adultery.
Inessa was understandably enraged, both by the point he was making and his tactless way of putting it. It was prudish, unimaginative and entirely ignored her own position. Had Inessa not left her husband for love? Did he not love her, adulterously? She replied that the issue had nothing to do with class relations and he was ‘confusing freedom of love…with freedom of adultery. Surely even a fleeting passion is…more poetic and pure than kisses without love between a husband and wife.’
Lenin still didn’t see her point and defended himself as though the matter was entirely academic, as though they had not conducted a love affair, and he wasn’t still living with his wife. ‘Kisses without love between vulgar s
pouses are filthy. I agree. These need to be contrasted…with what? It would seem: kisses with love. But you contrast a fleeting (why a fleeting?) passion (why not love?) – and it comes out logically as if kisses without love…are contrasted to marital kisses without love.’ Weren’t both reprehensible?*2, 8
They agreed to disagree – a rare event with Lenin – but the exchange clearly left Inessa dissatisfied. For a while she cut herself off from Lenin and Nadya, was slow in replying to his letters and displayed increasing independence. There was no mistaking his need for her when she wasn’t near him, in this lover’s apology. ‘Dear friend,…Apparently the lack of reply to several of my latest letters indicates – in connection with something else – a certain changed mood, a decision, your situation. At the end of your last letter a word was repeated twice. I went and checked. Nothing. I don’t know what to think, whether you are offended by something or were too distracted…I’m afraid to ask, as I know you don’t like questions, and so I’ve decided to think that you don’t like being questioned and that’s that. So I’m sorry…’9
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The Germans were keeping as close an eye on Lenin as were the Okhrana. Lenin knew German spies were following him and he was careful to avoid obvious contact with any Germans or their agents while he was in exile. If it became known back home in Russia that he was consorting with anyone representing the Triple Alliance – but particularly a German – it would severely damage his reputation and harm the Bolsheviks. He was on the lookout for provocateurs and kept his distance from newcomers. In Berne he regularly met Karl Moor, a Swiss banker and Social Democrat who helped finance the Bolsheviks. Lenin began to be suspicious of him when Moor wanted to introduce him to other leftists whom Lenin didn’t know. He wrote to trusted Swiss radicals and asked them to check Moor out. ‘What is Moor like? Has it been completely and absolutely proved that he is honest? Has he had any recent direct or indirect hobnobbing with German Social Imperialists [Lenin’s new term for pro-war Social Democrats]…I urge you to check him very carefully – with documentary evidence if you can. There must be no room for the shadow of doubt or rumour.’ Moor passed the test and Lenin was satisfied.*3
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