But through guile, secrecy and elaborate subterfuge – all things Lenin enjoyed immensely – he maintained some links with Germany that proved vital to the success of the Revolution. If it had not been for an obese, louche, corrupt multi-millionaire socialist called Alexander Helphand – usually known by the code-name Parvus – Lenin might never have seized power in Russia. Of all the scoundrels, crooks, charlatans, murderers and ruthless cynics – as well as idealists, clever thinkers and subtle politicians – who appear in these pages, Parvus was the most curious and grotesque.
Born in 1867 near Minsk, the son of a Jewish artisan, Helphand/Parvus went to school in Odessa and university in Berne, where he obtained a doctorate in philosophy. He returned to Russia and became a successful journalist and public speaker; he was ‘scintillatingly quick-witted, with a paradox nearly always on his lips’. In a series of articles in 1904 he forecast, almost exactly as it happened, Russia’s defeat in the war against Japan, and the revolutionary opportunity at home. He could be a serious thinker. The idea of ‘permanent revolution’, the central theory of what would become Trotskyism, was developed by him. He played a prominent part in the 1905 Revolution, along with Trotsky, with whom he was close politically and personally. But they drifted apart. They were arrested, separately, towards the end of 1905 and exiled to Siberia. Both escaped, Parvus to Germany, where he made a fortune in various businesses – from publishing to selling chemicals, pharmaceuticals and condoms to the German army. Parvus loved political plotting, ‘being in the know’ and at the centre of events; but he loved money rather more.
Briefly he became Gorky’s agent and represented his literary interests in Germany, at a time when The Lower Depths was playing to full houses. According to Gorky, Parvus took 20 per cent of the profits for himself, and agreed to give a quarter to Gorky and the rest to the German Social Democratic Party. Parvus amassed more than 100,000 marks, but instead of handing Gorky his share he wrote to him frankly, explaining that he had spent it all on a luxurious trip to Italy with a female companion. Gorky replied good-humouredly that ‘it must have been a very pleasant holiday’. Yet he still complained to the German Social Democrats. A ‘court’ comprising Party heavyweights Kautsky, Bebel and Zetkin ‘condemned Helphand morally’ and he left Germany for Constantinople, where he became a political adviser to the ‘Young Turk’ movement which wanted to modernise the Ottoman empire. He made another vast fortune in trade with the Turkish military.
As a young man he had been handsome and svelte, but he grew hideously obese. ‘His stomach vibrated like a sack of grain,’ one of his good friends remarked. ‘He was a massive, gigantic figure…broad, bull-like face with its high forehead, tiny nose and carefully trimmed beard, and a flabby double chin, behind which his neck completely disappeared. The small lovely eyes were deeply embedded in fat. His short legs were barely strong enough to support his body, and when he was standing up or walking he seemed to use his arms to maintain himself on an even keel.’
He saw the war as an opportunity to make a vast amount of money – but also to further revolution in Russia. Despite his champagne breakfasts and series of young mistresses which shocked the puritan comrades, he believed that revolution was bound to come to Russia, and he wanted to be the man to speed up the process. He was convinced ‘that the interests of the German government are identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries. The Russian Social Democrats can achieve their aims only with the destruction of Tsarism. On the other hand, Germany would not be completely successful if it were not possible to kindle a major revolution in Russia.’ In March 1915 he wrote an eighteen-page memorandum which he presented to the German Foreign Ministry detailing how Russia could be destabilised from within by groups of revolutionaries, who would organise a series of army mutinies, strikes and acts of sabotage. The German government was convinced the plan could work and gave Parvus a million marks – the equivalent of more than US$4 million in 2016 – to bring about revolution in Russia. Parvus moved his business operations to Copenhagen, where he could appear more neutral and operate more freely.*4
He went to Berne in May 1915 with the sole intention of meeting Lenin and offering him a large amount of money to help the Bolsheviks. He wouldn’t be the only recipient of the German largesse: many other radical groups, the Mensheviks and the Socialist Revolutionaries among them, would be offered cash too. But Lenin was key to the plan. As Parvus told Arthur Zimmermann, the German Foreign Minister, Lenin was ‘much more raving mad’ than the other revolutionaries and the most vociferous against the war.
Parvus arrived in Switzerland with his latest paramour, Ekaterina Groman, and took a suite in the most expensive hotel in Berne. One evening he entered a restaurant where Russian émigrés habitually met and went straight to a table where Lenin, Nadya, Inessa and a group of Bolsheviks were dining. Lenin knew a great deal about Parvus but they had never met. They had a brief conversation, and the two of them left the restaurant. Lenin took Parvus to his apartment where they talked alone for several hours. Lenin told nobody details of the meeting. All Helphand said, later, was that he tried to convince Lenin that the Bolsheviks couldn’t win without German help. Lenin distrusted Parvus on sight. If it ever got out publicly that he had accepted funds from ‘this dissipated man’ his political career could be finished. He turned down any deal – ‘Parvus ate without salt,’ Lenin maintained, meaning he got nothing out of the meeting. But he kept a line of contact open to ‘that fat man’ through one of his most trusted and useful lieutenants, Yakov Fürstenberg, also known as Ganetsky (Hanecki) or Borel, who lived in Copenhagen and took a job with Parvus.*5 It suited Lenin politically to disassociate himself from Parvus, but he genuinely hated him – everything from his appearance to his extravagant lifestyle and his hypocrisy. No money went from Parvus to the Bolsheviks until Lenin returned to Russia in 1917. Later he would be altogether less fastidious.10
*1 Elizaveta Vasilyevna did eventually find her way back to Russia. On 21 February 1969, in the Brezhnev years, the Soviet government arranged for her ashes to be taken to Leningrad, as it was then called, where she was born. White propaganda in the Civil War put about an altogether different account of Lenin’s mother-in-law’s death, which was widely believed by some people. The story went like this. During her final illness Nadya sat up with her mother night after night. On 20 March, exhausted, she asked Lenin to relieve her for a few hours, ‘but don’t fail to wake me if Mother needs me’. Lenin sat with a book, while Elizaveta peacefully died during the night. The next morning Nadya was mortified and asked him why he had not woken her as he had promised. ‘But I acted strictly in accordance with your instructions,’ he is said to have replied. ‘You wanted to be woken in case your mother needed you…[she died] so simply and logically did not need you any more.’ This account is a popular anti-Communist myth, entirely fabricated. Nadya’s account that she was with her mother is the truth.
*2 Nadya was much more prudish than Lenin and never believed in the kind of ‘free love’ advocated by Inessa and, more notoriously, by Alexandra Kollontai. Nadya liked Kollontai and they became good friends, but she admitted that she was ‘deeply shocked’ by Kollontai’s famous comment that when women’s emancipation arrived and there was equality between the sexes, for women making love would be ‘no more significant than sipping a glass of water’, as it was, she argued, for most men. Nadya was bourgeois middle class when it came to sexual matters, and treated marriage – her own and those of others – with much more reverence than other feminists in her radical set. She never expressed approval for any alternative to monogamy, and certainly never flirted with another man after she married Lenin. His comment on Kollontai’s ‘glass of water’ remark was typical Lenin: ‘Yes of course everyone has needs. But who would choose to drink from a puddle?’
*3 Moor was an odd fish. He was very wealthy but a genuine radical – and, in fact, also a double agent for German military intelligence. He never betrayed Lenin, however, who admired his intelligence and hi
s useful gossip about Swiss politics. Strangely, after the Revolution, though his role as a German agent was exposed, he moved to Soviet Russia and kept in occasional contact with Lenin.
*4 Rosa Luxemburg, beacon of socialist purity, despised him. Helphand, she sneered, was ‘first to make a fortune during a war in which millions of proletarians are being killed, and then sit in the safety of Klampenborg in Denmark and run from there a limited company for the exploitation of…two national proletariats – for this “superior” revolutionary role we have little understanding’.
*5 Lenin also turned down work writing for the socialist paper which Parvus had established, Die Glocke (The Bell), which was a tub-thumping pro-war journal campaigning for German victory. He described it as ‘an organ of renegades and dirty lackeys…a cesspool of German nationalism…not a single honest thought, not a single serious argument, not a single straightforward article could be found’.
26
The Last Exile
‘How could this obstinate little man…Lenin ever have become so important?’
Stefan Zweig, The Tide of Fortune, 1927
At the beginning of 1917 Nadya and Lenin had never been so poor. They were no longer receiving money from Russia following his mother’s death. Rich donors to the Bolsheviks had dried up; there was no access to the tainted funds from the Schmidt inheritance and Lenin was earning a pittance from writing and lecturing. He was still awarding himself the same Party ‘salary’ as before, but it wasn’t a great deal for two to live on. Nadya was taking work copying and teaching Russian to private students but they were few and far between. She was left a small legacy of 4,000 rubles from an aunt – her mother’s sister, who had been a teacher in Novocherkassk, a small town near Rostov. An Austrian banker transferred the money from Galicia, but took a 50 per cent commission. Unlike her husband, Nadya seldom complained about money, but she wrote to her sister-in-law Maria: ‘We shall soon be coming to the end of our former means of subsistence and the question of earning a living will be serious. It is difficult to find anything here. I will have to think of a literary income.*1 I don’t want this side of our affairs to be Volodya’s worry alone. He works so hard as it is. The question of an income worries him greatly.’1
Soon afterwards Lenin told Maria the same thing. ‘I must say I need an income. Otherwise I shall simply perish. Truly! The fiendishly high cost of living – there is nothing to live on. Money must be squeezed out forcibly somehow. Shlyapnikov must speak about this to Gorky himself, if this isn’t too awkward…and to the publisher of Letopis [a left-wing magazine] to whom two of my articles have been sent…let them pay immediately – and as much as possible. If this is not arranged I shall not be able to hold out. Of this I am sure. This is very, very serious.’ Lenin was wont to whinge about money, even when his mother was alive and sending him subventions. But he had seldom written in such desperate terms before. He was not utterly penurious in the way many other Russian émigrés were – ‘I never had to worry about bread…that never happened in my life,’ he admitted. But he faced unaccustomed hardships.
They had moved to Zurich in March 1916, into the most modest of all their various homes in the long years of exile. ‘We were reduced to…the very lower depths of the town,’ as Nadya admitted.2
At first they rented one room in a boarding house in the ancient, down-at-heel centre of Zurich. They took their meals at a small eating house close by, run by a middle-aged blonde woman, Frau Perlog. It was dark and dirty and ‘smelled more like a mouldy cellar than a restaurant’, but, typically, Lenin made a political point and said he liked how ‘plebeian’ it was, and was delighted to be ‘frequenting a place where they used chipped cups for tea’. They shared the dining room with a prostitute known as Red Maria – a reference to the colour of her curly hair rather than her politics. She told Lenin and Nadya her troubles, explaining that she was resorting to her profession to support her ageing mother and younger siblings. Her Austrian lover had been taken away from her by the war, which she said ‘was nothing but robbery of men, a dirty trick…by the rich’. Frau Perlog would echo the sentiment. She told Lenin that she didn’t understand why the soldiers didn’t just shoot their officers and go home. Lenin smiled and agreed.
After a few weeks they moved to a small room on the second floor of a five-storey building, 14 Spiegelgasse, in the medieval centre of Zurich overlooking a courtyard ‘that often smelled of a nearby sausage factory’.*2 The apartment was sublet to them by a cobbler, Titus Kammerer, who ran his business from the ground floor of the building next door. It was a miserable and dark room, but they got used to it, despite the poor heating in the winter and the overpowering smells in the summer. There was one table to eat and work on, a couple of chairs and two single iron bedsteads. Kammerer recalled that Lenin and Nadya ‘lived in a very plain way…but he seemed like a good fellow…with a neck like a bull…she was a good soul but she didn’t look well much of the time. She would have been a good hausfrau, but she had her mind always on other work.’
They ate very simply and the meals were rarely improved by Nadya’s extraordinary capacity to burn the potatoes or oatmeal they invariably ate for lunch. Lenin would look at Herr Kammerer and joke, ‘There! You see we live in grand style.’ They ate meat as a special treat on Sundays. Frau Kammerer gave Nadya the first cookery lessons of her life, showing her how she could prepare simple, cheap but nourishing meals in her own tiny room.3
As usual, Lenin would stick to a routine. Each morning he would be at the Central Library at Zähringerplatz by 9 a.m. and come home for lunch. He returned to the library for two hours, and then read the papers at either the Café Adler or the Café Odéon on the Limmatquai by the lake. He held meetings of his small Bolshevik faction in a back room of the Zur Eintracht, another café in the old city. One or two evenings a week he would give lectures on socialism. As always they would take regular exercise. On Thursdays, when the Zurich Central Library closed at lunchtime, he and Nadya would walk up the 700-metre-high Zürichberg, ‘take a chocolate snack and find a favourite spot in the thick of the woods where there were no crowds’. In fine weather they would remain until evening. At weekends they would go for long walks by the lake shore.
—
In six months Lenin completed one of his longest and most interesting books, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. Much is dated, but some of his ideas have resonance now: ‘Capitalism…is no longer the progressive force described by Marx’; the free market era ‘has been followed by a new one in which production is concentrated in vast syndicates and trusts which aim at monopoly control’. Giant multinational technology companies ‘freeze out other competition to forestall independent technological innovation’. Financial control ‘has passed from the industrialists themselves to a handful of banking conglomerates – the creation of a banking oligarchy’.
There were few territories left for rising powers like the US to exploit. They had no alternative but to resort to militarisation and war. ‘National independence movements…will have to be crushed in an endless cycle to maintain their markets. This movement for national independence threatens…capital in its most valuable and promising fields of exploitation, and capital can maintain its dominance only by continually increasing its military forces.’ These were points made as much on the Right as the Left in 2017 – especially the dangers to the economy of a ‘banking oligarchy’ and the monopoly aims of the technology corporations.
* * *
Zinoviev was in Zurich, Inessa split her time between Berne, Zurich and occasional visits to Paris, and as war-weariness grew, a trickle of Mensheviks and ‘Defencists’ drifted towards Lenin. But the numbers were small. The Swiss police barely took any notice of the Bolsheviks, though the Russian and German spies continued to follow him closely: ‘they knew what he was reading, what he was writing, what he had for breakfast’, as Zinoviev put it.*3 Nadya and Lenin hardly ever met anyone outside a tight-knit group of Russian émigrés, though Zurich was teeming with exiles
from various European countries waiting out the war. Occasionally he met the great Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, an anti-war pacifist, at the Café Odéon, where Bolsheviks frequently congregated – the Mensheviks favoured the Adler. Zweig was not impressed, wondering in later years ‘how could this obstinate little man…Lenin ever have become so important?’.4
Lenin did not despair: ‘Reaction is triumphant at the moment…but our day will come,’ he told Inessa in a letter in the new year of 1917. He was not sure when, though he didn’t appear to think it would be imminent. At the end of 1916 he had applied for a further year’s extension on his residence permit to stay in Switzerland and, with his application, had to send proof that he had a bank account (he had, it contained 100 francs credit). He wrote to Inessa about his latest plan – to establish a small publishing company to produce a series of pamphlets about the tasks for the Left in Europe while the war dragged on. A few days later he wrote to her again, and clearly the fall of the Romanovs and returning to Russia was not at the forefront of his mind. He was convinced, for some reason – he never explained why – that the Western powers were about to invade Switzerland and was concerned about Party funds. ‘If Switzerland is drawn into the war, the French will occupy Geneva immediately. To be in Geneva then is to be in France – is to be in touch with Russia. I am therefore thinking of turning the Party’s funds to you, for you to keep on your person, sewn up in a special little bag.’ Nothing came of the plan, but at one point he genuinely imagined that Inessa would walk around Switzerland for the duration of the war with the Bolshevik money chest secreted about her clothes. For a highly clever man who would soon be in charge of one of the most powerful empires the world had seen, Lenin had some bizarre ideas.5
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