Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Some senior officers were worried that information about the deployment of British chemical weapons would become public, but Churchill remained convinced that gas was a reasonable weapon. He said he would ‘very much like the Bolsheviks to have it [a chemical attack] if we can afford the disclosure’. He thought it would be the most effective means to crush the Bolsheviks before it was too late.*4 When other Cabinet members objected he accused them of ‘squeamishness’. He said: ‘Gas is a more merciful weapon than the high-explosive shell, and compels an enemy to accept a decision with less loss of life than any other agency of war.’ Throughout 1918 there were scores of chemical attacks against the Bolsheviks, but they were less effective than Churchill and his generals had hoped.

  Churchill wrote repeatedly to Woodrow Wilson urging a far more committed intervention, but the President was wary. He tried diplomacy instead. He proposed a peace conference in early 1919 between the Reds and the Whites, on one of the Princes Islands in the Sea of Marmara near Constantinople. Lenin was willing at least to talk about talks. He thought that with the war against Germany won, the Allies would not stop at supporting the Whites, but would combine forces to destroy the Soviet regime. He was willing to discuss a deal that would leave the Bolsheviks in power over most of Greater Russia. And he told the commissars that he would be prepared to negotiate repaying historic loans from the West and compensating foreigners for confiscated property. It was always unlikely that a deal would be struck, but Lenin said he would send a delegation to the talks anyway. Kolchak and the Whites refused: they wouldn’t discuss a settlement that involved granting independence to the nationalities.

  Wilson tried once again. He sent the author and millionaire diplomat William Bullitt as a peace envoy, but his efforts came to nothing. By late summer 1919 the Reds were on the way towards winning the Civil War and Lenin was less inclined to compromise. The Whites would not budge on independence for the other nations in the empire. Their position exasperated Wilson, at a time during the Versailles Conference when he was proposing to give self-determination to dozens of new countries from the ashes of the Austrian and Ottoman empires. The Americans and the British ditched the Whites. ‘We cannot afford to continue with such a costly intervention in an interminable Civil War,’ said Lloyd George in autumn 1919. ‘Other methods must be found to restore peace.’

  It was a devastating blow for the Whites, whose defeat was accompanied by a mass migration from Russia. Between 1.5 and two million people left the country within two years of the Revolution, most of them educated, professional people, the intelligentsia. Many would have agreed with Zinaida Gippius, in French exile, who mused bitterly: ‘We know why the White movement perished…the leaders miscalculated the strength of the enemy…but the main reason was that it was totally abandoned, both internally and externally. It was abandoned not only by the Russians, but also by its perfidious allies of yesterday.’

  By the end of 1919 Lenin no longer feared outside attack, though there was still a ‘cordon sanitaire’ around Russia and an economic blockade: his regime was not recognised internationally. He was confident he would not be ousted by an invading army. He still faced opposition internally, but it could be charmed, deceived, intimidated or, finally, terrorised into submission. It was from the end of the Civil War that Lenin can be said to be Russia’s dictator, the first Red Tsar.9

  *1 Originally it was commanded by Lavr Kornilov, who soon after the October Revolution escaped from jail at the Bykhov Monastery, with a group of his entourage of officers. But he was killed in action in April 1918.

  *2 Tsvetaeva wrote a series of haunting poems, The Swans’ Encampment, about the Civil War and the struggle against the Bolsheviks. One was called simply ‘White Guards’ and embodied all she genuinely believed they stood for:

  White Guards, Gordian Knot

  Of Russian Valour.

  White Guards, white mushrooms

  Of the Russian folksong.

  White Guards, white stars

  Not to be crossed from the sky.

  White Guards, black nails

  In the Ribs of the Antichrist.

  *3 When Trotsky said that while racially, yes, he was a Jew, he hated Judaism and was an internationalist, the Chief Rabbi of Moscow, Yakov Mazeh, observed: ‘It was the Trotskys who made the Revolution, but the Bronsteins who paid the bills.’

  *4 He had the same attitude to gassing rebellious tribes in northern India and Afghanistan. He was frequently told by Lloyd George to tone down his rhetoric against the Bolsheviks. After one outburst in Cabinet, the PM wrote asking him to shut up about Russia. ‘I wonder whether it is any use my making one last effort to induce you to throw off this obsession, which if you will forgive me for saying so, is upsetting your balance. I again ask you to let Russia be, at any rate for a few days.’

  47

  Funeral in Moscow

  ‘For romantics, love holds the first place in a person’s life – higher than anything else. And until recently I was nearer to believing that than I am now. True, for me love was never the only thing…There was also public activity…there were times in the past…where I’ve sacrificed myself for the good of the cause…In my life, love still occupies a big place, it makes me suffer a lot, and takes up a lot of my thoughts. But still, not for a minute do I cease to recognise that, however painful for me, love and personal relationships are nothing compared to the needs of the struggle.’

  Inessa Armand, 11 September 1920

  As dawn was breaking in Moscow on 11 October 1920 a train formed of just two railcars drew into Kazan Station. Waiting on the platform were an honour guard standing to attention, a solemn-looking welcoming committee of twenty comrades dressed in black and a catafalque with two white horses. A team of sentries climbed up to the rear car of the train, and reappeared carrying a coffin covered by a black cloth with a red overlay. They placed the coffin on the carriage and the cortège marched slowly a kilometre and a half through the centre of the city to the giant House of Trade Unions,*1 a big neo-classical building in the Tverskoy district close to the Kremlin. An early-morning funeral procession of evident celebrities was a strange sight in Moscow, so many people at the start of their working day stopped to stare. Soon a buzz went around among the onlookers: wasn’t Lenin among the mourners? Hundreds of people joined in, without at first knowing whose coffin they were following.

  The closed casket was placed on a raised platform in the centre of the House of Trade Unions, where the body would lie in state for one day, guarded overnight by four Red Army officers and groups of Bolshevik Party workers in hour-long shifts.

  The funeral procession on a sunny and crisp autumn morning the next day was far bigger. Thousands of people turned out to pay their respects as the catafalque was driven the short distance to Red Square, where the body would be buried by the East Wall of the Kremlin.

  While the Bolshoi Theatre Orchestra played Chopin, Mozart and Beethoven, most of the Communist Party magnates arrived at the burial place, including Lenin, ‘his head bare, in an autumn coat’. As the body was lowered into the grave the crowd sang the ‘Internationale’. There were dozens of wreaths neatly placed by the side of the wall. One, of white hyacinths with a red ribbon, was simply inscribed, ‘To Comrade Inessa, from V. I. Lenin’.

  No one had ever seen him so overcome by emotion in public. Kollontai said he ‘was unrecognisable at Inessa’s funeral. He walked with his eyes closed and at every moment we thought he might fall to the ground.’ Nadya was weeping openly, but gripped Lenin by the arm as strongly as she could to prop him up.

  ‘I never saw such torment. I never saw another human being so completely absorbed by sorrow,’ Balabanova remembered. ‘At one point I found myself in the immediate vicinity of Lenin. Not only his face but his whole body expressed so much sorrow that I dared not greet him, not even with the slightest gesture. It was clear he wanted to be alone with his grief. He seemed to have shrunk…his eyes seemed drowned in tears held back with effort.’1

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  She had been feeling ill for months, exhausted, overworked and complaining of fevers. In March 1919, at the height of the Civil War, Inessa had gone on a tricky diplomatic mission to France as head of a Red Cross delegation to negotiate the return of 45,000 Russian POWs on the Western Front. She had a premonition that she would die before Lenin. The day before she went she wrote to her daughter Inna: ‘I’m enclosing a letter for Sasha and Fedya [her sons] and a third one for Ilyich. Only you are to know about the third one…keep it to yourself for the time being. When we get back I’ll tear it up. If something happens to me…then you must give the letter personally to V. I. The way to do it is to go to Pravda where Maria Ilyinichna works. Give her the letter and say it’s from me and personal only for him…Meanwhile, hang onto it.’

  The mission lasted two months. When she returned she looked painfully thin, almost haggard, and every bit her now forty-five years of age. Lenin saw a lot of her – she came to the Kremlin often, as did her children, and he sometimes visited her nearby flat. He worried about her health. When she came down with a series of ailments in the winter of 1919–20 he sent physicians to check on her, English and French newspapers for her and numerous notes along the lines of one in February 1920: ‘Dearest Friend, I wanted to telephone you…when I heard you were ill, but the phone doesn’t work…I’ll tell them to repair it.’

  A few weeks later: ‘Please say what’s wrong with you. These are appalling times: there’s typhus, influenza, Spanish flu, cholera. I’ve just got up and I’m not going out. Nadya has a temperature of nearly 39 and wants to see you. What’s your temperature? Don’t you need some medicine? Tell me frankly.’

  He ordered his office to send round a doctor, and hours later wrote, ‘Has the doctor been? I beg you earnestly not to go out and tell your daughter from me that I want them to watch you and not to let you out 1) until your temperature is back to normal and 2) with the doctor’s permission.’

  The letters may not have been as passionate as they had been but he was still always calling her ‘ty’ and he was showing care for her. ‘Inessa, I rang to find out what size galoshes you take? I hope you get hold of some. Write and tell me how you are. Has the doctor been?’

  In August 1920 she told him she was feeling exhausted, as though her ‘lungs were collapsing’, she was depressed about her work, and she needed a complete rest. She had always loved the sea and she wanted to go to the South of France where the air was clear. He convinced her against France, in his last letter to her dated 20 August: ‘Can’t I do something for you…get you into a sanatorium? I’ll do anything with great pleasure. If you go to France I will, of course, help with that, too. I’m a bit concerned, in fact I am afraid, I’m really afraid, that you’ll get into trouble there. They will arrest you and keep you there a long time. You must be careful. Wouldn’t it be better to go to Norway…or Holland. Or Germany?…Best not to go to France, where they could put you inside…If you don’t fancy a sanatorium, why not go to the south? To Sergo [Ordzhonikidze] in the Caucasus. Sergo will arrange rest, sunshine…he can fix it all up. Think about it.’

  On the same day he wrote as head of the government a ‘to whom it may concern’ note. ‘I request that you help in every way possible to arrange the best accommodation and treatment for the writer, Comrade Inessa Armand, and her son. I request that you give complete trust and all possible assistance to these Party comrades, with whom I am personally acquainted.’ He also called Ordzhonikidze, asking him to put himself out over Inessa’s safety and accommodation in Kislovodsk, and told his secretaries to help see her off and make sure she was comfortable on her journey south.2

  Almost immediately she fell victim to a cholera epidemic sweeping through the southern Caucasus. Her final illness was ghastly. She drifted in and out of consciousness, but in her lucid moments she kept a harrowing account of her disease and a painfully honest, moving diary full of revelations about her feelings for Lenin.

  On 1 September 1920 she wrote in her diary: ‘Now I have time I’m going to write every day, although my head is heavy and I feel as if I’ve been turned into a stomach that craves food the whole time…I also feel a wild desire to be alone. It exhausts me even when people around me are speaking, never mind if I have to speak myself…I hardly ever laugh or smile because I’m prompted to by a feeling of joy, but just because one should smile sometimes. I’m also struck by my present indifference to nature. I used to be so moved by it. And I find I like people less now. I used to approach everyone with a warm feeling. Now I am indifferent to everyone…I’m bored with almost everyone. I have warm feelings left only for the children and V. I. In all other respects it’s as if my heart has died. As if, having given up all my strength, all my passion to V. I. and the work, all the springs of love have dried up in me, all my sympathy for people, which I used to have so much of. I have none left, except for V. I. and my children and a few personal relations…And people can feel this deadness in me, and they pay me back in the same coin of indifference or even antipathy (and people used to love me)…I’m a living corpse and it’s dreadful!’

  From her last diary entry on 11 September it is clear she knew she would soon die. Lenin would have wholeheartedly approved of her last words. ‘For romantics, love holds the first place in a person’s life – higher than anything else. And until recently I was nearer to believing that than I am now. True, for me love was never the only thing…There was also public activity…there were times in the past, not a few instances, where I’ve sacrificed myself for the good of the cause. But the importance of love, compared to the cause, has become altogether less, it cannot be compared. In my life, love still occupies a big place, it makes me suffer a lot, and takes up a lot of my thoughts. But still, not for a minute do I cease to recognise that, however painful for me, love and personal relationships are nothing compared to the needs of the struggle.’

  Lenin knew that she was seriously ill, and was wracked with guilt that he had sent her to the Caucasus where diseases were rife and there was still occasional fighting and post–Civil War chaos. Early on the morning of 25 September he had heard that she was much improved and that both she and her son André were well. Later that same afternoon he received a telegram. ‘Top Priority and Personal. To Lenin. Unable to save Comrade Inessa Armand sick with cholera. She died on 24 September. Sending body back to Moscow. Signed Nazarov.’

  Lenin insisted that the body be sent back to Moscow and insisted on a state funeral, but it was two weeks before it was returned. Lenin was infuriated by the delays and wrote a string of cables to officials demanding speedier action. With famine and disease throughout southern Russia, it was no easy matter to secure a railway car and a coffin from outlying regions. Almost everyone was being buried without coffins. When Inessa lay in state she was in a lead-lined coffin, closed, as she had been dead for some time in the heat of late summer.3

  —

  After Inessa died her younger children spent long periods at the Kremlin and summers at Gorki. Nadya and Lenin unofficially adopted them. ‘Vladimir Ilyich and Nadezhda Konstantinovna became the guardians of my sister, my youngest brother and me,’ said Inna. The childless couple seemed to enjoy the role.

  Varvara stayed in the Kremlin apartment for many months after the funeral. Nadya wrote to the girls often, usually beginning the letters ‘My beloved daughter’, and constantly fussed over their health and diet. They returned the affection. Years later, whenever either of them lived in Moscow they visited her every Sunday.

  When in July 1921 Varvara and Alexander went to Tehran, Lenin ordered Theodore Rothstein, the Russian Ambassador to Iran, to keep an eye on them: ‘I hope you will manage to devote some little time to Inessa’s children.’ Lenin wrote to the boys regularly, sending André annotated chess puzzles he had set himself.*2

  Both of them tried to keep Inessa’s memory alive. He wrote to Kamenev, Chairman of the Moscow Soviet, on 24 April 1921, asking if there could be a permanent memorial to her in Red Square and flowers
planted around her grave. She was given a simple granite gravestone. Soon after she died a collection of essays was published about her life as a socialist and her achievements. The warmest and longest was by Nadya, who for the rest of her life kept a picture of Inessa on her desk. The only other photographs were of her mother and Lenin.4

  *1 The magnificent building was built as the Assembly of Nobles in the mid-eighteenth century and later, during Stalin’s Great Purge, would be where the big show trials took place.

  *2 Varvara graduated from the Art Institute in Moscow in 1927. She worked in a textile factory for seven years, then became a teacher of graphic design and an artist in her own right – named an ‘Honoured Artist’ of the USSR after the Second World War. There was a retrospective of her work, in the socialist-realist tradition, in 1977. She died in 1987. Inna lived in Berlin, where she worked in the Comintern, and married Hugo Eberlein, a leading German Communist. They had a daughter, Inessa. They left Germany in 1933. But even Nadya’s protection couldn’t save Eberlein from Stalin’s terror. At one point, after the Hitler/Stalin pact, he came near to being handed over to the Gestapo. He escaped that fate but succumbed to one as ghastly: he died in the Gulag in 1941. Until her retirement in 1961 Inna worked at the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, editing sections of Lenin’s collected works. She wrote a memoir in 1971 which contained letters between Inessa and her children. Her son Fyodor joined the air force as an instructor – the only one of Inessa’s children not to join the Communist Party. He died (naturally) in 1936. André joined the Moscow Militia; he died at the Front in 1944. Alexander was a minor diplomat and remained a Stalin apologist until his death in the 1960s.

  48

  The ‘Internationale’