Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (17 page)

1910 was also the year in which Lenin developed a friendship with Inessa Armand, who arrived in Brussels from Moscow with two of her five children in 1909. She was a steadfast Bolshevik and a beautiful and energetic woman of half-French, half-English descent. She was a lively presence and, in Krupskaya’s words, ‘soon gathered our Paris group around her’. Without doubt Lenin developed a great affection for Inessa and, most probably, fell in love with and embarked on an affair with her. Krupskaya, not surprisingly, is very low key about Inessa in her memoirs but the three of them maintained good relations with each other and Inessa often accompanied Lenin and Krupskaya on trips. Once again Lenin appeared to be copying Chernyshevsky, though unlike the husband who stood aside to allow his wife to have her lover in Chernyshevsky’s novel, Krupskaya did not withdraw to the United States but continued to work just as devotedly for the cause and for her husband. It was, however, a feature of Chernyshevsky’s ‘New People’ that they could overcome petty jealousy and show deeper love for one another than bourgeois convention allowed. The Lenin love triangle, though never a
ménage à trois
, did follow Chernyshevskyean principles not least in Lenin’s eventual stoic rejection of Inessa in favour of Krupskaya, putting the interests of the revolution first, but none the less maintaining friendship and collaboration between the three of them.

Neither the presence of Inessa nor the resumption of cycle rides in spring 1912 was sufficient to drive away the emigration blues. The delights of Paris continued to pall. Writing to Lenin’s sister Anna, Krupskaya said: ‘Life goes on so monotonously here that I don’t know what to write about … We went to the theatre, the play was idiotic … Today we are going to see Sophocles’
Elektra
.’ [CW 37 612]

The growing irritation was fuelled by a return to labour militancy in Russia which began to revive hopes for a renewed challenge to the autocracy. War clouds were also forming. Though Lenin rightly predicted during the 1912 Balkan crisis that there would not be a general war [CW 37 482], it was clear that something deeper was brewing. Lenin’s attention was increasingly drawn by two issues – what strategy to pursue in Russia and the international entanglements caused by the conflicts of imperialism. They dominated his writing for the years to come. The apparently rising revolutionary tide strengthened the urge to be near events. But a return to Russia was out of the question. Lenin’s solution was to get as close as possible, this time Poland rather than the still inaccessible Finland. From 1912 to 1914 Lenin and Krupskaya lived in Krakow accompanied by the Zinovievs and others. The relief of returning to a near-Russian environment was unmistakable. Krupskaya wrote that ‘Ilich liked Krakow very much; it reminded him of Russia.’ [Krupskaya 206] Lenin himself showed his relief in a letter to his mother: ‘This summer we have moved a long way from Paris – to Krakow. Almost in Russia! Even the Jews are like Russians and the Russian frontier is only 8 versts [about 8 kilometres] away.’ [CW 37 479] According to Krupskaya: ‘Exile in Krakow was only semi-exile. In Krakow we were almost entirely absorbed in the work in Russia. Close connections with Russia were quickly established.’ [Krupskaya 204] Enthusiasm mounted. In a letter to Gorky Lenin commented that ‘in Russia the
revolutionary
revival is not any kind of a revival, but a revolutionary revival.’ [Krupskaya 204] Lenin’s spirits clearly rose. ‘The change of environment, the absence of émigré squabbles, soothed our nerves somewhat.’ [Krupskaya 206] In another letter to his mother Lenin wrote from Krakow:

The weather here is wonderful and I frequently go cycling. No matter how provincial and barbarous this town of ours may be, by and large I am better off here than I was in Paris. The hurly-burly of life in the émigré colony there was incredible; one’s nerves got worn down badly and for no reason at all
… Of all the places I have been in my wanderings I would select London or Geneva, if those two places were not so far away. [CW 37 519]

There were also walks in the woods and bathing in the River Vistula. In summer 1913 there was the irresistible lure of the Tatra mountains and the Polish resort of Zakopane. They rented a large bungalow in the cheaper spot of Poronin, seven kilometres from Zakopane. ‘The bunga
low was situated 700 metres above sea level at the foot of the Tatra Mountains. The air was wonderful and, although there were frequent mists and drizzle, the view of the mountains during the clear intervals was extremely beautiful. We would climb up the plateau which was quite close to our bungalow and watch the snow-capped peaks of the Tatra mountains.’ [Krupskaya 228] However, Krupskaya’s health meant a trip to the specialist and an operation in Berne. The operation, conducted without anaesthetic, appears to have brought some relief. Ever making the best of the situation, they travelled to Vienna and returned via old haunts in Munich. They returned to Krakow for the winter but returned to Poronin the following May.

Unfortunately, as enemy aliens, they were not able to stay in Austrian-controlled Poland once the war began on 4 August. They soon began to attract the attention of the local police and the population who were suspicious of the presence of strange Russians so close to the frontier. What could they be but spies? On 7 August their holiday home in Poronin, near Zakopane, was raided by the Austrian police. Lenin recounted the comic opera scenario to a colleague and neighbour: ‘The head of the local police was in charge … the blockhead left all the Party correspondence but took my manuscript on the agrarian situation. He thought the statistical tables in it were a secret code.’ [Weber 103] The following day, Lenin was arrested. Through the good offices of the Austrian Social-Democratic leader Victor Adler, he was released and Lenin and Krupskaya were able to leave, via Vienna, for neutral Switzerland where they arrived on 5 September. Though they did not, of course, know it, it was the last staging post of their exile before the tornado of war tore into their world and turned it upside down in the most astonishing circumstances.

4

For a revolutionary, bad news can be good news. From 1912 onwards the fragile post-1905 balance of the autocracy began to be lost as the strike movement got under way. Once again, the main agent of revolu
tion was the autocracy itself rather than the radical parties. In April 1912, some 200 people, striking miners and members of their families, were shot by police in a single massacre in the Lena goldfields in Siberia. Once again, single-handedly and without provocation, the autocracy had found a way to plunge itself into unnecessary crisis. In a single day its agents had undone more than six years of precarious recovery. Without its revolutionary or liberal opponents lifting a finger they had been presented with a dramatic confirmation of their diagnosis of the terminal ineptitude of the autocracy. At a stroke, the real situation in Russia was laid bare. Labour was still ruthlessly exploited and was prepared to stand up for itself. Sensitive middle-class souls were embarrassed by the anachronistic barbarism that was their government. Revolutionaries were energized by a new wave of labour unrest as Russia’s armaments-led mini-boom of 1908–12 collapsed into a rising cycle of unemployment and renewed worker militancy. It was a new Bloody Sunday, putting the political clock back almost a decade, exposing the farce of quasi-constitutionalist Russia. Not that the opposition were above using the opportunities presented by the limited parliamentary system. The massacre became a
cause célèbre
taken up by opponents of the autocracy in the Duma as well as on the street. Their case was put by a rising young leftist civil-rights lawyer named Alexander Kerensky, the son of Lenin’s headmaster and another product of Simbirsk. On the wider horizon the complex series of Balkan wars and crises which led to the general war of 1914 had already begun. Here, too, tsarist incomprehension and ineptitude reaped a heavy harvest. In its domestic and foreign policy choices the autocracy would have been hard put to find a more effective way of committing suicide.

SOCIALISTS AND THE APPROACH OF WAR

Lenin, correctly as it turned out, saw such developments as the birth of renewed revolutionary opportunity. As the various clouds gathered Lenin’s hopes began to rise again. It should not, however, be inferred that Lenin in any way lauded violence and misery. Quite the opposite. His whole life had been devoted to abolishing misery and war. Marxism was the mechanism by which it could be done. The iron laws of history were not of Lenin’s making but he believed he could interpret them. If capitalism was heading towards open conflict it meant, Lenin believed, it was on its deathbed and was bringing forward the moment of liberation from its yoke. That alone should be celebrated. The terrible cost should not. If there was any way to avoid it, so much the better. But there wasn’t and that was the fault of capitalism, not its opponents. The consolation was that it was the last convulsion after which there would be no more.

From his home in Krakow he observed carefully what was going on in Russia. The turn in the international situation also brought him to focus on international relations – diplomatic and economic – and the phenomenon of imperialism which, he believed, linked them together. Just as the war, when it came in August 1914, was the culmination of a series of imperial, diplomatic, military and internal crises for the participants which blew apart the old systems and the old assumptions, so it was for the socialist movement. At the level of analytic discourse and national and international organization, the approaching war brought a series of crises to the socialist movement and, as the war broke out, the crises culminated in the destruction of the remnants of socialist solidarity at the national and international levels. Although prone to factionalism before the war there was still a sense that all socialists belonged to the same family despite its quarrels. After it the socialist movement was totally divided with no prospect of meaningful reunification for the rest of the century.

The growing international crisis, which reached new levels of acuteness by 1912, focused attention on what was at the heart of the events and on what should be done. Socialists were in the forefront of this analysis. Though Lenin had been largely preoccupied with internal questions of class and revolutionary struggle in Russia, he had begun to show an increasing interest in international issues from the turn of the century. Ingeniously, in a dimension often lost on his later adulators, Lenin’s interpretation of the growing international conflict, as we shall see, also impinged heavily on and arose directly out of the fundamental dilemmas of Russian Marxism. Three major themes dominated the thinking of Lenin and all other socialists. The first was the catastrophic split in the movement induced by the war; second, why the war was as it was; third, what were the prospects for revolution in the new circumstances?

Despite the gathering storm clouds many observers believed there would not be a war. Some of them even believed a major war was impossible. From the liberal perspective there were a number of people who followed the reasoning of the utopian thinker St Simon. He had argued that modern technology and communications (writing in the mid-nineteenth century he was deeply impressed by the emergence of railway networks, the Internet of that age) created greater and greater interdependence and mobility of peoples from country to country. This would, he thought, blur sharp national identities and antagonisms and, in the economic sphere, make the prosperity of one country dependent on the prosperity of its neighbours, reversing ancient enmities and zero-sum games in which success could only be bought at the expense of another’s failure. Instead, war would be mutually ruinous, destroying the international system and all the participant economies. There could be no victors, so rational leaders would shy away from war. While, in some respects, the European Union has created a kind of St Simonian oasis out of one of the areas which generated the world’s worst conflicts of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there was insufficient recognition of the consequences of war in 1914 to make such ideas convincing. There was concern, however. On the eve of war powerful industrialists from Britain, France and Germany tried to stave it off. The City of London was nervous and days before the war began, the British Foreign Secretary, Grey, warned the French ambassador that ‘the commercial and financial situation was extremely serious, there was danger of a complete collapse that would involve us and everyone in ruin.’ Individuals like Albert Ballin, a personal friend of the Kaiser, and Sir Ernest Cassel lobbied actively against the war.
¹
Tragically, common sense was overwhelmed by the uncontrollable tide of jingoism on all sides, the contrary interests of heavy munitions companies and the ongoing culture of diplomacy linked to defence of national ‘credibility’ as it is thought of today. The existence of antiwar capitalists showed the existence of contradictions within the elite but Lenin, for one, was little impressed. As the war went on, he increasingly developed a theory of capitalism based on its rampant, aggressive, imperialist tendencies.

However, before he turned his attention in that direction, the other force which, it was thought, might successfully throw itself in front of the juggernaut of war, was the internationalist socialist and labour movement. The Second International had been set up in Paris in 1889 to continue the work of the First International which had broken down through a split between Marxists and Bakuninite anarchists among other things. The Second International had brought together a wide variety of left-wing groups from moderate labourists to revolutionary socialists like Lenin. In 1914 they were united about one thing. The war was not in the interests of workers. It was an imperialist dispute between conflicting capitalist elites. The workers would be enrolled only as cannon fodder. In a famous statement of 1911 – which, incidentally, shows that, like Lenin, he also believed revolution might arise out of the war – the moderate Belgian socialist leader Emile Vandervelde pointed to the two major forces working against war: ‘There are in Europe at present too many pacifist forces, starting with the Jewish capitalists who give financial support to many governments through to the socialists who are firmly resolved to prevent mobilization of the nations and in the event of defeat to spring at the throats of their rulers.’
²

Tragically, the socialist movement proved to be much less ‘firmly resolved’ than Vandervelde had predicted. Although the majority of socialist leaders probably shared his outlook they did very little to implement a practical antiwar strategy. They held a series of meetings, passing resolutions against the war right up until late July, and even believed at that point that, although they would have to move their scheduled international congress from Vienna since Austria-Hungary had already declared war on Serbia, it might still be held in August in Paris. Like the rest of Europe they were soon to be overwhelmed by the chain of events.

There were obviously weaknesses in the socialists’ expectations. Above all, workers were not immune to national enmities. In Vienna, for instance, the working class was deeply anti-Serb and supported their government. The key weakness, however, lay in Germany and had been pointed out at a Party conference in 1891, long before the war crisis took hold, by none other than the veteran German socialist August Bebel. ‘If Russia, the champion of terror and barbarism, were to attack Germany to break and destroy it … we are as much concerned as those who stand at the head of Germany.’
³
It was through this opening that the worm of national self-defence entered into and started to eat away the body of the labour movement and its much-vaunted international solidarity. While international resistance was a fine thing, when it came to the crunch, the majority of German socialists decided, after an agonizing debate, that they must support their government once Russia had mobilized. That swayed the debate elsewhere. If Germany was threatening invasion then the left would have to join in the defence of France. If Belgium were to be invaded British workers could not stand idly by and watch the Kaiser reach the Channel and so on. The brittle chain snapped. Majorities succumbed to patriotism. Only a rump of opponents stood firm against the war. It was a disaster for the socialist movement.

At first sight, it might appear that the minorities would find it easy to come together, which is what they tried to do in an antiwar coalition. However, their national governments put severe restrictions on them even in ‘democratic’ Britain, France and Germany, hampering international travel and contacts, suppressing newspapers and organizations and turning opinion firmly against the ‘white feather’ brigade, accusing them of cowardice. That, however, was not their greatest problem. Despite sharing opposition to the war they remained a widely disparate group comprising pacifists,
‘
moderate’ labourists like Ramsay MacDonald and radical Marxists like Lenin motivated by class solidarity and dreams of class struggle and even civil war. Attempts to bring the antiwar movement together foundered on its broad disparities. Attempts were made to hold antiwar conferences in Switzerland at Zimmerwald in September 1915 and Kienthal in April 1916 but they had no practical consequences as far as the war was concerned, serving only to emphasize the differences. The only one that promised to achieve something was called in Stockholm in 1917, largely at the behest of Russia’s Provisional Government which needed to appear to have a peace policy for internal political reasons. However, Britain and France ensured that it did not succeed.

From the outset of the war Lenin’s position was clear. The war was an imperialist struggle in which the workers of the combatant countries had no stake. They would, sooner or later, recognize this basic fact and act accordingly by throwing off the imperialist yoke imposed by their bourgeoisie, hence Lenin’s call as early as September 1914 to turn the imperialist war into a European-wide civil war. The prospect of civil war remained fundamental to Lenin’s strategy in the war years although, for obvious tactical reasons, he chose not to emphasize or even admit to it on occasions. He outlined his ideas in a pamphlet entitled
The War and Russian Social Democracy
written in October and published in November 1914. The opening paragraph is an excellent encapsulation of many of the main themes of Lenin’s analysis of the war:

The European War, which the governments and the bourgeois parties of all countries have been preparing for decades, has broken out. The growth of armaments, the extreme intensification of the struggle for markets in the latest – the imperialist – stage of capitalist develop
ment in the advanced countries, and the dynastic interests of the more backward East-European monarchies were inevitably bound to bring about this war, and have done so. Seizure of territory and subjugation of other nations, the ruining of competing nations and the plunder of their wealth, distracting the attention of the working masses from the internal political crises in Russia, Germany, Britain and other countries, disuniting and nationalist stultification of the workers, and the extermination of their vanguard so as to weaken the revolutionary movement of the proletariat – these comprise the sole actual content, importance and significance of the present war.

The solution, Lenin continued, was in the hands of the revolutionary left:

It is primarily on Social-Democracy that the duty rests of revealing the true meaning of the war, and of ruthlessly exposing the falsehood, sophistry and ‘patriotic’ phrase-mongering spread by the ruling classes, the landowners and the bourgeoisie, in defence of the war. [SW 1 657]

The rest of the short, sharp article largely expanded these thoughts. The bourgeois leaders of both warring camps had ‘hoodwinked’ their respec
tive peoples by disguising a war of plunder as a ‘war of defence’. ‘Neither group of belligerents is inferior to the other in spoliation, atrocities and the boundless brutality of war’ but each distracts the masses from the true struggle – ‘a civil war against the bourgeoisie both of its “own” and “foreign” countries … with the help of false phrases about patriotism’. [SW 1 658] Lenin’s views could not be clearer. Only class struggle, not national struggle, could truly liberate the toiling masses. So convinced was Lenin of the primacy of class struggle that he introduced a remarkable theme into his argument which recurred throughout the war. Despite squaring up to each other, and in the case of the Anglo-French bloc ‘spending thousands of millions to hire the troops of Russian tsarism, the most reactionary and barbarous monarchy in Europe, and prepare them for an attack on Germany’, [SW 1 658] the two blocs would, nonetheless, in the event of a revolution in Russia, work together to defend their class interests. ‘In fact, whatever the outcome of the war, [the German] bourgeoisie will, together with the Junkers, exert every effort to support the tsarist monarchy against a revolution in Russia.’ [SW 1 657]