Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (6 page)

So, was Trotsky right? Had Volodya disappeared and been replaced by Lenin already? Not entirely. Some Volodya-style features, such as a respectful deference before the elder statesmen of the social-democratic and populist movements, remained. Lenin was not noted for deferential respect to anyone. Also, Lenin had not yet developed broad themes of argument. For the time being a well-grounded but repetitive intellec
tual critique of populism was his stock in trade, with a certain amount of attention to worker agitation beginning to develop. In no way did he stand out from the crowd as a potential leader, nor had he set out on his devastating course of splitting groups and splitting them again in pursuit of the finest degree of intellectual and doctrinal purity. It was in the next phase of his life, from his arrest through the fateful Second Congress of the Party in 1903 and on to the Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath, that Lenin truly emerged.

Trotsky’s conclusion that Lenin emerged fully fledged in 1893 belongs to the realm of hagiography and propaganda. The Lenin who went into exile was certainly a rising star of the Social-Democratic movement but he still lacked some of the basic characteristics of the mature Lenin. He remained deferential towards his superiors in the movement and had not developed the steely edge and the frightening self-confidence which was to come later.

Even so, by 1903, he began to play his personal hand. He opened up a split in the Party, though he was reluctant to break fully with Plekhanov and some of the most prominent leaders of the movement just yet. His manipulativeness and dogmatism were in full flow. What was it that put extra steel into Lenin in the years between 1895 and 1902, by which time the foundations of Lenin’s own distinctive revolu
tionary theory and practice – Leninism, in other words – were being laid?

It would be tempting to say that after his arrest in December 1895, along with the other leaders of the League of Struggle, some of the harsh experiences of the next few years of his life, notably imprisonment, interrogation and Siberian exile, had hardened Lenin. Ironically, however, exile appears to have been one of the more relaxed periods of his life. Far from bringing out the vindictive side of his personality Lenin appears to have been more healthy and oddly stress-free.

Clearly, the conditions of tsarist imprisonment and exile, which varied enormously according to the class, status and criminal activity of the detainee, were much more lenient, for gentlemen and lady political prisoners, than the average twentieth-century place of detention. Prisoners were under loose surveillance but, provided they stayed in their allocated villages and only moved elsewhere with permission, they could do much as they pleased. The very nature of the system meant that a number of like-minded people were gathered in the same region so lively discussions about politics were possible from time to time. Lenin himself undertook some translation work to earn a little money and was able to continue some of his own research into the state of Russian agriculture and the economy.

His ability to work creatively was in no small part due to the unhesitating support of Nadezhda Krupskaya. When sentenced to exile herself she applied for permission to join Lenin, describing herself as his fiancée. This polite fiction was not accepted by the authorities who insisted that, if they were to be allowed to live together, they must marry. The wedding duly took place on 22 July 1898. Since she was also responsible for her mother, Nadezhda brought her along, too. Once again, Lenin found himself living in a supportive, female cocoon.

According to Krupskaya, Siberia brought out the best in Lenin. His love of nature and of hunting translated itself into long, invigorating walks in all seasons of the year, accompanied by his hunting gun as often as not, which provided some substantial additions to their diet. Clearly, exile in tsarist times was far less onerous than it was to become in Soviet times. The thought of Soviet prisoners strolling around the Siberian forests with hunting guns is just too bizarre to entertain. For Lenin and Krupskaya the only real restriction was confinement to their assigned village under the eye of an individual appointed as an assessor by the government. They would live freely within the village – receiving and sending letters and getting parcels of books and even occasional luxuries and delicacies from home. It was also possible on occasion to obtain permission to visit other exile centres in the region. The simple way of life restored Lenin’s health and brought the colour back to his cheeks and the twinkle to his eye.

Lenin, of course, was not satisfied to treat this period as an enforced and prolonged vacation but continued developing his ideas and following, as closely as the controls on him would allow, the evolution of Russian and world politics. Some of his most important ideas matured while he was in exile. Clearly, these were important years in the formation of Lenin. Let us take a closer look at them.

LIFE IN PRISON AND SIBERIAN EXILE

After his arrest, Lenin was at first kept in prison in St Petersburg and subjected to a series of interrogations. Prison, as opposed to exile, was a particularly miserable experience and, eventually, ‘even Vladimir Il’ich was affected by the prison melancholy’. [Krupskaya 29] Lenin, like other prisoners, was kept in near solitary confinement. Communication with the outside world was carefully scrutinized. Prisoners on remand were, however, allowed a large number of books and Lenin was able to occupy much of his time preparing his work on the development of Russian capitalism. He pressed on in the knowledge that, in Siberia, books would be much harder to acquire. Books also had the advantage of being used for coded messages. By putting barely visible dots in letters messages could be spelled out. Invisible writing, usually in milk, could also evade the censor. Messages could be revealed by heating the paper against a candle flame. According to Krupskaya, Lenin devised another method. Dipping the paper in hot tea also revealed the message. [Krupskaya 28] The method was also used to get messages out of prison. Small ‘inkwells’, made of bread and filled with milk, could be concealed from an unexpected visit by guards by the simple expedient of eating them. In one day Lenin consumed six inkwells. [Krupskaya 29]

Eventually, after four interrogations, Lenin was sentenced in February 1897 to exile in Siberia. In April, he travelled to Krasnoyarsk and was exiled to the village of Shushenskoe in Minusinsk district, a remote area some two hundred miles from Achinsk, the nearest stopping point on the Trans-Siberian railway. In the meantime, Krupskaya had also been arrested. She was sentenced to three years exile in the less remote area of Ufa in the Urals/Western Siberia. However, as we have seen, she applied to join Lenin and she was allowed to do so.

When she arrived, Lenin was, characteristically, out hunting and this gave his friends the opportunity to play a practical joke on him. Without mentioning the arrival of Krupskaya they told him a local drunk had broken into his room and thrown his books around. ‘Lenin quickly bounded up the steps. At that moment I emerged from the
izba
[hut]. We talked for hours and hours that night.’ [Krupskaya 33]

Although exile was exile, there was a certain amount of pleasure and joy in the lives of Lenin and Krupskaya. Even before Krupskaya’s arrival Lenin had written in May and June 1897 to his mother that Shushenskoe was ‘not a bad village’, [CW 37 107–8] that ‘life here is not bad’ [CW 37 112] and that ‘I am very satisfied with my board and lodging.’ [CW 37 116] There was a nearby spot on the river Yenisei where Lenin bathed and he had already ‘travelled twelve versts [about

12.8 kilometres] to shoot duck and great snipe.’ His expectation in June that ‘I shall not be bored’ [CW 37 116] had, by August, become a complaint that his surroundings were ‘very monotonous’ and that his work was progressing too slowly. [CW 37 122] Things only began to change for the better the following May when Krupskaya and her mother arrived, easing his boredom and lightening his work load. They found him living in quite comfortable surroundings. ‘In the Minusinsk region’, Krupskaya reported, ‘the peasants are particularly clean in their habits. The floors are covered with brightly-coloured, homespun mats, the walls whitewashed and decorated with fir branches. The room used by Vladimir Il’ich, though not large, was spotlessly clean. My mother and I were given the remaining part of the cottage.’ [Krupskaya 32] However, the little household was increasingly inconvenient and they moved to a larger lodging, an entire house with a yard and kitchen-garden in which they grew cucumbers, carrots, beetroots and pumpkins. After a summer of fighting with the Russian stove and knocking over the soup and dumplings with an oven-hook, the two intellectuals were able to engage the services of a local 13-year-old girl, Pasha, as their housekeeper. Their household was completed by a dog Lenin trained for hunting and a kitten.

While conditions were by no means idyllic life could go on despite the long and bitter winters stretching from October to April, with their short days and long nights. Looking back Krupskaya describes the awesome majesty of spring. ‘After the winter frosts, nature burst forth tempestuously into the spring. Her power became mighty. Sunset. In the great spring-time pools in the fields wild swans were swimming. Or we stood at the edge of a wood and listened to a rivulet burbling or woodcocks clucking … One felt how overwhelming was this tumultuous awakening of nature.’ [Krupskaya 37] Winter was different but it too had its attractions. Krupskaya describes ‘a magic kingdom’ of ice and snow:

Late in the autumn, when the snow had not yet begun to fall, but the rivers were already freezing, we went far up the streams. Every pebble, every little fish, was visible beneath the ice, just like some magic king
dom. And winter-time, when the mercury froze in the thermometers [–39 °C], when the rivers were frozen to the bottom, when the water, flowing over the ice, quickly froze into a thin upper ice-layer – one could skate two versts [two kilometres] or so with the upper layer of ice crunching beneath one’s feet. Vladimir Il’ich was tremendously fond of all this. [Krupskaya 38]

Hunting was a major daytime occupation and Lenin became addicted. At first, Krupskaya was taken aback by all the talk about ducks. ‘They talked for hours on the subject, but by the following spring I had also become capable of conversing about ducks – who had seen them, and where and when
… Vladimir Il’ich was an ardent hunter, but too apt to become heated over it. In the autumn we went to far-off forest clearings. Vladimir Il’ich said: “If we meet any hares, I won’t fire as I didn’t bring any straps, and it won’t be convenient to carry them.” Yet immediately a hare darted out Vladimir Il’ich fired.’ [Krupskaya 37] Massacre of hares was common. In winter, they were trapped on islands in the Yenisei. ‘Our hunters would sometimes shoot whole boat loads.’ Krupskaya also recalls that Lenin still hunted much later in life when they had returned to Russia proper but ‘by that time his huntsman’s ardour had considerably ebbed. Once we organized a fox-hunt. Vladimir Il’ich was greatly interested in the whole enterprise. “Very skilfully thought out,” he said. We placed hunters in such a way that the fox ran straight at Vladimir Il’ich. He grasped his gun and the fox, after standing and looking at him for a moment, turned and made off to the wood. “Why on earth didn’t you fire?” came our perplexed inquiry. “Well, he was so beautiful, you know,” said Vladimir Il’ich.’ [Krupskaya 38]

The long winter nights were an opportunity for reading. According to Krupskaya Lenin read Hegel, Kant and the French naturalist philosophers or, ‘when very tired’, Pushkin, Lermontov or Nekrasov. He also read and reread Turgenev, Tolstoy and Chernyshevsky’s
What is to be Done?
plus what Krupskaya calls ‘the classics’ apparently including Zola and Herzen. [Krupskaya 38] They also translated the Webbs’ book on trade unionism into Russian, though how they did this when their English was, as they later discovered, rather poor is hard to explain. It seems that they were only able to do so by having the German translation by their side. Nonetheless, it did bring in a little money. They also wrote and read drafts of Lenin’s first major book,
The Development of Capitalism in Russia
, about which more later.

Their social life was largely circumscribed by the village to which they were confined and its immediate surroundings. The situation brought Lenin an opportunity to observe Siberian rural life at first hand. Not unnaturally, on arrival at Shushenskoe, Lenin tried to establish good relations with the local schoolteacher, the only educated person in the immediate vicinity. However, the teacher spent his time with the local elite, consisting of the priest and a couple of shopkeepers, and he showed no interest in social problems. Lenin did, however, get to know several local peasants quite well, one of whom, a certain Zhuravliev, he described as ‘by nature a revolutionary’ who opposed the rich and fought against injustice. Another, named Sosipatych, was a typical stubborn
muzhik
[peasant] who accompanied Lenin on hunting trips. Through these acquaintances and his observation of local life Lenin observed what he called the ‘ruthless cruelty’ of small landowners typical of Siberia whose labourers worked ‘as if in servitude, only snatching a little rest at holiday time’. [Krupskaya 34]

Krupskaya also describes a practice of Lenin’s which brought broad contact with local problems. On Sundays he set up a juridical consultation to advise peasants of their rights and, as was the way in the Russian countryside, also to deal with personal and informal problems. According to Krupskaya he began to have an impact. ‘It was often sufficient for the offended person to threaten to complain to Ulyanov and the offender would desist.’ Of course, Lenin was not authorized to conduct such consultations ‘but these were liberal times in Minusinsk’. Apparently their assessor was more concerned to sell the middle-class couple some of his veal than to control their activities. [Krupskaya 35]

‘Liberal times’ also meant that, occasionally, journeys could be made, on some, often devious, pretext or other, which would bring them into contact with other exiles. Once permission was granted for them to make a trip to see the unusual geographical formations of an area which just happened to contain other exiles. Another time they met up with other exiles to pass a resolution on a growing debate in social democracy. They might also go to the funerals of comrades who died in exile. Krupskaya mentions a particularly large New Year (1899) gathering in the town of Minusinsk at which a premature escape by a social-democratic exile provoked a ‘scandal’ with other, mainly older,
Narodnaya Volya
exiles who had not had time to conceal things before the inevitable police searches which followed such an event. It is less surprising that Lenin and the social-democratic exiles broke with the elderly populists over this ‘scandal’ than the spirit of sympathy in which it was done. ‘These old men have got bad nerves,’ Lenin said. ‘Just look at what they’ve been through, the penal sentences they have undergone.’ In Krupskaya’s words, ‘We made the break because a break was necessary. But we did it without malice, indeed with regret.’ [Krupskaya 41–2] Once again, Lenin’s latent respect for the older generation of revolutionaries was in evidence.