Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (20 page)

It was very comfortable to work at Soerenberg. Some time later Inessa came to stay with us. We would rise early and before dinner, which was served at 12 o’clock everywhere in Switzerland, each of us would work in different nooks of the garden. During those hours Inessa often played the piano, and it was particularly good to work to the sounds of the music that reached us. After dinner we sometimes went to the mountains for the rest of the day. Il’ich loved the moun
tains – he liked to get to the crags of the Rothorn towards evening, when the view above was marvellous and below the fog was turning rosy … We went to bed with roosters, gathered alpine roses, berries; all of us were mushroom-pickers … and we argued with so much heat about their classification that one might have thought it was a question or resolution involving important principles. [Krupskaya 264–5]

Despite wrenching himself away from this magical world, Lenin threw himself heart and soul into the conference. Even though this was a con
ference largely of the left and of antiwar socialists many of whom shared Lenin’s approach, he was unable to command a majority. His left-wing platform was outvoted nineteen to twelve. It seemed that, for Lenin, opposition, rather than being in the majority, continued to be his natural stance. Not that Lenin enjoyed defeat. Once again he had to recuperate. He rejoined Krupskaya back in the mountains. Il’ich, she recalled,

came back from the Zimmerwald Conference in a state of irritation. The day after Il’ich’s return from Zimmerwald we climbed the Rothorn. We climbed with a ‘glorious appetite’, but when we reached the summit, Il’ich suddenly lay down on the ground in an uncomfort
able position almost on the snow, and fell asleep. Clouds gathered then broke; the view of the Alps from the Rothorn was splendid and Lenin slept like the dead. He never stirred and slept over an hour. Apparently Zimmerwald had frayed his nerves a good deal and had taken much strength out of him. It required several days of roaming over the mountains and the atmosphere of Soerenberg before Il’ich was himself again. [Krupskaya 267]

While the beauties of the scenery and the delights of country and mountain walks and cycle rides were essential to Lenin they were only the backdrop and support to his real passion of revolutionary politics. Defeat at Zimmerwald found him ready for the fray once more as the follow-up conference at Kienthal approached. True to his conception of the way the war would go he detected a steady, but still minority, growth of antiwar sentiment in Europe and a strengthening of the ‘Zimmerwald left’ in particular. However, Kienthal itself was no more Leninist than its predecessor. There were twelve delegates out of forty-three supporting the left, including the Bolshevik delegation of Lenin, Zinoviev and Inessa Armand. Once again there were fierce disputes but, try as he might, the majority remained firmly opposed to Lenin’s position, essentially still that of turning the imperialist war into a European-wide class and revolutionary civil war. Even so, Lenin was optimistic, sum
ming the results up in a letter to Shliapnikov. ‘After all, a manifesto was adopted … that is a step forward.’ ‘On the whole,’ he continued, ‘despite the mass of defects’ it was ‘a step towards a break with the social patriots’. [CW 36 390–1]

Kienthal does not seem to have taken it out of Lenin the way Zimmerwald had done. The Ulyanovs had been living ‘quietly’, as Lenin put it, in Zurich since early 1916 when they had gone there for a fortnight for Lenin to use the libraries in connection with his pamphlet on imperialism which was the centre of his attention. They kept postponing their return until they eventually settled down there, finding it more lively than Berne. It also brought them into contact with members of the sparse Swiss working class. They rented an unsuitable room from a shoemaker rather than a better one they might have had because they ‘greatly valued their hosts’. The house had a mixture of German, Italian and Austrian, as well as Russian, inhabitants. There was no atmosphere of chauvinism. One day, when the women of the various nationalities were talking around the gas stove the shoemaker’s wife, ‘Frau Kammerer, exclaimed indignantly: “The soldiers ought to turn their weapons against their governments!” After that Il’ich would not listen to any suggestions about changing quarters.’ [Krupskaya 272]

Krupskaya also gives another anecdote from later in the year when they had moved out of the city into the mountains for summer, once again for her health as much as Lenin’s. They chose an inexpensive ‘rest resort’ in Chudivise ‘amidst wild mountains, very high up and not far from the snow peaks’. It had three drawbacks. The first was a milk diet ‘which we positively howled against’ and supplemented ‘by eating raspberries and blackberries which grew in the vicinity in great quantities’. Second, the rest home was an eight-kilometre donkey ride from the station. Apart from delaying the post this also meant guests returning home had to leave early. As a result, almost every morning at six some guests would leave and a song of farewell, with a refrain about ‘goodbye cuckoo’, would be sung. ‘Vladimir Il’ich, who liked to sleep in the morning, would grumble and bury his head under the quilt’. Finally, the place was non-political, ‘they did not even talk about the war’. ‘Among the visitors was a soldier’ sent at state expense to help a lung condition. ‘He was quite a nice fellow. Vladimir Il’ich hovered about him like a cat after lard, tried several times to engage him in conversation about the predatory character of the war; the fellow would not contradict him, but he was clearly not interested. It seemed that he was very little interested in political questions in general, certainly less than in his stay at Chudivise.’ [Krupskaya 278–9]

The Ulyanovs stayed at Chudivise from mid-July to the end of August. Although Lenin thought about politics a great deal and talked to Krupskaya about his ideas, there were no Russians there, it was too remote for visitors and there were no libraries so Lenin was completely unable to work in his usual way. Eventually, it was their turn to leave and have ‘goodbye cuckoo’ sung to them.

As we were descending through a wood, Vladimir Il’ich suddenly noticed white mushrooms, and in spite of the fact that it was raining he began eagerly picking them, as though they were so many Zimmerwald Lefts [i.e. his opponents from the Zimmerwald Conference]. We were drenched to the bone, but picked a sackful of mushrooms. Of course we missed the train and had to wait two hours at the station for the next one. [Krupskaya 279]

It is hard to realize that this delightful moment – of two committed intellectual companions, harmlessly picking mushrooms, failing to engage locals in political conversation and generally spending a delightful six weeks cut off from the world – was only six months before Lenin’s return to Russia and only a year before he was to find himself running the world’s largest country. It was the last time the Ulyanovs were able to be quite so carefree. Once they returned to the Kammerer’s in Zurich the approaching revolution slowly rose in their perspective.

Though, of course, they did not know it, the Ulyanovs’ return to Zurich, still wet but triumphantly carrying their sack of mushrooms, opened up the final phase of their long exile. The autumn and winter were largely spent in the usual round of lectures, libraries and articles. Lenin continued to live more like the professor he often passed himself off as than a revolutionary activist. ‘In the autumn of 1916 and the beginning of 1917 Il’ich steeped himself in theoretical work. He tried to utilize all the time the library was open. He got there at exactly 9 o’clock, stayed until 12, came home exactly at ten minutes past 12 (the library was closed from 12 to one), after lunch he returned to the library and stayed until six.’ [Krupskaya 284] Working at home was difficult not least because of the distraction of unwanted visitors trying to get Lenin involved in the overheated intrigues of the Russian émigré colony in Zurich. To make matters worse there was a sausage factory across the street which gave out ‘an intolerable stench’ [Krupskaya 284] which prevented the window from being opened during the day.

Throughout the war finances had been a problem, particularly after Maria senior’s death since the pension handed on from her husband had, for many years, provided a secure but small base income to which Vladimir Il’ich could turn. The saga of who controlled Social Democratic Party funds had rumbled on from 1906 to 1914 without clear resolution. Much of the funding had been frozen in this period. Despite constantly bumping along the borderline of impecuniousness, Lenin, as we have seen, managed to live the life he desired and to accomplish his main aims of publishing. However, in autumn 1916 the financial situation looked particularly dire. ‘Il’ich searched everywhere for something to earn – he wrote to Granat [a publishing house], to Gorky, to relatives and once even developed a fantastic plan to publish a “pedagogical encyclopaedia”.’ [Krupskaya 284] It was so bad that, for the first time, Krupskaya even contemplated getting a job! For what she describes as a ‘semi-mythical’ income, she became secretary of the Bureau for Political Emigrant Relief. Even so there was still time for the beloved walks in the mountains:

On Thursdays, after lunch when the library was closed, we went to the Zürichberg mountain. On his way from the library Il’ich usually brought two bars of nut chocolate, in blue wrappers, at 15 centimes a piece, and after lunch we took the chocolate and some books and went to the mountains. We had a favourite spot there in the very thick of the woods, where there was no crowd. Il’ich would lie there on the grass and read diligently. [Krupskaya 284]

What was Lenin reading? What was the theoretical work in which he steeped himself in these last few months of his intelligentsia way of life? Largely it was the issues of imperialism, opportunism, war and the coming revolution which continued to be at the centre of his attention. Imperialism had raised questions of the role of the state in advanced capitalist society and, conversely, of its role in the socialist transition. No doubt, much of his thinking laid the foundation for
State and Revolution
which he wrote later in 1917.

Reading was also Lenin’s lifeline to the outside world. During the war, Switzerland was the peaceful eye of a hurricane raging all around. It was from this protected bubble that Lenin peered into the maelstrom. Though it did not happen all at once the world was changing. The melting pot of war was altering social relations of class and gender. The massive incorporation of the male population into the military via conscription led to rising expectations. Above all, a determination that such things should never happen again got stronger and stronger. Having been expected to pay the butcher’s bill, working-class men began to insist on some return and, as a minimum, greater rights in making national decisions. Working-class women also came out of the home in larger numbers than ever though many were happy to return to it after the war, if they still had partners, in order to get back to the deferred task of having families. Middle-class women began to agitate anew for the vote. National rivalries and alliances were deepening. After the war, large multi-ethnic empires collapsed and a whole raft of new states came into existence. Harder to pinpoint but perhaps more profound in the long run, a cultural revolution was under way. In the face of a mass slaughter that more and more people saw as unnecessary the remnants of scientific optimism about progress were blown away. The end products of human scientific and technological ingenuity seemed only to be more and more effective engines of death. Intellectual and social escapism took hold in certain circles. Left-wing parties burgeoned and, particularly in defeated countries, revolution approached.

While much of this remained concealed or only half-formed in 1916, Lenin would have been able to perceive some of it. In particular, he was following, as closely as he could, the developing crisis in Russia. 1915 had been a disastrous year, with massive military defeats leading to retreat and loss of territory. Masses of refugees were cast adrift and flowed through the Russian home front as a major destabilizing factor. Many of them were Jews and their flight completely broke down the attempt to confine them to the ‘Pale of Settlement’ in the west. Panicky generals talked of falling back even further. Some of them found a handy scapegoat for their own ineptitude in ‘Jewish spies’ who supposedly gave away vital secrets to the enemy. Vicious pogroms broke out in the remnants of Russian Poland as the army retreated. The appalled government called for them to stop, not only on humanitarian grounds, but also because they alienated the British, French and American bankers on whom Russia relied to finance the war.

The crisis came to a head in August 1915. Nicholas, foolishly, decided to promote himself to the rank of Commander-in-Chief of the armed forces. His ministers objected on two grounds, one overt, the other, more serious but covert. The former argument was that by taking such a step, Nicholas was associating himself too closely with the fate of the army, which looked bleak at that moment. More seriously, they were concerned that the decision imposed a virtual military dictatorship in that Nicholas would spend more time at military headquarters in western Russia and less with them in Petrograd. His absence did cause a vacuum and most of the objecting ministers were rapidly replaced. Their replacements were also soon replaced with an apparent reduction in competence at each change. A sinister game of ‘ministerial leapfrog’ was being played and everyone’s candidates for gamemaster were Rasputin and Alexandra, Nicholas’s wife. The rumour spread that they headed a pro-German faction determined to bring Russia down. Such legends, for there was no truth in them, were extremely powerful in undermining loyalty at all levels. Even more unsettling were three other areas of developing crisis. A broad swathe of conservative and ‘moderate’ members of the Fourth Duma began to agitate for more power. Their position was simple. The autocracy was increasingly incompetent and only they, the Duma members, could bring it back to its senses before disaster struck. They set up a Progressive Bloc in August 1915 which became the foundation for Duma action in the February Revolution of 1917. Its leading members formed the Provisional Government. Their middle-and upper-class anxieties were being fuelled by a gradual but unmistakable return of working-class militancy from late 1915 on and also by a developing food crisis. This was partially caused by oversupply to the military but also by a reduction in the peasants’ incentive to market grain as the price of scarce industrial goods soared out of their reach. Gloomy news for the Duma politicians was balm to the eyes of Lenin as he read of the growing turmoil in his homeland.