Lenin: A Biography Read online

  Lenin: A Biography

  Robert John Service

  Lenin is a colossal figure whose influence on twentieth-century history cannot be underestimated. Robert Service has written a calmly authoritative biography on this seemingly unknowable figure. Making use of recently opened archives, he has been able to piece together the private as well as the public life, giving the first complete picture of Lenin.

  This biography simultaneously provides an account of one of the greatest turning points in modern history. Through the prism of Lenin’s career, Service examines events such as the October Revolution and the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, the one-party state, economic modernisation, dictatorship, and the politics of inter-war Europe. In discovering the origins of the USSR, he casts light on the nature of the state and society which Lenin left behind and which have not entirely disappeared after the collapse of the Soviet regime in 1991.

  ‘Immensely scholarly but also vivid and readable. This is a splendid book, much the best that I have ever read about Lenin… I was overwhelmed by the power and vividness of this portrait.’

  Dominic Lieven, “Sunday Telegraph”

  ‘He has managed skilfully to depict the surreal life of an obsessive, brilliant and stubborn individual.’

  “Guardian”

  ‘Lenin’s life was politics, but Service has succeeded in keeping Lenin the man in focus throughout… This book deserves a place among the best studies of one of the most fascinating figures in modern history.’

  Harold Shukman, “The Times”

  Robert Service

  LENIN

  A Biography

  To my family

  Preface

  This book was read in draft by Adele Biagi, David Godwin, Heather Godwin, Martyn Rady, Arfon Rees and Tanya Stobbs, and John Klier read the first chapter. Their suggestions made for very welcome improvements. Several helpful tips were also offered by Philip Cavendish, Myszka Davies, Norman Davies, Bill Fishman, Julian Graffy, Riitta Heino, John Klier, Richard Ramage, Arfon Rees, Kay Schiller and Faith Wigzell. I should also like to thank John Screen and Lesley Pitman in the School of Slavonic and East European Studies Library in London and Jackie Willcox in the St Antony’s Russian Centre Library in Oxford for their assistance in getting important material on to the stacks. David King generously introduced me to the wonders of his personal collection of Soviet photographs and posters, and I am immensely grateful for his permission to use some here. A particular debt is also owed to the staff of the Russian Centre for the Conservation and Study of Documents of Contemporary History, especially Kirill Anderson, Larisa Rogovaya, Yelena Kirillova, Irina Seleznëva and Larisa Malashenko; and to Vladimir Kozlov at the State Archive of the Russian Federation. Russian fellow historians who have given me useful ideas for research include Gennadi Bordyugov, Vladimir Buldakov, Oleg Khlevniuk, Vladimir Kozlov and Andrei Sakharov.

  Lenin is a subject of great political and emotional resonance in Russia and I am grateful for the encouragement given by Russian friends to undertake this biography. I am aware that as a foreigner I may be walking into sensitive areas, perhaps even with hobnailed boots. Then again this is perhaps what the biography of Lenin requires.

  For several years on my way to work in central London I used to cycle past buildings where Lenin lived, edited or researched. One route took me through Highbury (where Iskra editors had their Russian mail sent) and on to the St Pancras district (where Lenin lived in 1900), across Gray’s Inn Road (with its pubs where Lenin drank with party comrades in 1905) and along Tavistock Place (where he lived for some months in 1908). It strengthened a feeling that my subject was not quite as exotic as it sometimes appeared. But of course it is in Russia that fuller perspective on his life and times must be obtained. The Kremlin, Red Square and the Smolny Institute are buildings that have to be visited in order to acquire a sense of time and place. I have tried in the following chapters also to give a sense of personality. In this connection it was a pleasure to meet and spend an afternoon with Viktoria Nikolaevna Ulyanova, one of the few people alive who knew the Ulyanov family members mentioned in the book. Her generosity of spirit – a trait not shared by Lenin, her husband’s uncle – demonstrates that not everything that happened in Russia earlier this century was absolutely inevitable.

  Lastly, I want to thank my family – my wife Adele and our boisterous descendants Emma, Owain, Hugo and Francesca – for discussing the contents of the book. Each of them has read lengthy sections and helped with the editing. They have displayed the same attitude as those millions of Soviet citizens who, while acknowledging Lenin’s huge historical significance, took an interest in his private – and occasionally comic – foibles. I have tried to write a book that brings together the public and private aspects. Until the opening of the Moscow archives in the 1990s a biography of this kind was unfeasible. And I hope the chapters provide material for my family as well as for readers more generally to go on resolving the enduring questions of Lenin’s career and impact.

  Robert Service

  Oxford, May 1999

  For the paperback edition I have made some corrections, for most of which I am indebted to Israel Getzler.

  Note on Transliteration and Calendars

  The system of transliteration employed in this book is a simplification of the system developed by the US Library of Congress. The first difference is the dropping of both the diacritical mark and the so-called soft i. Secondly, the yoh sound is rendered here as ë. By and large I have kept to the Russian versions of Russian proper names, but some sound too exotic in English. Aleksandr Ulyanov, for example, therefore appears as Alexander Ulyanov. The Julian calendar was maintained in Russia until January 1918, when Lenin’s government introduced the Gregorian version. Unless otherwise indicated, the dates mentioned in this book correspond to the particular calendar in official use at the time.

  Glossary of Names of Lenin and his Family

  Lenin

  Ilich – Respectful nickname for Lenin, used mainly inside the party

  Lenin – The most famous of the 160 pseudonyms he used

  V.I. – Lenin. Short version of Vladimir Ilich

  Vladimir Ilich – Lenin’s Christian name and patronymic

  Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov – Lenin’s name at his christening

  Volodya – The diminutive of Lenin’s first name

  His Close Family

  Alexander Ilich (Ulyanov) – First name and patronymic of Lenin’s elder brother

  Anna Ilinichna (Ulyanova) – First name and patronymic of Lenin’s elder sister

  Anyuta – Diminutive first name of Lenin’s older sister Anna Ilinichna Ulyanova

  Dmitri Ilich (Ulyanov) – First name and patronymic of Lenin’s younger brother

  Ilya Nikolaevich – First name and patronymic of Lenin’s father

  Manyasha – Diminutive of Christian name of Maria Ilinichna (Ulyanova)

  Maria Alexandrovna (Ulyanova) – First name and patronymic of Lenin’s mother

  Maria Ilinichna (Ulyanova) – First name and patronymic of one of Lenin’s younger sisters

  Mitya – Diminutive first name of Lenin’s younger brother Dmitri Ilich Ulyanov

  Nadezhda Konstantinovna (Krupskaya) – First name and patronymic of Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife

  Nadya – Krupskaya’s diminutive first name

  Olga Ilinichna (Ulyanova) – First name and patronymic of one of Lenin’s younger sisters

  Olya – Diminutive of Christian name of Olga Ilinichna Ulyanova

  Sasha – Diminutive of Christian name of Lenin’s elder brother Alexander Ilich Ulyanov

  MAPS

  1. Lenin’s early years: Volga, St Petersburg, Siberia, 1870 to 1900

  2. The carousel of European
emigration, 1900 to 1917

  3. Return from Zurich to Petrograd, 27 March to 3 April 1917

  4. The travels diminish, May 1917 to January 1924

  INTRODUCTION

  Lenin was an exceptional figure. He founded a communist faction, the Bolsheviks, which he turned into a party that made the October Revolution of 1917. The world’s first socialist state was proclaimed. This state – which was the territorial core of what eventually became the USSR – survived against the odds. Lenin and the communist leadership withdrew Russia from the First World War and won the Civil War. By setting up the Communist International, they imprinted themselves upon politics across the continent. The USSR was a beacon to the world’s far-left socialists and a dangerous rock to conservatives, liberals and other socialists. Lenin’s interpretation of the doctrines of Marx and Engels became holy writ for communists, and at his death was designated as Marxism–Leninism. After the Second World War the communist model – the one-party state, ideological monopoly, legal nihilism, militant atheism, state terror and the elimination of all rival institutions of authority – was transferred to eastern Europe, China, south-eastern Asia and eventually parts of the Caribbean and Africa. Communism was dismantled in eastern Europe in 1989 and in the USSR at the end of 1991. But no one had made a greater impact upon the development and establishment of the communist order than Lenin.

  This could never have happened if Lenin had not spent his early life in an extraordinary society at a unique period of its development. Growing up in the Russian Empire in the late nineteenth century, he and others of his generation were caught in a vortex of historical change. The potential of the world’s largest country was beginning to be exploited. The old cultural and social constraints were being undermined. International contacts were being improved and the cultural and scientific achievements made the Russian Empire a marvel to the world.

  Yet the transformation was at a preliminary stage and most educated Russians were dismayed by the slowness of their country’s progress. Many thought Russia was too vast, variegated and tradition-bound to change. They had a point. It was five thousand miles from the Polish lands in the west of the empire to Vladivostok on the Pacific coast. From the White Sea down to the Persian and Ottoman frontiers it was two thousand. The roads were poor and rivers froze in the long winter months. The rail network was rudimentary: the Trans-Siberian Railway was started in 1891 and not completed until 1903. On every border there were problems. To the west was the threat from Germany and Austria–Hungary. To the south there were tensions with the Ottomans – and war broke out in 1876. In the east, Russia feared that other powers would despoil China. Japanese power too was on the rise. Russian armed forces had long lost their reputation for invincibility. In the Crimean War of 1854–6 a limited expeditionary force of the British and French came close to victory over the Russian defence. The Russians were more successful against the Turks but there was no room for complacency. The international power of the Romanovs no longer had the weight it had won in global relations after Napoleon’s retreat from Moscow in 1812.

  Society in Russia was ill prepared for change. Russia had ‘missed’ the Renaissance and, to a large extent, the Enlightenment. The reforming tsar Peter the Great had reinforced feudalism at the beginning of the eighteenth century by forcibly tying peasants to their landed masters. Educational standards were woeful. Legal norms went unheeded. Poverty was awesome. The Romanov police-state banned political parties, trade unions and public protest, and administrative arbitrariness was pervasive.

  Emperor Alexander II tried to nudge the country towards modernity in 1861 by freeing the peasants from compulsory personal bondage to the landed nobility, and he followed this with a series of alterations in judicial, military and educational institutions. But there remained a massive gap between rich and poor. The legendarily rich Yusupov family had estates all over the country – land equivalent in size to a small European country – and retainers, Old Master paintings, fine clothes and meals shipped by train from Germany. At the other end of the range there were the households of the Russian poor. Most peasants lived in their native village and rarely strayed beyond it. Each wore bast shoes and a smock, let their beards grow long and feared God in a traditional way unassociated with Biblical study. Peasants were highly credulous and had little idea of the broader concerns of public life. Exploited as a human resource by successive tsars, they were subject to discriminatory legislation including even flogging. Resentment against the authorities and the propertied elites was acute. Across the country there were other groups that objected to the social structure. The so-called ‘Old Believers’ had fled from the reformation of the Church ritual in the seventh century. There were also various sorts of sectarians. Sparsely inhabited areas of Siberia existed where the police barely penetrated – and Siberia was used as a dumping ground for convicts as Australia was used by the British.

  Disgruntlement was growing not only in the Russian heartland but also in the ‘borderlands’. Poland had been partitioned among Russia, Prussia and Austria in the eighteenth century and the Poles who were under Romanov dominion revolted in 1830 and 1863. The Finns were surly and looked down on the Russians. The Caucasus mountains were in rebellion through the later years of the nineteenth century. Even the Ukrainians, who had seldom given much trouble to the tsars, were becoming restless. It was not a quiescent empire.

  Yet the potential of the country was enormous. Raw materials existed in unrivalled abundance. The Russian Empire had coal, iron, diamonds, gold and oil. It had vast spaces where grain could be cultivated. It had opportunities to import foreign capital to intensify its industrial drive. It had a ruling elite that was refreshed by contact with foreign countries, and increasingly official opinion favoured a rapid attempt to catch up with the achievements of the advanced industrial countries to the west. Russia and its borderlands had an ever more buoyant high culture. Russian novelists Tolstoi, Dostoevski and Turgenev were taking Europe by storm. Russian scientists, led by Mendeleev, gained acclaim. Russian composers Rimski-Korsakov and Chaikovski had a continental reputation and, although Russian painters were not yet known abroad, they were superb exponents of their craft. Throughout the Russian Empire there was educational progress. And there was an expanding professional middle class that strove to build social institutions and practices independent from the state administration. Local agencies of self-government were being formed and schooling was being spread to the sons and daughters of the poor, especially in the towns. Architecture, dress and popular behaviour were undergoing change. Even the tsarist bureaucracy was becoming less dominated by the traditional nobility than had once been characteristic.

  It was a turbulent transformation. Political passions rose high as rival ideologies were attacked and defended. The less tolerant critics of the status quo were turning to violence against an Imperial state that for centuries had practised repression upon society. The agrarian socialists (narodniki) in particular were conducting propaganda from the 1860s, and some of them were engaged in assassination attempts. Liberal political groups also existed. But from the 1880s it was Marxism that became the most prominent ideology of assault upon the Romanov monarchy. It was a race against time. Would the tsarist system sustain its energy and authority for a sufficient period to modernise society and the economy? Would the revolutionaries accommodate themselves to the changing realities and avoid the excesses of violent politics? And would the tsarist system make concessions to bring this about?

  Lenin was one of those many intellectuals demanding Revolution. The political and economic structure was offensive to him; the social hierarchy disgusted him. The opportunities for consensual development in Russia held no appeal for him. He hated the Romanovs and Old Russia. He wanted a New Russia, a European Russia, a Westernised Russia. His specific admiration for Germany was enormous. But Lenin’s approval of ‘the West’ was selective. He admired Marx, the German Marxist movement and contemporary German industry and technology. But he wanted the
West too to change. There had to be a European socialist revolution that would sweep away the whole capitalist order. He was determined at the same time to liquidate those phenomena in Russia and elsewhere that appeared to him to be backward and oppressive. Lenin belonged to a particular type within his generation in his country. He believed in Enlightenment, Progress, Science and Revolution. In each instance he offered his own interpretation. Nothing shook his confidence that he had the right ideas.

  It was not only his own actions that gave him his practical importance. Environment was immensely significant. The fact that fellow Bolsheviks shared his political vision meant that a party existed for all-out Revolution even when he was geographically isolated or physically incapacitated. Without that party’s zeal and practicality, Lenin would have been a political nullity. He was also helped by the widespread antagonism among Russia’s intellectuals, workers and other social groups to tsarism and to many aspects of capitalism. And the peculiar nature of Russia – its political tensions, its administrative fragility, its internal national and social divisions, its violent popular culture – played into his hands. The final crisis of the Romanov monarchy was induced by the First World War. The fighting on the eastern front brought disaster as transport, administration and economy started to implode. There can therefore be no doubt that luck was on the side of the Bolsheviks in 1917–18. If the Germans had won the First World War in 1918, the military plans of the Kaiser were to turn upon Russia. Lenin’s government would have been strangled in its cradle. Without all these factors counting in his favour, Lenin would have been a bit-player on the side of the stage of twentieth-century world history.