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Lenin and Inessa Armand

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2017

Bertram D. Wolfe
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Extract

In 1924, immediately after Lenin died, the Central Committee of his party called upon all who had a shred of writing from his hand to deposit it in the party's archives. The holders hastened to comply. All his letters were ostensibly published in three substantial volumes, supplemented by items in a number of “Miscellany” (Sbornik) volumes, Not one letter to or from Inessa Armand appeared in that flood of Leniniana.

On February 27, 1939, Krupskaia died. Four months after her death, Bolshevik (No. 13, July, 1939) published the first of two letters from Lenin to Inessa on the “woman question.” The letters were not so much an expression of Lenin's views as a comment on Inessa Armand's. Planning in the course of her Bolshevik work with “working women” to write a brochure addressed to them, Inessa had dutifully submitted her outline to Lenin.

Type
Articles
Information
Slavic Review , Volume 22 , Issue 1 , March 1963 , pp. 96 - 114
Copyright
Copyright © Association for Slavic, East European, and Eurasian Studies. 1963

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References

1 The principal sources of information on Inessa Armand used in the present article are: Krupskaia's references to her in (Moscow, 1957); the reminiscences of Krupskaia and others in (Moscow, 1926); the letters of Lenin to Inessa as published in censored form in (4th ed.; Moscow, 1941-52), XXXV; reminiscences of Angelica Balabanoff communicated orally to the writer; reminiscences of Marcel Body, who was recounting both what he himself knew (he was a member of the League of French Communists in Russia formed by her in 1918), what Alexandra Kollontai told him (he was an aide in her embassy and her confidant for many years), which he later published, and matters communicated by him in a letter to the writer; Inessa Armand: Une Grande Figure de la Révolution Russe (Paris, 1957) by Jean Fréville, who was permitted to examine materials concerning her in the archives of the Marx-Lenin Institute (he has refrained from quoting, or was forbidden to quote, any key passages from her letters to Lenin, although he makes it clear that he was permitted to read them; his book is more pious hagiography than biography); an obituary notice in Πραα on the occasion of Inessa's death, signed by Krupskaia; an article on her in a discussion of her relations with Lenin in N. Valentinov, (New York, 1953), pp. 97-102; Walter, Gérard, Lénine (Paris, 1950), pp. 204–5 Google Scholar. These various accounts contain some discrepancies, many reticences, in some cases palpable inaccuracies. For example, most of the accounts give the first name as Inessa, not Elizabeth, omit her maiden name or give it wrongly as Petrova, Petrovna, and Stephanie, and set her date of birth as 1875 instead of 1879. Gérard Walter has examined the original French documentary sources to establish her first name, father's name, maiden name, real age, and so forth, using among other documents Lyonnet's Dictionaire des Comédiens français, which gives biographical data on her father in Vol. II, p. 513. According to Walter, the errors concerning Inessa Armand in the were in large measure corrected in the published by the Society of Former Exiles and Political Prisoners (Moscow, 1931), Vol. V, Part 2, cols. 127-29, which I have not had an opportunity to consult.

2 In 1952, twenty-four of his letters to her—manifestly somewhat cut and usually deprived of their salutation and complimentary closing—were published in Vol. XXXV of Lenin's CoHuuenwi.

3 This is testified to by every mention of Martov in the two volumes of Krupskaia's (Moscow, 1931), p. 43. Krupskaia relates that when Lenin felt his end was near, one of his last utterances was a mournful query: “They say that Martov is dying, tool“

4 Lenin, XXXIV, 117-18 (the ty letter), and p. 146 (the first vy letter). Between the two letters, seven months apart, had come the fateful disagreement on the definition of a member and on the composition of the Iskra editorial board.

5 Lenin, XXXIV, 113-14, 127, 186-88; XXXV, 370-71, 375-76, 397, 399, 400, 405, 406-7, 409-10, 414, 415, 422, 423-34, 431, 456, 472. All the letters in Vol. XXXV use vy.

6 The last letter using ty is dated July 15, 1914. The first wartime letter is dated by the Marx-Lenin Institute as “written in September 1914.” One cannot tell whether Lenin thinks of her as ty or vy because, for the first time in his life, Lenin tries to write the whole letter, except two impersonal sentences, in English. It remained unpublished until 1960, when a Russian translation (with no original) was published in , No. 4, 1960, pp. 3-i. Then there were no letters until the war was five months old because Inessa joined Lenin and Krupskaia in Berne as soon as they got to Switzerland. But when they separated and there was occasion to write her once more, on January 17, 1915, Lenin wrote vy.

7 “Inessa,” by N. Krupskaia, in , Oct. 3, 1920.

8 A common bond between Lenin and Inessa Armand on their first meeting was their shared admiration for Chernyshevsky's novel. This novel, which took the Russian intelligentsia by storm with its image of the “new men,” also contained a “new woman,” its heroine, Vera Pavlovna. The American anarchist Benjamin Tucker, who translated it into English, wrote of the novel: “The fundamental idea is that woman is a human being and not an animal created for man's benefit, and its chief purpose is to show the superiority of free unions between men and women over the indissoluble marriage sanctioned by the Church and State.” Preface to the fourth edition (New York, 1909), p. 3.

If Lenin was attracted by the vision of the “uncommon men” and their “rigorist” leader concerning Utopia, Inessa was attracted by the deeds and views of the novel's heroine. In Krupskaia wrote: “Inessa was moved to socialism by the image of woman's rights and freedom in What Is To Be Done?” Like the heroine, she broke her ties with one man to live with another, concerned herself with good deeds to redeem the poor female and the prostitute, tried to solve the problems of woman's too servile place in society. Indeed, whole generations of Russian radicals were influenced by Chernyshevsky's manysided Utopian novel and were moved to imitate its “uncommon men and women.” Just as Marx could be the spiritual ancestor of people as various as Bernstein, Kautsky, Bebel, and Luxemburg, so Chernyshevsky was a formative influence for the two men who in their persons incarnated the two opposing poles of socialism in 1917: Tsereteli and Lenin. If Inessa found in the novel her image of woman's rights and freedom in love, and Lenin the prototypes of his vanguard and his leadership, Tsereteli found there his ideal of service to the people. Men who are big enough to have spiritual progeny are likely to be thus manysided and complicated, while each “descendant” finds in his “ancestor” that which enlarges and reinforces what already exists in him.

9 , p. 7.

10 The one exception is Angelica Balabanoff, who got to know her five years later through their joint work in the Zimmerwald and Kienthal wartime conferences, and the International Woman's and Youth's meetings. Dr. Balabanoff told me: “I did not warm to Inessa. She was pedantic, a one hundred per cent Bolshevik in the way she dressed (always in the same severe style), in the way she thought, and spoke. She spoke a number of languages fluently, and in all of them repeated Lenin verbatim.“

11 For this controversy, see my Three Who Made a Revolution, Chapter 29.

12 Valentinov, op. cit., p. 99.

13 The quotations from Krupskaia, here and throughout the article, are either from hei account in or from Vol. II of her . In the Englishlanguage edition, Memories of Lenin (New York: International Publishers, 1930), they me quoted from pp. 58, 66, 67, 73, 84, 90, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130, and 150. Where rlie translation seemed poor, I have retranslated from the corresponding pages of the 19–7 Russian edition.

14 14 The Kamenevs lived on an upper floor in the same building as the Ulianovs.

15 See note 13 above.

16 (Moscow, 1958), pp. 251-52. An English translation is in Gorky, Maxim, Days with Lenin (New York, 1932), p. 52.Google Scholar

17 Lenin, XXXVII, 430.

18 Fréville, Inessa Armand, p. 90.

19 See note 13 above.

20 Lenin, XXXV, 232.

21 Ibid., p. 96.

22 Krupskaia, op. cit., English edition, pp. 188 and 197; Russian, pp. 264-65 and 271. Lenin, XXXV, 167.

23 Lenin, XXXV, 209.

24 This did not prevent Lenin from writing out for her every word she was to say, and supplementing this with four sets of zametki privées (private notes). The report and instructions he wrote for her take u p forty pages in Vol. XX of his .

25 Lenin, XXXV, 108-10; XX, 463-502.

26 All passages in italics are underlined by Lenin in the original; an asterisk (*) after them indicates that they are in English or French or some other language than Russian. The first two paragraphs are in what Lenin believes to be English, the third in Russian except for the word contrepropositions.

27 I am indebted to Vera Alexandrova for identifying the novel as the only one of Vinenchenko's works that fits Lenin's “critique.” 11

28 English in the original. Where the editors have not omitted the salutation and closing, M Lenin generally writes Dorogoi Drug (Dear Friend) and closes with “firmly (or “firmly, S firmly“) I press your hand.” In one letter he tries to put this into English as “Friendly M shake hands!” JI

29 Lenin, XXXV, 107.

30 Ibid., pp. 137-38. This is the letter which closes with the English “Friendly shake handsl“ 31 Ibid., pp. 139-41.

32 Marcel Body, “Alexandra Kollontai,” in Preuves (Paris), April, 1952, pp. 12-24. Body was a French workingman, a printer in Limoges. Mobilized in 1914, he was sent to Russia with a French military mission to the Russian army. Like a number of other men of that mission (Captain Jacques Sadoul, hitherto a Right Socialist, for example), he sympathized with the February and October Revolutions. Remaining in Russia, he joined first Inessa's group of French Communists in Moscow, then the Russian party, and served the Soviet government in various capacities. When Kollontai arrived in Oslo as the world's first woman ambassador in 1922, a kind of honorific exile by Lenin for her activity in the Workers Opposition, she found Body there as secretary to Ambassador Suritz. His friendship with her and his service under her began then and lasted until her death. Sickened, as she was too, by Stalin's purges, he did not return to Russia and now lives in Paris.

33 “Kolosov” is the hero of a short tale by Turgenev, which Lenin cherished as a discussion of the proper attitude of the “uncommon person” toward love. Krupskaia told Valentinov that when they were in Siberia, she and her husband translated several pages of the tale into German. (This was Lenin's method of improving his German and at the same time becoming more deeply acquainted with some of his favorite pages from literature.) Kolosov, the narrator of the tale says, fell in love with a girl, lost his love for her and left her. In this there was nothing “unusual.” Unusual was the resoluteness with which he broke with her and with his whole past as tied up with her: “Which of us would have been able to break in good time with his past? Who, say, who does not fear reproaches—not, I say, the reproaches of the woman but the reproaches of the first stupid bystander? Which of us would not yield to the desire to play the magnanimous, or egotistically to play with another devoted heart? Finally, which of us has the strength to oppose petty selfishness, petty proper feelings: pity and remorse? Oh, gentlemen, a person who breaks with a woman once loved, at that bitter and great moment when he involuntarily realizes that his heart is no longer entirely filled by her, that person, believe me, better and more deeply understands the sacredness of love than do those fainthearted people who from tedium, ’ from weakness, continue to play on the half broken strings of their flabby and sentimental hearts. We all called Andrei Kolosov an uncommon m a n …. In certain years, to be natural means to be uncommon.” (Cited by Valentinov, op. cit., pp. 92-94.)

34 Body, op. cit., p. 17.

35 Gankin, O. H. and Fisher, H. H., The Bolsheviks and the World War (Stanford, 1940), p. 301–8.Google Scholar

36 The writer interviewed Angelica Balabanoff many times concerning Lenin during her years in America, but she never hinted at the Inessa affair until I said to her i n Rome that I had learned of it from Marcel Body. Then she told me the above, permitting me to take notes as she talked.

37 Singularly, all of the Ulianov family of Lenin's generation, his sisters Anna and Maria, his brother Dmitrii, a n d Lenin himself, remained childless.

38 On this see Ypsilon, , Pattern for World Revolution (Chicago and New York, 1947), p. 68 Google Scholar. The writer interviewed both of the anonymous authors of Ypsilon on Eberlein's marriage a n d Inessa Armand.

39 For Lenin's appreciation of John Reed's book, see Foreword, Lenin's to Ten Days That Shook the World (New York, 1960), p. xlvi Google Scholar. Lenin's note to Kobetsky is not given in any edition of his , No. 11, 1957, in an article on “Lenin and Foreign Writers,” in the commemorative number for the fortieth anniversary of the October Revolution.

40 Jean Fréville, Inessa Armand, p. 180.