Lenin, Krupskaya and Inessa Armand

By Bob Gould

I am a relatively late convert to internet technology. Some months ago when I hooked up to the net, I also hooked up to four leftist discussion groups, the Marxism List, the Socialist Register List, Leftist Trainspotters and the Australian-based Green Left Discussion List.

A little earlier, I participated, along with others, in setting up Ozleft, an Australian-based document archive list. A byproduct of hooking up to the four discussion lists is the vast amount of material that plops into my inbox every morning. I've allocated half an hour a day to surfing this material and deleting the large part that doesn't interest me, but sometimes it gets on top of me a bit, if I take my eyes off it for a day or two. Nevertheless, the swirl of issues and interests is often revealing. (I'm rather pleased by the irritated but friendly comment that I've now had from quite a number of young militants in different groups, at demonstrations etc, growling at me, in a jocular way, with statements like, "God, you're a bastard, Bob Gould. That bloody Ozleft kept me up last night, surfing it until three in the morning." The net is clearly, on the basis of my experience, a very powerful medium.)

My particular immediate interests are focussed on the redevelopment, clarification and re-arming of the socialist project in the new conditions, after the overthrow of Stalinism etc, etc. It seems to me that a serious engagement with the history of the socialist movement, its extraordinary peaks, like the 1917 Soviet Revolution, and its dreadful lows, like the victory of counter-revolutionary Stalinism in Russia, is a very necessary part of re-arming the socialist movement and re-establishing the socialist project.

In the sphere of socialist history, we have an wealth of new material at our disposal, since the overthrow of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union and the partial opening of the Soviet archives. A serious balance sheet on the Soviet experience is at the heart of my current interests.

I'm obsessed with the scope and significance of Lenin's political contribution. Lenin gets a consistently bad press from the ruling class and most of the liberal intelligentsia, but he appears to me to be absolutely central, and his contribution to revolutionary thought and practice, overwhelmingly positive.

There has been a significant Lenin industry in the last few years. Some of the most useful information has come from scholars who are personally hostile to Lenin, but who have dug up material that significantly broadens our understanding of Lenin. For instance, the two biographies of Lenin by a rather harsh critic, Robert Service, one of three volumes and one of one volume, are extraordinarily useful as sources incorporating the new material available, despite Service's exasperated antagonism to Lenin.

Even the extreme right-wing ideologue, Richard Pipes, has done us a service in his collection of documents, "The Unknown Lenin", which, despite the fact that his intention is malevolent towards Lenin, gives us useful new information. One hopes that scholars more sympathetic to Lenin than Pipes, will also trawl the Soviet archive for more hitherto suppressed material.

On the Leftist Trainspotters List a characteristically verbally abusive exchange, erupted recently about whether Inessa Armand and Lenin had a sexual relationship. The bizarre heat of this exchange is reminiscent of the angry way the Stalinist bureaucracy reacted to this suggestion in the 1960s, when they closed down the "Time" bureau in Moscow because "Time" magazine referred to an article by Bertram D. Wolfe about this relationship.

The new biographical material, out of the archives, about Lenin, Krupskaya and Inessa Armand, seems to settle this question. There clearly was a sexual relationship between Lenin and Inessa. All the fragments of letters, etc that have survived the prudish, Victorian Stalinist sanitisation of the archives, clearly points to a sexual relationship between them.

The people on Trainspotters who try to deny the Lenin-Armand relationship, rely heavily on R.C. Elwood's biography of Armand, and ignore other evidence, including the other biography of Inessa Armand by Michael Pearson, and several biographies of Alexandra Kollontai.

The biography of Inessa Armand by R.C. Elwood, which tries to make a case that there was no sexual relationship, is refuted by the balance of the evidence. Elwood's book has a curious point of view. Published in 1992, it has a kind of radical feminist slant (though Elwood is a bloke) and it presents Armand as a kind of victim of Lenin's megalomania, which is a caricature, and an insulting caricature, of Lenin, Inessa Armand and Krupskaya. Elwood is deeply hostile to Lenin and portrays him as a kind of villain.

The real facts of the situation seem altogether both more prosaic, and, in some respects, more tragic, from the point of view of all three revolutionary comrades involved in this triangle. These circumstances even had some bearing on the Stalinisation of the Russian Revolution, which commenced at a very early stage. The old and new biographical material about Lenin, Krupskaya and Armand, shows them to be people of a particular historical place and time, members of the Russian intelligentsia, utterly preoccupied with the socialist revolutionary tasks they set themselves early in life. It also shows them as human beings with complex and intense family relationships, specifically family relationships of the Russian middle classes. Throughout his active political life, Lenin was particularly reliant on the support, emotional, practical and even financial, of the women in his life, his mother, his sisters, Krupskaya, Krupskaya's mother and Inessa. In a way, Lenin got on somewhat better with women than he did with men. Lenin had a close relationship with his own mother, and a close and affectionate relationship with Krupskaya's mother.

Lenin, Krupskaya, Inessa, and even the mother and mother-in-law, were all intensely practical people, with quite a strong family sense. All the evidence suggests that Lenin and the two women in his life were disinclined to disrupt their common political activities because of the natural human rivalry, initially, between the two women, and also they wished to minimise scandal, in the small, rather incestuous emigre Russian revolutionary community. They clearly resolved these problems by accommodation, dissimulation and discretion.

The interesting thing about all this is that both women remained Lenin's staunch political allies and later became close friends, despite the triangular nature of the circumstances. The image of the two women sitting together in the front row, supporting Lenin, in his initially minority position, turning Bolshevism upside down, at the April Conference in 1917, is very striking.

The very useful and thorough biography of Krupskaya, "Bride of the Revolution" by Robert McNeal, carefully explores Krupskaya's exceedingly practical reaction to the new set of circumstances, after Inessa came into their lives.

All observers agree that Lenin was totally devastated by Inessa's death from typhus, but being the practical revolutionary that he was, he doggedly went on with business. When you take together all the sequence of events that shattered Lenin's health, you get some idea of the combination of environmental factors and genetic history, that contributed to Lenin's comparatively early death. Lenin had always been a bit preoccupied with health matters because of a history of the early death of males in his family. The image from Trotsky's "My Life", describing Lenin and Trotsky lying down side by side, in an anteroom during the vital meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, totally exhausted, but unable to sleep, gives you some picture of the tensions of the times.

The useful book by T.H. Rigby, "Lenin's Sovnarkom", gives some picture of the extraordinary work load Lenin shouldered in the administration of the new Soviet state, for more than three years. In this period Lenin was shot by an attempted assassin, and the bullet was not removed because it was too dangerous to do so. Inessa died. Krupskaya's health problems worsened.

It seems obvious from the difficulties of the period that possibilities for the physical renewal of the Lenin-Inessa relationship were extremely unfavourable. It may also have been the fact that Lenin's libido declined considerably with increasing age and the intense and difficult circumstances of the time, but equally clearly, their powerful comradeship and emotional involvement persisted, despite separation and political upheavals. It's fairly clear from Armand's last diary entries, and from Lenin's utter devastation at her death, that possibly they both had some vague perspective of resuming the physical side of their relationship at some more favourable time in the future, as humans often do in such circumstances. Who knows.

Another feature of Inessa Armand was that, despite her intense emotional involvement with Lenin, she was capable of disagreeing with him politically, on points of principle She was a vigorous participant in the Workers' Opposition, despite the fact that this involved a profound political collision with Lenin.

Moshe Lewin's important book, "Lenin's Last Battle", remains the best account of the ailing Lenin, fighting to his last breath against the early development of Stalinism. It is of considerable significance that Stalin's crude and brutal actions towards Krupskaya was the factor that triggered the qualitative leap of Lenin swinging over into total opposition to Stalin. (It was not accidental either, that in defiance of all Stalin's self-interested propaganda about the alleged permanence and continuance of Lenin's conflicts with Trotsky, that Krupskaya initially rallied to the beleaguered cause of the Left Opposition against Stalinism, until, like many other Old Bolsheviks she was bludgeoned into submission by Stalin's machine.)

The whole of Lenin's political activity was marked by the tension between the objective material circumstances, and the subjective efforts and intentions of Marxist revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks of the classic period, and particularly Lenin, are accused of Blanquism and Jacobinism by many critics, because of Lenin's stress on, and preoccupation with, the active intervention of revolutionaries in the revolutionary process. The sombre history of the Russian Revolution and its subsequent Stalinisation raises, at a number of points, the perennial question of the role of the individual in history. Trotsky very forcefully makes the point that despite the overripe objective conditions in Russia, that the Russian Revolution would never have happened without Lenin's fantastically energetic reorganisation of the Bolshevik Party, and his constant agitation inside the Bolshevik Party for the seizure of power.

This also raises the question of the enormous tragedy for humanity involved in Lenin's early death. It's interesting to speculate as to what would have happened if Lenin's bodyguards had been vigilant enough to prevent the bullets fired into Lenin by Flora Kaplan, if Lenin had used the same solicitude he had for the health of the other Bolshevik leaders, for his own health during the critical Sovnarkom period, and if Inessa Armand had not holidayed in the Caucuses and caught cholera there. If Lenin had lived in reasonable health for, say, another five years, the whole history of the 20th century might have been different. Trotsky was a courageous and serious revolutionary, but compared with Lenin, he was not a very effective politician. It's clear from Lenin's attempt to make a bloc with Trotsky against Stalin from his sick bed, that Lenin would have used all his extraordinary political skill and ruthlessness, to smash the Stalin faction. (It's entertaining to speculate about the effective and brutal way the old firm of Lenin, Krupskaya et al, would have carefully mobilised and counted every vote to do in Stalin. Even Stalin's secretarial machine would probably have been outmatched by Lenin at that early stage of developments.) Lenin would have invoked his and Trotsky's prestige amongst the masses, etc, etc, and he would have had the formidable support of independently powerful revolutionaries like Trotsky, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and many other Bolshevik leaders. The enormous, incipient objective forces for bureaucratisation that the uniquely barbaric and vicious Stalin came to represent, would still have been a powerful opposing force. It's not absolutely clear how the situation would have ultimately played itself out, but it can be asserted, with reasonable confidence, that the peculiarly vicious form that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution took, with the monster Stalin as the extremely conscious and rather skillful embodyment of the counterrevolution, would not have been the form developments took. Lenin's early death was the greatest human, social and political tragedy of the 20th century, and possibly of all history.

In the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, a whole mad hagiographic culture of so-called Leninism was developed, basically to strengthen Stalin's spurious claim to be Lenin's political heir. Historically speaking, Stalin's creation of the Lenin-Stalin cult was thoroughly reactionary. Many non-Stalinist organisations unfortunately take over part of the Stalinist hagiography of Lenin, and try to create a seamless "Leninism" to justify their own sect interests. This approach is a substantial obstacle to the development of a useful, open and informed "Leninism", as a constructive part of socialist political practice.

The intense, courageous, difficult and interesting lives of Lenin, Krupskaya, Armand and all the other Bolsheviks, is worthy of serious and objective study and contains many useful insights for modern socialists.

We've put on Ozleft, four pieces of documentation that bear on the history of the relationship between Lenin, Krupskaya and Inessa Armand.

They are:

Letters from Lenin to Inessa Armand

Extracts from Lenin: A Biography, by Robert Service

Extracts from Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin, by Robert H. McNeal

Inessa Armand, by Bertram D. Wolfe

Created on September 24, 2003