Nadzezhda Krupskaya wrote in "Memories of Lenin": "Peter[sburg], autumn 1893; an unknown Marxist arrives from the Volga; an exercise book is passed around `the comrades'- each page is folded in half, one side covered in an unsightly scrawl, with many crossings out and emendations. This contained the views `On Markets' of Krasin, the `legal' Marxist. The other side carefully written, with no corrections, contains the replies of the newly-arrived Ulyanov. The social-democratic circles; the Sunday Evening Adult School, discussion groups, clubs, illiteracy classes, the `workers' study circles beyond the Nevsky Gate'. Agitation and propaganda. The workers circles read Vol I of Marx's Capital, then Engels, The Origin of the Family, Private Property and the State: `The method of agitation on the basis of the workers' everyday needs became rooted deeply in our Party's work', Krupskaya wrote. Unlike social-democratic parties in the West, they did not stand aside from purely `trade-union' struggles, strikes etc. As police surveillance increased, Lenin showed unusual aptitude for covert work. `He knew all the courtyards' and gave the police spies the slip. He learnt ciphers. Harrassed by the police, he continued to do agitational work. A A Yakubova and Z O Nevzorova did a leaflet for women workers at the Laferme tobacco factory on Vasilievski Ostrov Street. They rolled the leaflets up in tiny tubes and loitered by the factory gates tll the hooter sounded. As the workers poured out in great throngs, the rushed through them scattering the leaflets from their aprons into the very hands of the astonished employees. Lenin played an increasingly central role, travelled to Berne and Zurich and met Plekhanov, came back and was hunted as an `important state criminal'. On 9 December 1895, Lenin and his closest comrades were arrested. From prison voluminous correspondence began, all in code with letters written in invisible ink made of milk. Lenin even wrote The Development of Capital in Russia in prison. `Today I have eaten 6 inkpots' was the PS on a letter. The inkpots were made of bread, and eaten whenever a warder appeared. In May 1898 Krupskaya went to Shushenskoye where Lenin was exiled. Krupskaya arrived with her mother at dusk, `Vladimir Ilyich was out hunting'. His `izba' (log hut) had whitewashed walls decorated with fir branches, and brightly-coloured home-spun mats on the floors. The owners of the izba and the neighbours all crowded round. Later when Lenin returned the owner told him a drunken friend had arrived and scattered his books everywhere; he shot up the wooden steps at the very moment Krupskaya emerged. Lenin was lean, healthy and very fit. They talked `for hours and hours' and strolled under the Siberian stars too. They rented half a house with kitchen-garden attached, which grew cucumbers, carrots, beetroots and pumpkins. They planted hope; Lenin hunted deer and rabbits and ducks and hares, dressed in leather breeches and often getting into bogs and ditches after the game hidden there. In the mornings Lenin translated the Webbs (the English Fabian leaders) and in the afternoons worked on his book, Development of Capitalism in Russia. Huge landscape, feudal society, illiterate serfs groaning under kulak oppression: `After the winter frosts, Nature bursts forth tempestuously into the spring,' Krupskaya writes. '...Sunset. In the great spring-time pools in the fields, wild swans were swimming,' the wood-cocks were clucking, waters burbling. Lenin had a retriever, a Gordon setter called Zhenka: `In the autumn we went to far-off forest clearings. Vladimir Ilyich said: `If we meet any hares, I won't shoot as I haven't brought any straps to carry them.' But when a hare darted out Vladimir Ilyich fired at it just the same'. In the evenings, he read German philosophy- or Russian novels, Pushkin or Lermontov or Tolstoy. They corresponded voluminously -- with Anna Ilyinichna, Lenin's sister, and with many comrades in Petersburg and elsewhere. In exile Lenin reflected on the political strategy for the future. News from Russia grew scant; the Party was in complete disarray but the Economists had made huge strides. The `Credo' became popular. So what was to be done? In his last year of exile, 1899, Lenin had already clarified the organisational plan which he later developed in What is to be Done? and in Letter to a Comrade: There would have to be an All-Russian newspaper, published abroad. `Vladimir Ilyich began to have sleepless nights, and became terribly thin', Krupskaya would write., 'thinking out his plan in minute detail'. February 1900: Lenin leaves Siberian exile for Russia, travelling on horseback hundreds of miles along the Yenisei. They rode by day and by night, under clear skies and bright moonlight, wrapped in elk-skin coats and wearing felt boots. They arrived at Pskov on 10 March 1900. On 2 June Lenin arrived in Petersburg with Martov, was promptly arrested and soon found himself in exile once more. Krupskaya was still in exile; his mother, alone in Moscow; his sister Maria-Ilyinichna in jail, his sister Anna-Ilyinichna abroad. Then followed the years of exile, and the at first uncertain, desperate, unremitting efforts to set up a revolutionry centre among the emigre communities; a world of false-bottomed suitcases, secret passports and papers, of hiding, hunger, lack of news, enforced separations, of bitter quarrels which were destined to leave their marks on the Russia of the future. Lenin went abroad first, and for a time was separated by force of circumstance from Nadezhda. When she finally tracked him down, going mistakenly first to Prague and finally locating him in Munich, she found him boarding in a pub and eating out at a German hausfrau's kitchen in Mehlspeise. Lenin had a tin mug hung on a nail in his room, to drink tea with; from here he began to create Iskra, a project which drew dismissive scorn from older, more world-weary exiles like Vera Zasulich. But in Munich, then London, Iskra came alive, grew, and was soon at the heart of a web of revolutionaries throughout the Russian empire -- the plot as laid down in `What is to be done?' (written during this time in Munich). They lived communally, in the bohemian, often extravagant fashion which became the caricatural image of the exiled Russian revolutionary of the `Red Terror Party', as some British newspapers called it. Vera Zasulich dressed carelessly, smoked endlessly, lived in apparent disorder, and raised a child too: she was asked by some middle-class English ladies for Russian recipes - How did she cook her meat? `It just depends', she told them. `If I am hungry I cook it for ten minutes; if I am not hungry, about three hours'. She, like Krupskaya, like all the exiles, yearned for Russia, and feared what Krupskaya called `the dead sea of emigre life, that drags one to the bottom'. Soon there were Iskra agents in Berlin, Paris, Brussels, Berne. Letters came from Petersburg, Moscow, the Urals, the South. Lenin -- working feverishly, pacing the room, muttering under his breath what he was about to write -- 22 January 1917 Lenin gives lecture to a youth meeting at the Zurich People's Hall. Subject: 1905 revolution. Many in audience from Germany and elsewhere - pacificsts, war-resisters and the like. Lenin wanted to show what a revolution feels like. The coming European revolution, he foresaw, would be both proletarian and socialist: `Only stern battles, only civil wars, can free humanity from the yoke of capital'; and it will be class conscious wkers who come forth to lead the submerged, exploited masses in these titanic struggles. But Lenin says he has no idea when these events will begin: `We of the older generation may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming generation'. Then one evening , while Ilyich was getting ready to leave for Zurich library to read the newspapers, as was his custom, a fellow-emigre, Bronsky, arrived with the news: a revolution had broken out in Peter! Lenin and Krupskaya walked down to the lake, where the nespapers were displayed. `I do not remember how the rest of the day and the evening passed,' wrote Krupskaya, but next day they plunged headlong into the incessant activity which led them, breathless, to October. They worked out desperate schemes for getting back to Russia. In `the semi-delirium of the night' they thought of returning by airplane- but this would mean Swedish identities and then, Krupskaya told him, one night `you'll fall asleep, dream of Mensheviks, start swearing... and give the game away'...Lenin sat in Geneva, tormented; on 18 March he lectured Swiss workers on the lessons of the Paris Commune (it was the anniversary); they left elated, but Lenin crushed by feelings of impotence...He bombarded Pravda with his `Letters from Afar', including the article on the proletarian militia (only published posthumously; his cautious Petersburg comrades thought Vladimir Ilyich had gone mad) -- the hated police were abolished overnight after the February revolution (and were never replaced). Lenin wanted a general arming of the citizens, wanted the militia not only to keep order but distribute bread, act as `sanitarki', see every family was provisioned and each child given a bottle of good milk - and that no rich family has extra milk, that the palaces of the rich are not left unoccupied with the poor are destitute.... `What other organisation except a universal people's militia with women participating as the equals of men, can do such deeds?' he wrote. And then, characteristically, while arguing about whether militiamen delivering infants' milk was socialism or not, Lenin struck at the root question dogging the whole revolutionary process: `Theoretical classification doesn't matter now. It would indeed be a grave error if we tried now to fit the complicated, urgent, rapidly unfolding tasks of the revolution into the procrustean bed of a narrowly conceived "theory", instead of regarding theory first of all and above all as a guide to action'. The Mensheviki - even the bourgeois parties, in their unfettered cynicism - criticised Lenin for his opportunism, for his blatant disregard of all that the classics of Marxism taught about the need to observe the stages of a revolution - and accused him of rivetting together from the fragments of mass desires, a programme which had nothing in common with Marxism, which borrowed greatly from the SR's agrarian platform, and which had only one real purpose - to lever Lenin and his henchmen into power, at any cost. Lenin, they said, knew a backward country like Russia could not build socialism in isolation- and knew, or suspected, that World Revolution was a chimera. Yet Lenin's pragmatic determination to follow a mass line, to speak only of `Peace Bread and Land' because that was what the masses wanted, Marxist or no- could (the Mensheviks argued) in the end mean only the betrayal of his working-class supporters and the destruction of his party amid the fanatastical pursuit of `socialism in one country'. Lenin was contemptuous of these criticisms. Mark Jones _______________________________________________ CrashList website: http://website.lineone.net/~resource_base
