Memories of Lenin Vol. I

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Text originally published in 1930 under the same title.

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Although in most cases we have retained the Author’s original spelling and grammar to authentically reproduce the work of the Author and the original intent of such material, some additional notes and clarifications have been added for the modern reader’s benefit.

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MEMORIES OF LENIN

by

Nadezhda K. Krupskaya

TRANSLATED BY E. VERNEY

Volume I

The Russian original is entitled ВОСНОМИНАНИЯ. This translation by Eric Verney is from the second Russian edition, published at Moscow, 1930

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Contents

TABLE OF CONTENTS 4

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE 5

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO SECOND RUSSIAN EDITION. MOSCOW, 1930 7

I — IN PETERSBURG, 1893-1898 8

II — IN EXILE, 1898-1901 20

III — MUNICH, 1901-1902 34

IV — LIFE IN LONDON, 1902-1903 44

V —GENEVA. 1903 55

VI — THE SECOND CONGRESS, JULY-AUGUST, 1903 57

VII — AFTER THE SECOND CONGRESS, 1903-1904 63

VIII — NINETEEN ‘FIVE IN EMIGRATION 71

IX — NINETEEN ‘FIVE IN PETERSBURG 84

X — PETERSBURG AND FINLAND, 1906-1907 91

XI — AGAIN ABROAD, END OF 1907 101

APPENDIX 104

LENIN’S METHOD OF WORK 104

LENIN ON HOW TO WRITE FOR THE MASSES 106

LENIN AND CHERNYSHEVSKY 111

THE KIND OF FICTION THAT PLEASED ILYICH 113

REQUEST FROM THE PUBLISHER 118

TRANSLATOR’S PREFACE

NADEZHDA KONSTANTINOVNA KRUPSKAYA—Lenin’s wife and life-companion—author of these reminiscences, has this in common with Lenin: not only has she devoted her whole life to the struggle for the emancipation of the working class, but, as with him, this devotion has been marked by the utmost self-negation and modesty.

Thus, although these Memoirs must of necessity be to an extent autobiographical—in so far as N. K. Krupskaya was at Lenin’s side from first to last in these years of struggle—yet, by dint of her extreme modesty, we learn little from them about her capabilities, her personality, and the leading positions which she has occupied in the Russian revolutionary movement.

One is therefore justified in prefacing these reminiscences with a brief outline of the career of their distinguished author.

Nadezhda Krupskaya came from the intelligentsia. At the age of fourteen, after her father’s death, she began earning her own living. While still at school she started giving lessons. N. Krupskaya took an active part in the work of the social-democratic circles, from the time of their inauguration in 1891. After the arrival of Lenin in St. Petersburg, their lives became closely interwoven. Together they helped to unite the isolated social-democratic circles of St. Petersburg into the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. In exile in Siberia, N. K. Krupskaya not only helped Lenin in his literary work: she herself put in a tremendous amount of study and labour in initiating and leading the emancipation movement of Russian working women. It was in exile that she wrote her important booklet The Working Woman. It was the first, and at that time the only, book written on that subject published by the Socialist movement.

In the period 1901-1903 N. Krupskaya filled the responsible post of Editorial Secretary of Iskra, and later was secretary of the Bolshevik fraction of the Social-Democratic Party. While in charge of the correspondence and illegal communications with Russia during the period when the Bolsheviks were preparing for the 1905 Revolution, she became well known to all the leading comrades working underground in Russia. Her responsibilities included the tremendous work of ciphering and deciphering the correspondence. She returned to Russia with Lenin at the time of the 1905 Revolution, and went abroad with him again in 1907, where she remained until 1917.

From 1905 to 1908 N. Krupskaya was secretary of the Party Central Committee. In 1915-1916, in Switzerland, she wrote her book Popular Education and Democracy, in which, for the first time, the subject of the education of the people was placed on a firm Marxist basis.

On returning to Russia with Lenin in 1917, N. Krupskaya participated actively in the preparation for the October Revolution. In addition to working at the centre, she was active in the Viborg District of Petrograd, on the District Party Committee and the local Duma.

After the October Revolution, she was placed in one of the most important posts in the Education Department of the Soviet Government. All these positions N. Krupskaya has filled with unflagging courage and strength in face of all difficulties.

This translation is made from the second (revised and enlarged) Russian edition, published in Moscow this year.

ERIC VERNEY.

Shoreham, Sussex,

April, 1930.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO SECOND RUSSIAN EDITION. MOSCOW, 1930

THE reminiscences printed here have the object of presenting a picture of the conditions in which Vladimir Ilyich lived and worked.

The first series of reminiscences covers the period from 1894, from the time of my first acquaintanceship with Vladimir Ilyich up to 1908, the time of the second emigration. Here are included reminiscences of (1) work in Petersburg, (2) the time spent in exile, (3) the Munich and London periods of our first emigration, (4) the time preceding the Second Party Congress, the Second Congress itself, and the period directly following it up to 1905; then (5) come the reminiscences of 1905 abroad, (6) on 1905 in Petersburg, and, finally, (7) on the years 1906-7.

The majority of these reminiscences have already appeared in Pravda. Later, some of them were printed in a collection published by Pravda, and then in a symposium published by the State Publishing Co. (1926). Now the reminiscences have been enlarged and newly revised.

The second series of reminiscences will concern the second emigration (from 1908 to 1914), the epoch of the imperialist war and the period after the return from emigration in April 1917 until the moment of Vladimir Ilyich’s death. Part of these reminiscences are already written.

In addition, the present series includes, in the form of an Appendix, a few articles written at various times, containing material characterising the different aspects of Lenin’s life.

N. KRUPSKAYA.

I — IN PETERSBURG, 1893-1898

VLADIMIR ILYICH arrived in St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1893. I did not get to know him at once, however. Some comrades told me that a certain learned Marxist had arrived from the Volga. Then they brought me an exercise-book containing a screed On Markets, which was being passed round for comrades to read in turn. The book contained the views both of our Petersburg Marxist (the technologist Herman Krassin) and of the new-corner from the Volga. The pages were folded in half. On the one side, in a straggling scrawl, with many crossings-out and insertions, were the opinions of H. Krassin. On the other side, carefully written, and without any alterations, were the notes and replies of our newly arrived friend.

At that time the problem of markets very much interested all us young Marxists. Among the Petersburg Marxist circles a special tendency was already beginning to be crystallised. To the representatives of this tendency the processes of social development appeared as something mechanical and schematic. Such an interpretation of social development completely neglected the rôle of the masses, the rôle of the proletariat. The revolutionary dialectic of Marxism was stowed away somewhere, and only lifeless phases of development remained. Nowadays, of course, any Marxist would be able to refute this mechanical viewpoint. At that time, however, our St. Petersburg Marxist circles were very much concerned about this issue. We were still very poorly equipped. Many of us knew nothing of Marx’s works save the first volume of Capital, and had not even seen the text of the Communist Manifesto. It was thus more from instinct that we felt this mechanicalness to be quite the opposite of live Marxism.

The question of markets was closely connected with this general problem of the interpretation of Marxism. The advocates of mechanicalness generally approached the question very abstractly.

More than thirty years have passed since then and, unfortunately, the exercise-book I have referred to has not been preserved. I can therefore only speak of the impression it made upon us.

Our new Marxist friend treated this question of markets in a very concrete manner. It was linked up with the interests of the masses, and in the whole approach we sensed just that live Marxism that takes phenomena in their concrete surroundings and in their development.

One wanted to become more closely acquainted with this new-corner, to find out his views at closer range.

I did not actually see Vladimir Ilyich until Shrovetide, when it was decided to arrange for certain Petersburg comrades to confer with him. The conference was to take place at the home of the engineer Klasson,{1} a prominent St. Petersburg Marxist, who had been with me in the same study-circle two years before. To screen our conference, we organised it as a pancake party.

At that meeting, besides Vladimir Ilyich, there were present: Klasson, Y. P. Korobko, Serebrovsky, S. I. Radchenko, and others. Potressov and Struve were to have come, but, I believe, did not turn up. I remember one moment particularly well. We were discussing the lines that we ought to follow. There did not seem to be general agreement. Someone was saying—I think it was Shevlyagin—that what was very important was to work in the Committee for Illiteracy. Vladimir Ilyich laughed, and somehow his laughter sounded laconic. I never heard him laugh that way on any subsequent occasion.

Well, he said, if anyone wants to save the fatherland in the Committee for Illiteracy, we won’t hinder him!

I ought to say that our generation of young people still witnessed the skirmishes of the Narodniki{2} with Tsardom. We saw how the Liberals at first were sympathetic about everything, but after the breaking up of the Narodnaya Volya{3} Party, became cowed, feared every whisper, and started preaching little things first.

One could quite understand Lenin’s sarcastic remark. He had come to discuss how we could take up the struggle together, and in response was treated to an appeal to distribute the pamphlets of the Committee for Illiteracy!

Later, when we had become closely acquainted, Vladimir Ilyich once told me about the attitude of the Liberals towards the arrest of his elder brother. All acquaintances shunned the Ulyanov family. Even an aged teacher, who had formerly come every evening to play chess, left off calling. There was no railway at Simbirsk at that time, and Vladimir Ilyich’s mother had to go on horseback to Syzran in order to go on to St. Petersburg, where her eldest son was imprisoned. Vladimir Ilyich was sent to seek a companion for the journey. But no one out wanted to travel with the mother of an arrested man.

Vladimir Ilyich told me that this widespread cowardice made a very profound impression upon him at that time.

This youthful experience undoubtedly did leave its imprint on Lenin’s attitude towards the Liberals. It was early that he learned the value of all Liberal chatter.

In the autumn of that same year, 1894, Vladimir Ilyich, in his article The Economic Content of Populism, and its Criticism in Mr. Struve’s Book, wrote: The bourgeoisie rules both in life in general and in Liberal society. It would seem, therefore, that it is necessary to turn away from this society and go to what is diametrically opposed to the bourgeoisie. (Collected Works, Vol. II, p. 18, Russian Edition.)

And farther on:

You (the Narodniki) attribute a desire to defend the bourgeoisie to anyone who demands that working-class ideologists break completely with these (Liberal) elements and serve exclusively those who are ‘differentiated from the life’ of bourgeois society. (Ibid., p. 54.)

But Vladimir Ilyich’s views on the Liberals, his mistrust of them, his continual exposure of them...these are well known. I have merely given a few quotations relating to the same year that the meeting took place at Klasson’s house.

At the pancake party no agreement was reached, of course. Vladimir Ilyich spoke little and was more occupied with contemplating those present. People who styled themselves Marxists became uncomfortable beneath his fixed glance.

I remember how, when we were returning home from the Okhta along the banks of the Neva, I was first told about Vladimir Ilyich’s brother, Alexander. He was a member of the Narodnaya Volya, and took part in the attempt on the life of Alexander III in 1886. He perished at the hands of the Tsar’s hangmen before he had even come of age. (See Ref. Note No. 8.) He was very fond of Alexander. They had many common tastes, and both of them liked to remain alone for long periods in order to concentrate. They usually lived together, at one time in a special part of the house. And when any of their numerous boy or girl cousins called, the brothers had a favourite phrase: Oblige us with your absence. Both brothers were tenacious workers, and both were of revolutionary dispositions. But the difference in age probably made itself felt. For Alexander Ilyich did not tell Vladimir about everything.

Vladimir Ilyich told me of his brother’s activity as a naturalist. The last summer that he came home, he had been preparing a dissertation on worms and was working all the time at the microscope. In order to get as much light as possible, he rose at daybreak and immediately set to work. No, my brother won’t make a revolutionary, I thought then, Vladimir Ilyich recounted; a revolutionary cannot devote so much time to the study of worms. He soon saw how he was mistaken.

The fate of his brother undoubtedly profoundly influenced Vladimir Ilyich. What in addition played an important part was the fact that by this time Vladimir Ilyich had already begun to think independently on many subjects, and had already come to his own decision as to the necessity of revolutionary struggle.

Had it been otherwise, probably his brother’s fate would only have caused him profound grief, or at the most awakened in him the resolve and aspiration to follow his brother’s footsteps. In these circumstances his brother’s fate whetted his brain, brought out in him an unusual sobriety of thought, the capacity to look truth straight in the face, not for one moment to be carried away by phrases or illusions. It developed in him an extremely honest approach to all problems.

In the autumn of 1894 Vladimir Ilyich read his work The Friends of the People to our circle. I remember how everybody scrambled for this book. It set out the aims of our struggle with remarkable clarity. The Friends of the People, in duplicated form, afterwards passed from hand to hand under the alias of the Little Yellow Books. These were unsigned. They had a fairly wide circulation, and there can be no doubt but that they had a strong influence on the Marxist youth of those days. When in 1896 I was in Poltava, P. P. Rumyantsev, who at that time was an active social-democrat and had just been released from prison, characterised The Friends of the People as the best, the strongest, and the most complete exposition of the standpoint of revolutionary social-democracy.

By the winter of 1894-1895, I had already got to know Vladimir Ilyich fairly intimately. He was occupied with the workers’ study-circles beyond the Nevsky Gate. I had already been working for years in that district as a teacher in the Smolensky Sunday Evening Adult School, and was already fairly well acquainted with local working-class life. Quite a number of the workmen in Vladimir Ilyich’s circle were my pupils at the Sunday School: Babushkin, Borovkov, Gribakin, the Bodrovs—Arsenius and Phillip, Zhukov, and others. In those days the Sunday Evening Adult School was an excellent means for getting a thorough knowledge of the everyday life, the labour conditions, and the mood of the working masses. The Smolensky School had six hundred scholars, not counting the evening technical classes and the attached Women’s and Obukhov Schools.

The workers displayed unlimited confidence in the school-mistresses. Thus the gloomy watchman from the Gromov timberyards, with face beaming, told the teacher that he had been presented with a son; a consumptive textile-worker wanted her to teach her enterprising suitor to read and write; a Methodist workman who had spent his whole life seeking God wrote with satisfaction that only on Passion Sunday had he learned from Rudakov (another pupil) that there was no God at all. And how easy things had now become. For there was nothing worse than being a slave of God, as you couldn’t do anything about it. But to be a human slave was much easier, as here a fight was possible. Then there was a tobacco-worker who used to drink every Sunday until he lost all human semblance. And he also seemed so saturated with the smell of tobacco, that one could not bend over his exercise-book without one’s head beginning to swim. He wrote (using pot-hooks and hangers and leaving out the vowels) to the effect that he had found a three-year-old kiddy in the street, that she was living in their artel,{4} that they would have to hand her over to the police, and it was a pity. Came a one-legged soldier and said—"Mikhail, whom you taught to read and write last year, died