The key Kiental resolution on the “International Socialist Bureau,” based on a draft by Zinoviev, came close to meeting the demands of the left by condemning this organization for turning into “an accomplice in the policy of the so-called ‘defense of the fatherland’ and of civil peace” and contending that the
International can recover from its collapse as a definite political power only to the extent to which the proletariat is able to liberate itself from all imperialist and chauvinist influences and reenter the road of class struggle and of mass action.134
Even though Lenin’s demand for a split in the International once again went down in defeat, after the conference adjourned a member of the right, S. Grumbach, declared that “Lenin and his friends have played an important role at Zimmerwald and a decisive role at Kiental.”135 Indeed, the Kiental resolutions laid the groundwork for the Third International, which Lenin was to found in 1919.
Lenin owed his relative success at Zimmerwald and Kiental in 1915–16, as he did later in the Russia of 1917, to the fact that he took the socialists at their word and demanded that they make good on their rhetoric. This earned him a small but devoted following in foreign socialist circles. More importantly, it paralyzed his opponents and prevented them from giving him battle because with this stand he seized the moral high ground of the socialist movement. The leaders of the International despised Lenin for his intrigues and slander, but they could not disown him without disowning themselves. His tactics enabled him to push the international socialist movement steadily leftward and eventually to split off from it his own faction, exactly as he had done in Russian Social-Democracy.
This said, it must be noted that the war years were for Lenin and Krupskaia a time of severe hardship, a time of poverty and isolation from Russia. They lived in quarters that bordered on slums, took their meals in the company of criminals and prostitutes, and found themselves abandoned by many onetime friends. Even some former followers came now to view Lenin as a crackpot and “political Jesuit,” a spent man.136 When Krasin, once one of Lenin’s closest associates, now living in comfort as an official working for war industries, was approached for a contribution for Lenin, he pulled out two five-ruble notes, saying: “Lenin does not deserve support. He is a harmful type, and you never know what crazy ideas will sprout in his Tatar head. To hell with him!”137
The only shaft of light in Lenin’s exile was an affair with Inessa Armand, the French-born daughter of two music-hall artists and the wife of a wealthy Russian. Influenced by Chernyshevskii, she broke with her husband and joined the Bolsheviks. She met Lenin and his wife in Paris in 1910. She soon became Lenin’s mistress, tolerated by Krupskaia, as well as a faithful follower. Although Bertram Wolfe speaks of her as a “dedicated, romantic heroine,” Angelica Balabanoff, who had many occasions to meet Inessa, describes her as “the perfect—almost passive—executrix of [Lenin’s] orders,” “the prototype of the perfect Bolshevik of rigid, unconditional obedience.”138 She seems to have been the only human being with whom Lenin ever established intimate personal relations.
Lenin did not lose faith in the ultimate outbreak of a European revolution, but the prospect seemed remote. The Imperial Government had sufficiently weathered the military and political crisis of 1915 to be able to launch a major offensive in 1916. From sporadic communications sent him by his Petrograd agent, Alexander Shliapnikov, he knew of the deteriorating economic situation in Russia and the popular discontent in its cities,139 but he disregarded the information, apparently convinced of the ability of the Imperial regime to overcome such difficulties. Addressing a gathering of socialist youths in Zurich on January 9/22, 1917, he predicted that while a revolution in Europe was unavoidable, “we old-timers perhaps shall not live [to see] the decisive battles of the looming revolution.”140 These words he spoke eight weeks before the collapse of tsarism.
*On the primary and secondary materials concerning the young Lenin which are kept concealed in Soviet depositories, see Richard Pipes, ed., Revolutionary Russia (Cambridge, Mass., 1968), 27, note 2.
†I have attempted to draw a picture of Lenin’s early intellectual and spiritual evolution on the basis of the available documentary evidence in Revolutionary Russia, which I edited. Most of the information on the pages which follow comes from this work as supplemented by two other of my writings: Struve: Liberal on the Left, 1870–1905 (Cambridge, Mass., 1970) and Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885–1897 (Cambridge, Mass., 1963). Of the secondary sources, the most valuable is Nikolai Valentinov’s The Early Years of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1969).
*Chernyshevskii was the leading radical publicist of the 1860s, the author of What is to be done?, a novel that urged young people to abandon their families and join communities committed to new positivistic and utilitarian ways of thinking. He regarded the existing world as rotten and doomed. The hero of the novel, Rakhmetov, is portrayed as a “new man” of iron will, totally dedicated to radical change. Lenin borrowed the title of Chernyshevskii’s novel for his first political tract.
*In 1792, in a transport of exuberance, Robespierre exclaimed: “I am neither the courtier of the people, nor its moderator, nor its tribune, nor its defender—I am the people itself!” (Alfred Cobban, Aspects of the French Revolution, London, 1968, 188.)
†He eventually came to tolerate his personal cult because, as he explained to Angelica Balabanoff, it was “useful, even necessary”: “Our peasants are suspicious; they don’t read, they must see in order to believe. If they see my likeness, they are persuaded that Lenin exists.” Impressions of Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1964, 5–6).
*A. N. Potresov, Posmertnyi sbornik proizvedenii (Paris, 1937), 297. Tatiana Aleksinskii concurs: “For Lenin, politics superseded everything and left room for nothing else”: La Grande Revue, XXVII, No. 9 (September 1923), 459.
*In order for his common-law wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, to accompany him to Siberia, Lenin had to marry her. Since the Russian government did not recognize civil marriages, the wedding (July 10, 1898) had to take place in church: Robert H. McNeal, Bride of the Revolution: Krupskaya and Lenin (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1972), 65. Neither Lenin nor his bride ever referred in their writings to this embarrassing episode.
*See above, Chapter 1.
†Lenin, PSS, IV, 375–76. A decade later, Benito Mussolini, ten years Lenin’s junior and a leading Italian socialist, arrived independently at the same conclusion. In 1912 he wrote that “a worker who is merely organized has become a petty bourgeois who obeys only the voice of interest. Every appeal to ideals finds him deaf: B. Mussolini, Opera omnia, IV (Florence, 1952), 156. On another occasion Mussolini said that workers were, by their very nature, “pacifistic”: A. Rossi, The Rise of Italian Fascism, 1918–1922 (London, 1938), 134.
* At the end of the month, to elude surveillance by the Russian and Belgian police, the congress moved to London.
*Parvus first formulated the theory of “uninterrupted” or “permanent” revolution (without, however, using either name) in the introduction to Trotsky’s pamphlet Do deviatogo Ianvaria (Geneva, 1905), pp. iii-xiv, dated Munich, January 18/31, 1905. On this subject, see Isaac Deutscher, The Prophet Armed: Trotsky, 1879–1921 (New York-London, 1954), 112–14, 118–19, 149–62, and Z. A. B. Zeman and W. B. Scharlau, The Merchant of the Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) (London, 1965), 76–79. The concept of “Revolution in Permanence” had been briefly promoted by Marx in 1848: Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (New York, 1960), 77.