This modest volume makes no pretence of being a ‘definitive’ biography of V. I. Lenin. Readers seeking such are referred with confi dence to Robert Service's trilogy. It is not even a standard biography of the first Soviet leader in that I have not sought to discuss any aspects of his childhood or to replicate James White's treatment of his intellectual evolution. Neil Harding's study of Lenin's ideological contributions to Marxism is unchallenged herein, and the study of the early history of Russian Social Democracy has been left to the admirable works of Allan Wildman, Leopold Haimson and John Keep. Lenin's role in 1917 and in leading the early Soviet state is also beyond the scope of my study.

The objective of this volume is more limited. I wish to examine the period from Lenin's defeat at a plenum of his Central Committee in January 1910 until the outbreak of the First World War, and at the same time to present a more nuanced picture of his personality. The four and a half years before the war are the murkiest and least studied in party history. During this time Lenin sought to build an all-Bolshevik Party. The degree to which he was successful is important to an understanding of its contribution to the rising unrest in Russia on the eve of the war and perhaps also to its subsequent success during the revolutions of 1917.

2 December 1920

I make this entry in my diary on the eve of setting out to the islands of Torres Strait and New Guinea. My primary purpose is to take cinematographic films and plates for a travelogue entertainment. … I am cooperating with the Anglican mission who, in return for me taking a film illustrating their work in the region I propose visiting, will provide me with maintenance and transport facilities. The films will subsequently be lectured to by Lowell Thomas, I reserving the rights for Australasia. The Lowell Thomas rights will be subject to agreement previously made between us. … So new adventure and faces lay ahead of me and I go out into the world knowing no one, into unknown places, yet filled with enthusiasm and feeling that success alone is with my own efforts.

3 December 1920

The Taiynan moved away from the wharf at 10.30 a.m. The wife and little ones and my old friends Allison and Lipman waving until we had passed beyond their vision, behind the wharves and warehouses. I then turned to the fo'c'sle head to watch the bows clearing away the free seas and to look out over the splendid harbour which nature has endowed our ugly city with. Calm sea and exquisite weather heralded our passage from the port into the open sea, and then northward in the eye of a light nor'easter for Newcastle.

5 November–4 December 1914

… On the morning of 5 November and our tenth day from leaving Buenos Aires, the obscure outlines of a rugged and mountainous coast was dimly observed through the snow squalls immediately to the south. Unable to accurately determine a harbour entrance in the mist, we were pleasurably surprised to notice, making in our direction, a small craft, which on coming alongside proved to be the Sitka, a whaler from Leith Harbour. Captain Michelson her able skipper piloted us into Cumberland Bay, where the Endurance laid [at] anchor in a superb miniature haven, King Edward Cove. King Edward Cove is a small basin encircled by noble cliffs that rise precipitously above its sheltered waters some 1500 feet. Apart from the transcending scenery one is at once struck by the pungent effluvium which hangs obscure yet fluid-like over its greasy waters. This is an emanation from the Grytviken Whaling Station at the head of the cove, and from innumerable derelict whale carcasses that float in the vicinity. … At Grytviken, the carcasses are allowed to go to waste; so polluted are the foreshores of King Edward Cove with grease and decaying carcasses that it is impossible to view the trade with other than loathing. … South Georgia boasts a magistrate, customs officials, and a post-office and a meteorological station. A pleasing phase of our stay was the insistent hospitality tendered us by the principals – all of whom are Norwegian.

It is interesting to speculate on the career V. I. Lenin would have chosen had he not lived in a time and a place where most intellectual professions were closed to men and women of non-conformist thought. It has been suggested that he had the makings of an admirable university teacher: his mind was well-disciplined, his speech was articulate and his knowledge was impressive. Only once, however, did the pressures of revolutionary and governmental leadership allow him to practice his pedagogical talents. During the summer of 1911, while living in the small French town of Longjumeau, he organized a little-known school for underground party workers. This chapter is primarily an account of that school. It is also a study of Lenin's schismatic approach towards two earlier schools established by his factional opponents in Capri and Bologna.

The unsuccessful Revolution of 1905 had two deleterious effects on the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP). Inside Imperial Russia, the revolutionary intelligentsia – who had borne the burden of organizing, agitating and propagandizing the urban masses – were now disillusioned with the underground and went into emigration, retired from revolutionary activity, or found themselves in tsarist prisons. This meant that the tasks of leading and organizing the workers' movement had to be assumed by the workers themselves who lacked their predecessors' theoretical training and practical experience necessary for revolutionary propagation and underground survival.

Arrival in the Middle East

10 September 1940

… [W]e reached the head of the Persian Gulf and came to the entrance of the Shat-el-Arab – the short broad river made by the conflux of the Tigris and Euphrates. The head of the gulf is an abysmal dreariness of mud – silt brought down by these great streams and deposited in the sea through the ages.

Abadan with its great oil refineries passed below and then Basra soon came into view; unfortunately, the air was heavy with dust whirled up from the desert by a 50 miles per hour headwind and visibility was restricted. The Shat-el-Arab at Basra is a magnificent stream at least half a mile wide, with docks and steamers and myriads of native craft gliding along with their huge white sails, like moths fluttering on a narrow mirror. The country for miles around is green with plantations of date palms, for it must be remembered that Iraq (old Mesopotamia) supplied the world with more than half its dates. …

We practically stepped from the Circe onto the fine garden lawn before the Shat-el-Arab hotel in the late afternoon and escaped much of the blazing heat. After the usual customs formalities conducted in the inspection room of the hotel, we were into the lounge hall for afternoon tea. An Aladdin's palace in the wilderness! In this splendid hall the ultra modern contrasted queerly with the native attendants.

Only twice in its 93-year history did the RSDRP-CPSU fail to call a party congress more or less within the prescribed time-span – the ten-year lapse that followed the Fifth (London) Congress in 1907 and the 13-year gap after the Eighteenth Congress in 1939. In each instance the absence of a congress was a result in part of the current leader's disinclination to hold one, in part of the party's own atrophy, and in part of more pressing concerns of a military nature. While the congresses that did meet in the 1930s were dismal, predictable and perhaps avoidable affairs, the same cannot be said of those of the pre-revolutionary period.

The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDRP) accorded its congresses the position of being ‘the highest organ of the party’. Only such gatherings had the power to pass binding resolutions, to alter the party's programme, to amend its statutes, or to elect its central bodies. It is not surprising, therefore, that much of the early history of the party has been written around the struggles and the changes that occurred at its congresses, particularly the Second (1903), Fourth (1906) and Fifth. These three gatherings – all of which took place in the relative safety of western Europe – were large, long and expensive.2 Nevertheless, they were seen as essential in the building of the party and in the defining of its role. The Fifth Congress declared that henceforth congresses should be called every year by the Central Committee.

The ‘July Days’ were a pivotal period in the history of the Russian Revolution. They also nearly led to the destruction of the Bolshevik Party. On the evening of 3 July 1917, soldiers from the First Machine Gun Regiment began demonstrating against the Provisional Government and the possibility that they might be sent off to fight in the disastrous Kerensky Offensive. They were soon joined by other soldiers from Petrograd's revolutionary garrison, by workers from the striking Putilov Works and, the next morning, by 20,000 sailors from the Kronstadt naval base. This growing but leaderless mob posed a problem for the Bolshevik Central Committee as well as for the Provisional Government. The soldiers were reacting to agitation by lower-echelon Bolsheviks in the city's Military Organization; they were shouting Bolshevik slogans about ‘Down with the Provisional Government’ and ‘All Power to the Soviets’; and they were well armed. The party leadership, however, felt that any attempt to seize power in the summer of 1917 was ill advised and premature. Initially, the demonstrators were urged to call off their protests and then, when this appeal was ignored, to make sure their actions were ‘peaceful’ so as not to justify government countermeasures. This hesitant advice also went unheeded by many of the 400,000 demonstrators. One reason that the Central Committee was following rather than leading events in the streets was that its own leader, V. I. Lenin, was not on the scene.

It is the nightmare of most authors that just before or immediately after the publication of a book that has taken years to complete, someone will find an unknown archive or gain access to a previously closed file and that material found therein will seriously undermine an argument the author has made. This happened to me in 1992. A year and a half earlier I had delivered a 400-page manuscript entitled Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist to Cambridge University Press. I had consulted the few relevant archives in the West, all of the pertinent primary materials published in the Soviet Union, and the secondary literature on my topic. I was aware that the Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism–Leninism had unpublished material in Moscow but I knew from personal experience and that of other researchers that access to these particular records, even in the name of glasnost', was virtually impossible. The publisher's referees recognized this fact and accepted my argument that Armand's long overlooked career as a Bolshevik revolutionary and later as a Soviet feminist could be convincingly documented with the evidence then available. I was reasonably certain that no ‘smoking gun’ lay in Soviet archives that might demolish my picture of her professional career.

Armand's private life was another matter. Western scholarship, ever since Bertram Wolfe's exposé in 1963, has concentrated on her relationship with Lenin.

In September 1915 the First International Socialist Conference of antiwar Marxists met in the Hotel-Pension Beau Séjour in the Swiss village of Zimmerwald. Ninety years later, Ralf Beck, owner of the Gasthaus Löwen in the same picturesque village, announced plans to commemorate the event by offering his customers delicacies such as a ‘Trotsky plat du jour’ and a ‘Lenin dessert’. His announcement was doubly ironic.

As Leon Trotsky, one of the participants of the 1915 conference, recalled, a few days after the 38 delegates dispersed, ‘the hitherto unknown name of Zimmerwald was echoed throughout the world. This had a staggering effect on the hotel proprietor – the valiant Swiss told [Robert] Grimm [the conference's organizer] that he looked for a great increase in the value of his property and accordingly was ready to subscribe a certain sum to the funds of the [proposed] Third International. I suspect, however, that he soon changed his mind.’ Indeed he did. After the war and the Russian Revolution, his visitors were mostly frugal European Marxists and Soviet officials bent on making a Leninist shrine out of his hotel. To the staunchly anti-communist villagers, this was not a welcome development. In 1971 most of the Beau Séjour was torn down, the rest was turned into a private residence, and village resistance prevented the erection of any form of plaque or monument to mark the event.

March 15, 1917, was a dismal day in Zurich. There was a heavy mist in the air and patches of dirty snow on the ground. The mood of V. I. Lenin was no better than the Swiss weather when a fellow émigré burst into his apartment to announce that there had been a revolution in Petrograd. The response of the disbelieving Bolshevik leader was to wander down to the offices of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung where press clippings confirmed the rumours but offered few details. A brief visit to the Russian Reading Room did little to relieve either his depression or his uncertainty. Abandoning plans to work in the cantonal library, Lenin set off instead to climb the Zurichberg. It was hardly a strenuous excursion. The crest of the Zurichberg was only 270 metres above the city and a couple of kilometres from its centre. The walk, however, cleared his head and helped to restore his optimism concerning the day's unexpected news. It was to be the last of his many forays into the Swiss mountains, for on that same day Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his throne in the first of a series of events that was to bring Lenin to power eight months later.

The fact that he should choose to climb a mountain, albeit a small mountain, on a crucial day of the February Revolution was not inconsistent with Lenin's character.

‘The most important thing is to prove that only we are the party… Unless they accept our conditions, there will be no rapprochement’. Alternatively, ‘agree to nothing, walk out, promise to submit the “counter-proposals” of our dear comrades to our own congress’ which will complete the task of building an all-Bolshevik Social Democratic Party. With these uncompromising words of wisdom Lenin sent Inessa Armand off to do battle with G. V. Plekhanov, L. D. Trotsky, P. B. Aksel'rod and I. O. Martov at the ‘Unity’ Conference which the International Socialist Bureau (ISB) called in a last vain attempt to unify the factious groups of Russian Social Democracy. The 28 delegates who attended this three-day meeting in Brussels were impressed neither by Armand's reluctant presentation nor by Lenin's vitriolic arguments. Indeed, Bolshevik conduct in Brussels served only to unify the disparate non-Bolshevik groups and to ensure them the firm support of Karl Kautsky, Emile Vandervelde, Camille Huysmans and the other influential leaders of the Socialist (Second) International. As a result of the conference, the Tenth Congress of the International, scheduled to convene in Vienna on 23 August 1914, very likely would have witnessed the expulsion of the Bolsheviks from the European socialist movement. The outbreak of the First World War, however, saved Lenin this indignity. It also served for many years to obscure from historical scrutiny the events which transpired in Brussels and the potential consequences of the Bolshevik defeat.

21 August 1917

The day has at last arrived and I have left London. After an early morning's packing and visiting administration offices, I caught the staff train from Charing Cross at 12.50 p.m. Never had I dreamt there were so many generals, colonels and majors engaged on staff work. The train was packed with them. … A couple of hours brought us to Folkestone where the Princess Victoria, laden with returning troops, and the staff steamer were waiting. The large amount of equipage carried by myself, gave me an anxious time keeping it from getting mixed with the ponderous amount of baggage dumped promiscuously in the vessel's hold. Whilst waiting, several aeroplane scouts treated us to a magnificent display of diving, turning and manoeuvring. So apparently easy and graceful were their movements, that there appeared no more danger in their evolutions than if they had been birds on the wing. I met Wilkins on board; and so we left the shores of dear old England for the grim duties of France. The weather was beautiful, and our vessel, convoyed by two destroyers, did her 17 knots without a movement. Soon the French coast came in sight and the details of Boulogne gradually became more distinct. We had a particularly fine view just before entering the port of the beach, where great numbers of folk were bathing.