Читать книгу Lenin: A biography - Harold Shukman - Страница 17

Some ‘professional revolutionaries’ lived quite well. One would search the Soviet sources in vain for any account of where Lenin and his family found the money to live on after their father died, yet they could travel abroad almost at will, and lived in Germany, Switzerland and France. For seventeen years Lenin lived in the capital cities of Europe and stayed in some of the most congenial resorts. What was the source of the funds that he needed not merely for his activities as leader of the Bolsheviks, but also for ‘doing nothing’?

The Bolsheviks had a rule that only the highest Party authorities should know the details of the Party’s finances; often only the General Secretary himself. Millions of Communists – as they called themselves after October 1917 – dutifully paid their dues without the least notion of where their money was going. Not even the government knew how much was being spent on ostentatious Party occasions such as congresses, support for foreign Communist Parties and illegal groups, and funding Comintern right up to 1943. The Central Committee reviewed the budget for Comintern annually. For instance, on 20 April 1922 the Politburo accepted a forecast budget of 3,150,600 gold roubles for Comintern activities for the year. There was no discussion, despite the fact that other complex matters of state expenditure were on the agenda, such as reparations which Soviet Russia had agreed to pay to Poland under the terms of the Treaty of Riga, and the allocation of gold to the intelligence services for special purposes.¹²⁵ A week later, Zinoviev, as chairman of Comintern, tabled a paper on the budget, and the previous week’s forecast was revised upwards by a further reserve of 400,000 gold roubles as a first instalment. Zinoviev explained that he needed 100,000 gold roubles at once ‘for agitation among the Japanese troops’.¹²⁶ The passion for financial secrecy was, however, born long before, and it extended to the official account of Lenin’s early life as well.

Hired in January 1892 as an assistant to the barrister A.N. Khardin, the young Ulyanov stuck the job for barely eighteen months. He acted as defence counsel in a few cases, mostly of petty theft – personal items from a merchant’s suitcase, bread from a warehouse – in his own words barely enough ‘to cover the selection of court papers’. At the time of the revolution of 1917, Lenin, aged forty-seven, had spent all of two years in paid work. How was the impression formed in the Soviet public mind that, contrary to the ‘materialistic philosophy of history’, questions of Lenin’s everyday life and existence counted for nothing alongside the worldwide issues of the revolution? The first historian to raise the question of Lenin and money was the émigré and former Bolshevik and Menshevik Nikolai Valentinov, who based the various accounts he published, mostly after the Second World War, on first-hand knowledge and scrupulous research.

After the death of Ilya Ulyanov, his widow, as the widow of a State Counsellor and holder of the Order of Stanislav First Class, received a pension of 100 roubles a month. This compares with the eight roubles a month that Lenin received from the state as an exile in Shushenskoe, and that he found adequate for rent, simple food, and laundry.¹²⁷ Could all the Ulyanovs have lived on their mother’s pension, even though it was a good one by contemporary standards, and study, travel, go abroad? She went abroad herself three times, to Switzerland, France and Sweden, on two occasions with her daughter Maria. And Maria in addition went abroad five times, sometimes for lengthy periods. The elder daughter, Anna, also went abroad several times, staying in Germany and France for almost two years. Tickets, hotels, food, purchases and unforeseen expenses on long trips, all took considerable funds, certainly more than the pension would stand. Anna and Maria and Lenin’s wife all testified that they lived on the mother’s pension and on what their father had managed to save in his lifetime. But this does not square with the reality, and Krupskaya herself says so: ‘They are writing about our lives as if we were in penury. It’s not true. We were never in the position of not being able to afford bread. Were there such people among the émigrés? There were some who had had no income for two years and got no money from Russia, and they really starved. We were not like that. We lived simply, that’s the truth.’¹²⁸

Neither in Russia nor abroad did Lenin suffer deprivation. He lived on his mother’s resources, his ‘Party salary’, the donations of various benefactors at various times. Pamphlets and articles printed for illegal distribution inside Russia earned precious little, while the émigré market for such works was scarcely more rewarding. His mother owned part of the estate at Kokushkino which the family had put at the disposal of a certain Anna Alexandrovna Veretennikova, who paid Lenin’s mother her admittedly not very large share of the rent regularly. The sale of the estate helped to fill the family’s coffers. In February 1889 Lenin’s mother acquired a farm at Alakaevka in Samara province. Her agent for the purchase was Mark Yelizarov, Anna’s future husband. For 7500 roubles the family had acquired just over 200 acres, much of it non-arable. The original intention had been to carry on a farming business, with Vladimir in charge, and in fact in their first year they acquired some livestock, and sowed some wheat, buckwheat and sunflowers. But Vladimir soon became bored as ‘farm manager’, and began, in Nikolai Valentinov’s words, ‘to live on the farm like a carefree squire staying at his summer home. He would ensconce himself in the lime-tree avenue and prepare for the state exams at St Petersburg University, study Marxism and write his first work, an article called “New Economic Movements in Peasant Life”.’¹²⁹ The article describes the exploitation of peasants and land, criticizes many of the ills of capitalism in the countryside, such as money-lending, leasehold, the increasing number of ‘kulaks’, or rich peasants. Yet when Lenin was put off by his own experience of farming, the family leased out land to a kulak, one Mr Krushvits, who paid rent to the Ulyanovs for several years, substantially supplementing their income.

There may have been another reason for leasing out the land. The peasants of the region were extremely poor, and those around Alakaevka especially so. Numbering thirty-four households, together they had about 160 acres of arable, roughly the same as the Ulyanovs. Farming in the midst of such appalling poverty may have been felt by the budding Marxist as an uncomfortable moral position, especially as he himself had sued his peasant neighbours for letting their cattle wander onto his crops. None of this prevented the family from summering at Alakaevka every year, reminding Krushvits of his responsibilities, and collecting their rent. Eventually it was decided to sell the farm, and a document composed by Vladimir in his mother’s name shows the sale having been made to S.R. Dannenberg in July 1893.¹³⁰

Maria Alexandrovna had evidently decided it was better to realize her assets and keep the money in the bank, together with what she had been given by her late husband’s brother, and live on the interest. Meanwhile, no one in the family was earning anything. Vladimir soon gave up legal practice, and Anna, Dmitri and Maria were long-term students, and showed no inclination to supplement the family income. As Valentinov wrote: ‘the money deposited in the bank and converted into state bonds, together with the pension, constituted a special “family fund”, which Lenin’s very thrifty mother capably managed over many years. They all dipped into this fund … They certainly were not rich, but over this long period there was enough …’¹³¹ Enough, for instance, for Vladimir to be able to write to his mother from Geneva: ‘I had hoped Manyasha [Maria] would come … but she keeps putting it off. It would be good if she came in the second half of October, as we could pop down to Italy together … Why can’t Mitya [Dmitri] also come here? Yes, invite him, too, we’ll have a great time together.’¹³²

Such a secure material environment must have played a significant part in Lenin’s intellectual development, enabling him to run his own life, decide for himself where to live, where to go, what to do. Had he been the ‘proletarian’ some authors would have liked him to be, his position among the leaders of the Russian social democratic movement would have been immeasurably less important. He would not have had time for self-education, literary work or Party ‘rows’.

After the failure of the 1905 revolution, when revolutionaries – including Lenin – who had returned hopefully from Europe now had to retrace their steps, an important source of support for Lenin and Krupskaya in their various stopping-places was the Party fund, a source that was never revealed in published documents, but whose existence Lenin himself confirmed in a letter to his mother in 1908: ‘I still get the salary I told you about in Stockholm.’¹³³ In fact, references to money abound in Lenin’s voluminous correspondence with his mother and sisters, usually reporting that he had received a draft, or asking for money to be sent urgently, and so on.¹³⁴

Another, and rather more bountiful, source of income was the Party. The Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) was set up, rather shakily, at its First Congress in 1898 by a handful of provincial organizers. It was quickly decimated by the police, but its name remained as the banner for whoever was capable of gathering revolutionary-minded workers and intellectuals for the purpose of building a large and powerful revolutionary party. In February 1900, as soon as he had completed his term of exile in Siberia, Lenin departed for Europe, where he launched a newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), and began recruiting his own agents. These he sent back into Russia, both to distribute his message via Iskra and to obtain the allegiance of local forces.

By 1903 it seemed Lenin and his closest comrades had gathered sufficient backing to hold a new Party Congress, called the Second, for the sake of keeping the already well established name. This took place in the summer of 1903 in Brussels, moving to London when the Russian secret police proved too intrusive. Far from consolidating the Party’s forces, however, the Second Congress witnessed their split into Leninists and anti-Leninists, or Bolsheviks (Majorityites) and Mensheviks (Minorityites). These new labels came about as the result of one particular vote which gave Lenin a minuscule majority.

In the period following this fiasco, with the resulting contest for various resources and Party assets such as printing facilities and, especially, money, Lenin had to devote a great deal of attention to establishing his own, Bolshevik, fund. He needed it to maintain his ‘professional revolutionaries’, to conduct meetings and congresses, support his own publishing activities, and finance agitation inside Russia. The ‘professional revolutionaries’ of course knew about this fund, which in the final analysis Lenin personally controlled, since he was the creator of the Bolshevik wing of the Party, as well as its ideologist and chief organizer. For instance, Lev Trotsky, who was then on very bad terms with Lenin, wrote in June 1909 to his brother-in-law Lev Kamenev, who was Lenin’s right-hand man: ‘Dear Lev Borisovich, I have to ask a favour which will give you no pleasure. You must dig up 100 roubles and cable it to me. We’re in a terrible situation which I will not describe: enough to say that we have not paid the grocer for April, May, June …’ Kamenev left it up to Lenin to decide whether or not to provide Trotsky with the money, but there is no indication of the outcome.¹³⁵

At times the Bolsheviks had very considerable funds at their disposal, some of it legitimate in origin, some of it not. Some came from local Party committees in Russia, who in turn gathered it from their members and supporters: on the eve of the 1905 revolution, there were probably 10,000 paid-up members of the Party altogether. In his memoirs, the former Bolshevik A.D. Naglovsky wrote that in the summer of 1905 he was sent by the Kazan committee to Geneva to hand over 20,000 roubles to Lenin and await instructions.¹³⁶ In fact, the origins of such money were tortuous. Lenin himself frankly admitted after the revolution: ‘The old Bolshevik was right when he explained what Bolshevism was to the Cossack who’d asked him if it was true the Bolsheviks stole. “Yes,” he said, “we steal what has already been stolen.”’¹³⁷

At the 4th Congress of the RSDLP in 1906, at which the two factions were meant to have reunited, a fierce struggle took place between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks over whether such ‘expropriations’ in the interests of the revolution should be countenanced. The Bolsheviks proposed that armed raids on banks be allowed. The Mensheviks opposed this vigorously, and succeeded in passing their own resolution. Nevertheless, the robberies continued, with Lenin’s knowledge. Krupskaya, who was well informed on the subject, wrote frankly that ‘the Bolsheviks thought it permissible to seize tsarist treasure and allowed expropriations’.¹³⁸ At the centre of this bandit venture stood the Bolsheviks Iosif Dzhugashvili (Stalin) and Semyon Ter-Petrosyan (Kamo). The operation was run by Leonid Krasin, a highly qualified electrical engineer.

The biggest ‘expropriation’ took place at midday on 26 July 1907 on Yerevan Square in Tiflis (Tbilisi), Georgia. As two carriages carrying banknotes to the bank entered the square, a man in an officer’s uniform jumped out of a phaeton and starting shouting orders. From nowhere, a gang of ‘expropriators’ emerged, throwing bombs and firing shots. Three people fell dead by the carriages, and many more were wounded. Sacks containing 340,000 roubles were rapidly thrown into the phaeton, and in three or four minutes the square was deserted.¹³⁹

The stolen banknotes were of large denominations, and the Bolsheviks were not able to convert them all even by the time of the revolution. Those who attempted to do so, as Krupskaya recalled, were arrested. ‘In Stockholm they picked up Strauyan of the Zurich group, in Munich, Olga Ravich of the Geneva group and Bogdasaryan and Khodzhamiryan who had just left Russia, and Semashko in Geneva. The Swiss burghers were terrified to death. All they could talk about was the Russian expropriators.’¹⁴⁰ The Tiflis operation was the most ambitious of all those carried out by the radical wing of the RSDLP. Other ‘expropriations’ included the seizure of large sums from the steamship Nikolai I in the port of Baku, and the robbery of post offices and railway ticket offices. Officially, the Bolshevik Centre was not involved, but part of the loot was sent by Dzhugashvili and Ter-Petrosyan to the Bolsheviks,¹⁴¹ and Lenin paid small ‘Party salaries’ – sums ranging from 200 to 600 French francs – to the dozen or so members of his inner Party nucleus, the Bolshevik Centre.¹⁴²

There are many unpublished documents in the Lenin archives concerning financial affairs, some of them requiring careful deciphering. One thing is clear enough, however: Bolshevik money was under Lenin’s control. He taught himself to handle money and to keep all kinds of bills and invoices, and detailed lists of his own expenses, often of trivial amounts. There is, for instance, a ‘personal budget’ for 3 July 1901 to 1 March 1902, running to thirteen pages.¹⁴³ Money figures in much of his correspondence with the family. His earnings from the pamphlets and newspaper articles he wrote for the revolutionary press formed a small, if not negligible, part of Lenin’s income, as his literary output was of interest to only a few people. It was his family and Party ‘injections’ taken from the donations of rich sympathizers that supported him.

Formally, Lenin stood aside from the ‘expropriations’, preferring, as in many of his ventures, to remain off-stage. His speeches and editorials, whether published in his own weekly, Proletarii, founded in 1906, or in other revolutionary organs, however, reveal a more ‘balanced’ position on the ‘expropriations’ than a simple prohibition. For instance, six months after the 4th Congress, which had condemned ‘partisan actions’, he wrote: ‘When I see social democrats proudly and smugly declaring, “We are not anarchists, we’re not thieves or robbers, we are above all that, we condemn partisan warfare,” I ask myself if these people realize what they are saying.’¹⁴⁴ He had earlier stated that the combat groups must be free to act, but with ‘the least harm to the personal safety of ordinary citizens and the maximum harm to the personal safety of spies, active Black Hundreds, the authorities, the police, troops, the navy and so on and so forth.¹⁴⁵ The Black Hundreds were ultra-rightist organizations, with such names as the Union of Russian Men, the Russian Monarchist Union, the Society for Active Struggle against Revolution and Anarchy. Rabidly anti-Semitic and anti-Western, they organized virulent press campaigns, as well as violent physical attacks, against the liberal and socialist movements.

In 1911, Kamo (Ter-Petrosyan) was in Lenin’s sitting-room in Paris, eating almonds and recounting the details of his arrest in Berlin in 1907, when the authorities had caught him trying to transport explosives and weapons. He had spent the last four years in prison in Germany, feigning insanity. Krupskaya recalled that ‘Ilyich listened and felt so sorry for this selflessly brave, childishly naive man with such a burning heart, willing to do great deeds … during the civil war Kamo found his niche and again performed miracles of heroism.’¹⁴⁶ Kamo did not know that he and his ilk were merely blind tools of the Bolshevik Centre, needed to acquire money ‘for the revolution’ by whatever means. For the Bolsheviks violence and ‘exes’ were part of a wide range of methods to be used as the need arose. It is likely, however, that the ‘exes’ were one of the main sources of the Party’s pre-revolutionary funds, under the control of Lenin’s trustees Krasin, Bogdanov, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Ganetsky and a few others. This explains how his mother’s ‘injections’ into her son’s personal budget were regularly topped up by his ‘Party salary’, which though not great, was no less than the average wage of a European worker. According to Valentinov, the maximum Party salary for the Bolshevik leaders was fixed at 350 Swiss francs.¹⁴⁷ This was the amount Lenin stated he received every month, while not declining the money his mother went on sending him right up to her death in 1916.

A major source of funding, both to the Party coffers and for Lenin’s personal needs, came from private benefactors. At the turn of the century the Russian social democrats, like the liberals, enjoyed a certain degree of sympathy, not only from sections of the intelligentsia, but also from a number of industrialists, who looked to the revolutionaries for liberation from the conservative attitudes of the autocracy. The relationship sometimes took on bizarre form. The ‘N. Schmidt affair’, for instance, sometimes seemed like a detective story, and even now aspects of it are unclear, as the papers relating to the case were carefully concealed for many years. The official version has always been that the ‘affair’ took place for the good of the Bolshevik cause. In Krupskaya’s words, the funds which came from this source provided a ‘sound material base’.¹⁴⁸

The Schmidt affair began with the millionaire Savva Morozov, the head of a large merchant dynasty in Moscow. His relatives were known as patrons of the arts and social enterprises. One was a celebrated collector of ceramics, while another collected rare Russian and foreign paintings. Both collections ended up as Soviet state property. The Morozovs built hospitals, founded courses to eradicate illiteracy, supported theatres. The well-known newspaper Russkie vedomosti (Russian News) depended on Savva Morozov’s largesse for many years. At the beginning of the century, under the influence of Maxim Gorky, he gave money to publish the social democratic paper Iskra and to help social democratic organizations. His motivation was probably less social than religious or spiritual, expressing a desire to support not only culture but also the oppressed. A somewhat confused individual, his mind haphazard and unstable, he was terrified of going insane, and in Cannes in May 1905, in a moment of deep depression, he killed himself. Through Gorky, he left a large amount in his will to the Bolsheviks – 100,000 roubles, according to some sources.

Savva’s nephew, Nikolai Pavlovich Schmidt, owned a large furniture factory in Moscow, and also supported the social democrats. During the armed uprising in Moscow in December 1905 he was arrested for supporting the ‘insurgents’, and in February 1907, aged twenty-three, he killed himself in prison in suspicious circumstances. It is still unclear why he should have done this, just before he was to be released on his family’s surety. In any event, he left part of his estate to revolutionary causes, although not exclusively to the Bolsheviks. According to the law, his estate should have gone to his two sisters, Yekaterina and the sixteen-year-old Yelizaveta, and a younger brother, but then two of Nikolai’s young Bolshevik acquaintances, Nikolai Andrikanis and Viktor Taratuta, entered the scene.

It seems that these two had been deputed to ensure that Nikolai’s money came to the Bolsheviks. Their assignment was to court, conquer and marry the girls, nothing less. Taratuta, whom Lenin knew well, and his comrade performed their rôles to perfection, and both girls were swept away by the romance of ‘preparing for revolution’ in Russia. Soon, however, Andrikanis began having second thoughts about handing over the inheritance to the Party. Lenin wrote (the text in the archive is in the hand of Inessa Armand) that ‘one of the sisters, Yekaterina Schmidt (married to Mr Andrikanis), questioned giving the money to the Bolsheviks. The conflict was settled by arbitration in Paris in 1908, with the good offices of members of the Socialist Revolutionary Party … The judgment was that the Schmidt money should go to the Bolsheviks.’¹⁴⁹ In 1909 the two newly married couples arrived in Paris.

Andrikanis, however, would only part with a small amount. When it was decided that he should be ‘tried’ by a Party court, he simply left the Party, which had to be content with the crumbs ‘Person X’, as he was codenamed, had deigned to cast its way.¹⁵⁰ In order to act before the funds of the younger sister, Yelizaveta (who was still a minor, and whose financial affairs were in the hands of a trustee), were also cut off, a session of the Bolshevik Centre was held in Paris on 21 February 1909. Zinoviev, who took the minutes, recorded: ‘In January 1908 Yelizaveta X told the Bolshevik Centre … that in carrying out her brother’s will as correctly as possible, she considered herself morally obliged to give the Bolshevik Centre the half-share of her brother’s property that had come to her legally. That half, which she inherited by law, includes eighty-three shares in Company X and about 47,000 roubles of available capital.’ The document is signed by N. Lenin, Grigorii (Zinoviev), Marat (V. Shantser), V. Sergeev (Taratuta), Maximov (A. Bogdanov), Y. Kamenev.¹⁵¹

It was agreed that the money should be transferred after sale of the shares. In November, Taratuta and Yelizaveta came back to Paris and handed Lenin more than a quarter of a million francs. By now the Bolsheviks had received more than half a million francs, as documents written and signed by Lenin indicate: ‘In accordance with the decision and calculations of the executive commission of the Bolshevik Centre (plus the editorial board of Proletarii) of 11 November 1909, I have received from Ye. X. two hundred and seventy thousand nine hundred and eighty four (275,984) francs.’¹⁵² He issued a receipt to Yelizaveta and Taratuta, stating: ‘We, the undersigned, acting in the matter of the money with power of attorney from Comrade Vishnevsky, in concluding the case conducted by the entire Bolshevik Centre, and in taking over the remainder of the money, accept before you the obligation to answer to the Party collegially for the fate of this money. Signed N. Lenin, Gr. Zinoviev.’¹⁵³

This was not the end of the affair. After various vain attempts to reunite the Party, the Mensheviks raised the question of uniting the Party funds. The question was, who was to control the capital, which of course contained more than just the Schmidt inheritance. After long and heated argument, it was agreed in 1910 that the Party’s resources be handed over to three depositors, the well-known German social democrats Clara Zetkin, Karl Kautsky and Franz Mehring, and in due course a substantial part was deposited in a bank under their names. But the reunification turned out to be a fiction, with the Party carrying on its in-fighting as before. The trustees found themselves pressured and accused by both wings of the Party, as only they had the authority to disburse the money. Lenin demanded they hand all the money back to the Bolshevik Centre. Kautsky replied, on 2 October 1911: ‘Comrade Ulyanov, I have received your letter. You will receive a reply once I have consulted Madame Zetkin and Mr Mehring. You probably know that he has retired as a depositor owing to illness. As a result of this, the depositors can take no decision if there is a difference of opinion.’ He added a postscript: ‘My work is suffering from the great waste of time and energy spent on this hopeless matter. Therefore I can no longer continue my functions. With Party greetings, K. Kautsky.’¹⁵⁴

Clara Zetkin tried to break the deadlock by suggesting that all the money be returned as the property of the entire Party. A tug-of-war ensued, involving lawyers, long drawn-out correspondence, and caustic comments addressed to the depositors. In a letter to G.L. Shklovsky on Zetkin’s position, Lenin wrote: ‘“Madame” had lied so much in her reply, that she’s got herself even more confused …’¹⁵⁵ The case went to court, and a typical letter from Krupskaya, written on 23 May 1912 under Lenin’s instructions, to their lawyer, a certain Duclos, reads:

Sir,

My husband, Mr Ulyanov, has left for a few days and has asked me to acquaint you with the enclosed documents. A letter from the three depositors dated 30 June 1911. A memorandum from the manager of the National Bank’s agency in Paris dated 7 July 1911 concerning the despatch of a cheque to Mrs Zetkin for the sum of 24,455 marks and 30 Swedish bonds. A decision of the RSDLP of January 1912 concerning the sum held by Mrs Zetkin.

Signed N. Ulyanova.’¹⁵⁶

Zetkin held her ground, handing out some money for various meetings, and the row only subsided after the First World War had intervened. The money at issue, however, was the smaller part of the Schmidt inheritance, the greater part having remained all the time in the hands of the Bolshevik Centre, i.e. Lenin’s, as the chief controller of the Party’s finances. In August 1909, for instance, he sent an order to the National Discount Bank in Paris to sell stock held in his name and to issue a cheque for 25,000 francs to A.I. Lyubimov, a member of the Bolshevik Centre.¹⁵⁷ Thus, the true ‘depositor’ of the Party funds was Lenin himself, and to a great extent the Bolsheviks in emigration depended financially on him.

The Mensheviks, fully aware of the murky background of the Schmidt affair, tried to depict Taratuta as a ‘Party pimp’ who was securing Lenin’s finances by sleazy methods. When Taratuta complained about attacks on him by Bogdanov – another member of the Bolshevik Centre, but by now Lenin’s rival – Lenin secured a special resolution of the Bolshevik Centre, amounting to a Party indulgence and emphasizing that what had happened ‘in no way evokes the slightest weakening of the trust the Bolshevik Centre has in Comrade Viktor [Taratuta]’.¹⁵⁸ After 1917 Taratuta continued to enjoy Lenin’s trust and confidence.

Lenin had other sources of funds beyond Morozov, Schmidt and Gorky. In 1890, for example, he had met A.I. Yeremasov, a young entrepreneur from Syzran in the province of Simbirsk, who had been involved with local revolutionary circles.¹⁵⁹ At the end of 1904 Lenin asked him to help fund the Bolshevik newspaper Vpered in Paris.¹⁶⁰

There were many others. The relationship between Lenin and Maxim Gorky was a special one. Gorky, who was internationally famous before the revolution, for his play The Lower Depths (1902), his novel The Mother (1906) and his three-part autobiography, gave the Bolsheviks much material help. This did not not prevent him from taking an independent position at critical moments, as the essays he published in 1917–1918 in his own newspaper, Novaya zhizn’ (New Life), show.¹⁶¹ Their correspondence was voluminous, and there is hardly one letter from Lenin in which he does not complain about money. Among other things, he asked Gorky to donate some of his royalties to supporting this or that Bolshevik publication, ‘to help drum up subscriptions’, ‘to find a little cash to expand Pravda’, or nudged him with such hints as, ‘I’m sure you won’t refuse to help Prosveshchenie’, ‘hasn’t “the merchant” started giving yet?’, or ‘Because of the war, I’m in desperate need of a wage and so I would ask you, if it’s possible and won’t put you out too much, to help speed up the publication of the brochure’.¹⁶² While Gorky helped the Bolsheviks with both money and influence, in November 1917 he could still refer to Lenin darkly as ‘not an omnipotent magician, but a cold-blooded trickster who spares neither the honour nor the lives of the proletariat’.¹⁶³

From the little we have so far seen of Lenin’s financial affairs, it is plain that he was not in need, although he was always ready to raise the issue. Biographers have frequently quoted his letter from Zurich to Shlyapnikov in Stockholm in the autumn of 1916, in which he wrote: ‘As for myself, I need a salary. Otherwise we’ll simply perish, I mean it!! The cost of living is diabolical, and we’ve nothing to live on. You’ve got to drag the money by force out of [Gorky] who has two of my brochures (he must pay, now, and a bit more!) … If this doesn’t happen, I swear I won’t make it, and I am really, really serious …’¹⁶⁴

Perhaps the death of Lenin’s mother in July 1916, which had so shaken him, explains the dramatic tone of this letter. He was, after all, still controlling the Party finances, which, though depleted, were accessible to him. Furthermore, before the war broke out Krupskaya had inherited money from an aunt in Novocherkassk, Lenin’s sisters Anna and Maria were still sending occasional remittances, and even when they returned to Russia in April 1917, Lenin and Krupskaya were not without funds. The fact is, Lenin, whether in Russia or abroad, was never short of money. He could decide whether to live in Bern or Zurich, he could travel to London, Berlin or Paris, visit Gorky on Capri, or write to Anna, ‘I’m on holiday in Nice. It’s sheer luxury here: sunny, warm, dry, the southern sea. In a few days I return to Paris’.¹⁶⁵ Doss-houses and attics were not for him. He wrote to Anna in December 1908 on arriving in Paris, ‘We’ve found a good apartment, fashionable and expensive: 840 francs plus about 60 francs tax, and about the same for the concierge per year. Cheap by Moscow prices (4 rooms, kitchen, larder, water, gas), but it’s expensive here.’¹⁶⁶

Lenin was punctilious about keeping accounts and planning his budget. He kept notes of what he had spent on food, train fares, mountain holidays and so on,¹⁶⁷ and carried these slips of paper around with him from country to country, city to city, long after their ‘expiry date’, until he finally ensconced himself in the Kremlin, whereupon he handed them over to the Central Party Archive.

He loved dealing with financial matters. In June 1921 he ordered 1878 boxes of valuable objects to be brought into the Kremlin.¹⁶⁸ Perhaps it made him feel more secure. On 15 October of that year the Politburo ordered that no expenditure of the gold reserve was to take place without its – i.e. Lenin’s – authority.¹⁶⁹ He loved holidays in expensive resorts, and he often went to the theatre and cinema. All this was perfectly natural behaviour, especially for the hereditary nobleman Lenin described himself as,¹⁷⁰ and there was no need for him to make a big secret of it. What remains a mystery, however, is not the financial details of his everyday life, but how he, like his comrades Trotsky and Stalin – none of them ever having worked for a living, and none of them having anything in common with the working class – could think they had the right to determine the fate of a great nation, and to carry out their bloody, monstrous experiment.

^* For decades the Party archives also concealed evidence that both Marx and Engels fathered illegitimate children – Marx by his housekeeper Elena Denmuth.¹⁰¹