LRB, Vol. 43 No. 1 · 7 January 2021
To King’s Cross Station
by Sheila Fitzpatrick
The Spark That Lit the Revolution: Lenin in London and the Politics That
Changed the World
by Robert Henderson.
I.B.Tauris, 270 pp., £17.99, March 2019, 978 1 78453 862 0
Lenin liked London. He arrived in April 1902, not long after his
release from Siberian exile, and spent about a year in the city before
moving on to Geneva, returning for several briefer visits over the next
decade. Like a good tourist, he explored the East End on foot and
investigated the rest of the city from the top of a bus. He went to
local workers’ meetings he had found out about from announcements in the
newspapers and listened to Irish orators in Hyde Park. He didn’t have
much to do with the English, that nation of shopkeepers, but being an
itinerant Russian revolutionary he didn’t have to. There was no need to
be grateful to them for their generous right of asylum or award them
points for liberal tolerance. The local Russian émigrés, a ramshackle,
quarrelsome lot but generous to new arrivals, were the relevant
community from Lenin’s standpoint, but even they didn’t matter to him a
great deal. Lenin liked London primarily because he had fallen in love.
The object of his love was the British Museum – or rather, the great
circular reading room of the library (now renamed the British Library,
stripped of all its grandeur and romance and moved to the Euston Road)
that was then the hidden heart of the Museum. His favourite seat is said
to have been number L13.
This last detail is not in Robert Henderson’s book, which leads me to
wonder whether it’s wrong. Henderson, a former Russian curator at the
British Library, knows everything there is to know about Lenin’s love
affair with the BM, and tells it all. This is a level of detailed
Leniniana seldom encountered since the demise of the Soviet Union, but
even those diligent Soviet researchers who used to track Lenin’s every
move and hour didn’t know the BM as Henderson does. It’s what gives his
book its charm. I hadn’t anticipated enjoying yet another report about
Lenin in emigration, quarrelling with one fellow revolutionary after
another, developing rashes from ‘over-tension’ and writing endless
revolutionary polemics. Lenin was living in London the year before his
intransigence split the embryonic Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
at its 1903 congress in Geneva, so I expected yet another detailed
immersion in the party’s factional politics. But, happily, readers will
find little on ‘the politics that changed the world’ or even ‘the spark
that lit the revolution’ – other than some discussion of London printing
arrangements for the newspaper Iskra, or ‘Spark’, which Lenin edited
until 1903. This is essentially a book about the everyday life of émigré
Russian revolutionaries in London in the early 20th century.
While the intensity of Lenin’s feeling for the British Museum sets him
apart, he wasn’t the only Russian revolutionary to use its reading room.
‘They all, without fail, would ... register as readers,’ Henderson
reports, and he has ferreted out applications from more than ninety of
them, including Prince Peter Kropotkin, Sergei Stepniak, Vladimir
Burtsev and Vera Zasulich. Lenin was more difficult to track down than
some, as he first applied under his London pseudonym of Dr Jacob Richter
and later under his own name of Ulyanov, registered by the BM as
Oulianoff – but Henderson found him in the end. ‘I came from Russia in
order to study the land question’ was Dr Richter’s reason for desiring
admission, and study it he duly did, usually arriving early in the day
and working in the library until the afternoon. He spent ‘half his time
there’, his wife recalled, and was eloquent in its praise. ‘How pleasant
and comfortable it is to work there,’ he told a young Russian disciple.
You had your own desk, with room to spread out your notes; books were
brought almost immediately; the reference department and specialist
staff had no equal; and you could find Russian books there that you
couldn’t get in Petersburg or Moscow. Altogether, Europe could offer ‘no
better library than the British Museum’.
This was not a fleeting love affair, soon forgotten. In 1908, Lenin came
over from Paris for more than a month to work in the British Museum on
his philosophical treatise Materialism and Empirio-criticism. He also
presented his own published works to the library, as detailed in an
appendix to Henderson’s book: at least four separate donations,
including The Agrarian Question by V.C. Oulianov, presented by the
author, Rue des deux ponts 17, Geneva, 14 March 1908, and Development of
Capitalism in Russia by V. Ilin, presented by Mr Oulianoff of the same
address, 11 April 1908.
But there were other libraries in London too. A key institution for the
émigré community was the Russian Free Library at 16 Whitechapel Lane, up
a rickety staircase smelling of ‘cabbage and fried fish’ (it was next
door to the kosher ‘Russian Odessan restaurant’), to a dusty room full
of shabbily dressed patrons reading Russian and Jewish newspapers. The
Free Library had been set up by Aleksei Teplov, a former member of the
violent revolutionary organisation Narodnaya Volya (‘People’s Will’),
with the moral and financial support of a more established cohort of
Russian revolutionaries, including Vladimir Burtsev, then editor of the
historical magazine Byloe, and V.G. Chertkov, Tolstoy’s literary
executor. This was the ‘cultural hub of the Russian East End’, complete
with excursions to museums, botanical gardens and London Zoo, as well as
the predictable socialist lectures, at which both Lenin and Trotsky
spoke in 1902. It also served as an informal employment agency for
translators and language teachers.
Since there were Russian revolutionaries in London, there had to be
revolutionary conferences. Russian Social Democratic Labour Party
congresses were held in London in 1905 and 1907, with Lenin in
attendance on both occasions. Henderson quotes Victor Sebestyen’s
assessment of the 1905 congress – in his recent book Lenin the Dictator
– as ‘probably the most pointless of all the various leftist conferences
before 1917’. Henderson disagrees, but such gatherings did take place
under challenging circumstances. The head of the Russian secret police
claimed that a third of the delegates at the 1907 congress were in the
pay of his service. Russian spies weren’t the only ones paying
attention: Scotland Yard was in the game too, and at the 1905 congress,
held in an upstairs room of the Crown and Woolpack in Clerkenwell, one
of its Special Branch men hid in a cupboard to eavesdrop, though he
probably knew no Russian. Despite the revolutionaries’ precautions
against infiltration by unauthorised persons, the same man got into
another meeting under heavy disguise and was able to report that ‘a vote
on revolution’ had been carried by 21 to seven.
Police spy stories provide some of the liveliest pages of The Spark That
Lit the Revolution. Especially good is an account by a Russian police
spy, Jean Edgar Farce, detailed from Paris to work in London, about the
difficulties of plying his trade in an English context. In a letter to
his superiors in 1906, Farce complained of how hard it was to operate in
a place where, unlike in Paris, there were ‘no doormen whose souls can
be bought for 100 sous’: ‘If you knock on the door and make up some
story to obtain further information, 99 times out of 100 the door will
be shut in your face and you will be reported to the tenants.’ It’s
poignant, now, to learn that ‘in London, everyone knows what time their
post should arrive,’ and if it comes late ‘a simple complaint to the
central post office’ will result in ‘postal detectives’ being notified
and the dispatch of ‘one or several lettres-trappes’ (a mystifying
phrase that Henderson leaves untranslated and unexplained).
Among M. Farce’s targets in the London community of Russian émigrés were
Konstantin Takhtarev and his wife, Apollinariya Yakubova. Takhtarev, a
graduate of St Petersburg University and the Medical-Military Academy,
had served his revolutionary apprenticeship in Russia, including a
prison spell, before arriving in London in the late 1890s and finding
lodgings off Tottenham Court Road – convenient for the British Museum,
to which both he and his wife soon acquired readers’ cards. Their visits
to the BM were duly monitored by Farce. Takhtarev, the son of a general,
presumably had independent means; in any case, he was known for his
generosity to other Russians, including Lenin and his wife. This was
despite doctrinal differences: Takhtarev was inclined to the moderate
side of Russian social democracy, which usually inhibited social
relations with Lenin. But Lenin continued to treat him in a polite and
comradely way, perhaps partly out of fondness for his wife, the female
lead in Henderson’s story.
A woman of ‘rare beauty’ possessed of an ‘unconquerable spirit’,
Apollinariya Yakubova has clearly won Henderson’s heart, and he thinks
she won Lenin’s, too. Like Lenin’s younger sister, Olga, and his wife,
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Yakubova was a graduate of the Bestuzhev Courses in
St Petersburg, Russia’s first higher education institution for women.
She became a revolutionary in the early 1890s and – like Lenin,
Krupskaya and Takhtarev at various points in that decade – was arrested
for her activities. Rumour has it that before proposing to Krupskaya –
with their marriage allowing them to spend their Siberian exile together
– Lenin had proposed to Yakubova and been turned down. Henderson
exhaustively canvasses this possibility before deciding to accept the
opinion of an earlier commentator that ‘such matters cannot be
documented’ and so one should ‘move on’. Yakubova seems to have had the
hardest time of the four – she was held in prison for 14 months before
being sent into exile – and it wasn’t until 1899 that she escaped,
making her way to Latvia via Berlin, where she met up with Takhtarev and
they married. In London, as well as extending hospitality to new Russian
arrivals and doing her own work in the British Museum, Yakubova helped
Aleksei Teplov run the Russian Free Library’s lecture series (her own
contribution was ‘A Short Course in English History’) before becoming
the group’s secretary and treasurer when it was formalised as the East
End Socialist Lecturers’ Society.
Henderson’s book includes six glossy photographs of Yakubova, out of a
total of 29 plates, and a 12-page postscript (‘Apollinariya’s Story’) on
her later fate. I liked the look of her from the pictures. As a young
woman she was lively-looking and attractive (‘rare beauty’ may be going
too far), but her face becomes more strained over time, the expression
more set. She and Takhtarev returned to Russia in 1906, and she gave
birth to a son, Misha, not long after, when she must have been almost
forty. But then the story turns sad: she soon fell ill with TB and,
after long periods of medical treatment that separated her from her
husband and son, died a few months before the outbreak of the First
World War. Takhtarev became a sociologist at the maverick
‘reflexologist’ Vladimir Bekhterev’s Psycho-Neurological Institute in St
Petersburg until, in 1924, the year of Lenin’s death, his lectures were
banned, presumably for lack of Marxist orthodoxy; he died of typhus in 1925.
Of these four young revolutionaries arrested in St Petersburg in the
mid-1890s and meeting up again in London in 1902, the only one to
survive beyond her mid-fifties was Krupskaya, who died in Moscow in
February 1939, having just turned seventy. She is an also-ran in
Henderson’s story; her later life, in contrast to Yakubova’s, merits no
postscript. Krupskaya’s early friendship with and later estrangement
from Yakubova is examined, and her memoirs of Lenin are used for
background, but otherwise she is featured, cursorily, only as Lenin’s
‘dutiful wife’. Noting her various unflattering party nicknames (‘fish’,
‘herring’), Henderson quotes Jean Edgar Farce’s unappealing description
of her in 1905 as a ‘32-year-old woman, tall, brown hair, blinks her
eyes, walks with a slight stoop, dressed in dark grey’.
It is nothing new for Krupskaya to have a bad press, whether from
contemporary revolutionaries and police spies or later historians. A
Russian police report made a few years after Farce’s (quoted by
Krupskaya’s biographer, Robert McNeal) is even more unflattering: ‘tall,
about forty years old, medium brown hair, thin, stoops, grey eyes, small
nose, thin lips. Dressed always slovenly.’ Nikolai Valentinov, a
Menshevik who met Lenin a few years after the London period and felt
that Krupskaya disapproved of their friendship, judged her in his
Encounters with Lenin to be ‘intellectually ... a very commonplace woman
... unfeminine’, with a tendency to enunciate truisms ‘in the tone of a
schoolmistress’. This was taken up by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his
virtuoso act of ventriloquism, Lenin in Zurich, in which his narrator
reflects that he had been right to choose Krupskaya over the ‘more
vivacious and nicer looking’ Yakubova, since even ‘on the most trivial
of subjects’ Krupskaya’s ‘thoughts and feelings never differed from his
own’, but later notes that their conversations had started to bore him:
‘Her replies, delivered with long-winded solemnity, were so obvious as
to be superfluous. Never a fresh and original response.’
For those brought up Soviet citizens, as Solzhenitsyn was, the problem
with Krupskaya was that, in her unsought role as relict and eulogist of
the lost leader, her image was so solemnly and drearily good. For
Western historians, perhaps the main problem was that, of the three
Bolshevik women anyone had heard of, she was the non-glamorous one who
wasn’t interested in sexual emancipation – the opposite to the
challenging Alexandra Kollontai and Lenin’s elegant later love, Inessa
Armand. Krupskaya was a feminist, of course (she kept her own name after
marriage, unlike Kollontai and Armand), but the women’s issues that
concerned her – crêches for working women, literacy schools etc – seemed
mundane. She evidently thought that sex was boring, and celebrity too.
When, in the Soviet Union in early 1930s, she was forced to entertain
George Bernard Shaw and Lady Astor on a visit, she wore her oldest
dress, claimed to have no sugar in the house for tea, and was
straight-out rude to Shaw when, rattled by her evident hostility, he
expressed the hope that Lenin had left her well provided for. To be
sure, Krupskaya tended to dislike important and, in particular,
self-important men, putting Shaw in a distinguished company that
included Stalin and Trotsky. But rudeness, or at any rate grumpiness,
was her forte, and it stood her in good stead in her career as an
Oppositionist after Lenin’s death. She mocked Trotsky (also an
Oppositionist, but in a competing group) for repeating the new mantra
that ‘the Party is always right,’ which she found silly, and became the
only leading Oppositionist who, despite all the private pressure and
public heckling Stalin could bring to bear, stubbornly refused to make
grovelling recantations. Bearing all this in mind, let’s go back to the
beginning of Henderson’s story and try reading Krupskaya into it.
Krupskaya disliked London. Her Reminiscences of Lenin – written in the
early 1930s under vigilant Soviet political surveillance that only
partially blurred her individual voice – painstakingly list the things
Lenin liked about the city. Although many of these were things they did
together, she doesn’t associate herself with his liking but simply
reports it. ‘We’ appears in the context of unfavourable impressions: ‘We
know little about English socialists in their home surroundings. The
English are a reserved people ...’ On landladies and their families: ‘We
were able to study to our heart’s content all the abysmal philistinism
of petty-bourgeois English life.’ ‘We found that all those “ox-tails”,
skates fried in fat and indigestible cakes were not made for Russian
stomachs.’ There are no songs of praise about the British Museum. It
rates a few brief mentions, and backhanded ones at that: for instance,
that Lenin didn’t like going to museums – ‘I mean the ordinary museums,
not the British Museum, where he spent half his time’ – and, when forced
(evidently by Krupskaya) to leave the reading room and look at the BM’s
collections of medieval armour and Egyptian vessels, he quickly became
bored.
Unfortunately, Henderson didn’t find out – or at least doesn’t tell his
readers – whether Krupskaya had a reader’s card for the museum. If we
assume that she did not – unlike all the other Russian revolutionaries,
including Yakubova – the contrast between Lenin’s experience of life in
London and Krupskaya’s appears in a wholly new light. Up to this time,
they had been more or less equals, first as revolutionaries and then as
exiles. In St Petersburg, Krupskaya had her own job, teaching at a
workers’ evening school, and a sense of vocation as a teacher never left
her. Now she was stuck as an émigrée in London, with a theoretical
knowledge of English that turned out to be unusable in practice, and
forced for the first time to be a housewife, which she disliked both in
practice and in principle, and was, by general consensus, no good at.
‘To get the best out of a foreign country, you have to go there when you
are young and are interested in every little thing,’ she had written to
a correspondent in Russia in 1901 (when she was 32 and clearly didn’t
think of herself as such). From London in 1902 she wrote to Lenin’s
sister Maria to say that ‘Volodya is getting really interested, as with
everything that he does’ – but that, she implies, was a fortunate quirk
of his temperament. Krupskaya, for her part, had become ‘strangely
averse’ to writing letters because there was nothing interesting to
write about. Don’t, whatever you do, come abroad to live, she wrote to
another friend; she wouldn’t wish it even on an enemy. ‘People somehow
fade terribly quickly here. A person arrives full of joy in life, talks
about everything under the sun, and in two months all the spirit has
gone out of him.’ Except for Lenin, of course, but then he had his love
affair with the British Museum. ‘He usually went there first thing in
the morning, while Martov’ – Julius Martov, who was running Iskra with
Lenin – ‘and I ... would go through the mail together.’ In this way, she
wrote in her Reminiscences, Vladimir Ilyich ‘was relieved of much of the
tiresome routine’.
It wasn’t just that Krupskaya disliked London. She must also, and quite
specifically, have disliked the British Museum. The eleven-volume Soviet
edition of Krupskaya’s Pedagogical Works includes a 700-page volume on
libraries in which the British Museum gets a single mention. This is in
an article on ‘Lenin’s work in libraries’ which repeats the sentence
from her Reminiscences about his spending ‘half his time’ there. In her
own person, Krupskaya had approving words for the American public
library system (known to her only at second hand), and she wrote warmly
about ‘our’ work in Swiss public libraries, especially the Zurich one.
Yes, ‘our’ work. ‘We’ is back here, both in her accounts of Swiss
library work and in Lenin’s. They were working together on their
separate research projects in the Zurich city library when revolution
broke out in Russia in February 1917. When the chance finally came to
return in April, courtesy of the German ‘sealed train’, Krupskaya was
given two hours to pack up the household, pay the landlady and ‘return
books to the library’.
Unlike Lenin, who sent the British Museum copies of his work, Krupskaya
didn’t offer any of her publications, including her Reminiscences of
Lenin. Henderson may be right that Krupskaya took against Yakubova
because of Lenin’s earlier attachment to her. But that affection, even
on Henderson’s account, was infinitely less than his love for the
British Museum. Krupskaya, whose aversions were strong and stubborn, if
often obliquely expressed, and who tended to view Lenin’s enthusiasms
with a healthy dose of scepticism, had even more reason to dislike the
BM than to dislike Yakubova and English landladies. Indeed, it may be
that this aversion was reciprocated. Henderson occasionally cites the
1930 Russian-language edition of Krupskaya’s Reminiscences of Lenin in
his book, but never the most complete Soviet edition of 1957. This is
presumably because he works out of what is now the British Library,
which, falling below the high standards of comprehensive acquisition
noted by Lenin, failed to get a copy.
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