Reminiscences of Lenin

428 Pages·2015·1.289 MB·English

by  Nadezhda Krupskaya

Reminiscences of Lenin
Nadezhda K. Krupskaya
Also know as   Krupskaya's “Reminiscences of Lenin”
Written: 1933
First Published in English by: International Publishers, 1970
Nadezhda Konstantinovna "Nadya" Krupskaya
26 February 1869 – 27 February 1939
Published by the Anarcho-Communist Institute as an e-book in  2015

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Part I.
St. Petersburg
In Exile
Munich
Life in London
Geneva
The Second Congress
After the Second Congress
The Year 1905
Back in St. Petersburg
St. Petersburg and Finland
Again Abroad
Second Emigration
Years of Reaction
Paris
The Years of New Revolutionary Upsurge 1911-1914
The Years of The War
Last Months In Emigration
In Petrograd
Underground Again
On the Eve of the Uprising
Part III
Preface to Part III
The October Days
From the October Revolution to the Peace of Brest
lyich Moves to Moscow, His First Months of Work in Moscow
1919
Introduction

The reminiscences printed in this volume cover the period 1894 to 1917
from the time I first met Vladimir Ilyich up to the October Revolution. I
have often been told that my reminiscences are rather sketchy. Everyone, of
course, is eager to learn all he can about Ilyich, and besides, the epoch itself
was one of tremendous historical importance. It saw the development of a
mass movement among the workers, the creation of a strong staunch party
of the working class, steeled under the most difficult conditions of
underground activity and the steady growth of working-class consciousness
and organization. It was an epoch of desperate struggle, which ended in the
victory of the proletarian socialist revolution.
Heaps of interesting articles and books could be written both about that
epoch and about Ilyich. The purpose of these reminiscences is to give a
picture of the conditions under which Vladimir Ilyich lived and worked.
I wrote only of those things which stood out most vividly in my memory.
These reminiscences were written in two stages. Part I, covering the period
1894-1907, was written a few years after Lenin's death. It contains
recollections relating to his work in St. Petersburg, to the time of his
Siberian exile, the Munich and London periods of his first emigration, the
period preceding the Second Congress of the Party, the Second Congress
itself and the period immediately following it right up to 1905. Then come
recollections of 1905 both in Russia and abroad, and finally of the period
1905-1907. I wrote them for the most part at Gorki, where I roamed about
the large house and the overgrown paths of the park in which Ilyich had
spent the last year of his life. The years 1894-1907 saw the upsurge of the
young working-class movement, and one's thoughts were involuntarily
drawn back to that period, when the foundations of our Party were laid. I
wrote the first part almost entirely from memory. The second part was
written a few years later.
One had to study very hard during those years, to reread Lenin sedulously,
to learn to link up the past with the present, to learn how to live with Ilyich
without Ilyich. And so the second part of the book differs from the first. The
first has a more personal touch, the second deals more with Ilyich's interests
and thoughts. I think both parts should preferably be read together. The first
part is closely linked with the second, and the latter, if read alone, may
strike the reader as being less "reminiscential" than it really is.
Part II of the reminiscences was written at a time when many other
recollections and symposiums, as well as the second edition of Lenin's
Works, had come off the press. This, to a certain extent, determined the
character of the reminiscences of the second period of emigration. It
enabled me to check up on myself. Moreover, the period they deal with
(1908-1917) was far more complex than the first.
The first period (1893-1907) covered the early steps of the working-class
movement, the efforts to build up a Party, the rising wave of the first
revolution directed chiefly against tsarism, and the defeat of that revolution.
The second period – that of the second emigration – was far more involved.
It was a summing up of the revolutionary struggle of the first period, a
period of struggle against the reaction, a period of fierce struggle against
opportunism of every kind and description, a struggle for the necessity of
adapting our work to every kind of condition without any falling off in its
revolutionary content.
The period of second emigration was a period of impending world war,
when opportunism in the working-class parties led to the collapse of the
Second International, when entirely new problems faced the world
proletariat, when new paths had to be laid, and the foundation of the Third
International built up stone by stone, when the struggle for socialism had to
be started under the most adverse conditions. In emigration, all these
problems were sharply focussed and concrete.
Unless these problems are understood it is impossible for anyone to grasp
how Lenin rose to be the leader of October, the leader of the world
revolution. Leaders are formed in and grow out of the struggle, from which
they draw their strength. No reminiscences of Lenin during the period of
emigration are conceivable that do not link up every detail of his life with
the struggle that he waged at that time.
The nine years of his second emigration had not changed Ilyich a bit. He
worked just as hard and as methodically, he took the same keen interest in
every little detail, was able to put two and two together and had lost none of
his ability to see the truth and face it, no matter how bitter it was. He hated
oppression and exploitation as cordially as ever, was just as devoted to the
cause of the proletariat, the cause of the working people, and took their
interests just as closely to heart. His whole life was bound up with that
cause. It came naturally to him, he could not live in any other way. He
fought opportunism and all and every backdown as passionately and
sharply as ever. He was still capable of breaking with his closest friends if
he saw them acting as a drag on the movement; he would go up to
yesterday's opponent in a simple comradely way, if it was essential to the
cause, and say what he had to say frankly and bluntly as he had always
done. He was just as fond of nature, of the spring woods, the mountain
oaths and lakes, the noise of the big cities, the working-class crowd; he
loved his comrades, movement, struggle, life in all its numerous facets. The
same Ilyich, except that, watching him day by day, one would notice that he
had become more reticent, still more kindly towards people, and that he
would often lapse into meditation, roused from which his eyes would have a
fleeting shadow of sadness in them.
Those years of emigration had been trying ones, and had taken their toll of
Ilyich's strength. But they had moulded a fighter out of him, the kind of
fighter the masses needed to lead them to victory.
N. Krupskaya
Part I.

St. Petersburg
1893-1898

Vladimir Ilyich came to St. Petersburg in the autumn of 1893, but I did not
get to know him until some time later. Comrades told me that a very erudite
Marxist had arrived from the Volga. Afterwards I was given a pretty well-
thumbed copy-book "On Markets" to read. The manuscript set forth the
views of technologist Herman Krasin, our St. Petersburg Marxist, on the
one hand, and those of the newcomer from the Volga on the other. The
copy-book was folded down the middle, and on one side H. B. Krasin had
set forth his views in a scrawly hand with many crossings out and
insertions, while on the other side the newcomer had written his own
remarks and objections in a neat hand without any alterations.
The question of markets interested all of us young Marxists very much at
the time.
A definite trend had begun to crystallize among St. Petersburg Marxist
study-circles at that time. The gist of it was this: the processes of social
development appeared to the representatives of this trend as something
mechanical and schematic. Such an interpretation of social development
dismissed completely the role of the masses, the role of the proletariat.
Marxism was stripped of its revolutionary dialectics, and only the bare
"phases of development" remained. Today, of course, any Marxist would be
able to refute that mechanistic conception, but at that time it was a cause of
grave concern to our St. Petersburg Marxist circles. We were still poorly
grounded theoretically and all that many of us knew of Marx was the first
volume of Capital; as for The Communist Manifesto, we had never even set
eyes on it. So it was more by instinct than anything else that we felt this
mechanistic view to be the direct opposite of real Marxism.
The question of markets had a close bearing on the general question of the
understanding of Marxism.
Exponents of the mechanistic view usually approached the question in a
very abstract way.
Since then more than thirty years have passed. Unfortunately, the copy-
book has not survived, and I can only speak about the impression which it
made on us.
The question of markets was treated with ultra-concreteness by our new
Marxist friend. He linked it up with the interests of the masses, and in his
whole approach once sensed just that live Marxism which takes phenomena
in their concrete surroundings and in their development.
One wanted to make the closer acquaintance of this newcomer, to learn his
views at first hand.
I did not meet Vladimir Ilyich until Shrovetide. It was decided to arrange a
conference between certain St. Petersburg Marxists and the man from the
Volga at the flat of engineer Klasson, a prominent St. Petersburg Marxist
with whom I had attended the same study-circle two years before. The
conference was disguised as a pancake party. Besides Vladimir Ilyich, there
were Klasson, Y. P. Korobko, Serebrovsky, S. I. Radchenko and others.
Potresov and Struve were to have been there, too, but I don't think they
turned up. I particularly remember one moment. The question came up as to
what ways we should take. Somehow general agreement was lacking.
Someone (I believe It was Shevlyagin) said that work on the Illiteracy
Committee was of great importance Vladimir Ilyich laughed, and his
laughter sounded rather harsh (I never heard him laugh that way again).
"Well, if anyone wants to save the country by working In the Illiteracy
Committee," he said, "let him go ahead." It should be said that our
generation had witnessed in its youth the fight between the Narodovoltsi
and tsarism. We had seen how the liberals, at first "sympathetic" about
everything, had been scared into sticking their tail between their legs after
the suppression of the Narodnaya Volya Party, and had begun to preach the
doing of "little things."
Lenin's sarcastic remark was quite understandable. He had come to discuss
ways of fighting together, and had had to listen instead to an appeal for the
distribution or the Illiteracy Committee's pamphlets.