Throughout his life, Lenin’s family circle consisted mostly of women: mother, sisters, wife and mother-in-law. In the absence of any children of his own, he himself was the constant object of their care and concern. He differed from his Party comrades in his puritanical restraint, steadiness and constancy, and would have been a model husband, had it not been for the ten-year relationship he began in 1909 with a lively woman revolutionary called Inessa Armand.
In none of the mass of writing about Lenin is there any mention of an affair of the heart in his youth. It appears that his preoccupation with books and revolutionary dreams left no room for the normal feelings that usually occupy the mind of any young man. There is no broken first marriage, no stormy romance, no love at first sight, no unhappy love affair. Yet there was something like an undying love. When he returned to St Petersburg in January 1894, Lenin established contacts, legal and illegal, with the local Marxists. With little to do, he was free to spend time with his new acquaintances. One day in February, at the apartment of an engineer called Klasson, a group of Marxists gathered in the cosy sitting-room, among them two young women, Apollinaria Yakubova and Nadezhda Krupskaya. At first, Lenin spent time with both of them, then he started visiting Nadezhda’s home on the Nevsky Prospekt on a more regular basis. Nadezhda lived with her mother, Yelizaveta Vasilievna, the widow of an army officer whose career had been cut short when he was cashiered for reading Chernyshevsky and Herzen, and who apparently belonged to the revolutionary organization Land and Freedom. He had been dismissed and even put on trial, then after several years of indecision was exonerated, but banned from public service. When he died, the family had moved to St Petersburg, where they lived on his pension. Nadezhda taught at a Sunday evening school for workers.
Her mother made tea while the young people talked about Plekhanov, Potresov, the book the young man – who was already quite bald – was writing, the need to establish contact with European social democrats. We do not know what Yelizaveta thought of her future son-in-law, except that she remained independent of him all her life, and was known to have been openly critical of ‘people who don’t do any real work’.71 The clever young man kept appearing at the apartment, but he seemed more interested in politics than in Nadezhda.
Lenin was also friends with Apollinaria Yakubova, and sometimes the three of them would go out together. When he was arrested in December 1895 for being part of a Marxist propaganda circle – an almost routine event for men of Lenin’s cast of mind at the time – both young women tried to visit him at the pre-trial prison on Shpalernaya Street. Lenin wrote Nadezhda a coded message, saying they should walk past the prison at 2.15 so that he could catch a glimpse of them through the window.72 It is difficult to establish the nature of the relations between these three young people, especially as the almost hundred-year-old ‘conspiracy’ about this area of their lives has destroyed almost any trace.
Apollinaria was a teacher, like Nadezhda, and a Marxist, and Lenin apparently proposed to her, but was rejected in favour of K.M. Takhtarev, the editor of the journal Rabochaya mysl’.73 Also like Nadezhda, she was exiled to Siberia in 1896. She and Lenin maintained a correspondence, notably when Lenin was in Munich after 1900 and she was in London, in which he reminded her of their ‘old friendship’,74 and they met several times in London in 1902 and 1903, where he was then living and working on his Party newspaper, Iskra. There is some evidence that, before Lenin became acquainted with Inessa Armand, he had an affair with a Frenchwoman in Paris. When Viktor Tikhomirnov, a researcher from the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute, met the ex-Bolshevik émigré G.A. Alexinsky in Paris in 1935 to discuss some Lenin documents, Alexinsky showed him letters of an extremely personal nature that Lenin had written to a woman writer, and which the recipient preferred not to send to Moscow as long as Krupskaya was still alive. She was then living on a Soviet pension which she had been receiving via Dzerzhinsky and later Menzhinsky, successive heads of the Soviet secret police.75 The letters remained in Paris and their whereabouts are now unknown.
Exile to remote parts of Siberia was the usual punishment for a wide range of activities regarded as seditious by the government, whether taking part in a Marxist study circle or fomenting a strike and joining a demonstration. After a series of interrogations in prison in the capital, therefore, Lenin was exiled for three years to Siberia under police surveillance in February 1897. He soon began to correspond with Krupskaya. At the same time, his mother launched a campaign of requests to the police on her son’s behalf, starting with an application to allow him to travel at his own expense, because of his poor state of health, followed by one asking them to delay his departure from the capital, then for him to stay in Moscow for a week as she herself was ill, then to extend his stay there, and so on. She also wrote to the governor-general of Eastern Siberia asking him to ‘allocate Krasnoyarsk or one of the southern towns of Yenisei province’ as her son’s place of exile, again because of his poor state of health. Lenin reinforced her efforts on his own behalf, advancing the same reason.76 All of their requests, except one, were conceded by the ‘blood-stained tsarist regime’.77 Lenin would not be so lenient when he came to power, even where former social democrat comrades were involved. In a note to Stalin dated 17 July 1922, he proposed that a number of them, including Potresov, be expelled from the country forthwith: ‘… several hundred of such gentlemen should be put across the border without mercy … Get the lot of them out of Russia.’78 He believed in general that ‘repressions against the Mensheviks should be stepped up and our courts should be told to do this’.79
How his attitudes had changed! Exile in Shushenskoe had been little more than an enforced three-year vacation. He had thought it normal to request a nicer place to live ‘in view of my poor health’, nobody made him do any work, he was under no restraints. Many other exiles, Julius Martov, for instance, thought it beneath their dignity as revolutionaries to beg for favours or a nicer place. Lenin, however, for all his ‘poor state of health’, wrote home to the family that ‘apart from hunting and swimming, most of my time is spent on long walks’.80 He was also sleeping ‘extraordinarily long’, and although it was ‘impossible to find [domestic] help, and unthinkable in the summer’, he was ‘satisfied with the apartment and the food’, had ‘filled out and got a suntan’, and was living ‘as before, peacefully and unrebellious’. He compared his present abode favourably with Spitz, the Swiss resort where the family was then on holiday.81
The life of a political exile under the tsar was immeasurably easier than that installed by the Soviet regime, whose prisoners first had to build their own camps and then fill them. The tsar’s exiles – we are not speaking of prisoners, but of those expelled from European Russia and made to remain in a designated place for a period – could pay each other visits in different locations, arrange meetings, write books and political programmes, entertain their relations and even start families. In July 1897, for example, Lenin received an invitation to attend the wedding of his friends V.V. Starkov and A.M. Rozenberg, the sister of the Marxist organizer G.M. Krzhizhanovsky. Perhaps it was such an event that prompted the correspondence between Lenin and Nadezhda Krupskaya, who by then was herself in exile, for the same offence, in Ufa in the southern Urals. In January 1898, Lenin applied to the police department to allow his ‘fiancée’, Krupskaya, to continue her exile in Shushenskoe. Krupskaya recalled