At the beginning of May 1898, after a long journey by rail, boat and horse-drawn transport, Krupskaya arrived in Shushenskoe with her mother, who would accompany the couple wherever fate despatched them. According to Lenin, his future mother-in-law had barely set eyes on him before she exclaimed, ‘They really wanted you well out of the way, didn’t they?’83 He wrote to his mother that Nadezhda had ‘imposed a tragi-comic condition: if we don’t get married right away (!), she’s off back to Ufa. I’m not at all disposed to go along with this, so we’ve already started having “rows” (mostly about applying for the papers without which we can’t get married).’84
There were a number of formalities to be observed. Lenin applied to the Minusinsk district prefect and then to higher provincial authorities for the necessary papers, but old Russia had more than its fair share of bureaucracy, and nearly two months passed before the papers arrived. Nadezhda’s mother insisted they have the full religious ceremony, and despite the fact that Lenin was by now twenty-eight and Nadezhda a year older, and that both of them were long-standing atheists, they felt compelled to submit. Lenin invited a few exile-friends to the wedding, and on 10 July 1898 the modest ceremony took place, witnessed by two local peasants called Yermolaev and Zhuravlev. Congratulatory greetings arrived from Apollinaria, who was in exile near Krasnoyarsk. Also, on the very day of the wedding, the couple received a letter from Y. M. Lyakhovsky with the news that Fedoseev had committed suicide in Verkholensk, and had wanted Lenin to know that he had done so not with disappointment, but ‘wholehearted faith in life’.85 Another letter arrived soon afterwards with the news that Fedoseev’s fiancée had also killed herself.
The Ulyanovs’ marriage, a union of two mature people, was itself mature, practical, quiet and devoid of either passionate love or emotional upheavals. Unlike her mother, Nadezhda was an obliging, even-tempered and balanced woman. Exceptionally intelligent and hard-working, she at once assumed her rôle as assistant to the man who was working hard, through his writing and contacts, to establish himself as a dominant force in the Russian Marxist revolutionary movement while still in Siberian exile. After the wedding, the couple moved from the house of a certain A.D. Zyryanov to that of a peasant woman called A.P. Petrova. Lenin’s work on his first major book, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, began to make more rapid progress. Between jaunts on the river, hunting and walking in the forest, he consumed a vast amount of economic, philosophical and historical literature, which was sent to order by his mother, Potresov and Pavel Axelrod, a close associate of Plekhanov’s. The first book he read in Shushenskoe was The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis by Alexander Helphand, who wrote under the alias of Parvus, and who would emerge in a far more significant rôle in Lenin’s life in later years.
Nadezhda settled straight away into serving as her husband’s workmate, helping him select material, rewriting passages, listening as he read her some of his chapters, though rarely offering critical comment. They were destined to be childless, though neither apparently ever confided their disappointment to anyone. Perhaps there was a clue in the letter he wrote to his mother from Pskov, having left Shushenskoe and Nadezhda temporarily: ‘Nadya must still rest: the doctor found, as she wrote to me a week ago, that her (woman’s) illness requires sustained treatment and that she must rest for 4–6 weeks (I sent her more money, I got 100 roubles from Vodovozova), as the treatment is going to cost quite a bit.’86 Later, when they were abroad, Nadezhda contracted exophthalmic goitre, or Graves’ Disease, and had to undergo surgery. Lenin, again writing to his mother, reported that ‘Nadya was very poorly, very high temperature and delirium, and it gave me quite a scare’.87 It is worth noting, perhaps, that between them, all of the Ulyanov siblings produced only two children – Dmitri had a son and a daughter, Olga, who is still alive at the time of writing (1994). Nadezhda says nothing about this in her memoirs, although occasionally she allows the pain of her personal unfulfilment to break through when describing the lives of others. She commented, for instance, that Vera Zasulich, with whom she was extremely close and who lived alone, missed not having a family: ‘She had an enormous need for a family. One had only to see how lovingly she played with Dimka’s fair-haired little boy.’88 ‘Dimka’ was Lenin’s brother Dmitri, the sole parent of his generation of Ulyanovs.
Krupskaya’s prominent place in Soviet history is, obviously enough, explained by the fact that she was Lenin’s wife. It might be argued that she also played a part in her own right, as witnessed by the eleven editions of her collected writings on education that were published by 1963. But all of her ideas on Communist education were based on her husband’s comments, and do not merit special attention. Her memoirs, however, do have historical value, especially when she is dealing with Lenin’s last years and his illness. Her notes entitled ‘The last six months of the life of V.I. Lenin’, read together with the memoirs of Lenin’s sister Maria, give the fullest account of that fateful period, and draw aside the veil on many hitherto unknown details, though neither of these women could reveal everything they knew, and their most informative reminiscences remained under lock and key in the Party archives.89
The marriage which began without strong love became closer over the years, but Nadezhda was in effect Lenin’s shadow, her life having meaning only because she was linked to him. When they went abroad, she soon adapted to the leisurely pace her husband set, as the letters Lenin wrote to his mother between 1900 and 1914 indicate: ‘I still follow my summer style of life, walking, swimming and doing nothing’; from Finland he wrote: ‘The rest here is wonderful, swimming, walks, no people around, nothing to do. Having no people around and nothing to do is best of all for me’; from France: ‘We’re going to Brittany for a holiday, probably this Saturday’; from Poland to his mother in Vologda: ‘It’s already spring here: the snow’s all gone, it’s very warm, we go without galoshes, the sun’s shining especially bright above Cracow, it’s hard to think that this is “wet” Cracow. Too bad you and Manyasha [Maria] have to live in that miserable dump!’90
The telegram lay on the desk in front of Lenin, but he seemed unable to grasp its message, and had to read it several times: ‘Top priority. To Lenin, Sovnarkom, Moscow. Unable to save Comrade Inessa Armand sick with cholera STOP She died 24 September [1920] STOP Sending body to Moscow signed Nazarov.’91 The shock was all the greater because earlier that very day Ordzhonikidze, his emissary in the Caucasus, had told him that Inessa was fine, when Lenin had asked him to see that she and her son were being taken care of. Nor could he forget that it had been at his insistence that she went to the south for a rest. She had wanted to go to France, but he had dissuaded her. It was so absurd, so senseless. Why hadn’t the doctors been able to help? Why cholera? He was shattered. As Alexandra Kollontai, a senior Bolshevik who knew them both well, said later: ‘He could not survive Inessa Armand. The death of Inessa precipitated the illness which was fatal.’92
Lenin had no close friends. It would be hard to find someone, apart from his mother, for whom he showed greater concern than Inessa Armand. In his last letter to her, around the middle of August 1920, he had written:
Dear friend,
I was sad to learn that you [he addressed her formally as Vy] are overtired and not happy with your work and the people around you (or your colleagues at work). Can’t I do something for you, get you into a sanatorium? I’ll do anything with great pleasure. If you go to France I will,