I’ve had a marvellous holiday, got tanned, didn’t read a line or take a single phone call. The hunting used to be good, but it’s been all ruined. I hear your name everywhere: ‘Things were all right with them here,’ and so on. If you don’t fancy a sanatorium, why not go to the South? To Sergo [Ordzhonikidze] in the Caucasus? Sergo will arrange rest, sunshine, interesting work, he can fix it all up. Think about it.
He signed off conventionally as ‘Yours, Lenin’.93
Lenin had been hearing Inessa’s name everywhere because he was close to the Armand family estate in the village of Yeldigino in Moscow province. What there was to hunt in August is unclear.
On the same day he wrote, as head of the Soviet government: [To whom it may concern] ‘I request that you help in every way possible to arrange the best accommodation and treatment for the writer, Comrade Inessa Fedorovna Armand, and her elder son. I request that you give complete trust and all possible assistance to these Party comrades with whom I am personally acquainted.’94 He also cabled Ordzhonikidze, asking him to put himself out over Inessa’s safety and accommodation in Kislovodsk, and ordered his secretaries to help see her off to the Caucasus. Although Russia was still enduring the civil war, the Bolshevik leadership were accustomed to frequent holidays. Hence Lenin could insist on the fateful trip.
For a decade, since they had met in Paris in 1909, Inessa Armand had occupied an enormous space in the life of a man whose dedication to the Great Idea left little or no room for anything else. She had succeeded in touching chords hidden deep in his near-puritanical heart. He had felt a constant need to be with her, write to her, talk to her. His wife did not stand in their way. As Alexandra Kollontai recalled in the 1920s, in conversation with her colleague at the Soviet legation in Norway, Marcel Body, Krupskaya was ‘au courant’. She knew how closely ‘Lenin was attached to Inessa and many times expressed the intention of leaving’, but Lenin had persuaded her to stay.95
This appears to have been one of those rare triangles in which all three people involved behaved decently. Feelings of attachment and love do not readily lend themselves to rational explanation. If Lenin’s life was filled with the turbulence of politics and revolutionary activity, on the personal level it had been monotonous, flat, boring. Inessa entered his life in emigration like a comet. It is pointless to speculate what it was about her that attracted him. She was extremely beautiful, elegant and full of creative energy, and that was perhaps enough. Also, she was open and passionate about everything she did, whether it was caring for her children or the revolution or the routine Party jobs she was asked to do. She was an exceptional person, emotional, responsive and exciting. For all his old-fashioned views on family life, Lenin was unable to suppress the strong feelings she evoked in him. For the historian, however, it is as difficult to write about feelings as it is to try to convey in words the sound of a symphony.
In her later memoirs, Krupskaya often refers to Inessa, but usually in passing and in another context: ‘Inessa’s entire entourage lived in her house. We lived at the other end of the village and ate with everyone else’; ‘Vladimir Ilyich wrote a speech, Inessa translated it’; ‘all our people in Paris were then feeling strongly drawn to Russia: Inessa, Safarov and others were getting ready to go back’; ‘It was good to be busy in Serenburg. Soon Inessa came to join us’; ‘Our entire life was filled with Party concerns and affairs, more like student life than family life, and we were glad of Inessa.’96 To Krupskaya’s credit, having once decided the tone of her relationship with Inessa, as a Party comrade, she never changed it. Inessa’s presence was an inevitability which she accepted with dignity. Occasionally, she abandons her own conventions and writes in greater detail: ‘For hours we would walk along the leaf-strewn forest lanes. Usually we were in a three-some, Vladimir Ilyich and Inessa and I … Sometimes we would sit on a sunny slope, covered with shrubs. Ilyich would sketch outlines of his speeches, getting the text right, while I learned Italian … Inessa would be sewing a skirt and enjoying the warmth of the autumn sunshine.’97 It was perhaps during such walks that Inessa would talk about her origins, her parents and the dramas in her life.
She was born, according to the register of the 18th arrondissement, in Paris at 2 p.m. on 8 May 1874 at 63, Rue de la Chapelle, and was named Inessa-Elisabeth. She was the daughter of Theodore Stephan, a French opera singer aged twenty-six, and an English-French mother, Nathalie Wild, aged twenty-four, of no profession. Her parents were not married at the time of her birth,98 but they legalized their relationship later at St Mary’s parish church in Stoke Newington, London. Inessa’s father died young, leaving his family of three small daughters penniless. Her mother became a singing teacher in London. The turning point in Inessa’s life was a trip to Moscow in 1879 with her grandmother and aunt, who taught music and French, and who together were capable of giving the girl a good education. The archives tell us little about her life, and the best Russian account so far to emerge is Pavel Podlyashchuk’s Tovarishch Inessa, first published in 1963 and revised with new material in 1987. This has been superseded by Ralph Carter Elwood’s Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist, published in 1992.
A gifted young woman, fluent in French, Russian and English, and an excellent pianist, Inessa became a governess. She took after her handsome father in looks, attracting the attention of a good many men, and in October 1893, at the age of nineteen, she married Alexander Evgenievich Armand, the son of a wealthy merchant. The wedding took place in the village of Pushkino, outside Moscow, in the presence of members of Moscow’s business élite, to which the Armands themselves belonged.99
Everything seemed as it should in a successful, wealthy family. Inessa had a handsome, good husband, children, trips to the South and abroad. In the course of eight years she gave birth to five children, three boys and two girls. Despite her preoccupation with her family, she managed to read a great deal and was drawn to the social and political writings of Lavrov, Mikhailovsky and Rousseau. By the late 1890s she had also become seriously concerned with feminist issues, an interest she retained all her life. To all appearances, she was living in harmony with her husband, when suddenly, on the eve of the 1905 revolution, she left him, taking the children with her. She had been consumed by passion for another man, her husband’s younger brother Vladimir.
Everyone suffered in this great family drama, yet there were apparently no dreadful scenes, mutual recriminations or arm-twisting. Inessa was exercising her commitment to the principle of ‘free love’. Two weeks before she died in 1920 she would confide to her diary: ‘For romantics, love occupies first place in their lives, it comes before everything else.’100 By this time she had come to see love with different eyes, but she was recalling herself as a younger woman, when her dramatic departure from the marital home shifted her life onto a completely unexpected course.
Her life with the young Vladimir did not last long. Since 1903 she had become involved in illegal propaganda activities on behalf of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Moscow, and in 1907 she was arrested (for the third time) and exiled to the North above Archangel. Vladimir followed her, but he soon developed tuberculosis and went to Switzerland for treatment. There was, however, no cure to be found, and two weeks after she had fled from exile abroad to join him, at the beginning of 1909, he died.
With the financial help of her ever-tolerant husband, who was also caring for the children, Inessa, now aged thirty-five, enrolled to study economics at the New University in Brussels. In the same year, in Paris, she met Lenin,