The Austrians did not yet realise that Lenin would become their ally. He hated both tsar and Kaiser, but, as he wrote to one of his trusted agents, Alexander Shlyapnikov, in October 1914, ‘tsarism is a hundred times worse than kaiserism’.109 Yet even what they already knew about him prompted the Austrian authorities to cable the Nowy Targ prosecutor to ‘free Vladimir Ulyanov at once’.110 Within a couple of weeks Lenin and Krupskaya were in Zurich and shortly after in Berne, where Lenin was soon reunited with Inessa. According to the official version, he suggested she give lectures, ‘work to unite the left socialist women of different countries’, helped her prepare a publication for women workers, and even ‘criticized her outline of the brochure’, appointed her to take part in the International Socialist Youth Conference, and gave her a host of Party missions to perform. This version does not, however, report that she was a frequent visitor at the Ulyanovs, that they often went for walks together, that she played the piano for Lenin, and that she joined the couple on holiday in Serenburg.
It was here in Switzerland in March 1915 that Krupskaya’s mother died. As Krupskaya recalled, the old lady had wanted to return to Russia, ‘but we had no one there to look after her’. She had often quarrelled with Lenin, but on the whole they had maintained a civil relationship. ‘We cremated her in Berne,’ Krupskaya wrote. ‘Vladimir Ilyich and I sat in the cemetery and after two hours they brought us a metal jug still warm with her ashes, and showed us where to bury them.’111 Yelizaveta Vasilievna nevertheless found her way back to Russia eventually: on 21 February 1969 the Central Committee Secretariat arranged for her ashes to be taken to Leningrad.
After Inessa had left for Paris, she and Lenin conducted a lively correspondence. He signed himself variously as ‘Ivan’, ‘Basil’, or sometimes even ‘Lenin’. Apart from their personal relationship, Lenin had come to rely on her in Party affairs to a considerable extent as well. In January 1917, for some reason, he decided Switzerland was likely to be drawn into the war, in which case, he told her, ‘the French will capture Geneva straight away … Therefore I’m thinking of giving you the Party funds to look after (to carry on you in a bag made for the purpose, as the banks won’t give money out during the war) …’112
In 1916 and 1917, up to the time Lenin left for Russia, he wrote to Inessa more often than to anyone else. When he heard about the February revolution, it was to her that he wrote first, and she was among those who left Switzerland for Russia, via Germany, in the famous ‘sealed train’. Her children were in Russia, and it was of them she was thinking as the train from Stockholm to Petrograd carried them on the last leg of the journey.
The revolution soon took its toll on Inessa. She had never been able to work at half-steam, and in Petrograd and later in Moscow she held important posts in the Central Committee and the Moscow Provincial Economic Council, and she worked without respite. In 1919 she went to France to negotiate the return of Russian soldiers, and she wrote for the newspapers. Her meetings with Lenin became less frequent; he was at the epicentre of the storm that raged in Russia. Occasionally, however, they managed a telephone conversation. His address book contained her Moscow address, which he visited only two or three times: 3/14 Arbat, apartment 12, corner of Denezhny and Glazovsky Streets, temporary telephone number 31436.113
Sometimes he rang or sent a note, such as the one he wrote in February 1920: ‘Dear Friend, I wanted to telephone you [the polite form] when I heard you were ill, but the phone doesn’t work. Give me the number and I’ll tell them to repair it.’114 On another occasion he wrote: ‘Please say what’s wrong with you. These are appalling times: there’s typhus, influenza, Spanish ’flu, cholera. I’ve just got up and I’m not going out. Nadia [Krupskaya] has a temperature of 39 and wants to see you. What’s your temperature? Don’t you need some medicine? I beg you to tell me frankly. You must get well!’115 He telephoned the Sovnarkom Secretariat and told them to get a doctor to see Inessa, then wrote again: ‘Has the doctor been, you have to do exactly as he says. The phone’s out of order again. I told them to repair it and I want your daughters to call me and tell me how you are. You must do everything the doctor tells you. (Nadia’s temperature this morning was 37.3, now it’s 38).’ ‘To go out with a temperature of 38 or 39 is sheer madness,’ he wrote. ‘I beg you earnestly not to go out and to tell your daughters from me that I want them to watch you and not to let you out: 1) until your temperature is back to normal, 2) with the doctor’s permission. I want an exact reply on this. (This morning, 16 February, Nadezhda Konstantinovna had a temperature of 39.7, now in the evening it’s 38.2. The doctors were here: it’s quinsy. They’ll cure her. I am completely healthy). Yours, Lenin. Today, the 17th, Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s temperature is already down to 37.3.’116
Volume 48 of the Complete Works contains a letter from Lenin to Inessa from which the following was cut: ‘Never, never have I written that I respect only three women! Never!! I wrote to you [familiar form] that my experience of the most complete friendship and absolute trust was limited to only two or three women. These are completely mutual, completely mutual business relations …’117 It seems certain he had Inessa and Krupskaya in mind. There had been other women, of course, who had left a fleeting trace in his heart: Krupskaya’s friend Yakubova, the pianist Ekaterina K., and the mystery woman in Paris with the pension from the Soviet government. The relations between Lenin, Krupskaya and Inessa were, as we have seen, both of a personal and a practical nature.
The revolution inevitably distanced Inessa from Lenin, although their feelings for each other remained strong. She was worn out by the privation, the burdens and the cheerless struggle. Not that she lost her revolutionary ideals or regretted the past, but at a certain point her strength began to flag. Lenin gave support occasionally, telephoning, writing notes, helping her children, but she felt he was doing so from habit. The Bolshevik leader no longer belonged to himself, or to Krupskaya, still less to her; he was completely possessed by the revolution. Sometimes his concerns were extraordinary, considering his Jacobin priorities: ‘Comrade Inessa, I rang to find out what size of galoshes you take. I hope to get hold of some. Write and tell me how your health is. What’s wrong with you? Has the doctor been?’118 He sent her English newspapers, and several times sent physcians to see her. By 1920, however, Inessa was utterly exhausted. She wrote to Lenin: ‘My dear friend, Things here are just as you saw them and there’s simply no end to the overwork. I’m beginning to give up, I sleep three times more than the others and so on …’119
An invaluable insight into Inessa’s mental state during her ‘restcure’ in the North Caucasus is provided by a diary which she kept in the last month of her life, and which by a miracle survives in the archives. The last, fragmented, hastily pencilled notes tell us more about their relationship than a thousand pages of Lenin’s biography:
1 September 1920. Now I have time, I’m going to write every day, although my head is heavy and I feel as if I’ve turned into a stomach that craves food the whole time … I also feel a wild desire to be alone. It exhausts me even when people around me are speaking, never mind if I have to speak myself. Will this feeling of inner death ever pass? I hardly ever laugh or smile now because I’m prompted to by a feeling of joy, but just because one should smile sometimes. I am also surprised by my present indifference to nature. I used to be so moved by it. And I find I like people much less now. I used to approach everyone with a warm feeling. Now I’m indifferent to everyone. The main thing is I’m bored with almost everyone. I only have warm feelings left for the children and V.I. In all other respects it’s as if my heart has died. As if, having given up all my strength, all my passion to V.I. and the work, all the springs of love have dried