In his reminiscence of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov-Lenin, first published in 1956, N. S. Karzhansky wrote as follows:
There are many literary portraits of Lenin, which give a reasonable enough description of his appearance, his face, his eyes, the way he walked, his gestures and so on. But most of these sketches are of the Lenin of 1917, or even later, when he was 47 years old or more. The Ilyich I met in 1907 was only 37 years old – a beautiful age in a man’s life. And everything he did then, he did as a young man would do, with a kind of youthful and captivating ease.1
Karzhansky – the nom de plume of the writer and dramatist Nikolai Semenovich Zezyulinsky – had a valuable tale to tell, for he had been given the honour of spending a week working alone with Lenin at the end of the Fifth (London) Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), transcribing, and helping the latter edit, his speeches and other contributions to Congress. Few, if any, of Lenin’s associates (with the exception of his wife Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya) had spent so much time with him on a one-to-one basis for such a prolonged period. Karzhansky was right to draw attention to the fact that reminiscences of the young Lenin during his early years in emigration were few and far between. In these memoirs, Lenin was often referred to as ‘the old man’ (starik) – his party name (klichka) – doubtless earned thanks to his outward appearance of one who was somewhat ‘older than his years’, enhanced by a prematurely receding hairline and wise, brooding eyes. But appearances can be deceptive and Karzhansky was astute enough to recognize, and to stress in his memoir, the underlying drive and dynamism which would see Lenin through some particularly difficult and turbulent times until his eventual triumphant return to Russia in 1917.
Since the time of Karzhansky’s memoir, considerably more research has been carried out into Lenin’s early years in emigration in London and, fortunately, some of that work has been published in English: notable examples being Andrew Rothstein’s Lenin in Britain; Mura’veva and Sivolap-Kaftanova’s Lenin in London; and, more recently, Helen Rappaport’s excellent Conspirator: Lenin in Exile, in which the author devotes much considered attention to the Bolshevik leader’s several visits to the British capital and provides a thorough review of the available literature on the subject.2
The present book will try to avoid going over the same ground as the above works wherever it is possible to do so without breaking the narrative flow (although that narrative will not follow a strictly chronological path!), and concentrate instead on new archival finds and other, hitherto unpublished, information relating to this ‘beautiful age’ in Lenin’s life. The book will also bring to life that, as yet largely undiscovered, London and those of its inhabitants and visitors whom the Bolshevik leader ran up against during his various stays. This is not to say that ‘Russian London’ has escaped scholarly attention. For example, much rigorous work in the field has been carried out by the likes of Sarah Young who has made it available on her excellent website. Her ‘Map of Russians in London’ is particularly valuable.3 However, as I have discovered over the years, there are numerous other memorial sites connected with Lenin and the Russian emigration waiting to be added to the list and many more fascinating episodes from his early years yet to be recounted. All this and much more is to be found in these pages.
My own interest in Vladimir Ilyich’s association with London has a very specific starting point. It was first sparked by a discovery I made in the archives of the British Museum at precisely 10 am on Tuesday 4 April 1989. As a young Russian curator at the British Library, I had been despatched there by the head of the Slavonic and East European Branch of the Department of the Printed Books, who had assigned me the task of bringing together all information held by the Museum on Lenin’s visits to the Library. Thus my first archival commission. After an unsuccessful first visit to the archives I feared I was destined to draw a blank, but I would soon discover that archival research has much in common with panning for gold or mining for diamonds – a lot of dross had to be extracted and discarded until, with luck, one might come across a tiny historical gem, un petit bijou d’histoire, as one recent find was described.4 And so it was with my first discovery.
It was already known that Lenin had visited the ‘Museum’ on five separate occasions during his emigration in the early twentieth century but documentary evidence existed for only one of these visits: for a number of years, his 1902 letter of application for admission under the pseudonym of Dr Jacob Richter was kept on display in one of the Museum galleries. Of his other visits, however, little was known and, for some time, this lacuna had sparked the curiosity of numerous scholars (primarily, but not exclusively, Soviet). Over the years, a variety of archivists and curators had been called on to tackle the ‘Lenin question’ but without result. The admissions registers for the period had been exhaustively checked and had yielded nothing. After all, in the course of his career, Lenin had used well over 100 pseudonyms and, in addition, he and his fellow revolutionaries were not averse to using each other’s pen names when the mood took them. Moreover, there were many ways in which these Russian names could be rendered. I was already aware of the various transliteration systems which existed – the different ways in which countries around the world chose to transpose the Cyrillic into the Latin alphabet. The task that faced me, therefore, resembled that of trying to find a very small needle in a very large haystack (with the added difficulty that the needle had no defined shape or form).
After spending many hours scanning the registers, searching fruitlessly for variations of these multiple pseudonyms, I was on the point of giving up. But then, back in my office, leafing through a volume of Lenin’s correspondence, I came across a letter he had written in the early 1900s. How he had signed that letter gave me renewed hope and so, the following morning, I was back, knocking on the archivist’s door, explaining that Lenin, whose real name was transcribed, according to the Museum’s transliteration scheme, as ‘Ulyanov’ would often, instead, use the ‘continental’ Latinized form – ‘Oulianoff’. In other words, quite simply, might we try to search the card index again, but this time under the letter ‘O’ rather than ‘U’? To my delight, this new and breathtakingly obvious approach produced the desired result in the form of a small index card bearing the briefest of details of the admission to the Reading Room in May 1908 of one ‘Oulianoff, Vladimir’. Armed with this information, the archivist disappeared into the cavernous underbelly of the Museum and returned smiling broadly and bearing a small packet of faded brown documents tied up, as was customary archival practice, with a delicate, pink ribbon. He granted me the honour of opening the pack and, to my joy, amongst other documents I discovered a letter, written in a very neat hand but in somewhat halting English, from the said Oulianoff to the director of the British Museum, requesting a ticket of admission to the famous Reading Room.
The details of this and the other documents in the bundle will be laid out in due course, but suffice it to say, Lenin’s letter requesting admission contained no information of any earth-shattering consequence. Indeed, its mundanity was such that my wife’s initial reaction on perusing a copy was that it was ‘a bit like a laundry list really’. And, in truth, it was – but it was ‘Lenin’s laundry list’ and, as such, a real ‘little historical gem’, the discovery of which would soon attract international press attention.5 I was, of course, delighted with the interest my small find had generated, but that was as nothing compared to the excitement I had felt at that precise moment of discovery: for, as I quickly realized, following Lenin’s admission, a Museum clerk must have brought all of these documents together, tied them up with that little pink ribbon, parcelled them up with hundreds of similar applications and sent them off for storage. And here was I now, some eighty years later, the first person to untie that bow, and to hold these unique manuscripts in my hand. At that point of discovery, I recall leaning back in my chair, closing my eyes and clearly seeing the young Vladimir Ilyich sitting at a desk. I saw him holding a pen, sensed him searching for the correct English words and felt the scratch of nib on rough paper. This was my first experience of the exhilaration of archival research and, fortunately, it would not be my last, for the Museum afforded me the opportunity to expand the scope of my research and, in the weeks and months to come, to uncover yet more little archival treasures, many of which will appear later in this book.
As my work in the archive progressed, I came to realize that just about every other Russian revolutionary of note had visited the Reading Room at one time or another. London had been particularly popular as a place of refuge during the years 1890 to 1910, a period when the steady influx of East European Jews had been augmented by wave upon wave of Russian political activists, obliged to flee, first from persecution in their homeland and then from the new pro-tsarist policies being adopted by many of the other major West European states. Most, but certainly not all, of these fugitives chose to settle in the East End of the city, an area which, by the turn of the century, had already come to be known by its inhabitants as the ‘Little Russian Island’ (Russkaya ostrovka). Although, with other new arrivals choosing instead to put down their roots in other parts of the capital – in the centre, west and north – the London which greeted Lenin in 1902, might more accurately be described as a ‘Russian Archipelago’.
To date, the lives of these little communities of castaways have received scant attention and it is one of the aims of this book to remedy the situation by offering the first detailed account of the life of these groups of refugees among whom Lenin lived, worked and (very occasionally) played. The reader will be offered pen portraits of a wide range of those ‘Little Russian Islanders’ and their visitors whom Lenin encountered during his various stays – from the foremost leaders of the tsarist opposition to the solitary activists of an extreme anarchist or terroristic bent. Their ever-changing relationship with the British public, press and government will be charted, as will their constant battle against not only the agents-provocateurs and spies of the tsar’s dreaded political police force, the Okhrana, but also detectives from the Criminal Investigation Department at Scotland Yard and, indeed, from other European police agencies such as the French Sûreté.
This book is primarily the result of research carried out over a number of years, not only in the British Museum but in a range of other British and international archives and it is my hope that it will present an original, engaging and compulsive narrative in which many of the characters (who for a variety of reasons have been written out of history) appear for the first time. Key amongst these ‘non-persons’ is the enigmatic co-founder of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, Apollinariya Aleksandrovna Yakubova-Takhtareva, whose alleged secret love affair with Lenin has been hinted at for several decades. Here, for the first time, the association between the two – and indeed the impact it had on their respective spouses, Nadezhda Krupskaya and Konstantin Takhtarev – will be examined in detail. To date, the history of the relationship which existed between these four individuals in London has hardly received a mention, which is surprising to say the least, given that Krupskaya herself admitted that she and her husband were at the Takhtarev’s flat ‘all the time’ during their first stay in 1902–1903.6 That relationship, which began in Russia some years earlier, is certainly worthy of examination here for the new light it throws on this under-reported side of Lenin’s life and, indeed, on a particularly intriguing aspect of the man’s psychological make-up.
Although she was described by contemporaries as a woman of rare beauty, until recently, no portrait of Yakubova was thought to exist, nor was much known about her life in general. In 2015 I was fortunate enough to discover such a portrait and, as a direct result of the publicity following that find, a collection of her personal papers came to light, allowing a much fuller portrait of her to be drawn. In addition, her small archive contains a number of other remarkable photographic portraits, a selection of which are published here for the first time. Readers can now form their own opinion with regard to those of Yakubova’s qualities which others, including the first leader of the Soviet Union, may, indeed, have found irresistibly attractive.
But, quite apart from the Yakubova-Takhtareva revelations, the book also contains a raft of other previously unpublished information, some of which brings into question the accepted version of the young Lenin’s London years. To date, many of the Soviet leader’s biographers have raised him up as the ‘conspirator’s conspirator’ – an individual who, thanks to his meticulous planning and the extreme caution which he exercised as he moved throughout Europe in the years leading up to 1917, managed, on the whole, to avoid the attentions of the tsarist and other European police forces. Indeed, it is namely this – Lenin’s supposed mastery of the art of konspiratsiia – which historians have often put forward as the reason for the dearth of information in their accounts of certain periods of his life, such as, for example, his visit to London in the spring of 1905. But, as I will show, Lenin was not always as successful in his attempts at concealment as he and his biographers might have imagined – for example, as a recent archival discovery proves, his every movement and those of his associates during his 1905 London stay were, in fact, meticulously tracked and recorded by a talented Russian police spy whose fascinating reports are detailed here – again, for the first time. By incorporating new information from a range of other archives, contemporary newspaper reports and some important and previously overlooked personal reminiscences, the book will also afford the reader fresh glimpses into all of Lenin’s six stays in the British capital from 1902 through to 1911. In 1917 and in the years of the Civil War that followed, Lenin became known for his cold-blooded ruthlessness and determination. As this book will show, the young Lenin who visited Britain in the first years of the twentieth century demonstrated, even at that early age, a similar callous single-mindedness.
But before moving on to tell the story of Lenin’s London years, we must first of all set the scene. We will begin by taking an historical tour around the East End and some of London’s other émigré haunts in order to meet those of Lenin’s revolutionary compatriots who had already made the British capital their home, and to gain an understanding of the changes which ‘Russian London’ had undergone in the years leading up to his arrival. Then we shall journey back to the St Petersburg of the 1890s to examine that first decade of Lenin’s political activism, and witness the formation of his first personal and political relationships, not only with such as Nadezhda Krupskaya and Yuly Martov but also, more importantly, with Konstantin Takhtarev and his wife-to-be Apollinariya Yakubova. It is only then that Lenin’s continuing close relationship with the latter during his first years in London can be brought fully into focus.