“Dear Comrade Olga!
“Many thanks for your letter about the affairs in your local party. To tell the truth, ‘pessimism’ frequently takes hold of others besides yourself.
“The party here is opportunistic to the core; it is a philanthropic institution of Philistine bureaucrats.
“Even leaders who are seemingly left-minded (like Nobs and Platten) are good for nothing, especially the two mentioned. Without access to the masses nothing can be done.”221
—Vladimir Lenin to Olga Ravich, a Geneva Bolshevik and future wife of Grigory Zinoviev, February 15, 1917
“NO LAME EXCUSES can conceal the fact,” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin wrote in an appeal to socialist committeemen that January from his nest in Berne. “The complete fiasco of the Zimmerwald [effort] has manifested itself in Switzerland.”222 He never sent the appeal. Lenin saw little to cheer him in early 1917. His political movement appeared to be fragmenting around him, his revolution stalled, his friends scattered.
In February he and his wife, Krupskaya, left Berne and moved to Zurich, a much larger city. But the change of scenery didn’t improve his outlook. Elegant and cultured, with its riverfront and lake, its theaters, cafés, and nearby mountains and spas, Zurich offered as cozy a haven from the world war as anyone could ask. Lenin spent most of his days there working in the city library on a new pamphlet called “Imperialism, the Highest State of Capitalism,” which he would finish in June. He moved into a home at 14 Spiegelgasse, a narrow cobblestone lane in an old part of town, where he lived quietly with Krupskaya, busying himself writing letters by the hundreds and studying newspapers and books: Hegel on philosophy, Clausewitz on strategy, poetry by Victor Hugo. Occasionally he took Krupskaya to a lecture or concert, a restaurant or a nearby spa. To neighbors passing him on the sidewalk in his winter coat, he hardly looked like a fire-breathing revolutionary.
In his work, Lenin faced waves of frustration. He had so little cash these days that he could barely afford to print pamphlets, let alone pay for travel or books. Trying to keep touch with people brought constant headaches. His closest Bolshevist friend, Grigory Zinoviev, lived hours away in Berne. With telephones rare and service spotty, he had to rely on the mail, and letters sent abroad could take weeks to deliver, if not lost or confiscated en route. Messages smuggled in or out of Russia took longer, with even greater risk.
Worst of all, though, were the betrayals. All that winter and the prior fall, Lenin had seen one-time supporters abandon his “Zimmerwald left” line, his idea, proposed in 1915, that socialists transform the energy of world war into local civil wars of proletariat revolution. Lenin considered this principle his ultimate test of loyalty, and his list of failures grew by the week: French socialists Albert Bourderon and Arthur Merrheim (who had voted for a pacifist resolution at a Paris meeting), Italian socialist Minister Filipo Turati (who had insisted that Italy must reclaim its lost border territories), and German socialist parliamentarian Karl Kautsky (who had failed to oppose German war credits). Even in Switzerland, his long-time ally Robert Grimm, a co-organizer of the original 1915 Zimmerwald conference, had recently blocked a party meeting in Berne called to reaffirm Lenin’s hard line.
Lenin complained endlessly about these turncoats. “Zimmerwald,” he wrote in March, “has obviously become bankrupt and a good name again serves to cover up rot.”223
Even his hopes for revolution in Russia took a blow that winter. Russia sat on the verge of collapse, its army in retreat, its government paralyzed, and food shortages crippling major cities. Lenin’s subversive propaganda pamphlets had become popular with Russian soldiers and prisoners. But news from America threw a wet blanket on hopes for change anytime soon. If the United States entered the war against Germany, it would only strengthen the tsar and his hold on power. As Lenin saw it, Russia either had to crumble from within or be defeated in the war. There was no other way.
And when would that happen? In his lifetime? Would all his years of preparation be wasted? “We old folks may not live to see the decisive battles,” he conceded in a lecture to a group of students in Zurich that January.224 The setbacks that winter forced Lenin to rethink basic assumptions. “Ilyich considered it of the greatest importance to work out a correct tactical line,” Krupskaya recalled of this period. “He thought that the time was ripe for a split on the international scale,” she wrote, “to break forever with [Karl] Kautsky and Co., to begin with the [albeit dwindling] forces of the Zimmerwald Lefts to build a Third International.”225
Amid all this pessimism, Lenin was surprised and delighted one day in mid-February 1917 to receive a letter from America. He studied the envelope and easily recognized the neat handwriting: Alexandra Kollontai, his favorite pen pal from Norway. It had taken the letter weeks to cross the ocean from New York, making it all the more confusing, since Lenin had already heard from her directly from Norway since her return. He had placed high hopes on Kollontai’s trips to America, and now here was unexpected news from her second voyage. Had she raised money? Gotten his articles published? Found new allies?
KOLLONTAI HAD LEFT New York in early February and by late that month had reached her home in Holmenkollen, a small rural town just north of Kristiania (Oslo), Norway, known even back then for its beautiful mountains, skiing, and ski jumpers. It had been a nervous passage. British sailors again had stopped her ship and searched the passengers. Now in Norway she found her family scattered. Her son, Misha, had stayed behind in Paterson, New Jersey; her estranged husband, Vladimir, still in Russia, had enlisted as an officer in the tsar’s army; and her occasional lover Alexander Shliapnikov had moved on to Petrograd.
At home, back in what she called her “little red house above a fjord,”226 Kollontai was happy to reconnect with local socialists and resume her duties managing the smuggling of messages in and out of Russia. By now even her views on Trotsky had softened. She complimented him in a letter: “A week before my departure Trotsky came, and this raised the hopes of Ingerman and Co. [the Mensheviks on the Novy Mir board of directors],” she wrote to Lenin on her return. “But Trotsky clearly disassociated himself from them and probably will carry on his own line, which is by no means clear.”227
Lenin had barraged her with letters of his own, asking her to keep him posted on the local infighting among Norway’s radicals and directing her to organize loyal followers in Stockholm and Copenhagen, as well as Kristiania. She was glad to rejoin the fold and would have been surprised to know her letter from America had only now reached Zurich.
LENIN READ THE new letter, shared it with Krupskaya, and sat down to answer it the very same day. He began with “Dear A.M.!,” his shorthand for Alexandra Mikhailovna, as he liked to call her. “Today we received your letter and were very glad to have it. For a long time we did not know that you were in America and had no letters from you except one with news of your departure from America [the prior summer]. I wrote you on January 7 or 8,” he went on, but “the French intercept everything that is mailed directly from here to America! [It] obviously missed you in New York.”
Beyond the gossip and pleasantries, though, Lenin saw little good news in what Kollontai had shared with him. In a few terse sentences, she had told Lenin about an incident in New York City during which she and Nikolai Bukharin had tried to convince a group of key leftists there to split from their conservative American Socialist Party and endorse Lenin’s Zimmerwald left line. But they had failed, she told him, losing the argument to an old rival fresh off the boat from Europe. Lenin saw the name: Trotsky.
Did he roll his eyes at the story? Or maybe stifle a laugh? How typical of Trotsky, Lenin must have thought, this Menshevik straddler with his “sheer false pride,”228 who always, it seemed, had to interfere and insist on winning an argument, even in America. “I am sorry about the news of Trotsky’s bloc with the ‘Rights’ for a struggle against Nikolai Ivanovich [Bukharin],” Lenin wrote. “What a swine that Trotsky—Left phrases [rhetoric] yet a bloc with the Right against the aim of the ‘Lefts’!! He should be exposed (by you) at least in a brief letter to Sotysial-Democrat!”229
After these few words, Lenin turned his attention to his other wayward protégé in New York, Bukharin. He was pleased that Bukharin had established himself at Novy Mir, he wrote, but he then launched into complaints. He had asked Bukharin to send him materials on local New York politics but hadn’t received them yet. “I have begged Bukharin to do so, but apparently the letters get lost,” he wrote. As for Bukharin’s latest theoretical writings, Lenin again found plenty to criticize. They were “much better than Kautsky,” he wrote, but “Bukharin’s mistakes may destroy the ‘just cause’” in arguments with Kautsky’s followers.
Then he turned to his bigger problems: disloyal followers and lack of cash. “How sad—we have no money!” he wrote.230 He finished the letter to Kollontai, one of many he had scribbled from his desk that day in scenic, cultured, comfortable Zurich, waiting for the world to change. “Please reply at least briefly, but quickly and accurately, since it is terribly important for us to establish a good correspondence with you,” he ended it. Then he took all the letters to the post office.
Lenin, by all indications, had no idea how much he and Trotsky, thousands of miles apart, were coming to see the world much the same way: resentment toward “social patriots” (socialist politicians who backed their own countries’ war efforts), fear of America entering the world war, impatience at affairs in Russia, even their mutual dislike of Morris Hillquit (whom Lenin had met in Stuttgart in 1907). As long as they remained separated by an ocean, they would never bridge the gap. But this too would change in not so many weeks.