Ce sont les mêmes que partout, un peu (!) plus grosses, avec ajout de marchandise griffée donc plus chère et avec le bonheur de pouvoir se faire servir en anglais!  Non mais, c'est presqu'un voyage à l'étranger! ;-) Et bang!  Quelle coïncidence, mon envie de magasinage m'envahit au moment béni des soldes!

Excitée comme une puce (très cher Armand,  vous qui avez toujours l'URL juste, un lien vers l'excitation des puces serait apprécié) je promène mes pieds d'une boutique à l'autre, débusquant ici et là quelques pièces que j'aime et j'achète.  Puis j'arrive chez Zara, où je trouve souvent des trucs intéressants.  Diable!  Gardiens de sécurité à l'entrée, grands et gros messieurs polis mais décidés qui fouillent mes sacs (en anglais).  Je montre patte blanche et entre dans le temple...SOS  y'a de la folle à lier ici!

Je trouve quelques trésors en manquant perdre un bras, mes yeux, un pied...Me lève la tête pour repérer la salle d'essayage et je vois les files se confondant...Des colonnes de fourmis magasineuses trottinant sans se lasser des étalages aux salles d'essayage à la caisse puis vers la sortie...Et là j'ai craqué, tout laissé mon paquet de vêtements à essayer à une vendeuse en lui disant je reviendrai cette nuit quand elles dormiront toutes!  Elle a bien ri puis a ajouté que l'an prochain elle saurait quand prendre ses congés! (NDLR: tout ceci en français!)

Plus je m'approchais de la "zone sensible" pire c'était...La switch magasinage s'est mise en veille et la sociologue a pris le relai! ;-)  J'aime observer les fourmis gens, en plus hier il mouillassait (quand il ne tombait pas des cordes!).  Les pauvres cadets policiers qui tentaient d'empêcher les marcheurs de passer sur les feux jaunes ou rouges avaient un peu de difficulté.  Ne vous mettez pas en travers de la route d'un promeneur mouillé!  Encore moins d'une magasineuse à tête chercheuse d'aubaine bien décidée à mordre ou mutiler quiconque l'empêchera de se ruer vers l'or à moitié prix!

Puis j'en ai eu assez, suis allée acheter le dernier Coldplay et le jeu pour la nouvelle Wii de Mad chez HMV et suis arrivée à ma bagnole en même temps qu'un schtroumpf gris.  Merde me suis-je dit, une contravention!  C'est que je dépassais de 7 minutes l'heure du boire de bébé parco.  J'ai fait mon grand sourire contrit-PR-cute-blonde en disant j'm'excuse...Il m'a souri et est parti sans me donner de contravention. :-D  C'est la première fois qu'un schtroumpf à carnet de contravention me sourit...J'en suis toute retournée et émue...Bon ok ce moment "portez un mouchoir à vos quenoeils" est terminé!

Et j'ai fini ma soirée à la Paryse, en dégustant un méga hamburger mozzarella bacon tout équipé, qui a bien évidemment dégouliné dans mon assiette.  Non ce n'est pas l'endroit pour une première rencontre, quoique...Une fois que t'as vu l'autre tenter d'avoir l'air crédible en mangeant un hamburger qui se défait à mesure et dégouline dans l'assiette...M'enfin tu peux voir le niveau d'humour et d'humilité de ton "prospect" ! ;-)

Bon week-end les tinamis!!!!

]]> http://fimdefesta.wordpress.com/?p=26 Tue, 17 Jun 2008 18:34:55 +0000 André David http://fimdefesta.wordpress.com/?p=26 Hey leitores!
Tem uma idéia que sempre repito para todos, em plenos pulmões:"Amo minha profissão [professor], mas sou doido de vontade de fazer uma faculdade de cinema.".
Depois de iniciar diversos roteiros e parar pela metade, estou conseguindo levar um projeto para frente. É o Nerd Reporter, para fazer cobertura de eventos do Conselho Jedi São Paulo.
O primeiro vídeo está aqui, e não tem nada de "Teorias de fim de festa". É apenas para concluir meu raciocínio de cuidar da morte.

Ah sudahlah, lebih baik saya bercerita tentang si voucher pra bayar. Di suatu warnet di Banjarbaru, si voucher ini dipakai oleh saya buat buka buka youtube. Setelah sukses bikin akun youtube, maka sebagai manusia berjenis kelamin penis tentu saja keyword yang saya ketikkan tidak jauh dari kata Sex, sexy, dan naked. Atau sederet nama artis artis bule yang memang sudah top sebagai pedagang daging mentah yang tak lupa di belakang namanya ditambahkan kata naked.

Sayang sungguh sayang "some highly trained monkeys have blocked this link" yang banyak saya dapati. Lalu kemudian saya mulai berfikir, buat apa itu semua? Hanya buang buang voucher yang jumlahnya tidak banyak. Hanya menghabiskan benwit yang memang jauh dari manusiawi itu. Mungkin lebih baik saya mencari video obsesi saya: Slank-Gigi-Dewa 19-Erwin Gutawa-Rockhestra. Meskipun hasilnya tidak sesuai kenyataan yang diharapkan. Namun selalu ada hikmah setelah kejadian.

Dengan memutar mutar keyword keyword di youtube, ada beberapa video yang saya dapatkan. Inilah mereka yang akhirnya saya download selama berhari hari dan menghabiskan ratusan menit dari voucher warnet: Saya mulai dari video yang sudah saya sortir dan saya rename tapi tidak saya kasih folder.

• Armand – 4 Gitaris. Ini video yang berisi kolaborasi Armand Maulana (Gigi) yang membawakan lagu lagu dari Slank, Gigi, Sheila on 7 dan Padi. Ada 11 Januari (Gigi) yang di bawakan bersama Abdee (Slank), Begitu Indah (Padi) bersama Eross (Sheila on 7). Dan..(Sheila on 7) bareng Dewa Budjana (Gigi), lalu terakhir Piyu (Padi) memetik gitar mengiringi Armand menyanyikan lagu I Miss You but I Hate You nya Slank. Diiringi oleh orkestrasi hasil gubahan Erwin Gutawa, tapi entah kenapa saya kurang suka memutar ulang video ini. Entah apa yang kurang.
• Bento. Acara ultah Trans TV. Ada Iwan Fals dan Band yang berkolaborasi dengan Ian Radja, Giring Nidji dan Bams Samsul Samsons. Asli, ini kolaborasi jelek banget. Ian dan Bams nyanyinya kacau buangettttttttt!!!!!!!!!. Ga hapal lirik pula. Cuma Giring yang benar benar perfect, liriknya hafal, bawakan lagunya pas.
• Elang. Khazanah Cinta Dewa 19 yang ditayangkan RCTI. Nicky Astria yang bawakan lagunya bareng personel Dewa 19 lainnya. Yang ini juga cuma saya buka beberapa kali, kayanya lagu Elang memang untuk Ari Lasso.
• Gigi feat 3 Vocalist - 11 Januari. Gambarnya ketinggalan dengan suaranya. Saya paling suka suara Alil Ariel Peterpan yang bawakan lagu ini. Cocok! Berhubung kualitas gambarnya yang ancur, saya memilih untuk tidak terlalu sering buka video ini.
• Guns N' Roses - We Will Rock You. Asyik. Suara Axl matching buat lagu itu. Juga waktu Axl teriak teriak bagian akhir lagu "Bohemian Rhapsody"nya Queen: So you think you can love me and leave me to die!!!. Frekuensi pemutaran: Rare. Malas aja. Lagipula ada beberapa gambar yang ga cocok dengan suara.
• Iwan Fals&Ari Lasso – Hampa. Asyik mendengarkan suara dan gaya Iwan bawakan lagu ini. Lagi lagi kualitas gambar menghalangi saya untuk memutarnya sering sering.
• JAP. Nah, kalau yang ini saya betah, soalnya si cantik Dian Sastro yang jadi model video klip.
• Metallica - Enter Sandman, Metallica - Nothing Else Matters. Video klip asli. Tidak begitu menarik. Saya lebih suka yang versi orkestra bersama Michael Kamen. Atau dengarkan mp3nya saja.
• Metallica - Stone Cold Crazy. Kalau We Will Rock You pas buat Axl, maka tak salah kiranya kalau lagu Queen yang satu ini adalah jodohnya James Hitfeld. Soalnya lagunya memang asli lagu metal. Oh iya, itu lagu yang bawakan personel Metallica komplit. Waktu bassist nya masih Jason Newsted.
• Munajat Cinta. Dapat dari linknya Joe. Punyanya Liquid Tension ya?
• One Million Voices. Kolaborasi luar biasa hasil polesan Erwin Gutawa. Pokoknya bagus dan unik!!!! Hampir tiap hari saya putar, mumpung belum bosan...
• Restu Bumi. Ini juga di putar terus, soalnya saya memang suka lagunya. Sayang, Andranya masih pegang gitar listrik, padahal temanya akustik.
• Risalah Hati. Cuma sekali di putar. Lagu Pelet ini terlalu slow.
• Take. Kolaborasi Armand Maulana, Eross, Nissa, Badai, dan Hendi. Musiknya bagus, sayang saya bosan liatnya. Sekarang cuma tersimpan rapi di harddisk.

Okey, sekarang berlanjut kepada folder yang saya beri nama “Slank”.

• Slank - Shout Asia. Ga asyik, ada bagian lagu yang kepotong. Jarang diputar.
• Slank&Cokelat - Bendera. Waktu ultah Slank, entah yang keberapa. Suara Kaka sebenarnya ga terlalu pas buat lagu ini, tapi karena beat tinggi makanya aroma rock-nya jadi matching dengan karakter suara Kaka, dan kali ini saya salut dengan kemampuannya ngakalin kata kata waktu lepas dalam menghapal lirik lagu Bendera ini. Ini sebuah kolaborasi manis, lumayan juga liat Bim Bim olahraga mainin beat tinggi lagi, soalnya Bim Bim udah jarang ngamuk kaya waktu di lagu ini ketika dia ngikutin gebukannya Ervin Cokelat.
• Slank&Iwan Fals - Ku Tak Bisa+Yang Terlupakan. Waktu konser tour “Bersatu Dalam Damai”. Ketika di main Rindam Banjarbaru seingat saya kolaborasi mereka adalah Orkes Sakit Hati, Kesaksian, dan Pesawat Tempur. Kali ini lagu Iwan Fals yang berjudul Yang Terlupakan yang disambung setelah lagu Ku Tak Bisa. Suara Kaka dan aransemennya plus lagunya cocok sekali, ini video masuk top playlist juga bareng One Million Voices.
• Slank&Iwan Fals - Orkes Sakit Hati. Yang jelas bukan waktu mereka main di Banjarbaru, tapi lumayan sering saya putar.
• Slank&PAS Band - Kesepian Kita. Suara Kaka ga pas dengan lagu ini. Trus Yukie nya ada salah faham setelah melodi. Asyik liat cara Bim Bim mainkan drum waktu mencontoh Sandy. Ini video jarang diputar.
• Slank&Peterpan - Tak Bisakah. Kaka harus baca teks, suaranya jadi kurang sangar gara gara lagu Peterpan ini yang memang melankolis. Video ini juga jarang saya putar.
• Slank&Peterpan - Yang Manis. Entah kenapa Peterpan memilih lagu ini, mungkin karena lagunya slow. Ini video juga kurang menarik buat saya.
• Slank&Ratu - Juwita Malam. Suara Maia Ratu kurang kedengaran, mungkin salah tukang mixer televisinya. Secara umum kolaborasi ini bagus, namun saya kurang suka lagunya sehingga videonya juga jarang diputar.
• Slank&Ratu - TTM. Suara Kaka jadi ga ada sangarnya. Ini lagu soalnya cewe banget dan centil abis, makanya suara serak rocker Kaka jadi ikutan ngepop. Tapi, saya suka mutar video ini.

Demikianlah, masih ada Folder bernama Tribute to Freedie Mercury yang merupakan kumpulan download dari youtube juga, namun saya masih belum memperhatikan tiap videonya dengan seksama.

Dan dengan ini maka vocher saya dipastikan akan berkurang lagi guna mempublikasikan tulisan ini, termasuk tentunya beberapa menit yang akan terbuang untuk menuju dashboard dan pilihan buat tulisan baru.

I hate you still. Love you always.

123 Minutes

Aux contraire mon cher, he could eat the whole colony. -Lestat de Lioncourt

Synopsis

After existing over two hundred years as a vampire, Louis de Point du Lac seeks out a journalist and wants to share his journey of loneliness.  It began in his youth when he had just lost his wife and child.  At the young age of twenty four he seeks out his own death, no longer desiring the things a normal human would.  In his despair he is sought out by a creature of supernatural existence.  Lestat de Lioncourt begins to love Louis and wants to make him his vampire companion.  Lestat presents Louis with his offer of immortality, giving him the choice he never had.  In his shock Louis lets Lestat make him a creature of the night and together they exploit the city of New Orleans, but it isn’t long before their unnatural behavior is noticed and the locals realize they are not what they seem.  In Louis’s remorse and depression, Lestat tries to help Louis in a desperate attempt and together they make Claudia, the beautiful doll like child, a vampire as well.  After twenty years inside a child’s body, with the mind of a grown woman and killer, Claudia falls into a sort of dementia and everything begins to fall apart.

Review

What made this movie so amazing was a perfect cast, but also the adapted screenplay by Anne Rice herself.  Taking her own masterpiece and working it into a dark vampire movie unlike any that had been made before it.  The story is motivated by Louis’s inner conflict.  He has the cravings of a killer, and yet the conscience of a man.  Refusing to let go of his humanity and acknowledging all that he truly is and once was, is Louis’s source of strength and yet simultaneously his weakness.

The story is told in the same methodical manner as Rice’s novel version.  The inner turmoil of Louis’s conflict is so desperate and yet so tangible.  Tangled into the mix with the gleeful and maddening Lestat who revels in everything he is, Louis finally understands he is not just a companion to Lestat, he is his own obsession.  When Louis realizes Lestat’s real affection is for Louis’s humanity and not Louis himself, he and the child vampire Claudia leave the America’s and head to Europe in search of other vampires like them.  Now Louis has Lestat’s demise to wallow over as well, and together he and Claudia are the perfect couple of lamentable despair.

Being a time piece, the costumes of this film are elegant and beautiful.  With the lovely colors and attention to detail in paintings and decorations, the cinematography is stunning in itself.  The visuals of this film are just as beautiful as the tormented tale is.  In the novel it’s always touched on how beautiful each of these vampires are, yet their pale skin and magnificent eyes are clear indications they are not human but immortal beings.  The makeup of the vampires was exquisite, revealing the paleness and unearthly eyes, yet making them look human enough to pass in society.  Anne Rice’s creation is truly brought to life.  There is no question you feel as though you have stumbled into a dark world of beauty and misery.

Unlike other stories, the vampires of this tale are not mindless, blood thirsty creatures that are victims of their unfavorable fortune.  They are thinking, intelligent beings, that are far beyond the comprehension of humanity.  What they are is their own superior race that while in the world of humans, they are not part of it.  The intelligent race they are makes this ideal of a vampire very different than any other movie interpretation before it.

Cast

• Brad Pitt as Louis
• Tom Cruise as Lestat de Lioncourt
• Kirsten Dunst as Claudia
• Antonio Banderas as Armand
• Christian Slater as Daniel Malloy
• Stephen Rae as Santiago
• Thandie Newton as Yvette

This was an enormous break out role for Brad Pitt, who actually won the part due to Tom Cruise challenging Anne Rice who said he could never play the role of Lestat, and so the role of Louis was given to Pitt, who captured the suffering, lamentable existence of Louis in a way so profound and so tangible he seemed to have even more humanity than humans themselves.  With the brilliant chemistry he had with Cruise who played my hero Lestat with all the charisma, the sense of humour, the sarcasm, and the delicious hedonistic pleasure anyone could imagine to every degree of hope I ever had.  Cruise is Lestat, and no one, including Mr. Townsend could ever capture his spirit the way Cruise did.  In fact, this is a role I would have deemed Oscar worthy Cruise played it so powerfully and brilliantly.  I can’t speak highly enough of his performance.  The child vampire played by a very young Kirsten Dunst was an amazing preview for the now very successful actress.  Playing off the powerful duo of Pitt and Cruise was no easy task, but this little girl commanded the screen each time she was on it.  It made for a blissful trio of acting, and while the script was amazing, it was a success because of these three actors.

Ratings and Suggestions

This is a very adult oriented film for viewers in their late teens and up.  I would recommend this film to anyone who loves Anne Rice, it pays such a beautiful homage to her genius of the written word.  Even if you’re not a fan of her novels this movie is worth a couple hours just to watch one of the greatest character’s of all time being visualized so perfectly with Cruise as Lestat.  This epic tale of loneliness, regret, and accepting the gamble of life is a story like none other told, and it’s a vampire film like you’ve never seen before.  The brutality of them and the beauty of them is a most enjoyable paradox.  I rate Interview With The Vampire Four out of Four breathtaking Stars.

...

...

He aqui mi foto más famosa en uno de los dos grandes cementerios de París.

Una tumba con el nombre del chaval vampiro de las cronicas de Anne Rice.

friki ¿eh?

...

y envejecida con este programilla

Indonesia kembali berduka. Musisi juga artis kebanggaan tanah air, Gito Rollies telah tutup usia. Gito menghembuskan nafas terakhirnya di rumah sakit Pondok Indah.

Menurut keterangan sahabat dekat Gito, Adrie Subono, sang pentolan The Rollies itu dilarikan ke rumah sakit semalam, Rabu (27/2). Gito diketahui berpulang sekitar pukul 18.45 WIB.

"Tadi malam saya sempat bertemu dia. Tadi malam dibawa ke rumah sakit emang udah pendarahan," ujar Adrie kepada detikhot seraya terisak, Kamis (28/2/2008).

Sejak tahun 2005, Gito memang diketahui menderita penyakit kanker kelenjar getah bening. Namun perjuangannya untuk bertahan hidup tak perlu diragukan lagi. Kesehatan Gito pun mulai membaik ia juga sempat merilis sebuah album Ramadhan tahun 2007 dan berkolaborasi dengan GIGI.

Pria yang selama 23 tahun akrab dengan narkoba itu belakangan sibuk menjadi dai. Kehidupannya telah berubah 180 derajat, namun ternyata penyakit yang menggerogoti tubuhnya yang berusia 60 tahun itu tak sanggup membuatnya terus bertahan.

Yulia Dian - detikHot

My tickets for Vegoose have been purchased! Fuck rent! I'm really excited. I went to Coachella earlier this year, and I have to say that was my best concert-going experience thus far. We'll see how Vegoose goes. This will be the third time I've seen Rage Against the Machine in 2007. I'm making up for the times they put on a show but I was too young to attend. Daft Punk's last performance in America!! That's monumental, and I'm glad I will be a part of it. I've never seen them live, and I barely got into their music earlier this year. I also want to see Mastodon, Ghostface, and Pharoahe Monch. There's a lot of bands on the bill that I haven't seen live, or even listened to before. Hopefully they're worth the money. I'd like to get friday off so I can get to Vegas sometime in the afternoon and hit the strip for a bit. Fuck gambling, I haven't been to an arcade in ages. I'm down with some old school Top Skater. Remember that shit?

Yo, do you guys like hard records? I've been going through my playlist all day, and I discovered that a lot of hard ass records are from Jadakiss, or have Jadakiss on them. "Time's Up" with Nate Dogg is one of the hardest jams I've ever heard in my life, and that was a fucking radio single! I wish rappers still released shit like this. Sad shit, that track is only from three years ago. The hook is probably the grimiest shit I've ever heard anyone sing:

The time to talk is up, so bring the heat, play time is over.
While you're running your mouth,  I'm creeping up over your shoulder
A gun, a knife, a bat, a brick, anything I can get my hands on
Call my bluff, start acting up, and I'll leave you..underground.

Amazing. Shouts to the piano man on the beat.

Lately I've been listening to a lot of dancey, House, R&B, and Electrofunk type of shit. Armand van Helden, Daft Punk, Chromeo, KANO, Planet Patrol, Kavinsky, T-Pain, Timberlake, Timbaland..shit. My shit right now is Keri Hilson's track with Timbaland and the dude with the lisp:

That beat, along with that broad, is perfect. I can relate to Timbaland & Co. to an extent. I do have a car, but it's a piece of shit. My credit card is from 1st Financial Bank, and it's gold, not red. The color has nothing to do with status. It's just a bland ass gold color. I don't have a 'huge ol HOUTH,' I have an apartment. No motorboat either, but I can most definitely work my fingers. Where are the broads who don't give a fuck about all those material possessions? Keri Hilson needs to come to my place, seriously. We'd knock boots for hours, and afterwards, sit around wearing sweat pants and eating ice cream out of the carton. We'd be cute together.

So, while at Debonair last night listening to The Glass play a set, I was drinking my beer as "Touch Your Toes" comes on. 'Damn, what is that track?' I ask my friends. They didn't know, so I found myself wandering up to the dj booth to ask, surprised to hear that it was a 'Helden track. I'm kind of an Armand Van Helden hater to be quite honest. And though it's very apparent that he can construct a floor banger, I feel that most of his music is the same commercial house crap that everybody else creates nowadays. However, get Stretch Armstrong on the mix with it and DAMN. First you gotta drop the sub-par Fat Joe lyrics off of it and then you got something to work with. I'll tell you what, if I was any good at mixing, I'd throw "Golden Skans" to that beat and watch a floor cave in on itself. I'll throw the original remix on there just to help you get an idea of what I'm talking about in regards to Fat Joe.

As far as the other tunes go, the Ursula 1000 track that was touched up by Red Foxxxworth is awesome. I generally like anything that that guy touches. Boys Noize is still hot enough to drop a remix every post that I do. Britney Spears is so terrible that even Timbaland is reduced to new lows in producing for her, however, he can be redeemed through the Bloody Beetroots tearing his tracks apart for the moment- never really liked Timbo. Yeah. Of course, anything that The Junior Boy lay a hand on is an automatic work of genius, no matter how lengthy and boring the intro. Fujiya and Miyagi are rolling through Chicago in a few weeks as well- part of the assembly line of amazing talent that chi-town promoters have been baiting lately- so I'm going to start warming you guys up to their sound if you are previously unfamiliar. "Collarbone" is the first in a series of posts that will include their works, or maybe I'll just heap them all together. I guess we'll see. The Klaxons remix that Miyagi worked on is by FAR the best version I've heard so far, rivaling Switch's remix for best overall Klaxons edit- if you want my two cents. And a little Trentemoller & The Knife to finish it all up with.

Armand Van Helden - Touch Your Toes (Stretch Armstrong Remix Instrumental)

Armand Van Helden - Touch Your Toes feat. Fat Joe (Stretch Armstrong Remix)

Timbaland - Miscommunication - Bloody Beetroots Remix

Ursula 1000 - Kaboom (Red Foxxxworth Remix)

Boys Noize - & Down (Ryan Justin Edit)

Basement Jaxx - Romeo (Shinichi Osawa Tokyo Garage Mix)

Britney Spears - Kiss Me All Over (Produced by Timbaland)

Decemberists - Perfect Crime (Junior Boys Remix)

Fujiya & Miyagi - Collarbone

Klaxons - Atlantis to Interzone (Mr. Miyagi Bootleg Remix)

The Knife - We Share Our Mothers Health (Trentemoller Remix)

Letters from Lenin to Inessa Armand

Extracts from Bride of the Revolution:
Krupskaya and Lenin, by Robert H. McNeal

Inessa Armand, by Bertram D. Wolfe

Introduction

Bob Gould

I am a relatively late convert to internet technology. Some months ago when I hooked up to the net, I also hooked up to four leftist discussion groups, Marxmail, the Socialist Register List, Leftist Trainspotters and the Australian-based Green Left Discussion List.

A little earlier, I participated, along with others, in setting up Ozleft, an Australian-based document archive list. A byproduct of hooking up to the four discussion lists is the vast amount of material that plops into my inbox every morning. I've allocated half an hour a day to surfing this material and deleting the large part that doesn't interest me, but sometimes it gets on top of me a bit if I take my eyes off it for a day or two.

Nevertheless, the swirl of issues and interests is often revealing. (I'm rather pleased by the irritated but friendly comment that I've now had from quite a number of young militants in different groups, at demonstrations etc, growling at me, in a jocular way, with statements like, "God, you're a bastard, Bob Gould. That bloody Ozleft kept me up last night, surfing it until three in the morning." The net is clearly, on the basis of my experience, a very powerful medium.)

My immediate interests are the redevelopment, clarification and rearming of the socialist project in the new conditions, after the overthrow of Stalinism.

It seems to me that a serious engagement with the history of the socialist movement, its extraordinary peaks, like the 1917 Soviet Revolution, and its dreadful lows, like the victory of counter-revolutionary Stalinism in Russia, is a very necessary part of rearming the socialist movement and re-establishing the socialist project.

In the sphere of socialist history, we have an wealth of new material at our disposal, since the overthrow of the Stalinist regime in the Soviet Union and the partial opening of the Soviet archives. A serious balance sheet on the Soviet experience is at the heart of my current interests.

I'm obsessed with the scope and significance of Lenin's political contribution. Lenin gets a consistently bad press from the ruling class and most of the liberal intelligentsia, but he appears to me to be absolutely central, and his contribution to revolutionary thought and practice, overwhelmingly positive.

There has been a significant Lenin industry in the last few years. Some of the most useful information has come from scholars who are personally hostile to Lenin, but who have dug up material that significantly broadens our understanding of Lenin. For instance, the two biographies of Lenin by a rather harsh critic, Robert Service, one of three volumes and one of one volume, are extraordinarily useful as sources incorporating the new material available, despite Service's exasperated antagonism to Lenin.

Even the extreme right-wing ideologue, Richard Pipes, has done us a service in his collection of documents, The Unknown Lenin, which, despite the fact that his intention is malevolent towards Lenin, gives us useful new information. One hopes that scholars more sympathetic to Lenin than Pipes, will also trawl the Soviet archive for more hitherto suppressed material.

On the Leftist Trainspotters list a characteristically verbally abusive exchange, erupted recently about whether Inessa Armand and Lenin had a sexual relationship. The bizarre heat of this exchange is reminiscent of the angry way the Stalinist bureaucracy reacted to this suggestion in the 1960s, when they closed down the Time bureau in Moscow because that magazine referred to an article by Bertram D. Wolfe about this relationship.

The new biographical material, out of the archives, about Lenin, Krupskaya and Inessa Armand, seems to settle this question. There clearly was a sexual relationship between Lenin and Inessa. All the fragments of letters, etc that have survived the prudish, Victorian Stalinist sanitisation of the archives, clearly points to a sexual relationship between them.

The people on Trainspotters who try to deny the Lenin-Armand relationship, rely heavily on R.C. Elwood's biography of Armand, and ignore other evidence, including the other biography of Inessa Armand by Michael Pearson, and several biographies of Alexandra Kollontai.

The biography of Inessa Armand by R.C. Elwood, which tries to make a case that there was no sexual relationship, is refuted by the balance of the evidence. Elwood's book has a curious point of view. Published in 1992, it has a kind of radical feminist slant (though Elwood is a bloke) and it presents Armand as a kind of victim of Lenin's megalomania, which is a caricature, and an insulting caricature, of Lenin, Inessa Armand and Krupskaya. Elwood is deeply hostile to Lenin and portrays him as a kind of villain.

The real facts of the situation seem altogether both more prosaic, and, in some respects, more tragic, from the point of view of all three revolutionary comrades involved in this triangle. These circumstances even had some bearing on the Stalinisation of the Russian Revolution, which commenced at a very early stage. The old and new biographical material about Lenin, Krupskaya and Armand, shows them to be people of a particular historical place and time, members of the Russian intelligentsia, utterly preoccupied with the socialist revolutionary tasks they set themselves early in life. It also shows them as human beings with complex and intense family relationships, specifically family relationships of the Russian middle classes. Throughout his active political life, Lenin was particularly reliant on the support, emotional, practical and even financial, of the women in his life, his mother, his sisters, Krupskaya, Krupskaya's mother and Inessa. In a way, Lenin got on somewhat better with women than he did with men. Lenin had a close relationship with his own mother, and a close and affectionate relationship with Krupskaya's mother.

Lenin, Krupskaya, Inessa, and even the mother and mother-in-law, were all intensely practical people, with quite a strong family sense. All the evidence suggests that Lenin and the two women in his life were disinclined to disrupt their common political activities because of the natural human rivalry, initially, between the two women, and also they wished to minimise scandal, in the small, rather incestuous emigre Russian revolutionary community. They clearly resolved these problems by accommodation, dissimulation and discretion.

The interesting thing about all this is that both women remained Lenin's staunch political allies and later became close friends, despite the triangular nature of the circumstances. The image of the two women sitting together in the front row, supporting Lenin, in his initially minority position, turning Bolshevism upside down, at the April Conference in 1917, is very striking.

The very useful and thorough biography of Krupskaya, "Bride of the Revolution" by Robert McNeal, carefully explores Krupskaya's exceedingly practical reaction to the new set of circumstances, after Inessa came into their lives.

All observers agree that Lenin was totally devastated by Inessa's death from typhus, but being the practical revolutionary that he was, he doggedly went on with business. When you take together all the sequence of events that shattered Lenin's health, you get some idea of the combination of environmental factors and genetic history, that contributed to Lenin's comparatively early death. Lenin had always been a bit preoccupied with health matters because of a history of the early death of males in his family. The image from Trotsky's "My Life", describing Lenin and Trotsky lying down side by side, in an anteroom during the vital meeting of the Petrograd Soviet, totally exhausted, but unable to sleep, gives you some picture of the tensions of the times.

The useful book by T.H. Rigby, Lenin's Sovnarkom, gives some picture of the extraordinary work load Lenin shouldered in the administration of the new Soviet state, for more than three years. In this period Lenin was shot by an attempted assassin, and the bullet was not removed because it was too dangerous to do so. Inessa died. Krupskaya's health problems worsened.

It seems obvious from the difficulties of the period that possibilities for the physical renewal of the Lenin-Inessa relationship were extremely unfavourable. It may also have been the fact that Lenin's libido declined considerably with increasing age and the intense and difficult circumstances of the time, but equally clearly, their powerful comradeship and emotional involvement persisted, despite separation and political upheavals. It's fairly clear from Armand's last diary entries, and from Lenin's utter devastation at her death, that possibly they both had some vague perspective of resuming the physical side of their relationship at some more favourable time in the future, as humans often do in such circumstances. Who knows.

Another feature of Inessa Armand was that, despite her intense emotional involvement with Lenin, she was capable of disagreeing with him politically, on points of principle She was a vigorous participant in the Workers' Opposition, despite the fact that this involved a profound political collision with Lenin.

Moshe Lewin's important book, Lenin's Last Struggle, remains the best account of the ailing Lenin, fighting to his last breath against the early development of Stalinism. It is of considerable significance that Stalin's crude and brutal actions towards Krupskaya was the factor that triggered the qualitative leap of Lenin swinging over into total opposition to Stalin. (It was not accidental either, that in defiance of all Stalin's self-interested propaganda about the alleged permanence and continuance of Lenin's conflicts with Trotsky, that Krupskaya initially rallied to the beleaguered cause of the Left Opposition against Stalinism, until, like many other Old Bolsheviks she was bludgeoned into submission by Stalin's machine.)

The whole of Lenin's political activity was marked by the tension between the objective material circumstances, and the subjective efforts and intentions of Marxist revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks of the classic period, and particularly Lenin, are accused of Blanquism and Jacobinism by many critics, because of Lenin's stress on, and preoccupation with, the active intervention of revolutionaries in the revolutionary process. The sombre history of the Russian Revolution and its subsequent Stalinisation raises, at a number of points, the perennial question of the role of the individual in history. Trotsky very forcefully makes the point that despite the overripe objective conditions in Russia, that the Russian Revolution would never have happened without Lenin's fantastically energetic reorganisation of the Bolshevik Party, and his constant agitation inside the Bolshevik Party for the seizure of power.

This also raises the question of the enormous tragedy for humanity involved in Lenin's early death. It's interesting to speculate as to what would have happened if Lenin's bodyguards had been vigilant enough to prevent the bullets fired into Lenin by Flora Kaplan, if Lenin had used the same solicitude he had for the health of the other Bolshevik leaders, for his own health during the critical Sovnarkom period, and if Inessa Armand had not holidayed in the Caucuses and caught cholera there. If Lenin had lived in reasonable health for, say, another five years, the whole history of the 20th century might have been different. Trotsky was a courageous and serious revolutionary, but compared with Lenin, he was not a very effective politician. It's clear from Lenin's attempt to make a bloc with Trotsky against Stalin from his sick bed, that Lenin would have used all his extraordinary political skill and ruthlessness, to smash the Stalin faction. (It's entertaining to speculate about the effective and brutal way the old firm of Lenin, Krupskaya et al, would have carefully mobilised and counted every vote to do in Stalin. Even Stalin's secretarial machine would probably have been outmatched by Lenin at that early stage of developments.) Lenin would have invoked his and Trotsky's prestige amongst the masses, etc, etc, and he would have had the formidable support of independently powerful revolutionaries like Trotsky, Krupskaya, Inessa Armand and many other Bolshevik leaders. The enormous, incipient objective forces for bureaucratisation that the uniquely barbaric and vicious Stalin came to represent, would still have been a powerful opposing force. It's not absolutely clear how the situation would have ultimately played itself out, but it can be asserted, with reasonable confidence, that the peculiarly vicious form that the degeneration of the Russian Revolution took, with the monster Stalin as the extremely conscious and rather skillful embodyment of the counterrevolution, would not have been the form developments took. Lenin's early death was the greatest human, social and political tragedy of the 20th century, and possibly of all history.

In the Stalin era in the Soviet Union, a whole mad hagiographic culture of so-called Leninism was developed, basically to strengthen Stalin's spurious claim to be Lenin's political heir. Historically speaking, Stalin's creation of the Lenin-Stalin cult was thoroughly reactionary. Many non-Stalinist organisations unfortunately take over part of the Stalinist hagiography of Lenin, and try to create a seamless "Leninism" to justify their own sect interests. This approach is a substantial obstacle to the development of a useful, open and informed "Leninism", as a constructive part of socialist political practice.

The intense, courageous, difficult and interesting lives of Lenin, Krupskaya, Armand and all the other Bolsheviks, is worthy of serious and objective study and contains many useful insights for modern socialists.

Below are four important, well-documented comments on the the relationship between Lenin, Krupskaya and Inessa Armand.

Extracts from Lenin: A biography, Robert Service (2000) pp 197-200

Until then, apparently, Lenin resisted sexual temptation. This restraint, if indeed it had been holding since his marriage in Siberia, seems to have broken down in Paris when he became acquainted with Inessa Armand. Everyone knew her simply as Inessa. She was a widow. Her father had been French, her mother English. Inessa had lived in Russia as a child; on growing up, she married Alexander Armand, in whose parents' family she was training to become a domestic tutor. She had five children, but her marriage became a sham after she started sleeping with her brother-in-law Vladimir Armand. This liaison, however, was short-lived: Vladimir died of tuberculosis in 1909. Inessa then moved to Western Europe with three of her children (and her husband Alexander continued to support her there financially). She had already been involved in revolutionary activity and been exiled by the Ministry of the Interior to Archangel in the Russian far north, and in Paris she aligned herself with the Bolshevik faction in the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party. Her fluency in Russian, French and English ensured her a warm welcome.

Inessa Armand was a fine-looking woman in her mid-thirties with long, wavy auburn hair. The pictures in the archives show that she had a beautiful face. When reproduced in Soviet history books, they never did her justice — and the thought occurs that the authorities, wishing to downplay speculation about a relationship between her and Lenin, tried to make her seem visually less appealing than she was. She had high, well-defined cheekbones. Her nose was slightly curved and her nostrils were wonderfully flared; her upper lip was slightly protrusive. Her teeth were white and even. She had lustrous, dark eyebrows. And she had kept her figure after having her children. In pictures taken with them as adolescents she looks more like an elder sister than a mother; her appearance was such that the Okhrana agents underestimated her age by several years. Inessa was also vivacious. She liked to ride side-saddle when she could, and to play Beethoven on the piano. She adored her children, but did not let them get in the way of her wish to enjoy herself. In particular, she had an uninhibited attitude to extramarital relationships.

The relationship between Lenin and Inessa Armand began slowly, and the passion originated on her side. She later wrote eloquently about this to him:

At that time I was terribly scared of you. The desire existed to see you, but it seemed better to drop dead on the spot than to come into your presence; and when for some reason you popped into N.K. [Krupskaya]'s room, I instantly lost control and behaved like a fool. Only in Longjumeau and in the following autumn in connection with translations and so on did I somewhat get used to you. I so much loved not only to listen to you but also to look at you as you spoke. Firstly, your face is so enlivened and, secondly, it was convenient to watch because you didn't notice at that time.

In the same letter she added: "At that time I definitely wasn't in love with you, but even then I loved you very much." Soon she fell in love with him. No letter survives to demonstrate that he in his turn fell equally for her, and this has led some writers to conclude that there was no affair. But Lenin's epistolary silence is not surprising. In mid-1914, when the relationship had waned, he asked her to return the correspondence he had sent her; it is difficult to imagine that his purpose was other than to destroy the evidence of what had taken place between them.

The associates and acquaintances of the Bolshevik leader took it for granted that the two were having an affair in 1910-12. When the French Marxist Charles Rappoport came upon them talking in a café on the Avenue d'Orléans, he reported that Lenin "could not take his Mongolian eyes off this little Frenchwoman". A hint was dropped also by Lidia Fotieva, one of Lenin's secretaries after the October Revolution, who recalled from her own visits to Lenin's apartment that Nadya no longer slept in the marital bedroom but in the bedroom of her mother. In September 1911, Inessa moved into the Rue Marie-Rose and lived next door to the Lenins at No. 2.

Admittedly, the evidence is circumstantial. But the intensity of the letters they subsequently sent each other makes it unlikely that Lenin was just flirting with Inessa; the probability is that they had had an extramarital affair. A reciprocal passion had obviously existed even if Lenin, unlike Inessa, did not explicitly refer to it in the correspondence. What, though, was the attraction between the two of them? For Lenin, it was probably crucial that Inessa was someone who, as she confided to her last diary, thought that life ought to be lived in the service of some great cause. The Bolshevik vision of revolutionary strategy was exactly such a cause for her. And, of course, she was lively, beautiful and "cultured" in the broadest sense. No wonder Lenin took to her. She in turn left a record as to why she was attracted by him. She adored his lively eyes, his self-belief and his intimidating presence. Even his initial unawareness of her intense interest in him had an appeal to her, but she found him irresistibly fascinating, and she absolutely had to have him.

For a time she surely succeeded. The victim of this process was Nadya, who had dedicated her life to Lenin's career since their marriage in 1898. She was an enduring soul. Yet she understandably drew the line at participating in a permanent ménage a trois. The detail of their disagreement was carried to their deaths with them, and rumours sprang up to fill the void. It is said that Nadya wanted to walk out and leave the lovers to their relationship. Lenin was aghast that his marriage might end. A sense of indebtedness to Nadya may have influenced him, and he perhaps also was sorry for her difficulties with Graves's disease. Possibly, too, his happiness depended on having Inessa without losing Nadya. In Nadya he had a personal secretary and household organiser. Inessa would never be as competent as Nadya at this dual role. She might not even agree to fulfil it at all. And so, according to the rumours, Lenin urged Nadya to change her mind: "Stay!" And Nadya did as requested, but only after being assured that his passion for Inessa did not exclude Nadezhda from his affections.

Nadya and Inessa felt no hostility for each other, and worked together in the party school a dozen miles to the south of Paris at Longjumeau in late 1911 where the Ulyanovs rented an apartment at 140 La Grande Rue. Furthermore, it was a lasting sadness to both Lenin and Nadya that their marriage had produced no children. The presence of Inessa's offspring in the neighbouring house on Rue Marie-Rose brought delight to the Ulyanov couple, who acted like uncle and aunt to the youngsters not only in Paris but years later in Moscow.

pp 414-416

While all this was happening, a terrible event occurred in Lenin's personal life. Inessa Armand had returned from her Red Cross mission to France and had fallen ill. Lenin wrote her a note:

Dear Friend,

Please write a note to say what's up with you. These are foul times: typhoid, influenza, Spanish 'flu, cholera. I've only just got out of bed and am not going out. Nadya has a temperature of 39^o and she's asked to see you. What's your temperature? Don't you need something to make yourself better? I really ask you to write frankly. Get better!

Yours, Lenin

Despite the chatty style, he preserved an emotional distance by addressing her with the polite Russian sy rather than the familiar iy and he can hardly have been trying to conduct a secret affair with her because he mentioned that his wife Nadya wanted Inessa to visit her. The ties between Lenin and Inessa were close, but they were not of the same nature as in Paris in 1912. Nadya by contrast seemed to have gained in influence over him. Alexandra Kollontai, whose novel The Love of Worker Bees was an allegory of the Lenin-Nadya-Inessa triangle in Paris in 1911-12, noted in her 1920 diary how "he takes great notice of her".

As for Lenin, he was bossy towards Inessa but there was an endearing ineffectuality about his efforts. When he wrote again to her, he tried to stop her venturing outside in the cold. He knew that she would ignore his instructions and directed her to tell her children to command her not to go outside in the freezing cold. It was Lenin's habit to supervise the medical treatment of his associates, but there is no parallel to his detailed intervention in the case of Inessa. She recovered from this bout of ill health and agreed to act as interpreter at the Second Comintern Congress in July.

This was very intensive work and — coming on top of disputes with colleagues such as Alexandra Kollontai — induced a relapse. In truth Inessa was exhausted, and Lenin advised her to go to a sanatorium. He suggested that, if she insisted on going abroad, she should avoid France for fear she might be arrested. In Lenin's opinion it would be better if she made for Norway or Holland. Better still, he suggested, she might try the Caucasus, and he promised to make dispositions for a pleasant period of care for her there. To cheer her up he mentioned that he had been hunting in the woods near the old Armand estate outside Moscow, and that the peasants had talked nostalgically about the days before 1917 when there had been real "order".

Inessa agreed to go to the spa town Kislovodsk in the mountains of the north Caucasus. Lenin gave orders that she and her son Andrei — then a lad of sixteen — should be well looked after. But the area was affected by a cholera epidemic; it also had not yet been pacified by the Red Army. Inadvertently Lenin had sent his former lover into mortal danger. First she caught cholera. Then the order was given for people to be evacuated to Nalchik. Inessa's health was finally broken, and she perished on 24 September 1920.

Knowing she was dying, she had put down her last thoughts in a presentational notebook given to her at the Comintern Congress. They make for poignant reading. Inessa wrote on 1 September:

Will this feeling of inner death ever pass away? I've reached the point where I find it strange that other people laugh so easily and that they obviously get pleasure from talking. I now laugh and smile almost never because an inner joy induces this in me but because it's sometimes necessary to smile. I'm also struck by my present indifference to nature. And yet it used to make me tremble so strongly. And how little I've now begun to love people. Previously I would approach each person with warm feelings. Now I'm indifferent to everyone. But the main thing is that I'm bored with almost everyone. Hot feelings have remained only for my children and for V.I.

There was only one person she could have referred to as V.I., and that was Vladimir Ilich Lenin. Inessa continued:

It's as if my heart has died in all other respects. As if, having devoted all my strength and all my passion to V.I. and to the cause of our [political] work, all sources of love and sympathy for people — to whom it once was so rich — have been exhausted. With the exception of V.I. and my children I no longer have any personal relationships with people except purely practical relationships.

Inessa called herself a "living corpse"; it was not only cholera but also a broken heart that did for her. Ten days later she contemplated the meaning of her life:

For romantics, love holds the first place in a person's life. It's higher than anything else. And until recently I was far nearer to such a notion than I am now. True, for me love was never the only thing. Alongside love there was public activity. And both in my life and in the past there have been not a few instances where I've sacrificed my happiness and my love for the good of the cause. But previously it used to seem that love had a significance equal to that of public activity. Now it's not like that. The significance of love in comparison with public activity becomes quite small and cannot bear comparison with public activity.

Letters from Lenin to Inessa Armand

Extracts from The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archives, Richard Pipes, 1996

Document 6. Letter to Armand (p 26)

25 May (7 June) 1914

7 June 1914¹

Dear friend!

I am always very busy now & worried with the same story of Malinowsky. He is here & it is very hard to see him — so useless & helpless now. And the liquidators² continue their infamous compagn of slander & chantage. Wiring [sic] with brother³ & small misunderstandings with him do not cease. Generalle he is very good, excellent — but exceptionally in such crisis he is from time to time a little too weak.

The liquidators have published (if we understood rightly the wire [news]) that we knew oui dire (rumors) about political improbity (dishonesty) of Malinovsky! In fact, we heard it from the Viennese (the liquidators), who blabbed — but we, of course, rejected the rumors, submitting [them] to a collegium of three members of the Central Committee.⁴ As for the liquidators!! To whom have they submitted [the rumors]?? Well, the workers have already given and will continue to give these filthy slanderers what for! We are sending you the new newspaper.⁵

If possible, do not be angry against me. I have caused you a great pain, I know it.

Yours truly

W.L[enin]

After your depart from Paris — you will not accomplish anything there! What can you do with people like that!

Notes

1. The date is recorded in the hand of Armand.

2. A term of opprobrium coined by Lenin for Mensheviks who wanted the movement to adapt itself to the workers' desires and needs and thereby to "liquidate" the revolution.

3. L.B. Kamenev.

4. The reference is to a Central Committee commission of inquiry made up of Lenin, G.Ye. Zinoviev, and Ya.S. Ganetsky, established to investigate the charges of provocation against Malinovsky.

5. Reference to the newspaper Rabochii [The workerj, the first issue of which was published on 22 April (5 May) 1914.

Document 7. Excerpt of a Letter to Armand. (p 27)

[Prior to 23 June (6 July) 1914]

Never, never have I written that I esteem only three women. Never!! I've written that fullest friendship, absolute esteem and confidance of mine are confined to only 2-3 women. That is quite another quite, quite another thing. I hope we will see each other here after the congress and speak about it. Please bring when You will come (that is, bring with you) all our letters (sending them by registered mail here is not convenient: the registered packet can very easily be opened by friends. And so on ...) Please, bring all letters, Yourself and we shall speak about it.

Document 8. Excerpt of a Letter to Armand (p 27)

[3 (16) July 1914]

My dear & dearest friend!¹

Oh, I would like to kiss you thousand times greeting you & wishing you but success: I am fully sure you will be victorious.

Notes

1. The PSS version has it, "My dear friend!"

The importance of Document 9 lies in the opening sentence, which reveals that Lenin saw the outbreak of the First World War as inevitably leading to a revolution in Russia.

Document 9. Letter to Armand. (p 27-30)

[Before 12 (25) July 1914]

My dear & dearest friend!

Best greetings for the commencing revolution in Russia. We are here without news. Extremely eager to know what is happening — but no telegrams!! Now the great town would be better than a village in Galicia. This evening at ... o'clock the question of war between Austria & Serbia will be answered ... The idiot Brussels conference can be forgotten in such time.¹ (I understand that the liquidators & Plekhanov² & other canailles are preparing a common manifesto. The traitors Poles, opposition, will not sign it!! Already the decomposition of the new "third-july block"!!)

Tomorrow I expect here the comrade You have seen in Brussels from the letton [Latvian] party.³
This summer is extremely unhappy: at first "affair" of Malinovsky, then the conference at Brussels. And now totally unknown if the great meeting of our party will be possible after the events in SPB [St Petersburg].⁴

Here extremely unpleasant "stories" with the stupid wife of the army.⁵ She is here with army & two her new friends: i) young man with grey hair, whom You have seen at first in Russia after having left Krakow in summer 1912, and the former editor of our scientific review. Both are friends of wife of the army. Both hate Malinowsky & repeat: the wife ... is "convinced", that he is an agent-provocateur!!

We in our quality as a committee of investigation, have lost many many hours to hear the "evidence" of the wife of the army. Stupid talks, hystery, — nothing serious. She accuses us to be partial (in relation to Malinovsky)!! Confrontation of her with Malinovsky. She is blamed — she has mixed personal affairs & intimities with the politics. Malinovsky reveals her intime discourses. Now come "the three" (army & both friends) & will have almost a duel with Malinovsky & soon & soon ... Oh, quelle misère! These hysterical stupid creatures, I am so angry, so angry!! Losing of time for such stupid stories!!! Yours very truly, I hope You are not angry against me, my dear friend?

Your W.L.

In our capital "etat de siege". Both [Bolshevik] papers must be closed. Arrests innombrable. The brother⁶ must be safe, because I've got a despatch from Finland with allusion that the brother is there & safe. But this is only a supposition. Nothing is certain.

Notes

1. Reference to conference in Brussels of the International Socialist Bureau, 16-18 July 1914 (NS).

2. Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov (18/6/1918): founding father of Russian Social Democracy. Before the 1917 Revolution, lived mainly in Switzerland; vacillated between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks. During World War I, adopted a "defensist" position. On his return to Russia, opposed Lenin's dictatorship.

3. Ya A. Berzin (1881-1938). Old Bolshevik of Latvian origin. On 8 April 1918, was appointed the Soviet "political representative" in Bern, Switzerland. After Bern, posted in London (1921-25) and in Vienna (1925-27). Perished in Stalin's terror.

4. Reference to major industrial strike in St Petersburg on 12-14 July 1914 (NS).

5 Possibly A.A. Troianovsky (1881-?): Russian writer and economist. Vacillated between the Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. In the 1920s emigrated to the United States.

6. L.B. Kamenev.

Inessa Armand

From Strange Communists I Have Known, 1965

Bertram D. Wolfe

In March, 1963, I published an article in the Slavic Review titled Lenin and Inessa Armand. In February, 1964, the same article was published in the British magazine, Encounter. In both cases, Moscow took no notice. But when Time made reference to it in their issue of April 14, 1964, with a cover drawing of Lenin by Ben Shahn, the Moscow authorities closed the Time bureau and expelled its correspondent. Time, said Izvestia by way of explanation, had "smeared what was dear and sacred to every Soviet person" and "touched with dirty fingers the memory of the founder of the Soviet State". At the same time, a spate of somewhat inaccurate and trivial articles about the almost forgotten Inessa Armand filled the Soviet press on what would have been her ninetieth birthday had she lived, and her daughter, "little Inessa", was the subject of a special childhood profile in Pravda. Here is the story of Lenin and Inessa Armand as I reconstructed it, primarily from Soviet sources.¹ From it the reader can judge who has touched her memory or Lenin's with "dirty fingers".

In 1924, immediately after Lenin died, the Central Committee of his party called upon all who had a shred of writing from his hand to deposit it in the party's archives. The holders hastened to comply. All his letters were ostensibly published in three substantial volumes, supplemented by items in a number of Miscellany (Sbornik) volumes. Not one letter to or from Inessa Armand appeared in that flood of Leniniana.

On February 27, 1939, Lenin's wife, Krupskaya, died. Four months after her death, Bolshevik (No. 13, July, 1939) published the first of two letters from Lenin to Inessa on the "woman question". The letters were not so much an expression of Lenin's views as a comment on Inessa Armand's. Planning in the course of her Bolshevik work with "working women" to write a brochure addressed to them, Inessa had dutifully submitted her outline to Lenin. Among her programmatic demands for woman's rights she included "free love."

The Marx-Lenin Institute has not chosen to publish any of her letters to Lenin, although from a French communist, Jean Fréville, who was permitted to consult her letters to Lenin when writing an authorized biography of Inessa, we know that the Institute has them. Something of the nature of her plan, however, we can glean from Lenin's letter concerning it, in which he quotes hers. But first we must consider his letters to Inessa Armand as a whole.²

The first thing that strikes the Russian reader of Lenin's letters to Inessa is the use of the intimate pronoun ty in addressing her, in place of the usual polite second person pronoun vy. To the English-speaking reader it is hard to convey how unusual, and how intimate, it is for an educated Russian to address a woman as ty. Or for that matter to address another man thus, unless they were childhood intimates, companions from youth, members of the same family, or much closer to each other than adult friends and socialist comrades. In all the 600-odd published letters of Lenin, except for his mother, his two sisters, and his wife, Inessa is the only woman to whom he ever wrote ty. Only two men ever received a letter with the intimate personal address. Both were comrades of his youth, one being Martov, for whom, as Krupskaya testifies in her Memories of Lenin, he felt a lifelong attachment.³ Yet there is only one letter extant in which he wrote ty to Martov. After their first political disagreement he never again addressed him except as vy.⁴ The other was Krzhizhanovsky, who in the nineties lived near him as a fellow exile in distant Siberia along the Yenisei, for weeks on end sharing with him the same cabin. With Krzhizhanovsky, too, after the latter crossed him once in politics, though he afterwards returned to unquestioning discipleship, Lenin never again used anything but vy.⁵
Neither Krassin, who made Lenin's bombs in 1905 and became his Commissar of Trade in 1918, nor Bogdanov, who was his chief lieutenant after the break with Iskra, nor Zinoviev, who held the same place from 1908 to 1917, nor Bukharin, whom he called the "darling of the party", nor Sverdlov nor Stalin, who each in turn became his chief organization man, ever received a letter that used the intimate pronoun.

Sparing as most educated Russians are in the use of ty with each other, Lenin was even more so than most, always maintaining a subtle distance between himself and the closest and most useful of his disciples. Nor, to mention the women who served him longest and most faithfully and for whose work he was most grateful, did he ever write ty to Stasova, Ludmila Stal, Lilina Zinoviev, Alexandra Kollontay, or Angelica Balabanoff. Any of them would have been astonished had he done so.

In the letters to Inessa Armand, too, there is a sudden change from ty to vy, but not out of cooling friendship or disagreement. In his first published letter to Inessa Armand Lenin uses the intimate form, and he continues to do so until the day war is declared. Then, with wartime censors opening letters on every frontier, he drops the telltale ty for the more formal vy, for Lenin was conspiratorial even in this. Otherwise there is no change in tone.⁶
Inessa Armand was a dedicated, romantic heroine, who seemed to come out of the pages of Chernyshevsky's What Is To Be Done? — Lenin's favorite revolutionary novel as it was Inessa's. Indeed, Chernyshevsky's novel was the chief instrument of the conversion of Inessa to socialism. The true story of her life has been obscured by the accounts of those who did not know her intimately, and by an understandable reticence on the part of those who did. The sketch of her in the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediia is meager, omits what is most important in her career, and is mistaken even as to the date of her birth and true name.

The Encyclopedia gives her birth date as 1875, her name as Inessa Fedorovna (i.e., Inessa, daughter of Fedor), and her maiden name as Stephanie. Actually, she was born in Paris in 1874, of a French father and a Scottish mother, both music hall artists, and was christened Elizabeth d'Herbenville. The Inessa by which she came exclusively to be known was the name she assumed in Russia for party work. So much did she become known by it (though she sometimes used the pseudonym Blonina instead) that when she died, the obituary written by Krupskaya for Pravda was headed with the single word: "Inessa." The maiden name Stephanie given her in the Encyclopedia is an obvious misunderstanding of her father's stage name, for in the French theater he was billed as Stephen. The name Petrova or Petrovna, given by some sources, is the pseudonym she used when she appeared in Brussels on Lenin's behalf in July, 1914, to defy the International Socialist Bureau, which was trying to unify the Russian socialist movement. It was as Comrade Petrova that she delivered in French the speech Lenin had written for her; it was as Petrova that the police agent present reported on her. It was an appropriate name, for it is derived from petra, "rock", and signifies that she, as a good Leninist, was "rock hard" and would stand up against all the great men of the International, firm as a rock.

Her childhood was that of a daughter of people of the theater. Her father, Pécheux d'Herbenville, was a comedian and singer, known on the stage as Stephen. Her mother sang in French and gave singing and piano lessons. As a child Inessa learned to speak both her native French and her mother's English tongue with equal fluency. The world of music and the stage were her home. When her father died and her mother could no longer support three fatherless children by teaching or music hall work, the girl, Elizabeth, was taken to Russia by a French aunt and her English maternal grandmother, both of whom secured positions, as was the fashion of the day, tutoring in French and English respectively the children of a wealthy Russian industrialist of French descent, Evgenii Armand, a textile manufacturer in Pushkino, thirty miles from Moscow. Here the young girl grew up in a family with liberal views. She was accepted on an equal footing with the children of the Armand family.

At fourteen she too was provided with a tutor, who turned out to be a man of advanced, perhaps revolutionary, ideas. These she did not understand, but they excited her imagination. She mastered Russian, was introduced into the Orthodox Church, and shared the interests that prevailed in educated circles in the closing years of nineteenth-century Russia. By now she spoke faultless German and Russian as well as French and English-polyglot. talents that would make her invaluable to Lenin. Her aunt, who had been a teacher of singing and piano, taught her to be a virtuoso at the piano, another talent that Lenin was to prize. At eighteen she married Alexander Evgenevich Armand, the manufacturer's second son, slightly older than she. The couple moved to the nearby estate of the Armands at Eldigino, and later to Moscow. She lived with her husband for many quiet, apparently happy years, bearing him five children, three boys and two girls. But this substantial family, in the words of Krupskaya's memoir, "did not prevent her from going her own path all the same, and becoming a revolutionary Bolshevik."⁷

It was her husand's older brother, Boris Evgenevich, who by word and example first steered her course towards "advanced ideas." He took the side of the workingmen in his father's factory, tried to organize them, and was questioned by the police when they traced to him the ownership of a mimeograph machine on which his unsigned leaflets were being reproduced. It was most likely he who put into his sister-in-law's hands Chernyshevsky's novel, Chto delat?, on whose utopian heroes and heroine, Vera Pavlovna, Inessa sought to model her own life.⁸

Like so many idealistic women of her generation, Inessa was not content with the sheltered career of wife and mother. Like her heroine, she too wanted to be "socially useful", to help the less fortunate members of her sex. She tried running the farm on her husband's estate, then teaching and doing works of charity. In time, the problem of prostitution became her obsession.

She sought to redeem these unhappy women from their life of degradation, but was shocked to find them suspicious, unashamed, unwilling to be "redeemed." Since one of her sources of inspiration was Leo Tolstoy, she went to this fountainhead of wisdom for counsel. His answer ("Nothing will come of your work. It was so before Moses, it was so after Moses. So it was, so it will be")⁹ turned her away from Tolstoyanism to a more exclusive dedication to Chernyshevsky. She would imitate Vera Pavlovna and her "uncommon" friends and tutors in their efforts to transform the structure of society. Thus she would put an end, she thought, to the hateful institution which had existed before Moses and which neither the Laws given to Moses nor the coming of Christ had been able to change. It was with "the woman problem in its relation to socialism" that she concerned herself for the rest of her life. She left husband and children, apparently without bitter scenes or rancor (just as Vera Pavlovna left Lopukhov). Later she sent for her two youngest to live with her abroad. But unlike her model, who was eager to earn her own way, Inessa continued to receive support from her husband all her life — until Lenin's seizure of power put an end to the fortune of the Armands in Russia.

In 1904 at the age of thirty, Inessa made her final break with her husband (they sometimes met as friends as occasion permitted thereafter), and went to Sweden to study feminism at the feet of Ellen Key. In Stockholm's Russian colony she got to know of Lenin's What's to be Done?, a title that reverberated in her spirit. In his organizational principles, his doctrine of the elite or vanguard, his hard line, she must have felt an echo of Rakhmetov, the "rigorist" of Chernyshevsky's novel. Thus before she met Lenin, she became his admirer and a Leninist.

An organizing mission for the Bolsheviks sent her back to Russia, where she landed almost immediately in prison, on January 6, 1905. The October Manifesto of the Tsar, promising freedom and a constitution, contained an amnesty provision for politicals which released her. On April 9, 1907, she was arrested a second time for Bolshevik activities in the armed forces. Her husband furnished bail, but she landed in jail once more while awaiting trial, and from jail was deported by administrative order to Archangel Province in Russia's far north for a two-year period. She managed to flee abroad before her term was quite over.

Early in 1910 she went to Paris where she got to know the Ulyanovs. Lenin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev (then the troika) had just moved to Paris in December, 1909. The leading Menshevik exiles were there too, and many Socialist Revolutionaries, so that Paris possessed a big Russian colony, in which Inessa soon assumed a leading position. She came with two of her children, a boy, André, and a girl, Ina. "She was a very ardent Bolshevik," writes Krupskaya, "and soon gathered our Paris crowd around her."

Those who knew her then remember her somewhat strange, nervous, slightly asymmetrical face, unruly, dark chestnut hair, great hypnotic eyes, and inextinguishable ardor of spirit. She had a wider culture than any other woman in Lenin's circle (at least until Kollontay became an adherent of his during the war), a deep love of music, above all of Beethoven, who became Lenin's favorite too. She played the piano like a virtuoso, was fluent in five languages, was enormously serious about Bolshevism and work among women, and possessed personal charm and an intense love of life to which almost all who wrote of her testify.¹⁰ When Lenin met her, she had just turned thirty-six.

In the course of his factional war with the Vperyodist Bolsheviks,¹¹ who had set up a party school in Gorky's home in Capri, Lenin rejected their invitation to teach, promoted (unwittingly aided by a police agent) a split in their student body, and opened a rival school in Longjumeau, near Paris. Inessa rented a large building there and set up lodgings and a dining room for the students. The Ulyanovs dined there too. As a rare mark of Lenin's confidence, she was permitted to alternate with him in the course on political economy. The rest of the faculty were Zinoviev and Kamenev. No other Bolshevik woman had ever been so honored.

The Ulyanovs generally held everyone at arm's length, with Krupskaya as self-appointed guardian to see that Lenin's work and privacy were not interfered with. But by 1911 it had become obvious to the little circle of Russian émigrés that Inessa had somehow breached the barrier: "He was often seen with her at a café on the Avenue d'Orleans ..." It struck even so unobservant a person as the French Socialist-Bolshevik, Charles Rappaport. Lenin, he wrote, "avec ses petits yeux mongols épiait toujours cette petite française".¹²

The Ulyanovs now moved to 4, Rue Marie-Rose, and Inessa and her children to Number 2 of the same street. (The houses are still standing, in good condition, with a plaque outside Number 4 telling the passerby that Lenin once lived there.) "The house grew brighter when Inessa entered it," Krupskaya was to write six years after Inessa's death.¹³

In 1912 Lenin completed the final split in the Social Democratic Party by designating his Bolshevik conference in Prague an official party congress, and declaring Martov, Axelrod, Plekhanov, Trotsky, and their followers "outside the party" until they submitted to his "Congress." He moved to Krakow, in Austrian Poland, to be nearer St. Petersburg, where the legal daily Pravda now began to appear. To line up the underground inside Russia, he sent Inessa, who had also moved to Krakow, on a clandestine tour of Russia. There were so many police agents in his underground now that almost immediately she landed in prison once more. When she developed signs of tuberculosis in jail, her husband managed to get her out on bail after a year in prison. She immediately rejoined Lenin and his wife in Krakow and in Poronin in the Tatra Mountains.

We were terribly glad ... at her arrival ... In the autumn [of 1913] all of us became very close to Inessa. In her there was much joy of life and ardor. We had known Inessa in Paris, but there was a large colony there. In Krakow lived a small closely knit circle of comrades. Inessa rented a room in the same family with which Kamenev lived.¹⁴My mother became closely attached to Inessa. Inessa often went to talk with her, sit with her, have a smoke with her. It became cosier and gayer when Inessa came. Our entire life was filled with party concerns and affairs, more like a student commune than like family life, and we were glad to have Inessa. Something warm radiated from her talk.

Ilyich, Inessa, and I often went on walks together. Zinoviev and Kamenev dubbed us the "hikers" party. We walked in the meadows on the outskirts of the city. Meadow in Polish is blon, and Inessa from then on took the pseudonym of Blonina. Inessa was a good musician, urged us all to go to Beethoven concerts, and played very well many of Beethoven's pieces. Ilyich especially loved Sonate Pathétique, constantly begging her to play it.

In 1921, when Lenin had taken power and Inessa was dead, one day he said to Gorky:

I know nothing that is greater than the Appassionata: I am ready to listen to it every day. It is amazing, more than human, music. I want to say gentle stupidities and stroke the heads of people who, living in this dirty hell, can create such beauty. But today you must not stroke the head of anyone — they will bite your hand.

It is necessary to beat them over the head, beat without mercy, even though in our ideal we are against the use of force against people. Hm-hm, duty is hellishly hard!¹⁵

It was this side of Lenin's nature — the side which he strove mightily, and on the whole successfully, to restrain — that Inessa ministered to. The gentleness she evoked in him (the desire to say gentle stupidities and stroke the heads of people) is reflected in his letters to her, despite the censorship to which they have been subjected, reflected even in letters arguing with her when she has disagreed and pressed her point hard.

Life in Krakow proved too cramping for Inessa's overflowing energies. She made a tour of the Bolshevik exile colonies, lecturing on the woman question, and then returned to her native Paris, where the main Bolshevik group abroad was settled. At the beginning of January, 1914, Lenin stopped over in Paris with Duma Deputy (and police agent) Malinovsky, when they were on their way to address a Lettish Congress in Brussels. He returned to Paris alone, spending a month and a half in the French capital. To his mother he wrote on February 21: "I have just been in Paris, not a bad trip. Paris is not a good city to live in with modest means, and quite an exhausting one. But to be there a little while, to visit, to wander about a bit — there's not a better nor a gayer city. It refreshed me greatly."¹⁶ No letter of Lenin's ever suggested a happier, more relaxed mood. It was while Inessa was living in Paris and the Ulyanovs were in Krakow that Lenin's first letter to her was written. The published version has been censored and lacks salutation and closing and all personal touches. His last letter to her is dated in his works as "written between the 25th and the 31st of March, 1917, that is, after the February Revolution had begun, and both Inessa and Lenin were getting ready to go to Russia. She was one of the eighteen Bolsheviks who accompanied him across Germany to Russia in the "sealed train" that enabled them to reach Petrograd on April 16, 1917.

During the war Lenin wrote more letters to Inessa Armand than to any other person, whether relative or disciple. As soon as he got out of prison in Austria and reached a safe haven in Berne, Switzerland, he wrote to Inessa, who because of her lung ailment was living in the Swiss Alps at Les Avants. Except for the first two sentences, Lenin writes this time as best he can in English. He tells Inessa of the need to gather materials on the war positions of all parties, then asks about her health, whether she eats better, whether she has books and newspapers, how the weather is in Les Avants, whether she is taking walks, and whether they can see each other soon. The letter must have been written after September 6. "Towards the middle of September," according to her official biographer, Inessa moved to Berne.¹⁷ Thereafter there were no letters to Inessa for the rest of the autumn. A passage in Krupskaya's memoirs explains why:

The memory of that autumn is interwoven in my mind with the autumnal scene in the forest in Berne. The autumn of that year was a glorious one. We lived in Berne on a small, neat, quiet street bordering on the Berne Forest ... Cater-corner across the road lived Inessa [the street was Distelweg] ... We would wander for hours along the forest roads covered with fallen yellow leaves. Generally the three of us went together on these walks, Vladimir Ilyieh, Inessa, and I. Sometimes we would sit for hours on the sunlit, wooded mountainside, while Ilyich jotted down outlines of his speeches and articles ... I would study Italian Inessa would sew a skirt and bask with delight in the autumnal sun.

As soon as Inessa left Berne, Lenin resumed writing to her. In the brief period from November 20, 1916, to the outbreak of the February Revolution in 1917, he wrote fourteen letters to her, two brief notes to his younger sister, one to his older sister's husband, and four to other persons — in short, more to her than to all the rest put together. In his letters to Inessa, as always, preoccupation with politics is uppermost. But tone and depth reveal facets of his nature exhibited in no other letters, whether to members of his family or to other disciples.

Unlike the letters to other intimates of the Ulyanovs, there are in the letters to Inessa no mention of Krupskaya, no regards from her, nor any personal note added by her. Only after Lenin has been writing to Inessa for three years does he once mention Krupskaya: "Nadia is ill: she caught bronchitis and has a fever. It seems she will have to toss about in bed for a while. Today I called a woman doctor."¹⁸

Several letters sound a rare note akin to self-pity and search for sympathy: how hard his life is, how unending and ungrateful his factional struggles, how dumb even the best Bolsheviks can be. Thus in the earliest letter from Krakow to Paris in December, 1913, he tells her that he is receiving protests from offended party cells because he does not work through them but picks his own men of confidence for confidential tasks:

Clowns! They chase after words. Don't think how devilishly complicated and tricky life is which provides altogether new forms.People for the most part (99 per cent of the bourgeoisie, 98 per cent of the Liquidators, some 6o to 70 per cent of the Bolsheviks) are unable to think, only able to learn words by heart. They have learned by heart the word "underground." Good. They can repeat it. This they know by rote.But how its forms must be changed under new circumstances, how one must learn anew for this, and how to think, that we do not understand.I am greatly interested in knowing whether you could explain this to the public. Write me in the greatest detail.¹⁹

No doubt in this "dialectical" and "statistical" analysis of the class ability to think there is something intentionally comic, but the complaint is serious all the same, and flattering in its implication that Inessa is one who can not only think but perhaps write a pamphlet that will teach other Bolsheviks how to think. The year 1916 was a bitter, quarrelsome year for Lenin. "Never, I think," wrote Krupskaya, "was Vladimir Ilyich in a more irreconcilable mood than during the last months of 1916 and the early months of 1917. "He had differences of opinion with Rosa Luxemburg, Radek, the Dutch, Bukharin, Piatakov ... and Kollontay" and even with his sister Ann.²⁰ He wrote Inessa several letters full of abusive reproaches of comrades who were closest to him, and apparently she reproved him in reply.

But just at that point, Maxim Gorky, who at his request was trying to arrange the legal publication of Lenin's Imperialism in Petrograd, demanded that he omit some of the epithets directed at Kautsky. This, Lenin wrote Inessa, was "ridiculous and offensive"; then he added: "There you are, that's my fate. One fighting campaign after another — against political stupidities, vileness, opportunism, etc. And this from 1893 on. And the hatred of the philistines because of it. Well, all the same, I would not change my fate for "peace" with the philistines²¹

This is one of the rare autobiographical reflections we have from his usually extrovert pen.
His big opportunity to use Inessa, as we have already noted, came when he sent her in his place to represent the Bolsheviks at the International Socialist Bureau conference called in Brussels on July 16 and 17, 1914, to unify once more the Russian socialist movement. He was sending her to meet and do battle with such large figures as Kautsky, Vandervelde, Huysmans, Luxemburg, Plekhanov, Trotsky and Martov. He counted on her mastery of all the languages of the International, her literal devotion to him and his views, her steadfastness under fire. Apparently Zinoviev or some other close lieutenant found Lenin's confidence misplaced and thought Inessa too small for the task, so he wrote her:

I am convinced that you are one of those who develops, grows stronger, becomes more energetic and bolder when alone in a responsible post ... I stubbornly disbelieve the pessimists who say that you — are hardly — nonsense and again nonsense! With a splendid tongue you will smash them all; you will not let Vandervelde interrupt you and yell.²²You must make the report. You will say that you demand it and that you have precise and practical proposals. What can be more practical and businesslike? We go our way, they theirs — and we'll see what happens. Either a general line is accepted or we say let's report to our congress, we to the congress of our party. (But in fact, it is clear, we will accept exactly nothing.)²³

After a great deal more in this vein, Lenin breaks into English, as he delights to do in his letters to this master of five languages:

I've forgotten the money question. We will pay for letters, telegrams (please wire of tener) & railroad expenses, hotel expenses & so on. Mind it!*If you succeed to receive the first rapport for 1-2 hours, it is almost all.*Then it remains to "kick back," to fish out their contrepropositions* (on all 14 points) and to declare we do not agree (not one of their proposals will we accept).²⁴
In all the forty pages of instructions and private notes, although the time was nearly three weeks after the assassination of the Archduke at Sarajevo, Lenin has not one word to say about war, except his own war against all the other varieties of Russian socialism. Inessa, Krupskaya writes, was selected because it was necessary to have a firm person who could "resist a storm of indignation. She carried out her task bravely." And the police agent's comment showed that she did so, to the "great disgust" of the International Socialist Bureau representatives and those from the other Russian factions, "as no one had expected the impudence of the Leninists to reach such proportions.

To follow up Lenin's and their advantage, the police instructed all their secret agents in the underground "steadfastly and persistently to defend the idea of the complete impossibility of any organization fusion whatsoever, especially a union of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks." Lenin, who was taking no chances either, determined not to attend the Emergency Session of the I.S.B. on July 29, 1914, the day after Austria shelled Belgrade, for the sole purpose of trying to stop the war from spreading.

We turn now to three letters to Inessa, one written on June 5, 1914, and the other two in December, 1916, which refer directly or indirectly to Inessa's preoccupation with "the woman question", her reading in this field, and her plan for a pamphlet.

The first deals with a novel by Vinenchenko, which Inessa had recommended to Lenin, then sent him to read. The novel was no doubt The Commandments of Our Fathers.

I have read, my dear friend,²⁵ the new novel by Vinenchenko which you sent. What a nonsensical and stupid story!To bring together as many "horrors" as possible of all kinds, to collect and unite both "vice" and "syphilis" and romantic villainy, with extortion of money for a secret (and the transformation of the blackmail victim into a mistress) and the trial of a doctor! All with hysterics, mental contortions, pretensions to a theory of "his own" on the organization of prostitutes.Coming singly, there are in life, of course, all the "horrors" which Vinenchenko depicts. But to join them all together.Once I had to spend the night with a sick comrade (delirium tremens). And once I had to try to dissuade a comrade who was attempting suicide. In the end he died a suicide. Both are memories a la Vinenchenko. But in each case these were small fragments of the lives of the two comrades. But this pretentious, arrant fool of a Vinenchenko ... has made this a collection of nothing but horrors. Brrr — dullness, nonsense, unpleasant to have spent time in reading it.²⁶

A glance at the novel will convince the reader that Lenin was the better critic and that Inessa's interest was largely due to the author's "own theory on the organiza-tion of prostitutes".

Unfortunately, Inessa's letter outlining her plan for a pamphlet on the "woman question" has not been published. But from Lenin's letters we can see that she had included among her list of "immediate demands" the "demand for free love". Pedantically, dogmatically, but with an effort to be tactful and gentle, Lenin sought to persuade her to strike it out. "This is really not a proletarian but a bourgeois demand," he writes in his first letter. "What can be understood by it?" Answering his own question, he enumerates ten possible interpretations:

(1) Freedom from material calculations in the matter of love? (2) From material cares also? (3) From religious prejudices? (4) From prohibitions by papa, etc.? (5) From the prejudices of "society"? (6) From a narrow environment (peasant or petit-bourgeois-intellectual)? (7) From the fetters of law, the court-room, and the police? (8) From the serious in love? (9) From childbirth? (10) Freedom of adultery?

Of course, you have in mind not Nos. 8-10 but Nos. 1-7. But for numbers 1-7 you must select another term, for free love does not exactly express this thought. And the public will inevitably understand by "free love" Nos. 8-10, just for the reason that it is not a proletarian but a bourgeois demand ... It is not a matter of what you "want to understand" subjectively by it. It is a matter of the objective logic of class relations in matters of love.²⁷
Something in Lenin's letter — perhaps his remark on "freedom of adultery" — must have hurt Inessa deeply. In reply to her protest, not available to us, he defends his "class analysis" of love:

Good, let us examine the question once more. You "object": [you say] "I don't understand how it is POSSIBLE to identify (I!??) free love" with No. 10. So it seems that it is I who do the "identifying" and you are getting ready to scold ... me? How? Why?Bourgeois women understand by free love pts. 8-10 — that is my thesis. Do you reject that? Then tell me what bourgeois ladies do understand by free love? ... Don't literature and life prove that? You must mark yourself off clearly from them, oppose to theirs the proletarian point of view. Otherwise they will seize upon the corresponding points of your pamphlet, interpret them in their own way, make of your pamphlet water for their mill, pervert your thoughts before the workers, "confuse" the workers (by sowing among them the fear that the ideas you bring may be alien to them). And in their hands are the powerful hosts of the press.But, you, completely forgetting the objective and class point of view, pass over to an "attack" on me, as if it were I who "identify" free love with pts 8-10. Strange, verily, verily, strange.

Lenin seems to sense that this pedantic self-exculpation does not touch the core of her feeling, so he tries another approach:

"Even a temporary passion and love affair" — so you write — is "more poetical and clean" than "kisses without love" of vulgar, and worse than vulgar, spouses. [The words I have rendered with "vulgar and worse than vulgar" are poshlyi (vulgar) and poshlenkii, a pejorative diminutive of the same word. — B.W.] So you write. And so you are getting ready to write in your pamphlet. Splendid.Is the contraposition logical? Kisses without love, of vulgar spouses, is dirty. I agree. To this must be counterposed — what? It would seem: kisses with love?But you counterpose "temporary (why temporary?) "passion" (why not love?). Logically it turns out as if kisses without love (temporary) are opposed to kisses without love (conjugal) ... Strange. For a popular pamphlet, would it not be better to oppose to middle-class-intellectual-peasant vulgar and dirty marriage without love-proletarian, civil marriage with love (with the addition, IF YOU ABSOLUTELY INSIST, that a temporary affair-passion may also be dirty or clean).Truly I do not want to engage in a polemic with you at all. Gladly would I throw this letter away and postpone the matter until we can have a talk together.But I did want your pamphlet to be a good one, so that from it no one would be able to rip out a phrase unpleasant for you ... I am sending you this letter only that you may perhaps re-examine your plan in more detail, as a result of letters, than on the occasion of a chat. A plan, you see, is a very important thing.²⁸

The pamphlet was never written!

Inessa continued to play an important part in Lenin's wartime activities. She served on the Bolshevik delegations to Zimmerwald and Kienthal. At the Berne Conference of Bolsheviks, she was one of a committee of three, with Zinoviev and Lenin, that drafted the official resolution on war. (There is no doubt that the real author was Lenin.) She continued to lead the Bolshevik work among women. Despite her age — she was forty in 1914 — she represented Bolshevism at the International Youth Conference. She became one of the founders and a foreign editor of the Petersburg legal Bolshevik journal, The Woman Worker, the other editors being Kollontay (who agreed with her on "free love"), Lilina Zinoviev, Krupskaya, Lydia Stal, and Lenin's sister Anna.

Inessa was on the "sealed train" that took Lenin and his wife, the Zinovievs, and other prominent Bolsheviks back to Russia. Thereafter Lenin's life in the maelstrom of revolution, and hers, scarcely less agitated and active, in woman's work, work among French Communists and sympathizers in Russia, activities as first chairman of the Economic Council of Moscow Province, editor of the Woman's Section of Pravda and Bednota, her struggle against the ubiquitous prostitution during the years of civil war and economic breakdown, her translation work at two congresses of the Comintern — the churning whirlpool of revolution left little time for these two to think of themselves or each other.

The descriptions of her dating from this period agree that she dressed plainly, carelessly, even neglectfully, in worn and shabby garments; that she was ill-fed, often cold and hungry; that her face had begun to show the ravages of overwork and neglect of self. At last, her friends and comrades, frightened by the signs of physical breakdown, persuaded her to go to the Caucasus for a rest. There too was hunger, overcrowding, floods of refugees, civil war, breakdown, disease. She slept in freight cars, was carried from town to town, and nursed the sick on the train. At last she was struck down herself by typhus in the autumn of 1920, dying at the age of forty-six.

When Alexandra Kollontay, then serving as ambassador to Norway, died in 1952, Marcel Body, a French communist who had been in Inessa's group in Moscow and then served as aide, intimate friend, and first secretary of Kollontay's embassy, wrote a memoir concerning the first woman ambassador in history. In the memoir he told how Kollontay had spoken to him of Lenin's deep love for Inessa Armand.²⁹ Krupskaya had known of it, she said, and in line both with the principles instilled in her by Chernyshevsky's "uncommon persons" in What's to be Done?, and the principles expressed in another favorite tale of Lenin's, The Story of Kolosov, by Turgenev,³⁰ Krupskaya had bravely faced the thought that her husband would now leave her for Inessa. When he did not go, she offered to leave. More than once, she signified her intention of leaving, but each time Lenin said to her, "No, stay!" Dutifully, she stayed.³¹

After Body published this memoir, Angelica Balabanoff felt that she too might break the puritanical silence she had hitherto observed concerning Inessa in my many interviews with her on what she knew of Lenin.

Lenin loved Inessa [Dr. Balabanoff told me]. There was nothing immoral in it, since Lenin told Krupskaya everything [again the same code]. He deeply loved music, and this Krupskaya could not give him. Inessa played beautifully — his beloved Beethoven and other pieces.He sent Inessa to the Youth Conference of the Zimmerwald Group — a little old, but she had a credential from the Bolsheviks and we had to accept it. He did not dare to come himself, sat downstairs in a little adjacent café drinking tea, getting reports from her, giving her instructions. I went down for tea and found him there. Did you come na chai, I asked, or na rezoliutsii? (for tea, or for the resolution?) He laughed knowingly, but did not answer. [Inessa fought hard, but the resolution Lenin prepared for her was defeated 13-3.]³²When Inessa died, he begged me to speak at her funeral. He was utterly broken by her death. She died miserably of typhus in the Caucasus. I did not want to speak because I did not feel close to her nor really know her well. Yet I did not want to refuse.Fortunately, at the last moment, Kollontay arrived, and delivered a moving address. I east sidelong glances at Lenin. He was plunged in despair, his cap down over his eyes; small as he was, he seemed to shrink and grow smaller. He looked pitiful and broken in spirit. I never saw him look like that before. It was something more than the loss of a "good Bolshevik" or a good friend. He had lost some one very dear and very close to him and made no effort to conceal it.He had had a child by Inessa. She married the German communist, Eberlein, who was purged by Stalin. What happened to Lenin's daughter then I do not know.³³

This last belief of Dr. Balabanoff, which I heard also from Germans who had known Hugo Eberlein well, is nevertheless mistaken. When Inessa died, the Ulyanovs adopted her daughter, ma, and took her to live with them. It was at Lenin's home that Eberlein met ma Armand, but she would have been too young to have been at a nubile age then if she had really been a daughter of Lenin and Inessa, whose personal acquaintance dates from 1910. (Eberlein married for the second time in Moscow in 1921.)³⁴

For the rest, Kollontay's account and Balabanoff's confirm each other. The account of Kollontay reads: "When her body was brought from the Caucasus and we accompanied her to the cemetery, Lenin was unrecognizable. He walked with closed eyes; at every moment we thought he would collapse." Always the romantic, Kollontay added: "He was not able to go on living after Inessa Armand. The death of Inessa hastened the development of the sickness which was to destroy him." Be that as it may (he managed to continue active political life for two extremely full years, then died in the same way as his father, whom he so greatly resembled, at almost the same age)³⁵ both accounts make it clear that Lenin deeply loved Inessa and that her death affected him profoundly.

To Krupskaya fell the task of writing the obituary notice for the Woman's Section of Pravda, on October 3, 1920. She tried hard to summon up a sense of loss, but the obituary is formless and colorless. In time, however, this devoted woman learned to accept this aspect of her husband's life, like every other, as parts of a paradigm of perfection. In 1926, Krupskaya edited and wrote the opening article of a symposium brochure, In Memory of Inessa Armand. It is the warmest and most informative essay in the collection. When in 1930-32 she came to write her Memories of Lenin, the personality of Inessa shone through its pages, radiant and joyous, as Lenin saw her. Thus perhaps it was Krupskaya, even more than Inessa and Lenin, who deserved the appellation of "uncommon person" used alike by Chernyshevsky and Turgenev in their discussions of freedom in love. Whatever may have been their reason, it was no longer Krupskaya's personal sensitiveness that motivated the Marx-Lenin Institute in waiting for her death before publishing the letters of Lenin to Inessa Armand. But the officials of the Institute did not know Krupskaya's spirit well enough to be aware of the change.

Perhaps we should add a footnote on the subsequent lives of the family of Inessa Armand. Her husband, after the loss of his fortune, entered "agriculture," working in a kolkhoz until his death in 1943. Her oldest son, Alexander, fought in the Civil War. For some reason which I have not been able to ascertain he was expelled from the Communist Party under Stalin shortly after World War II, thereafter having a difficult time. In 1957 he was reported to be working in the Thermotechnical Institute in Moscow. Fedor, her second son, was a military aviator, then engaged in the organization of athletics, until his death of tuberculosis in 1936. The youngest son, André, became an engineer and tank constructor. He died in battle in 1944. The older daughter, ma, lost her German communist husband in the Stalin blood purges. In 1957 she was working in the Marx-Lenin Institute. The younger daughter, Varvara, is a "decorative artist." At least, such is the account given in the official French communist biography of Inessa Armand. (All except the marriage to Eberlein and his subsequent purge, for unpersons did not then get into official biographies.)

Appendix

The sources I have used in the present study are the following: the references of Krupskaya (Lenin's wife) to Inessa in her Vospominaniya o Lenine (Memories of Lenin); Krupskaya's reminiscences concerning her, and the reminiscences of others of her friends, in Pamyati messy Armand: Sbornik pod redak-tsiei N.K. Krupskoi (In Memory of Inessa Armand: Symposium under the Editorship of N.K. Krupskaya), Moscow, 1926; the letters of Lenin to Inessa, published in slightly censored form in Vol. XXXV of the Fourth Edition of his works; reminiscences of Angelica Balabanoff, communicated orally to the author; reminiscences of Marcel Body, French communist who recounted what he himself knew when Inessa was the organizer of the French communists in Moscow in 1918, and also what he learned from Alexandra Kollontay, as her confidant and aide in the Embassies of Norway and Sweden; a letter of Body to the writer; Jean Fréville, Inessa Armand: Une Grande Figure de la Revolution Russe, Paris, 1957 (Fréville was permitted to examine her letters and other materials in the archives of the Marx-Lenin Institute, but has refrained from quoting or been forbidden to quote from them); an obituary notice in Pravda written by Krupskaya on the occasion of Inessa's death; an article on her in the Bolshaya Sovetskaya Entsiklopediia; a discussion on her relations with Lenin in N. Valentinov, Vstrechi's Leninym (Meetings with Lenin), New York, 1953; Gerard Walter, LCnine, Paris, 1950. These varying accounts contain some discrepancies, many reticences, and in some cases, palpable inaccuracies. Thus fre-quently her first name is given as Inessa (a pseudonym) and not Elizabeth. Her maiden name is omitted or wrongly given as Petrova, Petrovna (a pseudonym) or Stephanie (her father's stage name). Her father's stage name and real name are given in Lyonnet's Dictionaire des Comédiens Francais, Vol. II.

Notes

1. See Appendix page 164.

2. In 1952, twenty-four of his letters to her — manifestly somewhat cut and usually deprived of their salutation and complimentary closing — were published in Vol. XXXV of Lenin's Works.

3. This is testified to by every mention of Martov in the two volumes of Krupskaya's Vospominaniya and by M. Gorky, ^{V.I. Lenin} (Moscow, 1931). Krupskaya relates that when Lenin felt his end was near, one of his last utterances was a mournful query: "They say that Martov is dying, too!"

4. Lenin, XXXIV, 117-18 (the ty letter), and p. 146 (the first vy letter). Between the two letters, seven months apart, had come the fateful disagreement on the definition of a member and on the composition of the Iskra editorial board.

5. Lenin, XXXIV, 113-14, 127, 186-88; XXXV, 370-71, 375-76, 397, 399, 400, 405, 406-7, 409-10, 414, 415, 422, 423-34, 431, 4~6, 472. All the letters in Vol. XXXV.

6. The last letter using ty is dated July 15, 1914. The first wartime letter is dated by the Marx-Lenin Institute as "written in September 1914. One cannot tell whether Lenin thinks of her as ty or vy because, for the first time in his life, Lenin tries to write the whole letter, except two impersonal sentences, in English. It remained unpublished until 1960, when a Russian translation (with no original) was published in Voprosy Istorii KPSS, No. 4, 1960, pp. 3-4. Then there were no letters until the war was five months old because Inessa joined Lenin and Krupskaya in Berne as soon as they got to Switzerland. But when they separated and there was occasion to write her once more, on January 17, 1915, Lenin wrote vy.

7. Inessa, by N. Krupskaya, in Pravda, Oct. 3, 1920.

8. A common bond between Lenin and Inessa Armand on their first meeting was their shared admiration for Chernyshevsky's novel. This novel, which took the Russian intelligentsia by storm with its image of the "new men", also contained a "new woman", Vera Pavlovna. The American anarchist Benjamin Tucker, who translated it into English, wrote of the novel: "The fundamental idea is that woman is a human being and not an animal created for man's benefit, and its chief purpose is to show the superiority of free unions between men and women over the indissoluble marriage sanctioned by the Church and State." Preface to the fourth edition (New York, 1909), p.3. If Lenin was attracted by the vision of the "uncommon men" and their "rigorist" leader concerning utopia, Inessa was attracted by the deeds and views of the novel's heroine. In the work entitled In Memory of Inessa Armand, Krupskaya wrote:

Inessa was moved to socialism by the image of woman's rights and freedom in What Is To Be Done? Like the heroine, she broke her ties with one man to live with another, concerned herself with good deeds to redeem the poor female and the prostitute, tried to solve the problems of woman's too servile place in society. Indeed, whole generations of Russian radicals were influenced by Chemyshevsky's many-sided utopian novel and were moved to imitate its "uncommon men and women". Just as Marx could be the spiritual ancestor of people as various as Bernstein, Kautsky, Bebel, and Luxemburg, so Chernyshevsky was a formative influence for the two men who in their persons incarnated the two opposing poles of socialism in 1917: Tsereteli and Lenin. If Inessa found in the novel her image of woman's rights and freedom in love, and Lenin the prototypes of his vanguard and his leadership, Tsereteli found there his ideal of service to the people. Men who are big enough to have spiritual progeny are likely to be thus many-sided and complicated, while each "descendant" finds in his "ancestor" that which enlarges and reinforces what already exists in him.

9. In Memory of Inessa Armand, p.7.

10. The one exception is Angelica Balabanoff, who got to know her five years later through their joint work in the Zimmerwald and Kienthal wartime conferences, and the International Woman's and Youth's meetings. Dr Balabanoff told me: "I did not warm to Inessa. She was pedantic, a one hundred per cent Bolshevik in the way she dressed (always in the same severe style), in the way she thought, and spoke. She spoke a number of languages fluently, and in all of them repeated Lenin verbatim."

11. For this controversy, see my Three Who Made a Revolution.

12. Valentinov, op. cit., p. 99.

13. The quotations from Krupskaya, here and throughout the article, are either from her account in In Memory of Inessa Armand or from Vol. II of her Memories of Lenin. In the English-language edition, Memories of Lenin (New York, International Publishers, 1930), they are quoted from pp. 58, 66, 67, 73, 84, 90, 121, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 130 and ff. Where the translation seemed poor, I have retranslated from the corresponding pages of the 1957 Russian edition.

14. The Kamenevs lived on an upper floor in the same building as the Ulyanovs.

15. Lenin i Gorkii: Pisma, (Moscow, 1958), pp. 251-52. An English translation is in Maxim Gorky, Days with Lenin (New York, 1932), p. 52.

16. Lenin, Works XXXVII, 430.

17. Friville. Inessa Armand. p. 90.

18. Lenin, XXXV, 232.

19. Ibid., p. 96.

20. Krupskaya, op. cit., English edition, pp. i88 and ff; Russian, pp. 264-65 and 271. Lenin XXXV, 167.

21. Lenin, XXXV, 209.

22. This did not prevent Lenin from writing out for her every word she was to say, and supplementing this with four sets of zametki privées (private notes). The report and instructions he wrote for her take up forty pages in Vol. XX of his Sochineniw.

23. Lenin, XXXV, 508-10; XX, 463-502.

24. All passages in italics are underlined by Lenin in the original; an asterisk after them indicates that they are in English or French or some other language than Russian. The first two paragraphs are in what Lenin believes to be English, the third in Russian except for the word contrepropositions.

25. English in the original. Where the editors have not omitted the salutation and closing, Lenin generally writes Dorogoi Drug (Dear Friend) and closes with "firmly [or firmly, firmly] I press your hand". In one letter he tries to put this into English as "Friendly shake hands!"

26. Lenin, XXXV, 107.

27. Ibid., pp. 137-38. This is the letter which closes with the English "Friendly shake hands!"

28. Ibid., pp. 139-41.

29. Marcel Body, Alexander Kollontai, in Preuves (Paris), April, 1952, pp. 12-24. Body was a French workingman, a printer in Limoges, Mobilized in 1914, he was sent to Russia with a French military mission to the Russian army. Like a number of other men of that mission (Captain Jacques Sadoul, hitherto a Right Socialist, for example), he sympathized with the February and October Revolutions. Remaining in Russia, he joined first lnessa's group of French communists in Moscow, then the Russian party, and served the Soviet government in various capacities. When Kollontay arrived in Oslo as the world's first woman ambassador in 1922, a kind of honorific exile by Lenin for her activity in the Workers Opposition, she found Body there as secretary to Ambassador Suritz. His friendship with her and his service under her began then and lasted until her death. Sickened, as she was too, by Stalin's purges, he did not return to Russia and now li