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+--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ |Ozleft | |An independent forum of strategy, tactics and history in the Australian left, green and labour movements| +--------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------+ Inessa Armand From Strange Communists I Have Known, 1965 By 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 Freville, 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, Pecheux 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, Andre, 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 emigres that Inessa had somehow breached the barrier: "He was often seen with her at a cafe 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 epiait toujours cette petite franc,aise".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.14 My 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 Pathetique, 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.22 You 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. Contents * What's new Coming singly, there are in life, of course, all the "horrors" which * Australian left Vinenchenko depicts. But to join them all together. * Bob Gould's writings * Discussion Once I had to spend the night with a sick comrade (delirium tremens). And * History once I had to try to dissuade a comrade who was attempting suicide. In the * Reading end he died a suicide. Both are memories a la Vinenchenko. But in each case * Reviews these were small fragments of the lives of the two comrades. But this * Site map 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 * Environment, ecosocialism A glance at the novel will convince the reader that Lenin was the better * Political campaigns critic and that Inessa's interest was largely due to the author's "own theory * News sources on the organiza-tion of prostitutes". * Theory 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 Left links free love". Pedantically, dogmatically, but with an effort to be tactful and * International gentle, Lenin sought to persuade her to strike it out. "This is really not a * Australia proletarian but a bourgeois demand," he writes in his first letter. "What can * New Zealand be understood by it?" Answering his own question, he enumerates ten possible * Trade unions interpretations: Ozleft home (1) Freedom from material calculations in the matter of love? (2) From material cares also? (3) From re-ligious 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.