Lenin always liked a fight. It was as if the whole of his life had been a preparation for the struggle that awaited him in 1917. ‘That is my life!’ he had confessed to Inessa Armand in 1916. ‘One fighting campaign after another.’ The campaign against the Populists, the campaign against the Economists, the campaign for the organization of the party along centralist lines, the campaign for the boycott of the Duma, the campaign against the Menshevik ‘liquidators’, the campaign against Bogdanov and Mach, the campaign against the war — these had been the defining moments of his life, and much of his personality had been invested in these political battles. As a private man there was nothing much to Lenin: he gave himself entirely to politics. There was no ‘private Lenin’ behind the politician. All biographies of the Bolshevik leader become unavoidably discussions of his political ideas and influence. Lenin’s personal life was extraordinarily dull. He dressed and lived like a middle-aged provincial clerk, with precisely fixed hours for meals, sleep, work and leisure. He liked everything to be neat and orderly. He was punctilious about his financial accounts, noting on slips of paper everything he spent on food, on train fares, on stationery, and so on. Every morning he tidied his desk. His books were ordered alphabetically. He sewed buttons on to his pin-striped suit, removed stains from it with petrol and kept his bicycle surgically clean.55
There was a strong puritanical streak in Lenin’s character which later manifested itself in the political culture of his regime. Asceticism was a common trait of the revolutionaries of Lenin’s generation. They were all inspired by the self-denying revolutionary hero Rakhmetev in Chernyshevksy’s novel What Is To Be Done? By suppressing his own sentiments, by denying himself the pleasures of life, Lenin tried to strengthen his resolve and to make himself, like Rakhmetev, insensitive to the suffering of others. This, he believed, was the ‘hardness’ required by every successful revolutionary: the ability to spill blood for political ends. ‘The terrible thing in Lenin’, Struve once remarked, ‘was that combination in one person of self-castigation, which is the essence of all real asceticism, with the castigation of other people as expressed in abstract social hatred and cold political cruelty.’ Even as the leader of the Soviet state Lenin lived the spartan lifestyle of the revolutionary underground. Until March 1918 he and Krupskaya occupied a barely furnished room in the Smolny Institute, a former girls’ boarding school, sleeping on two narrow camp-beds and washing themselves with cold water from a bowl. It was more like a prison cell than the suite of the dictator of the biggest country in the world. When the government moved to Moscow they lived with Lenin’s sister in a modest three-room apartment within the Kremlin and took their meals in the cafeteria. Like Rakhmetev, Lenin did weight training to build up his muscles. It was all part of the macho culture (the black leather jackets, the militant rhetoric, the belief in action and the cult of violence) that was the essence of Bolshevism. Lenin did not smoke, he did not really drink, and, apart from his romantic friendship with Inessa Armand, he was not interested in beautiful women. Krupskaya called him ‘Ilich’, his popular name in the party, and he called her ‘comrade’. She was more like Lenin’s personal secretary than his wife, and it was probably not bad luck that their marriage was childless. Lenin had no place for sentiment in his life. ‘I can’t listen to music too often,’ he once admitted after a performance of Beethoven’s Appassionata Sonata. ‘It makes me want to say kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people … But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.’56
Lenin’s interests in literature were, like everything else, determined by its social and political content. He only bothered with books which he thought might be useful to him. He admired Pushkin for what he simplistically supposed to be his opposition to autocracy, and he liked Nekrasov for his realistic depiction of the oppressed masses. He had read Goethe’s Faust whilst teaching himself German in Siberia, and had even learned some of Mephistopheles’s speeches off by heart; but he never showed any interest in any of Goethe’s other works. He refused to read Dostoevsky, dismissing his novel The Possessed, which had tried to expose the psychotic nature of the revolutionary, as ‘a piece of reactionary filth … I have absolutely no desire to waste my time on it. I looked through the book and threw it away. I don’t read such literature — what good is it to me?’57
