The lengths to which Lenin was prepared to go to acquire money for his organization is illustrated by the so-called Schmit affair.102 N. P. Schmit (Shmit), a wealthy furniture manufacturer related to Morozov, died in 1906, an apparent suicide, while awaiting trial on charges of having financed the purchase of weapons used in the December Moscow uprising. He left no last will, but told Gorky and other friends that he wanted his fortune, amounting to some 500,000 rubles, to go to the Social-Democrats. This disposition had no validity in the eyes of the law because the party, being illegal, could not be the beneficiary of a legacy. The money went, therefore, to his next of kin, a minor brother. Determined to prevent Schmit’s estate from being squandered by his heirs or transferred to the SD treasury, the Bolsheviks decided, at meetings chaired by Lenin, to get hold of it by any available means. The teenage brother was quickly talked into renouncing his share of the inheritance in favor of his two sisters. Arrangements then were made for two Bolsheviks to court and marry the heiresses. The younger girl, also a minor, was wed to a Bolshevik roughneck named Victor Taratuta; but to mislead the police, it was arranged for her to be married a second time, fictitiously, to a solid citizen. The 190,000 rubles which she subsequently received was forwarded to the Bolshevik treasury in Paris.103
49. Leonid Krasin.
The second installment of the Schmit legacy, owned by the elder sister, was in the hands of her husband, also a Social-Democrat with Bolshevik leanings. He, however, preferred to keep the money. The dispute was submitted to a socialist court of arbitration, which awarded the Bolsheviks only one-half or one-third of the inheritance. Under threats of physical violence, the husband was eventually persuaded to turn his wife’s inheritance over to Lenin. In this manner, Lenin eventually acquired between 235,000 and 315,000 rubles from the Schmit estate.104
This sordid financial affair and others like it greatly embarrassed the Bolsheviks in socialist circles in Russia and abroad when they were revealed by Martov, compelling Lenin to agree to have the funds of the SD Party deposited with German Social-Democrats as trustees. Quarrels over money were one of the main bones of contention between the two factions during the decade preceding the 1917 Revolution. Working as Lenin’s secretary, Krupskaia maintained a steady correspondence with Bolshevik agents in Russia using invisible ink, codes, and other devices to keep the police in the dark. According to Tatiana Aleksinskii, who helped her with this work, most of Lenin’s letters contained demands for money.* 105
In 1908, the Social-Democratic movement in Russia went into decline, in part because the intelligentsia’s revolutionary ardor cooled and in part because police infiltration had made it all but impossible to conduct underground activity. The security services had penetrated the Social-Democratic organizations from top to bottom: before they could move, their members were exposed and arrested. The Mensheviks responded to this situation with a new strategy which called for emphasis on legal activity: publishing, organizing trade unions, working in the Duma. Some Mensheviks wanted to replace the Social-Democratic Party with a Workers’ Party. They did not intend to give up illegal activity altogether, but the drift of their program was toward democratic trade unionism in which the party did not so much lead the workers as serve them. To Lenin this was anathema and he labeled the Mensheviks who supported this strategy “liquidators,” on the grounds that their alleged aim was to liquidate the party and give up revolution. In his usage, “liquidators” became synonymous with counterrevolutionaries.
Nevertheless Lenin, too, had to accommodate himself to the difficult conditions created by police repression. This he did by exploiting for his own ends police agents who had infiltrated his organization. Although there cannot be any certainty about this, it seems the most convincing explanation of the otherwise puzzling case of the agent provocateur Roman Malinovskii, who for a while (1912–14) served as Lenin’s deputy in Russia and chairman of the Bolshevik Duma faction. It was a case of police provocation which in the opinion of Vladimir Burtsev exceeded in importance even the more celebrated case of Evno Azef.106
Lenin ordered his followers to boycott the elections to the First Duma, while the Mensheviks left the matter to their local organizations, most of which, with the exception of the Georgian branch, also opted for a boycott. Lenin subsequently changed his mind and in 1907, disregarding the wishes of most of his associates, instructed the Bolsheviks to run. He intended to use the Duma as a forum from which to spread his message. It was here that Malinovskii proved of inestimable value.
