The Russian Revolution полностью

The practical conclusion was for the “proletariat to raise the call for an immediate truce and an opening of peace negotiations.” Again, no call for rebellion and turning the guns against the bourgeoisie, but such action was not precluded by the premise of the resolution and may even be said to have been implicit in it.

As he had done at Zimmerwald, Lenin drafted the minority report for the left, which concluded with this appeal to the proletariat: “Lay down your weapons. Turn them against the common foe!—the capitalist governments.”* Among the twelve signatories under Lenin’s statement (of the forty-four present) Zinoviev took it upon himself to represent Latvia and Karl Radek, Holland.

The key Kiental resolution on the “International Socialist Bureau,” based on a draft by Zinoviev, came close to meeting the demands of the left by condemning this organization for turning into “an accomplice in the policy of the so-called ‘defense of the fatherland’ and of civil peace” and contending that the

International can recover from its collapse as a definite political power only to the extent to which the proletariat is able to liberate itself from all imperialist and chauvinist influences and reenter the road of class struggle and of mass action.¹³⁴

Even though Lenin’s demand for a split in the International once again went down in defeat, after the conference adjourned a member of the right, S. Grumbach, declared that “Lenin and his friends have played an important role at Zimmerwald and a decisive role at Kiental.”¹³⁵ Indeed, the Kiental resolutions laid the groundwork for the Third International, which Lenin was to found in 1919.

Lenin owed his relative success at Zimmerwald and Kiental in 1915–16, as he did later in the Russia of 1917, to the fact that he took the socialists at their word and demanded that they make good on their rhetoric. This earned him a small but devoted following in foreign socialist circles. More importantly, it paralyzed his opponents and prevented them from giving him battle because with this stand he seized the moral high ground of the socialist movement. The leaders of the International despised Lenin for his intrigues and slander, but they could not disown him without disowning themselves. His tactics enabled him to push the international socialist movement steadily leftward and eventually to split off from it his own faction, exactly as he had done in Russian Social-Democracy.

This said, it must be noted that the war years were for Lenin and Krupskaia a time of severe hardship, a time of poverty and isolation from Russia. They lived in quarters that bordered on slums, took their meals in the company of criminals and prostitutes, and found themselves abandoned by many onetime friends. Even some former followers came now to view Lenin as a crackpot and “political Jesuit,” a spent man.¹³⁶ When Krasin, once one of Lenin’s closest associates, now living in comfort as an official working for war industries, was approached for a contribution for Lenin, he pulled out two five-ruble notes, saying: “Lenin does not deserve support. He is a harmful type, and you never know what crazy ideas will sprout in his Tatar head. To hell with him!”¹³⁷

The only shaft of light in Lenin’s exile was an affair with Inessa Armand, the French-born daughter of two music-hall artists and the wife of a wealthy Russian. Influenced by Chernyshevskii, she broke with her husband and joined the Bolsheviks. She met Lenin and his wife in Paris in 1910. She soon became Lenin’s mistress, tolerated by Krupskaia, as well as a faithful follower. Although Bertram Wolfe speaks of her as a “dedicated, romantic heroine,” Angelica Balabanoff, who had many occasions to meet Inessa, describes her as “the perfect—almost passive—executrix of [Lenin’s] orders,” “the prototype of the perfect Bolshevik of rigid, unconditional obedience.”¹³⁸ She seems to have been the only human being with whom Lenin ever established intimate personal relations.