Vera Zasulich

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From Lenin, April 21, 1924

For lodgings, I was taken by Nadezhda Konstantinovna [Krupskaya] several blocks away, to the house where Zasulich, Martov, and Blumenfeld lived. The latter was in charge of Iskra’s print shop. There a vacant room was found for me.

The apartments were arranged vertically, as is common in England, and not on the same floor, as in Russia: the lowest room was occupied by the landlady, and then came the tenants, one above another. There was in addition one common room, which Plekhanov christened “the den” after his first visit. In this room, thanks mostly to Vera Ivanovna Zasulich, but with assistance from Martov, great disorder reigned. There we had coffee, gathered for conversations, smoked, and so on; hence its name.

As regards Zasulich, the simplicity and cordiality in her attitude toward young comrades were truly beyond comparison. If one cannot speak in a literal sense of her hospitality, it is only because she was more in need of it herself than able to offer it to others. She lived, dressed, and ate like the most frugal of students. In the realm of material things, her greatest passions were tobacco and mustard. She used both in enormous quantities. When she would spread a very thin slice of ham with a thick layer of mustard, we used to say, “Vera Ivanovna is off on a binge.”

It was not just her heroic past that had placed Vera Ivanovna in the front ranks. No, it was her penetrating mind, her extensive education, primarily in history, and a rare psychological insight. It was through Zasulich that the Emancipation of Labor Group had in the past kept in contact with the old Engels.

The editorial board of Iskra and Zaria consisted, as we know, of six people: three “old-timers” (Plekhanov, Zasulich, and Axelrod) and three young members (Lenin, Martov, and Potresov). Plekhanov and Axelrod lived in Switzerland. Zasulich was in London, with the younger members. Potresov was at that time somewhere on the Continent. This dispersion of personnel caused technical inconveniences, but Lenin did not feel at all burdened by them; quite the contrary. Before my visit to the Continent, while initiating me cautiously into the internal affairs of the editorial board, he told me that Plekhanov insisted on moving the whole editorial staff to Switzerland, but that he, Lenin, was against this, as it would make the work more difficult. It was then that I understood for the first time, but only dimly, that the editorial board remained in London not only because of considerations involving the police but also for organizational and personal reasons. In the day-to-day organizational and political work Lenin wanted the maximum independence from the “old” members and, first of all, from Plekhanov, with whom he had already had sharp conflicts, especially over the drafting of the party program. Zasulich and Martov were the mediators in these situations: Zasulich acted as Plekhanov’s second, and Martov served in the same capacity for Lenin. Both mediators were of a very conciliatory disposition and, what is more, very friendly with each other. Only gradually did I learn about the sharp clashes that had occurred between Lenin and Plekhanov over the theoretical part of the program.

As far as I remember, according to the accounts of Martov and Zasulich, Lenin’s original draft, which he counterposed to Plekhanov’s, was severely criticized by the latter in the haughty and mocking tone that was characteristic of Georgi Valentinovich on such occasions. But it was impossible, of course, for Lenin to become either discouraged or intimidated by this. The struggle took on a very dramatic aspect. Vera Ivanovna, according to her own account, once told Lenin: “Georgi is a greyhound: he will shake you and shake you and then let you go; but you are a bulldog: you have a deadly grip.” I remember this phrase very well, and also Zasulich’s concluding remark: “This appealed to Lenin very much. ‘A deadly grip?’ he repeated with obvious delight.” And Vera Ivanovna good-naturedly mimicked Lenin’s intonation and accent.

During the London period, as in Geneva later, I met Zasulich and Martov much more often than Lenin. In London we lived in the same house, and in Geneva we usually had lunch or dinner in the same small restaurants, so Martov, Zasulich, and I met several times a day, while with Lenin, who lived a family life, every meeting apart from official gatherings was something of an event.

Zasulich was an exceptional person, with a special charm. She wrote very slowly, going through real torments of creation. “Vera Ivanovna doesn’t write,” Vladimir Ilyich once told me. “She composes a mosaic.” And indeed, she would put her thoughts on paper one sentence at a time, pacing up and down the room, shuffling in her slippers, endlessly smoking hand-rolled cigarettes, disposing of cigarette butts, or simply half-smoked cigarettes, in all the corners and on all the window sills and tables, strewing ashes over her blouse, hands, manuscript, tea, and glass, and also, on occasion, her interlocutor. She was, and remained, to the end, an old radical intellectual, on whom Marxism had been grafted by fate. Zasulich’s articles show that she had assimilated the theoretical elements of Marxism splendidly. But at the same time the moral and political foundations of a Russian radical of the 1870s persisted in her, undiminished, to the end. In intimate conversations she would allow herself to grumble about certain methods or conclusions of Marxism, For her the concept “revolutionary” had a self-sufficient meaning independent of class content. I remember my conversation with her about her “Revolutionaries from among the Bourgeoisie.” I used the expression “bourgeois-democratic revolutionaries.” “But no,” Vera Ivanovna responded with a trace of annoyance, or rather, chagrin. “Not bourgeois and not proletarian, but simply revolutionaries. You can, of course, say ‘petty-bourgeois revolutionaries,’” she added, “if you count as petty-bourgeois all those you don’t know what else to do with. . , .”

Germany was then the ideological center of the Social Democracy, and we were tensely following the struggle between the orthodox wing and the revisionists in the German Social Democratic Party. But Vera Ivanovna cared little for this, and would only say:

“Here’s how it is. They will do away with revisionism, they will restore Marx, they will win the majority, and all the same they will live with the kaiser.”

“Who are ‘they,’ Vera Ivanovna?”

“The German Social Democrats.”

On this point, by the way, Vera Ivanova was not so mistaken as it seemed then, although everything happened differently, and for different reasons, than she thought.

“With Vera Ivanovna much is based on morals, on feelings,” Lenin said to me one day. He then told how she and Martov had been inclined toward individual terror when Val, the governor of Vilna, ordered the flogging of workers who took part in a demonstration. Traces of this temporary “deviation,” as we would now call it, can be found in one of the issues of Iskra. This, it seems, is how it happened. Martov and Zasulich were putting out an issue without Lenin, who was on the Continent. The news agencies carried a report of the flogging in Vilna. This awoke in Vera Ivanovna the heroic radical who shot Trepov for ordering the whipping of political prisoners. Martov backed her up. Lenin, when he received the new issue of Iskra, was indignant: “This is the first step toward capitulation to the Social Revolutionary doctrine.” Simultaneously a letter of protest was received from Plekhanov. This episode took place before my arrival in London, so there may be some factual inaccuracies in this account, but I remember well the essence of the affair. “Naturally,” Vera Ivanovna explained to me, “it is not a question of terror as a system; but it seems to me that terror might teach them not to flog people. …”

Zasulich never engaged in real debate; even less was she skilled in public speaking. She never answered her opponent’s argument directly, but would work on some thought deep inside herself and then, catching fire, would rapidly pour out a string of phrases, choking on the words and addressing not the one who had disagreed with her, but the one who, she hoped, was able to understand her. If there was a formal discussion, with a chairperson, Vera Ivanovna never put her name on the speakers’ list, because the only way she could say anything was to burst out with it. And when that happened she would hold forth without paying any attention to the speakers’ list, which she treated with utter contempt; she always interrupted both the speaker and the chair and kept talking until she had said what she wanted to say. In order to understand her, it was necessary to follow her train of thought closely. But her ideas — whether right or wrong — were always interesting and entirely her own. It is not hard to imagine what a contrast Vera Ivanovna — with her diffuse radicalism, her subjectivity, and her untidiness-presented to Vladimir Ilyich. It was not that there was a lack of sympathy between them so much as a feeling of deep organic dissimilarity. With her psychological insight, Zasulich sensed Lenin’s strength, and viewed it with a shade of hostility even then. That was expressed in her phrase about the deadly grip.

Vera Ivanovna Zasulich felt the approach of the revolution, I suspect, more directly than all the other old members. Her knowledge of history — lively, free from pedantry, and richly intuitive — helped her in this. But her sense of the revolution was that of an old radical. She was convinced to the depths of her soul that we already had all the elements of the revolution, with the exception of “genuine,” self-confident liberalism, which should take the leadership into its hands, and that we, the Marxists, by our premature criticism and, “baiting” of them, were only frightening the liberals and thereby playing, in essence, a counterrevolutionary role. In the press, of course, Vera Ivanovna never said this. Even in personal conversations she did not always express it fully. Nevertheless, this was her heartfelt conviction.

After one of the editorial meetings in the Cafe Landolt … , Zasulich, in the shy but insistent voice peculiar to her on such occasions, began to complain that we were attacking the liberals “too much.” That was a sore point with her.

“Just look how hard they are trying,” she said, gazing past Lenin, though she was addressing him primarily. “In the last issue of Osvobozhdenie Struve holds up the example of Jaurès to our liberals and calls on them not to break with socialism; otherwise they will be threatened with the pitiful fate of German liberalism. He says they should take their cue from the French Radical Socialists.”

Lenin stood by the table with his soft straw “imitation Panama” hat on (the meeting had already ended, and he was preparing to leave).

“It’s all the more necessary to attack them,” he said, smiling gaily and seemingly teasing Vera Ivanovna.

“So that’s how it is,” she exclaimed in utter despair. “They move toward us, and we attack them!”

“Exactly. Struve tells his liberals: Against our socialism we must use, not crude German methods, but the subtler French ones. We must lure, cajole, deceive, and corrupt in the manner of the French left Radicals who are flirting with Jaurèsism.”

I remember that it was a spring day (or perhaps, already early summer?), the sun was shining brightly, and Lenin’s guttural laugh was cheerful. I remember his whole appearance — calm, mocking, self-assured, and “solid” — yes, solid, although Vladimir Ilyich was then much thinner than in the last period of his life. Vera Ivanovna, as always, was fidgeting, turning now to one person, now to another. But no one, it seems, intervened in the argument, which, moreover, lasted only a short time as the meeting was breaking up.

I returned home with her. Zasulich was depressed, feeling that Struve’s ace had been trumped. I could offer her no consolation. None of us, however, foresaw then to what extent, in what superlative degree, the aces of Russian liberalism had indeed been trumped in that little dialogue at the door of the Cafe Landolt.