Apollinaria and Nadya were arrested too. They were exiled to Siberia but, just a few months into her sentence, Apollinaria was rescued by a young law professor named Takhterev. They fled to London where Lenin met them during his stay there in 1902. Apollinaria helped Lenin and Nadya find rooms at 30 Holford Square, off Grays Inn Road.
After a short jail sentence, Lenin was also exiled to Siberia. By that time, he was engaged to Nadya and asked the authorities if they could be together during their exile. The authorities agreed on condition they got married. Lenin’s sister Anna was less than thrilled. “Nadya,” she wrote, “looks like a herring.”
Although Nadya had been pretty when she was younger, by the time she married Lenin, she was plain and looked older than her years. The writer Ilya Ehrenburg said unkindly: “One look at Krupskaya, and you can see that Lenin wasn’t interested in women.” She suffered from Graves disease, which meant they could not have children. He was no picture either. Nadya’s first words to her fiance, when she eventually arrived in his Siberian village, were: “My, you’ve grown awfully fat.” That night they stayed up drinking with the locals and it was nearly dawn before they went to bed.
Whatever chance they had of wedded bliss was shattered when Nadya’s mother turned up. A deeply religious woman with a tart tongue, she and Lenin constantly quarrelled.
Lenin developed a taste for upper-class women. In 1905, when he was living in St Petersburg under an assumed name to protect himself from arrest, he met a divorcee known simply as Elizabeth de K. She was aristocratic and independently wealthy, with a refined taste for the arts, literature and gracious living.
They met in the Restaurant Tartar, where Lenin was dining with his friend Mikhail Rumyantsev. She was dining alone and Lenin could not keep his eyes off her. Rumyantsev, knowing her slightly, went over and invited her to join them.
“You will meet a very interesting man,” Rumyantsev told her. “He is very famous, but you musn’t ask too many details.”
Amused and interested, she came to their table where Mikhail introduced one “William Frey”. She asked if he was English.
“No, I’m not exactly English,” he said.
They had a pleasant conversation for about an hour. She was conscious that there was an air of danger about him, but she had no idea that he was the N. Lenin who wrote the inflammatory articles in Novaya Zhizn that everybody was talking about.
A week later she was visiting the offices of Novaya Zhizn when she bumped into the mysterious “Englishman” again.
“I’m glad to see you,” he said. “I was worried about you. You don’t come to the Restaurant Tartar any more.”
She realized that, in a subtle way, he was inviting her to dinner there again, but she did not know him well enough to accept. She had to find out more. She sought out Rumyantsev and asked him about “William Frey”.
“You don’t understand,” said Rumyantsev. “My friend Frey is certainly interested in women — but chiefly from a collective, social and political point of view. I doubt very much whether he has any interest in women as individuals. Allow me to add that, after our dinner the other evening, he asked me to vouch for you. He is suspicious of new acquaintances. He is afraid of informers. I had to tell him who you are.”
Elizabeth realized that the mysterious Mr Frey was a dangerous revolutionary. But she had to see him again. Rumyantsev arranged a small dinner party. In the course of the conversation, the question of holding secret meetings in her apartment was raised. Her flat was in a fashionable district and visitors could slip in and out without being seen. The police were unlikely to suspect that revolutionaries were gathering there.
Elizabeth agreed to let them use her flat twice a week. She would send the maid away and prepare a samovar. Lenin would arrive first and give her the password of the day. She would let the other visitors in, once they had given the password. While the discussion was under way, she would retire to her bedroom. Some nights though, Lenin was the only one who turned up.
Their affair was passionate, but they clashed from the beginning. Elizabeth was a woman of broad cultural interests. Lenin cared for nothing except politics. However, she did try to move some way towards him. In June 1906, she attended a secret meeting in a field outside St Petersburg. When Lenin appeared, the crowd went wild. He exalted them to rebel immediately and they set off marching into the city with Vladimir Ilyich at their head.
On their way down Pulostrovsky Prospect, the Cossacks rode the march down, slashing at the crowd with whips. Lenin threw himself in a ditch. He seemed pleased with the outcome, but Elizabeth realized that he was in imminent danger of arrest for inciting a rebellion. She asked him whether he was prepared to put himself totally in her hands and obey her implicitly. He said he was. She led him across the fields and down a series of overgrown pathways to an outlying village, then took him back to the centre of St Petersburg by streetcar.
He was equally protective towards her. Once, when they were alone together in her apartment, a blazing cinder from the samovar fell on her dress, setting it on fire. Lenin hurled himself on her, smothering the flame. When he got up, she noticed he was trembling and as cold as ice. He turned and ran from the house. It was then that she knew he was in love with her.
She followed him when he went to live in Stockholm. Even in Sweden, he was afraid of the secret police. He lived the life of a conspirator — there were secret signs, passwords, meetings in out-of-the-way places.
One day, he phoned and told her to meet him at a certain arcade, but if other Russians were there, she was to pretend not to recognize him. When she arrived, she saw two Georgians hammering away at one of the vending machines. When Lenin turned up, the Georgians shouted, “Comrade Ilyich, help us with this damn bourgeois machine. We wanted ham sandwiches and all it gives us is pastry.”
The Father of the Revolution then proceeded to use all his dialectical skills to get them their sandwiches, while Elizabeth pointedly looked the other way. Lenin was delighted with her, even though there was no real danger.
“Do you know who those two Georgians were?” he said later. “They are our delegates from the Caucasus. Splendid boys, but absolute savages.”
Between his wife and party congresses, Lenin had little time to spare for Elizabeth. Sometimes, on Sundays, he would hire a little rowing boat and take her out on the lake. The passion continued though. When she returned to St Petersburg, she got a wild and urgent letter from him.
“Write to me at once,” he wrote, “and tell me precisely where and how we can meet, otherwise there will be delays and misunderstandings.”
Elizabeth did not like the tone of this letter and decided to break off the affair. But two years later, she was in Geneva when she read in the newspaper that he was giving a speech in Paris. On an impulse, she took a train there. During the intermission, she went to see him in a small room behind the platform. He was surrounded by admirers and she could not get near him. Eventually he spotted her. He looked startled, then his eyes widened.
“What on earth are you doing here?” he asked.
“I came to hear you,” she said, “and I have a commission to give to you from a certain person.”
She handed him an envelope. In it were the address and phone number of the place where she was staying.