The next morning, she waited by the phone. It never rang. Instead, Lenin came round in person and they threw themselves into each other’s arms.
The affair resumed, but without the intensity they had known before. Altogether they met and wrote, on and off, for nine years. Some of his early letters were passionate. The later ones read like a lecture on Marxist dialectics. In the end, they found that they simply lived in different worlds. Though a champion of women’s rights, Lenin said that he had never met a woman who had read Das Kapital right the way through, could understand a railway timetable or play chess. He gave her a chess set and asked her to prove him wrong.
In response, she sent him a postcard of the Mona Lisa to study it and tell her his reactions. He wrote back: “I can make nothing of your Mona Lisa. Neither the face nor the dress tell me anything at all. I believe there is an opera of the same name, and a book by d’Annunzio. I simply don’t understand anything about this thing you have sent me.”
The final falling out was over the question of liberty. Elizabeth questioned his belief in rock-solid Marxist dialectics. Surely, she said, there must be a place for personal liberty.
“The people have no need for liberty,” he said. “Liberty is one of the forms of the bourgeois dictatorship. In a state worthy of the name there is no liberty. The people want to exercise power, but what on earth would they do if it were given to them?”
This was 1914 and Lenin was already a dictator in the making.
During the time he was still seeing Elizabeth de K, Lenin met the great love of his life, another wealthy divorcee named Elisabeth d’Herbenville Armand. A French woman by birth, she was the daughter of a music hall comedian. When her father died, she went to stay with her grandmother and aunt who were teachers in Moscow. Elisabeth was eighteen and she soon attracted the attention of twenty-year-old Alexander Armand, the second son of a wealthy textile manufacturer. They married, settled down on a nearby estate and had five children. She was happy and life gave her everything she wanted — except for danger and excitement.
Suddenly, she left her husband and moved in with his younger brother, Vladimir. In the name of free love, they had a passionate affair but this did not really satisfy her either, so she went to live with feminist Ellen Key in Stockholm. Soon she was bored with feminism, but at Ellen Key’s she read Lenin’s essays which promised the challenge and excitement of direct action and she became a Bolshevik.
Returning to Russia to take part in the 1905 revolution, she took the nom de revolution Inessa and was arrested within a couple of days. After nine months in prison, she was released, but continued to work as a courier for the Bolsheviks. She was arrested again, this time for the serious charge of suborning the armed forces. Her husband put up the bail, but she continued her subversive work and was arrested a third time. This time she was exiled to Archangel, where the harsh northern winter finished off all but the strongest of political prisoners.
Her brother-in-law Vladimir Armand was still besotted with her and followed her there. He developed tuberculosis and died. She escaped and, with two of her children, fled to France, where she was already something of a legend.
In Paris, Lenin welcomed her with open arms. She was a revolutionary heroine. He had been following her exploits and he arranged for her to live in an apartment next door to the one he lived in with Nadya.
Inessa was thirty. She had enormous eyes, a wide sensitive mouth, finely modelled features and an unruly mass of chestnut hair. She was quick and intelligent. Just having her around inspired the other exiles and she was often seen with Lenin in the cafes on the Avenue d’Orleans.
She was popular, though Angelica Balabanoff -the Bolshevik agitator who went on to become Mussolini’s lover — did not like her. Perhaps she was jealous.
“I did not warm to her,” Balabanoff said. “She was pedantic, a one hundred per cent Bolshevik in the way she dressed, always in the same severe style, in the way she thought and spoke. She spoke a number of languages fluently, and in all of them repeated Lenin verbatim.”
Up until this time, Lenin had been seen as a puritan. Now his fellow revolutionaries saw him addressing an attractive young woman with the familiarity used by educated Russians among intimates. Normally, Lenin only used by with his mother, his two sisters and his wife.
Lenin and Inessa shared a love of Beethoven and a similar interpretation of Marx; and they had both modelled themselves on characters from a novel by Chernyshevsky called What is to be Done — the hero and the heroine, naturally. Soon they began acting out the parts Chernyshevsky had written for them.
Nadya had no objection to Lenin’s relationship with Inessa. Indeed, she oiled the wheels. That summer, Nadya went on holiday with her mother to Pornic, a village near St Nazaire, leaving the two lovers together in Paris.
There is evidence that Lenin had an affair with a French woman before Inessa turned up in Paris. He wrote a series of letters of an extremely intimate nature to a woman writer. When they surfaced after Lenin’s death, she agreed not to have them published while Nadya was still alive and received a handsome pension from the Soviet government in return.
Perhaps Nadya tolerated his affair with Inessa because she preferred him to see someone who could at least speak Russian and was devoted to the cause. Nadya certainly liked Inessa. She enjoyed being with her and loved the two children she had brought to Paris with her. Nadya wrote openly that “the house grew brighter when Inessa entered it”. Lenin certainly did nothing to hide the direction in which his passion lay. However, the Revolution had to come first.
Lenin and Inessa were separated in 1914, when he went with Nadya to Cracow on revolutionary business. Inessa missed him terribly.
“We have parted, you and I, my dear! And it is so painful,” she wrote from Paris. “As I gaze at the familiar places, I realize all too clearly, as never before, what a large place you occupied in my life, here in Paris. All our activity here is tied by a thousand threads to the thought of you. I wasn’t at all in love with you then, even though I did love you. Even now I would manage without the kisses, if only I could see you. To talk with you occasionally would be such a joy — and couldn’t cause pain to anyone. Why did I have to give that up?”
Her letters also speak eloquently of the stresses and strains between the three of them.
“You ask me if I’m angry that it was you who “carried out” the separation. No, I don’t think you did it for yourself. There was much that was good in Paris in my relations with N.K. [Nadya]. In one of our last chats she told me I had become dear and close to her only recently …only at Longjumeau [their revolutionary summer school] and then last autumn over the translations and so on. I have become rather accustomed to you. I so loved not just listening to you, but looking at you as you spoke. First of all, your face is so animated, and secondly it was easy for me to look at you because you didn’t notice.”
The separation did not last long though and, after eight months apart, they settled together in Galicia. Initially, it did not work out and Nadya decided to leave, so that he could marry Inessa. But Lenin would have none of it. He depended on Nadya too much for his revolutionary work. On the other hand, he needed Inessa too, for other reasons. So the menage a trois continued; and there were happy times.
“For hours we would walk along the leaf-strewn forest lanes,” Nadya recalled. “Usually we were in a threesome, Vladimir Ilyich and Inessa and I… Sometimes we would sit on a sunny slope, covered with shrubs. Ilyich would sketch outlines of his speeches, getting the text right, while I learned Italian… Inessa would be sewing a skirt and enjoying the warmth of the sunshine.”