At that point I had only just started to publish my work. My articles and sketches were being published in the Stock Exchange Gazette,[11] a paper devoted mainly to castigating the city fathers—those who had managed to grab for themselves a piece of the public “pie”. I was contributing to this castigation. One of the popular topics of the day was a plan by the city governor, Lelyanov, to fill in the Catherine Canal.[12] I had written a verse fable entitled “Lelyanov and the Canal”:
The Tsar was against Lelyanov’s plan, so he very much liked my fable. The paper’s editor, Stanislav Propper, was “rewarded by a smile from his majesty”, and added an extra two kopecks to my fee. In those days the only journalist who could command the legendary fee of ten kopecks was Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko. In short, a brilliant career lay ahead of me. What did I have to learn from Lenin?
But K.P. was not easily put off. First he introduced me to a mysterious character called Valeria Ivanovna—though I soon discovered that this was an alias. She appeared to be in her thirties, she had a tired-looking face and she wore a pince-nez. She would often ask if she could bring along some interesting acquaintance. Among those she then brought along were Lev Kamenev, Alexander Bogdanov, Martyn Mandelstam, Alexander Finn-Yenotaevsky and Alexandra Kollontai.
Her friends paid me little attention. For the most part, they talked among themselves about things like congresses, resolutions and “co-optations”, of which I was entirely ignorant. They liked to repeat the phrase “iron resolve”, and they liked to abuse some people they called “Mensheviks” and to quote Engels, who had argued that armed revolt on the streets of a modern city was inconceivable.[13] They were evidently on a very friendly footing with one another—they all addressed one another as “comrade”.
Once they brought along an absolutely ordinary working-class man. They called him “comrade” too. Comrade Yefim. He said very little—and then, after a few visits, he disappeared. I heard somebody mention, in passing, that he had been arrested.
A few months later Yefim came back, completely transformed, in a new, pale suit and bright yellow gloves. He sat with his hands raised and his fingers spread.
“Why are you doing that?” I asked.
“I don’t want to get my gloves dirty. I’ve been dressed as a bourgeois, so as not to attract attention.”
It was a most unfortunate camouflage. Now his appearance was so picturesque that it was impossible not to look at him.
“So you’ve been in prison?” I asked. “Was it hard?”
“No, not particularly.” And then, with a sudden, good-natured smile: “At Christmas they gave us roast gooses.”
But I should not have been surprised by Yefim’s fancy dress. Very soon, events were to convince me that it was not as silly as it had seemed to my inexperienced eye.
Valeria Ivanovna left the country for a couple of months. She came back dressed in a bright red blouse.
“Why are you got up like that?” I asked.
It turned out that she had entered the country on a false passport made out in the name of a sixteen-year-old girl with no education. The comrades had decided that by putting a bright red blouse on a middle-aged woman with a pince-nez and the weary face of an intellectual, they would transform her into an illiterate young teenager. And they had been right. The border guards had believed the story, and Valeria Ivanovna had arrived safely in Petersburg in her red blouse.
Later, at the time when the newspaper New Life was being published,[14] Lenin would hide from the police using a still more artful method. Every time he left the editorial office he would simply turn up the collar of his coat. And not once was he recognized by the agents of the secret police, even though he was, of course, under surveillance.
People began to arrive from abroad. Mainly from Switzerland. There were more of the same conversations. They all criticized the Mensheviks, and they often spoke of Plekhanov, though for some reason they always called him “Plekanov”.
“Why?” I asked.
“Oh, that’s how you say it in Switzerland.”
Many of them would tell me proudly that Plekhanov was from an old aristocratic family. For some reason they all found this very gratifying. I had the impression that Plekhanov had got under their skin in some way, that they were very anxious to convince him of something and that they were afraid he would abandon them.
The one member of the group who stood out was Alexandra Kollontai. She was a young, very beautiful society lady, always elegantly dressed, with a coquettish habit of wrinkling her nose. I recall how she once began a speech to a women’s congress with the words, “I don’t know what language to use in order to make myself understood to the bourgeois women here.”
And there she was on the platform, wearing a magnificent velvet dress with a mirror pendant on a golden chain that hung to her knees.
I noticed that all the comrades were very proud of Kollontai’s elegance. At one point she was arrested, I don’t remember exactly when or why, and the newspapers reported that she had taken fourteen pairs of shoes with her to prison. The comrades would repeat this number with reverence, lowering their voices. In exactly the same way as when they were speaking of “Plekanov’s” aristocratic lineage.
Once Kollontai invited us to her house. Valeria Ivanovna led us up the back staircase. This took us straight into the kitchen, where the astonished cook asked:
“Who are you looking for?”
“We’ve come to see Comr… to see Kollontai.”
“But what made you use the back stairs? Please go through to her study.”
Valeria Ivanovna appeared to have taken it entirely for granted that comrade Kollontai’s room was in the servants’ quarters.
When we entered the spacious, beautifully furnished study, we were greeted by Kollontai’s friend, Finn-Yenotaevsky, a tall dark man with a pointed face and hair like a bush of Austrian broom. Each of the curly dark hairs on his head grew in a distinct spiral, and one half-expected these spirals to chime together in the wind.
We were served tea and biscuits, just as you might expect in any well-to-do household, but then it was back to the same old conversations: the Mensheviks… as Engels said… iron resolve… Plekanov… Plekanov… Plekanov… Mensheviks… co-optation.
It was all extraordinarily dull. They were always picking over some trivial bone of contention: perhaps someone had been abroad and brought back some senseless Party gossip; or someone had drawn caricatures of the Mensheviks, which provoked childish amusement among the bearded Marxists with their “iron resolve”. And all the while, hardened agents provocateurs, whose role only came to light many years later, were strolling about happily in their midst.[15]
They talked about how the Mensheviks were accusing Lenin of having “pocketed ten francs intended for Menshevik use” (“pocketed”—that was the word the Mensheviks were using). Abroad, the Mensheviks were interrupting speeches by the Bolsheviks, caterwauling when Lunacharsky appeared in public, and had even tried to run off with a cash box full of admission money, which the Bolsheviks had defended with their fists.
11
12
This plan by the mayor of St Petersburg, P. Lelyanov, to fill in the Catherine Canal (Yekaterinsky Canal, now the Griboyedov Canal) was never put into effect.
13
In his introduction to Marx’s
14
15
The tsarist security service, the Okhrana, made extensive use of secret agents, both to gather information and to subvert revolutionary groups from within.