For nostalgias' sake, from my scr & scrm archives (013)

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From nikst@xxxxxxxxxx Thu Nov 27 20:58:31 EST 1997
Date: Sun, 23 Nov 1997 21:35:25 CST
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From: "nikst" <nikst@xxxxxxxxxx>
Subject: V.I.Lenin and Inessa Armand
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The Sunday Times (UK)
23 November 1997

Lenin kept secret lover in Kremlin

by Nicholas Hellen
Media Correspondent

   LENIN, founding father of the Soviet Union, kept a secret mistress in
the Kremlin. Private letters and medical records hidden from public
scrutiny since the start of the 1917 Bolshevik revolution reveal that
Lenin, the most influential dictator of the century, led a double life.
The remarkable papers, which have survived intact in the Soviet state
archives despite purges by Stalin and other enemies of Lenin, show that
the tyrant indulged an obsessive and adulterous passion for a beautiful
communist comrade whom he insisted live inside the Kremlin, along with
the rejected wife who continued to be loyal to him.
   Letters unearthed by the historian Robert Service, professor of Russian
history at the School of Slavonic and East European Studies of the
University of London, show how Lenin cruelly forced his wife Krupskaya
into playing a role subordinate to Inessa Armand, a French-born
revolutionary who espoused free love.
   Previously it had been thought that Lenin, in the interests of decorum
and overwhelmed by the pressures of work, dropped Armand after a brief
affair in Paris in 1911-12. The letters suggest that the affair
continued long afterwards. They also reveal that Krupskaya, whose
devotion never wavered, proposed on Lenin's death that he be buried
alongside his beloved girlfriend rather than embalmed in a mausoleum in
Red Square.
   Service, who is to present his findings on BBC1's Timewatch programme
next month, was given access to the state archives in Moscow for a week
last June. He found previously undisclosed letters in the spidery hand
of Krupskaya, written shortly after Lenin's death in 1924.
   The letters reveal how Lenin, the ideologue who laid the foundations for

Stalin's terror, was besotted by his lover, who is described in tsarist
police reports as "an intelligent woman with a high education . . .
medium height, thin, oval face . . . hair with a reddish shade . . . a
very interesting appearance". Lenin tried to part from Armand in 1912
because he felt that she distracted him from the revolution, but he
could not live without her. Lenin called her Petrova, a female version
of his nom de guerre, and loved to hear her playing Beethoven's
Pathetique on the piano.
   After the Bolsheviks assumed power, he installed her, his wife and
sister Maria in the Kremlin in 1918. They all had separate bedrooms.
Neil Harding, professor of political theory at the University of Wales,
speculates that the childless marriage of Lenin and his wife, whose eyes
bulged from a thyroid condition in middle age, may not even have been
consummated.
   Krupskaya saw little of her husband, and in her biography of Lenin, she
referred to herself as no more than his former personal assistant. Maria
took over the running of the household, and Maria, not Krupskaya, was
present when he was badly injured in an assassination attempt in 1918.
   Proof of a continuing relationship may be in a letter written by Armand
in September 1920, just before she died of cholera, and entrusted to her
daughter, Ina. The covering note, which survives, declares that she only
cared for her children and for Lenin.
   But she also asked her daughter to hand-deliver an enclosed message to
Lenin, via Maria, who detested children, rather than Krupskaya, who was
fond of her. Service believes the letter must have contained a message
of love which would have upset Krupskaya.
   Armand's death came as a hammer blow to Lenin. On the day of her funeral

he was so overwhelmed by grief that he had to be propped up to remain
upright in the funeral cortege.
   Service, author of A History of Twentieth Century Russia, is convinced
that his mistress's death also disrupted Lenin's political judgment. "He
became emotionally less stable, and his ability to cope with his
volatile moods and medical problems was diminished," he said.
   Krupskaya attended to her ailing husband as he lived out his last days
in a bath chair in a sanatorium at Gorki. He died on January 21, 1924.
In death, she forgave her husband and his mistress the misery they had
caused her. She wrote to Armand's daughter, Ina, the day after the
funeral.
   Less than two months later she wrote again, this time with the
astonishing suggestion that the two lovers should be united in death.
She said she was still thinking of Armand. "I was terribly upset [at the
plan to embalm Lenin in the Red Square mausoleum] - they should have
buried him along with his comrades so that they can lie together under
the Red Wall." Armand was buried in the red wall of the Kremlin. Service
said: "From the context, it is unmistakable that she is referring to
Armand."

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Da, Volodya tozhe ne otkazyval sebe v udovol'stvii,
"shalunishka" etakij...



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