Paris, city of love, brought them all together. A Russ­ian movie of 1981.

The offi­cial his­tory often misses a very impor­tant and inter­est­ing point in the course of the Russ­ian Rev­o­lu­tion – not every­body knows that Vladimir Lenin, a for­mi­da­ble mind behind the Great Octo­ber Patri­otic Rev­o­lu­tion and the leader of all com­mu­nists, had less than straight­for­ward love life – apart from a wife, he had a mis­tress – and not only that, these two women knew each other and got on very well!

Young Nadezhda

Vladimir Lenin’s wife, nee Nadezhda Krup­skaya, was born in 1869, in a noble but poor fam­ily. She was trained as a school teacher and had a very suc­cess­ful start to her teach­ing career – until she got involved with some rev­o­lu­tion­ary ideas which the air was pen­e­trated with at the time. It all started with her pas­sion for the books of Leo Tol­stoy and then grad­u­ally devel­oped into some seri­ously marxism-winged outlook.

Young Nadezhda was very well organ­ised, hard­work­ing, dis­ci­plined: she took up ger­man so she could read Carl Marx’s man­u­scripts. She suf­fered from thy­roid dys­func­tion and was incred­i­bly skinny, with pro­trud­ing eyes, hence she was nick­named as Her­ring Fish.

It didn’t take her long to become a promi­nent fig­ure in the rev­o­lu­tion­ary circles.

She was 25 when she met Lenin, and due to their ide­o­log­i­cal con­nect­ed­ness, they hit it off right­away: she was sub­dues by his lead­er­ship skills and staunch Marx­ist views, he – well, he was in the need of a wife. The rumour had it that he was deeply in love with a friend of his sis­ter Olga, but never had any luck there. Her mother, on the othe hand, con­sid­ered Nadezhda unat­trac­tive and utterly mar­riage­able, so Lenin, with his decent upbring­ing and edu­ca­tion, was warmly welcomed.

In 1896, when Nadezhda was arrested and sen­tenced to three years of exile for espi­onage and anti-Tsar activ­i­ties, she received a telegramme from Lenin ask­ing her to marry him. Appar­ently her answer was “Oh well, you need a wife – I could be a wife”.

Their wed­ding rings were made out of cop­per coins by a friendly polit­i­cal exile; there was a church cer­e­mony and the bride wore a black skirt and a white blouse, while the groom had his only brown suit on. She kept her maiden name (Krup­skaya) on gen­eral fem­i­nism principle.

Taa

Nadezhda was no good at cook­ing: her mother did all of house­work. After she died, Nadezhda wrote in her diaries that “our life became even more student-like”. Dur­ing her hon­ey­moon, she wrote a book “A female worker”, try­ing to analyse the women’s posi­tion in the soci­ety through the prism of Marx­ism philosophy.

One of the rare pho­tographs: Nadezhda and Lenin

Within the next few years after the wed­ding, the cou­ple moved to Paris in the hope to get some peace from the Tsar dogs. There Vladimir Lenin meets Inessa Armand, an adorable rich man’s wife of French ori­gin who also hap­pens to be a devout Social­ist. Lenin was 39, she was 35, with five kids to two dif­fer­ent hus­bands who also hap­pened to be broth­ers, yet they fall in love and it is a strong, gen­uine, mutual feel­ing, which they man­aged to main­tain through­out the years. Nadezhda learns that she is not the only one almost right away and makes sev­eral attempts to leave Lenin, but he objects, say­ing that their rela­tion­ships – these plural and com­pli­cated rela­tion­ships are well beyond any prim­i­tive bounds of a reg­u­lar mar­riage alliance, and so she stays.

Inessa Armand

Although Nadezhda always remem­bered those years in Paris as the hard­est years in their lives, she still man­aged to develop some sort of a warm feel­ing for Inessa.

This bizarre rela­tion­ship con­tin­ued for a good num­bers of years – until Inessa’s son devel­oped a TB and she had to take him to a resort in the Cau­ca­sus where she con­tracted cholera and died at the age of 46, in the year 1920. Lenin, already unwell due to over­work, never man­aged to fully recover after her death. Lenin out­lived Inessa for three years only. Nadezhda Krup­skaya had to take care of Inessa’s five kids, which she did with great plea­sure – the con­tem­po­raries often said that Inessa’s daugh­ter was the only per­son whom Nadezhda felt warm about.

Her con­tri­bu­tion to the devel­op­ment of the edu­ca­tional pro­grammes for the chil­dren of the young Soviet coun­try can­not be under­es­ti­mated — with no kids of her own, she was known as “everyone’s Grand­mother”. She is still the one to thank for the estab­lish­ment of the school­ing sys­tem of Russia.

Nadezhda lived for fif­teen long years after Lenin had died. She was an avid enemy of Stalin, who is often held account­able for her death – she died under sus­pi­cious cir­cum­stances on her 70^th birth­day – many think she was poi­soned by the cake that Stalin sent. Her only request – to bury Lenin – was never granted. She was buried in Moscow, under the walls of Kremlin.

An old collage

Related posts:

1. Best of Win­ter 2009  –  2010
2. 21+ Depress­ing Pho­tos of Post-Revolutionary Rus­sia by Arkady Shaikhet
3. Soviet Brands: The Scent Of Com­mu­nism. Part 1 of 2
4. Exper­i­men­tal Soviet Home­made Photography
5. The Great Patri­otic War: the Vil­lain­ous Hitler’s Plan or the Provoсation?

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