Lenin's Mistress: The Life of Inessa Armand - Hardcover

Pearson, Michael

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 037550589X ISBN 13: 9780375505898

Publisher: Random House, 2002

Synopsis

From the acclaimed author of The Sealed Train and Those Damned Rebels comes the definitive biography of Inessa Armand: revolutionary, tactician, and confidante and mistress of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Although she is little known today, after the October Revolution in 1917, Armand became the most powerful woman in Moscow.

The illegitimate daughter of a Parisian opera singer, Armand was fortunate to marry into a wealthy Moscow family, yet she left home after ten years and four children to live openly with her husband’s much younger brother, through whom she became deeply embroiled in Russia’s growing anti-tsarist underworld.

By the time she met Lenin in Paris, Armand had been imprisoned four times and had escaped Arctic exile, making her a fugitive in her homeland. Lenin soon recognized her talents, and Armand became his lieutenant, organizer, and lover. Through seven years of exile, she helped Lenin hone the Bolshevik Party, despite bitter internal strife, into the disciplined unit that would gain him immense power.

Following the February Revolution in 1917, Armand supported Lenin in his greatest gamble: She accompanied him from their latest exile in Switzerland through Germany—still at war with Russia—to St. Petersburg via the legendary “sealed train.” It was a journey that would shape the twentieth century.

Armand was soon appointed chief of the Woman’s Section of the Central Committee, with unique access to Lenin and the power to make legislative decisions. Her relationship with Lenin was profound yet volatile. The demands of revolution were great on both of them, but an attempt on Lenin’s life in 1918 brought a renewed closeness. In 1920, Armand died of cholera after taking a holiday in the Caucasus at Lenin’s insistence, and at her state funeral, an extremely rare honor for a woman, Lenin’s visible distress shocked his comrades.
Michael Pearson, with access to family papers (including 150 letters from Lenin to Armand), previously censored materials from Russian archives, and interviews with Inessa Armand’s descendants, brings her to life with precision and insight—as a wife and devoted mother, political standard-bearer, and woman in love.

About this title

About the Author

Michael Pearson is the author of eleven books, including The Sealed Train: Lenin’s Eight Months from Poverty to Power; Those Damned Rebels: The American Revolution as Seen Through British Eyes; and the novel The Store, which was a worldwide bestseller, translated into seven languages. He lives in England.

From the Back Cover

Advance Praise for Lenin’s Mistress

“Fascinating...groundbreaking...a well-researched and lively account of a woman at the center of
one of the turning points of world history.”
—Stirling Observer


Praise for The Sealed Train

“The story of the tension, discomfort and squabbles in the carriage is told in refreshingly human and authentic terms. What emerges clearly is the tenacious, ice-cold, ruthless, conspiratorial side of Lenin’s character.”
—The Times (London)

“An exciting tale.”
—London Evening News

“Skillfully written.”
—The New Yorker

“Full of fascinating detail.”
—Daily Mail (London)

“A genuine historical thriller...a plot worthy of Le Carré.”
—Kirkus Reviews

“An exciting, almost minute-by-minute account...an interesting piece of popular history on the man who,
with Gandhi, did more than any other to forge the character of the twentieth century.”
—The Boston Globe


Praise for Those Damned Rebels

“This is the way history ought to be written.”
—American Heritage

From the Inside Flap

laimed author of The Sealed Train and Those Damned Rebels comes the definitive biography of Inessa Armand: revolutionary, tactician, and confidante and mistress of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Although she is little known today, after the October Revolution in 1917, Armand became the most powerful woman in Moscow.<br><br>The illegitimate daughter of a Parisian opera singer, Armand was fortunate to marry into a wealthy Moscow family, yet she left home after ten years and four children to live openly with her husband’s much younger brother, through whom she became deeply embroiled in Russia’s growing anti-tsarist underworld. <br><br>By the time she met Lenin in Paris, Armand had been imprisoned four times and had escaped Arctic exile, making her a fugitive in her homeland. Lenin soon recognized her talents, and Armand became his lieutenant, organizer, and lover. Through seven years of exile, she helped Lenin hone the Bolshevik Party, despite bitter internal strife, into the disciplined

Reviews

One of the fascinating secrets that emerged when Russia opened up the Party Central archives was the influential role of Inessa Armand, Lenin's paramour and confidante. Michael Pearson (The Sealed Train) draws on declassified documents, family papers and interviews with Armand's descendants to piece together Lenin's Mistress: The Life of Inessa Armand. Fluent in four languages, an accomplished pianist and mother of four by her wealthy Muscovite husband, Armand was jailed a number of times for her own revolutionary activities. Pearson focuses mostly on the postrevolutionary period, when Armand, close to both Lenin and his wife, was widely understood to be the most powerful woman in Moscow.
Copyright 2002 Cahners Business Information, Inc.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Chapter 1

PUSHKINO 1893

It was before the early snows in October 1893, and already dark by mid-afternoon, when Inessa Stephane married Alexander Armand in the Church of St. Nikolai in the little town of Pushkino-and transformed a future that would take her eventually into the highest levels of power in Russia.

Until this day, as an educated, unmarried girl, the only occupation open to her in Russia was to be a tutor, and even that was under question, since technically Inessa was illegitimate.

Now, in that beautiful church ablaze with candles, she walked behind the ikon boy in his scarlet shirt and shared with Alexander the rituals-such as the kissing of the rings and the circling of the praying desk beneath the crowns of silver-and became a young wife of status and wealth. Her husband was the eldest son in a large family that owned local textile plants as well as estates in the region and property in Moscow.

A slight, pretty girl with auburn hair and green eyes, she was immature even for her nineteen years. The letters she had written to Alexander before the marriage suggest an emotional muddle.

There was no doubt, though, about her artistic potential. She was well-read, fluent in four languages, and a talented pianist, able to play classics from memory for two hours at a stretch. But none of those present in the church that day could have guessed that she also had the qualities to survive the intellectual rough-and-tumble of Lenin's years in exile, nor that she could ever stay stubbornly cool in debate against such formidable heavyweights as Trotsky or Plekhanov or Axelrod, while Lenin himself would usually lose his temper.

Inessa Armand was to become Lenin's lover, in a relationship that was volatile but bound them, even when she was barely speaking to him, by deep emotional roots. She was his troubleshooting lieutenant, his "front" when he wished to stay in the background, and his friend who could discuss tactics with him, console him after setbacks, and also share his victories. At meetings and conferences, some of which she organized, she helped to execute his torturous strategies, which were ultimately to yield him greater authority than even the tsar could command.

Lenin had, for twelve years, been married, but Nadya-Nadezhda Konstantinovna, whose cover name was Krupskaya-looked after the back office, the running of his faction of the Social Democratic Party, and the coded correspondence with its members.1 Inessa, though, would be in the field, directing the hand-to-hand combat in the large exile community that, riddled with frustrations and conflicts, was preparing for the day they all dreamed of, even if they disagreed about its form.

All that, of course, lay years ahead. At nineteen, Inessa was politically innocent, even disinterested. But without this marriage and possibly this husband, she might never have been drawn to meet Lenin-nor, for that matter, gained the power that enabled her to write in 1918 to the commissar of a military district, requesting the "Respected Comrade" to "receive my acquaintance," a childhood friend. She was then confident that her wish would be enough to achieve the object, since anyone in authority would know how close she was to the ruler of all the Russias.

ooo

The Church of St. Nikolai, with its twin bell towers and blue-and-gold cupola, was on a hill that overlooked Pushkino. In the 1890s, the forest town, with its lake, two rivers, and a thriving summer theater, was a favored place for holiday dachas, being only an hour by train from Moscow-especially by the families of the city's French community, in which the Armands were prominent.

It was also a company town. Two tall brick chimneys, which still exist today, reached high above the Armand textile plant. Workers' cottages, built in timber, with carved wooden friezes, lined the roads.

The Armand family home was extraordinary. Originally four separate houses, it was a strange, sprawling complex of carved and decorated timber, linked by galleries on the ground floor and flanked by verandas. It had elaborate gardens featuring gazebos and an avenue bordered on both sides by poplars. At its center was a large covered area, containing an eighteen-foot table, used for parties, children's games, name-day celebrations, and impressive theatrical productions, with elaborate programs designed by Alexander's sister Maria.

It was here that Alexander's father, Eugene-Evgenii Evgenevich-lived with his two brothers, Emil and Adolf, each family occupying separate houses within the complex.

Like many French Muscovite families, the Armands had settled in Russia early in the nineteenth century, in the wake of Napoleon's retreat from the city, in which Alexander's ancestor Paul was killed. Legend has it that Paul's son, Ivan, was captured by peasants and, on being released, started a wine-import business-only to be threatened with failure by the sinking of a delivery ship. It was Ivan's son, the first Eugene, Alexander's grandfather, who founded the Armand fortunes on a more stable basis with a factory in Pushkino, making army uniforms, and the purchase of property with the profits.

Foreign families were required by law to take Russian nationality, but only as "honorary citizens," not as full-fledged Russians. Second-class, in other words, and ignored by the local nobility. Alexander's father, also named Eugene, had made some concession to his country of residence by converting from the Roman Catholic faith to Russian Orthodoxy, and Alexander, like most of his brothers and sisters, had followed him.

Inessa's mother, Natalie Wild, also came from a French family that had settled in Moscow, although her roots lay in Franche-Comte, then a Protestant area of France. Her father was a language teacher, and the Wilds naturally came to know the Armands.

Natalie, though, had run away from Moscow to live with a French opera singer, Theodore Stephane, and Inessa had been born in Paris. Ines, as she was called by then, was the eldest of three girls, born four months before her parents were married-a future problem in Russia that Natalie tried to address by having the date of her wedding to Theodore forged on her daughter's birth certificate. Confusingly, on this her name was Elise-or Elisabeth or Elisaveta in transliterated Russian.

Inessa was five when her father's contract with the Grand-Théâtre in Lyons ended. He was a man of buoyant spirits and great optimism, a quality which had come to infuriate Natalie, who feared it had little base in reality, though quite why is not clear. The notices of his performances in such operas as The Thief of Baghdad, Rigoletto, and even Faust were often good, enough to later earn him an obituary in Le Figaro.2

The break with the Lyons opera house, however, seemed to confirm Natalie's suspicions. They returned to Paris, where he rejoined the Théâtre de la Gaietie, but the marriage had become troubled, and they parted, leaving Natalie, pregnant, facing the prospect of raising three children under five on her own.

Natalie's mother and her sister, Sophie, visited Paris in 1879, probably to help while Natalie bore her third child. To ease Natalie's burden, they took Inessa back with them to Moscow. Sophie was herself a tutor to various Moscow families, possibly at times to the Armands, and she and her mother educated Inessa at home.3

The details of Inessa's childhood in Russia remain obscure. According to early accounts, including that of Lenin's wife, Nadya, Inessa was taken to the Armand home on the death of her father by her aunt Sophie, to be brought up with the family's children. This story, though attractive, is wrong, probably fabricated by Soviet propagandists, for whom a tutor, being an employee, and a poor fatherless little girl fit the picture they liked to draw of the proletarian revolution (though in fact virtually all its prominent figures were bourgeois).

Inessa's father, as testified to by his death certificate, lived on, in fact, for six years after she had left Paris.

Her daughter Inna has confirmed that Inessa was brought up by her aunt and grandmother. Her letters to Alexander before the marriage confirm much of this picture. The education the two women gave her-especially in music, languages, and literature-was very sound and ideal for a good marriage, but, as she was to be sensitively aware for much of her life, it was not intellectual.

In 1891, when Inessa was seventeen, her grandmother died, and Natalie brought her other two daughters to Russia to live in the Moscow apartment, probably near Kouznietsky-Most, the French business area of old Moscow.

A few months later, Alexander Armand, who had been away from Pushkino for some years, training to take his place in the Armand business, returned home. He knew Inessa quite well. In the summertimes, she had often been to Pushkino, where the Wilds had friends, and she had mixed with the Armand children in the huge, rambling home where there were nannies and forty-five servants, some of the older ones having been Armand serfs.

But Inessa had matured since he'd last seen her, blossoming into a young woman he found totally compelling, and he fast fell in love with her.

Inessa encouraged him, writing in May 1892 under the pretext of wanting the address of a mutual friend. In the same letter, she speaks of what she has been doing and thinking about since she last saw him-though it was only the previous night.

With her sister Renee, Inessa visited the lake near Pushkino where a seemingly contrived meeting with Alexander led to an afternoon boat ride. Alexander made her promise to keep the meeting secret, since a younger sister was hardly an adequate chaperone, but the moment she got home she could not resist telling her mother.

A few days later, Inessa sent Alexander an invitation to a small party for her birthday. "Please come. We'll be expecting you. There will be a lot of young ladies for only four or five young me...

Edition details

• Publisher: Random House
• Publication date: 2002
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 037550589X
• ISBN 13: 9780375505898
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304