Lenin and Armand

It is the nightmare of most authors that just before or immediately after the publication of a book that has taken years to complete, someone will find an unknown archive or gain access to a previously closed file and that material found therein will seriously undermine an argument the author has made.* This happened to me in 1992. A year and a half earlier I had delivered a 400-page manuscript entitled Inessa Armand: Revolutionary and Feminist to Cambridge University Press. I had consulted the few relevant archives in the West, all of the pertinent primary materials published in the Soviet Union, and the secondary literature on my topic. I was aware that the Central Party Archives of the Institute of Marxism-Leninism had unpublished material in Moscow but I knew from personal experience and that of other researchers that access to these particular records, even in the name of glasnost, was virtually impossible. The publisher's referees recognized this fact and accepted my argument that Armand's long overlooked career as a Bolshevik revolutionary and later as a Soviet feminist could be convincingly documented with the evidence then available. I was reasonably certain no smoking gun lay in Soviet archives that might demolish my picture of her professional career. Armand's private life was another matter. Western scholarship, ever since Bertram Wolfe's expos6 in 1963,1 has concentrated on her relationship with Lenin. The perceived wisdom was that the two revolutionaries were lovers intermittently or continuously from 1911 to at least 1917 and that any accomplishments she might have had as a revolutionary or feminist were secondary to that fact and usually obscured by it. My primary intention was to lift this veil of obscurity and to call attention to her work first as an underground propagandist, then as a Bolshevik organizer in emigration, and finally as a defender of women's rights in the workplace and in society. I could not avoid, however, her relationship with Lenin. It is impossible to prove [I wrote in 1992] that two persons who saw each other frequently over a six-year period and also were obviously very close friends were not at the same time emotionally involved or that they did not have an isolated affair. It is almost as difficult to prove that they did not have an extended involvement with one another. It is possible, however, to examine the evidence that has been used to support the hypothesis that they were lovers and to suggest, if the veracity of this evidence is in question, other possible interpretations of their relationship.2 In examining that evidence I found much of it to be based on conjecture, gossip and clearly erroneous information. My conclusion that the case of the romantic school of historians could not be proven was tempered by the realization that unpublished letters from both parties remained inaccessible in Soviet archives. These were obviously historical guns; I took the chance that they were not loaded with ammunition that would destroy the secondary case I sought to make in my biography. I corrected the proofs of Inessa Armand as the Communist Party and the Soviet Union collapsed in the second half of 1991. By the time the book appeared the next June, nothing that I had found in the post-Soviet press proved me wrong. I breathed a sigh of relief when reviewers, while noting my lack of research in Soviet archives, recognized the reasons for it and produced no new documents to undermine my major conclusions. Almost without exception, I was credited with having rehabilitated Armand's revolutionary reputation and most were willing to accept my view of her relationship with Lenin. It was reassuring and gratifying six months later to receive the Heldt Prize awarded annually by the American Association for Women in Slavic Studies to the best book published in the field of Slavic women's studies. This sense of relief proved premature and the author's nightmare soon became a reality

Political science · Anarchism and Radical Politics · Historical and Contemporary Political Dynamics · History · Soviet and Russian History

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