Book Of The Month May, 2010
ConspiratorHelen Rappaport
Conspirator is the compelling story of Lenin’s exile: the years in which he and his political collaborators plotted a revolution that would change 20th century history. It tells the story of Lenin in the long and difficult years leading up to the Russian Revolution, years that were spent constantly on the move in and around Europe in the company of his loyal and longsuffering wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. Conspirator strips away the arid politics of Lenin s official life and reveals the real man, as well as describing his many conflicts, personal and political, with those who shared his exile. It also looks at the loyal circle of women who unquestioningly supported Lenin, at Russian émigré lives in the enclaves of the cities in they lived and the risks taken in support of Lenin’s vision by the wider network of Russian revolutionaries in the underground movement, both at home and abroad.
What We Think
Author Helen Rappaport about her book Conspirator:
Since my early teens I’ve been in love with the Russia of Tolstoy and Chekhov. Having written a book on the Romanovs, I started looking for a new subject in the Soviet period. Lenin had always intrigued me but the thought of venturing into the drab and depressing waters of Soviet history seemed a tough call. Lenin was not an easy person to take on: he wasn’t a ‘sexy’ subject like the Machiavellian Stalin, who had a predilection for robbing banks and sex with underage girls. Indeed, Lenin came across as a pedant – the archetypal sober, moral puritan. He didn’t drink, didn’t smoke and, so we were led to believe, didn’t have much of, if any, sex life – all in all a subject only for political and academic historians
When I dug deeper, however, I was struck by how little had been said about his non-political life – in as much as it is possible to say he had one – and especially his seventeen long, hard years in exile before his rise to power. The challenge, as I saw it, was to write a book without all the dreary politics that I had found so defeating when reading about Lenin before and only include as much as was necessary to explain the context. What intrigued me as a historian – and also as a woman and a feminist – was getting to the real man behind the iconic, public image. I wanted to know more about the sheer logistics of how and where he and his wife had lived in Europe: what kind of accommodation did they have; what did they do for money; what did they eat? What were Lenin’s relationships like with his fellow exiles and especially the women in his life? During my research I came to see that Lenin had no qualms whatsoever in ruthlessly exploiting the loyalty of the women who formed his essential back up team: his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, his mother, mother-in-law, wife, sisters and his sometime lover Inessa Armand – and how he wore them all ragged in the cause of his own political ends.
At the end of a fascinating journey in Lenin’s company across Europe – including research trips to Finland, Russia and Poland – I can’t say that he ever became a hero to me but I did find him compelling, at times utterly infuriating if not repellent, but always endlessly fascinating. I could not help admiring his astonishing resilience and will power through so much adversity. He certainly was never boring as I had imagined him to be back in my student days. It has been a wonderful challenge, as a woman and a non-academic to write a major monograph on Lenin and I hope I have managed, in so doing, to shed new light on a less well documented part of his life.