Real Dictators - Lenin Part 1: The Revolution is Born

Episode Date: September 27, 2022

Vladimir Lenin changed the course of history like very few ever have. He turned Russia upside down and created the first communist state. As the founder of the Soviet Union, he ensured the world would never be the same again. But long before his time in power, his life is something straight out of a spy thriller. Young Vladimir enjoys a happy, comfortable childhood. That is, until a double tragedy puts him on a very different path... A Noiser production, written by Dan Smith. This is Part 1 of 4. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

TD Direct Investing offers live support, so whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. July 17th, 1918. We're in the Russian city of Ekaterinburg, not far from the Ural Mountains. It's 1.30am. In an old mercantile house, a man called Evgeny Botkin is shaken awake. Before him, dressed in military fatigues, stands Commander Urovski, and his tone is of the utmost urgency. There are enemy soldiers nearby, he says. Botkin does not doubt him. He'd heard gunfire himself earlier this very evening.

Gather the family, Urovski instructs him. Gather the family and take them down to the basement. Botkin scrambles out of bed to do as he is told. The family in question is not his own. Far from it. They are the Romanovs, and Botkin is their physician. They had been Russia's ruling dynasty until their overthrow the previous year. These days the country is under the rule of Vladimir Lenin and his Bolshevik revolutionaries. Lenin knows that the Romanovs represent a threat to his new regime.

They will always be a rallying point for his enemies. He's had the family moved around the country at regular intervals, to wherever they pose the least danger. The Romanovs have been living quietly at this property, Ipatiev House, for the past few weeks. They share four rooms on the upper floor. The upstairs windows are painted over to keep out prying eyes. Their guards, headed by Commander Urovsky, live downstairs.

Botkin does his best to chivvy them, but it takes half an hour to get the sleepy royals out of bed. They descend to the basement, down a steep, narrow staircase in the semi-darkness. Nicholas carries 14-year-old Alexei in his arms. The son has been left immobile by a long-standing illness. Underground, they pile into a tiny room. Alexandra demands that chairs for herself and her son be retrieved from upstairs. Yurovsky instructs the rest of the party to stand against the wall, a rather odd command.

He then leaves. A few moments later, he returns. He's not alone. Nicholas has his back turned as they enter. Yurovsky barks at them. Because of the continuing activities of certain royals against Lenin's new regime, they are all to be shot.

Nicholas spins around. He demands an explanation for this impertinence. But the time for talking is long past. With Nicholas still exclaiming in disbelief, the shooting starts. Some of the death squad, hand-picked by Yurovsky, have been drinking. Their aim is off. Bullets ricochet off the walls. A gunpowder fog descends and blood pools on the flagstones.

It takes fully twenty minutes for the assassins to finish their gory business. They strip the corpses of valuables, then lift each one into a sheet, which they then haul across the garden to a waiting truck. Its engine has been idling all this time, to drown out the sound of gunfire. The bodies are chucked in, one on top of another. They're driven off to be burned and thrown down an old mine shaft. Vladimir Lenin has been in power for nine months. Tonight, he has extinguished

the last embers of the old order. His new Russia is only just beginning. Tonight he has extinguished the last embers of the old order. His new Russia is only just beginning. At the turn of the 20th century, the Russian Empire is a realm of deep inequality, where the masses are truly downtrodden. From the shadows emerges a man determined to challenge the status quo. He dreams of bringing communist revolution, not just to Russia, but to the world. But once installed in power, his worker's utopia descends swiftly into a nightmare of totalitarianism,

as idealism gives way to sheer cruelty and barbarism. Vladimir Lenin is one of history's great divisive figures, eulogised by some, reviled by many others. As the founder of the Soviet Union, his significance is unquestionable. In terms of his personality, history has painted Lenin as rather unremarkable, even boring, in stark contrast to the box office character of Joseph Stalin. But in fact, Lenin's is a truly extraordinary life story, something straight out of a spy thriller. He spent years on the run, living under false identities, literally in disguise,

before he got anywhere close to power. So who is the real man, beyond the propaganda and the myth-making? From Noisa, this is the Lenin Story. And this is Real his real name. He won't adopt that moniker until his thirties. Vladimir Ulyanov is born on April 10, 1870, in Simbirsk. It's a small well-to-do town on the banks of the Volga river, 500 miles southeast of Moscow. The Russia into which he's born is a country of a few haves and plenty more have-nots.

Unlike much of Europe, this empire has developed little in the way of the middle class. At the same time, its industrial base is playing catch-up with Russia's neighbours. Some 80% of the people in this sprawling realm live in the countryside, with most classified as peasants. Dr James Ryan is Senior Lecturer in Modern Russian History at Cardiff University and author of Lenin's Terror, the Ideological Origins of Early Soviet State Violence.

So it's very much a sort of a varied picture when it comes to the peasants. Some are better off than others. These are the so-called kulaks. These were relatively well off. But by definition, a peasant is not a capitalist farmer. By definition, a peasant is not somebody who is producing a large amount of grain and other agricultural product for profit on the market. So very much subsistence farmers. They've got small plots of land, big families living in their dwellings,

which are usually quite small. Life isn't all terrible. Peasants have fun. There are celebrations and festivals and that sort of thing, but life could certainly be a lot better. Russia's leader is the Tsar, at the time of Ulyanov's birth, Alexander II. As Russian law makes clear, he is an absolute monarch who is not obliged to answer for his actions to anyone in the world. In certain respects, Alexander II is a social reformer. Most notably, in 1861, a decade before Lenin's birth, he emancipated the serfs. Serfs were bonded peasants who could be bought and sold along with the land that they farmed. In many ways, slaves. But, at Alexander's behest,

23 million of them were given new freedoms. To own land and businesses, for example, and to marry freely. Other reforms followed, but in truth, these have barely scratched the surface of Russia's inequality. Poverty is ubiquitous. The death rate is high relative to much of Europe. Most people are illiterate. Victor Sebastian is an historian of Eastern Europe, Russia and communism, and author of Lenin the Dictator. And in some ways, the peasants were worse off than underserved them, because the conditions in which they were so liberated left them with huge debts, because effectively, they were forced to buy their land, or buy the use of their land, from their former landlords. And they didn't have much choice about it and the price they were paying was extremely high. That caused an enormous amount

of resentment. Conditions were much worse than they were in Western Europe. It was an autocracy. When Vladimir Ilyanov is born, the midwife comments on how little his body is in relation to his notably large head. On this basis, she says, he is destined to be either very intelligent or very stupid. Either way, this baby is one of the lucky ones. He does

not come from peasant stock. His background is very comfortable. He is his parents' third child. There's an older brother, Sasha, and a sister, Anna. In time, he will get younger siblings too. Professor Catherine Merriday is an expert on Russian history and author of Lenin on the Train. And everybody thought they were lovely children.

They were very disciplined. They were always well-dressed. They didn't swear. They didn't misbehave. They never stole. People were quite surprised. In fact, on one occasion, somebody saw them throwing snowballs, and people were quite shocked.

Those are the Ulyanov children throwing snowballs. They don't do that. Because they were such disciplined and good children. They were called the beautiful family. The family lives in a large two-story wooden house the garden is lush with apple plum and cherry trees and rows of lilac bushes in the summer that you'll yarn offs play croquet on the lawn and go for walks in the orchards that stretch for miles around listening to the songs of nightingales. Vladimir's father, Ilya, is a teacher by profession.

He holds the prestigious role of regional school's inspector. Not only does he earn a good living, in time he's even awarded a noble title. Ilya has come far in the world, and his children are the beneficiaries. Young Vladimir loves the outdoors. He hunts, skates, and slays. He's a keen walker and a skillful gymnast, too, often to be found swinging on a horizontal bar under the lime trees in the garden. In quieter moments, he plays chess. His father hand-carves him a set.

It will be a lifelong passion. Education is prized highly. Ilya demands excellence from his children. The family library is kept well-stocked. Vladimir's favourite book in his youth is Harriet Beecher Stowe's Uncle Tom's Cabin, that landmark work of anti-slavery. His mother, Maria, too, pushes her children to strive academically.

Dr. Brandon Gautier is adjunct professor of history at Fordham University and author of Before Evil, Young Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mao, Mussolini, and Kim. I think the most important thing to say about Lenin's relationship with his mom, Maria, was that she was a lovely mother. He would say later on in his early 20s, mama, you know, she's a saint. He would reflect only with the warmest feelings about his mother. She's a saint. He would reflect only with the warmest feelings about his mother. This was a mom who made sure that her kids had access to all different types of reading materials from a young age. This was a household that subscribed to journals from St. Petersburg, a household that had sheet music lying around. His mom homeschooled him for a time as a young boy,

and she did things with young Vladimir, like teaching him how to pun in German and French. A mom who was a great pedagogue and a lovely human being who wanted nothing more than for her child to find success in the world. In terms of academic performance, Vladimir does not disappoint. He is a grade A student. Absent from the Ulyanov household is any hint of radical politics. In fact, radicalism of any kind is very much frowned upon. We wouldn't call his father a liberal, you know, something in between a conservative and a liberal.

But he was someone who deplored radicalism and thought that particularly political zealotry could bring the country only to a bad end. Case in point, when Vladimir is 10 years old, Tsar Alexander is murdered. Members of a revolutionary movement called the People's Will ambush the monarch as he travels through the capital, St. Petersburg, in his carriage. The response of the Ilyanov family speaks volumes as to their values. When you have the assassination of Tsar Alexander II, Ilya takes his entire family to the memorial service. He wears his formal uniform and he sits in a pew next to his two boys. And he will tell his kids, you know, what rogues, what stupid people could have done this. And does everything he can to encourage Sasha, Lenin's older brother, and then Lenin himself, to stay away from politics.

On January the 12th, 1886, Ilya Ulyanov drags himself to the sofa in his study. He lies there, shaking, unable to speak. Maria calls for the doctor. She brings the children in to see him, just in time. Ilya dies before the physician can get there. It was a stroke. He's buried the very next day. With Sasha away at university

15-year-old Vladimir, as the oldest son present is the chief pallbearer A year and a half later, in May 1887 a gang of criminals is led out into a courtyard in St. Petersburg Looking up, Sasha Ulyanov, age 21 A gang of criminals is led out into a courtyard in St. Petersburg. Looking up, Sasha Ulyanov, age 21, sees the scaffold looming above him. Moments later, along with his four accomplices, he is hanged to death. Sasha had got involved in a conspiracy to kill the new Tsar, Alexander III.

Those who know him can scarcely believe it. Sasha had been studying natural sciences. He'd even won a gold medal for a paper he gave on freshwater worms. His family had no inkling of his extremist politics. It turns out his father's death hit him particularly hard. One friend describes how he prowled around his dorm like a caged animal when he heard the news. In the coming months, Sasha discovered the works of Karl Marx. Without the moderating influence of Ilya, he had taken it upon himself to become an agent of change.

Lennon's older brother discovers political economy. He falls in love with the notion of a socialist utopia that he views as inherently scientific rather than utopian. That the story of what Marxism offers, like a lab experiment, can translate this world into something without rich and poor. And then it begins. If that's how you really feel, surely you're willing to do what needs to be done to help bring it about. And he becomes pulled into a conspiracy to kill Tsar Alexander III. And Lenin's older brother throws his life away. The plot had been crude, a clumsy attempt to blow up the Tsar.

But word had made it back to the secret police, the Okhrana. In court, Sasha was unrepentant. Terror is the only form of defense, he said. The only road individuals can take when their discontent becomes extreme. It soon becomes clear that Sasha's actions have cast a long shadow over Vladimir's life. Based on his academic performance, the school has no choice but to award him a gold medal. But Vladimir is denied the honour of having his name inscribed on a plaque alongside previous winners. It's the first of many snobs. He will be denied a place at

either of the elite universities, in St. Petersburg and Moscow. Instead, he will have to settle for Imperial Kazan University. As irony has it, he's accepted on the basis of a letter of recommendation from his headmaster, a man named Kerensky. Many years later, Vladimir will depose Kerensky's son as the head of Russia's government. But all that is a long way off. Since Sasha's execution, the good people of Simbirsk, who not long ago took tea with the Ulyanov's, now cross the road to avoid them. One incident in particular from the time of the hanging itself will rankle with Vladimir.

When his mother needed to go to see the son who was about to be hanged in St. Petersburg, a long journey from Simbirsk involving coaches and trains, Lenin was deputed to find someone locally who could take his mother. He couldn't find anyone amongst the nice bourgeois families who had taken tea with them and that led to his extreme hatred of the bourgeois. He spoke about that repeatedly during his life. Around this point it seems a seething resentment sets in, an anger towards those hypocritical bourgeois do-gooders as he perceives them. Vladimir Ilyanov, just 17 and with his calm world shattered, embarks on a new phase of life,

determined to find answers to his many questions. of life, determined to find answers to his many questions. And then it started, the question of why. Why had my older brother embarked on this path? That question is one of the most important origin sources of his radicalism, because he starts with a core conviction, which is that Sasha must have felt like he was doing the right thing. is that Sasha must have felt like he was doing the right thing. Vladimir starts, as ever, with books.

He has already devoured Gogol, Pushkin, and Tolstoy. But now he seizes on the works that Sasha loved. Marxism attracted him much, much more. It got popular within the intellectual circles much more quickly than it ever did in Germany. When Das Kapital was published in Russia, well before anywhere else in Western Europe, it was translated into Russian. It was sold out faster than the print run had been in Germany by a long, long way. And extraordinarily, Voltaire and Rousseau were banned in Russia. Marx was allowed.

And the censors said, well, nobody will understand a word of it. It's just too dense an economic theory. And that was a mistake by the censors, if ever there was one. Vladimir will tell his sisters, I fell in love with Marx and Engels. Literally in love.

But another work is of almost equal importance to him. What is to be done is a novel of 1862 by Nikolai Cheryshevsky. It's the story of an idealist, a man prepared to submit to extreme self-sacrifice for the sake of a revolution. To Vladimir, it seems to foretell Sasha's own fate. Vladimir will carry a picture of Cheryshevsky in his pocket for the rest of his days. When he makes it to the Kremlin, he will have a portrait of the author hung on the wall in his office. Just as happened to Sasha, a flame of rebellion lights within Vladimir. But he does not intend to die for his convictions.

He intends to see the revolution. Vladimir's stint studying at Imperial Kazan University is short and disappointing. He joins a group of political radicals. On one occasion they organise a protest. There are 130 students in all, and Vladimir is involved in only a very minor way. But his reputation, or his brother's, precedes him. In the aftermath of the demonstration, just four students are thrown out of the university. He is one of them.

We're looking at a society that has failed the young, that has failed to produce reform, that is clamping down, shutting down gross injustices. Tsarism is actually very violent in the way that it suppresses opposition, punishes people for even economic misdeeds, you know, sort of going bankrupt or not paying their taxes or whatever. This is not a fair or free society. And any teenager who's been brought up properly educated

has ideas of justice and decency is going to be drawn towards some form of protest. It would be hard not to be. And for Lenin, he was never somebody who went for half measures. Despite his mother's pleas, he will not be allowed back to continue his degree. She decides the time has come to sell the house in Simbirsk and buy a country estate. Vladimir does not take to life as a country squire. He doesn't get on with the peasants. When cows and horses go missing, he is sure the perpetrators are his own tenant farmers.

Relations with them, as he puts it, become abnormal. The man who will dismantle Russia's ancient class system struggles in his role of the gentleman landlord. Instead of managing the land, he sits beneath the linden trees and translates the communist manifesto into Russian. He was always an intellectual, and so he's isolated from what you might call ordinary people. He's following this path in the library, and of course he goes to the books that are the most interesting and to some extent the most extreme. He does get back into academia after a fashion. Embarking on a law degree at the University of St. Petersburg by correspondence, he's not permitted to attend classes in person. He completes the four-year program in just 18 months, graduating top of his class. Vladimir Ulyanov even practises law for a while.

In 1893 he takes a job at a high-profile firm in St. Petersburg. But his heart isn't in it. His vocation is politics. And here he's becoming increasingly ruthless. he's becoming increasingly ruthless. In the winter of 1891-92, there is a brutal famine. The death toll rises into the many thousands. When his sisters discuss how they might help alleviate the hardship for those less fortunate,

Vladimir talks of the revolutionary opportunities that lie in such suffering. Starving people are more likely to demand change. He is soon making a name for himself in the capital's radical salons. By his early twenties, his reddish hair is mostly gone. He sports a thin beard. His voice has the timbre of one much older. He wins a nickname, Starek, Old Man. His powers of debating are impressive. Short, yet imposing, with his hunched shoulders and fierce eyes, he is a formidable opponent. He stands with his fingers in the armholes of his waistcoat so that his elbows jut out. He is routinely abusive and crude. He does not seek to persuade his opponents.

He destroys them. He calls them scoundrels, philistines, class traitors, filthy scum, and much worse besides. He helps to write a pamphlet in support of striking factory workers. He shows an ability to communicate complex ideas in punchy prose. As a public radical now, and with his family background, he is firmly in the sights of the authorities. But even for Vladimir Ulyanov, there is more to life than revolution, for now at least. He is about to meet, if not the love, then the woman of his life. On February 13, 1894, Vladimir Ulyanov arrives at a Shrove Tuesday pancake party.

It's here that he will be introduced to Nadia Krupskaya. The pancake party is a facade, by the way. This is actually an illegal meeting of Marxist sympathizers. At 24, Nadia is a year older than him. She's striking, tall, with a firm jaw and high cheekbones. Her hair parted in the middle and drawn back. Her conversation is intelligent and earnest. She doesn't quite know what to make of this cocksure fellow. He's a bit too sarcastic for her liking. His laugh, she thinks, is harsh, even cruel. When she talks of her passion for teaching at Sunday schools, Vladimir is dismissive. He simply holds forth on the coming world revolution as predicted by Marx,

and the role he wishes to play. Romance does not come naturally. Still, Nadia agrees to let him walk her home, back along the banks of the Nevsky River. They don't know it, but the two will be bonded for life. Whether love or something else, it's hard to say. In any case, it will endure. Much later in her life, Stalin organized a campaign to try and discredit her. So we have this image of Nadia as this sort of ugly old hag who Lenin must have married purely for convenience. It's equally wrong to think of it in terms of hearts and flowers. These were two revolutionaries who believed that revolution was the most important cause. And their relationship was professional. It was probably affectionate.

They wanted children, but they never managed to get children for whatever reason. To live with Lenin was not to expect he would remember your birthday. I suspect there wouldn't have been a great deal of pink fluffiness going on whoever Lenin had been with. Vladimir Ulyanov, soon to be Lenin, is fast emerging as a leader of the underground.

There are two distinct sides to Ulyanov's revolutionary personality. On the one hand, he is a great thinker. He reads and absorbs, he strategizes. But on the other, he wants to see practical results. There were so many revolutionary groups within Russia. Most of the revolutionaries were quite happy to sit around and talk about it. What separated Lenin from the others, why he succeeded, the others got nowhere, was he was absolutely single-minded and meant it.

So many of the others were playing at it. Historians agree that he is obsessed with revolution. But they take slightly differing views on Ulyanov's quality as a leader. Dr Helen Rapoport is a historian of late imperial Russia and the revolution and author of Conspirator, Lenin in Exile. Lenin fundamentally was the thinker of the revolution. He was not an action man. He would never have led from the barricades. He was basically a physical coward. He was a

theoretician. He was a thinker. He saw the whole thing really as one great big abstraction because he had no comprehension or true understanding of the Russian people or what they wanted or needed. comprehension or true understanding of the Russian people or what they wanted or needed. His commitment to the cause is taking a toll on his health. He suffers from terrible headaches, insomnia and stomach problems. These ailments shorten his temper. Colleagues frequently find themselves on the receiving end of vicious tirades. He got into these terrible rages.

I think he also realised his life probably wasn't going to be long because he could probably sense that. His father died when he was 54. He had high blood pressure and he had strokes. Lenin was obsessive about keeping fit, but he kind of knew that he probably, his health wasn't that good. He was

a bit of a hypochondriac too. So I think he sensed that he had to get things done quickly. That's why you can't wait for a revolution, because if you wait too long, I won't be around to lead it. His new girlfriend, Nadia, becomes adept at sensing when things are getting too much for him. In these moments, she sweeps him off to the countryside. These trips can last days, even weeks,

but they are crucial to restoring his energies. He loved mountains. He loved walking. He loved nature. People who knew him described the rages he would get, where he'd almost be foaming at the mouth in rages, and he just needed to get away from it, and that's how he did it. Even at times of great political activity he still found time to get away for long walks in the mountains. In April of 1895 Vladimir Ulyanov takes his first trip outside of Russia. It's a four-month grand tour of radical exiles in Western Europe, taking in Austria, Switzerland, France and Germany.

It's on this journey that he falls in love with the Swiss Alps. He also gets to meet his political hero, Yogi Plakhanov, a legend of the Russian Marxist underground, forced into exile back in 1877. In Paris, Vladimir enjoys a night at the Folies Beigères. He also meets Paul Lafargue, a son-in-law of Marx and a veteran of the 1871 Paris Commune, the first concerted attempt at a Marxist revolution. Ulyanov travels with two false-bottomed and double-lined suitcases.

These are used to smuggle banned literature. He loved the underground life. He thought he was an expert on everything, so even on invisible ink, he thought he could produce the best invisible ink. He wrote essays about how you hide from the secret police. He loved all that. He was a very, very secretive man.

When he returns to Russia in the September, Ulyanov co-founds the country's first overtly Marxist revolutionary organisation. It's called the Union for the Struggle of the Working Class. He sets to work publishing the group's own newspaper, The Worker's Cause. Late one night, he's in the office, along with the rest of the editorial board. Just as the presses are about to start rolling, the okrainer burst in. It turns out that one of the group's founders, a local dentist, has been informing on them. Ulyanov is caught red-handed in possession of subversive literature.

Ulyanov is hauled off to prison in St. Petersburg, where he's held for some 14 months. He's subjected to numerous interrogations, but gives little away. He adapts pretty well to life inside. First of all, he was extremely fit. He was somebody who believed in physical fitness. When he was in prison, he used to tell everybody to do circuits in their cells. He was forever doing press-ups and calisthenics to keep himself fit. He believed in long walks and cold showers. He was one of those people who regarded his body as an important part of who he was. On January 29, 1897, Vladimir Ulyanov is sentenced, without trial or right of appeal, to three years' exile in Siberia.

exile in Siberia. This may seem harsh, but for any aspiring revolutionary, such an experience is almost a rite of passage. Around 5% of Siberia's population are exiles. It was a badge of honour. You were no one unless you had been sent to Siberia or been in jail for a while. Ulyanov is destined for a town called Shushenskoia. It sits on the river Yenisei in southwestern Siberia. He's been dealt a pretty decent hand, as it turns out. Certainly much better than those exiles who come from less well-to-do backgrounds, or who are Jewish. The region to which Vladimir is headed is known as Italy of Siberia. Here he resides in a small peasant hut, surrounded by forests and swamps.

He gets a small allowance to live on. He even has a gun for hunting. He takes up correspondence chess, and secures a publishing deal to translate a work by the famous British socialists, Sidney and Beatrice Webb. This is certainly no gulag. If you read the biographies of almost all the great revolutionaries, they spent time in prison. They read the books. They started to write their own pamphlets. Almost all of them used prison as a university of revolution. And Lenin was no different. He used his exile to hone his ideas and to start writing some of his great analysis of the Russian economy. At the same time, Nadia is facing her own exile in a different part

of Siberia. That is, until Vladimir hits upon a way to bring them back together. Using invisible ink, of course, he writes her a letter, a marriage proposal, which she accepts. In so doing, she acquires the right to travel to Shushenskoye, where they are duly married in a local church in July 1898. A fellow exile fashions their wedding rings out of old coins. Their stay in Siberia truly is a family affair. Nadia's mother even comes to live with them. Vladimir's stint ends at the end of January 1900.

Nadia still has another six months. He carries on to Pskov, about 90 miles southwest of St. Petersburg. His conditions of release prevent him from living in any major city or university town. While Ulyanov was in exile, the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party was founded. This is the group that will evolve into the Communist Party. It's riddled with Ukrana agents. Ulyanov manages to slip the leash of the authorities on several occasions to attend secret meetings in St. Petersburg, but soon he's rearrested, again for possession of subversive literature. This time, he avoids a long prison stint or banishment to Siberia. But he can only ride his luck for so long.

And besides, he has big plans. He wants to set up another newspaper to spread the Marxist message. It will be called Iskra, or Spark. Producing it while under constant surveillance as impossible. So, he begins the process of leaving the country. It will be another exile, but a self-imposed one. It will last on and off for the best part of two decades. Lenin was a marked man.

Life in Russia would not have been easy, if indeed possible. And so really he's got little choice or little option but to be abroad. It's also where Russian revolutionaries are. Russian revolutionaries were indeed abroad. At that time, they hung out in cafes in European cities. That's what they did. They hung out in cafes in European cities. That's what they did. As an active revolutionary, there was no prospect for him in Russia except jail and or execution. Also, he wanted access to libraries so that he could write all his masterworks, his pamphlets and tracts and books about revolution and the new socialist state.

And he knew that the best libraries in Western Europe, i.e. British Library, the French Bibliothèque Nationale. So basically he couldn't fulfill his own political ambitions as so hamstrung in hiding in Russia. The authorities agreed to Ulyanov's request, calculating that he will be less of a headache to them overseas. Thus, in July, 1900 that he will be less of a headache to them overseas. Thus, in July 1900, he departs Russia once more. Vladimir Ulyanov heads to the southern German city of Munich.

Here he rents a couple of rooms in a lodging house. Nadia, a Siberian sojourn now complete, joins him in April 1901. Their existence in Munich is pretty Spartan, but they don't mind too much. He lived in very, very simple, frugal flats. He was not a man bothered remotely about possessions or his surroundings. He could have lived forever that way, as long as he could write, and as long as there weren't a room full of Russians arguing politics and staying up all night smoking and drinking tea because that really irritated him. He just wanted peace and quiet to get on with his master plan.

of Lenin's life, he fundamentally was kept going by women. Because if you look at his story in exile, he fell out with every single male friend he had. It was the women who were the rock who kept him going. Nadia, so self-effacing, enduring years of being on the run from one grubby little grotty hot flat to another, living on boiled potatoes, which she burnt because she couldn't cook. Always sublimating herself to what Lenin needed and actually ignoring her own quite bad ill health. She had quite serious thyroid problems, but she neglected them at the expense of looking after Lenin because he'd have regular meltdowns.

Vladimir adopts new aliases all the time. He will take over 100 false identities in the course of his life. January 1901 sees him use the name Lenin for the first time. Its origins are unclear. It's perhaps linked to the Lena River in Siberia. Regardless, it sticks. His newspaper, Iskra, soon launches. His old mentor, Georgi Plakhanov, is on the board. But so single-minded is Lenin that even they fall out.

Lenin wants full editorial control bested in himself. He does have a few trusted lieutenants, chief among them a warm and rather eccentric chap called Yuli Martov, but in the press room Lenin is already a dictator. Copies of the papers circulate the continent and find their way into Russia, where underground volunteers distribute them. Constant invention is required. One method of smuggling involves hiding the newspapers in greaseproof paper and concealing them in boxes of salted fish, which are then imported into Russia via Norway. Before long, the German authorities are taking a rather closer interest in Lenin. So it's time to move on again.

On the morning of April 14th, 1902, Mr. and Mrs. Lenin disembark at London's Charing Cross station. They exit into a thick fog, a real pea-super as the locals call it. They move into a small flat close to King's Cross, under the aliases of Mr. and Mrs. Jakob Richter. They cannot understand the accents of the local cockneys, and they don't much like the food. Their landlady isn't quite sure what to make of these foreigners,

but at least they're quiet and pay the rent on time. After a bumpy start, Vladimir and Nadia develop a real fondness for London. Their accommodation beats the decrepit commune nearby where many other exiles live. Lenin might be a communist but a commune is more than he can bear. He must have his own space. The Lenins are the latest

in a long line of notables who sought refuge here, from Marx and Engels to the Russian anarchist prince, Pyotr Kropotkin. They visit Speaker's Corner in Hyde Park, a bastion of free speech

unthinkable in their homeland. They enjoy the music hall with its knockabout comedies, a place for the workers to prick the pomposity of the ruling classes. But for Lenin, by far the best thing the city has to offer is the reading room at the British Museum. He visited every day. The refuge he found the most accommodating to his work and his activism was, weirdly, London. Because Britain at the time was probably one of the freest countries he could be in. And at the time, Lenin and a few other anarchist and revolutionary Russians were hanging out in London. The police weren't

particularly bothered about them. You know, they were more worried about the Italian fascists in the East End. So the Russians stayed in this closed-in lane play and got on with their underground activities quite happily. Early one morning in October 1902, there is a knock at the door. Nadia opens it and is greeted by a handsome, dishevelled man in his early twenties. He has a mop of curly brown hair and wears glasses. Nadia prepares the guests some breakfast while her husband gets dressed. This will be the first meeting of Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky.

Despite his youth, Trotsky does not lack self-confidence. He already has a reputation as a brilliant journalist and polemicist. The pair soon become firm friends. Everything is looking up. But then, surprising news reaches Lenin. His old mentor, Plakhanov, has been maneuvering behind his back. Production of Iskra is to be relocated immediately to Geneva. And so the Ulyanov's move once again, this time to Switzerland.

In Geneva, each day they meet fellow émigrés at the nearby Café Landolt, where they dine on sausages, sauerkraut and cheap beer. They soon come to the attention of one of the café regulars. He is a young student from Italy. He will remember the Russians as a strange, eccentric, fantastic group of nihilists and bohemians, their lives orgies of strong talk and weak tea. The student in question is Benito Mussolini.

In Switzerland, Lenin never won for sentimentality, its hardening as a character. He tells friends how he resists listening to his favourite piece of music, Beethoven's Appassionata, for fear that it makes him weak. You must not stroke anyone's head, he says. You might get your hand bitten off. You have to hit them over the head without any mercy. He publishes a revolutionary primer called What Is To Be Done, a nod to the great novel by Cheryshevsky that so influenced his late brother, Sasha. The most important of Lenin's works was a pamphlet, really, of no more than about 25,000,

30,000 words, called What Is To Be Done. And it was the Bible of how to create a party, how to create its self-structure, exactly how you operate. And that was his contribution to Marxist thought and to the communist movement, which is a considerable contribution, how you win power and how you keep it. Some of Lenin's colleagues are deeply concerned by the tone he's struck in his book. Martov considers that Lenin has written a tyrant's handbook.

Even Trotsky is uneasy. With fractures in the movement appearing, a congress is announced, an attempt to iron out some of the differences. After an unsuccessful meeting in Brussels in July 1903, the party reconvenes in London. This marks the moment that the communists divide into the rival factions of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. They will battle each other for the next two decades. We have this perception, don't we, that on the sort of the hard left, even to this present day, it's notoriously fractious, notoriously inclined to splits. we might think well it's obviously counterproductive that you are fighting amongst yourselves fighting internally but that speaks to us about the

importance of ideas not i would suggest necessarily or even simply the importance of power it's not about individuals trying to elbow somebody out of the way. Ideas are so important to them. And getting the theory right, for Lenin as for many others, getting the theory right was essential so that in order to get the practice right. Simply put, the Mensheviks believe that the revolution must go through phases. First, the overthrow of the Tsar, then a period of bourgeois democracy before the final proletariat revolution. But Lenin has no patience with that middle section. He wants to leap straight from feudalism to all-out worker-led revolution. It's not trivial, this difference between Menshevik and Bolshevik.

At the time of the split, the principal issue was what kind of party are we going to have? Are we going to have a broad church or are we going to have people who are totally loyal, totally dedicated and therefore much less likely to get caught by the Tsarist police? And those people have got to be pretty much professional revolutionaries. And it was Lenin's group who pushed for the latter. And the Mensheviks said, we want to get all the working class involved in a very broad party. While their differences are substantial, Lenin knows that what these rivals call themselves will prove crucial. Bolshevik means of the majority, Menshevik means of the minority.

Lenin's designation of these titles is a simple yet brilliant piece of branding. There were a series of votes in which nearly all of them, Lenin's group, had lost. There was one vote about who was going to be the members of the party that his group won. So he immediately calls that group the Bolsheviks. Bolsheviks, the majority. And the Mensheviks were the minority. You know, he claimed majority, really spurious majority when he didn't have it, a lie.

But the name stuck. I mean, Lenin would never have been stuck calling his group the minority. I mean, he would never have allowed it. Back in Geneva, the rival factions start taking separate rooms at the Landolt Café. Their members cross the road to avoid each other. When you see a stinking heap in your path, you don't have to touch it to know what it is, Lenin says, with typical directness. He may brazen it out, but the tension is impacting his health. More and more frequently he flies into these rages. In March 1904 he even cycles into the back of a tram. For the next few weeks he walks

around Geneva with his face in bandages. He is a man living on the edge. But at least there are the Alps, and Nadia has her eye on him. Tucked away in Switzerland, Lenin is hardly known outside the circles of Marxist radicals. But in the shadows, the great strategist is laying the groundwork for the world's first communist state. In just a few short years, the world will be rocked on its axis. In the next part of the Lenin story. Lenin meets Stalin. Turning to crime to pay their way, the revolutionaries struggle to stay a step ahead of the authorities. But global events will soon shift in their favor.

When the First World War turns Russia on its head, they will pounce. That's next time.