revolution: all work and no play for lenin

…Lenin came to exercise enormous control over his emotions. He spurned all kinds of softness and spontaneity. Even his marriage was a “revolutionary” one to a fellow conspirator…

Any pleasure that stood in the way of work must be given up, and Lenin showed the way. He loved chess but eventually stopped playing, for, he said, “Chess gets hold of you too much, and hinders work.” So to, with skating. He told Krupskaya, his wife, “When I was a schoolboy I used to go in for skating, but I found that it tired me so that I always wanted to go to sleep afterwards. This hindered my studies. So I gave up skating.” Presumably for similar reasons, Lenin also gave up drinking and smoking.

—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.
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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. —click image for source…

On the positive side he disciplined himself through phyical education. “You must value and take care of your health,” Lenin advised a comrade. “It is always a blessing to be physically strong and healthy, to have powers of endurance- but for the revolutionary it is a duty.” Hence, play became a form of work. As Lenin’s friend Gorky summed him up, “By nature he is a puritan.”

Lenin came to exerciseenormous control over his emotions. He spurned all signs of softness and spontaneity. Even his marriage was a “revolutionary” one to a fellow conspirator. Krupskaya, in fact, was a revolutionary compnion rather than an object of romantic love. She shared his exile and served him faithfully in the cause to which they were both dedicated. There were, however, no children. One friend, perhaps nastily, described her as an “unfeminine woman,” but, then, she was the “new woman” that Chernyshevsky had called for. ( to be continued)…

ADDENDUM:

(see link at end)…Lenin’s approach to politics was every bit as extraordinary as his private life. Many people still believe that the man was an icon, a benign, wise and caring Bolshevik whose political philosophy was perverted by the monstrous, despotic Stalin – whereas the truth is quite different.

Inspired by the nihilist Sergei Nechaev, Lenin espoused the use of wholesale terror from a very early age. In Nikolai Chernyshevski’s novel What Is To Be Done? – the title that Lenin appropriated for one of his own works – Chernyshevski wrote: “Robespierre and his Jacobins were too mild. In Russia we need a Triple Terror [one] which really terrifies.” In his copy of the book, Lenin scribbled a note next to this quotation: “Excellent!” The playwright Gorky called Lenin “the thinking guillotine”.

Lenin not only believed in the efficacy of terror to solve most problems, but he abhorred concepts such as “democracy” or “freedom”, calling them “bourgeois shit”. His language was renowned for its vituperative scatology. He thought every form of socialism other than his own was “filth”. The British Labour Party he treated with scorn: “It is the job of every Communist to support the Labour Party leaders as the rope supports the hanged man.”Read More:http://www.newstatesman.com/node/138854