This slender book is where a great deal of what the twentieth century thought it knew about Lenin's mind actually came from. When people say "Lenin on the woman question" or "Lenin on art," they are, more often than not, quoting Clara Zetkin — these three short memoirs, written in the years just after his death, are the source of the most-cited conversations Lenin ever had. It is a book of enormous influence and modest length, and both facts are worth holding in mind, because a source this small carrying a load this large is exactly the kind of text a state learns to curate.
Zetkin had earned the right to write it. She was not a disciple who had met the great man once; she was one of the towering figures of the international socialist movement in her own right — the organiser of its women's international, the founder of International Women's Day, a leader of the German left through the SPD, the wartime opposition, and the founding of the Communist Party of Germany at the end of 1918. She came to Lenin as something close to an equal, and the recollections have the texture of that standing: she argues with him, presses him, records his impatience and his charm without awe. The long conversations of 1920 — the two famous talks on the women's movement, and the talk on art and culture — are set down with a novelist's ear, and they are the reason the book has never gone out of print in the movement. Here is Lenin insisting that the emancipation of women is a question of economics and politics before it is a question of the bedroom, impatient with the fashionable "glass of water" theory of free love, demanding that the drudgery of the private household be abolished and women drawn into public life on equal terms. Here is Lenin on the arts, admitting with disarming honesty that he could take no pleasure in expressionism, futurism and cubism — "I have not the courage to consider them the highest expression of artistic genius" — while insisting, against the proletkultists, that the new culture could only be built on the whole inheritance of the old. Whatever one makes of the opinions, the record is vivid and, by every internal sign, honest.
So read it first for that: a close, unhagiographic portrait of Lenin's mind at work, by a witness with the standing to draw it. But the reason it needs an introduction, and not merely a reprint, is the same reason it was so useful to the state that printed it. A handful of remembered conversations, once canonised, becomes doctrine — and doctrine that cannot be checked, because the only witness is dead and the interlocutor deader. Lenin's off-the-cuff remarks to Zetkin about futurism hardened, in official hands, into the Party's aesthetic line; his impatience with a silly theory of sex became the warrant for a deepening prudishness; his genuine insistence on the material roots of women's oppression was quoted in a country that was busy reversing the measures built on it. That is the first thing to watch. The book is a treasury of the radical Lenin on women and culture, and it was issued by a state that had abandoned most of what the radical Lenin proposed.
The reversal on the woman question is the sharpest case, because it is the book's most celebrated theme. Lenin tells Zetkin that there can be no real emancipation while the woman remains chained to "the petty, stultifying, drudgery of the kitchen," and that the answer is to socialise that labour and draw women fully into public production and public life. The young Soviet republic had gone further in that direction than any state in history. And then it turned back: the women's department of the Party, the Zhenotdel, was wound up in 1930; abortion, legalised in 1920, was recriminalised in 1936; and the family decree of 1944 rebuilt exactly the private household Lenin had told Zetkin must be dissolved. By the time this English edition appeared in 1956, the state publishing Lenin's demand for the abolition of the "domestic hearth" had spent twenty years restoring it and handing out medals to mothers of large families. The text was preserved; the programme in it was not. An honest reader keeps both facts in view at once.
Then there is what the framing does to Zetkin herself, which is quieter and, once seen, harder to unsee. Clara Zetkin's dearest friend and closest political comrade for a quarter of a century was Rosa Luxemburg. They were of the same left, the same temper, the same wing of the movement; when Luxemburg was murdered by proto-fascist officers in January 1919, with the German Social Democracy's connivance, Zetkin lost the person nearest to her in politics and in life. But "Luxemburgism," by the time these memoirs were canonised in Moscow, had been declared a heresy — Stalin's letter to the journal Proletarskaya Revolyutsia in 1931 fixed Luxemburg in the catalogue of dangerous errors, and there she stayed. The apparatus that lovingly published Zetkin's recollections of Lenin had no comparable use for Zetkin's recollections of Luxemburg, or for the fact that its warm, authoritative witness to Leninism was, by formation and by love, a Luxemburgist. The Zetkin who is handed to us here, blessed by a foreword from Lenin's widow, is Zetkin the loyal Comintern elder — the woman who, dying, opened the German Reichstag in 1932 as its senior member with a last great speech against the Nazis. That Zetkin was real. But she is a curated Zetkin, with the most inconvenient of her loyalties left discreetly out of frame.
None of which is a reason to distrust the memoirs — it is a reason to read them with the frame made visible. Zetkin did not falsify Lenin; she recorded him with unusual fidelity, and the tradition from which this introduction is written has always valued her testimony precisely because she was too substantial a figure to flatter. What the Soviet edition adds is not distortion of the text but a selection of the woman: it takes the witness whose whole life bound her to the murdered leader of the German left and presents her as a pillar of the very orthodoxy that filed her friend under deviation. The foreword by Krupskaya — herself, by 1956, long since overruled and marginalised — completes the effect, two great revolutionary women enlisted, one living and one dead, to lend their authority to a canon that had made its peace with neither of their causes.
So take this book for the double thing it is. On its surface it is what the Foreign Languages Publishing House meant it to be: the affectionate, authorised record of Lenin's views, foreworded by his widow, fixing the line on art and on women. Underneath, for the reader who brings the history with them, it is the testimony of a Luxemburgist to a Lenin whose most radical demands the publishing state had quietly buried — a small book that preserves, better than the regime that printed it ever wanted preserved, the memory of what the revolution had once intended for half of humanity, and had not delivered.