[Marxism] Fw: N.K. Krupskaya: Revolutionary Fighter

["Graham M." <gkmilner@xxxxxxxxxxxx>]

----- Original Message ----- 
From: Graham M. 
To: socialist alliance 
Sent: Thursday, September 02, 2004 10:41 PM
Subject: N.K. Krupskaya: Revolutionary Fighter


Dear Comrades,
                       The following piece was written by me some time ago.   
It has not been published before.   Krupskaya is an important figure among 
Bolshevik women - more important, in my opinion, than Alexandra Kollontai.   
When she is assessed in her own terms, rather that simply as 'Lenin's wife', 
Krupskaya emerges as a significant figure in her own right, and her great 
contributions to the history of the Russian Revolution and the Communist 
movement become more evident.

                                                                            In 
solidarity,


                                                                                
            Graham Milner


                                            NADEZHDA KRUPSKAYA  - REVOLUTIONARY 
FIGHTER          


    Born into a family of radical Russian gentry in 1869, Nedezhda (which from 
Russian translates as 'Hope') Konstantinovna Krupskaya became, with her partner 
V.I. Lenin, a founder and central leader of the organisation of revolutionaries 
that led the Russian working class to power in October 1917 - the Bolshevik 
Party.

   Following the October Revolution, Krupskaya played an important role in 
developing public education and cultural life in the Soviet state.   A prolific 
writer and speaker, her Collected Works in the field of education alone fill a 
dozen large volumes.   After Lenin's death in 1924, Krupskaya was one of the 
first prominent Communists in the Soviet Union to raise her voice against the 
usurpation of power by the conservative, bureaucratic forces around Joseph 
Stalin.   Although she withdrew her support from the United Opposition to 
Stalin (led by Leon Trotsky, Gregory Zinoviev and Leon Kamenev) in 1926, 
Krupskaya never reconciled herself to the gangster regime established by the 
Stalinists.   Soon after her death in 1939, Stalin ordered Krupskaya's name 
never again to be mentioned in the public media, and indeed it rarely was until 
after Stalin died in 1953.

   Krupskaya came early to radical beliefs.   She recalled in a brief personal 
memoir written in later life how the experiences of her parents in resisting 
the autocratic regime of the tsars had brought her to an appreciation of 
different aspects of national and social oppression.   At one time her father 
worked as a factory inspector - until he was sacked for giving too accurate an 
account of abuses by the factory management.   Krupskaya recalls that she used 
to play with the factory workers' children, and that they always tried hard to 
ambush the factory manager and hit him with snowballs.

   She had a lifelong love of the great populist poet Nekrasov, and her first 
political article, entitled The Woman Worker, began with a quote from one of 
his poems:

                 Thy lot is hard, a woman's lot.
                 A harder lot can scarce be found.

   Like Lenin, Krupskaya was a brilliant student, and won a gold medal at 
secondary school.   Kept out of higher education by reactionary laws that 
excluded women, after graduating from secondary school she became a teacher.   
This was to be the beginning of a lifelong interest in the theory and practice 
of education.   She was strongly influenced by Tolstoy's libertarian ideas in 
the field.

   In 1889, Krupskaya first came into contact with Marxist ideas, through a St. 
Petersburg radical discussion circle, one of several meeting in the city at 
that time.   She read the first volume of Karl Marx's Capital, and was 
captivated by its imaginative and profound analysis of modern society.   She 
devoured all the Marxist literature she could get her hands on, reading among 
other books Engels' Anti-Duhring and his Origin of the Family, Private Property 
and the State.   
 
   Krupskaya spent five years in all teaching at an adult-education institution 
for industrial workers in St. Petersburg.   This school operated before any 
organised socialist movement in Russia had come into being.   The Marxist 
teachers at the school organised themselves into an underground circle in order 
to recruit and educate workers, and to distribute pamphlets and leaflets in 
factories around St. Petersburg, a major centre of Russia's burgeoning 
industrial development.   Krupskaya became a member of this circle, and it was 
at one of its meetings, in 1894, that she met Lenin for the first time.

   In 1895, the St. Petersburg Marxists organised themselves into a League of 
Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. and extended their 
propaganda work among the proletariat of the city.   Police repression 
escalated and both Lenin and Krupskaya were arrested that year.   Lenin was 
detained in gaol and eventually sent into exile in Siberia.   Krupskaya was 
released, only to be arrested a year later and sent in her turn to Siberia, to 
join Lenin, whom she had decided to marry.

   Life in Siberian exile for Krupskaya and Lenin was not all hard.   As 
Krupskaya recalled later: '...we were young then, [and] were deeply in love 
with one another'.   They shared a passion for the classics of Russian 
literature - Lermontov, Chernyshevsky, Turgenev, as well as their mutual 
devotion to the cause of socialism.   While in Siberia they both worked on 
Lenin's major treatise; The Development of Capitalism in Russia, and jointly 
translated the Webbs' History of Trade Unionism.

   At the end of their terms of exile, in 1900 and 1901 respectively, Lenin and 
Krupskaya agreed to go to Western Europe to join the Russian Marxist movement 
in exile abroad.   Once in Western Europe they both became deeply involved in 
the production and distribution of the newspaper Iskra - 'The Spark' - the 
major project then being undertaken by Russian Marxists.

   Krupskaya became the secretary of the Iskra group, handling the 
correspondence that formed the tenuous but vital link between the revolutionary 
underground in Russia and the team of emigres producing the newspaper.   She 
received and answered something like three hundred letters a month, many 
containing articles or messages that had to be decoded.   The tsarist secret 
police paid Krupskaya a back-handed compliment when their Paris office filed a 
memo from the St. Petersburg police chief that identified her as one who 
'occupies a central position in the organisation of Iskra abroad [and conducts] 
a lively conspiratorial correspondence with all the active committees of the 
RSDLP [Russian Social Democratic Labour Party] in Russia'.    The tedious, 
painstaking work done by Krupskaya as Iskra's secretary contributed enormously 
towards the development of those links across the Russian underground that 
formed the organisational basis for a united Russian socialist movement - a 
party in fact.

   The second congress of the RSDLP met in 1903.   Krupskaya wrote a full 
organisational report to be delivered by Martov, but this was never presented 
due to the sharp disagreements over political and organisational questions that 
rent the congress and split the party.   Following the congress the opportunist 
'Menshevik' tendency, defeated on the congress floor, managed to seize control 
of the eiditorial board of Iskra.   Lenin resigned in protest, and the 
Mensheviks took steps to remove Krupskaya, who supported Lenin and the 
Bolshevik tendency, from her position as secretary.

   This split in the Russian socialist movement was to have wide-reaching 
ramifications.   It effectively divided the movement into two opposed camps: a 
revolutionary wing on the one hand - the Bolsheviks; and a compromisist, 
opportunist wing on the other - the Mensheviks.   From the time of the second 
congress onwards there were effectively two parties differing more or less 
fundamentally over questions of programme and tactics.   In 1917, these 
divisions came to a head when the development of the revolution posed the 
question of working-class power.

   Krupskaya continued to play her central organisational role in the separate 
Bolshevik apparatus established after the split in 1903.   She and Lenin 
returned to Russia during the revolution of 1905-6, although at that time no 
tendency in the labour movement was sufficiently strong to decisively affect 
the outcome of what was regarded later by revolutionaries as a great 
'dress-rehearsal' for the events of 1917.   The period of reaction that 
followed the 1905-6 events was a bleak age for Russian revolutionaries.   
Krupskaya and Lenin once again went into Western European exile, and fought 
hard to preserve the precious apparatus of the Bolshevik organisation from 
attempts to 'liquidate' it, or move it from the course of revolutionary 
Marxism.   Krupskaya continued at the centre of organisational work.

   The radical movement began to pick up again in Russia in the years before 
the onset of World War I.   In early 1914 a plan for a legal socialist 
newspaper for women, called The Working Woman, was drawn up by leading women 
members of the Bolshevik Party, including Krupskaya, Inessa Armand, and Lilina 
Zinoviev.   The paper ran through only two issues however, before police 
repression compelled abandoning the project.   The war, which broke out in 
August 1914, forced Lenin and Krupskaya to move to the neutral country of 
Switzerland, where they lived until their return to Russia, after the February 
revolution in 1917.   During this period Krupskaya was secretary of, and the 
leading force in, a Commission for the Aid of Russian Prisoners of War.   The 
commission was established under Bolshevik auspices, with the aim of reaching 
Russian POWs interned in Germany and Austria.   She was also involved in aiding 
Russian political emigres caught in Switzerland by the war.

   Krupskaya continued to study and write on educational questions.   She 
published a book in 1915 on Public Education and Democracy.   She was on the 
verge of beginning work on a bigger project - a Pedagogical Dictionary for 
Russian readers - when the February revolution broke out.

   Once back in Russia, Krupskaya beame closely involved in the work of the 
Bolshevik Party organisation in the Vyborg district of Petrograd - one of the 
major centres of working-class power in this city, where the All-Russian Soviet 
convened.   She was a member of a Vyborg Bolshevik committee delegation that 
met with and urged the Central Committee to speed the insurrection, shortly 
before October 1917.

   After the October Revolution had transferred power to the workers and 
peasants councils, Krupskaya was appointed to a central administrative position 
in the People's Commissariat of Enlightenment - the body entrusted with 
developing education in the period of transition towards socialism in Russia.   
'Education' included not only schools, but also adult education, overcoming 
illiteracy, the emancipation of women, the development of libraries, the 
Communist youth movement, and the coordination of political education.   In 
this capacity Krupskaya travelled around the country speaking to gatherings of 
workers and peasants.   During the dangerous days of the civil war, when the 
young Soviet republic was threatened by a host of internal and external 
enemies, she addressed Red Army units on the matters covered by her portfolio.

   Krupskaya believed in the maximum possible degree of local autonomy and 
control over education, with strong representation for groups involved, such as 
teachers and unions.   She hadn't forgotten the libertarian precepts of Tolstoy 
absorbed in her youth.   As she wrote to a co-worker:   'It is such a pity that 
Leo Nikolaevich [Tolstoy] is not alive'.   Such a programme, however, was 
almost impossible to achieve in the conditions prevailing in the young Soviet 
state, where an already backward economic and social life was further 
devastated by years of war and civil war.   The material preconditions for 
building a socialist education system did not exist.

   Given these conditions of extreme material scarcity, and a decline in the 
immediate prospects for revolutionary victories outside Russia, as the initial 
post-war revolutionary wave in Europe subsided, a strong conservative current 
manifested itself in the Communist Party and the Soviet state apparatus.   This 
current found its material base in the burgeoning party and state bureaucracy, 
and its chief spokesperson in Joseph Stalin, general secretary of the party.   
Stalin and his supporters steadily increased their influence and control over 
the party apparatus.   They succeeded, among many other things, in hampering 
the activities of Krupskaya's commissariat and reducing its effectiveness.

   For the last two years of his life, Lenin sought ways and means of reducing 
the power of Stalin and his secretariat, and the bureaucratic forces that 
threatened to wreck the achievements of the Soviet republic since 1917.   
Finally Lenin called for the removal of Stalin from his post as party 
secretary, and approached Trotsky with a view to fighting the bureaucratic 
forces that Stalin represented.   However, Lenin died before such an alliance 
could be cemented and his testament, which recommended the removal of Stalin, 
was suppressed.

   Soon after Lenin's death in early 1924, Krupskaya learned of a decision by 
the ascendant group in the party leadership to embalm Lenin's body and place it 
on permanent display in a Moscow mausoleum.   She wrote an open letter to the 
Russian people, published in the party daily Pravda:

                          I have a great request of you.   Do not permit your 
grief for Ilyich [Lenin] to take the form of external  
                          reverence for his person.   Do not raise memorials to 
him, palaces named after him, splenderous festivals
                          in commemoration of him.   To all this he attached so 
little importance in his life, all this was so burdensome
                          to him.

   In line with Lenin's express wishes, Krupskaya attempted to have his 
testament read out at the thirteenth Party Congress in May 1924.   But her 
attempt was quashed by the ruling group on the Central Committee around Stalin. 
  She was, however, able to take the floor at this congress to defend Trotsky, 
who faced a demand from the Stalinists for the recantation of his 
anti-bureaucratic views.   Krupskaya again defended Trotsky's contributions to 
the socialist revolution in Russia, during the so-called 'literary debate' over 
Trotsky's booklet The Lessons of October.   In 1925 the ruling group began to 
suppress articles Krupskaya wrote for the party press, attacking the party 
leadership's conciliationist attitude towards the new class of rich capitalist 
farmers (kulaks) which had developed since the early 1920s, under a shift in 
orientation known as the New Economic Policy.

   In the same year Krupskaya signed a manifesto protesting against the party 
leadership's policies.   At the December 1925 fourteenth Congress, Krupskaya 
opened the attack on Stalin and Bukharin (the other central leader of the 
rightist course) on behalf of the so-called Leningrad Opposition, which also 
included Zinoviev and Kamenev - both of whom had only recently broken with 
Stalin - and Sokolnikov.   As well as taking issue with the leadership's 
policies, she attacked the restrictions placed on the full discussion of 
dissenting views in party publications under Stalin's apparatus, and defended 
Lenin's traditional position on the rights of dissenting minorites within the 
party.

   Krupskaya remained with the United Opposition until October 1926.   She 
signed, along with Trotsky and Zinoviev, the 'Declaration of the Thirteen', a 
document that sought to draw the party's attention to the deepening 
bureaucratic deformations ravaging the foundations of the workers state.   She 
also endorsed a protest against the Comintern's disastrous policy in the 
British general strike of 1926.   Illness kept her out of much of the political 
struggle, although she continued to write and speak.   It was Krupskaya who 
arranged for publication in the West of Lenin's testament, in 1926.   She is 
said to have told Kamenev at this time: 'If Lenin were alive today, he would be 
in jail'.

   Stalin and his acolytes were not slow to recognise the threat that Krupskaya 
represented to them, and they began a smear campaign against her similar to the 
one launched some years earlier against Trotsky.   Trotsky himself recalled 
this campaign of innuendo in an article written on Krupskaya's death in 1939: 
'...within the ranks of the apparatus they systematically compromised her, 
blackened her, degraded her, and in the ranks of the Komsomol [Communist Youth] 
spread the crudest and most ridiculous scandals'.

   In May 1927 Krupskaya, in a letter to Pravda, announced that she no longer 
supported the Opposition.   But unlike most other former Oppositionists in the 
same situation, she did not recant or repent - nor did she have a single word 
of support for Stalin.   Nevertheless, even without going back on her 
previously-held positions, she too, up to a point joined the chorus against the 
only forces opposing in a principled way Stalin's increasingly disastrous 
policies.

   Although nominally reconciled to the ascendancy of Stalin, Krupskaya spent a 
good deal of her later years attempting to disseminate through the means 
available to her the legacy of Lenin.   Thus she wrote and published her famous 
Memories of Lenin.   These memoirs present a realistic and politically 
well-informed portrait of a figure so often, before and since, distorted by 
hagiography or venom.   Krupskaya's record of the disputes in the Russian 
socialist movement is presented fairly, and without that acrimony typical of 
Stalinist-inspired accounts.   Stalin himself rarely appears in the narrative.

   Krupskaya's work in the sphere of education continued until her death, but 
it declined in importance as the causes and organisations that she supported 
were discarded by the Stalinist bureaucracy.   However, even as late as 1937, 
during the height of the purges, Krupskaya protested against the destruction of 
polytechnical education, invoking the authority of Karl Marx.   Although denied 
access to Soviet educational journals when she sought to publicise her views, 
she was heard to comment, after being shown over one of Stalin's educational 
establishments: 'A typical old school, in which there is nothing at all apart 
from the most boring studies....   Dead studies, with which we fought from the 
first, installed anew in full measure'.

   While essentially powerless to affect the course of Stalin's Terror, 
Krupskaya attempted to save the lives of the Old Bolsheviks facing the 
execution squads.   Thus, according to evidence held by the former dissident 
Soviet historian Roy Medvedev, she pleaded for the life of Piatnitsky, in vain, 
and begged Yezhov and Stalin to spare the lives of others, in at least one case 
successfully.

   Thus Krupskaya spent her last years miserably, in the knowledge that many of 
her generation of revolutionaries had been physically or morally destroyed by 
the Stalin regime, and uncertain that a restoration of Soviet democracy was a 
near prospect.   From exile in Mexico, Trotsky, who was himself to outlive 
Krupskaya by only a year, wrote her epitaph: 'With profound sorrow we bid 
farewell to the loyal companion of Lenin, to an irreproachable revolutionist 
and one of the most tragic figures in revolutionary history'.
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