Lenin in Krakow 1912 to 1914.

The PZPR used to make much of the fact that Lenin lived and worked in and around Krakow between 1912 and 1914. Yet Jan T Malecki's claims that he merely "had sojourned through the city" in his A History of Krakow for Everyone is a somewhat inaccurate assessment.

The wave of iconoclasm that met the deserved demise of the Polish People's Republic in 1990 was entirely understandable and, in the case of the statues in Nowa Huta Square on Roz Avenue and museums lauding him in Ulica Topolowa, the removal was justified. Communism was never wanted in Poland.

Yet, paradoxically, the iconoclasm against Communism and the Soviet imposed People's Republic itself has involved rewriting the story of Communism to serve propaganda purposes and in it's own way to distort and eradicate the real history in place of history as propaganda for politicians in Poland fighting a "New Cold War" against Russia.

Denying Lenin ever existed in Krakow as though a mere emigre on the run only opens up the way for the kitsch version of Communism that treats it all as a bit of a joke with Goodbye Lenin Hostels and Cool Tours regarding Nowa Huta, built in the 1950s under Stalin's Polish puppet regime, as being Lenin's 'favourite' part of Krakow.

That claim, of course, despite the fact Lenin was dead by 1923 and his attitide towards Poland never directly as hostile. For PiS, and other rightists, he was a Russian and an atheist, the worst twin forces of influence possible on the course of Polish history and it's struggle for independence.

This was undoubted revenge for the fact Communism was never wanted in Poland and the Krakow Communists had removed the apostles statues outside the beautiful baroque Sw Peter and Paul's Church on ulica Grodzka and destroyed the legends and commemorations surrounding Pilsudski's legions.

Yet it distorts the past to eradicate Lenin from Krakow as Robert Service's Lenin :A Biography shows that his period in Krakow, then just a few kilometres from the border with the Russian Empire was essential for him to keep in contact with the comrades fighting the system there.Moreover, Lenin was one of the some 12,000 refugees from Tsarist Russia, most of whom were Poles but a good deal too who were Russians who hated Tsarism and wanted the destruction of the Russian Empire with as much fervour as Pilsudski of the Polish Socialist Party.

Whether nationalist or internationalist, radicals were pining for the coming of the Great War that was long awaited and which would reconstruct Central Eastern Europe free from imperialism and that was Lenin's idea as much as Pilsudski's.

In March 1887 Pilsudski was arrested by Tsarist authorities on trumped up charges of plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III and exiled for five years to eastern Siberia. Lenin's politics of destroying the Tsarist Empire. Their tactics were the same before the war.

Moreover, Bronisław Piłsudski, who had been friends with friends of Vladimir Lenin's brother, was similarly sentenced to hard labor (katorga) in eastern Siberia, for fifteen years for the assassination attempt.

As Robert Service emphasises,

"Such was Pilsudski's hatred for the Romanov Empire that he was willing to assist any virtually any other opponent of Tsarism. Thus his men helped with the dispatch of messages to Russia on behalf of the Bolsheviks"

Moreover, both Lenin and Pilsudski shared the idea of breaking up the Russian Empire into it's constituent parts, a strategy still aimed at by Zbigniew Brzezinski, President Carter's National Security advisor, who admired Pilsudski and wrote a biography on him.

The differences came out only after the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Tsarist regime and wanted to export revolution to Germany through Poland with some Bolsheviks actually being Poles e.g Dzierzynski which was unsurprising given the multinational nature of the Soviet Union.

Lenin at no time showed any nationalist hostility to Poland but tended to think of it as no less ripe for revolution as the entire continent, though he tended to think of it in geopolitical terms as a fragmented state that would become part of a large expanding continental wide imperium.

The fact is that Lenin was a genuine fanatic with an apocalyptic and sincere view of exporting Communism as an idealistic Utopia, even if the aim was so lofty that any ruse or tactic was permissible to bring it about.

When Lenin stayed in Krakow he felt very much at home and enjoyed the freedom to write and smuggle letters of instruction to the Central Committee in Russia under conditions of freedom and no censorship under the relatively liberal Austro-Hungarian Empire.

The retrospective view that Lenin was a Russian nationalist mingling Russian imperialism and Communism is one that appeals to PiS politicians, the populist right wing rump of the Solidarity movement which undermined the People's Republic. Yet it is not the truth. Nor did liberation in 1989-1990 come from Heaven with Catholic piety winning over Evil Atheism.

Lenin was tolerated by a Catholic monarchy based in Vienna as he was acting to help undermine the rival Russian Empire. In return, Lenin could plot with freedom the destruction of the old order and regain control over the Bolshevik movement which had been difficult in Paris.

Moreover, Lenin thought of the peasants of Bialy Dunajec, Poronin and Zakopane where he climbed the Tatras as similar to those in Russia and felt at home there, despite not speaking Polish, and he was friendly with a great number of the most prominent Polish intellectuals of the time.

For if out of 150,000 Krakowians, some 12,000 were refugess and many, including the Russians, received material help from the Union of Asssistance for Political Prisoners. Lenin lived at 218 Zwierzyniecka, has access to the Jagiellonian University reading room and felt at home.

The Cafe intellectual scene was much to his liking and as Service states "Lenin greatly enjoyed Krakow....and the way it reminded him of home. The peasants who swarmed into the city on market days were recognisable types".

Kazimierz was similar to a Jewish shetl and Lenin wrote home to his mother that in being in Krakow it was,

"Almost Russia! The Jews here are like the Russians and the Russians and the Russian frontier are only eight versts away ( it's two hours away by train from Granica, nine from Warsaw) : there are bent nosed women in colourful dresses-it's just like Russia"

Lenin did not "hate" Poland. So the nationalist version of Lenin as some atheist Russian barbarian like the rest of the Bolsheviks who had no place in Polish history is a myth; he was tactically allied to the founder of the Second Polish Republic and, in fact, he liked Poland and fely at home in Galicia.

Reading history backwards for nationalist purposes is one reason a museum to Lenin is needed in Krakow as it stresses the dangers of his blend of Utopianism and realpolitik made him a self righteous zealot but it did not mean he hated or wanted to subjugate Poland because he was really a "Russian nationalist" in disguise.

In actual fact, Lenin tended to like Galicia so much that he spent much time hiking in the mountains, producing polemics against anyone who deviated from his infallible role as leader of the party whilst virtually doing nothing else nor preparing for the Great War of 1914 which he did not expect.

This had been the war, what he was to call "the mighty accelerator of events" that would bring upon the collapse of bourgeois civilisation and a new world order of universal Communism, a vision based on his own creed but in line with what even most Polish intellectuals thought with regards the impending crash of the dynastic European Empires..

As this account explains,

Lenin, his wife, and his mother-in-law spent long summers in 1913 and 1914 in Poronin, just outside Zakopane, at a new house belonging to Teresa Skupien. The household left Cracow at the beginning of May and, the first year, did not return until the end of October.

In Zakopane, according to this account, Lenin hung out with such Polish writers as Zeromski, Strug, Orkan, and Witkacy. He sat in the sunshine in front of the Zakopane post office reading his letters and newspapers, played chess in the open air, and went for walks in the Tatry. Dr. Podleski, a dentist in Poronin, treated Lenin in the spring of 1914 and entered the patient's name and fee, 8 koron, in his account book.

In 1914, the entourage left Cracow for Poronin on May 9. On August 8, the Austrian police arrested Lenin as an enemy national: Austria and Russia had declared war. Lenin and his family returned to Cracow on August 19 after his release from the prison in Nowy Targ. They left for Switzerland a few days later.

As Service contends, Lenin had actually become complacent in Galicia and did not realise how serious the situation was when the Habsburg police stated rounding up Russians as potential enemies with Catholic Priests claiming Russians were poisoning the wells to kill the barbarian semi-oriental Russian hordes.

In fact, it had been Priests telling parishioners to poison the wells that led to typhus outbreaks, a thing mentioned with verve and satire by Jaroslav Hasek in Good Soldier Schwiek when the Austrian Imperial Army reach the battle lines in Galicia only to get dysentry-including Polish troops serving as Galician regiments.

Given that's the kind of sabotage PiS would approve of, a museum for Lenin explaining this cultural and intellectual milieu would be better than the kind of idiotic bans proposed by the Sejm in 2009 which called for the banning Communist insignia or the marketing of such symbols.

Communism had little support in Poland amongst Gentile Poles and mostly among post-ethnic Jews like Isaac Deutscher ( the hagiographer of Trotsky born in Chrzanow ). Lenin was subsequently astounded when in 1920 the Bolshevik forces were not welcomed as liberators as others like Stalin, the Commissar for the Nationalities, had warned him they would not.

What any new museum of communism or of Lenin must do is avoid propaganda. Lenin and even Stalin, though he resented Poland for repelling Bolshevism and humiliating him as a military leader in the war between the Reds and "the Pans", were not Greater Russian nationalists.

The Soviet Union bore marks of the brutality encouraged by the repression of Tsarism but as Anne Applebaum stresses, the Tsarist prison was rather comfortable compared to the slave camp network of the Gulag which was part of the attempt to frogmarch and hurl "the people" towards Utopia.

Even when Stalin got his revenge on Poland by being ceded Poland to the USSR's sphere of influence after 1945 those who installed the UB and the apparatus of repression were multinational-Mikoyan was Armenian, Beria was Mingrelian, Stalin was Georgian as were many of his henchmen.

Lastly, even Lenin was of Mongol-Tatar, Russian, German and Jewish mixed ancestry from Kazan and who detested Russia and the lazy Russians he wanted to drive towards happiness by force. Claiming Bolshevism was Russian is propaganda as history useful in the notion of a "New Cold War".

That propaganda notion is one put forth by those who still want the Russian Empire broken up into smaller parts so as to gain control over the oil and gas wealth for the benefit of the Great Powers in the new Great Game, the renewed struggle between Empires over resources which was occurring before 1914

Unlike before 1914, the main focus of Imperial rivalry is between "the West", Russia, China and the West over Eurasia rather than between the dynastic Empires of Europe and breakaway states motivated by ethnic irredentism and the stakes are not only minerals but today oil and gas pipelines instead of railways.

Bibliography

Robert Service, Lenin : A Bibliography.
Jan T Malecki, A History of Krakow for Everyone.

( A essay on Lenin in Exile with be forthcoming soon based on a review of Helen Rappaport's Conspirator: Lenin in Exile. )