The place where Lenin and Stalin met for the first time
in what is now the Lenin Museum in Tampere, Filand
When I was on holiday in Finland recently, one of the
things I wanted to do anyway was visiting the Lenin Museum in Tampere (also
known as Tammerfors). The museum as such is interesting and also the building
is because of its typical style, which is a mixture of the Neo-Renaissance
style and Art Nouveau. However, for me it was especially important that it was
here that Lenin and Stalin met for the first time, for in those days hundred
years ago the building was used by the Tampere Worker’s Society as a meetingplace
for workers.
Sometimes first encounters are quite dramatic, as I
wrote a few weeks ago in my blog on the first encounter between the Finnish
philosopher Georg Henrik von Wright and Ludwig Wittgenstein in Cambridge. But
after a bad first encounter between both philosophers, in the end they became
friends. Also the first time that Lenin and Stalin met was not really good.
Lenin was already the big man of the Russian revolutionary movement and when
the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party held a congress in Tampere in the
Russian -ruled Finland in December 1905, Stalin was looking forward to it: Now
he could meet the man whom he admired a lot. But Stalin left the congress
disappointed. “I was hoping to see the mountain eagle of our party”, he wrote
later, “a great man, great not only politically, but ... physically, too, for
Lenin had taken shape in my mind as a giant, stately and imposing”. But he
appeared to be “the most ordinary man, below average height, in no way ...
different from ordinary mortals”. Moreover, Lenin was criticized by the other
conferees – also by Stalin – and in the
end he had to take back his proposals, defending himself that as an émigré he
had lost contact with the Russian reality. Later the relationship between both
men would improve and Lenin would become Stalin’s mentor. However, not long
before his death – it was in 1923 and he was already ill – Lenin judged that it
was better to replace Stalin by Trotsky as the General Secretary of the
Communist Party, for Stalin was ill-suited for the position while Trotsky was
the most capable man in the General Committee according to him. It didn’t
happen, and a few years later Trotsky had to flee and in 1940 he was murdered
by a Soviet secret agent in Mexico.
Trotsky’s first encounter with Lenin is also worth
mentioning. Usually we see other persons for the first time in public and
semi-public places, at parties and meetings and the like. But in a bedroom?
It’s quite unlikely that you even met your partner there for the first time.
Not so Trotsky and Lenin. Trotsky had an appointment with Lenin in London,
where the great communist leader lived then (not far from where Karl Marx had
written his Capital). Lenin was
already to bed and slept, when Trotsky knocked on the door. Nadezhda
Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, let him in in her nightclothes and brought the visitor
to the bedroom.
As you see, first encounters can happen at the most unexpected places, and
as said before in a blog, they say so much about the way we live and the kind
of person we are.
Sources:
- Rolf Hellebust, Flesh
to metal. Soviet Literature and the Alchemy of Revolution. Ithaca and
London: Cornell University Press, 2003; p. 92.
- Robert Himmer, “First
impressions matter: Stalin's initial encounter with Lenin, Tammerfors 1905”, on
http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/10.1080/09546540108575740
- Stephen Kotkin, Stalin.
Paradoxes of Power 1978-1928. London, Penguin Books, 2015.
- Nancy Caldwell Sorel “First encounters: When Lenin met Trotsky”,
on http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/first-encounters-when-lenin-met-trotsky-1523773.html
- Wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vladimir_Lenin#Declining_health_and_arguments_with_Stalin:_1920.E2.80.931923
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