Transcribed online in English for the first time here, as only she could, Lenin’s wife and comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya provides us with this wonderful description of Lenin’s attitude toward and habits of work.

‘How Lenin Worked’ by Nadezhda Krupskaya from The Communist. Vol. 7 No. 4. April, 1928.

WHATEVER work Vladimir Ilyitch undertook, he always did it thoroughly. He himself did much of the preliminary rough work.

The more importance he attached to this or that work, the more attention he paid to all details.

As he saw how difficult it was in Russia at the end of the ’90s to publish regularly an illegal newspaper, and as on the other hand he attached an enormous organisational and propagandist importance to an all-Russian newspaper which would deal from the Marxist viewpoint with all public events and facts and their bearing on the ever-growing labor movement, Vladimir Ilyitch, having selected a group of comrades, decided to go abroad and to organise there the publication of such a newspaper. Iskra was conceived and organized by him, Every issue caused, literally, birth pangs. Every word was carefully weighed. Another very characteristic detail: Vladimir Ilyitch read over himself the proofs of the whole newspaper, not because there was no one else to do it—I got used to that work very quickly—but because he was anxious that not the slightest mistake should slip in. First of all he read the corrected proof himself, then he gave it to me, and afterwards he looked through it again.

The same thing happened in regard to everything else. He spent much time over zemstvo (rural county council) statistics and their elaboration. There are many carefully written-out tables in his notebooks. In regard to figures, which he considered particularly important and weighty, he even verified the totals of already published tables. Careful verification of every fact and figure is characteristic of Ilyitch—he based all his deductions on facts.

This endeavour to back every one of his deductions by facts is particularly noticeable in his early propagandist pamphlets: “On Fines,” “On Strikes,” “The New Factory Law.” He does not force anything on the workers, he proves everything by facts. Some people thought that the pamphlets were verbose, but working men and women thought them very convincing. Lenin’s fundamental work which he wrote in prison, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” contains much valuable material based on facts. Lenin, in whose life the study of Marx’s “Capital” played such an enormous role, knew that Marx based his deductions on an enormous quantity of material borne out by facts.

Lenin did not depend on his memory, although it was first-rate. He never expounded facts from memory, “approximately”; he expounded them with the utmost exactitude. He looked through heaps of material (he read and wrote very rapidly), but he always made notes of anything he wanted to memorize. He left much material in his notebooks. Once, when he was looking through my pamphlet “Organization of Self-Education,” he said that I was not right in saying that notes should be made only of the most necessary things—his experience was different. He used to look over his notes often, as shown by marginal remarks, underlinings, etc.

If the book was his own he limited himself to underlining and marginal remarks, marking on the cover only the page, and underlining the most important parts. He used to read over also his own articles, making notes to them. He underlined any paragraph or sentence which gave him a new idea and marked the page on the cover. This is how Ilyitch organized his memory. He always remembered exactly what he had said, under what circumstances and in discussion with whom. We meet with very few repetitions in his works, speeches and articles. It is true that in the course of years we meet the same fundamental thoughts in Ilyitch’s articles and speeches. That is why all his sayings bear the imprint of something steadfast and whole. However, we do not meet with ordinary repetition of what was said before. The same fundamental thought is applied to new conditions, to another concrete situation, and throws light on the question from another side. I remember a conversation I had with Ilyitch. He was already ill. The talk was about some volumes of his works which had just been published; I said that they reflected the experience of the Russian revolution and that it is of the utmost importance to make this experience accessible to foreign comrades, that these volumes should be used to show how the fundamental idea is inevitably treated in different ways, always commensurate with changes in the concrete historical situation. Ilyitch instructed me to find a comrade who would do this work. However, this has not yet been done.

Lenin studied carefully the experience of the revolutionary struggles of the world proletariat. This experience is brilliantly expounded in the works of Marx and Engels. Lenin read them over and over again, at every stage of our revolution. Everyone knows what an enormous influence Marx and Engels had on Lenin. But it would be very useful to find out in what way the study of their works helped Lenin to appreciate at their right value current events and prospects of development, at every stage of our revolution. Such research work has not yet been done, and yet it would show so clearly what role the experience of the world revolutionary movement played in Lenin’s prophetic prognostications. Such a work would give a great deal to all who are interested in the way Lenin worked, how he read Marx and Engels and what he borrowed from them for his leadership and appreciation of our struggle. It would show what enormous influence the experience of the revolutionary struggle of the working class of the economically more developed countries had on our revolutionary movement. Such a work would enable people to realize that the Russian revolution, our whole struggle and construction are part and parcel of the struggle of the world proletariat. Such a work would show what and how Lenin borrowed from the experience of the international struggle of the proletariat and how he applied this experience. It is from Lenin that we can learn this.

Lenin was passionately interested in the study of the experience of the struggle of the international proletariat. It is difficult to imagine a more “anti-museum” person than Lenin. The hotch-potch character of museum material always wearied Vladimir Illyitch; after ten minutes of it he had the look of someone utterly exhausted. I remember so well our visit to an exhibition of the revolution of 1848 organized in two small rooms of a working-class quarter of Paris famous for its revolutionary struggles. It was a sight to see Vladimir Ilyitch studying with the utmost interest and attention, even the least detail. To him this was a live piece of the struggle. When I visited our “Revolutionary Museum” I visualized Ilyitch and his absorption in every detail.

Ilyitch himself wrote more than once how one has to utilize the experience of the revolutionary struggle of the international proletariat. I remember one of his sayings. Kautsky had written a pamphlet on the occasion of the Russian revolution in 1905 entitled Driving Forces and Prospects of the Russian Revolution. Ilyitch was very well pleased with this pamphlet and had it translated immediately. He corrected every sentence of the translation, wrote a passionate foreword to it, instructed me to have the pamphlet published immediately and himself looked through all the proofs. I remember how our big legal printing press took three whole days to set the type of the small pamphlet, how I had to sit there all these days waiting hours for the proofs. Ilyitch had the gift to inspire with his own enthusiasm those who surrounded him. After he had told me all the thoughts which Kautsky’s pamphlet had evoked and after he had written his foreword to it, I felt that, for the time being, I must give up everything and sit in the printing room until the pamphlet was ready. Strange to say, even now, more than twenty years after the event, I associate in my memory the grey cover, the type and printing mistakes of the pamphlet produced under the then haphazard methods of our technique, with Ilyitch’s passionate speeches and the concluding words of his foreword to this pamphlet:

“In conclusion a few words about ‘authorities.’ Marxists cannot share the usual viewpoint of an intellectual radical with his abstract notion, ‘no authorities.’ No, the working class which carries on throughout the world a difficult and stubborn struggle for full emancipation must have authorities—but of course, only in the sense that young workers need the experience of old fighters against oppression and exploitation, fighters who have carried out many strikes, have participated in a series of revolutions and have learned wisdom from revolutionary traditions and a broad political outlook, etc.”

In his foreword, Ilyitch raises his voice passionately against the application of old measures to new situations. We know that in his estimate of the revolution of 1917, Kautsky showed himself incapable of understanding the new situation and new problems and became a renegade as a result of this.

A characteristic feature of Leninism is—capacity to study and understand new situations and problems on the basis of the experience of the revolutionary struggle of the world proletariat, and to apply the Marxist method to the analysis of new concrete situations. Unfortunately, not enough light has been thrown on this side of the question on the basis of concrete facts.

There is also another side of the Leninist method of appreciating revolutionary events which has been left even more in the dark,—I mean capacity to visualize concrete reality and to express the collective views of the struggling masses which, according to Lenin (see the same foreword to “Driving Forces”) are decisive in all practical and concrete questions of our immediate policy. This question, however, must be the subject of another article.

There were a number of journals with this name in the history of the movement. This ‘The Communist’ was the main theoretical journal of the Communist Party from 1927 until 1944. Its origins lie with the folding of The Liberator, Soviet Russia Pictorial, and Labor Herald together into Workers Monthly as the new unified Communist Party’s official cultural and discussion magazine in November, 1924. Workers Monthly became The Communist in March ,1927 and was also published monthly. The Communist contains the most thorough archive of the Communist Party’s positions and thinking during its run. The New Masses became the main cultural vehicle for the CP and the Communist, though it began with with more vibrancy and discussion, became increasingly an organ of Comintern and CP program. Over its run the tagline went from “A Theoretical Magazine for the Discussion of Revolutionary Problems” to “A Magazine of the Theory and Practice of Marxism-Leninism” to “A Marxist Magazine Devoted to Advancement of Democratic Thought and Action.” The aesthetic of the journal also changed dramatically over its years. Editors included Earl Browder, Alex Bittelman, Max Bedacht, and Bertram D. Wolfe.

PDF of full issue: https://www.marxists.org/history/usa/pubs/communist/v07n04-apr-1928-communist.pdf