Canadian Slavonic Papers The Sporting Life of V. I. LeninAuthor(s): Carter ElwoodSource: Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes, Vol. 52, No. 1/2 (March-June 2010), pp. 79-94Published by: Canadian Association of SlavistsStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/40871517 .Accessed: 16/06/2014 09:36 Your use of the JSTOR archive indicates your acceptance of the Terms & Conditions of Use, available at .http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp .JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range ofcontent in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new formsof scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org. . Canadian Association of Slavists and Canadian Slavonic Papers are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize,preserve and extend access to Canadian Slavonic Papers / Revue Canadienne des Slavistes. http://www.jstor.org This content downloaded from 188.72.127.119 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 09:36:04 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/action/showPublisher?publisherCode=canassocslavhttp://www.jstor.org/stable/40871517?origin=JSTOR-pdfhttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsphttp://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

Articles Carter Elwood The Sporting Life of V. I. Lenin Abstract: The conventional picture of V. I. Lenin found in all Soviet and most Western biographies is that of a man committed solely to factional politics and the attainment of revolutionary power. In 1953, N. V. Vol'skii, writing as Nikolay Valentinov, referred to this as "the geometric Lenin." He noted that there was another dimension to the Bolshevik leader: a man with very human foibles and, often, bourgeois tastes. One of the over-looked aspects of this "non-geometric Lenin" was his interest in a wide variety of athletic endeavours. During his privileged upbringing, he learned to ski, swim and row. While in Siberian exile, he took up hunting and ice-skating. In his long years as a political migr in Western Europe, he continued to pursue some of these sports as well as becoming a committed mountain climber and a long-distance cyclist. This article discusses these sporting interests. It suggests that he was unique among his revolutionary colleagues in the breadth of these activities and it questions the assertion that he pursued them simply because he felt they made him a better revolutionary. Lenin, like many sportsmen, liked to challenge himself physically and he derived a certain pleasure from being in close touch with nature. March 15, 1917, was a dismal day in Zurich. There was a heavy mist in the air and patches of dirty snow on the ground. The mood of V. I. Lenin was no better than the Swiss weather when a fellow migr burst into his apartment to announce that there had been a revolution in Petrograd. The response of the disbelieving Bolshevik leader was to wander down to the offices of the Neue Zrcher Zeitung where press clippings confirmed the rumours but offered few details. A brief visit to the Russian Reading Room did little to relieve either his depression or his uncertainty. Abandoning plans to work in the cantonal library, Lenin set off instead to climb the Zurichberg. It was hardly a strenuous excursion. The crest of the Zurichberg was only 270 metres above the city and a couple of kilometres from its centre. The walk, however, cleared his head and helped to restore his optimism concerning the day's unexpected news.1 It was to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich, translated by Harry Willetts (New York: Farrer, Straus & Giroux, 1976) 201-218. Solzhenitsyn 's account of Lenin's activities on 15 March (2 March, according to the 'old-style' Russian calendar) is partially confirmed by Nadezhda Krupskaya, Reminiscences of Lenin, translated by Bernard Isaacs (Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1959) 335-336; Willi Gautschi, Lenin als Emigrant in der Schweiz (Zurich and Cologne: Benziger Verlag, 1973) 239; and Lenin's letter to Inessa Armand of 15 March 1917 in V. I. Lenin, Polnoe sobranie sochinenii, 55 vols. (Moscow: Izdatel'stvo politicheskoi literatury, 1958-1965) 49: 254. Canadian Slavonic Papers/Revue canadienne des slavistes Vol. LU, Nos. 1-2, March- June 2010 This content downloaded from 188.72.127.119 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 09:36:04 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp

80 Carter El wood be the last of his many forays into the Swiss mountains for on that same day Tsar Nicholas II abdicated his throne in the first of a series of events that was to bring Lenin to power eight months later. The fact that he should choose to climb a mountain, albeit a small mountain, on a crucial day of the February Revolution was not inconsistent with Lenin's character. His response to political or emotional pressures was frequently to seek physical release through hiking. Mountain climbing, however, was but one of Lenin's many athletic endeavours. He was also a strong swimmer, a passionate hunter, a skilled skater, a gymnast, a rower and a cyclist at a time when "sports were by no means fashionable among the democratic intelligentsia."2 Lenin's fellow revolutionaries much preferred the caf to the beach and none shared his obsession with physical exercise. Nikolay Valentinov, one of the few observers to recognize the breadth of Lenin's sporting interests, considered these to be a reflection of his "non-geometric" personality; an indication that he was not just the single-minded compulsive revolutionary found in most of his biographies.3 While evidence supporting Valentinov's assertion has long been available in the Reminiscences of Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaia, and in their extensive correspondence with his family, no biographer has used it to provide a detailed study of his multi-faceted sporting life.4 It is the intention of this modest article to fill that lacuna and in doing so to contribute to a more nuanced, non- geometric picture of the first Soviet leader. *** Lenin's initiation into outdoor sports came during his youth. He spent every summer from the early 1880s until 1893 either at a family estate at Kokushkino near Kazan or at Alekaevka, a country house outside of Samara. Both were near the Volga and surrounded by fields and woods where the Ul'ianov children whiled away their teen-age summers. It was in these "nests of gentlefolk," to the embarrassment of Lenin's Soviet biographers, that he developed his lifelong appreciation of nature and the opportunities it offered for athletic pursuits. Lenin's expulsion from the University of Kazan in December 1886 and his subsequent enforced residence for six months at Kokushkino gave him a chance to take up skiing on the country lanes near the estate and to try his hand at tobogganing.5 "A winter without snow is unpleasant," he later wrote his mother Leon Trotsky, The Young Lenin, translated by Max Eastman (New York: Doubleday, 1972) 137. Nikolay Valentinov (N. V. Vol'skii), Encounters with Lenin, translated by Paul Rosta and Brian Pearce (London: Oxford University Press, 1968) 77. A partial exception is Tamara Deutscher's edited collection Not by Politics Alone... The Other Lenin (London: George Allen & Unwin, 1973) 52-67. Robert Service's recent and comprehensive Lenin: A Biography (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000) touches in passing on many of the points raised in this article. Service, Lenin 64. This content downloaded from 188.72.127.119 on Mon, 16 Jun 2014 09:36:04 AMAll use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions http://www.jstor.org/page/info/about/policies/terms.jsp