Last Look at Lenin's Apartment

The ascent of Soviet man becomes clear inside Lenin's Kremlin office and apartment.


Here, nestled in an 18th-century building within the red Kremlin walls, is a museum so sacred that few nonbelievers have been allowed entry. It is a gem of the Soviet past that the Kremlin commandant keeps off limits to all except special groups; its mementos tell a story of the birth of a nation.


Take the three desk telephones and another by the windowsill. Nothing less than a revolution of office technology in the early 1920s, the multiple telephones set an important standard for self-important Soviet bureaucrats for decades to come.


Lenin's Kremlin apartment also lives up to the official Soviet image of prudishness that became the public norm for decades. Lenin and his wife kept separate bedrooms, each with a narrow single bed.


"This is the only Lenin museum in the country preserved exactly as it was during Lenin's times," said Alexander Shefov, the museum curator for the past 28 years. "It is the most important Lenin museum in the country because it recalls the five most important years of his life."


Lenin moved into the Kremlin apartment in March 1918, five months after leading the Bolshevik Revolution. After the leader's death at his suburban dacha in January 1924, his sister Maria and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, stayed in the Kremlin residence, one of the finest classical buildings in Moscow, until their deaths in 1937 and 1939, respectively.


Lenin's office looks as if the first Soviet leader had just stepped out for a few minutes. His telephone book still lies on the desk, with his own handwriting supplementing numbers written out by his secretary. Back then, it took just three digits to get in touch, so Lenin could reach Stalin, the head of the Communist Party at the time, by dialing 034, or Leon Trotsky, his Commissar of War, at 003.


His German-made telephones also suggest that Lenin had little patience for distractions. His main telephone has a light bulb on top rather than a bell, so that ringing would not disturb him.


"Lenin was annoyed by extraneous noise," said Shefov. "It's hard to imagine what it was like to work in those times. He had a lot of organizational questions to answer and he had to argue with what I would call not totally professional colleagues."


Lenin did not tolerate smoking, an aversion noted by a "no smoking" sign on the wall. He also was very particular about the temperature in his office, which he decreed had to be exactly 17.5 degrees Celsius.


He kept an array of distractions on his desk, such as a figure of a monkey contemplating a skull given to him by the American businessman Armand Hammer. And in the offices as well as in his apartment, Lenin surrounded himself with books; his 10,000 tomes included an array of English-language texts like "Women in Modern Industry," "The New Japanese Peril," and "Cooperation in Danish Agriculture."


Next door to his office, Lenin presided over meetings of the Council of People's Commissars. Visitors to the hall today are greeted by a recording of Lenin's voice and a small video clip of the leader talking, courtesy of the curator's foot on a hidden switch.


"I play these films so you feel as though Lenin were alive," Shefov said with enthusiasm.


Just a few steps away from his office and council room is Lenin's four-room apartment, a large comfortable place but not at all extravagant. His sister often entertained on the grand piano in the living room, although Lenin's great home passion appeared to be reading, with 600 pages a day the norm, Shefov said.


Photographs decorate several of the rooms, and on her dresser Krupskaya kept a framed image of Inessa Armand, a friend who was also rumored to have been Lenin's lover.


Despite his relatively modest surroundings, Lenin maintained demanding standards. When the elevator to the third-floor apartment broke down for three days, Lenin rushed off an angry letter to the Kremlin commandant. The tone suggests that the service sector in Moscow has not changed much in the past 70 years.


"This is the height of disgrace," he wrote. "I have pointed out a thousand times that the lift must be kept in order."


After Lenin's death, Stalin set up an apartment on the first floor of the building, but he was the last Soviet leader to take up a Kremlin residence. In 1955, two years after Stalin's death, the Kremlin opened up the Lenin apartment to VIP visitors.


Since then, about 2 million people, mainly Communist Party tour groups, have visited, a small fraction of the 120 million who have toured Lenin's tomb.


Although there is no longer a three-year waiting list to see the museum as in days of old, the Kremlin commandant must approve all requests to visit. That means that with workers already dismantling the Red Square Lenin Museum and the government hinting that his embalmed body will soon be buried, the commandant may soon hold the keys to the city's last Lenin museum.