There used to be a skating rink in the low ground down the hill from the Botanical Gardens, more or less where a seldom-used stadium and some buildings belonging to the Physical Education Academy stand today. Anyone braving the frosty air during a cold snap in the winter of 1912-1913 might have noted a solitary skater among the giggling crowd, a short, stocky man with narrow eyes who performed elaborate figures in a way that his own wife described as "showing off." "As soon as the 'frozen' days came," the skater wrote to his mother, "I immediately sought out a place to skate and checked to see whether I still know how."

Cracow has never produced any home-grown figure skaters of note, but this was a foreigner. He came from Russia, a land with far richer skating traditions. Cracow was the latest stop in his existence as a political emigre. An outlaw in his own country, at the age of 42, he was keeping a low profile while smuggling secret correspondence across the nearby border of Russian-occupied Poland and waging a lonely campaign in the west aimed at splitting the obscure emigre revolutionary movement, which was already weak and thoroughly infiltrated by police informers. 

Skating, obviously, came as a great relief. "It's wonderful winter weather without snow here. I bought myself some skates and am skating with great enthusiasm: it reminds me of Symbirsk and Siberia. I never skated abroad [before]"
(Feb. 24, 1913). 

A careful selection of similar citations from Lenin's correspondence and that of his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, along with her memoirs and those of some of the Polish-speaking Socialist Revolutionaries with whom Lenin dealt, appear along with a mass of old photographs, maps, and reproduced documents in a lavishly printed 1970 album titled "Lenin in Cracow" (published in Polish). 

Lenin arrived in Cracow at 9:30 AM on June 22, 1912, on train no. 13, the overnight from Vienna. It was a sunny summer day. That fall he wrote: "Life is better for us here than in Paris--our nerves are being restored, there's more journalistic work, and less bickering" (Lenin to A. I. Ulyanova-Yelizharova). He lived in rented rooms with his devoted wife and his mother-in-law, first on Krolowej Jadwigi behind the Salwator tram terminus, and then at ul. Lubomirskiego 47, across from what is now the Economics Academy.

His letters to his mother and sisters were faithful, banal, and sometimes weary. Skating was a highlight of Cracow existence, but the weather was fickle during his second winter in town. His wife wrote to his mother: "It was looking as if winter was going to set in. Volodya went skating three times and was trying to convince me to buy skates, but the weather suddenly changed, it got warm and all the ice melted, and today, for instance, it smells just like spring. Yesterday it was already not wintry, and Volodya and I walked far outside of town, and it was very pleasant." In the spring and fall, they walked on the Blonia, sometimes with their friend Inessa, or rode bicycles in Lasek Wolski. 

Lenin received newspapers in German and French by mail, and also tried to keep up with the local cultural scene, or at least some of it. "We attended a Ukrainian evening in honor of Shevchenko. I understand Ukrainian very poorly. Nothing new. Sending you a hug and wishing you good health -- Your W. U." (N.K. Krupska and W.I. Lenin to M.A. Ulyanova, Feb 16, 1914). 

While Lenin kept busy writing articles for Pravda, his wife suffered from heart trouble caused by nerves. She grew weak and went to the neurological clinic, where she was pleased that treatment was free and the doctors were solicitous. She spoke Polish to the other patients waiting there and resolved to improve her Polish over the summer by reading Polish books. 

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.

Producing this album in 1970 must have been a work of delicate necessity for its main writer, Jan Adamczewski (who churned out book after book on local history during the communist period). It was a necessity because Cracow was the only place in the Soviet bloc outside Russia where Lenin had spent any considerable period of time. It was delicate because so much had to be fudged or omitted. 

This was the case with large questions of ideology, such as the nationality issue. The album "Lenin in Cracow" makes it seem as if Lenin was a full-throttle advocate of Polish independence, but the truth was far more complex. 

It was also the case with what might be called questions of taste. Krupska's generally positive impressions of Cracow were sharp and far more insightful than this album indicates. "Lenin in Cracow" does not include her surprise at hearing first-hand how the former maid to an officer's wife "bitterly hated" her employer for lying abed until eleven and then insisting that the maid not only serve her coffee there, but also pull on her stockings for her. Nor do we get the slightest indication of Krupska's surprise, during the otherwise pleasant time she passed speaking Polish in the doctor's waiting room, at hearing patients seriously discussing "whether a Jewish child was the same as a Polish child or not, whether it was cursed or not. And a little Jewish boy sat there listening to it all." 

Cracow under the beloved Emperor Francis Joseph may have had a well-developed police service, but it struck the Russian emigres as an easy-going place. "The police in Cracow gave us no trouble, and our mail was not tampered with," Krupska wrote. Such a remark might have prompted some unfavorable comparisons with the situation in 1970, and so it does not appear in the album.

The publishers of "Lenin in Cracow" had to omit many good slices of revolutionary life. When Lenin's colleagues served as couriers into the nearby Russian zone, they disguised  themselves as Polish peasants. Lenin and Krupska drilled them in their Cracow apartment on how to dress, and how to obediently snap "Jestem!" when the border guard read out their names from their passes. One such courier, not mentioned in the album, was Stalin. 

Perhaps the best of the Krupska anecdotes that could not be included in "Lenin in Cracow" is this one: "Shumkin, a Moscow worker . . . was a great one for secrecy technique, and used to walk about the streets with his cap jammed down over his eyes. We went to a meeting and took him with us. He did not walk with us, though, and kept at some distance behind for safety sake. He looked so patently conspiratorial that he attracted the attention of the Cracow police. A police officer called on us the next day and asked us whether we knew this man and could vouch for him. We said we could."

The image pretty much sums up the Ruritanian laxity of Austro-Hungarian Cracow. Where else would the police, worried about a foreigner's blatantly conspiratorial behavior, check his bona fides with Mr. and Mrs. Lenin?
 

Read an account of Cracow's Lenin Museum in its heyday here.
 

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Readers' Comments
 

All these historical articles are interesting but the ones with a more personal angle like Lenin are best.
- Micah, USA

© Cracow Letters 2004