, Lenin's cat, and American journalist Lincoln Eyre in the
Kremlin, 1920 Krupskaya's political life was active: she was anything but a mere functionary of the
Bolshevik faction of the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from 1903.
Leon Trotsky, who was working closely with Lenin and Krupskaya from 1902 to 1903, writes in his autobiography (
My Life, 1930) of the central importance of Krupskaya in the day-to-day work of the RSDLP and its newspaper,
Iskra. "The secretary of the editorial board [of Iskra] was [Lenin's] wife [...] She was at the very center of all the organization work; she received comrades when they arrived, instructed them when they left, established connections, supplied secret addresses, wrote letters, and coded and decoded correspondence. In her room there was always a smell of burned paper from the secret letters she heated over the fire to read..." Krupskaya became secretary of the Central Committee in 1905; she returned to Russia the same year, but left again after the failed revolution of 1905 and worked as a teacher in
France for a couple of years.
Russian Revolution After the
Russian Revolution in 1917, she was appointed deputy to
Anatoliy Lunacharskiy, the
People's Commissar for Education, where she took charge of ''Vneshkol'nyi Otdel'' of the Adult Education Division. She became chair of the education committee in 1920 and was the deputy education commissar (government minister) from 1929 to 1939. Krupskaya was instrumental in foundation of the
Soviet educational system itself. She was also fundamental in the development of Soviet librarianship. Krupskaya became a member of the
Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union in 1924, a member of its control commission in 1927, a member of the
Supreme Soviet in 1931 and an honorary citizen in 1931. Hilda Ageloff reportedly traveled to interview Krupskaya in 1931 for the newspaper
Brooklyn Daily Eagle. Soviet education and libraries Before the
revolution, Krupskaya worked for five years as an instructor for a factory owner who offered evening classes for his employees. Legally, reading, writing and arithmetic were taught. Illegally, classes with a revolutionary influence were taught for those students who might be ready for them. Krupskaya and other instructors were relieved of duty when nearly 30,000 factory workers in the area went on strike for better wages. Even after the revolution her emphasis was on "the problems of youth organization and education." In order to become educated, they needed better access to books and materials. Pre-revolutionary Russian libraries had a tendency to exclude particular members. Some were exclusively for higher classes and some were only for employees of a particular company's "Trade Unions". In addition they also had narrow, orthodox literature. It was hard to find any books with new ideas, which is exactly why the underground libraries began. Another problem was the low level of literacy of the masses.
Vyborg Library, designed by
Alvar Aalto, was renamed the Nadezhda Krupskaya Municipal Library after the Soviet annexation of Vyborg. The revolution did not cause an overnight improvement in the libraries. In fact, for a while there were even more problems. The Trade Unions still refused to allow general public use, funds for purchasing books and materials were in short supply and books that were already a part of the libraries were falling apart. In addition there was a low interest in the library career field due to low income and the libraries were sorely in need of re-organization. Krupskaya directed a census of the libraries in order to address these issues. She encouraged libraries to collaborate and to open their doors to the general public. She encouraged librarians to use common speech when speaking with patrons. Knowing the workers needs was encouraged; what kind of books should be stocked, the subjects readers were interested in, and organizing the material in a fashion to better serve the readers. Committees were held to improve card catalogs. Krupskaya stated at a library conference: "We have a laughable number of libraries, and their book stocks are even more inadequate. Their quality is terrible, the majority of the population does not know how to use them and does not even know what a library is." She also sought better professional schools for librarians. Formal training was scarce in pre-revolutionary Russia for librarians and it only truly began in the 20th century. Krupskaya, therefore, advocated creation of library "seminaries" where practicing librarians would instruct aspiring librarians in the skills of their profession, similar to those in the West. The pedagogical characteristics were however those of the Soviet revolutionary period. Librarians were trained to determine what materials were suitable to patrons and whether or not they had the ability to appreciate what the resource had to offer. Krupskaya also desired that librarians possess greater verbal and writing skills so that they could more clearly explain why certain reading materials were better than others to their patrons. She believed that explaining resource choices to patrons was a courtesy and an opportunity for more education in socialist political values, not something that was required of the librarian. They were to become facilitators of the revolution and, later, those who helped preserve the values of the resulting socialist state.
Conflict with Trotsky and Stalin In December 1922, just after Lenin had suffered a second stroke, Krupskaya had a quarrel with Stalin, who was demanding access to Lenin, when she argued that he was too ill. On 23 December, she wrote to Kamenev complaining that the "vile invectives and threats" that Stalin had directed at her were the worst abuse she had suffered from a fellow revolutionary in 30 years. After the death of
Vladimir Lenin in January 1924, Krupskaya grew closer to the political positions of
Grigory Zinoviev and
Lev Kamenev in Party debates. Factions that would later form throughout the 1920s included the
Trotsky-led
Left Opposition, the Stalin-led "Centre", and the
Bukharin-led
Right Opposition. From 1922 to 1925, Zinoviev and Kamenev were in a triumvirate alliance with Stalin's Centre, against Trotsky's Left Opposition. Krupskaya supported them against Trotsky, though in more conciliatory language than they used, declaring in 1924 that "I don't know whether Trotsky is guilty of all the deadly sins of which he is accused." In 1925, Krupskaya attacked
Leon Trotsky in a polemic reply to Trotsky's tract
Lessons of October. In it, she stated that "Marxist analysis was never Comrade Trotsky's strong point." In relation to the debate around
socialism in one country versus
permanent revolution, she asserted that Trotsky "under-estimates the role played by the peasantry." Furthermore, she held that Trotsky had misinterpreted the revolutionary situation in post-World War I Germany. In late 1925, when the 'triumvirate' split into two factions, she openly supported Zinoviev and Kamenev against Stalin, and went into an alliance with Trotsky's Left Opposition in early 1926, to form the
United Opposition. Krupskaya was quoted by Trotsky's son
Leon Sedov in his book
The Red Book: On the Moscow Trial as saying "Lenin was only saved from prison by his death". But in a major boost for the leadership, Stalin announced at the end of his speech to the
Fifteenth party congress in December 1927 that she had abandoned the opposition. Krupskaya had previously written in
Pravda in May 1927 that she no longer supported the opposition, but she was then back supporting them months later, before Stalin's announcement at the 15th congress. In 1930, Krupskaya opposed Stalin again. This time, she gave a speech to the Bauman district party, in Moscow, defending the leaders of the right wing opposition,
Nikolai Bukharin and
Alexei Rykov, after which, according to
Nikita Khrushchev, who was a party official at the time, "without any publicity, the word went out to party circles to give her a working-over ... It was a bitter thing to watch her at these sessions when everyone started coming out against her. I remember her as a broken old woman." Khrushchev also claimed that Stalin threatened to remove Krupskaya's status, and nominate another woman as "Lenin's widow". The same story was told by the former
NKVD officer,
Alexander Orlov, who claimed that the new 'widow' was to have been
Elena Stasova. Another rumour was that it would have been
Rosalia Zemlyachka. Krupskaya was present at the plenum of the Central Committee in February 1937 which decided the fate of
Nikolai Bukharin and
Alexei Rykov, and voted in favour of expelling both from the Communist Party. But on other occasions, she tried to intervene on behalf of intended victims. At the Central Committee in June 1937, she protested, in vain, against the arrest of
Osip Piatnitsky. She successfully secured the release of an Old Bolshevik named I.D. Chugurin, though he was barred from rejoining the party, and worked as a roofer for the rest of his life. ==Death==