Hard Times at the Lenin Museum

Surely, it is the least approachable museum in the world. It is mentioned in no guidebooks. It has an unlisted phone number that changes frequently. Requests for appointments, mailed or dropped directly into its letter box, go unanswered for weeks. So one prowls the neighborhood, asking questions of strangers.

Eventually, one is advised to visit a small bookstore on the Left Bank. At the Bibliotheque Marxist de Paris, a librarian with thick glasses and a cigarette voice says, “You wish to leave a message for the museum?”

Weeks later, the phone rings. The line hisses suspiciously, as though originating from a pay box. Or a basement. A dark voice, of a type heard mostly in ‘50s black-and-white films, without introduction, begins this way:

“You are not French?”

“Uh, no, American, technically, but my mother. . . .”

“And you know of Lenin?”

“Uh. Oui .”

“And you have an intrigue in seeing his apartment?”

Conversation is clipped and includes a polite but thorough interrogation. Then:

“Friday morning next. At 10. You may bring a friend if you wish.” Click. May Day, 1991. There have been headier times for Communism.

Increasingly, the Iron Curtain seems a rusted metaphor. The Marxist-Leninist center will not hold. Generally in disrepair and disavowal throughout Europe--from Italy to the Soviet Union, Bulgaria to Britain--most countries’ party organizations have dropped the word Communist from their names. Except in France. There is still a French Communist Party, and since 1955 it has owned and operated the Lenin Museum, the homely two-bedroom third-floor walk-up apartment occupied by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin from July, 1909, to June, 1912, during his exile from Russia, while he was plotting revolution.

The Cradle of Bolshevism, this apartment was called, back when people cared.

Once, they did. The museum used to count nearly 10,000 visitors annually, Brezhnev and Gorbachev among them. Previously a red-star attraction on Soviet-organized itineraries.

Last year, however, attendance dropped more than 90%. In all of 1990, fewer than 800 people showed up.

The building is the same as every other on this narrow Left Bank street, Rue Marie Rose. It is a five-story block of stone with balconies on every other window and a facade like a weathered face. Beside the entry, a small black sign insists: “Visits on Appointment Only.”

Ten minutes before 10, one rings the bell. And waits.

Five minutes later, one rings again.

Slowly, as in a scene from Roman Polanski’s “The Tenant,” a third-floor shutter is thrown back, a dark-haired head peers down through a window, disappears. The window shuts. Rain stiffens to a hard slash. Five minutes pass until a church bell strikes the appointed hour.

A man with a perpetual squint peers through thick glass and iron doors, and inquires as to one’s business.

One waves one’s passport. This seems to help. One is asked inside.

“Politically motivated break-ins have happened here,” the man explains, climbing oak stairs that spiral around a caged lift.

This is Jean Claude Lamezec, curator of the Lenin Museum, and its staff of one. “Visits aren’t the priority just now,” he says with dignity. “There are tremendous economic problems in the Soviet Union this year. And people haven’t the rubles in pocket for travel.”

Pushing open a reinforced door fitted with stern locks, Lamezec reveals two well-swept galleries. Both display yellowing pamphlets, heroic statuary, grainy photos. Unfurled faded Russian flags lean in a corner. There is a musty, shy quality: an attic-like scent of old paper.

Crossing his arms, Lamezec begins a worn monologue. He speaks formally, in the vaguely uninterested tone of so many tour guides, except that he speaks so gently one must strain to hear. “In 1895, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, age 25, first came to Paris. . . .”

When he returned in 1909, Paris had an immense community of Russian emigres. As many as 25,000 Russians already lived in the working-class neighborhood that became home to Lenin. (He had changed his name from Ulyanov eight years earlier, while exiled to Siberia.)

He became a fixture in emigre cafes, absorbing the radical theories and conspiracies. He dined often with Marx’s daughter Laure and her husband, socialist Paul LaFargue, while building his own position among contentious Russian factions.

Paris influenced him greatly, and he became something of a Bolshevik boulevardier. A radical dandy. Affecting an English bowler, Lenin--young and beardless--frequented opera and theater with Trotsky, ate in fashionable restaurants, visited the book stalls along the Seine. Mostly, though, he wrote.

And plotted.

“His was a revolution conceived in a very bourgeois apartment of the period,” Lamezec says. Lenin paid about $16 monthly for two modest rooms opening on a narrow foyer where, Lamezec indicates, Lenin and wife Krupskaya leaned their bicycles.

In the three years Lenin occupied the apartment, it cradled Bolshevism and harbored dark-eyed conspirators under constant surveillance from French and czarist intelligence services. From its two-room cell, political conferences were arranged, speeches practiced, Pravda first published and politics argued at all hours with emigres and collaborators. All the while, Lenin produced reams of notes, treatises and articles. And conducted meetings of an even more clandestine nature.

According to French biographers, once established in Rue Marie Rose, Lenin installed in an adjacent apartment his mistress, French-Scottish radical Inessa Armand, and her children. The episode goes unmentioned by the tour guide.

The severe decor is enlivened only by rose-patterned wallpaper, the same design as when Lenin lived there. “The unintended gift,” says Lamezec, “of French fascists in the late ‘60s . . . They broke in at night and thoroughly destroyed the apartment. Smashed everything including the looking glass above the fireplace.” A swatch of the original wallpaper was retrieved from behind the broken mirror and sent to Moscow’s Central Lenin Museum to be authenticated. Then it was duplicated in Soviet factories.

The few personal belongings are austerely poetic. A small silver-framed portrait of Lenin’s mother, the daughter of a physician. A vase on a mantelpiece. Lenin’s traveling chess set (returned as a gift by Mikhail Gorbachev after his 1985 pilgrimage). From appearances, it would have taken only minutes, hours, for the exiles to pack their few possessions and move to Krakow and Geneva as events led inexorably toward war and revolution.

Each museum visit ends with ceremony. Returning to the gallery dedicated to the Glorious October Revolution, guests are asked to sign a leather-bound log. Page upon page of mostly Cyrillic signatures, going back years. The most recent one is dated many weeks ago.

“When Brezhnev visited,” rhapsodizes Lamezec, “the police had to close off the street. There were maybe 10,000 in front that night. And in ‘70, the centennial of Lenin’s birth, we saw thousands of French tourists. Soviet and Chinese groups. Germans, Swiss, Brazilians. Even one or two Americans.”