Thread: on Lenin’s tortured relationship with bikes.

In European exile, Lenin rode a bike almost everywhere. It was cost-efficient and an effective means to commune between mass meetings and party schools, which were often located on the periphery of cities like Munich, Geneva, and Paris.

But Lenin was somewhat clumsy (or, perhaps more accurately, effective at transmuting his psychic distress into physical pain).

In 1904, he was consumed by his bitter split with the Mensheviks and especially his rupture with his longtime comrade, Martov. On his way to a party conference, he drove directly into the back of a tram in Geneva and nearly lost an eye.

In 1910, on his way to the Bolshevik school he established in a Paris suburb, he collided with a car driven by a viscount, whom he sued. I can’t find anything about the outcome of the legal case.

He also rode his bike from the outer reaches of Paris’ 13th arr. to the National Library almost every day. One day he paid a concierge to park his bike beside a staircase.

When he returned, the bike was gone. The concierge explained he had accepted money to park the bike, not to look after it.

Wondering if Lenin still biked in the Soviet Union, or if he happily abandoned this necessity of exile life in capitalist lands? / fin