Departures of note

Grigory Aleksinsky, a Russian Marxist activist who rose to prominence as a Bolshevik orator in the Second Duma, spent his later years trying to sell what he claimed were Lenin's love letters. In 1936, he published a story in a Russian émigré newspaper alleging that Lenin had an affair with a wealthy woman named Elizabeth K. in 1905, which he resumed in France in 1910. Aleksinsky later offered to sell the purported letters to the Soviet government and then to Columbia University, adding the new detail that Elizabeth K. was his wife, but he was unable to arrange a sale. The story was taken seriously by one of Lenin's early biographers, though it has since been dismissed as a fabrication.

Born to middle-class parents in Dagestan in 1879, Aleksinsky became politically involved as a student at Moscow University, from which he was excluded. He met Lenin in St Petersburg in December 1905 and joined the Bolsheviks. In 1907, he was elected to the Second Duma, where he proved to be a witty and effective orator, but he escaped abroad to avoid arrest when the Duma was dissolved. Lenin hoped he would take charge of smuggling illegal Bolshevik literature into Russia, but Aleksinsky was 'quite unfitted for such work'.

Aleksinsky fell out with Lenin and in 1909 joined the ultra-left Vpered group led by Alexander Bogdanov. On the outbreak of war in 1914, he veered sharply to the right, becoming an outspoken supporter of the Russian war effort. Leon Trotsky, who described Aleksinsky as a 'shrieking orator and passionate lover of intrigue', alleged that he made a practice of accusing opponents of the war of being paid German agents, and he was expelled from the Paris Association of Foreign Journalists as a 'dishonest slanderer'.

He returned to Russia in 1917 after the February revolution, and in July produced documents to support his contention that Lenin was a German agent. After the October Revolution he was arrested by the Cheka but released on bail. He escaped abroad in 1918 and joined the Russian National Committee, chaired by Vladimir Burtsev. Aleksinsky died in Paris in 1967 at the age of 88.