On 1 September 1920 she wrote in her diary: ‘Now I have time I’m going to write every day, although my head is heavy and I feel as if I’ve been turned into a stomach that craves food the whole time…I also feel a wild desire to be alone. It exhausts me even when people around me are speaking, never mind if I have to speak myself…I hardly ever laugh or smile because I’m prompted to by a feeling of joy, but just because one should smile sometimes. I’m also struck by my present indifference to nature. I used to be so moved by it. And I find I like people less now. I used to approach everyone with a warm feeling. Now I am indifferent to everyone…I’m bored with almost everyone. I have warm feelings left only for the children and V. I. In all other respects it’s as if my heart has died. As if, having given up all my strength, all my passion to V. I. and the work, all the springs of love have dried up in me, all my sympathy for people, which I used to have so much of. I have none left, except for V. I. and my children and a few personal relations…And people can feel this deadness in me, and they pay me back in the same coin of indifference or even antipathy (and people used to love me)…I’m a living corpse and it’s dreadful!’

Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, New York, 2017, p. 465