Nadya was a constant presence and a sounding board for nearly all the important works Lenin wrote. Often she would tell him when something wasn’t clear or was inelegantly phrased. Biographers who simply see her as a quiet secretary who never spoke up have misunderstood her role. ‘When Lenin wrote a routine article he did it very quickly, dashing it off regardless of circumstances,’ a comrade who lived close to him in Geneva in the early 1900s recalled. ‘He needed only paper, ink and pen. When a more important work was in question…he would walk up and down his room for a long time, composing the sentences which expressed his main ideas. He began to write only after whispering his ideas many times over to himself and working out the best way of putting them across. However, this solitary whispering was insufficient during the writing of certain works. He had to explain to someone…aloud, what he was writing.’ Nadya, after Lenin’s death, said: ‘The bulk of Lenin’s writing has been done in my presence. In Siberia, before he began to write The Tasks of the Russian Social Democrats, he told me everything that was to be in it. The chapters of The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which he regarded as particularly important, were not written down until he had expounded them to me orally. He worked out the contents of What Is to Be Done? by talking to himself all the time as he walked about the room. After this preliminary work…he recited his ideas aloud in order to polish them. Before writing it…[he] rehearsed to me every chapter of the pamphlet… He liked to do this during our walks. We used to go out of town so that no one would disturb us. He used this same method – preparation first by whispering, then by talking – to write his other works.’

Victor Sebestyen, Lenin: The man, the dictator, and the master of terror, New York, 2017, p. 153