‘I’d like to arise from my grave in about a hundred years and have a look at how people will be living then.’
On 10 April 1870 the river Volga – the dominant natural feature of the provincial town of Simbirsk in Russia’s south east and the largest river in Europe – was showing the first signs of spring. The temperature had risen to 5° centigrade. The huge field of ice across the channel between the banks of the river was heaving and beginning to crack. Spring was arriving, and the long-awaited change of season caused excitement in every house in Simbirsk except for one on Streletskaya Street, where a baby boy was being born. His parents Ilya and Maria Ulyanov already had two children and the whole family attended his baptism some days later in the St Nicholas Cathedral, where the priest sprinkled water over his head and christened him Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. The godparents were Arseni Belokrysenko, an accountant in the Imperial civil administration and Ilya’s chess partner, and Natalya Aunovskaya, who was the widowed mother of one of Ilya’s colleagues.1 After the christening Ilya Ulyanov departed for St Petersburg to attend a pedagogical conference and left Maria Alexandrovna to recover from her labour with the assistance of the family’s new nanny Varvara Sarbatova. Life in the house on Streletskaya Street returned to normality.2
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov entered the history books as Lenin, the main pseudonym he used in the Russian revolutionary movement. It was also as Lenin that he bequeathed his name for a set of doctrines, Marxism–Leninism. Yet when his native city had its name changed in his honour in 1924 it was not called Leninsk but Ulyanovsk. And Ulyanovsk it remains to this day.
In the nineteenth century there was a widely held idea that places like Simbirsk were somnolent places and that bustle and enterprise was confined to St Petersburg. Foreign travellers had this impression. Many Russian observers – including tsars, ministers and intellectuals – thought this too. The static nature of Russia’s provincial way of life was part of the conventional wisdom. The assumption was made that the further a city was from the capital, the sleepier the urban scene was likely to be. In fact the cities in the Russian provinces were anything but quiet. Simbirsk, a Volga port a thousand miles from the capital, bustled with the struggle of its inhabitants to make enough money to survive. At its highest point, the town stood 450 feet above the water level. But most of the town was long and low-lying and stretched eleven miles along the waterfront. The quays were the main places where goods entered or left the city. Fishing was an important source of urban employment; sturgeon was the prime catch. Simbirsk lay along the route from central Russia to the Caspian Sea. Barge-haulers, who were the burlaki immortalised in the ‘Song of the Volga Boatmen’, pulled the heavy, flat vessels up and down the river. There was hardly any large-scale manufacturing. A few clothing factories and the old Simbirsk Distillery were the extent of the province’s industrial development. Although trade with the Ottoman Empire and Persia was on the increase, Simbirsk was not an economic centre at the level of St Petersburg and Moscow. There was no metal-working factory, and no significant foreign industrial presence existed. The buildings were mainly of wood and there was little sign of the architectural panache of the Imperial capitals.
Peasant agriculture was the other mainstay of economic activity. The peasantry sold their produce to middlemen with their businesses in Simbirsk and the other towns. The main crop was rye. Potatoes, wheat, oats and barley were also grown. In 1861 there had been a great jolt to the traditional way of treating the province’s peasants, when the Emperor Alexander II had issued an Emancipation Edict freeing them from the personal control exercised by noble landowners. But the land settlement was particularly disadvantageous to the peasantry of Simbirsk. The soil in the Volga region was as fertile as any in Russia, and the noble landlords contrived to keep all but a small proportion of it in their hands. And so the peasants could seldom live by agriculture alone. Many of them eked out their existence by means of various handicrafts. Simbirsk province was covered by forests, and woodworking was a common craft and trade. Carts, wheels, sleighs, shovels and even household utensils were wooden goods produced locally. The markets were colourful and the biggest of them was the Sbornaya Market in Simbirsk, where it was possible to buy anything made in the province.
By far the largest proportion of Simbirsk province’s inhabitants – 88 per cent – were members of the Russian Orthodox Church (and the proportion rose to 97 per cent for the town of Simbirsk itself). Two per cent were classified as ‘sectarians’ of various Russian sorts. This was the official designation for those Russian Christians who declined to accept the authority of the Orthodox Church; they included the so-called Old Believers, who had rejected the reforms in liturgy and ritual imposed by Tsar Alexei in the middle of the seventeenth century. In the province, too, there were Christians whose faith derived from foreign sources. Among these were Lutherans and Catholics. There were also about four hundred Jewish inhabitants. But the second largest group after the Orthodox Christians were the Moslems, who constituted 9 per cent of the population. They lived mainly in the villages of Simbirsk province and were diverse in their ethnic composition; most of them were Mordvinians, Chuvashes or Tatars. They had been there for centuries and were generally despised by the Russians as being their colonial inferiors. The great St Nicholas Cathedral at the heart of Simbirsk was an architectural reminder that the tsars of old Muscovy would brook no threat to Russian dominion in the Volga region.
Yet the central authorities in St Petersburg had experienced grave problems in maintaining their grip on the entire Volga region, and the problems were not caused exclusively by non-Russians. The Orthodox Christian peasants of Simbirsk province had played a part in the great revolts led against the holders of the throne by Stenka Razin in 1670–1 and Yemelyan Pugachëv in 1773–5. Care was consequently taken to equip an army garrison in Simbirsk, and the civil bureaucracy administered the province in the authoritarian style that was characteristic of tsarism. The governor of the province was personally appointed by the emperor and was empowered to do practically anything he saw fit to impose order.
After the Emancipation Edict, Emperor Alexander II introduced a reform of local administration whereby provincial councils – zemstva – were elected to take charge of schools, roads, hospitals and sanitary facilities. This was a limited measure, but it marked an important break with the past. However, Simbirsk province was known for the traditionalism of its social elite; it was one of the so-called ‘nests of the nobility’. Yet even in Simbirsk there was enthusiasm among the landed nobles to take up the new opportunities for self-government. The zemstvo was a hive of busy initiatives. The town had had its own newspaper in the form of Simbirsk Provincial News since 1838, and in 1876 the provincial zemstvo started up its own publication. The schooling network, too, was given attention. Funds for this were allocated from St Petersburg. By the end of the nineteenth century there were 944 schools of various sorts across the province. The pinnacle of this educational establishment was the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia (or Grammar School), which took pupils up to the age of seventeen. Although Simbirsk lacked a university, the Imperial Kazan University was only 120 miles to the north.
Inhabitants of Simbirsk had cultural achievements to their name. One of Russia’s greatest historians Nikolai Karamzin, who died in 1826, had hailed from the province. So, too, had the writer Ivan Goncharov, whose novel Oblomov – published in serial form in the 1850s – has become a European literary classic. Admittedly Simbirsk was not a centre of cultural and intellectual effervescence. The Karamzin Public Library did not have a very large stock and the bookshops were few; no literary circle existed there. But those individuals aspiring to a role in public life were not incapacitated by having been brought up there. It may even have been an advantage for them. Many of the most original Russian writers, thinkers and politicians came from a provincial milieu. Such intellectuals benefited from spending their early years outside the claustrophobic cultural atmosphere of St Petersburg. They developed their ideas on their own or within a small, supportive group, and did not have the originality and confidence crushed out of them. Often they were the ones who attacked the conventional wisdom of the day and were the country’s innovators – and there was to be no more innovative revolutionary thinker and politician than the man who had started life in Simbirsk as Vladimir Ulyanov.
The Ulyanov family had moved to Simbirsk in autumn 1869, a few months before the birth of Vladimir. The father, whose full name was Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, had been appointed as Inspector of Popular Schools for the province. He brought his pregnant wife Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova and their two children, Alexander and Anna, to the home they would rent from the Pribylovski family on Streletskaya Street.3 Ilya’s post had been created as part of the government’s scheme for a rapid expansion of schooling in the mid-1860s. He immediately became a prominent figure in the affairs of the town and province of Simbirsk.
Ilya and Maria Ulyanov had a heterogeneous background. The Soviet authorities were to try to keep secret the fact that Maria was of partly Jewish ancestry. Her paternal grandfather Moshko Blank was a Jewish trader in wine and spirits in Starokonstantinov in Volynia province in the western borderlands of the Russian Empire. Starokonstantinov was a small town and most of its inhabitants were Jews. Moshko was frequently in conflict with his neighbours, including his son Abel. He took Abel to court for verbal and physical abuse.4 But the result stunned him. The judge did not believe Moshko and fined him rather than his son. In 1803, Moshko himself was prosecuted when his Jewish neighbours brought an action against him for stealing hay. Two years later he was charged with selling illegally distilled vodka. In both cases he was found innocent. But in 1808 his luck ran out when he spent several months in prison on a charge of arson. Eventually he was again cleared of guilt, and he moved with his family to the provincial capital Zhitomir. Yet he did not forget his humiliation in Starokonstantinov. In 1824, he appealed for a judicial review of the arson case and secured the fining of the families who had prosecuted him. Moshko was no man to trifle with. It was a feature that one of his descendants was to share.5
Moshko Blank was not a practising Jew. His parents had not brought him up to observe the Jewish faith, and he had not sent his own children to the local Jewish school. By tradition they ought to have gone to the Starokonstantinov heder to learn Hebrew and study the Torah. Instead Moshko entered them for the new district state school where they would be taught in Russian. When Moshko’s wife died, he broke the remaining connections with the faith of his ancestors. He approached the local priest and was baptised as an Orthodox Christian.6
Perhaps Moshko Blank underwent a spiritual experience, but he may have had a more material motive. Conversion to Christianity would eliminate obstacles to his social and economic advancement. Few Jews had lived in the Russian Empire until the three partitions of 1772–95, when Austria, Prussia and Russia divided up Poland among themselves. The result was that the tsars acquired a large number of Jewish subjects. Catherine the Great feared unpopularity if she were to allow them to move outside the western borderlands since religious and economic hostility to Jews was common to Russians of every rank. She therefore issued a decree confining them to a Pale of Settlement in the western borderlands. Only the very small proportion of wealthy Jews was permitted to live outside the Pale and Jews could not attain the rank of nobleman. The solution for an ambitious, unbelieving Jew was to seek conversion to Orthodox Christianity. Any such former Jew was automatically registered as a Russian and was relieved of the burden of discriminatory legislation. Moshko Blank no doubt felt unusually hampered by his Jewish status since, by his own account, he had no religious or educational affiliation to Judaism.
Yet few apostates behaved quite as aggressively to their former coreligionists as Moshko Blank, who wrote to the Ministry of the Interior suggesting additional constraints upon Jews. He proposed to ban the Jews from selling non-Kosher food (which they could not eat themselves) and from employing Christians on the Jewish sabbath (when Jews could perform no work). He particularly urged that the Hasidim, the fervent and mystical Jewish sect, should be prohibited from holding meetings. Moshko’s militancy was extraordinary. He called upon the Ministry of the Interior to prevent Jews in general from praying for the coming of the Messiah and to oblige them to pray for the health of the Emperor and his family.7 In short, Moshko Blank was an anti-semite. This point deserves emphasis. Several contemporary writers in Russia have argued that Lenin’s Jewish background predetermined his ideas and behaviour. The writers in question tend towards anti-semitic opinions.8 But, in trying to pursue a Russian nationalist agenda by an emphasis upon the Jewish connections of Lenin, they avoid the plain fact that Moshko Blank was an enemy of Judaism and that no specific aspect of their Jewish background remained important for his children.9
Moshko’s sons, Abel and Srul, equalled him in their desire to dissolve their Jewish ties. Indeed they underwent conversion to Christianity before their father Moshko, who had sent them to study at the Medical-Surgical Academy in St Petersburg. Evidently Moshko did not hold a grudge against Abel for the violent clash that led them to appearing against each other in court in Zhitomir. Abel and Srul were choosing a career, in medicine, that was attractive to many who wished to rise from the base of Imperial society. The ‘free professions’ offered a route to public prominence by dint of technical competence. Abel and Srul studied hard to become doctors in St Petersburg. In 1820, after making known their wish to become Christians, they were given baptism in the Samson Cathedral in St Petersburg’s Vyborg district. As was the convention, they were accompanied by Russian nobles who had agreed to be their godparents. Abel and Srul took Christian names: Abel became Dmitri while Srul became Alexander. One of the godparents was Senator Dmitri Baranov, who had conducted a survey of Volynia province on behalf of the Imperial government in 1820 and who actively helped young Jews who converted to Christianity.10
The Blank brothers qualified as doctors. On graduating in 1824, Alexander (Srul) Blank took up practice initially in Smolensk province. Thereupon he appears to have made his own way in his career. If he kept contact with his father, there is little sign of this in the official records. Alexander was his own man. This was true of him even in his attitude to his studies. While learning the recommended textbooks at the St Petersburg Medical-Surgical Academy, he also read about unorthodox techniques of medicine.11
Alexander Blank married a Christian, Anna Grosschopf, in 1829. Anna was a Lutheran from St Petersburg. She was of German and Swedish ancestry: her father Johann Grosschopf was a notary whose family came from Lübeck while her mother, Anna Estedt, was of Swedish background. In any case, both the parents of Anna Grosschopf were long-term residents of St Petersburg.12 This was where she met and married Alexander Blank. Since her fiancé had become a Russian Orthodox Christian, she was supposed by Imperial law to adopt Alexander’s faith as a prerequisite of the marriage. She went through the formalities; but the fact that she was to bring up her daughters as Lutherans shows that she had not really abandoned her Lutheran faith. She also stayed loyal to a number of customs not yet shared by most Russians. Germans at Christmas placed a decorated fir tree in the house. This was a custom that Anna passed down to her children and her grandchildren, who regarded it as characteristically ‘German’.13 Alexander Blank and Anna Grosschopf were assimilating themselves to a Russian national identity, but they did not take the process to its furthest possible point. Anna in particular retained traces of her ancestral past; and Alexander, while relegating his Jewish past to oblivion, did not insist that his wife should forswear her own heritage.
By continuing to adhere to Lutheranism, Anna was breaking the law. But in practice the state authorities only rarely forced Orthodox Christians to stay strictly within the bounds of Orthodoxy, and Alexander and Anna could proceed to concentrate on establishing themselves in Russian society. Alexander had a decent but unspectacular career as a doctor. He moved from post to post in St Petersburg and the provinces. His was not an untroubled career. In Perm he clashed with his professional superiors and lost his job. His appeal against his treatment failed, but he eventually secured appointment as the medical inspector of hospitals in Zlatoust and restored his reputation. With this last posting he automatically became a ‘state councillor’ and a hereditary noble.14
But Anna’s health was frail and she died, before she was forty, in 1838; she left behind six children. There was one son, Dmitri, and five daughters: Anna, Lyubov, Yekaterina, Maria (Lenin’s mother) and Sofia. Alexander Blank could not cope on his own. He turned for help to his wife’s side of the family, and one of his wife’s sisters, Yekaterina, agreed to take her place in bringing up the children. Yekaterina von Essen – née Grosschopf – was a widow. Alexander Blank had several reasons to be pleased about her. Not only did she take responsibility for her nieces but also she had a substantial legacy and was willing to help with the purchase of the estate of Kokushkino, twenty miles to the north-east of the old Volga city of Kazan (where she had lived with her now-deceased husband Konstantin).15 The last reason is somewhat less seemly. Apparently Alexander Blank and Yekaterina von Essen were living together as man and wife soon after Anna Blank’s death. Alexander applied for permission to marry her without divulging to the authorities that Yekaterina was his deceased wife’s sister. Such a marriage was illegal, as he must have known, and the application failed. But Alexander and Yekaterina were undeterred from their liaison; they stayed under the same roof until Yekaterina’s death in 1863.16
The Blank family resided in Kokushkino in 1848 and Alexander Blank, having retired from his medical work in Penza in the previous year, became a landowner with personal control over the lives of forty peasant males and their families. Kokushkino had a substantial manor house with two storeys and a mezzanine floor. There would be plenty of room for all the Blanks. The boy Dmitri went to the Kazan Classical Gimnazia, but the five girls were educated at home. Aunt Yekaterina supervised formal academic studies as well as the musical training, especially at the piano; her efforts were supplemented by the hire of teachers who came out from Kazan to the Kokushkino estate. The girls were brought up with a knowledge of Russian, German, French and English. Aunt Yekaterina was a very demanding taskmistress, but her nieces were to appreciate the educational benefit they received from her.
As for Alexander Blank, he had a passionate interest in hygiene, diet and dress and wrote a booklet on the advantages of ‘balneology’.17 This was a medical fashion involving wrapping up patients in wet blankets; the idea was that enclosure by water helped to prevent ill health. Blank applied the method to his young family. He disliked to hand out medicine except in exceptional circumstances, and insisted on a plain diet: the girls were not allowed tea or coffee except when they were served these beverages on visits to their neighbours. The Blank children had to wear clothes with open necks and short sleeves even in winter.18 They had reason to think, in adulthood, that they had had an idiosyncratic upbringing.19 It is true that their father also had a sense of humour; but his jokes were usually made at someone else’s expense. On 1 April, for example, he played tricks around the house. On one occasion he fooled everyone by placing powdery snow on the dinner plates.20 But usually he and Aunt Yekaterina had erred on the side of strictness. Although the girls loved their father and aunt, they were more than a little in awe of them.
Young Dmitri was intensely unhappy. In 1850, shortly after the move to Kokushkino, while he was still a student, he committed suicide.21 Exactly what upset him is still not known. It may be that his mother’s death unhinged him or that something disturbed him in his relations with his father. Perhaps he felt himself to be under excessive pressure of expectations either from his family or from his tutors. Or possibly he was simply a victim of psychological illness.
Yet life for the Blank children was generally a lot more pleasant than for the peasants on the Kokushkino estate. When the Emancipation Edict freed them from their personal ties to the newly arrived Dr Blank, they refused to accept the maximum amount of land available to them since this would have entailed their agreement to pay him compensation. Instead they opted for the scheme whereby they received a minimal amount but did not have to pay anything for it. On the neighbouring estates the peasants had taken the maximum amount on offer, and Dr Blank, a tall, thin individual with dark eyes, asked his peasants to reconsider. He warned them that they would sink into penury if they stuck to their decision. But they did not trust him. Presumably they believed the unfounded rumours circulating among the discontented peasantry that all the land was about to be transferred free of charge to those who themselves cultivated it. They lived to regret their decision. But it was too late: the Blanks would not allow them to go back on the original settlement. The troubled condition of Russian agriculture in the nineteenth century was a topic that was understood at close quarters by Blank family members – and they did not take a kindly approach.
Maria Alexandrovna Blank had been born in St Petersburg in 1835. Her husband Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov had come into the world four years earlier. Ilya had belonged to a commercial family in Astrakhan, where the river Volga debouches into the Caspian Sea. He was the youngest of four children; his brother was called Vasili, his sisters were Maria and Fedosya. Their father Nikolai Ulyanov was a tailor.22 Official Soviet historians claimed that the Ulyanovs lived in straitened circumstances; but there is nothing to substantiate this. Nikolai Ulyanov lived in a stone house with a wooden superstructure and his business flourished.
Although the family’s ethnic and religious background is not completely clear, Nikolai probably descended from peasants who came to Astrakhan from the upper Volga province of Nizhni Novgorod in the eighteenth century. Originally their name, it seems, was not Ulyanov but Ulyanin; such a shift in orthography was common in those years. The possibility that they came from near Nizhni Novgorod, one of Russia’s greatest cities, has given rise to the suggestion that they were Russians. Quite possibly they were. But the province of Nizhni Novgorod, like several provinces of the Volga region, was inhabited by a mixture of ethnic groups, and it cannot be excluded that the Ulyanovs belonged to one of the indigenous ethnic groups conquered by the Russian tsars in the sixteenth century. Thus the Ulyanovs could have been Chuvashes or Mordvinians. Even more obscure is their religious affiliation. If they were Russians, they may have been Orthodox Christians; but it is equally conceivable that they belonged to one or other of the local Christian sects. If Chuvash or Mordvinian, they could have been pagans or Moslems or even converted Christians. All that is beyond challenge is that Nikolai Ulyanov – Lenin’s grandfather – brought up his family as Russian Orthodox Christians and had them educated in Russian schools.23
There also remains uncertainty about the identity of his Astrakhan grandmother. Even her first name is problematical. According to some sources, she was Alexandra, whereas others have her as Anna. It cannot wholly be discounted that she was a Russian by birth. But certainly Lenin’s sister Maria was convinced that their Astrakhan forebears had a Tatar ingredient in their genealogy; and Maria may have had her grandmother in mind when she referred to this. Most writers have her as a Kalmyk but it is conceivable that she was a Kirgiz. The Kalmyks were a mainly Buddhist people living in the southernmost regions of the Russian Empire. Their ancestors were the nomadic tribes which had overrun the Russians in the thirteenth century with the Mongol Horde. Most of the Kalmyks and Kirgiz who lived in Astrakhan were poor; some were even slaves. Only a few rose to become urban traders. They were disliked and despised by the Russian authorities as ‘Asiatics’.
Nevertheless the possibility that she was a Russian is not wholly discountable since the records are so scanty and imprecise. Mysteries continue to exist. But later generations of the family believed that a non-Russian element (‘Tatar’, as Anna Ilinichna Ulyanova put it) entered their ancestry in Astrakhan and it is difficult to believe that they invented this.24 Alexandra was younger than Nikolai Ulyanov, who had delayed marrying until middle age. Indeed he reportedly bought his wife out from a prominent Astrakhan merchant family. This has encouraged the speculation that she had been converted to Orthodox Christianity. But in truth a cloud of unknowing covers the matter. Another piece of guesswork is even more peculiar. This is that Nikolai Ulyanov already shared a surname with his bride Alexandra. The suspicion has been aired that Nikolai and Alexandra were related by blood, even quite closely related. Nothing has been proven and, in the absence of documents, probably never will be. The only fair conclusion is that Lenin could not claim a wholly Russian ancestry on his father’s side; indeed it is possible, but by no means certain, that he lacked Russian ‘blood’ on both sides of his family.
Yet Nikolai and Alexandra, whatever their origins, brought up their family in Russian culture, raised them in the Orthodox Christian faith and sent the boys to Russian schools.25 The Ulyanov family was taking its opportunities to establish itself in the lower middle class of Astrakhan society. Its ambition survived the death of Nikolai at the age of seventy-five in 1838. The eldest son Vasili, who never married, took his family responsibilities seriously and paid for his brother Ilya – thirteen years his junior – to enter the Astrakhan Gimnazia and to proceed to the Imperial Kazan University, where he completed a mathematics degree in 1854. On graduation Ilya took a succession of teaching jobs. His first post took him to Penza, where he worked in the Gentry Institute. It was there that he met Maria Alexandrovna Blank, who was staying with her sister Anna, the wife of the Gentry Institute’s director I. D. Veretennikov.26
The marriage of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Blank took place in Penza in August 1863. They shared many interests and a general attitude to life. In particular, they had a common passion for education. This brought them together despite the many contrasts in their backgrounds. Ilya adhered to Orthodox Christianity whereas Maria was a tepid Lutheran. Ilya had an Asian background, Maria a north European. Ilya was a man of the Volga. He lived his whole life near that great river: in Astrakhan, Kazan, Penza, Nizhni Novgorod and finally Simbirsk. Maria had lived her early years in St Petersburg and the western area of the Russian Empire. Whereas the Ulyanovs had only recently become comfortable in material terms, the Blanks had always been so. Ilya was a university graduate; Maria had been educated only at home. None of these differences mattered to them. What counted was their educational commitment. Maria was as zealous about this as Ilya; she too trained as a teacher even though she did not proceed to teach in a school. Education was the focal point of their lives. The Blanks had been brought up this way. Not only Maria but also two of her sisters married teachers who rose up the hierarchy of educational administration. Ilya and Maria were united by their zeal, which they successfully transmitted to the next generation.
Ilya had intellectual pursuits outside schooling. He was fascinated by meteorology, and he published learned articles based on his scientific observations. His training at the Imperial Kazan University had sharpened his intellectual appetite. Wind, rain, sun and humidity were recorded by him. Ilya Ulyanov was devoted, as his children would also be, to the rational investigation of their environment. For Ilya the object of attention was the weather; for his offspring it would be the politics of the Russian Empire.
Although Ilya was academically gifted, Maria outshone him in at least one respect. When speaking German, he had trouble with his rs as if he were speaking French. (In fact he had the same problem with the Russian language.) The results could be comic to the ears of his school pupils. On one occasion, for instance, he asked some of them what the German word was for ‘very’. A pupil answered ‘sekhr’, with the heavy aspirate of the Russian language, instead of sehr. But when Ilya tried to put him right, his own attempt was no better: ‘sehl’. Ilya pretended not to notice the class laughing at his mispronunciation.27 Yet simultaneously he let everyone know that he was always looking for high standards. His standards were applied not only to pupils but also to teachers. He never failed to reprimand any of his protégés who did not come up to scratch. But the successful ones held him in admiring respect and were proud to be called the Ulyanovites (ulyanovtsy). Ilya’s accomplishments provided him and his family with prominence and status in Simbirsk. He had done well for the province.
His success was made possible by his wife’s efficiency in running the Ulyanov household. Ilya even left it to her to buy his suits.28 Although he was a tailor’s son, Ilya could not be bothered to try on clothes. His preoccupation was with his work, and everything was subordinate to it. At home Maria enjoyed his total confidence and Ilya received her unstinting support. They lived a rather isolated existence. Ilya liked the occasional game of chess and whist. But he could find only the elderly civil servant and accountant Arseni Belokrysenko – his son Vladimir’s godfather – as his chess partner;29 and he played whist only with the town’s teachers.30 Maria Alexandrovna was even more withdrawn from local society. A few friends came to the family house on Streletskaya Street, but she seldom paid them any visits in return. Ilya and Maria travelled around the Volga region in the summer. Yet their trips were always to members of one side or the other of their family. In Ilya’s case this took them to Astrakhan, in Maria’s to her relatives in Stavropol and Kokushkino. Thus the Ulyanovs rarely ventured outside the milieu provided by professional activity or by family. To that extent they remained, despite Ilya’s manifest achievements, on the margins of the provincial elite.
They do not seem to have minded much about their seclusion. Their wish was not to climb up the social hierarchy of old Russia so much as to help to construct a new Russia. They focussed their hopes on Ilya’s career and upon the education of their sons and daughters. Eight Ulyanov children were born in quick succession. First came Anna in 1864. Then there arrived Alexander two years later. These were followed by Vladimir in 1870, Olga in 1871, Dmitri in 1874 and Maria in 1878. These were not the only ones born to the couple. There had also been an earlier Olga in 1868 and a Nikolai in 1873, both of whom died as babies. This was not unusual for those days, when health-care was rudimentary by twentieth-century standards. In any case the deaths did not discourage the Ulyanovs from continuing to increase the size of their family.
Ilya was not a talkative person and often shut himself away in his study when he was at home. He showed enthusiasm when he was chatting about education and lived for his work. He did not yearn for praise from others, and was rather stingy in praising others when they did well at work. Indeed both Ilya and Maria were emotionally undemonstrative. It took something wholly extraordinary to make them show their feelings – when the younger Olga died as a baby, Ilya sobbed his heart out.31 But Ilya and Maria were otherwise stolid, quiet individuals. As young adults they already looked middle-aged. Ilya was self-conscious about his premature baldness, and tried to disguise it by brushing forward what was left of his hair. Yet his burning ambition as a kind of cultural missionary was unmistakable; and he and his wife Maria – whose inner calm was extraordinary – were a couple who impressed everyone with their commitment to cultural enlightenment.32
Ilya’s job as Inspector of Popular Schools was not one he could discharge from his study on Simbirsk’s Streletskaya Street. By the last year of his life there were 444 primary schools and more than twenty thousand pupils in Simbirsk province.33 He had to travel around an area of nearly sixteen thousand square miles, and was frequently away for weeks at a time. Ilya had been appointed as Inspector only eight years after the Emancipation Edict of 1861; his job in the early years lay not so much in the inspection of pedagogical standards as in the supervised construction of suitable buildings in appropriate locations. This required much initiative. In town and village he had to ensure that things were being done to a proper level of efficiency and safety. From spring through to early autumn Ilya would take a tarantas to visit the provincial schools. The tarantas was not the most comfortable horse-drawn vehicle of its day since it had no springs. But it was sturdy and the roads in Simbirsk province were primitive. In any case things were better for Ilya in the winter when he could travel by sleigh. Whatever the season, however, the energy he expended in his early and middle career was extraordinary.
The Ulyanovs spent their summers in the Blank house at Kokushkino. Before Vladimir was born, they had also taken a trip with their children Anna and Alexander to visit Ilya Ulyanov’s surviving relatives in Astrakhan. Ilya’s mother Alexandra and elder brother were still alive. Anna Ulyanova never forgot the affectionate fuss made of herself and her brother Alexander. It was so different from what she was used to at home. Her mother Maria, however, disapproved. As often happens in families, she applied a regime of emotional austerity to her children even though she thought her own parents had been too severe towards her and her sisters. Maria Alexandrovna also thought her children were being ‘excessively spoiled’ by her Astrakhan in-laws.34 The Astrakhan trip was not repeated, and when the Ulyanovs visited relatives from then onwards, it was always to Maria Alexandrovna’s side of the family.35 Dr Blank was delighted to see his new grandson Vladimir, who was brought to Kokushkino with the rest of the family in the early summer of 1870. Old Dr Blank was not at home when the party arrived, and had to ascend the stairs to find Maria Alexandrovna. She met him proudly on the landing with the baby in her arms. Her father proceeded to make a medical examination of Vladimir and to ask questions about his progress.36
But Vladimir was to have no memory of his grandfather because, on 17 June, Dr Blank suddenly died. The estate at Kokushkino passed into the joint possession of the old man’s daughters, who kept it as a place for their families to relax together in the summer months. Their joys did not include the obligations of manual work. July was the time when the harvest was taken in and when the peasants of Kokushkino worked their hardest. They sweated in the fields where food and drink was brought out to them at midday; in the evening, folk songs were sung with gusto. This environment was familiar to the visiting Ulyanovs, but they took no part in it. They were on holiday. They were escaping the cares of their urban existence; but they refused to romanticise their rural surroundings. Peasant life was not very appealing to them – and the distrust shown by the recently emancipated serfs to Dr Blank cannot have helped matters.
Meanwhile Ilya Ulyanov had risen still higher in society. In July 1874 he was promoted from Inspector to Director of Popular Schools for Simbirsk province. Automatically he thus emulated Dr Blank and became a ‘state councillor’ and hereditary nobleman entitled to be addressed as ‘his Excellency’. Ilya’s absences continued to be frequent and lengthy, but Maria was more than capable of handling the situation. Like other middle-class families of the period, the Ulyanovs employed a cook to relieve the burden upon Maria, and nanny Sarbatova looked after the children from 1870. Workers, too, were hired when snow needed to be cleared or wood sawn. The Ulyanovs were similar to any other middle-class family.
Ilya and Maria were also loyal subjects of Alexander II and were committed to the reforms initiated with the Emancipation Edict of 1861. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, Ilya patriotically collected voluntary contributions for the care of wounded troops.37 In turn he was proud to accept the various awards, including the Order of Stanislav (First Class) in January 1887, which were conferred in respect of his professional achievements. Ilya and Maria avoided contact with anyone who caused trouble to the authorities. But they made an exception in respect of Dr Alexander Kadyan, whose subversive political opinions had led him to being sent into administrative exile in Simbirsk. This meant that he was obliged to stay within the limits of the town and remain under police surveillance. Ilya and Maria became acquainted with him and asked him to act as their family physician. The relationship, however, remained strictly medical, and the Ulyanovs scrupulously declined to discuss public affairs with him. Throughout the 1860s Ilya and Maria acted on the assumption that a line of official reforms would be followed permanently in the Russian Empire, and they discouraged their children from showing any sympathy for revolutionary ideas.
If his father and mother were so loyal to their Imperial sovereign, how can they have had much influence upon the development of the world’s greatest revolutionary? The question is easily answered. Every substantial memoir points in the same direction. Lenin’s parentage and upbringing moulded his personality, and Ilya and Maria had a profound, lasting influence on every single one of their children. They gave them a model of dedication. They worked hard, and put a high value on the life of the mind. To the children they transmitted a burning ambition to succeed. Ilya and Maria were half inside and half outside the Simbirsk provincial elite. At that time plenty of capable, educated individuals rose to membership of the gentry. The Russian Empire was in flux. Large-scale social changes were still going on. It would have been astonishing in such a society if the Ulyanovs had undergone complete assimilation within a single generation. They had made a massive advance, but they had not yet ‘arrived’. This transitional status did not matter much to Ilya and Maria at the time. They could cope with the tensions.
It is not social but national and ethnic factors that have stirred controversy. Russian nationalists have always claimed that Lenin’s ideology is directly attributable to the fact that he was someone who had little Russian blood coursing through his veins. The Jewish ingredient in his ancestry is the object of particular attention. Such commentary itself is mostly xenophobic. For ethnicity is not an exclusively biological phenomenon; it is also produced and reproduced by the mechanisms of language, education and social and economic relationships. The important thing about Ilya and Maria Ulyanov was that they thought, talked and acted as Russians – and so, too, did their children. Their ethnic origins barely affected them in their daily lives.
Indeed, according to Anna Ilinichna, she learned of the Jewish background of Dr Blank only in 1897, when she was thirty-three. This occurred in the course of a journey to Switzerland. Anna Ilinichna used her mother’s surname on foreign trips38 and the Swiss students she met asked her whether she was Jewish. She was surprised to hear that nearly all the Swiss Blanks were Jews. Anna Ilinichna made enquiries, presumably of her mother, and learned that their grandfather Dr Blank was of Jewish origin. Many years later, indeed after Lenin’s death, Anna Ilinichna also learned from a friend that a silver goblet that had once been owned by Dr Blank’s parents was of a type used in Jewish religious feasts.39 Neither Anna nor her siblings were disconcerted by their discovery. But they did not advertise it either. They already knew that their ancestry was not wholly Russian, and perhaps they added the Jewish ingredient to the existing list. It may be that a degree of caution was also at work. Anti-semitism was widespread in the Russian Empire, and the young Ulyanovs may have seen no reason to expose themselves to unnecessary trouble in society.
Yet Lenin, in later life, saw advantage in a cultural admixture having being made to their Russian heritage. He regarded Jews as a specially gifted ‘race’ (or plemya as he put it in the Russian fashion that was then conventional), and he took pride in the Jewish ingredient in his ancestry. As he remarked to his sister Anna, Jewish activists constituted about half the number of revolutionaries in the southern regions of the Russian Empire. According to the novelist Maxim Gorki, Lenin compared the Russians unfavourably with Jews: ‘I feel sorry for those persons who are intelligent. We don’t have many intelligent persons. We are a predominantly talented people, but we have a lazy mentality. A bright Russian is almost always a Jew or a person with an admixture of Jewish blood.’40 Nevertheless this was not a matter at the forefront of his attention. He may even have been unaware of it until Anna Ilinichna started to make her enquiries. Lenin primarily thought of himself as a Russian.
In fact it was less the Jewish than the Germanic aspect of Lenin’s mother’s background that continued to have an influence on the family. Maria Alexandrovna worshipped at the local Lutheran church while her husband attended Orthodox services just as she liked to celebrate Christmas in the German manner by having a fir tree in the house;41 and Lenin was to mark the season in the same manner whenever he and his wife had children among their guests.
German seasonal customs were not the only lingering element in the family’s ethnic ancestry. There was also the strong impetus of German and Jewish culture towards education and public achievement. The Blanks had this aplenty; and Ilya Ulyanov, coming from a non-Russian background and aspiring to a high career in the Russian Empire, reinforced the impetus: he knew that he would succeed on his merits and his qualifications or not at all. Maria and Ilya were alike in seeking fair treatment for those subjects of the Russian Empire who were not Russian. In this they differed from those many people of non-Russian descent who acquired a pronounced antipathy towards non-Russians who would not assimilate themselves to a Russian national identity. Thus Ilya was determined that the non-Russians should receive education in their native language. He was a pragmatist as well as a man of principle. He knew how difficult it would otherwise be to induce the Chuvashes to send their children to his schools. And so he insisted that the Chuvash children in Simbirsk province should be taught not in Russian but in Chuvash. This sensitivity towards other national and ethnic groups was passed on to the Ulyanov children, and was something that exercised Lenin’s mind to the very end of his life.
And so the Ulyanovs were Russians of a particular type. They were new Russians in the sense that they were of diverse ethnic ancestry. But Russians they had become. Although Maria Alexandrovna showed traces of her German origins, she had by and large assimilated herself to a Russian identity. Ilya Nikolaevich, too, had put his past aside. Both Ilya and Maria had about them the ambition that is often found disproportionately among people making a career in the midst of a society with a different national majority. Living by the Volga among Russians, the Ulyanovs were a bit like first-generation immigrants. They had a terrific zeal to succeed, and this zeal was passed on to their progeny. Furthermore, they were selective about the aspects of Russian culture with which they identified themselves. ‘Old’ Russia – the Russia of peasants, village customs, drunkenness, ignorance, arbitrary rule, social deference and hereditary privilege – held no attraction for them. Ilya and Maria wanted to get rid of those age-old traditions. They associated themselves with modernity and wanted Russia to become more akin to the countries of the West. They were hoping for the reforms of the 1860s to transform society. The Ulyanovs were believers in Progress, Enlightenment, Order, Cleanliness, Obedience, Hierarchy and Punctiliousness.
They were therefore attracted to trends in contemporary Russia that emphasised contact with Europe. All ‘progressive’ people wanted to learn French and German. Like other nobles, the Ulyanovs sometimes slipped out of Russian into French;42 perhaps, in contrast with an earlier generation of such Russians, they merely wanted to communicate without the servants knowing what they were saying. But their linguistic capacity was nevertheless considerable. So, too, were their musical inclinations. Not every house in Simbirsk took an interest in the operas of Richard Wagner.43 The Ulyanovs, moreover, read about the latest European artistic, philosophical and scientific developments. Ilya and Maria Ulyanov were ‘cultured’ Russians; they were patriots. They wanted to build a ‘modern’, ‘European’, ‘Western’ and ‘enlightened’ society. Lenin was the son of his parents.
So what kind of child was Volodya? Until recently there was too little information for anyone to be confident of the answer. It was not that memoirs did not exist. Quite the contrary: Volodya’s family left behind a copious record and his sisters Anna and Maria wrote incessantly about him. But only the material published within a year or two of his death in 1924 is frank about anything even mildly critical of him. Censorship was quickly at work in support of the Lenin cult and the memoirs were heavily edited by the central party leadership before appearing in print. Only now can we examine the original drafts. From this material a picture emerges of a little boy who was energetic, brilliant and charming but also bumptious and not always very kind.
Volodya’s sister Anna, six years his senior, recorded the impact he made as a baby:1
He was the third child and very noisy – a great bawler with combative, happy little hazel eyes. He started to walk at almost the same time as his sister Olya [that is, Olga], who was a year and a half younger than he. She began to walk very early and without being noticed by those around her. Volodya, by contrast, learned to walk late; and if his sister tumbled inaudibly (or ‘shuffled over’, as their nanny put it) and raised herself up independently by pressing her hands down on the floor, he inevitably would bang his head and raise a desperate roar throughout the house.
The wooden structure of the house made it into an echo chamber and the floors and walls resounded as the little fellow went on crashing his head on to the carpet – or even on to the floorboards themselves. His mother Maria Alexandrovna wondered whether he might turn out to be mentally retarded. The midwife who had delivered him offered as her opinion: ‘He’ll turn out either very intelligent or else very stupid.’ At the time this was not very reassuring to Maria Alexandrovna, and later she remembered how fearful she had been about her little Volodya.2
The family could only make guesses as to why he banged his head, and reached the conclusion that it had something to do with his physical shape. Volodya as a baby had short, weak legs and a large head. He kept falling over, apparently because he was top heavy. Once he had fallen over, they believed, he flailed around to pull himself up and banged his head in sheer frustration.3
This did not explain why he continued to be so noisy even when he had learned to walk. He never stopped making a racket and according to Anna, he was boisterous and demanding throughout his childhood.4 He was much more destructive than the other Ulyanov children. When his parents gave him a small papier-mâché horse for his birthday, his instinct was to creep off with the toy and twist off its legs. Anna watched him as he hid himself behind a door. A few minutes later he was found, perfectly content, with the horse in pieces at his side. What is more, Volodya was not always pleasant to his brothers and sisters. At the age of three, he stamped over the collection of theatre posters which his elder brother Sasha had carefully laid out on the carpet. He ruined several of them before his mother could haul him away. A couple of years later he grabbed Anna’s favourite ruler and snapped it in two.5 By then he was old enough to understand that he had done something seriously wrong in this orderly family. There was a malicious aspect to his behaviour and the rest of the family did not like it.
But he also had much charm and was always forgiven by his nanny Varvara Sarbatova. When he misbehaved, he owned up quickly. This at least reassured his mother to some extent: ‘It’s good that he never does anything on the sly.’6 At the age of eight he proved her point. It was then that he was allowed for the first time to travel by paddle steamer to Kazan to visit his Aunt Anna Veretennikova (née Blank) in the company of his sister Anna and brother Alexander. This was a big occasion for him and he had difficulty restraining his tears as he waved his mother goodbye on the Simbirsk quayside. In Kazan he had a rare old time with his Veretennikov cousins and got up to some horseplay. Unfortunately he smashed a glass vase in the process. Aunt Anna heard the commotion, rushed into the room and quizzed everyone about the incident. Volodya, however, kept quiet and did not admit to what he had done. Three months after the event, when he had returned to Simbirsk, his mother found him sobbing into his pillow late at night. When she went upstairs to his bedroom, he blurted out to her: ‘I deceived Aunt Anya [Anna’s diminutive]. I said that it wasn’t me who broke the vase whereas it was me who broke it.’7
Volodya was a stocky boy of moderate height with curly light-brown hair which turned ginger in adolescence. He still had shortish legs and a disproportionately large head. Although he was generally in good health, there was concern about the squint in his left eye. His mother took him to Kazan to be examined by the ophthalmologist Professor Adamyuk, who advised that the defect was irremediable and that he would have to manage exclusively with his right eye.8 Very late in his life, in 1922, Lenin learned he had been misdiagnosed. In fact the left eye was merely short-sighted,9 and Adamyuk’s failure to issue him with spectacles resulted in his habit – much noted when he became a famous politician – of screwing up his eyes when talking to people. His brothers and sister suffered from much greater problems. When Sasha became acutely ill with a stomach inflammation, Maria Alexandrovna fell to her knees before the icon in the sitting-room corner and called over to her daughter Anna: ‘Pray for Sasha.’10 Sasha recovered from his illness, but other Ulyanovs, including Volodya, suffered with their stomachs. There seems to have been a genetic predisposition in the family, possibly one that was inherited from the Blank side.
Yet for most of the time they were fit, active and full of purpose. The children were encouraged to take plenty of exercise. Their father Ilya Nikolaevich went on walks with them along the headland by the river Volga to the north of the town. He also bought season tickets for the family to bathe at one of the nearby beaches.11 But mainly the children were left to their own devices outside the home. A gap of fourteen years separated the eldest and the youngest of them – Anna and Maria. This meant that the smallest children almost treated the others as adults. But Volodya was different. Sometimes he and the younger children were left in the care of Sasha and Anna, who obeyed and applied the rules set by their parents. Volodya loved and admired Sasha, but still he would avail himself of the opportunity to play up. On occasion he ran into the hall in his muddy galoshes. Floor and carpet were dirtied and Anna and Sasha were horrified. Such antics marked him off from his brothers and sisters.12
The children paired off for companionship. Sasha and Anna, the two eldest, got together; then came the boisterous couple, Volodya and Olga; and the third pairing was of Dmitri and Maria. The closeness of Sasha and Anna endured beyond adolescence; they still saw a lot of each other when they became students in St Petersburg. Volodya and Olga were also contented playmates; nobody could remember them ever falling out. Their harmony probably resulted, at least in part, from the fact that Olga, who had a sweet nature, did as Volodya told her, and as their elder sister Anna recalled, ‘he liked to give commands [komandovat’].’13 Volodya and Olga raced about the large garden and played on the trapeze that Ilya Nikolaevich had bought after the family had watched a travelling circus in Simbirsk. On quieter days, Volodya and Olga might get out the croquet set. But always there was some palaver. Their mother’s friend Gertruda Nazareva was to write: ‘The whole day long you could hear Olga singing, hopping, spinning round or playing with Volodya, who I think caused greater bother than any of the others to his mother and elder sister.’14
Again he was hardly a delinquent, just the most mischievous child in a remarkably orderly family. Punishment was rarely thought necessary. Ilya Nikolaevich had a fiery temperament and his sons and daughters feared his disapproval even when his job took him off on lengthy trips around the province of Simbirsk. At such times Maria Alexandrovna punished any misbehaving child by sending them to sit on the chair in Ilya Nikolaevich’s study. This was known in the family as ‘the black chair’. The family never forgot an episode when Volodya, after a piece of naughtiness, was dispatched to the chair and his mother forgot all about him for hours. Mischievous though he was, he did not dare get down or make a sound until she returned to the study.15
And so life went on. Their growing number of children impelled the Ulyanov parents to look for a larger house, and in summer 1878, on Ilya’s appointment as Provincial Director of Popular Schools, they moved to 48 Moscow Street. This was the place Volodya was to remember as his Simbirsk home. Moscow Street was near the heart of the town and was one of the larger, more prestigious streets since it contained the official residence of the Simbirsk army garrison commander. (Even so, it was not supplied with a pavement and pedestrians had to walk along wooden duckboards if they wished to avoid the mud and puddles in wet weather.) The Orthodox Cathedral, the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia and the Karamzin Public Library all lay within a short distance. The location was convenient for the entire family, including Maria Alexandrovna, who could visit the Lutheran Church a few houses away. But the main attraction for the Ulyanovs was the house itself. Ilya had a capacious study on the ground floor; Maria, too, had her own room. Downstairs there were five large rooms and a kitchen and plenty of space existed in the children’s bedrooms on the first floor. The garden was substantial; large trees graced the lawn and the family employed a gardener to produce the fruit and vegetables they needed. Like all middle-class professional families, the Ulyanovs had servants.
As they settled into their new home, they were known by their acquaintances as ‘the beautiful family’. Ilya was esteemed for his achievements in educational administration and Maria was respected for her musical and linguistic accomplishments. The children without exception were successful at school and were noted for their good behaviour at home and in the town. It was a topic of local amazement that none of them strayed into the horticultural part of the grounds. No flower or vegetable was ever trampled, no tree branch broken. It was a matter of honour that no Ulyanov child, even the disruptive Volodya, should misbehave in public. Any such incident was a cause of local comment. For example, neighbours were surprised in winter when the Ulyanov children, like children in all other Simbirsk families, threw snowballs at passers-by through the wicker fence.16
They were not kept apart from other girls and boys because Ilya Nikolaevich and Maria Alexandrovna supplemented their income by taking in lodgers. Among these were the Persiyanov family, who occupied rooms on the mezzanine floor.17 Vyacheslav Persiyanov was in the same school year as Vladimir Ulyanov. So too was Nikolai Nefedev, whose mother had died and whose father pleaded with the Ulyanov parents to let his son live with them while attending school. The request was granted and space was found for him in a converted bath-house at the bottom of the garden.18 Vladimir played a lot with Nikolai Nefedev. But generally the Ulyanov children sought their closest companions within the family. The children had been brought up to make something of themselves, and each supported the efforts of the others. Perhaps the close ties of the family made it harder for the children to form deep relationships outside the family. Only four of the six grew to adulthood. Of these, Maria never married and seems to have been celibate; and although both Anna and Dmitri married, the weddings took place in their late twenties: there was no rush to leave the Ulyanov home. Vladimir, despite marrying in his mid-twenties, did so in circumstances that make it unlikely that he did this out of a passionate commitment.
The stable warmth of family life, however, did not stop Vladimir from being antisocial to his sisters and brothers. There was always a touch of malice in his character. Thus, although he got on well with his little brother Dmitri, he sometimes teased him badly. Vladimir used to say that Dmitri could cry ‘to order’. Dmitri denied this, but under further baiting from Vladimir he would break down in tears. Then Vladimir would announce that Dmitri indeed cried to order.19
Such behaviour annoyed his parents and the older children, particularly Alexander. Yet he was still popular with them and it was not thought that his faults outweighed his virtues, and his sister Olga continued to believe that he could do no wrong. His educational prowess was a source of pride to the family. The best schools in Simbirsk were the Classical Gimnazia for the boys and the Marinskaya Gimnazia for the girls. An entrance examination was obligatory and only very able students secured a place. The Ulyanov children were bright and had been prepared for the examination, and their father’s rank in the educational system exempted him from paying the regular thirty rubles per annum for each of them. Maria Alexandrovna had worked on them to get them through the examination. She took each child in turn and used the new-fangled method of phonics and flash-cards to teach them to read.20 Part-time tutors were also employed, mainly from among the young teachers trained by Ilya Nikolaevich. Several of them came to the Ulyanov home, including Vasili Kalashnikov, Ivan Nikolaev and Vera Prushakevich.21 The parents’ expectation of achievement was intense and an early start in literacy and numeracy was recognised as the most effective means of enhancing the children’s eventual educational attainment.
The eldest child Anna sought relief from the pressure of parental expectations:22
It was I who a year later often begged my mother with bitter tears to take me out of the gimnazia, assuring her that I would accomplish more at home; and sometimes I implored her permission to miss school, sitting down to work with considerable zeal. I sensed very painfully that father would look on this as a manifestation of laziness. I felt that this was unjust, but couldn’t explain this intelligently and did not dare talk about it to father.
Anna was an intelligent girl who had been promoted to the class a year ahead of her age. But she could not cope with the amount of homework and was suffering badly from headaches and insomnia.
Not daring to mention any of this to her father, she asked her mother to negotiate for her to study alone at home. But her father was implacable.23 Anna was too loyal to accuse her father of being insensitive; she did the opposite and reproached herself for being a ‘fiery, capricious’ girl.24 Yet a sense of resentment persisted. She thought that her father might have been a little more indulgent to his offspring when they did well. If Ilya Nikolaevich liked one of her essays, he used to mention it to her mother but not to Anna herself. Simbirsk’s leading educationalist was a poor psychologist. The occasional touch of praise, Anna concluded, would not have gone amiss.25 Not surprisingly, she grew up with a tendency to panic when faced with educational tests of various sorts. Maria, her younger sister, was the same. Both were intelligent and purposive girls, but Maria spent her early adult years starting course after course and not finishing them. Anna was clear in her own mind that the two of them had been pushed too hard as youngsters and that they had failed to pick up the confidence that seemed to come naturally to her brothers Alexander and Vladimir.
Certainly Vladimir was bright and confident. The succession of personal tutors prepared him for a couple of years and in summer 1879, at the age of nine, he sat the various tests for the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia. In the autumn he entered the first class, which consisted of thirty boys.26 In his dark-blue tunic with its upturned, military collar and nine brass buttons he looked just like the others. He was the second Ulyanov boy to enter the school: Alexander was already a pupil there and was the outstanding student of his year.
The kind of education received by Vladimir Ulyanov has not attracted much attention. But in fact it is of great significance for his later development. The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment had laid down statutes for all Russian gimnazii in 1871. The curriculum and timetable were set in St Petersburg. A preparatory class was introduced so that all pupils might start with a roughly equal opportunity of successful completion of their education. Thereafter, from the age of nine, each boy was expected to undergo a further eight years’ schooling. In the preparatory class attention was paid to the contemporary educational rudiments. Out of twenty-two hours per week, six were spent on the Russian language, six on handwriting, six on mathematics and science and four on religion. Other subjects were brought into the curriculum as soon as the boys entered the first full gimnazia year. In the first-year timetable of twenty-eight hours, eight were given over to Latin, five to maths and physics, four each to Russian and French, three to handwriting, two each to geography and religion. German was introduced in year two, history and ancient Greek in year three. Handwriting was dropped after year one, geography after year four. This balance of subjects was by and large sustained through to the eighth and final year.27
Latin and Greek constituted half the timetable in years six to eight. The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment saw Classics as purveying the ideals of belief, truth, endurance and courage; it regarded the ancient authors as promoting loyalty to the interests of the Romanov dynasty. As in the rest of Europe, the norm was to get pupils to translate the works of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Livy, Horace and Cicero. Intellectual curiosity was discouraged. The accurate rendering of the authors into Russian was the requirement and the older classes were taught to transform Greek and Latin hexameters into Russian verse.
Russian literature was hardly studied; nearly all the country’s great poets and novelists – Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Lev Tolstoi and Dostoevski – were harassed by the state censorship for supplying ideas subversive of the contemporary political system. But the Russian literary heritage was not entirely ignored. In the restricted time allotted by the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment the pupils were required to learn several poems by heart. The selection included not only politically ‘safe’ figures such as Krylov, Zhukovski and Koltsov but also even Pushkin and Lermontov. The appreciation of artistry was less important to the schoolteachers than the inculcation of patriotic pride and allegiance to the monarchy. Immense slabs of poetry had to be committed to memory and tested at the end of the school year. It was a tall order. In order to be permitted to move from the fourth to the fifth class in the gimnazia, Vladimir Ulyanov and his fellow pupils had to be able to recite over a hundred poems, including forty-five fables by Krylov and thirty-one of Pushkin’s poems. It is hardly astounding that only half the class passed the end-of-year oral test enabling them to proceed to the fifth year. Vladimir was among the successful pupils.28
Although the pupils studied French and German, the government strove to stamp out the potential for them to pick up revolutionary ideas. Grammar edged out literature. No Russian gimnazia taught Voltaire, Rousseau or Goethe, and Headmaster Fëdor Kerenski – who by an extraordinary quirk of history was father of Alexander Kerenski, who was to lead the Provisional Government in 1917 which Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew – banned his pupils from using the Karamzin Public Library where they might borrow disapproved works of literature. Kerenski was following the government’s guidelines. The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment, wishing to insulate gimnazia students from the contemporary world, reduced physics, chemistry and biology to a minimal presence in the curriculum (and the works of the world-famous chemist Mendeleev were withdrawn from libraries). The government also stipulated that gimnazia pupils should attend the Russian Orthodox Church services regularly. Discipline was rigorously enforced. Like other headmasters of the period, Fëdor Kerenski employed beatings, detentions, extra work and heavy moralising, and, as was the fashion in all tsarist schools, teachers encouraged pupils to snitch on their delinquent fellows.29
Such schooling was unpleasant for most pupils. The discipline was irksome and sometimes brutal, the workload immense, the curriculum disconnected from everyday life. Although none of the worst disciplinary sanctions was applied to Vladimir, it is difficult to believe that his experience at school left no negative mark on his consciousness. The state’s direct, heavy-handed interference in the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia had a pettifogging aspect and few bright pupils failed to draw the conclusion that if the schools were run in so bureaucratic a fashion, then so were the other state institutions. Vladimir must also have noted the contrast between his studies at home and the regime in the school. Under his mother’s tutelage his academic work had been more pleasurable; the fact that many fellow pupils abandoned the gimnazia because of the excessive requirements must surely have given him at least a rudimentary idea that all was not well.30 Yet, unlike elder brother Sasha at the same age, Vladimir did not rebel. Just once, when he was caught mimicking his incompetent French master Adolf Por, did he get into trouble.31 But his father made him promise never again to step out of line, and Vladimir reverted to his habits of obedience.
His general attitude, however, was positive and he made exceptional academic progress. Headmaster Kerenski was pleased with the adolescent, awarding him not merely 5s but 5+s in his school reports; he was so impressed that, according to Anna Ilinichna, he ‘forgave him certain acts of mischief that he would not so easily have forgiven in respect of others’. She added: ‘Of course, an influence here was exerted by his good attitude to Ilya Nikolaevich and the entire family.’32 The only person to express doubts about Vladimir was indeed his father Ilya Nikolaevich, who worried that academic success was coming to him too easily and that he might not recognise the need to be industrious.33
Vladimir’s obedience is unsurprising – and not just because of the pressure of parental expectations. The gimnazii were a pathway to the higher echelons of Imperial state and society. Vladimir Ulyanov, once he attained maturity, would automatically obtain noble status. But even the Ulyanovs needed to enhance their opportunities, and an education of this quality secured this. The prior work he had done with his mother and tutors at home meant that the curriculum was already within his reach. He was accustomed to being diligent. Immediately he became the brightest boy of his year. Annual reports gave him the full five marks in subject after subject. Never did he obtain less than this except in the single subject of logic. No doubt it helped a little that he was the son of the Simbirsk Province Director of Popular Schools. In a setting where personal contacts played a large part in everyone’s career few teachers would have wanted to offend Ilya Ulyanov. But Headmaster Kerenski did not have to write a fictional account. Vladimir Ulyanov, like his brother Alexander, was a genuinely brilliant pupil. For Vladimir, it was natural to try his hardest at school. Work was a family duty and duty was a pleasure.
He was generally unobtrusive outside lessons but was noted for his sarcasm, and when a fellow pupil broke his pencils, Vladimir grabbed him by the collar and forced him to stop.34 Not himself a trouble-maker, he met trouble with a direct physical response. No one bullied Vladimir for long. He was strong and stocky, and it did him no harm that he shared his expertise when others could not understand the lessons. But he had no close friends at the gimnazia.35 Vladimir got on with his work, left people alone and expected to be left alone. He was a bit of a loner.
Meanwhile his education was inculcating an attentiveness to the precise meaning of words; the years of parsing Latin verbs and construing Greek iambics left their mark. The pernicketiness of Lenin the writer–revolutionary owes as much to the literary heritage of Athens and Rome as to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It may even be that he first learned from the orators Demosthenes and Cicero how to discern a crack in the wall of an opponent’s arguments and prise it open – and perhaps the stories of heroism in the epic poetry of Homer and the prose of Xenophon and Livy predisposed him to give high value to the potential role of the individual leader. Nor can anyone who has made a close study of the historians Herodotus and Thucydides fail to be influenced by their insistence on delving below the surface of events to their hidden basic causes. But all this is speculation. Vladimir Ulyanov was reluctant to reveal much about his early life. What little we know about his reaction to the Classics comes from his relatives. His sister Anna, for example, wrote that his zest for Latin was such that he provided her – six years his senior – with coaching on the more difficult elements of grammar.36
Thus throughout the rest of his life he quoted sentences from the ancient authors even though most of his readers had not had the benefit of his education. This was not just a bit of exhibitionism; it was the unconscious behaviour of former Classicists everywhere in contemporary Europe. In later years he had no time for Latin and Greek. But then suddenly in 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War, he felt a compulsion to resume his philosophical research and (as we shall see) to include Aristotle among the authors he studied.
Yet the gimnazia education was as important in what it failed to do as in what it did to the pupils. In its attempt to avert attention from acute public problems, it vacated space to be filled by ideas that were not to the liking of the official authorities. The fact that a comprehensive training in the humanities was withheld from the pupils exposed them to the attractions of philosophies that incurred the government’s official disapproval. Headmaster Kerenski had tried to maintain a monopoly over the ideas available to his pupils by ruling that they needed his permission to use the public libraries. But the effort was counterproductive. Clever boys and girls, when reacting against the contents of their schooling, often identified any proposition opposed to the officially approved notions as being inherently worthy of their commitment. If the tsar thought one way, then the truth must lie in the opposite one. Ilya Nikolaevich, for once, declined to support the headmaster; he had always regarded the gimnazia curriculum as too narrow and had sent his children to gimnazii mainly because they offered an avenue for entrance to universities. While not condoning open subversive reading matter, he allowed his son Alexander to take out a subscription to the weighty Historical Journal.37
Ilya Nikolaevich himself not only followed the latest discussions of pedagogy but also kept a large general library in his study. He and Maria Alexandrovna were typical of most educated Russians in keeping abreast of the great works of contemporary literature, and Maria Alexandrovna particularly enjoyed the romantic poet Lermontov (who had written in the manner of Lord Byron). Ilya Nikolaevich imparted his cultural enthusiasms by visual as well as academic means. For example, he took Vladimir and a couple of classmates on a trip in the family horse-drawn trap outside Simbirsk to the spot described by the writer Ivan Goncharov in his novel The Precipice. There, at Kindyakovka, they gazed up at the precipice described in the novel and clambered about the bottom of it.38 Other authors, too, were read and discussed in the family. Thus the Ulyanov children read the novels of Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev. Characteristically they made a competitive game out of what they read. In the evenings, when they had nothing else to do, they would try to guess the name of the author of an excerpt from a poem or a novel. They were a studious lot even when they were having fun.39
Politics hardly impinged on Vladimir Ulyanov’s early life in any direct fashion. He saw the Turkish prisoners-of-war who were billeted nearby on Moscow Street during the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, and his father made a collection for the Red Cross while hostilities were going on. But the Ulyanov parents tended to avoid direct political discussion. At least they did so until 1 March 1881. It was on that day – a fateful one for subsequent Russian history – that terrorists assassinated the Emperor Alexander II. There had been several conspiracies against his life in recent years. But the People’s Will organisation, formed in 1879, was more competent than its predecessor and it was partly in response to their violent activity that Alexander II had begun to contemplate granting a consultative national assembly. But the People’s Will did not want merely a reformed monarchy. They wanted the Emperor dead, and at last they succeeded with a bomb that was rolled under a carriage bearing him through to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.
Vladimir Ulyanov was still only ten years old when the family attended the service of commemoration to the deceased emperor in Simbirsk Cathedral on 16 March. All local dignitaries, including the province’s governor, did the same. Ilya and Maria were appalled by the killing. They were not revolutionary sympathisers and detested the spilling of blood. Both considered that Alexander II had played a useful role in pushing Russia down the road towards reform, even though he had regressed somewhat in the 1870s. In particular, he had trimmed the rights of the elective provincial administrative bodies (the zemstva); he had also restricted the system of trial by jury after the socialist terrorist Vera Zasulich, who had been caught in the act of trying to assassinate the Governor-General of St Petersburg Fëdor Trepov, failed to be convicted by due process. Yet an agenda of reform remained in place through to the end of Alexander II’s life. Indeed, under pressure of the terrorist campaign, he had begun to give thought to sanctioning a consultative national assembly as a means of rallying support for the throne. His assassination had the effect of convincing his son and heir Alexander III to abandon all further reform. He directed intense suspicion at any innovative measures; his emphasis, until his death in 1894, was upon traditional concepts of order.
Vladimir Ulyanov presumably shared the revulsion of his parents from the terrorist act. But, like other children, he can hardly have been preoccupied by thoughts about politics once the anguished excitement about the Emperor’s death and funeral had dissipated. His precocity was as a school pupil, not as a revolutionary theorist.
Even so, political themes were not entirely absent from his young life. The Ulyanov children learned from their brother Alexander how to make toy soldiers out of paper and to organise play-battles. Alexander made up his models in the uniforms of Garibaldi’s troops of the Italian Risorgimento. Anna and Olga chose the Spanish forces that struggled to free their country from the Napoleonic invasion. Vladimir plumped for the Union Army of Abraham Lincoln that fought against the pro-slavery South in the American Civil War.40 Their cousin Nikolai Veretennikov was later to object that Vladimir had models of the contemporary ‘English’ army. But Dmitri Ulyanov, Vladimir’s younger brother, repudiated this version. By and large Dmitri was an accurate chronicler and there is all the more reason to believe him because of a second known political element in Vladimir’s early life. His favourite book, before he moved on to the Russian literary classics, was none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This tale of a Negro slave’s attempt to flee the cruelties of a cotton plantation in the American South was given pride of place in his room.41 Such choices cannot have been coincidental. The Ulyanov children were brought up in a cultural environment that favoured national, political and social freedom.
Yet it is striking that Vladimir’s most cherished book described not Russia but the USA. This was in keeping with the desire of his parents to keep themselves and their children away from dangerous discussions of Russian public life. If so, they were a little naive. Uncle Tom’s Cabin contained ideas of universal significance; its sentimental style communicated ideals of universal human dignity. When we try to trace the origins of Vladimir’s political outlook, we often look to what he read in his late adolescence and early manhood. We focus on Chernyshevski, Marx, Plekhanov and Kautsky. But we need to remember that, before these Russian and German male authors imprinted themselves upon his consciousness, an American woman – Harriet Beecher Stowe – had already influenced his young mind.
Vladimir was a lively boy. Once he had completed his school and other academic obligations, he loved to get outside. At the age of nine or ten he gave up playing the piano. His mother was disappointed; she was a serious pianist herself and trained her daughter Anna to a high enough level to play the main classical works as well as the operas of Richard Wagner.42 But Maria Alexandrovna – for once – complied with Vladimir’s wishes, perhaps because he had so much schoolwork to prepare. Yet the rest of his family did not think this was the reason. His sister Maria guessed that her brother felt that the piano was too girlish an occupation for him.43 This little event is also noteworthy as an early sign of Vladimir’s clinical capacity to decide what was worth doing and to drop everything else. It also reveals the unattractiveness of artistic activity for him. In fact he was an able painter. An extant postcard he made for a friend is executed in vivid colours; and in particular not a drop of paint is spilled where it should not be: Vladimir was already a perfectionist about anything he was intending to show to others. The postcard had one of those coded messages where the painted figures of Red Indians, trees and someone drowning stood for something recognisable to the recipient.44 He also learned from his mother how to compose a letter in invisible ink with the use of milk – this was to prove specially useful in 1895 when he needed to smuggle messages out of the St Petersburg House of Preliminary Detention.45
Vladimir, unlike his brothers and sisters, had no hobbies. Carpentry left him cold. Philately and other kinds of collecting were not for him. In the summertime he was practically never out of the family garden. He and Nikolai Nefedev were always up to pranks. Crouching among the fruit trees and birches, they set cage-traps for blue-tits. They lacked the expertise and were driven to buying birds from a Mr Lapshin, who lived in the Alexander Gardens in Simbirsk. Lapshin also sold them more efficient trapping mechanisms, and in the winter they caught five or six birds. In the following spring, Volodya determined to set them free. Young Nefedev persuaded him to keep a small goldfinch.46
On another occasion things took a nasty turn. Nikolai Nefedev and Volodya had the habit of swimming in the shallows of the river Sviyaga in the centre of Simbirsk. Seeing how other youngsters were fishing off the Vodovozny Bridge, they went home to make their own nets with the idea of catching fish of their own. Foolishly they followed another boy’s advice to starting fishing in the nearby ditch at a point near the town’s distillery. Although the water was not very deep, it was covered in green slime which made it indistinguishable from the quagmire next to it. Volodya lost his footing in search of frogs and tumbled into the quagmire. Both he and Nikolai let out a shriek. A worker ran speedily out of the distillery to their aid, but by then Volodya was enmired to his waist and in grave danger. The unnamed worker waded in after him, dragged him out and settled him on the bank. Knowing that he would be in trouble when his mother found out, Volodya tried to smarten himself up before going home. But to no avail. Inevitably his mother noticed his muddy face and clothes and the upshot was a prohibition on going fishing again.47
There was still plenty for Volodya to do outside the house. He liked to skate on the rivers Sviyaga and Volga; this was still allowed. He also enjoyed himself amusing young Dmitri and Maria. His games of hide-and-seek with them were much appreciated. Meanwhile Volodya kept his eyes on his brother Alexander and tried to copy him. There was a family joke that his first question, whenever he was in a quandary about something, was what would Alexander do in similar circumstances. He even ate what he thought would meet Alexander’s approval. This was more than a normal wish to imitate. Alexander was the family’s pride and joy. It is difficult to avoid the thought that within the sinews of confidence there lurked a streak of diffidence even in young Volodya.
What is clear beyond a shadow of doubt is that his personality had been to a very large extent moulded by his experiences as an adolescent. He had attended, and been successful, at a school where the very highest demands were made in relation to a very restricted curriculum. He emerged – and this would probably have occurred in such a family in any case – as an extraordinarily ambitious and determined young man. His schooling was narrow, but it also had depth, a depth that gave him the lifelong confidence to tackle any intellectual problem that came his way. The mental manoeuvrability required by the study of the Classics was never to leave him. Nor was the belief in the importance of the written word – and especially of the printed word. At the same Vladimir Ulyanov had access to ideas and emotions that predisposed him to question the nature of the society in which he lived. He had this mainly from books. ‘The other Russia’, the Russia of barge-haulers, peasants, country priests and factory workers, was unknown to him except through reports from his father or the novels of Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoi.
His intellectual challenge to the status quo had yet to emerge. He was mischievous and sharp-tongued, but these qualities did not express themselves in a political standpoint. For a boy of his age this was not unusual, even though it was not entirely unknown for gimnazia boys to adopt ideas of Revolution. In the eyes of his headmaster, Vladimir was an exemplar of academic devotion. He came from the sort of family that cultivated a spirit of industriousness and hopefulness; and he had gone to a school that gave him the opportunity to proceed to university and then to a career of public distinction. As yet there was no reason to predict that he would adopt an ideology markedly different from that of his father Ilya, who had his disappointments with the regime but flinched from that of any rebellious talk. Vladimir seemed set to achieve all the prizes that his father had achieved and more.
Until 1886, the year when Vladimir Ulyanov turned sixteen, he had no outward troubles. His parents had continued to better themselves. They lived in a large town-house on Moscow Street and Ilya had risen to the post of Director of Popular Schools for Simbirsk province. The Ulyanov parents had six children who appeared to be on the threshold of rewarding careers.
Yet the situation was not as congenial as it seemed. Later accounts have neglected evidence in the published memoirs that Ilya Ulyanov was a controversial local figure for the province’s more conservative and powerful inhabitants. In 1880 he had completed twenty-five years’ service; although he was only forty-nine, his terms of employment compelled him to apply formally for an extension to his contract. In the event he was given an extra year and then a further five years.1 Matters had been worsened by the stand taken by Ilya in the contemporary Russian debate about schooling. Complaints were being made that, like other educationalists of his generation, he paid scant attention to religious instruction in schools. Ilya in fact complied with the curriculum, which included the teaching of Christian belief. But he did not approve of the Orthodox Church itself being allowed to regulate schools, and he disliked the switch in governmental policy towards the construction of Church schools. Ilya incurred hostility for the stand he took. In 1884 Archpriest A. I. Baratynski attacked him in the local newspaper Simbirsk Provincial News.2 All this cannot have improved his ability to cope with his increasingly frequent bouts of ill health. He was becoming dispirited and had ceased to believe that he would be able to work until the normal age of retirement.3
He had always been at his happiest when he could get out and about in Simbirsk province. His last such visit was to the Syzran district, a hundred miles away, in mid-December 1885.4 His eldest child Anna, who had travelled from St Petersburg where she had been training to be a teacher on the new Higher Women’s Courses, joined him in Syzran. Father and daughter returned to find the rest of the family preparing for Christmas. He had still to write up his annual report on education in the province and much of his time was spent in a feverish attempt to finish this off before the festivities.5
It was typical of the family that Alexander, who in 1883 had entered St Petersburg University in the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, was not compelled to come home for the holiday. Already he was a student of promise. Alexander explained that he had to sit a zoology test in mid-December and a further one in organic chemistry in mid-January. In his letter to his parents he expressed no regret over his absence.6 He knew that they had hopes of his becoming a university professor7 and would approve of his wish to avoid disruption to his studies. In truth it would have taken several days for him to reach Simbirsk from St Petersburg. The railway system had still not been extended to Simbirsk, and in winter he could not use the steamship down the ice-bound river Volga.8 He would not have been able to do much studying on the way. Meanwhile Christmas at the Ulyanovs was organised by Maria Alexandrovna. The four youngest children – Vladimir, Olga, Dmitri and Maria – had finished their school term. A fir tree was erected in the sitting room and cards were painted and dispatched; presents were prepared. On Christmas Day the family went to St Nicholas Cathedral in Simbirsk.
Yet Ilya Ulyanov was not well. On 10 January 1886 he was coughing badly. Next day, when the Ulyanovs had visitors for afternoon tea, he did not join them. The family assumed that he was suffering from some temporary stomach malaise, and Anna Ilinichna talked unconcernedly about her plans to go back to her teacher-training course in St Petersburg. Ilya himself was determined to resume his administrative duties as the holiday came to an end. It was cold outside; snow was on the ground. Ilya refused to let up the pace of his work. On 12 January, although he still felt poorly, he arranged to be visited in Simbirsk by one of his inspectors, V. M. Strzhalkovski. They worked together until two o’clock in the afternoon. Yet Ilya Ulyanov did not come through to eat after Strzhalkovski’s departure. He had had another relapse. While the family was eating, he appeared in the doorway and gazed at everybody. They were to remember it as an occasion when he was trying to take his final leave of everybody. He made no direct comment in this vein, but simply went back into his study.9
His wife went to find him after lunch, and already he was shivering violently. She called out Dr Legcher and at five o’clock fetched Anna and Vladimir to see their father. By then he was in agony. He shuddered twice and then, just as suddenly, fell silent. Before Dr Legcher could arrive, Ilya Nikolaevich was dead. He was only fifty-three years old. Although there was no post-mortem, Legcher believed that the cause of death was a brain haemorrhage.10
Vladimir, in Alexander’s absence, performed a role of some responsibility for the family. While his mother and elder sister tended to the dead body and passed the news to relatives and acquaintances, Vladimir was sent out in the family carriage to bring back his brother Dmitri from a friend’s house. This was not a sign of Vladimir taking over responsibility for the household. Such a myth was Soviet-inspired, and was always ridiculous; in reality it was his mother and his sister Anna who were in charge of the main domestic arrangements. Vladimir could be spared to do the job of collecting young Dmitri and the fact that he was sent to do this in a carriage was a sign of Vladimir’s still rather junior status. The priority was to arrange the funeral, organise the family’s finances and generally plan the future for the Ulyanov children. Vladimir had yet to reach the age of sixteen years. His mother and his sister were not deferring to him: they were trying to protect him.
One of Maria Alexandrovna’s first needs was to write to the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment on 14 January 1886 requesting the delivery of the due payment of Ilya’s pension. According to the terms of her late husband’s pension, she could claim one hundred rubles for herself per month and a further twenty-five rubles for each of her children while they remained minors. This excluded Anna and Alexander. Maria Alexandrovna was entitled in total to two hundred rubles a month, a sum that would diminish as her younger four children attained maturity.11
The funeral of Ilya Ulyanov was held next day. The sudden death of a much admired local dignitary shocked teachers and educational administrators. Those who had been promoted by him were sometimes referred to as ‘Ulyanovites’; he was respected for the cultural benefit he had brought to his post as Director of Popular Schools. Ilya Ulyanov by his activity and his example had made a difference. Wreaths were prepared by schoolchildren and obituary notices appeared in the Simbirsk press. The chief bearer of his coffin, at the age of fifteen, was his second son Vladimir; it was traditional for coffins to be borne by the menfolk. The other bearers were Ilya’s closest friends and colleagues. Then the congregation processed to the Pokrovski Monastery in Simbirsk, where the remains of Ilya Ulyanov were buried in the grounds by the south-facing wall. His widow was offered possession of the medal of Stanislav, first class, which her deceased husband had been awarded a few days earlier, but she refused it. She preferred to remember him in a simpler fashion and arranged for a plain tombstone to be erected over his grave.12
Anna, her eldest daughter, considered abandoning her teacher’s training course in order to assist with the running of the family. Another possibility was for student friends to send on their lecture notes to her in Simbirsk so that she might return to take the exams in the autumn of 1886. Maria Alexandrovna would have none of it. Anna was told to return to St Petersburg to complete her studies. She departed in March.13 Meanwhile in an effort to stabilise her finances, Maria Alexandrovna rearranged the rooms in the house so that the family occupied only the half of it facing the river Sviyaga. The other half was rented first to a doctor, then to a lawyer.14
One of Maria Alexandrovna’s problems was the worsening behaviour of Vladimir. Although his father had often worked away from Moscow Street, his very existence had acted as a restraint upon the way Vladimir spoke to his mother. Ilya had not been a parent to be disobeyed and the mere possibility of paternal disapproval had usually been a sufficient deterrent to disrespect. All this changed after Ilya’s death. Vladimir became cheeky to his mother. Matters were made worse by his elder brother’s residence in St Petersburg: there was no one in the house whose disapproval he feared. When Alexander came home for the summer vacation, Vladimir did not even mind his brother witnessing his misbehaviour. This infuriated Alexander. After a contretemps between Vladimir and their mother while he and Alexander were having a game of chess, Alexander calmly but firmly declared: ‘Volodya, either you immediately go and do what Mama is telling you or else I’m not playing with you any more.’ Vladimir’s resistance crumbled. But he continued, more quietly, to assert himself more than the rest of the family thought seemly.15
Anna and Alexander talked about this after their father’s death as they tried to sort out their emotions. The pattern of relationships inside the family had been shattered by their bereavement, and the two eldest Ulyanov children – now in their twenties – were also having to come to terms with the fact that their brother Vladimir was entering late adolescence. Anna put the question directly to Alexander: ‘How do you take to our Volodya?’ His reply was negative: ‘Undoubtedly a very able person, but we don’t get on.’ Indeed when she wrote her memoirs, Anna was not confident that she remembered the exact words, and she wondered whether Alexander had not put it more forcefully, to the effect that ‘we absolutely don’t get on’.16
It was the domineering side of his brother that Alexander could not stand, especially when he was cheeky to their widowed mother. But this judgement on Vladimir, which many historians have eagerly endorsed, is too harsh. He was still a schoolboy. His father had suddenly died and naturally he was badly affected by the experience. Vladimir had not got over the shock. Any youth of fifteen in those circumstances, particularly one accustomed to the direct support of his elder brother and sister, might have been expected to exhibit some degree of uncongenial reaction. The fact that he did not go round maundering about his unhappiness does not mean that he managed to avoid being distraught. On the contrary, Vladimir was profoundly upset and withdrew into himself; the jovial boy of before had disappeared. Books were his consolation and he devoured many classics of Russian literature. His taste moved from Gogol to Turgenev. The wish for Gogolian caricatures of contemporary life had vanished. Now Vladimir Ulyanov preferred the steady and sensitive descriptions of provincial life offered by Turgenev. In Turgenev’s novels the public message of the writer was far from being self-evident. His readers assumed that somehow he wanted change in the regime. But was he a liberal, or an impatient conservative, or even a revolutionary?
How Vladimir Ulyanov interpreted the works of his favourite novelist is unknown. His later remarks were not necessarily a truthful reflection of what he had thought in his adolescence. But probably there was some similarity. To be an Ulyanov was to aim at educational improvement, at realistically possible improvement if only the Emperor consented. Vladimir in his adulthood would pick out situations in the novels that corroborated his Marxist interpretation of Russian reality. There were plenty of feckless landed noblemen and well-meaning but ineffectual intellectuals in Turgenev’s prose, and Lenin used them in his own writings to denounce Imperial society. Turgenev perhaps also had an influence through his stress that all the talk in the world would not change the world. What was required was action. Few of Turgenev’s characters were capable of action, but whereas the novelist pitied them for circumstances which they had little opportunity to alter, Lenin grew up to deride them.
The history of the Ulyanov family until 1886 provides several examples of its members engaging in activities that contributed to the improvement of life in the Russian Empire. Vladimir’s most respected forebears were doctors and teachers. They were not doctors and teachers who did little healing and teaching, as was the case in the novels of Turgenev or in the turn-of-the-century plays of Anton Chekhov. They were practical professionals. It was possible to read Turgenev in other ways. For example, he can appear as an advocate of kindness or the embodiment of Hamlet-like indecisiveness; he may also be regarded as an artist of the word, who was more interested in the manner of exposition than in the substance of his own thought. But, for Vladimir Ulyanov, Turgenev was a brilliant painter of the defects in Imperial society that needed correction.
While Vladimir was starting to ask himself basic questions about life in Russia, his brother Alexander in distant St Petersburg was already an enemy of the Romanov monarchy. The shock of their father’s death stayed with him for many weeks, and several people were concerned lest he commit suicide. But they underestimated the young man’s determination to continue with his research on the biology of annular worms. His dissertation, once submitted to the university authorities, won the approval of his professors, and he was awarded a gold medal for it. His mother was delighted, though the thought that Ilya Nikolaevich could not share in her joy caused her to burst into tears.
In his letters home Alexander chatted about the cost of lodging, the ghastly food and the unsavoury landladies. Unlike Anna, however, he did not offer to drop his studies out of worry about his mother’s widowhood; he intended to consolidate his base for a successful career. But he was troubled by his growing revulsion from the political conditions in the Russian Empire. He had hated the irksome regime in the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia. He had also lost his religious faith at about the age of sixteen. His purity of purpose was such that his father had made an exception of him and absolved him of the requirement to attend church services on Sundays. His spirit of intellectual challenge persisted in St Petersburg. By 1886 he was coming to agree with those of his generation who called for a root-and-branch transformation of the Russian political and social structure. He had turned into a revolutionary sympathiser. The very outcome feared by Ilya Ulyanov was being realised. Alexander Ulyanov, breaking with his father’s example, thought peaceful, evolutionary development of society impossible in Russia.
A large number of university students had the same attitude. In the 1880s there were only eight universities in the Russian Empire and the most prestigious of them was St Petersburg. The others were in Moscow, Kiev, Yurev, Kharkov, Warsaw, Kazan and Novorossiisk. Officials treated students as a necessary evil and suspected them of being extremely prone to subversive notions. The Ministries of the Interior and of Education refused to relax their tight control over them. There were no grants for impecunious students, and many of them barely survived the rigours of their courses by taking paid employment in order to pay for food and shelter. But there were no such worries for Alexander Ulyanov. As long as he reported how he spent his money, he was allocated exactly what he asked for. But more generally Alexander was as irked by the regimentation of academic life as any fellow student. There were regulations about everything from the curriculum and prescribed textbooks to comportment, dress and lodgings. Anything that might bring young men and women into contact with philosophies of liberalism, of socialism, of atheism or indeed of any kind of challenge to the institutional status quo was eradicated.
In reaching his stand as a revolutionary, Alexander mentioned his frustration at the obstacles put in the path of the development of scientific research in Russia. His general hostility to the monarchy, therefore, was induced by personal experience. He felt that the regime was obscurantist about science; he never forgot that science had been discouraged in his gimnazia education. He expanded this particular sensation into a comprehensive rejection of the regime and everything it stood for.
St Petersburg University, like all the great institutions of the Russian Empire, was a vantage-point for observing the power and majesty of the monarchy. Established by the tsars on Vasilevski Island, it was only a short distance from the bridge leading over the river Neva to the Winter Palace. From the university it was possible to glimpse the great statue of the Emperor Peter the Great near St Isaac’s Cathedral. Peter’s horse seemed about to hurl itself and its rider into the waters. The symbolism of monarchical determination to rule society in his own chosen fashion, to conquer nature and to make Russia into a power respected throughout northern Europe, was unmistakable. Also visible from St Petersburg University was the Winter Palace of the tsars, including the incumbent Emperor Alexander III. The building where he lived and governed stretched along the bank to the south of St Isaac’s Cathedral, and was fronted by a vast semi-circular space that gave visitors a view of a neo-Classical frontage with huge, pillared segments. The granite magnificence of the Winter Palace was known across the continent. Opposite it across the Neva stood the Peter-Paul Fortress, where rebels against the Romanovs were traditionally incarcerated.
St Petersburg itself had been created at the behest of Peter the Great; no village had existed on the site before he opted to transfer his seat of government there from Moscow. Marshes were drained. Institutions and dwelling-places were constructed. Moscow lost its status as the capital. Hundreds of thousands of peasants died in the programme of works commanded by Emperor Peter, perishing from exhaustion, malnutrition and disease. It was impossible to live in the central zone of the city, where the university lay, and not be conscious of the power of the Imperial state. And Alexander Ulyanov was an acute observer of his environment.
It was common at this time for the natural science and engineering faculties to attract young men who jibbed against the monarchy. What was different about Alexander and his friends was their willingness to adopt an ideology of violent opposition. Already before his father’s death he was taking up with friends who believed in instigating a general revolutionary transformation by assassinating the Emperor Alexander III. Initially he simply talked with them; but steadily they undermined his reluctance to become a participant in their conspiratorial group. The leaders were Orest Govorukhin and Pëtr Shevyrëv. Alexander was a useful recruit for them. His character was such that, once convinced that something was morally desirable, he would stick to his aim through thick and thin; and he had the inestimable advantage of being a scientist with a practical knowledge of chemistry: they wanted him to make up the nitroglycerine for the bomb with which they planned to kill the Emperor. Also important was Alexander’s facility with language. They wanted his help with the production of propaganda explaining the political objectives of the group. Late in 1886 he finally threw in his lot with them. The twenty-year-old Alexander Ulyanov intended to be a regicide.
What was the group’s rationale? The dominant ideology of Russian revolutionaries had been socialism – or, in some cases, anarchism. They were usually known as narodniki (roughly translatable as populists). The leaders and activists in the various clandestine groups had had many disputes, but generally agreed that the peasantry’s customs of communal welfare, collective responsibility and co-operation at work and at leisure should be the foundations of the ‘good’ society. Consequently this generation of revolutionaries can be regarded as advocates of an agrarian ideology; they wanted the transformation of society to begin in the countryside. But they also had a broader agenda. They believed in ‘the people’ and wished to win the nascent working class as well as the peasants to their cause. They had no time for the idea that Russia would be better off without industry; they were hostile, too, to privileging the Russians over the other nations of the Russian Empire and would have been enthusiastic supporters of the Socialist International founded in 1889 in Europe. Russian agrarian socialists aimed to enable Russia to avoid capitalism altogether. They wanted to establish a society that embodied socialism and to bring all oppression and exploitation to an end.17
The fearful revenge wreaked by Alexander II’s son and heir Alexander III had a number of consequences. In particular it discouraged many revolutionaries from persisting with a political strategy that prioritised the campaign to kill the Imperial family. Until Govorukhin’s group grew up in 1886, there had been no serious enterprise of the sort for five years.
Another development was of equal importance. This was that many revolutionaries concluded that the agrarian socialists had been deeply misguided in the way they thought about transforming the state and the society of the Russian Empire. A revision of strategy was demanded most notably by Georgi Plekhanov, who maintained that the future of the Revolution did not realistically lie with the peasant, the land commune and the countryside. Plekhanov was a lapsed agrarian socialist. For him, the hunting down of revolutionary activists after Alexander II’s death was just one defeat too many. He urged that success could no longer be achieved unless the clandestine groups recognised that Russia was undergoing an economic and social transformation. Railways were being laid to connect all the major cities. Factories were being financed and constructed. Mines were being sunk. Foreign investment was being attracted into the country in pursuit of the quick, high profits available in an economy rich in natural resources and cheap, willing labour. It was no longer feasible, wrote Plekhanov, to dream of transforming Russia into a socialist society without it first undergoing the stage of capitalist development. Capitalism, he declared, had already arrived – and had arrived in force.
This led Plekhanov, who fled to Switzerland in 1880, to proclaim that revolutionaries in Russia should place their faith in the urban working class, in contemporary forms of industrial activity, in large-scale social and economic units. As a former leader of Black Redistribution, he remained an advocate of political change by means of revolution. In 1883 he and his friends Vera Zasulich, Lev Deich and Pavel Axelrod formed the Emancipation of Labour Group – and they announced that only Marxism offered a key to understanding and transforming Russia. Previous revolutionary trends, including their own earlier commitment to agrarian socialism, were rejected by the Emancipation of Labour Group as being based upon unscientific sentimentality. The future for socialists of the Russian Empire, the Group insisted, lay with Marxism.18
These niceties have greater political moment in retrospect than they appeared to have at the time. The differences are more of degree than of kind. For the agrarian socialists did not give themselves this name. They usually designated themselves simply as ‘revolutionaries’. Later they became known as narodniki; for they always claimed to be acting in the name of ‘the people’ as distinct from the governing authorities. As often as not, they referred to themselves as adherents of this or that revolutionary group such as Land and Freedom, Black Redistribution and People’s Will. Practically all these socialists, while seeing virtues in the ideas and practices of the people, were very far from repudiating the need for Russia’s industrialisation. They also found, through bitter experience, that workers were more responsive to revolutionary invocations than were the peasants. When a surge of students went out to effect revolutionary propaganda in the countryside in 1874, many of them had been turned over to the Ministry of the Interior by astonished peasants. Most such socialists regarded Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as attractive exponents of the economic and social case for socialism. It is no coincidence that the first translation of Marx’s Capital into any foreign language was made by a Russian populist, Nikolai Danielson, in 1872.
But Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour Group challenged this eclectic attitude to the definition of the most desirable form of socialism. Plekhanov wanted revolutionaries in Russia to deny, once and for all, that the traditions of the peasantry had anything positive to offer. The remnants of the populist organisations that had survived the police hunts after 1881 were aghast at this, and condemned Plekhanov as an ill-informed betrayer of the revolutionary movement. Bitter polemics were exchanged in 1883–6.
The small organisation joined by Alexander Ulyanov in mid-1886 had as the first of its purposes to kill Emperor Alexander III and as its second to mend the rift between the two rival revolutionary tendencies. For this reason they drew up a statement of objectives which would demonstrably overlap the objectives of the new Russian Marxists – and Alexander Ulyanov was given the task of final literary elaboration. A number of points were primed to appeal to Marxists. Above all, Alexander Ulyanov wrote about scientific ‘laws’. He also called for an elective assembly for the whole country – Plekhanov had repeatedly demanded the same thing. He did not mention the peasantry. Alexander Ulyanov insisted that all the oppressed sections of society had an equal interest in the removal of the monarchy. Truth, science, freedom and justice: all were ideals of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire. Alexander Ulyanov was well placed to predict which aims would be attractive to Marxists, for he himself had recently used his facility in the German language to translate some of Marx’s works into Russian. His organisation’s members, poised to exploit a political crisis arising out of the Emperor’s annihilation, wished to have as many active supporters on the streets as possible.
Their primitive methods had a trace of theatricality. They kept their activity to anniversaries in revolutionary history. In November, before Alexander Ulyanov joined them, they organised a student demonstration commemorating the life of the anti-monarchy writer Nikolai Dobrolyubov. The group planned that their next venture would involve not a demonstration, which by its nature would mean that other students had to be alerted, but an attempt on the life of the Emperor. The date chosen was gruesomely symbolic: 1 March 1887, the sixth anniversary of the assassination of the Emperor Alexander II.
Nothing, however, went right for the conspirators. One of them was already in the last stages of tuberculosis and another left the country at the last moment. The group’s members nonetheless went ahead on the day, but luck played into the hands of the authorities. Two members were picked up in suspicious circumstances and the attempt to blow up the Emperor had to be abandoned. The Okhrana, the government’s secret police, interrogated the arrested men and succeeded, one by one, in apprehending virtually all the group’s members. Alexander Ulyanov was among them. The Okhrana took friends and relatives of the accused into custody, so Anna Ulyanova too was incarcerated despite having had no part in the conspiracy. The interrogations revealed everything the police needed to know, and when Alexander Ulyanov saw this he took an exceptionally brave decision. First, he determined to take the blame even for aspects of the conspiracy that did not involve him. Second, he made up his mind to use his trial as an opportunity to disseminate the basic ideas of the revolutionaries, an opportunity denied him in the legal press because of the official censorship. This decision, he knew, would probably cost him his life.
Still suffering from the loss of her husband, Maria Alexandrovna was stupefied by what had happened. Even more astonished was Alexander’s elder sister Anna. What on earth, she asked, had been going on? Her words expressed the depth of long-unstated emotions: ‘There is no one better on earth or more kindly than you. It’s not just me who’ll say this, as a sister; everyone who knew you will say this, my dear unwatchable little sun in the sky.’19 Anna was released, but put under police supervision until 1892.
Alexander’s mother was not at first convinced that her son had planned regicide. She wrote immediately to the Emperor himself pleading for him to be released. She lied on his behalf, claiming that Alexander had always been ‘religious’. But what mother would not have said this and a lot more to save her son from being hanged? In the Ministry of Interior it was recognised that the press might take up her cause unless she herself were to be shown the materials of her son’s confession. In a break with precedent she was allowed to come to St Petersburg and talk to the prisoner. Alexander made no pretence. He was guilty of the most heinous crime in Imperial law, and admitted it. His mother’s hope was that he would do as others in his group were doing by expressing remorse and begging for mercy. She reasonably thought that he might thereby secure himself a sentence of penal labour. If this happened, she intended to take the younger Ulyanov children – presumably including Vladimir – to Siberia and to assist Alexander in serving out his term. Maria Alexandrovna would stand by her eldest son regardless.
When mother and son met in the Peter-Paul Fortress, Alexander fell to his knees and implored her to forgive him. But he refused to plead for a pardon. The Emperor took note of the trial proceedings and was aware that Alexander Ulyanov was consciously increasing the degree of his responsibility for the assassination attempt, but he saw no reason to commute the court’s death sentence. Not only Ulyanov but also V. D. Generalov, P. I. Andreyushkin, V. S. Osipanov and P. Y. Shevyrëv were consigned to the Shlisselburg Prison and at dawn on 8 May 1887 were taken from their cells and hanged.
Alexander’s mother had returned to Simbirsk: there was absolutely nothing more she could do for him. After her husband’s death and the execution of her eldest son, she was distraught, and contemplated suicide. In her absence in St Petersburg, Anna Veretennikova, the children’s aunt, had come from Kazan to look after them. The teacher Vera Kashkadamova also visited the Moscow Street home. All the Ulyanov children were in a condition of deep shock. The two elder daughters were especially distressed. Anna Ilinichna had lost the brother she adored, but managed to keep her emotions from view. Olga Ilinichna, however, threw herself to the ground and sobbed. Then she leaped up and shouted threats against the Emperor who had refused to spare Alexander. Aunt Anna was terrified. But then Olga, too, took herself in hand and strove not to let her mother see her distress. Maria Alexandrovna pulled herself together. She no longer thought of killing herself. When her youngest child, little Maria, climbed on to her lap on her return from St Petersburg, she knew that she had made the right decision. The Ulyanovs were determined to survive.20
They endured not only bereavement but also social ostracism. Vera Kashkadamova was one of the very few family friends who would still speak to them. Respectable Simbirsk – its doctors, teachers, administrators and army officers – indicated its abhorrence for any family that could feed and raise a regicide. When Olga went to the gimnazia, her teachers and classmates refused to have anything to do with her. Local society was closing its doors to the family. Most people were aghast at the plot to assassinate the Emperor. In 1881 the Ulyanov family had attended the Cathedral service commemorating the life of Alexander II. But a member of the same family had now been involved in a murderous conspiracy, and the Ulyanovs were treated as pariahs.
This terrible experience has never been accorded its true significance. The point is that the Ulyanovs had never been quite the same as most other noble families of Simbirsk. Ilya Nikolaevich was a newcomer to hereditary titled status. In a single generation, through his own professional efforts, he had clambered up the ladder of society and entered the nobility. The mass of Simbirsk province’s noblemen had enjoyed this status for several generations and there was little contact between them and the Ulyanov family. Snobbery was pervasive. Ilya and Maria had tried to surmount the difficulty mainly by ignoring it and getting on with their lives. The pressure on the sons and daughters to do well at school and gain formal qualifications was characteristic of parents who had come from the margins of and wanted to integrate the family into Imperial society. These hopes were shattered by Alexander’s rash affiliation to a group of terrorists. They were back in the margins of society, and all the children – from Anna down to little Maria – held the Emperor and his ministers to blame for their social exclusion. They could not think of Alexander without feeling bitter about tsarism.
Vladimir Ulyanov suppressed his emotions more effectively than his sisters Anna and Olga. The hurt was there, but he buried it. There is a story in every account of him that, on hearing of Alexander’s execution, he reacted not as a family member but as a revolutionary in the making. According to Maria Ilinichna, he concluded that the strategic bankruptcy of agrarian-socialist terrorism had been proven. ‘No,’ he allegedly said in her presence, ‘we must not take that road.’ This has been taken by Marxist–Leninists – and not just by them – as evidence of Vladimir’s principled decision at the age of sixteen to repudiate agrarian socialism. A less plausible story it is hard to imagine, even though generations of scholars have accepted it. Maria Ilinichna wrote her memoir after Lenin’s death, when it was obligatory to portray his career as a monolithic piece and Lenin himself as infallible, even as a youth. The usefulness of her testimony is anyway dubious since she was only eight years old when Alexander was hanged. It defies credibility that she would be able to recall the exact wording of a statement whose ideological resonance would have meant nothing to her in childhood.
More believable is the account given by their occasional private tutor Vera Kashkadamova. She was impressed by Vladimir’s willingness to play lotto and charades with his young brother and sister in order to distract them from their pain. The topic of Alexander inevitably arose in conversation, and, according to Kashkadamova, Vladimir expressed no opinion that distanced him from his elder brother. On the contrary, she remembered the following comment: ‘It must mean that he had to act like this; he couldn’t act in any other way.’21
This is surely the authentic voice of Vladimir Ulyanov. In the few years after his brother’s death, Vladimir joined groups dedicated to the ideas of agrarian-socialist terrorists. This is inexplicable if he had really already opted for Marxism of the kind that rejected what his brother had stood for. Even so, Kashkadamova’s account does not demonstrate that Vladimir was so impressed by the precedent of Alexander that he instantly adopted his ideas. There is really no reason to think that Vladimir had fixed thoughts about anything. More likely he was only beginning to know about the world of revolutionary ideas. Probably too he felt an instinctive but still unfocussed sympathy with the choices made by his brother. They had had their disagreements, and had latterly not got along very well, but this was no barrier to Vladimir’s surge of posthumous identification with him. It may even have deepened the flood. The phrase remembered by Kashkadamova – ‘he couldn’t act in any other way’ – is probably our best sign that Vladimir felt impelled to discover why his admired elder brother had acted as he did. Alexander’s disappearance had the consequence of hardening the thoughts of a brilliant youth into the posture of a revolutionary activist.
Such was the family’s sense of duty that Vladimir and Olga Ulyanov continued to prepare for their gimnazia final-year examinations through the months of Alexander’s imprisonment and execution. The tenacity of these two youngsters was extraordinary. Although Simbirsk was not yet on any railway-line, the government ensured that everyone knew of Alexander Ulyanov’s crime and its punishment. The town authorities also pasted up posters about the event, and he was the subject of an article in a special issue of Simbirsk Provincial News two days after he was hanged.1
It was on these very days that Vladimir took the first of his final examinations at the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia. The examination had begun on 5 May 1887 and lasted a month. Vladimir’s concentration was impeccable, even though he and the rest of the family were engulfed by the terrible news from St Petersburg. His academic performance was very impressive; indeed in the circumstances it was almost inhumanly impressive. He had achieved a five, the maximum mark possible, in all ten examined subjects.2 Vladimir had come out top of his class of twenty-nine examinees and was eligible for the gimnazia’s gold medal, just like his brother before him. His sister Olga meanwhile achieved the same result at the Simbirsk Marinskaya Gimnazia.3 The awarding of these medals had become a delicate matter after the scandal of Alexander Ulyanov’s assassination attempt. But the two gimnazii were sufficiently insulated from political pressure for Vladimir and Olga to receive their prizes.
Kerenski wrote a supportive reference for Vladimir:
Extremely talented, consistently keen and accurate, Ulyanov in all classes was the top pupil and at the end of his course was awarded the gold medal as the most deserving pupil in performance, development and behaviour. Neither at the gimnazia nor outside did any occasion come to light when Ulyanov by word or deed attracted a disapproving opinion from the governing authorities or teachers of the gimnazia. His parents always carefully supervised Ulyanov’s education and moral development, and from 1886, after his father’s death, this involved his mother, who concentrated every concern and care on the upbringing of the children. Religion and rational discipline lay at the foundations of the education.
The good fruits of the domestic upbringing were obvious in Ulyanov’s excellent behaviour. Looking more closely at the domestic life and character of Ulyanov, I cannot but remark on his excessive reclusiveness and on his self-distancing from intercourse even with his acquaintances – and outside the gimnazia even with schoolmates who were the great flower of the school – and generally on his unsociability. Ulyanov’s mother does not intend to let her son out of her supervision for the entire time of his education at the University.
What was Kerenski’s purpose in his last paragraph? Maybe he was guarding himself professionally against the possibility that the boy would become involved in university student disturbances. But probably Kerenski was just telling the truth and his pupil really was rather antisocial. Vladimir had never been very gregarious, and those who knew him while his brother Alexander was in prison observed that he became very depressed and unfriendly.
Maria Alexandrovna needed to think fast. Her first decision was to sell the house on Moscow Street and move to Kazan province. This was sensible. The Ulyanovs faced unending social ostracism in Simbirsk whereas Maria Alexandrovna could count on the family being welcomed in Kokushkino. Dr Blank had added a wing to the Kokushkino mansion house specifically so that his daughters could bring their families on visits, and had bequeathed his estate jointly to his five daughters when he died in 1870. Thus the Ulyanovs had been in receipt of a share of the income derived from the peasants who rented the land. Until 1887 Maria Alexandrovna had left it to Anna Veretennikova and Lyubov Ardasheva, her sisters, to look after her Kokushkino interests.4 Maria Alexandrovna hurriedly alerted these sisters that she needed to move her place of residence to the estate. As soon as they had responded positively, she sold up the house on Moscow Street – as it happens, the buyer was the then Simbirsk police chief – and did not return to the town until her son Dmitri took a medical post there in 1905.
The children coped with their brother’s loss by not mentioning it. This was the way they had been brought up. It was years before the eldest, Anna Ilinichna, could speak about Alexander to anyone, and even then she spoke only to her mother and never to her brothers or her sister.5 The inner tension was terrible. Her mother asked Anna to give her younger sister Maria some academic coaching. But Maria dreaded the assistance:6
My sister was preparing me at that time for the exams for the gimnazia’s second class. Having recently suffered the cruel trauma of the tragic death of a brother she deified, she was very nervous. This was sometimes manifested also in the course of her work with me, bringing torment to both of us. I remember how Vladimir Ilich’s face darkened while hearing one of these outbursts, and he said, as if to himself: ‘This isn’t how to do things.’
Vladimir himself could be abrupt. When little Maria proudly showed him a notebook she had made, he told her that it was unacceptable to sew up white pages with black thread and compelled her to redo the operation.7 But at least he did not torment her emotionally – and she for her part liked to please him.
He had yet to decide which university to enter and which degree to take. Had it not been for his brother’s notoriety, he would have gone to St Petersburg University, but Maria Alexandrovna was told this would not gain official approval. Consequently Vladimir sought admittance to the Imperial Kazan University, where his late father had studied. The choice of degree course caused some surprise. When Vladimir announced that he planned to study jurisprudence, his friends could not understand this. In these years it was the natural sciences which attracted the most able Russian students (such as Alexander Ulyanov). Vladimir’s teachers, noting his exceptional proficiency at Latin and Greek, would have preferred him to study in the Philological Faculty. But Vladimir insisted upon studying law. Unlike Alexander, he had never found biology and other sciences attractive. But why, with his interest in literature, did he not enter the Philological Faculty? The answer remains unclear. But perhaps he judged that he would more easily build a career as an independent lawyer than as a higher-education lecturer dependent on a state salary.
His mother Maria Alexandrovna hoped that she had kept him clear of politics and other dangers. She had even got him to stop smoking cigarettes. Her first argument had been that his physical condition would deteriorate if he continued to smoke and that he had not been in the best of health as a child. He ignored her entirely. Then in desperation she argued that, since he had no independent income, he had no right to squander the family’s funds on tobacco. He gave way and never put a cigarette to his lips again.8 Maria Alexandrovna was pleased not only by this but also by the gusto with which Volodya took to the rural sports at Kokushkino. He went shooting in the woods and skiing along the country paths, and often he took Dmitri along with him.9
But appearances were misleading. Alexander Ulyanov left behind books and articles that would have shocked his father. Chief among these were works by Nikolai Chernyshevski. When Vladimir talked about this episode later, he acknowledged that Chernyshevski had ‘ploughed him over and over again’. Vladimir was at an age when he was susceptible to deep influence from the reading he undertook. He had the technical facility of a rigorous linguistic training, but as yet he did not have beliefs. His Christian faith lapsed when he was sixteen years old. His mind was like an engine without a steering column: it was potentially very powerful, but would remain directionless until he decided what he thought about the world. Neither his father nor his brother was alive to guide him, and he no longer saw his teachers. Vladimir turned to bookcases for inspiration. He extinguished his passion for Latin, wanting no distraction from his political self-education.10 This was not the last time that he denied himself a pleasure. In future years he would give up chess, Beethoven and skating so as to concentrate on the revolutionary tasks at hand.
Chernyshevski was an odd writer to exercise such an impact. His prose was like a rash of nettles. Sprawling verbiage was covered with densely overgrown constructions, and he seemed immune to the models offered by the great novelists of mid-nineteenth-century Russia. But style was not what drew Vladimir to Chernyshevski. In any case, Chernyshevski’s constructions with their elongated sentences and thickets of subsidiary clauses were easily amenable to gimnazia students with their mastery of Latin.
Vladimir’s admiration was considerable. In 1864 the Ministry of the Interior banished Chernyshevski as an irreconcilable opponent of the Romanov autocracy to a forced-labour camp in eastern Siberia (and only in 1889, already very ill, was he allowed back to his native Volga city of Saratov). The Russian Empire was so large that it was not necessary to deport subversives from the country: they could be kept in a distant town and prevented from stirring up trouble from abroad. Chernyshevski refused to recant his opinions. In general he is considered to have been a revolutionary agrarian socialist, but nevertheless he was not an idealiser of the peasantry. Nor did he espouse the rural life. He wanted cultural development to be speeded up in his country and advocated industrialisation. He demanded a democratic political system based upon universal-suffrage elections. He supported women’s rights. He opposed the discriminatory legislation affecting the non-Russian nations and ethnic groups. He advocated the creation of a classless society. And he depicted the Imperial monarchy as barbaric, parasitic and obsolete.
Indeed, Chernyshevski saw himself as offering a vision of a Russian future congruent with the works of socialist thinkers elsewhere in Europe; he read widely in German and French, and was an enthusiastic reader of Karl Marx. But he was very far from thinking that Russia always had to learn from Germany without teaching something in return. He carried on a patchy correspondence with Marx, who began to learn the Russian language in order to acquaint himself with Chernyshevski’s writings on the agrarian question in the Russian Empire. For a young man such as Vladimir Ulyanov, who was at ease with exploring European culture, Chernyshevski embodied an intellectual ideal.
Vladimir Ulyanov was attracted to Chernyshevski emotionally as well as rationally. He was so affected by the heroic example of a man who suffered penal servitude in Siberia for the sake of political ideals that he obtained a photograph of his idol, which he carried around in his wallet. The book that deeply entered his consciousness was the novel What Is to Be Done? As a novel it is lamely constructed and unimaginatively written, but it offers a portrait of a group of socialist activists. Their solidarity with each other and their political commitment, dedication to educational self-improvement and irreconcilable hostility to tsarism captivated Vladimir Ulyanov. The main character of the novel was pure of spirit and endowed with the aura of an unchallenged leader. It is a good bet that Vladimir Ulyanov identified himself closely with him. Not all young intellectuals in the making were equally impressed by Chernyshevski’s book, and its clumsiness of style and structure made it the object of some mockery. But Vladimir Ulyanov would have none of this. Chernyshevski’s What Is to Be Done? helped him to define the direction of his life, and he was fiercely protective of Chernyshevski’s reputation.
Thus Vladimir Ulyanov was his brother’s brother. In the space of a year he had adopted the world-view and aspirations of a revolutionary. Insofar as he aimed to deepen his understanding of politics and society, he would do so at university but not at the feet of his university professors. Even before he entered the Imperial Kazan University, he was looking for trouble.
His mother’s guarantee that she would live near her son had been an important factor in getting him enrolled. So, too, were the funds she made available. The surviving Ulyanov children – Anna, Vladimir, Olga, Dmitri and Maria – liked to contend that their entire subsidy from Maria Alexandrovna took the form of the state pension of their late father. This was nonsense. Even the published financial figures reveal the opposite story. The will of Ilya Ulyanov left the 2,000 rubles in the Simbirsk Town Public Bank to his wife and children.11 This was no insubstantial sum, being a quarter of what the family was to pay in 1889 for the estate bought by the children’s mother in Alakaevka. The sale of the Ulyanovs’ Moscow Street house in Simbirsk in summer 1887 brought a further 6,000 rubles to the family.12 There was also Maria Alexandrovna’s share of the rent from the Kokushkino estate plus the sums in her bank account left to her by Dr Blank. (Her inherited land at Kokushkino was originally valued at 3,000 rubles.)13 To top it all, there was the legacy from Vasili, Ilya Ulyanov’s brother and benefactor, who had died at the age of sixty in 1878. The Ulyanov family was not bereft of ready cash.
Russian inheritance law entitled Vladimir to a share of his father’s capital. There is a record of this in relation to the above-mentioned 2,000 rubles in the Simbirsk Town Public Bank. The District Court ordered the following division of Ilya’s legacy. A quarter – only a quarter – was to go to Ilya’s widow. An eighth went to each of the two daughters who had not yet reached maturity, Olga and Maria. But a sixth went to each of the three sons, Alexander, Vladimir and Dmitri: the boys had a legal advantage over their sisters.
Lenin was later criticised for living comfortably on private capital while proclaiming himself as capitalism’s destroyer. There is something in this. But there is less in the criticism that he had a sumptuous style of life: cautious financial management was Maria Alexandrovna’s hallmark. At the end of August 1887 – with the start of the university year – she rented temporary accommodation in Kazan in order to search for a suitable ground-floor apartment. Her sister Lyubov Ardasheva, a widow since 1870, lived on the upper floor of the same house with her sons Alexander and Vladimir. The children of both women had spent previous summers at Kokushkino and enjoyed each other’s company. Kazan brought an end to the loneliness suffered in Simbirsk (and indeed in Kokushkino, since they scarcely saw any neighbours there either).14 But they could not stay in the apartment for long: they needed a larger place. After a month Maria Alexandrovna had found what she wanted and moved the family to New Commissariat Street.15 Dmitri and Maria went to the Kazan gimnazii and Vladimir started to attend lectures at the Imperial Kazan University. Meals were taken at home. Maria Alexandrovna hoped to settle the family into something near to the normality that they had enjoyed before 1886.
Yet Kazan was not the quiet city she had fondly imagined. It had been one of the fighting grounds between the Russians and the Tatars in the fifteenth century, and Russia’s history textbooks never failed to record that Ivan the Terrible’s defeat of the Tatars at Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556 opened the way for Russian imperial expansion to the south and east. The city retained a strategic importance in subsequent centuries. Trade was its lifeblood. Perched on an elbow of the river Volga, Kazan was an important entrepôt for goods that required further shipment by railway to Moscow and St Petersburg. Hardly a street existed without its church. Kazan was a gem of Russian architecture. Historical triumphalism was not the only reason for this. The official authorities had also built magnificent churches because they worried about the significance of Kazan as the greatest centre of non-Christian faith in the empire. Moslems constituted a tenth of the city’s population. Islam had its various institutions there, including Arabic-script printing presses. The ethnic composition was equally worrisome to St Petersburg. Tatars amounted to 31 per cent of the province’s inhabitants – and there were also Bashkirs and Chuvash. The Ministry of the Interior consequently took no chances with the town’s affairs. Successive governors were renowned for their abrasive, military approach to civil administration. At times it was as if Kazan was treated like a far-off colony that needed a display of brutality to keep it in order.
The tensions in the city as a whole were evident in its university even though hardly any Tartars belonged to it. In 1884 the central authorities in the capital had tightened the rules for student behaviour, and these were resented as much in Kazan as elsewhere. Demonstrations were held against the rector. Kazan University was constantly on the verge of public disorder, and the rector’s response was always to reinforce discipline. But this in turn aggravated the feelings of the students. Compulsory uniforms were introduced in 1885 so as to make the police surveillance easier. Students were prohibited from forming associations not given prior approval by the authorities. Petty regulations about the kind of salutation owed by them to their administrators and pedagogues simply added fuel to the flames. The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment appointed new professors, and anonymous denunciations of delinquent students were encouraged. It had even been proposed that such students should be transferred to military disciplinary battalions. The suggestion was rejected, but the fact that it had been made at all was a sign of the distrust between government and students.
The only associations allowed by the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment were the so-called zemlyachestva. These were groups of students based upon geographical origin; they had official approval because they lent a sense of togetherness and stability to young men who were away from home for the first time. They were not a social organism peculiar to students. Travelling traders and workers formed them; they were just one example of the way Russia teemed with local traditions, local accents and dialects, local diets and local religious tenets. The zemlyachestva helped Russians to cope with novelty and uncertainty. Immediately upon entering Kazan University, Vladimir Ulyanov joined the Simbirsk–Samara zemlyachestvo in order to take advantage of the practical guidance and leisure facilities it provided.
The zemlyachestva also functioned as an organisation for students to debate with each other. The academic year was bound to be unsettled. The hanging of Alexander Ulyanov and his fellow students still caused bitterness, and immediately there was discussion of protests that should be made in all universities. Kazan was no exception, and the Simbirsk–Samara zemlyachestvo tried to play its part. The disturbances had already begun in Moscow. In each city there were grievances to be aired, and Inspector N. G. Potapov reported to Rector N. A. Kremlëv of Kazan University that his own student informers had warned him to expect trouble.16 Emotions ran so high that students secretly discussed whether to mount a physical assault on Potapov. On 4 December the outburst took place. It was a sharp winter’s day. The snow was on the ground but the sun shone brightly. About midday a crowd of students started to gather in the university buildings. Potapov tried to disperse them: ‘Gentlemen, where are you going, where? Don’t go!’ Yet he was thrust out of the way.17 among the crowd was the first-year student Vladimir Ulyanov. The students chanted slogans demanding university autonomy from the state and relief from the unpleasant aspects of regulation of the student body. The sacking of Potapov was an immediate aim.
Rector Kremlëv asked professors to mediate on his behalf. But the students were unmoved. At the back of their minds, however, was the knowledge that the rector would ultimately bring in armed troops to disperse the gathering. About ninety of the assembled students were so enraged that on the spot they decided to abandon their special student passes in the room as a sign that they no longer wished to belong to the university. The decision was taken on the spur of the moment. These students knew that, once the administrative staff picked up the passes, the rector would have no choice but to expel them.18
Police searches were instigated across the city. Students were stopped in the streets. The university was closed down until further notice, and it reopened only in February 1888. Consultations took place between the Kazan administration and its superior authorities in St Petersburg. A battalion of troops was distributed in units at appropriate points throughout the city. Vladimir returned home to New Commissariat Street and to his distraught mother and his even more distraught former nanny Varvara Sarbatova.19 What could Maria Alexandrovna do to prevent her second son from sinking still deeper into trouble? The ‘beautiful family’, as Ilya Ulyanov’s obituarist had characterised the Ulyanovs in Simbirsk, was no model for respectable folk. Their potential for brilliant, regular careers would not be fulfilled. In the course of the night of 4–5 December the police came for Vladimir as they came for other Kazan students. Held in custody, they were asked where else they wished to live. They would not be permitted to stay in Kazan. Maria Alexandrovna thought of the obvious solution: she would appeal to the Ministry of Interior for a mandate to return to Kokushkino with her children.
For the moment the family had to await the dispositions of the rector. These were announced on 6 December 1887. Thirty-nine students were expelled from Kazan University and Vladimir Ulyanov was among them. Only two other students were, like him, in their first year.20 His residence permit for Kazan was withdrawn and on 7 December he was ‘exiled’ to Kokushkino.
His mother’s ability to direct her children was fading. She could still exercise a degree of control over them by dint of their need for her financial support; but usually she gave them whatever they asked for. A more subtle instrument was the fact that the Imperial government granted concessions to Vladimir Ulyanov only if his mother stood as some kind of guarantor of his good behaviour. Thus he was allowed to return to Kokushkino only on condition that she lived there with him. But even this did not give her much leverage over him. She wanted to stay with him more than he wished to be with her. Maria Alexandrovna must have felt let down by Vladimir even if she did not express the sentiment – and there is no evidence that she ever reproached him. The question arises why she was so restrained. Why did she collude in his misbehaviour? One reason would seem to be that Ilya had acted as the family’s enforcer of discipline, the usual paternal role in contemporary Russian families. Another reason might well be that she intelligently concluded that nothing could have pulled Alexander back from his self-destructive course – and so why should she assume that curt prohibitions to Vladimir would be more effective?
She had much to put up with. Vladimir’s expulsion had disrupted the rest of the family. Dmitri, living in Kazan and going to its Classical Gimnazia, could not return with the family to Kokushkino but would have to lodge at the school. The same was true of her sister Maria; and even Anna, who had been directed to live at Kokushkino, would be affected if the Ministry of the Interior decided to banish her mother’s eldest surviving son from Kazan province.
He went home on 4 December 1887 to a mother who no longer controlled him. During his residence in Kazan, he had already got in touch with revolutionary activists. The city was a place of exile used by the central government for the disposal of its enemies – and there were several such persons under police surveillance in this period. It was not unduly difficult for the brother of an executed revolutionary to find out who the local revolutionary sympathisers were and how to join in their discussions. The group that attracted Vladimir Ulyanov was led by Lazar Bogoraz, an agrarian-socialist advocate of terrorism. Bogoraz’s precise ideas are somewhat unclear. But he undoubtedly wanted an end to the monarchy and stood for the country’s social and economic transformation; and he seems to have hoped, like Alexander Ulyanov, to minimise the incipient divisions within the clandestine revolutionary movement. Vladimir was in the first stage of developing his thoughts about the politics of revolution. It was natural for him to start by learning what he could from people who were akin to his brother, and indeed people who were serious enough about their political commitment that they retained contact with similar groups in St Petersburg and elsewhere.
Indeed, if it had not been for the fracas at Kazan University, Vladimir would have become more deeply implicated in revolutionary conspiracy in the city. His summary expulsion saved him from becoming involved in activities that would have got him a much more severe sentence.21
Maria Alexandrovna was willing to support her children regardless of their extra-mural activities, but could not help fretting. Anna Ilinichna wrote to a friend: ‘We’re now very disturbed by Volodya’s fate. It will, of course, be hard for Mama to let him go off anywhere else, but he can’t be kept in the countryside.’22 His mother and elder sister agreed on one thing: he had to acquire a university degree. Somehow permission had to be obtained for him to re-enter the educational system. They spoke to him about it, and he told them of his desire to leave for a foreign university. This was financially possible for the family; but Maria Alexandrovna would not yet hear of it. On 9 May 1888, he therefore wrote to the Minister of Public Enlightenment seeking readmission to the Imperial Kazan University.23 Concurrently his mother wrote to the Director of the Police Department in similar terms. Both requests were refused. In September he asked permission to leave Russia to study abroad.24 Again he was turned down. The police objected to his ‘active participation in the organisation of revolutionary circles among the student youth of Kazan’.25 The Ministry of the Interior liked to keep enemies of the regime not only out of St Petersburg and Moscow but out of foreign countries too.
Yet indulgence was shown to the Ulyanovs. The Ministry of the Interior under the tsars was nothing like as systematically oppressive as the police force set up by Lenin at the end of 1917. In September 1888 the family was allowed to resume residence in Kazan. Vladimir had not been tamed by his experience. Full of audacity, he sent a letter to none other than the exiled Nikolai Chernyshevski in Saratov.26 Once he was back in Kazan, moreover, he searched out the local revolutionary activists. A clandestine circle organised by N. E. Fedoseev was functioning in the city, and Vladimir Ulyanov joined it.27
Fedoseev was on the way to declaring himself a Marxist. But such circles were usually still uncertain whether to identify themselves entirely with Georgi Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour Group in Switzerland. In particular, Fedoseev – very much in contrast with Plekhanov – did not delight in the prospect of the disappearance of the peasantry at the hands of aggressive capitalist development. Fedoseev thought there was a chance that a large class of small-scale farmers might survive – and no doubt his residual sympathy for agrarian socialism meant that he welcomed this possibility on moral grounds.28 Vladimir Ulyanov was mightily attracted by the sheer intellectual dedication of Fedoseev, who arranged that his circle held frequent discussions on major aspects of economic, social and political trends. This was a period of intense mental effort. Young Vladimir, freed from any obligation to study for a university degree, was reading furiously on his own behalf. Using his brother’s ample library and building up his own, he took account of authors who were at the centre of European cultural discussion in the 1880s. Among them were David Ricardo, Charles Darwin, Henry Buckle, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx’s Capital was a topic of crucial interest.
Vladimir Ulyanov wanted to educate himself on a broader plane than had been encouraged at Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia or the Imperial Kazan University. He assumed that he could not take himself seriously in this project unless there were convincing intellectual foundations to it. At the same time he was not wholly immersed in politics. Together with his cousin Alexander Ardashev, he visited a chess club in Kazan. He also went to opera performances with his sister Olga and his brother Dmitri. Such was his fascination with chess that he played games by post with the Samara barrister Andrei Khardin.29 This was no mean attainment since Khardin was accomplished enough to be taken seriously by the world-famous player M. I. Chigorin.30
The sojourn of the Ulyanov family in Kazan, however, no longer commended itself to their mother; she was no doubt thinking that she could better steer Vladimir away from the dangers of politics if she removed him from his local revolutionary friends. She needed to find somewhere else to live. There was help at hand. Anna Ilinichna had acquired a male admirer in Mark Yelizarov, whom she had known as a friend of Alexander Ilich at St Petersburg University. Yelizarov negotiated the purchase of a separate estate on the Ulyanovs’ behalf. He looked around not near Kokushkino but in his native Samara province, where his brother – a successful peasant farmer – farmed 120 acres.31 Yelizarov secured an option on a house and land owned by the Siberian goldmine magnate Konstantin Sibiryakov. Samara province is further south down the Volga, between Simbirsk and Astrakhan. Sibiryakov had bought up not just one but several landed estates after making his fortune in the goldmines in Siberia. But he was an industrialist with a political and social conscience. He held left-of-centre opinions, and was a sympathiser with agrarian socialism. But also he believed in up-to-date methods, and introduced the latest agricultural technology to his land in Samara province.32
Low agricultural prices in the 1880s made it hard for him to make a profit, and he decided to sell up. His preference was for purchasers who, like himself, were on the left of the political spectrum. The result was that Sibiryakov sold his various estates at a cheap rate to owners who wanted to modernise agriculture without lowering the local peasantry’s standard of living. Some of these owners were agrarian socialists such as Alexander Preobrazhenski. There were also followers of Tolstoi in the locality, who were Christian and pacifist. The new owners, regardless of their specific orientation, were annoyed that the government had no interest in improving the lot of the peasantry. Sibiryakov welcomed the Ulyanovs as potential buyers of an estate at Alakaevka; and after he had come to terms with Yelizarov, the estate was paid for with the various legacies in the control of Maria Alexandrovna.33
But Vladimir’s political aspirations remained. He repeatedly visited the Fedoseev group, and also sought out the veteran People’s Freedom terrorist M. P. Chetvergova, who was then living in Kazan. In his book-reading and in his various conversations, he imbibed everything he could about the efforts of Russian revolutionaries to get rid of the Romanov dynasty. Chernyshevski had already captivated him. Other revolutionaries, too, endeared themselves to Vladimir. Great agrarian-socialist terrorists such as Stepan Khalturin and Ippolit Myshkin were his lifelong heroes.34 He was to become no less enamoured of the French novelist Émile Zola, who in 1898 was to make a stirring literary defence of the unfortunate Jewish officer in the French armed forces Alfred Dreyfus. Zola’s photograph, too, was kept in Vladimir’s wallet. Nor would it be entirely out of order to speculate that Vladimir had his deep hatreds as well as loves. His brother’s execution left him an abiding resentment of the Romanov dynasty; and his family’s problems after the 1887 assassination attempt must have added to his feeling that the respectable middle and upper social classes – the aristocracy, the landed nobility, the urban merchantry – were deserving of no respect. The conventional picture of Vladimir as a coldly calculating figure is only part of the truth. He was also a young man of intense emotions, and the loves and hatreds in his opinions about politics were passionately felt.
For Vladimir, then, the Russian Empire was not merely too slow in its social transformation. Just as importantly it was oppressive. It was Europe’s bastion against the Progress; its troops had intervened directly on the side of the old regimes threatened by revolutions in 1848. Tsarism, insisted Vladimir, had to be overthrown. He could barely contain his anger and, although his revolutionary ideas were as yet unformed, the revolutionary commitment was already firm.
On 3 May 1889 the Ulyanov family took leave of their Veretennikov and Ardashev relatives in Kazan province and embarked on the paddle steamship that plied the route down the Volga to Samara. The boarding stage lay four miles from Kazan. The Volga flows southward to the Caspian in a slow and winding fashion, and the ferry captain had to avoid the shallows and the islands that lie across the river channel. The steamer needed two whole days to travel the three hundred miles from Kazan to Samara. The Ulyanovs might have enjoyed the trip more had they not been stopping at Simbirsk halfway along the route. Sad memories about Ilya Nikolaevich and Alexander Ilich would be revived. Fortunately the steamer would stop only for two hours, letting off those passengers who had a ticket for Simbirsk and picking up others. Nevertheless the members of the Ulyanov family would inevitably be reminded of their past. They could never forget Simbirsk and many people in Russia would never forget that the Ulyanov family had included a youth who tried to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. That youth’s younger brother would one day acquire his own notoriety.
Reaching Samara, the family took carriages to their estate at Alakaevka thirty-five miles to the east of the city. Maria Alexandrovna had made the purchase unseen, relying on Mark Yelizarov’s recommendation. She was not disappointed. Alakaevka was truly beautiful with its large wooden house and splendid setting. Forests and hills lay within walking distance; there was also a pond where the most inexpert fisherman could have success.1 The writer Gleb Uspenski immortalised the district in short stories that were revered by Russian readers, including Vladimir Ulyanov. Indeed Uspenski had lived on one of Sibiryakov’s estates in the late 1870s; his wife had taught in a school that Sibiryakov had built there. Sibiryakov was the financial patron of his works;2 he recognised the author as a brilliant portraitist of the local landscape and inhabitants. He also exposed the difficulties faced by poor peasants in coping with debt, land shortage and policemen. But, unlike many contemporary novelists, he did not idealise the peasantry. He saw how divided each village was by conflicts over land and money. He denounced the peasant proclivity for drunkenness, violence and intolerance of outsiders.3 All this made him unpopular with many contemporary socialists, but not with Vladimir Ulyanov. In later years Ulyanov and other Russian Marxists were notorious for vituperative attacks on peasant attitudes and practices. Usually their analysis has been traced to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In point of accuracy, the short stories of Gleb Uspenski should be recognised as having contributed to the intellectual development of Vladimir Ulyanov.
It was a time of change for the family. As she settled into Alakaevka, Maria Alexandrovna persuaded her son Vladimir to look after the new property. His Ardashev cousins – Alexander and Vladimir – had supervised the estate at Kokushkino, and Maria Alexandrovna wanted her eldest surviving son to do the same for the newly purchased property.4
At first he did as he was asked, going out to meet the peasants and making plans for the estate’s management. Meanwhile Anna Ilinichna was studying at home to become a teacher and helping with the running of the household. Olga worked harder than the rest of them. After leaving the gimnazia, she appeared to want to study twenty-four hours a day. Her ambition was to matriculate in medicine at Helsingfors (Helsinki) University, which – unlike the other universities in the Russian Empire – allowed women to take degrees.5 The younger children Dmitri and Maria went to the gimnazii in Samara. Dmitri, too, hoped to study medicine at university after finishing at school. Their mother was pleased by such purposefulness. She badly wanted to deflect her offspring from political involvement, especially Anna and Vladimir, who had already been in trouble with the authorities.
Yet Vladimir was always an unlikely farm manager. Poor, resentful peasants inhabited Alakaevka; this was the reality across the whole Volga region, especially among the peasantry of Samara province. The local landed nobles had seen the 1861 Emancipation Edict as an opportunity to keep the maximum of land and rid themselves of the slightest obligation to their serfs. The result was ‘land hunger’ among peasant households. The peasantry had a traditional proverb for their landowners: ‘We are yours, but the land is God’s.’ Russian peasants believed that the social order in the countryside was unnatural. They considered that only those persons who physically worked on the land should have the right to profit from its produce. This attitude prevailed even on the estates that had been owned by the benevolent Konstantin Sibiryakov. His several successors as landowners were no more likely to assuage peasant bitterness, and within a few years all of them had abandoned farming and sold up. Most of these owners had believed that they could turn their villages into socialist communities. But the peasants were defiantly uncooperative towards them. Resentment of middle-class proprietorship was never eliminated.6
There was a single exception to the exodus of the new landowners. This was Alexander Preobrazhenski, who believed until his dying day that socialism could be created in Russian peasant villages. Making the acquaintance of the Ulyanov family, he became a friend of Vladimir Ulyanov. But there was no convergence of minds. Vladimir was already concluding that socialism in Russia would need to base itself on a social class other than the peasantry, and he regarded Preobrazhenski as a companionable but misguided romantic.7
As a farmer, Vladimir merely went through the motions of filial obedience. Rather than farm he preferred – if he did anything – to teach, and he advertised his availability as a coach to local schoolchildren;8 but he did not pursue even this activity as a true priority. Ploughing, sowing, weeding and harvesting were of even smaller interest. He knew next to nothing about agriculture and made no effort to find out. His passion was restricted to revolutionary ideas and he quickly abandoned his activities as estate manager. For their part, the peasants spotted the opportunity offered by the arrival of an urban middle-class professional family. They got up to the usual trickery. They also thieved. The livestock of the Ulyanovs were easy targets: first a horse ‘disappeared’, then a cow – and when the second cow went missing, Maria Alexandrovna gave up trying to goad her son into taking managerial responsibility. Instead she rented out her Alakaevka property to the peasants, except for the family house.9 Eventually she sold her land to one of the richer local peasants, a certain Danilin, and thereafter the family took no interest in farming. This may have been the salvation of the Ulyanovs, since in the revolutionary tumult of 1905–6 Danilin was killed by the Alakaevka peasants, who detested him as much as they had hated the noble landowners whom he had replaced.10 If Vladimir Ulyanov had stayed on as estate manager, he could have suffered the same fate.
All this runs against the widely held notion that his later ideas were based upon his close regular experience of the peasantry of Samara province. Most of the time at Alakaevka he was studying, walking or hunting; he knew no peasant family and the fact did not trouble him. Indeed, Vladimir planned to leave what he called the ‘quiet provincial backwater’ of Alakaevka just as soon as the Ministry of the Interior’s restrictions upon his activities had been lifted. Although he spent five successive summers there, he had no intention of staying longer than he had to.11 His mother could command him no longer. When he made crude gestures, she might say: ‘Ah, Volodya, Volodya, can this be how to behave?’12 But she had to rely on guile and persuasion; orders were no longer effective.
Meanwhile Vladimir enjoyed himself. He went on long walks in the hills around the estate. He did some fishing in the pond either by himself or in the company of one of his brothers and sisters. Together with Olga Ilinichna he went on reading Gleb Uspenski’s stories about the local area; brother and sister spent a lot of time together until her departure to St Petersburg to further her education in the autumn of 1890.13 But he was also happy to be on his own. His greatest pleasure was to get down to his books. He hated to waste time and could be downright antisocial if he felt that his studies were being unduly disrupted. When his mother was expecting visitors to Alakaevka whom he did not already know, he barricaded himself out of sight and got on with his reading.14 As an exception he would allow his sister Maria to sit with him while he helped her with her schoolwork.15 She had transferred her affection from her late father to the eldest surviving Ulyanov male. But Vladimir was a stern taskmaster. He would check next day that she had memorised what he had told her and not simply written it down at his dictation.
He was acting as his own father Ilya had done towards him. By focussing intently upon his self-training he was again copying the paternal example. But Marxism and not pedagogy was Vladimir’s preoccupation. It so dominated his life that he began to translate The Communist Manifesto into Russian.16 He also worked to acquire a reading knowledge of English. For many years to come, such labour was a way of diverting himself. His training as a linguist had encouraged him to regard an hour spent in examining a foreign-language dictionary as one of life’s treats. Vladimir was trying, like others of his generation, to decide for himself how the revolutionary movement ought to try and reconstruct the Russian Empire. For this purpose it would not be sufficient by itself to read Marx and Engels or to browse through the latest interesting books in German, French and English. His obligation was to study the current trends in the Russian Imperial economy to discern what this revealed about the political and social possibilities.
A less bookish nineteen-year-old might have got acquainted with his peasants. But Vladimir’s transformation into a revolutionary came through volumes about the peasantry more than from direct regular experience. He wished to pursue his studies abroad, but in June 1889 the official authorities yet again turned down his request to travel. Yet in the following month he may have reflected upon his good fortune in no longer residing in Kazan when the police arrested the members of Fedoseev’s revolutionary circle.
By then Maria Alexandrovna had accepted that Vladimir would never become a farmer and decided to move the family into Samara. They left Alakaevka on 5 September 1889, eventually settling in a rented house on Voskresenskaya Street. Vladimir was delighted; he immediately sought out the public library and the local political dissenters. Critics of the tsarist political and social order used the same libraries, bookshops and coffee-houses. They welcomed a person of Vladimir’s intelligence and energy, and he in turn was pleased to get to know Alexei Sklyarenko, who headed one of the most serious discussion circles. Sessions were always held in Sklyarenko’s two-room apartment as Ulyanov, who lived with his mother, felt he could not offer his family’s residence for such a purpose. The circle was dedicated to the exploration of ideas, and Ulyanov read out the papers he had drafted on Russian economic history.17 Sklyarenko and Ulyanov set the tone. As former gimnazia students, they insisted that the group studied in a very academic fashion. Only after dealing with culture, history and economics would they allow themselves to proceed to an examination of socialist theory.18 Thereafter they invited socialists of all persuasions from elsewhere in Russia to address them; and one of the most active contemporary figures in Russian terrorism, M. V. Sabunaev, had visited them in December 1889 (after staying for a while with Bogoraz’s group in Kazan).19
They wanted to change the world for the benefit of the lower social classes, and yet their group made no attempt to contact industrial workers or peasants. They were students devoting themselves to the study of topics which were absent from the syllabuses of their former schools and universities. Sklyarenko himself was professionally acquainted with the peasantry to the extent that his job as a civil servant required him to make investigative trips to the countryside. But, by and large, the group believed that the official economic statistics provided the most dependable basis for members to decide what to do about contemporary Russia. Ulyanov in particular concentrated on educating himself as a theorist.20 Books, not people, were thought to supply the answers. And so the group confined itself to going out at night in Samara and sticking up revolutionary proclamations on the walls – and Sklyarenko impressed Ulyanov with his skill at teasing the authorities verbally. But the main activity was inactivity: collective intellectual self-preparation.
To what ideas did the group adhere? Sklyarenko was an agrarian socialist with respect for the terrorists. Vladimir Ulyanov had been delighted to meet the visiting advocate of terrorism, Sabunaev; and in 1891 he took the opportunity to make the acquaintance of another terrorist sympathiser, Maria Golubeva, who was exiled to Samara in autumn 1891. They met through their friendship with yet another such terrorist, Nikolai Dolgov, who lived in the town and gave her the address of the family of the late Alexander Ulyanov. Already Vladimir Ulyanov, too, had impressed the veteran activist Dolgov with his anti-tsarist attitudes: ‘Yes indeed, in everything: both in dress and in behaviour and in conversations – well, in a word, in everything.’ Golubeva tried, unsuccessfully, to win him over to the doctrines of agrarian terrorism. She failed; but she noted nevertheless that several doctrines, especially those on ‘the seizure of power’, never gave him problems. Their basic disagreement was caused by her belief in the revolutionary potential of ‘the people’. Vladimir Ulyanov by this time had rejected the possibility of making revolution without a focus on class struggle. He urged the need to rely on specific social classes; and for him this could only mean the primacy of the working class in the making of a socialist society.21
He continued to meet former People’s Freedom adherents and supporters socially. One of them was Apollon Shukht, ten years his senior, who had come to Samara after serving a term of Siberian exile. Such was the friendship between them that, when their daughter Asya was born in 1893, Mr and Mrs Shukht asked Vladimir Ulyanov to become her godfather.22 This, by the way, was yet another indication of the way Vladimir Ulyanov maintained many external proprieties of contemporary Russian life while plotting to overturn them in bloody revolution. At any rate the close friendship with a former activist of People’s Freedom did not preclude him from seeking a different path to the construction of a socialist society in Russia. Hatred of tsarism was common to them, and Ulyanov was both intrigued and appalled by Anton Chekhov’s short story ‘Ward No. 6’, about a sane public figure incarcerated on the orders of the Okhrana: ‘When I finished reading this short story last night, I genuinely felt sick. I couldn’t stay in my own room, but got up and left it. I had the kind of feeling as if I’d been locked up in Ward No. 6.’23
Both Ulyanov and Sklyarenko went on studying contemporary works on the Russian Imperial economy. Sklyarenko was interested in the significance of small-scale industrial production – in artisanal workshops – for Russian economic growth, and Ulyanov enjoyed their recurrent discussions. But he held back in several other respects. He opposed Sklyarenko’s refusal to take a detached view of capitalist economic development. Sklyarenko could not bring himself to accept the ‘historical necessity’ for the disappearance of the peasantry; and, in line with not a few other revolutionary activists of his generation, he tried to think of ways of preserving a large social class of landed small-holders after the expected revolution against the monarchy. Among Ulyanov’s associates, too, there were those who wished to give priority to fostering socialism not so much among the workers as among the peasantry. The prime proponent of this was Alexander Preobrazhenski, who was still trying to build up his socialist agricultural colony near Alakaevka.24 Ulyanov argued with both Sklyarenko and Preobrazhenski. Capitalism, according to him, would follow the path mapped out by Marx and Engels in Britain and predicted for Russia by Plekhanov. There was no room for sentiment. There were only iron laws of economic development. Russia had stepped on to the capitalist road and could not avoid following the demands of the contemporary market economy.
Thus the peasantry as a class was destined to fracture into two distinct and antagonistic segments: a rural middle class (‘bourgeoisie’) and a rural working class (‘proletariat’). Throughout the winter months Ulyanov strove to expand his knowledge of basic Marxist texts: Capital and The Poverty of Philosophy by Marx; Anti-Dühring and The Condition of the Working Class in England by Engels; Our Disagreements by Plekhanov. All the while he was confirming his intuition that Russia’s future lay with industry, urbanisation and large-scale social organisation. Moral questions, for him, were an irrelevance. From Marx he had already taken a philosophy of history which stressed that the conventional ideas in society were always framed by the ruling classes in their own interest. Morality was consequently a derivative of class struggle. Every political, social and cultural value had only a ‘relative’ significance. There was no such thing as ‘absolute good’; the only guide to action was the criterion: does it facilitate the more rapid and efficient progress through the necessary stages towards the creation of a communist society?25
His associates Alexei Sklyarenko and Isaak Lalayants were taken aback by this repudiation of sentiment in politics. They had become revolutionary activists in part because they wanted to serve ‘the people’. They themselves were not workers or peasants, and they thought that the duty of a Russian intellectual was to bring benefit to the oppressed and downtrodden elements in society. They were typical members of the conscience-stricken intelligentsia. What they perceived in their newly arrived comrade was a person who revelled in his rejection of concepts such as conscience, compassion and charity.
It was only later that his harshness acquired an importance in their minds. At the time they were disconcerted, but no more than that. And they were comfortable with him as a comrade. For the first time he was a permanent member of a voluntary group of his contemporaries, and he took to them as well as they did to him. When he produced his reports, with their scrupulously drafted graphs and tables, they were simply pleased that so brilliant a figure was emerging in their midst. He could have shown off academically at their expense, but this was not his style. He participated enthusiastically in their social jaunts. Trips beyond the outskirts of Samara were enjoyed by all of them. They could talk and argue without worrying that they might be surprised by the police, and have fun while they were doing so. They evidently felt that time was on their side. Surely the existing structure of state and society could not last much longer! Whatever else divided them, they agreed about the rottenness of the status quo. They were determined to bring down the Romanov monarchy. Sklyarenko was so fierce in his commitment that he had thrown an inkpot at a gendarme during his last interrogation in Samara prison.
Vladimir Ulyanov restricted his escapades to the occasional sailing trip down the Volga on his own. This would take him miles downstream as far as the river Usa and then back up the Volga. Such a trip might take him away from his family for three or four days at a time, and was not without danger from the unpredictable winds and currents. But he found that the physical exercise and the splendour of the Volga and the countryside removed his feelings of frustration at having to stay with his mother in Samara.
Meanwhile in his relations with the authorities he behaved with a prim civility. This was not just because he held to a gentlemanly code of conduct (except when in dispute with fellow revolutionaries); it was also out of a refusal to put himself at unnecessary risk. Nevertheless the inner fires were as strong in Ulyanov as in Sklyarenko, very probably even stronger. He had a visceral hatred for the slightest sign of illegality or corruption in contemporary Russia, and would never take it lying down, especially when he was personally affected. The existing social hierarchy he could tolerate temporarily. He cheerfully benefited from his own status as a nobleman until such time as the projected revolution inaugurated an entirely new order. Thus when his family vacated their estate at Alakaevka they entrusted their financial affairs to a bailiff by name of Krushvits, whose task was to collect the rents from the local peasants. The Ulyanovs lived off the profits; and Vladimir was unembarrassed, while he lived under a capitalist economic system, about easing his material conditions according to the rules of capitalism.
But any infringement of his legal rights provoked fury to a degree that astounded his friends and relatives. On a jaunt in Syzran, near his native town of Simbirsk, he and his brother-in-law Mark Yelizarov hired a boatman to row them across the river Volga. By doing this, they infringed the unofficial monopoly of a rich Syzran merchant, one Arefev by name, who owned a steam-ferry. As Ulyanov and Yelizarov got to mid-channel, Arefev sent out his ferry to block their passage and take them aboard. Before acceding to force, Ulyanov declared to the ferry captain: ‘It makes no difference that Arefev has rented the river crossing; that’s his business, not ours, and it doesn’t in any way give him or you the right to act lawlessly on the Volga and detain people by force.’26 Ulyanov punctiliously took down the names of the captain and his fellow employees for further reference while Arefev strutted around in triumph. His brother later recorded that anyone else would have calmed down ‘out of inertia and “Russian” indolence’. But Vladimir Ulyanov would not let the matter drop. On his return to Samara, he wrote a formal complaint to the authorities. Samara is sixty miles from Syzran, and Arefev exploited his own standing in Syzran to delay the legal case, and two hearings were held without result.
Maria Alexandrovna tried to get her son to back down: ‘Let go of this merchant! They’ll postpone the case again and you’ll be travelling there in vain. Besides, you should bear in mind that they have it in for you!’ With some justification she thought that Vladimir got too worked up about things. But he would not be denied. He took an early-morning train to attend the third hearing and at last got his revenge. Merchant Arefev, to general astonishment, was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment.27
Vladimir’s growing knowledge of Imperial legislation, as well as his character, assisted in this. As soon as the family moved to Samara, he resumed his requests to become a university student. His letter to the Minister of Popular Enlightenment started as follows: ‘In the course of two years since I finished my gimnazia course, I have had ample opportunity to become convinced of the enormous difficulty, if not the impossibility, of anyone getting an occupation who has not received a special education.’ Despairing of being allowed to study in the normal way inside a Russian Imperial university, he asked to be allowed to take the jurisprudence exams as an external student.28 His mother reinforced the plea with her own letter; and on 12 June 1890, having at last been granted the necessary permission, he began the process of registration at St Petersburg University.29 Accustomed to private study, he had no difficulty with this arrangement. He also had the money to order the necessary textbooks. Until such time as he could visit St Petersburg, he could get other family members such as Olga Ilinichna to go round the bookshops on his behalf; and his cousin Vladimir Ardashev advised him on the reading he needed to do for his degree.30
Such were the advantages of belonging to a closely knit, affluent family, advantages which were not shared by most contemporary revolutionaries. At last the sons and daughters of Maria Alexandrovna were finding their feet after the disasters of recent years. Olga Ilinichna had been thwarted in her desire to study medicine at Helsingfors University; she had learned Swedish to comply with the entrance qualifications but had recoiled from adding Finnish to her accomplishments and so could not be accepted for the degree.31 Instead in 1890 she left to take the Higher Women’s Courses in St Petersburg and become a teacher. Several of her Veretennikov, Ardashev and Zalezhski cousins were already students in the capital, and she saw them fairly often.32 There was no sign of Olga getting mixed up in revolutionary activities (although her friends Apollonaria Yakubova and Zinaida Nevzorova were soon to become Marxist activists).33 Maria Alexandrovna could feel increasingly relaxed as Dmitri and Maria went on working at their gimnazii; and Anna married her fiancé Mark Yelizarov in July 1889, with Vladimir as one of the formal witnesses.34 As for Vladimir, his mother knew that he would prepare himself properly for his tests at St Petersburg University.
His capacity for fast assimilation of data was so extraordinary that by March 1891 he was ready to go to the capital to take the first stage of his examinations. He rented a quiet room in a building by the river Neva. Vladimir and Olga saw a good deal of each other. Although Olga was his junior, she and their mother corresponded regularly about him. ‘It seems to me, Mama,’ she wrote on 8 April,
that you are worrying for no reason that he is ruining his health. Firstly Volodya is good sense incarnate and secondly the exams are very easy. He has already taken two subjects and has received a five for both of them. On Saturday (he had an exam on Friday) he took a break: in the morning he walked to Nevski Prospekt, and after lunch he came over to me and the two of us went for a walk by the banks of the Neva – we watched an icebreaker and then he set off to the Peskovskis.
He’s not going to stop sleeping at night since this would be completely unnecessary: a brain cannot work for a full 24 hours, so that rest is needed. He goes and has lunch every day – consequently he’s keeping on the go [progulivaetsya].35
This little excerpt shows the attentiveness given to Vladimir by the rest of the family – or at least by the female members. He was cherished as none other. More was expected of him and more was offered to support him.
He had not been ‘spoiled’ in the sense of being showered with presents or allowed to behave regularly in an ill-disciplined manner. But, although he was not an only child, he had been surrounded by what might be called an aura of warmly expectant encouragement. His mother was endlessly attentive and sisters Anna, Olga and – later – Maria gave him whatever assistance he required. Vladimir learned how to make use of the emotional interplay in his family. This was a trick that had an influence on his later political life. It was to give him a general presumption that others should indulge his wishes. Thus he appeared a ‘natural leader’. But it also limited his awareness of the difficulties he caused. He was so used to getting his way that, if balked in any fashion, he was altogether too likely to throw a fit of anger. He absolutely hated being thwarted. As a young man he belatedly became a sort of a spoiled child nurtured by four women.
One of these women, Olga, was not to be with him much longer. Unfulfilled by her teacher-training course, she was planning to go abroad and study medicine as she had always really wanted.36 At the end of April 1891 she fell ill in St Petersburg and was taken into the Alexander Hospital. This time it was Vladimir who communicated with his mother. His telegram ran as follows: ‘Olya [Olga’s diminutive name] has typhoid fever, is in hospital, nursing care is good, doctors hope for a successful outcome.’ For the moment he did not feel the need for Maria Alexandrovna to leave Samara. But Olga’s condition deteriorated with the onset of a febrile skin infection commonly known as St Anthony’s fire. At the beginning of May he sent another telegram to Samara: ‘Olya is worse. Wouldn’t it be better for Mama to travel tomorrow?’37 Maria Alexandrovna got rail-tickets for Moscow and then for St Petersburg. But she arrived too late. Olga died on 8 May 1891, which by a terrible coincidence was the anniversary of her eldest brother Alexander’s execution in 1887. She was only nineteen years old, and had been Vladimir’s playmate in their childhood. Olga was buried in the Lutheran cemetery in Volkovo on St Petersburg’s southern outskirts. After the funeral Maria Alexandrovna hurried back to Simbirsk to look after the rest of the family.
She had broken the law in choosing the Volkovo Cemetery. Anyone baptised as an Orthodox Christian was prohibited from crossing to another faith or denomination, and this applied in death as in life. Olga had been baptised by an Orthodox priest and should have been buried by one. The official state authorities seldom intervened to prevent or punish disobedience; but Maria Alexandrovna’s insistence on having her daughter buried by a Lutheran pastor was certainly a sign of the socially marginal status which characterised the Ulyanovs. She no longer worried about what was thought about her in high society. The ostracism confronted by the family since the hanging of Alexander Ulyanov left her no illusions, and she wanted to run her life in the fashion she felt comfortable with. Not that she had particularly strong religious beliefs. It was rather that she aimed to do things her own way. Her son Vladimir had abandoned religion entirely around the age of sixteen and, as a devotee of Russian revolutionary thought, was an atheist. For him, it counted for nothing whether the cemetery was Orthodox or Lutheran. His task as he saw it was simply to make the burial arrangements as unoppressive as possible for his mother.
Although he was considerate towards her, he did not make much display of his feelings. This was the way the Ulyanovs had been brought up. Self-control was a family virtue. Certainly both he and his sister Anna were very volatile; indeed Vladimir had an impulsive, choleric temperament that was notorious in the family. But he displayed it only when he was confronting someone who was challenging him. This was a different situation, which called for him to keep a tight grip on his emotions.
Vladimir accompanied his mother back to Samara and did not return to the capital until the second stage of his examination in September. The two stages involved one written and thirteen oral tests on subjects that included not only judicial proceedings but also ecclesiastical law and police law.38
His later hagiographers did not mention these subjects. Presumably it was impolitic to mention that the enemy of the Romanov police-state and founder of the world’s first atheist state should have chosen to study ecclesiastical law and police law. Nevertheless Vladimir achieved great success, receiving the highest possible grade in each and every subject. He was the sole student in his year to achieve this. His examiners’ recommended that he should receive a first-class diploma from the Imperial St Petersburg University, and he returned to Samara on 12 November 1891 with the qualifications to begin work as a lawyer. It was yet another of the oddities of tsarist public life. The young man whom the state empowered to practise law was himself still the object of the police’s secret surveillance on the ground that he was working to subvert the legal order of the state.
He arranged to begin in the barrister’s offices of Andrei Khardin, with whom he had played postal chess three years earlier. Since the move to Samara, the Ulyanovs and the Khardins had drawn closer to each other. Olga and one of Andrei Khardin’s daughters had been friends, and had written to each other when Olga was in St Petersburg.39 There was a political tinge to the situation. The authorities in St Petersburg regarded barrister Andrei Khardin as a figure of ‘doubtful reliability’ in the light of his political opinions, and he too was being kept under surveillance.40 He was the natural choice for Vladimir Ulyanov while he completed his five years of further training. The term of Ulyanov’s status as assistant barrister began on 30 January 1892.
In Samara, he rejoined his comrades in the group of Marxists founded by Alexei Sklyarenko. Work as an assistant barrister was never going to interfere with his revolutionary involvement. This was a moment of horrendous crisis in the society of the Volga region. In 1891–2 a famine afflicted the region, and cholera and typhus followed close behind. The main victims were the rural poor. According to reliable estimates, about 400,000 subjects of Alexander III perished. The assumption of most critics of the Imperial government was that the prime culprits were the ministers in the government. The novelist Lev Tolstoi championed a famine-relief campaign that raised a large sum of money to provide the region with basic foodstuffs. Abroad the reportage on the dying peasants made the Romanov dynasty less popular than ever. It was widely contended that, had it not been for the heavy direct taxation of the peasantry, the famine would never have occurred. In fact this was probably unfair. State revenues relied more upon excise duties than upon direct taxes, and consequently it would have been senseless for the Ministry of Finances to have deliberately impoverished the peasantry in pursuit of industrial growth. On the contrary, the central government’s budget depended vitally upon the continued capacity of peasants and others to buy vodka, salt and other taxed products. That there were millions of dreadfully poor peasants is beyond dispute. That the government’s fiscal callousness had produced this is a less likely explanation than the freak weather conditions and the backward modes of agriculture.
But most Russian radicals did not give the government the benefit of the doubt. They saw the famine as a ghastly indication of the regime’s ineptitude and brutality; they argued, too, that the whole country had been brought into disrepute across Europe. Handuts of food were inadequate. The hospitals were filthy and too few. The civil bureaucracy was extremely slow to react. Marxists, agrarian socialists and liberals concurred that tsarism’s rotten heart had been exposed and that, in the short term, opponents of the regime should lend a hand to voluntary organisations seeking to alleviate the famine.
Vladimir Ulyanov stood out against the rest of the intelligentsia; he would not even condone the formation of famine-relief bodies in order to use them for the spreading of revolutionary propaganda.41 His heart had been hardened. Virtually alone among the revolutionaries of Samara and indeed the whole empire, he argued that the famine was the product of capitalist industrialisation. His emotional detachment astonished even members of his family. His sister Anna Ilinichna went around the town to help the sick, giving them medicine and advice. Vladimir Ilich refused to join her.42 Maria Ilinichna was confused by all this; she could not reconcile her brother’s position with his adherence to an ideology that was meant to serve the poor and the oppressed. In a rare implicit criticism of him, she wrote the following comparison between her brothers Alexander and Vladimir: ‘But [Vladimir Ilich], it seems to me, had a different nature from Alexander Ilich, close though they were to each other. Vladimir Ilich did not have the quality of self-sacrifice even though he devoted his whole life indivisibly to the cause of the working class.’43
Nothing could shake Vladimir Ulyanov’s belief that mass impoverishment was inevitable. The peasantry had always paid a dreadful price for industrial growth – and so it would be in late-nineteenth-century Russia. For Ulyanov, capitalism was bound by its nature to hurt most people and to kill many of them. Humane counter-measures were not merely ineffectual: they would do harm by slowing down the development of capitalism and therefore of the eventual further progress to socialism. Thus the famine, according to Ulyanov, ‘played the role of a progressive factor’, and he blankly refused to support the efforts to relieve the famine.44 His hard-heartedness was exceptional. He lived in the very region, the Volga provinces, where the famine raged. Peasants were dragging themselves into the towns pleading for food and for work. Corpses were found lying in the streets. Yet Ulyanov, once he had formed his intellectual analysis, would not be deflected by sentiment. He was not just a witness to the horrors of mass starvation: he was a participant in it. His family derived income from a Samara provincial estate and yet still he insisted that Krushvits, who managed the estate for them, should pay up exactly what had been agreed; and this meant that the peasants would have to pay Krushvits in full regardless of circum-stances.45
This attitude demonstrates that, much as he was influenced by the ideas of Russian agrarian socialism, he never felt pity for the peasants. In this he was at one with his distant mentor Georgi Plekhanov. Ulyanov was following Plekhanov in his basic interpretation of Marxism, and Plekhanov was becoming an idol for him. For Ulyanov, Plekhanov’s interpretation of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was unrivalled. In fact there was much controversy among the revolutionaries of the Russian Empire as to whether Plekhanov had got it right. In 1881 Vera Zasulich, the agrarian-socialist terrorist, wrote to Marx himself asking whether he believed that the scheme of social development he had sketched out for the advanced capitalist states was necessarily applicable to agrarian Russia. In many of his works Marx had analysed how the capitalist stage came from the bowels of feudalism. He predicted that the internal processes of capitalism would engender crisis after crisis which in turn would induce the impoverished working class, equipped by capitalism itself with educational and organisational skills, to seize power. Thus the movement from feudalism to capitalism to socialism was not only desirable, it was inevitable. But, asked Vera Zasulich, was this sequence of stages predestined to affect every country? Might there not be a chance for a largely pre-capitalist country such as Russia to avoid capitalism altogether and adopt socialism?
The reply she received from Marx was gratifying. Far from claiming that Capital offered a template for all countries, he accepted that Russia’s agrarian economy and peasant communal traditions might allow it to have a socialist transformation without capitalist industrialisation. Thus he appeared to condone the strategy of the Russian agrarian socialist. And indeed he and Engels were also known to admire the anti-tsarist terrorists and to dismiss the self-proclaimed Marxists such as Plekhanov as bookish and cowardly.
Thus the Russian controversy over capitalism between the agrarian socialists and the ‘Marxists’ seemingly encouraged Marx to side with the agrarian socialists. But Marx was not quite so unequivocal as Zasulich claimed. On the possibility of a socialist revolution being based on the egalitarian aspects of the peasant land commune, he had specified that this would not be at all practicable unless there were concurrent seizures of power by socialist parties in the advanced capitalist countries of the West. This was a very large reservation. Moreover, Plekhanov insisted that Marx and Engels should recognise that capitalism had arrived in Russia. The growth of activity in factories, mines and banks was an incontrovertible fact, as all the official statistics testified. Zasulich herself was one of Plekhanov’s leading converts and helped him to found the Emancipation of Labour Group in Switzerland. Marx died in 1883, and so Plekhanov’s attention was concentrated upon Engels. But Engels did not immediately yield to Plekhanov. Only in 1892, three years before he died, would Engels concede that Plekhanov and the generation of Russian Marxists – including the still obscure Samara writer Vladimir Ulyanov – might be justified in rejecting the agrarian socialism of their forebears. The Emancipation of Labour Group set the precedent for Russian Marxists to treat the Marx–Zasulich letters as a regrettable but temporary episode. The future, insisted Plekhanov, lay in applying Capital to Russia.
Vladimir Ulyanov agreed, and dedicated himself to becoming a revolutionary. In 1892 he took on only fourteen cases as a barrister, one of them being the prosecution of his personal tormentor Arefev. This was no heavy workload even if account is taken of his mild bout of typhoid in the course of the year.46 The burden got even lighter in 1893: from January to August he handled only a half-dozen cases.47 Most of his clients were from the poorer elements in society,48 but he was far from being a campaigning humanitarian lawyer. He continued to live off the family legacies; he knew that his mother would never insist that he should earn his own living. His real work, as he saw it, was to understand the economic realities and political opportunities in the Russian Empire and to insert his conclusions into a wider public debate across Russia.
To this end he was already engaged in a lively correspondence with Nikolai Fedoseev, his friend from his days in Kazan. Fedoseev was the first person he had met who could test him intellectually. The topic that engaged them was of acute importance: how to deal with the peasantry once the Romanovs had been overthrown and a democratic republic and a capitalist economy had been established. Fedoseev, unlike Ulyanov, did not recommend that peasants should be surrendered without compunction to the vagaries of the market. Instead he suggested that a very large class of small-holding cultivators was compatible with the medium-term development of capitalism. There were Marxists in Samara, too, who believed that Ulyanov had not taken proper account of the social and economic composition of the Russian Empire. Pëtr Maslov, Ulyanov’s senior by three years, built on Fedoseev’s analysis by contending that Russian capitalist development was being hobbled by the government’s heavy taxation of the peasantry. The result, according to Maslov, was that only the richest peasants could expand their purchasing power and thereby enable Russia to catch up industrially with the advanced capitalist powers. Moral and practical objections coalesced in his objections to the basic orientation of Western capitalism.
But Ulyanov wanted to spread his wings. In summer 1893 his brother Dmitri passed out from the Samara gimnazia. The decision was taken that the family as a whole should move to Moscow. Anna’s term of exile had ended in the previous year, and Maria Alexandrovna anyway wished to move to a metropolis. The estate at Alakaevka was still being run by Krushvits at a substantial profit, so the family took up rented accommodation in Moscow. The youngsters Dmitri Ilich and Maria Ilinichna had still to be helped through their higher education, and Maria Alexandrovna wanted to be near them while this occurred. But in the process she was loosening her grip upon Vladimir, who planned to make a name for himself in the intellectual salons of St Petersburg.
Vladimir Ulyanov left home on 20 August 1893, bound for St Petersburg. His journey began with the long steamer trip up the Volga to Nizhni Novgorod, where he stopped at the Nikanorov Hotel. For the first time he could travel around the country without having to explain himself to his mother. He could fill his time as he wanted.
Nizhni Novgorod stands at the confluence of the rivers Volga and Oka. The city experienced a growth in industrial production in the last years of the nineteenth century but was still best known as an important river port, and every year the country’s largest fair was held there from mid-July until early September. The Great Fair attracted Russian peasants and merchants as well as the Moslem traders who lived in the Volga provinces. Half a million visitors packed the streets to inspect the booths and stalls that creaked with everything from machine-tools to elaborate daggers and baskets of felt shoes and leather belts. It was all noise and bustle in the summer months. Traders did not bother to bring samples of their wares; they carried their entire stock on their back or by cow, horse or camel. The peasants from deep in the countryside, if they were coming for the first time, could scarcely believe their eyes. To them the large banks, the corn exchange and the railway station were exotic beyond their dreams. At the same time these peasants in bast shoes and rough smocks presented a bizarre spectacle to visitors who had seen only St Petersburg and its inhabitants. Nizhni Novgorod combined Russia ancient and modern.
Yet if Ulyanov walked around the Great Fair, he did not mention it. Admittedly he seldom described such events in his correspondence, preferring to crush the bustle and colour of Russia into a pulp of abstract economic data; but it is quite possible that he passed up the opportunity to inspect the booths and stalls. He looked up fellow Marxists in Nizhni Novgorod. Pavel Skvortsov and Sergei Mickiewicz were among them.1 Ulyanov had friends in common with them: Skvortsov had taught Fedoseev the rudiments of Marxism in Kazan before Ulyanov had arrived there2 – and Ulyanov was cheered by coming into contact with revolutionaries who shared a preoccupation with books and systematic analysis. They sat up late into the night discussing politics and economics. Next day he left by train for the town of Vladimir. There his purpose was to find Nikolai Fedoseev, who had befriended him in Kazan, and seek his opinion on his writings.3 Unfortunately Fedoseev was not merely in exile in Vladimir but in prison, and the meeting could not take place. Ulyanov set off to Moscow, where he stayed with relatives and worked in the great library in the Rumyantsev Museum before taking the train to the north. He arrived in St Petersburg on 31 August.4
The capital for him represented New Russia. There was, he thought, no hope for the country unless industrial and educational progress could be maintained – and St Petersburg was in the vanguard of that movement. He hated Old Russia. A few years later he reproached his sister Anna for choosing Moscow as her place of residence: ‘But surely you agree that Moscow’s a foul city? It’s a foul place to hang around, it’s a foul place for book publication – and why is it that you stick to it? I really went mad when Mark informed me that you were opposed to moving house to St Petersburg.’5
What especially attracted him to the capital were not its hundreds of thousands of factory workers but the little group of young Marxist authors who published on the Russian economy and society. In previous decades there had been many political writers who proffered a critique of tsarism. Among them had been Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevski, Mikhail Bakunin, Pëtr Lavrov and Nikolai Mikhailovski. But they had much difficulty in co-operating with each other and greater difficulty in publishing their works in the legal press. Not so Vladimir Ulyanov’s generation of authors. Quite a number of them were active in the capital, most notably Pëtr Struve, Mikhail Tugan-Baranovski (a friend of Sasha Ulyanov) and Sergei Bulgakov. Others such as Pëtr Maslov were soon to join them. They were adept at analysing the official statistics on social and economic trends – and in Russia these records appeared in profusion. Such writers were exercised by the gamut of politics, economics, sociology and philosophy. They read major contemporary works in foreign languages and strove to apply the latest ideas to the Russian Empire; and they were the first intellectual generation without a sense of inferiority to the great poets and novelists who had emerged in Russia since the 1820s: Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevski and Tolstoi. The young men of the last decade of the nineteenth century felt that it had fallen to them to offer the definitive answers to questions about Russia’s future.
Ulyanov found a room for rent on Yamskaya Street. He was the sole lodger. The room was clean and the padded door into the hallway meant that the landlady’s young family did not disturb him. Yamskaya Street was handily situated, being only a quarter of an hour by foot from the state public library. As soon as he had settled in his lodgings, he went to pay his respects at his sister Olga’s grave in the Volkovo Cemetery and assured his mother by letter that the cross and flowers were in place. In a postscript he mentioned that he was running out of money. He had yet to receive his fees in full from Samara. (Not that they amounted to much because he had not been in regular work.) He asked his mother whether his Aunt Anna Veretennikova had sent the Ulyanovs their share of the Kokushkino estate rent and whether Krushvits, too, was paying up on time.6
Vladimir Ulyanov aimed to promote Revolution and to be comfortable in the process. On 3 September he took the precaution of registering as assistant to the barrister Mikhail Volkenshtein. A letter of recommendation from Andrei Khardin had preceded Ulyanov, and he made arrangements to establish himself as a metropolitan lawyer. Yet, although he wrote to his mother that his first appearance in court was imminent, no such appearance took place. His legal work went no further than occasional informal advice to friends and associates. Indeed the only time he and Volkenshtein worked together was when Volkenshtein tried to get him bailed in 1896.7 In reality Ulyanov was preoccupied with Revolution, and saw this as requiring him to read and write about Russian economic development. The bookshops in St Petersburg were better stocked than those in Samara; he also had access to illegally printed political literature. Ulyanov sought out everything available by Marx and Engels. Works he could not obtain in St Petersburg, including the third volume of Marx’s Capital, he asked his brother Dmitri and sister Maria to find for him in Moscow.8 Vladimir’s appetite for such literature was insatiable.
His own first piece was entitled ‘New Economic Trends in Peasant Life’ and was devoted to a Marxist interpretation of the quantitative data on the peasantry of southern Russia collated by the economist V. E. Postnikov in a book that was currently the focus of intense public discussion. He sent a copy to Pëtr Maslov in Samara, and asked him to send it on to Fedoseev. Ulyanov’s confidence was rising fast. But he was still to prove his talent in the opinion of fellow economic commentators. Fedoseev’s reaction to his article was important to him. He wanted Maslov, too, to supply ‘as detailed an analysis and critique as possible’. By then he had already had his earliest literary disappointment. The prestigious St Petersburg journal Russian Thought, which was noted for its coverage of public affairs, turned him down flat. He thought of issuing it as a separate pamphlet;9 but this idea, too, came to naught.
On reflection he found his failure unsurprising. The journal had recently published an article by V. P. Vorontsov on the very same book by Postnikov, and Ulyanov reasoned to himself that Vorontsov’s liberal political outlook was always likely to appeal to a liberal journal such as Russian Thought. He explained to others that he had softened the conclusions in quest of publication, but that this could never be enough to assuage the hostility of the editor.10 Whether this alone would have prevented publication, however, is doubtful. In any case there were other major journals that he could have approached, including ones which were willing to take articles by Marxists. The Marxist thinkers of the 1890s had an intellectual eminence which was recognised even by their opponents. The problem for Vladimir Ulyanov was not so much the rivalry with Vorontsov as the cogency of the article’s arguments. Ulyanov had tried to demonstrate that Postnikov’s data confirmed that capitalism was already the dominant feature of the Russian rural economy and that the peasantry was being rapidly dissolved into two contending social classes: namely a landed middle class and an agricultural proletariat. He scoffed at the continuing influence ascribed by Vorontsov to the peasant land commune. For Ulyanov, the commune could no longer practically restrain the economic expansion of the rich peasant households at the expense of the impoverished majority of households.11
This was so selective a review of Postnikov’s data that Russian Thought might reasonably have rejected the article even if the journal had shared Ulyanov’s political orientation. But Ulyanov would not hearken to such criticism. He felt that he had compromised enough by toning down his language. His animus against Vorontsov was acute, and it is not difficult to understand why. Vorontsov was a public figure with agrarian-socialist leanings. But even in private he did not call for a revolution against the monarchy; he was resigned to campaigning for the alleviation of economic and social distress within the framework of the existing political order. This was not what most annoyed Ulyanov. His anger was aimed at Vorontsov’s contention – and Ulyanov had explained this at clandestine meetings of Marxists in Samara and St Petersburg – that Russian capitalism would always remain a stunted growth. Vorontsov pointed to the heavy level of taxation on the peasantry as the prime reason for this. Therefore, he argued, the domestic market would remain fragile and the peasantry could look forward only to perpetual impoverishment.12
Ulyanov was irritated further by the fact that several thoughtful Marxists shared Vorontsov’s economic standpoint on the matter. Maslov, despite agreeing with Ulyanov in rejecting agrarian socialism and in believing in the need for revolution, was nevertheless convinced that the poverty in the countryside was so widespread that capitalist development would not pass the incipient stage. Such ideas were also to be found among the St Petersburg Marxists. Ulyanov contacted a group of them who met in the house of Stepan Radchenko and included students from the Institute of Technology. A discussion evening was held at the end of the month, and a bright young engineer called Leonid Krasin gave a paper on ‘The Question of Markets’. Ulyanov was an unforgiving member of the audience,13 and had a verbal dexterity which the others lacked. He was also extraordinarily belligerent. In all such discussions his fellow Marxists learned to beware of him. In February 1894 another meeting was held. This time the apartment of the engineer Robert Klasson was the venue. Ulyanov yet again displayed his revolutionary fervour. He disliked a discussion if it lacked a sense of practical political commitment, and he criticised his friends for this. They reeled in the face of such intemperance. Like him, they were trying to discern the pattern of current economic development. But Ulyanov wanted more than this: he demanded that the group examine how best to bring down the Imperial order.
One of the participants was the Marxist activist Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. She detected ‘something evil and dry’ in his laughter when someone suggested that the group should form a ‘literacy committee’ for local industrial workers. Ulyanov asked how such proposals would aid the revolutionary cause. No one had talked to them in such a fashion, and Krupskaya was to recall: ‘Klasson came up; he was very upset and said, twitching his beard: “Well, the Devil knows what he’s talking about!” “What do you mean?” responded Korobko, “he’s right: what sort of revolutionaries are we?”’14 Klasson and Korobko felt chastened. For the first time someone had pointed out to them that revolutions did not happen by themselves.
Whether Ulyanov himself was in a legitimate position to criticise others, however, is a moot point. Although he called for a practical approach to revolutionary struggle, he had yet to meet factory workers in any number. He saw the factories and commercial offices of St Petersburg only from the outside. He lived as a middle-class rentier. And unlike his engineer associates, he lacked any professional training that might put him in touch with the industrial Russia that was coming into existence. Nor did he perceive a need to change his lifestyle. He still thought the most effective way to enhance the prospects of Revolution in his country was to engage in economic and political controversy with other middle-class intellectuals. While he enjoyed trouncing Krasin, Klasson and Korobko, he recognised that they were hardly the outstanding thinkers of their generation. He was not arrogant towards them but had no intention of remaining a modest member of their group. Despite his contretemps with Russian Thought, he kept up his determination to have a broad impact on informed public debates. This, after all, was why he had come to St Petersburg in the first place.
Luckily for him, Klasson had the connections to attract Pëtr Struve and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovski to his apartment in late February 1894.15 Ulyanov was at last exchanging ideas with thinkers of his own intellectual calibre. The three of them – Struve, Tugan-Baranovski and Ulyanov – were tackling basic questions of Russia’s future. Struve was on the point of making his name with his book Critical Remarks on the Question of Russia’s Economic Development, and Tugan-Baranovski was to publish The Russian Factory. Like Ulyanov, they scrutinised the latest economic data. They had independent means and were converts to Marxism. It was the hope of Ulyanov to get his own works into the legal press.
But their new friend disconcerted Struve and Tugan-Baranovski. Ulyanov had never been abroad and witnessed the higher level of economic development in Britain, France and Belgium. This was not his fault. The Ministry of the Interior had turned down every request he had made to travel to foreign parts. Yet Struve and Tugan-Baranovski felt that Ulyanov had suffered intellectually from his insulation. In particular, they told him, he needed to drop his absurd over-statement of the degree of capitalist development that had occurred in the Russian Empire. His approach was altogether too schematic. To them it also appeared that Ulyanov was excessively keen to prove to Marxists that he was entirely ‘orthodox’ in his interpretation of Marxism. Struve and Tugan-Baranovski wished to use Marxism as a means of explaining the truth of Russian economic trends but not as an unquestionable creed; they thought Ulyanov was overly exercised by loyalty to Marx regardless of whether Marx was right or wrong. He refused to accept that Capital could be faulted in the slightest way. He was a secular ‘believer’.
And at the same time they thought he had altogether too much of the Russian terrorist tradition about him. In his own family Alexander had been a practising terrorist and Anna and even young Dmitri sympathised with the terrorists.16 Vladimir himself went on being friendly with former activists of People’s Freedom. He might castigate agrarian socialism, but he did not keep his distance from people who advocated its most extreme practical variant. And so he seemed to them to be an extraordinary mixture of influences – and they assumed that further residence in St Petersburg and a foreign city or two was needed for him to mature in a normal fashion.
There was an obvious paradox. Vladimir Ulyanov had been brought up as a European Russian. He was a fluent reader of German and French and had taught himself to read English. He was a brilliant student of the Classics. His parents, while rearing their family to be proud of Russian culture, had not imparted nationalist ideas. How on earth could such a boy have turned out to be so ‘Russian’ in comparison with many young Russians who had had much less access to the contemporary currents of European thought? Struve and Tugan-Baranovski were surely correct in saying that Ulyanov’s inexperience of Europe was a large part of the answer. But they overestimated the likelihood of him adjusting his ideas in reaction to a trip abroad. He had already made his mind up. From this period onwards, at least until he had held power for a couple of years, he would persist in seeing Russia as more advanced economically and socially than it really was. This was not all. He would also begin to contend that the policies he recommended for his own Russia should be applied to the rest of Europe. His Europeanisation of Russia was a first step on the path towards the Russianisation of Europe.
Another area of division between them was the gap in status between Struve the Petersburg aristocrat and Ulyanov the parvenu. When Anna Ilinichna wrote to Struve in 1899, who still professed Marxism, on her brother’s behalf, she addressed him formally as ‘Gracious Sir’;17 this was not the way that revolutionary activists usually communicated with each other. The Ulyanovs had been rising up the ladder of Imperial society, but they had no friends among the higher hereditary nobility, and after Alexander Ulyanov’s execution there was no chance that they ever would. Anna’s formal respectfulness towards Struve was just one sign of this. Not that Vladimir minded about his family’s position. He had never aimed to ingratiate himself with Old Russia. Unlike his sister, he did not disguise his emotions. He talked to Struve on his own terms, and Struve and Tugan-Baranovski were horrified by what they took to be the crudity of his ideas. But Vladimir Ulyanov did not care. He even disconcerted the Radchenko-Klasson group, whose members were from middle-class backgrounds more akin to his own. Wasn’t Ulyanov, they asked, a bit too ‘red’?18 In their eyes, his Marxism retained an excess of the more violent aspects of Russian agrarian-socialist terrorism.
He tried to reassure them that he was committed to ‘scientific’ Marxism and that he had put his agrarian-socialist phase behind him. But his heroes included precisely the terrorists that the Radchenko-Klasson group objected to. Ulyanov had a penchant for the works of Pëtr Tkachëv, who argued that Engels, after Marx’s death, had been insufficiently ‘Marxist’ inasmuch as his Anti-Diihring had offered an excessively deterministic analysis of world history. Tkachëv believed in revolutionary will, conspiratorial organisation and political violence, and thought such tenets congruent with Marxism. Eulogising dictatorship, he declared that if ever the revolutionaries got power they would need to carry out a mass terror against priests, policemen and landlords. More privately he harboured an admiration for Sergei Nechaev. This was an extraordinary hero for him. Nechaev had been the notorious arch-conspirator of Russian agrarian socialism who, in the interests of binding his adherents to their common cause, ordered the murder of one of them. The trial of Nechaev’s adherents in 1871 did much to alienate middle-class opinion from the nascent revolutionary movement, and Fedor Dostoevski put his version of the episode at the centre of his novel The Devils. The activists of the People’s Freedom organisation disowned Nechaev’s criminal and amoral self-aggrandisement.
Yet Vladimir Ulyanov felt that Nechaev’s name should be honoured. He reasoned as follows: ‘He possessed special talent as an organiser and conspirator as well as the ability to enrobe his thoughts in astonishing formulations.’ Nechaev had once been asked who in the ruling house of the Romanovs should be liquidated. The reply was: ‘The whole house of the Romanovs!’ Ulyanov repeated the phrase, calling it a simple stroke of genius.19 Thus Ulyanov the Marxist did not exclude non-Marxist idols from his pantheon. The traditions of Russian agrarian socialists, especially the advocates of dictatorship, had a deep and enduring impact upon him.
He shared a visceral hatred of every social prop of the tsarist political order. He detested the whole Romanov family, the aristocracy, the clergy, the police and the high command. He hated the mercantile middle class and the rising industrial and financial middle class. His zeal to smash down these props by violent methods was something he held in common with Zaichnevski, Tkachëv and Nechaev. In fact not all the terrorists he admired had felt this way. Indeed Vladimir Ulyanov’s terrorist brother Alexander had not forsworn concepts of morality or the goals of parliamentary elections. So what made Vladimir Ulyanov respond enthusiastically to the rhetoric and rationale of terror and dictatorship? The most obvious answer is the fate of that same elder brother. It had been within the gift of the Emperor Alexander III to commute the death sentence on Alexander Ulyanov. But Alexander Ulyanov was hanged. This would have been enough to turn many a younger brother against ‘the house of the Romanovs’ even though Alexander Ulyanov’s complicity in the assassination conspiracy of 1887 was undeniable. Moreover, the fate of his brother Alexander was bound to incline Vladimir to the bloody invocations of Zaichnevski, Tkachëv and Nechaev.
Yet this is not the whole story. Vladimir’s family had always yearned for a transformed Russia. The Ulyanovs felt a certain detachment from the official Imperial culture – and not just because they had non-Russian elements in their genealogy. They wanted a ‘cultured’, ‘civilised’ Russia. They wanted an end to privileges. Much in Vladimir’s early life had already undermined any inhibition to turning Russia upside down. His education had had a similar effect. The gimnazia curriculum had insisted upon technical linguistic accomplishment dissociated from everyday Russian life. His university training was equally abstract. The purposes of government were transmitted to him in the form of irksome regulations. He saw nothing to lose in destroying his state and society.
At the same time Vladimir Ulyanov was a complex individual who had not abandoned hope of general recognition as a writer on economics and society. Although Struve and Tugan-Baranovski remained uneasy about him, he refused to modify his analyses. He had stood up to his most severe intellectual test to date, and did not feel worsted. His confidence mounted in other ways too. His previous separations from his mother and family had been of short duration so that the move to St Petersburg marked a psychological break. He had all but lost his youthful appearance. Vladimir had inherited his father’s looks and one aspect of this gave him some irritation: early baldness. He discussed with his sister Maria Ilinichna whether there might be a way to reverse the process. Probably he was joking. But he kept his beard and what was left of his hair in proper trim. Indeed he hated untidiness – and he admonished family members if they failed to keep their buttons neatly sewn and their shoes repaired.20
Yet he was no dandy. While wanting to remain tidy, he did not enjoy shopping for clothes; he got others to do this for him – or rather he wore his clothes until such time as one of his relatives became sufficiently exasperated to buy a new suit or a pair of shoes for him.
The main women in his life were still his mother and sisters, and from St Petersburg he kept in regular contact with them by letter. He visited them in the summerhouse they rented near Lyublino railway station south of Moscow. The members of the Ulyanov family were good at supporting each other. On one of his trips to Lyublino, Volodya learned to ride a bicycle under instruction from Dmitri.21 He himself encouraged Maria in her educational objectives when she took up a two-year science course in Moscow in 1896. Maria Ilinichna had not had an easy time. She had been refused admission to the St Petersburg Higher Women’s Courses taken earlier by Anna Ilinichna.22 She was not as bright as her exceptional elder brothers, but probably the reason for her rejection was political rather than academic and she was paying a price for being related to brothers and a sister who were troublemakers for the Imperial regime. But she struggled on and Vladimir kept in touch and gave her encouragement to go abroad and finish her education.
Meanwhile his interest in members of the opposite sex was growing; many years later he referred to having chased after one or two of them. The rumour was widely believed that the beautiful Apollonaria Yakubova had caught his eye and become his sweetheart. Certainly he made a trip back to Nizhni Novgorod in January 1894 and met up with her; and in 1897, according to hints dropped by his sister Anna, there continued to be a feeling for him at least on Apollonaria’s part. The truth may never be known. By all accounts, however, he did not let affairs of the heart get in the way of public affairs – and this was to remain the case even during his involvement with Inessa Armand before the First World War.
Nor had his childhood quirks vanished. Pencils were still kept (mercilessly) sharp and his desk remained smartly arranged; he cleaned it daily. He also detested waste. When he received letters with blank spaces, he cut off and kept the unused parts. He was careful with his money and warned Dmitri against being diddled by booksellers. Always he drafted articles in his neat longhand. Not for him the ‘Bohemian’ slackness of his revolutionary associates. There was only one aspect of his personal life, namely his health, where he failed to display due care. He could not be blamed for his typhoid when he was a young man. But he was less than careful in relation to other problems. Vladimir had terrible, chronic pains in the stomach and the head and could not sleep at night. Doctors diagnosed ‘catarrh’ of the stomach membrane; nowadays this would be called an ulcer. His brother Sasha had suffered from similar problems as a very small boy; Anna Ilinichna too had the same ‘catarrh’ at the age of nineteen and their mother had her own difficulty with her stomach.23
Apparently there was a genetic susceptibility to severe gastric problems. But the environment, too, had an impact. Nearly always stomach illness occurred in those periods of his life when he was failing to stick to regular meal times and to a well-balanced diet; and any psychological tension arising from political disputes made the problems much worse.24
Yet in politics he was less inhibited than any contemporary Marxist in Russia. He was undeterred by his oral disagreements with Struve and Tugan-Baranovski, and in late 1894 wrote a lengthy review of Struve’s Critical Remarks. This had a print-run of 2,000 copies. Ulyanov looked forward to publishing a work of his own, but the political radicalism of its contents induced him to adopt the pseudonym K. Tulin. He referred to ‘Mr Struve’ – the use of ‘Mr’ itself a term of abuse among Marxists – as a ‘petit-bourgeois’. Above all, he declared that the ‘bourgeois’ nature of the contemporary Russian economy had long been established and that capitalism had already been consolidated:25
Is it really only ‘over recent years’? Was it not given clear expression in the 1860s? Did it not dominate in the entire course of the 1860s? The petit-bourgeois [Mr Struve] is trying to soften things by representing the bourgeois characteristics of the entire reform epoch [after 1861] as a sort of temporary distraction or fashion.
The contrast between Ulyanov and Struve could only be hinted at in a legal publication. This consisted in Struve’s suggestion that the end of capitalism might come about peacefully and even without very much conflict among the various social classes. Ulyanov had objected to this in a pamphlet he had written and had had reproduced on a hectograph machine. Struve, according to Ulyanov, had erroneously overlooked the need for Marxists always to advocate ‘class struggle’ and violent methods of Revolution.26 Although he did not say this openly in the new article, he strongly implied it. And the censors in the Ministry of the Interior understood this well enough. They impounded the book before it went on sale. In 1895 all but a hundred of the extant copies were burned. Once again Ulyanov had been thwarted in his attempt to become a widely read author.
Yet he still hoped for a greater future. He had always wanted to travel abroad, and now he had the additional incentive of the possibility of making direct contact with Georgi Plekhanov and his Emancipation of Labour Group. On 15 March 1895, to his surprise, the chance came his way when the Ministry of the Interior at last, for no particular reason, dropped its refusal to grant him a passport.27 He hurriedly made preparations for a trip to Switzerland, and packed materials about the Russian Imperial economy together with his clothes. On 24 April he set off from St Petersburg to Moscow with his Samara friend Isaak Lalayants, newly released from prison. Next day, alone, he took the train westwards to the Russian frontier across the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy.28
Vladimir Ulyanov was under instructions from his mother to write to Moscow as he made his journey, and he dutifully posted a card from Salzburg:29
I’ve now been travelling ‘in foreign parts’ for two days and am practising the language: I’m in a bad way; I understand the Germans with the greatest difficulty or, I should say, I don’t understand them at all. If I go up to the conductor with any question, I don’t understand when he replies. He repeats himself more loudly. I still don’t understand, and he gets angry and walks off. Despite such a shameful fiasco, I’m not disheartened and am pretty keenly mangling the German language.
Crossing into Switzerland, he was entranced by the Alps and the lakes, and explored the possibility of renting a summerhouse and hiring a maid. He reported, however, that maids received as much as thirty francs per month and had also to be fed – and that they expected to eat well!30 This was the reaction of a man who, whatever his politics, expected to keep expenditure on employees to a minimum. He was more willing to spend money in connection with his own health and, when his stomach continued to give him trouble, he paid for a consultation with an expensive Swiss medical specialist. The advice to Ulyanov was mainly dietary. He was told to eat regularly, avoid oily foods and drink plenty of mineral water.31
From Switzerland he made a trip to France, where he rented an apartment in Paris. Returning to Zurich, he found a place outside the city by the lakeside and amid greenery. Then finally on to Berlin, where he swam a lot and visited the Königliche Bibliothek.32 Whenever he began to run out of money, his mother helped him out. Within the family he was notorious for his reluctance to give presents. He wrote to her just before leaving Berlin offering to bring back a book on anatomy for his brother Dmitri. But what could he bring for his sister Maria? ‘I feel’, he added, ‘that I ought to buy various bits of rubbish.’33 Hardly the words of a sentimentalist. Yet for once he purchased a present for her. Maria never disclosed what it was, but she adored her brother and was so grateful that she never forgot this uncharacteristic act of generosity. Subsequently the sole presents she got from him were copies of books he had written.
By contrast Vladimir Ulyanov was highly emotional about his politics. Among his purposes in going abroad was to arrange a meeting with his idol, Georgi Plekhanov. His first task in May 1895 had been to track him down in Geneva. The two got on very well. At last Plekhanov had evidence of his growing following in St Petersburg. The tiny Emancipation of Labour Group was encouraged by Ulyanov’s visit to consider ways of expanding its influence, and discussed a scheme to establish a journal of socialist theory, Rabotnik. Ulyanov had proceeded from Geneva to Zurich in order to discuss further arrangements with Plekhanov’s associate Pavel Axelrod. He stayed for a fortnight with Axelrod and his wife at the village of Adoltern. Ulyanov’s intelligence, dedication and loyalty impressed Plekhanov and Axelrod. His Marxist faith was unquenchable. While he was in Paris, he looked up Marx’s son-in-law Paul Lafargue; and in Berlin he conversed with the prominent German social-democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht. It may reasonably be supposed that he would have paid homage directly to Friedrich Engels if Engels had not died in 1895. Such meetings were not just occasions for mundane political business. Ulyanov, a man who was shy of expressing his feelings, nevertheless confessed to being in love (vlyublënnosf) with Karl Marx and Georgi Plekhanov. This young heterosexual revolutionary was more excited by ideology – and its leading exponents – than by women.
He lived for politics. Back in St Petersburg, on 29 September, he brought the good tidings of the contacts he had made. On the way he had stopped over in Vilnius, Moscow and Orekhovo-Zuevo. In each of these places he forged links with local Marxists. He travelled with a yellow, false-bottomed leather suitcase which he had had made for him by a craftsman on Mansteinstrasse in Berlin; and he smuggled in plenty of illegal literature for his comrades.34 But the border crossing had not been as successful as had appeared at the time. The customs officers knew his identity and almost certainly refrained from searching his suitcase in order to enable the Okhrana to follow him back to St Petersburg and discover the names of the rest of his comrades.35 For Ulyanov personally, however, the trip was a memorable achievement. Organisation on a higher scale than clandestine discussion circles in Kazan, Samara or St Petersburg was in prospect. He expected the linkage with Switzerland to facilitate the construction of a network of political sympathisers across the Russian Empire.
But still the perspective was primarily literary: the co-operation between Ulyanov’s comrades and the Emancipation of Labour Group would be focussed upon the production of the Rabotnik journal. The Russian word rabotnik (or ‘worker’) signalled the Group’s orientation towards the industrial labour movement in Russia. And yet neither Ulyanov nor any of his comrades had plans to meet workers. The St Petersburg Marxists were sincere, hard-studying intellectuals, but they lived in complete isolation from the urban ‘proletariat’ which they described as the future vanguard of the revolution against the Romanov monarchy. It was only a matter of time before one of the comrades would become frustrated by their political passivity. In fact it was an outsider who provoked them into action. This was the young Marxist Yuli Martov, a newcomer to St Petersburg from Vilnius. Enthusiastic and resourceful, Martov formed his own discussion group before making the acquaintance of Ulyanov and his associates; quickly he pointed out that the business of revolutionaries was not merely to think and to discuss or even to publish, but also to act. Martov laid before them a mode of operation which would give the learned Marxists of St Petersburg the chance to influence the nascent labour movement.
Martov, who was a Jew, argued that Jewish socialists should bind themselves into the general socialist organisations of the Russian Empire. He opposed the idea of forming an exclusively Jewish party. He was very bright and had already acquired a formidable knowledge of the texts of Marx and Engels. His ability to write quickly was rivalled by no one in Ulyanov’s circle except Ulyanov himself. The two of them immediately got on well. Their friendship was so close because they agreed on the foundations of their world-view. But another factor was probably the contrast in their personalities. Whereas Ulyanov was neat and self-restrained, Martov – at least in private – had a chaotic, bubbly side. As so often happens with friends, they appreciated each other for their differences.
Martov’s experience gave him an edge in the debates held in St Petersburg after his arrival there in October 1895. The Marxists had a larger number of groups and adherents. More to the point, they had proselytised among the largely Jewish industrial workers and formed further groups of their own. The problem soon arose, however, that the workers whom they attracted tended to move out of the working class once they had received an education at the hands of Marxist activists. Martov’s mentor Alexander Kremer had the answer to this. In his pamphlet On Agitation Kremer argued the need for Marxists to maintain their study circles but also to include agitation among local factory workers in their immediate tasks. His hypothesis was that Marxism would be spread more widely and quickly by practical leadership of industrial strikes over grievances held by workers than by laborious expositions of Capital. While the Radchenko–Klasson–Ulyanov fraternity was investigating agrarian economic statistics, Kremer and Martov had been involved in industrial conflicts between owners and workforces which involved tens of thousands of workers. Martov put the point that the ‘Vilnius Programme’ should be adopted by the existing Marxist groups of St Petersburg.36
Several members of these groups – the so-called Elders (stariki) were unconvinced by Martov, and it would seem that Ulyanov was among them. For Ulyanov, a large part of Marxism’s attraction had been its emphasis on scholarship and science. He insisted that Marxists had something to teach the working class and that, if Revolution was to be successful, there had to be a widespread dissemination of Marxist doctrines. His intellectual solemnity made him well named as an elder. In fact, as his friend Alexander Potresov was to recall, ‘Old Man’ was his nickname:37
But he was young only according to his identity document. Face to face you would not be able to give him anything below thirty-five or forty years. The pallid face, the baldness that covered his whole head except for some sparse hair around his temples, the thin, reddish little beard, the screwed-up eyes that looked slyly at people from under his eyebrows, the old and harsh voice… It was for good reason that in the St Petersburg Union of Struggle of the time, that primary cell of the future party, this young man in years was called ‘the Old Man’, and we often joked that Lenin even as a child had probably been bald and ‘old’.
But Martov and the Youngsters (molodye) gained the upper hand at the joint negotiations. A Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class was formed and a five-person committee elected. The burden of Marxist activity was shifted from intellectual discussion-circle debate to economic and political agitation among industrial workers. Vladimir Ulyanov, whatever his early misgivings, moved with the times. In November 1895 he wrote a leaflet appealing to the five hundred striking textile workers of the Thornton Factory in St Petersburg.38 He visited strike leaders and handed over forty rubles for the relief of workers arrested by the police. In line with the Union of Struggle’s fresh policy, he wrote a lengthy booklet on the current legislation about the fines exacted from workers by factory owners. It was printed by an arrangement with St Petersburg supporters of People’s Freedom and had a fake announcement about its place of publication (Kherson in southern Ukraine) and about official permission obtained from the censors. Three thousand copies were prepared. Vladimir Ulyanov, the ‘red’ theorist of action of the most extreme nature, was at last engaging in political activity outside the confines of studious discussion-circles.
At last the Ministry of the Interior took a hand in the affairs of Russian Marxist organisations. Vladimir Ulyanov and his comrades had stayed out of prison because the Okhrana had thought them too studious to cause much trouble. The rise of the Russian labour movement put an end to this official indulgence. The Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class had to be arrested. Ulyanov had no presentiment of the change of policing policy. On 5 December 1895 he wrote chattily to his mother that his cousin Dmitri Ardashev, by now a qualified notary, had asked him to take on a legal case on his firm’s behalf. He went to see another cousin Dr Alexander Zalezhski in the city, but Zalezhski was unavailable. Life continued normally; the only trouble Ulyanov experienced was the noise made by his neighbours, who played loudly on their balalaikas: he had never been able to tolerate extraneous sounds when he was trying to read or write.1
It was an unpleasant shock for him on 9 December when the police turned up at the apartment and took him into custody. His friend Yuli Martov was detained a month later. By then Ulyanov had been placed in cell no. 193 in the House of Preliminary Detention. Since this was not his first offence, he knew that he was unlikely to be released, as he had been in Kazan in 1887. Ulyanov’s first interrogation took place on 21 December. Adjutant Dobrovolski posed the questions scrupulously, avoiding any psychological or physical pressure. Ulyanov, who had trained as a lawyer, easily offered formal compliance to the authorities while divulging no information to them. He phrased himself with precision: ‘I do not acknowledge myself guilty of belonging to the party of social-democrats or to any party. Nothing is known to me about the existence at the present time of any anti-governmental party.’2 In a strict sense he was correct. A social-democratic party had indeed not been created. Ulyanov dearly wished to form just such a party; but he had not yet succeeded. The confrontation between Adjutant Dobrovolski and the prisoner in cell no. 193 was brief and not unpleasant.
Ulyanov treated his stay in the House of Preliminary Detention as a political sabbatical. He got on with his treatise on Russian economic development (which appeared in 1899 as The Development of Capitalism in Russia). He could read virtually any legally printed book, and he quipped to his sister Anna Ilinichna: ‘I’m in a better position than other citizens of the Russian Empire: I can’t be arrested!’3 He had also taken the precaution of agreeing a code for communication with Nadezhda Krupskaya in the event of arrest He had prepared himself pretty thoroughly.4
Anna Ilinichna and their mother moved to St Petersburg from Moscow. Vladimir had a number of demands: good-quality lead pencils, food and linen. Above all, good-quality lead pencils. His family overdid the provision of food and Vladimir complained that a single day’s delivery was as large as one of the Easter cakes described in Ivan Goncharov’s comic novel Oblomov.5 Vladimir reminded his relatives of the diet prescribed for his stomach problem. They procured bottles of mineral water and even an enema tube for him after the doctor ordered regular bowel clearances.6 Vladimir got thinner and his complexion turned yellowish;7 but he also increased his muscular fitness through press-ups and sit-ups. His brother Dmitri recalled:8
Vladimir Ilich told that in the preliminary prison he always polished the cell floor himself since this was a good form of gymnastics. And so he acted like a real old floor-polisher – with his hands held behind him, he would begin to dance to and fro across the cell with a brush or a rag under his foot. ‘Good gymnastics, and you even get a sweat up…’
Physical exertion was uncongenial for most revolutionaries of that generation, but not for Vladimir Ilich.
While he was in the House of Preliminary Detention, he sketched out a Marxist party programme.9 He wrote it in invisible ‘milk ink’ which could be read only when the paper was heated and held over a bright lamp. He exclaimed to his sister: ‘There’s no trickery that can’t be out-tricked!’10 Vladimir Ilich’s treatment in prison had its ludicrous side. As he and Anna Ilinichna talked to each other through the cell grille, they used several Russian words of German or French origin. A guard interrupted them on the assumption that they were speaking a foreign language in order to engage in subversive activity.11 Brother and sister had to adopt a simpler vocabulary in order to avoid further trouble. And much as Vladimir Ilich enjoyed making use of the time to get on with his writing, he was frustrated by his inability to join in the debates among Russian Marxists. He wrote in a political void.
Did he also miss contact with women? In his earlier life there is no sign that he had girlfriends, but this may be the result of the prudery of his relatives when they wrote their memoirs about him. Nevertheless it is remarkable that no woman came forward in the 1920s claiming to have been paid court by Vladimir Ilich in his adolescence. But this absence might have resulted from the official discouragement given to any accounts that described him in terms other than those of political hagiography. Perhaps, however, he was anyway too upset by the deaths of his father and brother to become involved with women outside the family for several years. Perhaps, too, he had to leave home for St Petersburg before he could explore this new side of his emotions. Two female members of the Union of Struggle, certainly, were attracted to him. These were Apollonaria Alexandrovna Yakubova and Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who both planned to catch his eye by standing on the street corner which was observable by prisoners taking their daily walk from the House of Preliminary Detention. Yakubova was unable to be present when the attempt was made, and, although Krupskaya took up position for several hours, she failed to catch sight of Vladimir. Subsequent attempts were no more successful, but Krupskaya and Yakubova at least had tried. They were unable to continue the experiment for very long because both were taken into custody by the Okhrana in August 1896.
On 29 January 1897, the authorities sentenced nearly all the arrested members of the St Petersburg Union of Struggle to three years of ‘administrative exile’ in eastern Siberia. This was a Russian punishment that involved a convict being sent, without recourse to the courts and their juries, not to prison but to a designated place of banishment. A graded system of banishment had been developed. The more dangerous the convict, the more distant the place of exile. Permission for individual convicts to live in particular houses, to take paid employment and to make trips to nearby towns was granted in accordance with the Ministry of the Interior’s assessment of risk. Local officialdom in Siberia had large residual authority. The convicts knew that the conditions of their exile might be worsened if they did not behave themselves.
Another fear was that prisoners were sent in transport supplied by the government or even had to make the trip on foot along with other manacled prisoners. Trudging through the snow and living off inadequate rations, sometimes such convicts died before reaching their destination. The alternative was to get approval to pay privately for the trip to Siberia and travel in comfort. Vladimir Ulyanov successfully made such an application and on 14 February, along with other members of the Union of Struggle, was given three days outside prison to make preparations for the journey. A planning session took place in the house of Martov’s family.12
They agreed to sit out their term of exile without attempting to escape.13 Yet political questions divided them. The linkage of the Union of Struggle with anti-tsarist industrial workers was commonly desired; but there was disagreement as to what role should be played in the Marxist political movement by these workers. The experienced Marxist Stepan Radchenko, who was an ex-adherent of People’s Freedom and a founder of the Union with definite pro-terrorist proclivities, argued that no worker would be able to do better than a well-read, committed intellectual. His faction became known as the Veterans. Others felt differently. K. M. Takhtarëv and Apollonaria Yakubova – the so-called Youngsters – wanted working-class Marxists to have enhanced opportunities to run the various organisations of Russian Marxism. Vladimir Ulyanov’s intellectuality drew him closer to Radchenko than to Takhtarëv and Yakubova. But, unlike Radchenko, he was not absolutely hostile to the working class taking over the Marxist movement. Indeed, he wanted workers to assume such authority, but he insisted that they should have a basic intellectual grounding before they did so. This particular opinion of his, which marked him off from both the Veterans and the Youngsters, was to make an interesting reappearance when ‘the worker question’ was raised again after the turn of the century.14
All this lay in the future. At the time the Department of Police was considering the requests of the mothers of Ulyanov and Martov for their sons to travel to Siberia on their own financial account. Official permission was granted. Maria Alexandrovna could easily afford the train fare and politely declined the offer of a subsidy from the publisher and Marxist sympathiser Alexandra Kalmykova.15
Ulyanov was a mite embarrassed that several of his arrested comrades lacked his own family’s resources. But he conquered the temptation to travel with them; neither then nor later did he let comradely sentiment get in the way of his material comfort. On 17 February he set out for Moscow on the first stage of his journey. His mother accompanied him and petitioned the authorities that, in view of her ill health, Vladimir should be allowed to stay a few days in the family apartment in Moscow before heading off to Siberia.16 He finally left Moscow on 23 February, after studying for a few days in the Rumyantsev Museum Library. But he was not in the best mental shape since he was afflicted by the ‘nerves’ that were to bother him till he died. Like his sisters Anna and Maria as well as his parents,17 he was highly strung. Bouts of emotional instability frequently occurred when he was stepping into the unknown. Exile was a turning point in his life. For years he had had no serious intention of becoming a full-time lawyer. But his arrest and conviction put him permanently into the bad books of the authorities. Now he could hardly take up the profession even if he wanted to.18
He told his mother of his feelings; the act of communication seems to have helped him through his nervous bouts. He signed off letters to his sisters with a perfunctory ‘I press your hand. Yours, V.U.’; but when he wrote to his ‘dear Mama’ he often added: ‘I give you a big kiss.’19 That he genuinely loved his mother there can be no doubt; once he said about her: ‘Mama… you know, she’s simply a saint.’20 But he deliberately made the most of her saintliness: the constant references to his state of health kept him at the forefront of the family’s attention.
The prospect of exile was worse than the eventual reality; but before he left Moscow he had not been informed – indeed the authorities had not yet decided – exactly where in Siberia he would be ordered to stay. Although he was generally calm, there continued to be moments of extreme tension. At Kursk Station in Moscow he bade farewell to his brother Dmitri. His mother, sisters Anna and Maria and brother-in-law Mark boarded the train and accompanied him southwards to Tula.21 At Tula the Trans-Siberian Railway took an eastward switch of direction, and it was there that he said goodbye to his family and travelled onwards to Krasnoyarsk in central Siberia. Suddenly he again became thoroughly agitated. A problem had arisen on the platform in Tula when it transpired that there were too many passengers for the train. Ulyanov refused to accept this even though he had been lucky in getting permission to use the railway at all. He strode down the platform and angrily upbraided the nearest official. He showed all the confidence of an hereditary nobleman and a practising lawyer by insisting that the authorities fulfil their obligations and attach an additional carriage to the train.22 The complaint was passed to the station master, and after a flurry of negotiations the convicted revolutionary got his way. The repressive tsarist administration was capable of indulgence in a way that was wholly absent in the Soviet period under Lenin. The passengers proceeded comfortably to Krasnoyarsk.
Some days later they arrived in Krasnoyarsk in mid-Siberia, where Ulyanov was halted for two whole months because the river Yenisei remained frozen until the spring. Ulyanov took the opportunity to have a tooth pulled out by the town’s dentist; he also visited the renowned library of the vodka distiller and bibliophile Gennadi Yudin.23 It says much about the widening disenchantment of middle-class entrepreneurs with the Romanov monarchy that Yudin gave the young Marxist the run of his library.24 In the meantime Ulyanov wrote to the Irkutsk Governor-General citing his medical problems and asking to stay in Krasnoyarsk for the three years of his sentence.25 He did not really expect a positive reply, and proposed Minusinsk district as a second choice. The area was known among revolutionaries as the ‘Siberian Italy’ because of its congenial climate. If he could go to Minusinsk or some village near by, he would have no great difficulty in seeing out his term in comfort. Camaraderie prevailed among revolutionary sympathisers regardless of their specific political orientation. Thus the doctor and agrarian socialist Vladimir Krutovski, who argued against the Marxists in favour of retaining the peasant land commune, helped Ulyanov the Marxist to acquire certification on his stomach complaint.26
By April 1897 Ulyanov had learned that he was to be sent to the lakeside village of Shushenskoe in the Minusinsk district of Yenisei province.27 Delighted, he tried his hand at writing a poem about ‘Shu-shu-shu’ or ‘Shusha’, as he called Shushenskoe, before even seeing the place. The first line went as follows: ‘In Shusha, in the foothills of Mount Sayan…’28 But inspiration left him at this early point and he abandoned the attempt. Poetic expressiveness was anyway not his style. He was a passionate man, but his emotions were sublimated in ambitions of class struggle, economic analysis and Marxist ideology and were expressed in heavy, lumpy prose. He still loved literature, and yet increasingly he used it as an empirical source for his political ideas. He did not allow it to take him out of himself. He distrusted effusions of the imagination. He knew what he wanted to do in politics, and refused to be distracted.
But certainly Vladimir Ulyanov was looking forward to ‘Shusha’. The journey from Krasnoyarsk would be a pleasant adventure, involving a four-day trip by steamship southward along the river Yenisei to Minusinsk from Krasnoyarsk. Minusinsk was a district capital of 15,000 inhabitants, and it would be from there that the main decisions affecting the conditions of exile for Ulyanov would be taken. He was already far beyond the direct supervision of the St Petersburg ministerial authorities. On 30 April 1897, once navigation became practical after the raging springtime floods had subsided, he set off on the steamship St Nicholas.29 He was in congenial company. Travelling along with him were Gleb Krzhizhanovski and V. V. Starkov, friends from the St Petersburg Union of Struggle. They, too, petitioned about their ill health and had been allocated a village near to Shushenskoe. They took a cabin on board and, from the middle of the rushing Yenisei, admired the vista of mountains and woods. On reaching Minusinsk, the three comrades formally requested the monthly stipend of eight rubles to which each of them was entitled. This would be enough for an individual’s rudimentary needs: food, clothes and rented accommodation. Then they hired a carriage and horses to undertake the last stage of the journey. For Ulyanov, this meant a drive of nearly forty miles to his destination.
The village of Shushenskoe had over a thousand inhabitants and its own administration. The post from Russia was delivered on Thursdays and Mondays, and in an emergency it was possible for the Ulyanov family to send a telegram to Minusinsk.30 The river Shush ran along the outskirts of the village. There were woods in the vicinity and Ulyanov went bathing in an inlet of the great Yenisei river a mile from his house. He could look out of his window and see the snowy peaks of the Sayan mountain range. The food was cheap and nourishing and Ulyanov ceased to need to drink the bottles of mineral water he had brought with him on doctor’s advice. Soon he wrote to his mother: ‘Everyone’s found that I’ve grown fat over the summer, got a tan and now look completely like a Siberian. That’s hunting and the life of the countryside for you!’31
Martov was sent to Turukhansk just south of the Arctic Circle, probably because the authorities knew he was Jewish. Turukhansk would be extremely cold during the long winter and the mail would be delivered to him only nine times a year. Isolation and bickering among comrades were problems that would test Martov’s endurance. Ulyanov missed him a lot. Martov had an inspiring levity, and Ulyanov had already decided he wanted to work closely with him – and, apart from anything else, Martov loved to translate and teach others to sing revolutionary songs: in exile they would have had fun together. Instead Martov had to endure the worst conditions of exile with equanimity. Physical hardship was not the only problem for the exiles. Cut off from normal society in Russia, several of them became preoccupied by their own political disagreements and personal jealousies. Bickering sometimes became intolerably intense. Ulyanov’s correspondent Nikolai Fedoseev, who had been dispatched from his Vladimir prison to Verkholensk in north-eastern Siberia in 1897, could not endure the slanders heaped on him by some fellow exiles, and shot himself.32
The dark side of Siberian banishment did not touch Ulyanov, and it was in Shushenskoe that his skills as a leader were first glimpsed. Although he had striven to get the most comfortable conditions for himself, he did not forget the plight of his comrades, and did what he could for them by writing letters of encouragement to Martov, Fedoseev and others. Ulyanov also regularised his life in relation to women. At least this is how things appeared in his letter to the Police Department in St Petersburg on 8 January 1898, in which he appealed for permission for his ‘fiancée’ Nadezhda Krupskaya to move to Shushenskoe.33 Permission was virtually automatic even though Krupskaya had been sentenced to exile in Ufa, a town lying between the river Volga and the Urals mountain range. As Vladimir informed his mother, the plan was to use the projected engagement as a means of getting her transferred to mid-Siberia. The various activists wished to serve out their sentences in proximity.
The question arises whether there was much more to this than political calculation. It was Nadezhda Konstantinovna who had suggested herself as his fiancée when he moved into Siberian exile. According to Anna Ilinichna, Vladimir turned her down.34 At least at first. Later – perhaps at the end of 1897 – he changed his mind and became engaged to her. Yet she was not the sole woman with whom he was friends. For example, he and Apollonaria Yakubova (or Kubochka as he called her) had had a liking for each other. As he walked from the St Petersburg House of Detention, Yakubova ‘ran up and kissed him, laughing and crying at the same time’.35 Yakubova was a beautiful woman and a committed revolutionary, and Vladimir Ilich may have preferred her to Nadezhda Konstantinovna as his companion. There is a hint of this in an unpublished section of Anna Ilinichna’s memoirs. After Yakubova had left him, he declared ‘with great tenderness: “Ye-e-es, Kubochka!”’36 What are we to make of this tantalising passage? Certainly there is no sign whatever in Anna Ilinichna’s memoirs that Vladimir Ilich was attracted to Nadezhda Konstantinovna. But Anna Ilinichna was often spiteful about Nadezhda Konstantinovna and she was perhaps distorting the relative appeal of Lenin’s two female comrades.
Ulyanov’s motives in deciding to get married are not entirely clear. When he wrote to his mother on 10 December 1897, he implied that Nadezhda Konstantinovna had not definitively opted to apply to join him in his place of exile.37 Maria Ilinichna many years later gave a cool account: ‘She made her request to join V.I. [Ulyanov] as his fiancée and they had to get married or else N.K. [Krupskaya] would quickly have been returned to Ufa province, where she had originally been sentenced to stay in exile.’38 Maria Ilinichna, like her elder sister, played down the mutual attraction of Vladimir and his future bride. Not even Maria, however, denied that affection too was involved.
Several accounts have taken an almost prurient delight in the fact that the relationship was so tepid at the start; they use this to suggest that Lenin was emotionally inert. But recently available evidence shows this to be reflection of the cultural prejudice. The point is that romantic love, where a man and a woman fall passionately in love, was not a condition to which either Vladimir or Nadezhda aspired. Both wrote little about their feelings for each other; but after Vladimir’s death Nadezhda wrote a furious letter in 1927 to Bolshevik party historian Vladimir Sorin about the kind of relationships that had enjoyed approval among Marxist revolutionaries of their generation. She strenuously opposed Sorin’s suggestion that such revolutionaries fell ‘helplessly in love’ with each other. They consciously rejected contemporary bourgeois attitudes to matters of the heart and instead aimed to construct a new way of life – and they supposed that their own relationship should be focussed upon working collaboratively for the cause of Revolution. For them, the idea of a permanent marital union had distasteful connotations: tradition, religion, economic self-interest and the subjection of the wife to the husband. Russian Marxists, as Nadezhda pointed out, were keener than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe to form loose partnerships for the greater good of the cause. They were influenced by the revolutionary commune described in Nikolai Chernyshevski’s What Is to Be Done? and by the anti-bourgeois philosophy of Dmitri Pisarev.39 Krupskaya did not explicitly describe the feelings that she and Lenin had had for each other, but the hint is unmistakable: the two of them liked and fancied each other enough and thought that for the foreseeable future they could work with each other.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna, furthermore, was physically attractive even though no one could claim she was a beauty. Her face had a good bone structure. She was a couple of inches taller than Vladimir and was a year older. She dressed in rather dull clothes; her hair was plainly combed. She dressed like a typical contemporary schoolmistress (which, if she had not become a Marxist activist, would probably have been her career). Her family had gentry status but was not as comfortably off as the Ulyanovs. Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s father had got into trouble as an Imperial army officer: he had been found insufficiently severe on Polish dissenters after the 1863 Rebellion and had been cashiered. Thereafter he had taken whatever jobs came to hand, including work as an insurance agent. Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s mother had written children’s books in order to supplement the family’s uncertain income.40 The three of them moved frequently from place to place, but always the parents ensured that the daughter attended the local gimnazia. Nadezhda learned to cope with adverse circumstances and to be cheerful about it. She grew up to be a serious young women; at the age of eighteen she wrote to the novelist Lev Tolstoi asking to be allowed to work on his project for the translation of foreign classics.41
On coming to St Petersburg, however, she had become associated with students who rejected Tolstoi for his pacifism and his Christianity, and steadily she too had turned to ideas of Marxist revolution. She had few leisure pursuits outside Russian literature and the learning of foreign languages. She dedicated herself to becoming a revolutionary. More than anything else, this is what attracted Ulyanov to her. ‘He could never have loved a woman’, she recalled, ‘with whose opinions he disagreed and who was not a comrade in his work.’42 To a much greater extent than he, moreover, she had worked among ordinary labouring people. At Sunday schools and at evening classes she had given courses on reading and writing as well as Marxism, and she had a grasp of contemporary pedagogical theory. She was also a person of tact. Vladimir was moody and volatile and liked to get his way with other people, and anyone who became his wife would need to be patient. Nadezhda, according to nearly everyone who wrote about her, had these qualities in abundance.
Vladimir was not the only Ulyanov to suffer at the hands of the Ministry of the Interior. Dmitri was expelled from Moscow University in 1897 for involvement in the revolutionary movement; he was arrested and banished to Tula. Then the authorities arrested Vladimir’s sister Maria for revolutionary activity and banished her to Nizhni Novgorod.43 Their mother Maria Alexandrovna divided her time between Nizhni Novgorod and Tula. Soon she got permission for Dmitri to serve out his sentence in the family’s newly rented house in the little town of Podolsk on the Kursk Railway twenty-five miles south of Moscow, where her daughter Maria eventually joined them.44
The move to Podolsk, in spring 1898, was occasioned by the fact that Mark Yelizarov, Anna Ilinichna’s husband, had a post in the accountancy department of the Kursk Railway and needed to live locally – and his post had the advantage of offering free travel not only for himself but also for his wife and mother-in-law.45 Around Podolsk, with its four thousand inhabitants, there were forests and lakes. It was a wonderful spot, where Maria Alexandrovna hoped to stabilise herself mentally. Her ‘nerves’ were troubling her and she sought help from a medical specialist. She had also been suffering from a stomach ailment. One of the doctor’s questions was whether she had suffered recent ‘spiritual disturbances’. A more tactless enquiry is hard to imagine. Maria Alexandrovna’s husband had died prematurely. Her eldest son had been hanged. Three other children had been arrested, and one of them – Vladimir – was exiled in distant eastern Siberia. She had long since stopped dreaming that her family would continue along the normal paths of their professional careers. Each year seemed to bring a fresh crop of trouble to the Ulyanovs. No wonder Maria Alexandrovna showed signs of strain.
Meanwhile Nadezhda Krupskaya had asked permission to go to Shushenskoe. Before she departed for exile, she was not looking at all well. Her code name among revolutionaries was ‘Fish’. This was hardly a flattering designation for anyone, and in her case it probably referred to the incipient bulging of her eyes as a result of a goitre caused by Graves’s disease. Among the symptoms is a tendency for the neck to swell and the eyes to protrude. Anna Ilinichna, catching sight of Nadezhda before she departed for Siberia, said with cruel accuracy that she looked a bit like a herring.46
Already Nadezhda had negotiated the publication of her fiancé’s Economic Studies and Articles and acquired a commission for him to translate Sidney and Beatrice Webb on English trade unionism. The publishers, she explained to Maria Alexandrovna, had said that ‘even if Volodya has a poor knowledge of English, there is no problem since it’s possible to use the German translation and only check it against the [original] English book’. Nadezhda saw that Volodya needed someone near to him who could help to organise him. For example, he required money; but it took Nadezhda to obtain the commission for the Webbs’ book’s translation. She also made all the arrangements for herself and her mother Yelizaveta Vasilevna Krupskaya to leave Moscow along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Clothes, books, finance, official forms and food had to be put in order before they started. Then they made the long trip by train, steamer and carriage to join up with Volodya. On arrival in Shushenskoe in May 1898, furthermore, she tried to get him to take up new interests. She liked to go hunting for mushrooms; at first Volodya demurred, but soon mushroom-gathering became an obsession for him. ‘You can’t drag him out of the wood,’ Nadezhda reported to his mother. ‘We’re planning to arrange a garden for next year. Volodya has already contracted to dig out the vegetable beds.’47
Yet mainly it was Nadya, as he called her, who had to adjust herself to Volodya. Among her tasks before coming out to Shushenskoe was the purchase of the various books and journals he needed to complete the work. She also needed to get used to his passion for walking. While she liked to stay at her desk on Sundays, he customarily took a stroll. Nadya trained herself to accompany him.48 And in particular she had to learn how to handle his family. Anna Ilinichna plainly resented the intrusion of another woman into the family; she reproached her sister-in-law for writing frivolous letters and rudely surmised that Nadya was allowing Volodya to edit letters before dispatch. Nadya admitted to showing him such correspondence, but she stated that this was normal between man and wife. When Anna then moaned that he sometimes omitted to say that Nadya had asked him to pass on her respectful best wishes, Nadya replied that this was only because Volodya took it for granted that the Ulyanovs knew that she constantly wished them well.49 With almost superhuman patience, Nadya declined to comment on Anna’s failure to implicate Volodya himself in any breach of good manners.
Thus she was adopting a subordinate role to her husband. Discerning that his equanimity depended on her maintenance of at least half-decent relations with Anna, she bit her tongue. She would bite it again many times in the future since already she shared the reverence shown towards him by Anna Ilinichna and Maria Ilinichna. All three of them thought him a person of unique intellectual and political potential. They wanted to help him and serve him – and he was only too pleased to encourage them in their wish.
At Shushenskoe, Volodya was already living in some comfort and had prepared for the arrival of his prospective wife and mother-in-law by renting a larger house than his first one and employing a fifteen-year-old serving girl. He had allotted himself a study room, where he put his large collection of books as they arrived in packages from Russia. He also kept a photograph album containing pictures of his heroes. Among the heroes were the political prisoners sent out to hard-labour penal colonies in Siberia, a fate that he had escaped. He continued in particular to treasure the memory of Chernyshevski and by now had not one but two photographs of him in his album.50 Although Volodya Ulyanov professed a dislike for sentimentality in politics, he had a distinctly emotional attachment to certain political figures and to the revolutionary vocation. Not everything about this man conformed to the impression he tried to give. Like many other people, he needed heroes and to have a visual keepsake of them to hand. As yet none of his heroes had let him down, but it was to prove traumatic for him in later life when any of them in any way disappointed him.
There were also practical matters on his mind. He had heard from Moscow that his mother wished to sell the Kokushkino estate in Samara province. No one in the Ulyanov family lived there now, and Volodya’s arrest and exile made it sensible for Maria Alexandrovna to liquefy her financial assets. She decided to rent a house. Normally she would have turned to her son Volodya for help since he had had legal training. But luckily Mark Yelizarov, Anna Ilinichna’s husband, had professional experience as an insurance agent, and he advised on the sale of Kokushkino at an advantageous price. While handling this deal on behalf of his in-laws, Mark showed his solicitude for Volodya’s feelings by going through the formality of passing on details of the proposed transaction to him as the eldest male offspring; he also wished to send the Kokushkino estate dog to Volodya when the deal was at last done, but Volodya politely refused: he had already acquired his own Irish setter Zhenka in Siberia – and anyway it would be extravagant to send an unchaperoned dog from the Volga to mid-Siberia.51
Yet Volodya did not deny himself the country gentleman’s lifestyle. Thus he gladly accepted his brother Dmitri’s present of a Belgian two-barrelled rifle.52 Hunting for hare, rabbit and fox had become a passion; he also went across to the river Yenisei and fished. In the winter he skated and Nadya thought him rather too showy on the ice with his ‘Spanish leaps’ and his style of ‘strutting like a chicken’. But she admired his physical zest. When Vladimir got together with Krzhizhanovski, a much bigger man, they would sometimes have a wrestling contest. Both were among the small number of revolutionary activists who took an interest in bodily fitness. His ‘nerves’ were relaxed for the duration of his stay in Siberia and his stomach problems vanished. The fresh air and the healthier diet raised the spirits of those Union of Struggle members who had wangled themselves residence in the Minusinsk district. ‘Siberian Italy’ was everything they had hoped for.
There were, of course, unpleasant sides to exile even in this coveted district. Detainees had to ask permission to visit each other. Occasionally they had to send back to Russia for items of clothing that could not be obtained locally. Thus Volodya asked his mother for a good-quality straw hat for the summer and a leather coat for the winter. Hardmuth No. 6 pencils were the object of another request. (He quickly wore out the first ones sent to him.) Yet material inadequacies were not the main problem. Much more irritating were the local insects. The east Siberian mosquito was amazingly aggressive. After he made a net to cover his head, the mosquitoes simply attacked his hands at night. Volodya asked for kidskin gloves to be sent to him: ‘Gleb [Krzhizhanovski] assures me that the local mosquitoes chew through gloves, but I don’t believe him. Of course, the appropriate sort of glove needs to be chosen – not for dances but for mosquitoes.’53 Alas, the historical record does not tell us who was right, Ulyanov or Krzhizhanovski, in their heated discussion about the glove-chewing propensities of the east Siberian mosquito.
Not long after Nadya’s arrival in Shushenskoe, preparations for the wedding began. Volodya appreciated the more settled environment that Nadya and her mother brought about and went some way to befriend Yelizaveta Vasilevna and complimented her on her cooking.54 Ill-advisedly, however, he expressed his satisfaction with a goose she had roasted and remarked on the leanness of the flesh. Yelizaveta Vasilevna was annoyed since the bird on the dish was not a goose but a grouse. But perhaps, on reflection, she recognised that he was trying to be nice to her.
As the wedding day approached, a letter arrived from Anna Ilinichna asking for invitations to be sent to the Ulyanov family. Vladimir was exasperated:55
Anyuta [Anna’s diminutive name] is asking when the wedding’s going to be and even whom ‘are we inviting’!? She’s running ahead of things! For a start Nadezhda Konstantinovna must arrive here and then the administration has to give permission for the wedding – we are completely without rights as people. That’s what ‘invitations’ amount to here!
He denied being inhospitable, claiming to want the Ulyanovs to come to Shushenskoe for the ceremony.56 Although he relayed the concern expressed by Nadya’s mother Yelizaveta Vasilevna that the journey might prove too tiring for his mother, for his own part he suggested that this might not be the case if she bought at least a second-class rail ticket.57 Obviously he was distancing himself from a direct attempt to dissuade his mother from coming. This was in June 1898. In the same month he formally asked permission from the state authorities to wed his fiancée. A pair of copper rings had been hammered out for the couple by a Finnish fellow exile, Oskari Engberg. On 10 July 1898, they were married by Father Orest in the Peter-Paul Church in the village.58
Volodya’s excuse for haste was that the authorities would otherwise exile Nadya to Ufa province. Really he did not want a grand family wedding, but aimed to set himself up on his own terms. He let his new wife write letters to his family, and her tactful, friendly words relieved him of this obligation. Poor Nadya did not have an easy job. The Ulyanovs made it plain that her duty was to produce an Ulyanov of the next generation. She wrote back to her mother-in-law, barely eight months after the marriage, stating: ‘As regards my health, I’m completely healthy, but as regards the arrival of a little bird, there unfortunately things are bad; there is no sign of a little bird planning to come.’59 The ‘little bird’ was the hoped-for pregnancy. Nadya and Volodya always wanted to have children and it was Nadya who reported to her relatives about the lack of progress in this aspect of their marital life. She was accepting a submissive role from the start. She was expected to provide a child and Volodya did nothing to assuage her sense of guilt or protect her from the implied demands of the Ulyanov family.
Volodya’s pressing wish was to write and publish books. He was drafting The Development of Capitalism in Russia. In August 1898 he finished the text with its references to over five hundred books and articles. He asked his Minusinsk co-exiles for their criticisms of the chapters; he did not yet have his later confidence that enabled him to present his books to the world without such consultation.
The snag was that he was not an established author. Indeed he even considered arranging for the book to be printed independently. Pëtr Struve suggested dividing up the text and printing it in the form of journal articles. But Ulyanov wanted to have one last try at getting a contract with a commercial publisher. His thoughts turned to M. I. Vodovozova.60 Her small St Petersburg press had a tradition of publishing Marxist literature. Volodya asked Anna Ilinichna to explore the possibilities. He laid down conditions for the negotiation, but while encouraging his sister to obtain the maximum of royalties he confessed that ‘there’s no reason to hurry about the receipt of the money’.61 His greater concern was that the book should be decently produced with a clear typeface, neat statistical tables and no misprints. He expressed the desire, too, that publication should be swift and the print-run large. An agreement was signed for 2,400 copies to be published for the first edition and for Vodovozova to guarantee royalties sufficient for him to purchase the specialist literature he needed from Alexandra Kalmykova’s St Petersburg bookshop.
He published The Development of Capitalism in Russia, under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilin since he was a known revolutionary and wanted to evade problems with the official censorship. The erudition was considerable; the direct political commentary was kept to the barest minimum and the style was austere. But ‘Vladimir Ilin’ intended the book as a provocation. He had assembled a case that was extreme in its interpretation, and he knew it. But at the same time he expected the book to affirm his status as a major expert on contemporary economic trends. On Marxist philosophical and political theory he confessed his lack of education; and he admitted, for instance, that he had yet to read Immanuel Kant.62 But on the economy he felt he already knew his stuff.
The contents of the book covered the entire Imperial economy. It is worth looking at his argument not least because he used it to justify much of his later political orientation. Generally he repeated the tenets of Georgi Plekhanov. But he gave them a peculiar twist. Plekhanov had maintained that several trends among the better-off peasants indicated that capitalism was on the rise: the renting and buying of land; the hiring of labour; and the introduction of up-to-date agricultural equipment. Ulyanov went much further. Not only did he assert that capitalism in the countryside was already in an advanced stage of development. He also claimed that the better-off peasants – whom he labelled the rural ‘bourgeoisie’ – were so effective as farmers that their need for machinery, fertilisers and other such products could and did provide the main market for industrial companies across the Russian Empire. In its turn the manufacturing sector of industry was stimulating output in the mining sector – and this perforce required the support of the financial sector. Transport and communications had to be built up to cope with such demands. According to Ulyanov, the agricultural sector of the economy was not to be regarded as an auxiliary component but as the very motor of Russian capitalist development.
There were social ramifications to his analysis. In particular, the centuries-old category of ‘the peasantry’ could no longer be applied ‘scientifically’. Most peasants had become ‘proletarians’, who had no land or equipment and who existed by selling their labour in a capitalist market. A small minority of the peasantry was rich – and Ulyanov designated them as ‘bourgeois’, as rural capitalists, as kulaki (or ‘fists’, because they held their respective villages in their tight grasp). An intermediate group, the serednyaki, were about to be distributed between the vast proletariat and the small but dominant kulaki. Thus the agrarian-socialist notions of the solidarity and egalitarianism of the peasantry were poppycock. The Russian Empire’s immediate prospect was the maturation of an already robust capitalism in town and countryside.
Tucked into this analysis was a side-assault on non-Marxist economic theories current in Russia. Ulyanov felt he had demonstrated, for instance, that the possession of overseas colonies was not a prerequisite of capitalist development. He had also shown that this development was not crucially dependent upon foreign investment and entrepreneurship. Russia, he declared, was generating its own transformation on the basis of its own resources. Furthermore, his exposition dwelt upon the need to take account of the regional concentrations of capitalist development: Petersburg and Warsaw had metallurgy; the Moscow area had textile factories; the Don Basin had coalmines and Baku had oil. Intensive grain cultivation was occurring in Ukraine and southern Russia. Dairy output was growing in western Siberia and in the Baltic region. While backward regions continued to exist, there were many regions of highly effective economic development, development that would soon bring about the transformation of traditional Russia into a country able to rival the advanced capitalist West. Ulyanov derided those economic commentators who argued that Russian material progress was entering a cul-de-sac. Russia, having started upon the capitalist road, would unerringly follow it entirely in accordance with the laws of economic development.
Yet The Development of Capitalism in Russia, for all its quirkiness, was a tour de force. Ulyanov had the ability to drive an analysis to the most extreme conclusion and to fuel it exclusively with data that corroborated his analysis. To those who thought about politics it was evident what he was up to. If Russia was already a capitalist country, then the time was long overdue for the removal of the Romanov monarchy. A capitalist country needed political democracy and general civic rights. Tsarism was obsolete. Furthermore, the advanced condition of Russian capitalism meant that it would not be long after the ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’ against the Romanovs that a second, even deeper revolution could be attempted: socialist revolution. Ulyanov had issued an economic treatise which, he hoped, would attract thousands of converts to the Marxist cause in Russia.
One of his purposes was to demonstrate that Russian Marxists could share in the European socialist dream. What was being done in Germany today, he convinced himself, could be undertaken in Russia tomorrow. Even in exile, therefore, he scanned the available journals for information about Germany. After Engels’s death in 1895, Ulyanov’s hero in the German Social-Democratic Party was the theorist Karl Kautsky. Like Ulyanov, Kautsky wrote not only on economics but also on politics and philosophy. He took ‘theory’ seriously. He wanted a socialism with ‘scientific foundations’. He wanted systematic knowledge and systematic policy, and he saw himself as the posthumous defender of the legacy of Marx and Engels. Kautsky was a man after Ulyanov’s own heart. Ulyanov warmed in particular to his defence of Marx and Engels against the attempt by Eduard Bernstein, who had been a collaborator of Engels himself, to ‘revise’ certain key concepts of Marxism. Bernstein denied that advanced capitalist society was divided mainly between two social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He disliked revolution, preferring evolution and peaceful reforms, and he believed that socialism would be impossible to construct if it depended upon capitalism bringing the economy to ruin beforehand. For both Kautsky and Ulyanov, Bernstein’s revisionism was a betrayal of the tenets of Marxism.63
Ulyanov was dismayed that this revisionism was not confined to Germany. It was also happening in Russia. In summer 1899 a document written by two Russian Marxist emigrants, S. N. Prokopovich and Yekaterina Kuskova, was passed on to Minusinsk by Anna Ilinichna for her brother’s scrutiny. In a casual aside she referred to it as the ‘Credo’. Prokopovich and Kuskova, drawing upon the experience of the labour movement in western Europe, contended that Russian workers – the poor and ill-educated workers of Russia – should not be encouraged to engage in revolutionary politics but should focus their efforts upon the immediate improvement of their working and living conditions. Plekhanov and his Emancipation of Labour Group were appalled by the document, which rejected not only the leading role of the working class in the overthrow of the Romanov monarchy but even politics altogether. Plekhanov denounced Prokopovich and Kuskova as renegades from Marxism. Ulyanov was even more ferocious. Anna Ilinichna’s unofficial designation of the document as the ‘Credo’ made it seem to be more important than it really was – and she regretted the fuss she had inadvertently created.64 Meanwhile her brother summoned sixteen exiled St Petersburg Union of Struggle members to Shushenskoe, and got their approval for a point-by-point repudiation of everything which the ‘Credo’ stood for.
Ulyanov’s anger over revisionism made even his sister Anna wonder whether he might have lost a sense of proportion. Once he had finished the text of The Development of Capitalism, he longed to return to the active revolutionary fray. The three years of his exile were scheduled to end at the beginning of 1900. In the meantime he published five reviews in 1899 in substantial St Petersburg journals, including one on Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question. His attack on Bernstein was also printed. He contributed a learned article on ‘The Theory of Realisation’ to issue no. 8 of the periodical the Scientific Review. Gradually the Shushenskoe author was becoming a public figure. His years in exile had allowed him to expand his cultural range. He had studied Marx, Engels and Kautsky. He had looked at Western non-socialist economic thinkers such as Hobson, List and Sismondi. He had taken a look at neo-Kantian philosophy (and quickly rejected it, on the ground that it abandoned the materialist standpoint of Marxism). He had gone on reading the writings of the Russian agrarian socialists and gone on ridiculing them on every possible occasion; and he had started to be vituperative about any Marxist who dared to propose major amendments to the version of Marxism elaborated by Plekhanov.
Yet he had to wait upon dispositions of the Ministry of the Interior. Nadya had not served her full term of exile and would have to proceed to Ufa (which was the place originally designated in her case). Nor was it clear what restrictions the Ministry might put upon Ulyanov’s freedom of residence. He found the tension difficult to bear; his ‘nerves’ started to play him up and he stopped eating sensibly.65 For most of his time in Shushenskoe he had taken plenty of exercise and acquired a ruddy complexion. Latterly, however, he grew pale and thin.
By 19 January 1900 he had at least been informed that he would be leaving Siberia. They loaded their books – all 500 pounds of them – into a trunk. They worried most about the first stage of the trip to Achinsk. The journey from Shushenskoe would have to be undertaken in a roofless carriage in temperatures that could easily be more than 30 degrees below zero. The fact that Nadya’s mother was already coughing badly was a cause for concern.66 But no one thought of delaying until the more clement weather of springtime. On 29 January they set off as best they could. By then Volodya had heard that he was banned from residing in St Petersburg, Moscow or any town with a university or a large industrial area. Nadya and he were going to split up for the duration of her sentence. Whereas she had come to support him in Shushenskoe, he had no intention of reciprocating in Ufa, seven hundred miles east of Moscow. Revolution, not romance, was his preoccupation and he chose Pskov, 170 miles by train from St Petersburg, as his place of exile.67 He would stay a day or two in Ufa to see that his wife and mother-in-law were settled properly before he moved on.
His destination was Podolsk, in the countryside south of Moscow, where his family awaited him. His mother and his elder sister were shocked by his physical appearance:68
First came the impression of disillusionment with his external appearance: thin and with a beard that he had allowed to grow [unacceptably? RS] long, he mounted the staircase. Mother was the most disillusioned. ‘How on earth’, she exclaimed, ‘did you write that you’d sorted yourself out and got fit in exile?’
It turned out that my brother really had sorted himself out in exile but had ‘given up’ in the last few weeks.
In his thirtieth year he was reaching new heights of achievement and acclaim. The Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopaedic Dictionary, which appeared in St Petersburg in 1900, included a brief entry on him as an economist. He was rising fast. He was not yet Lenin in the literal sense because he had not used that particular pseudonym. But in other ways he was Lenin already. He was fiercely Marxist. He retained an enduring respect for the Russian terrorist tradition. He was a man of letters and his revolutionary expectancy was found more upon bookish study than upon direct acquaintance with the working class of Russia. But his confidence in Marxism was total. It stemmed from intellectual conviction. It also conformed to the needs and aspirations that had been created in him before ever he read Marx, Engels and Plekhanov. His parents were committed to Progress, Rationality and Enlightenment and to the making of a new, ‘European’ Russia. They did not quite fully gain social acceptance; and when Alexander Ulyanov was convicted of terrorism, they were treated as pariahs. Vladimir Ulyanov was deeply imprinted by this experience. Having been rejected by the powers of Old Russia, which he identified with ‘Asiatic’, ‘medieval’ and ignorant repressiveness, he yearned to have his revenge by playing his role – increasingly a leading role – in the making of Revolution.
As a child he had striven to get his own way. He needed help, and used his family and his young wife as a crucial means of keeping support. He was not the fittest of men; and although he showed no outward signs of self-doubt, he suffered badly from nerves and other ailments. He was choleric and volatile. He was punctilious, self-disciplined and purposive. He was awesomely unsentimental; his ability to overlook the immediate sufferings of humanity was already highly developed. But at his core he had his own deep emotional attachments. They were attachments not to people he lived with but to people who had moulded his political opinions: Marx, Alexander Ulyanov, Chernyshevski and the Russian socialist terrorists. He had peculiar ideas of his own. But he aggressively presented them as the purest orthodoxy. He had yet to mature as a political leader. But a leader he already was. He was determined to waste no more time in furthering the cause of Revolution.