Simbirsk in the 1880’s and 1890’s was an isolated town perched on a hill above the Volga River. There was no railroad, and although paddlewheel steamers stopped at its quay during the summer, in winter the only highway was the ice of the frozen river. On the crest of the hill, looking out over the river and the meadowland stretching away to the eastern horizon, stood the town’s cathedral, the governor’s mansion, the high school, the library. “From the summit right down to the waterside,” recalled Kerensky, “stretched luxuriant apple and cherry orchards. In the spring the whole mountain-side was white with blossom, fragrant, and at night breathless with the songs of the nightingales. From the summit … the view across the river over miles of meadowland was magnificent. With the melting of the snow, the river used to leave its banks and flood the low-lying fields … stretching like an endless sea over the fields which later in the heat of summer would be gay with the songs and games of peasants and townspeople come to mow the rich, fragrant grass.”
In this pleasant place Vladimir Ulyanov was born in 1870, two years after the birth of Nicholas II. His father, Ilya Ulyanov, the son of a serf who had won his freedom, had graduated from Kazan University and begun his career as a teacher of mathematics. Ilya Ulyanov rose rapidly through the ranks of the state educational system and in 1863 he married Maria Blank, a Volga German whose father, a doctor, owned a large estate. Vladimir, named after the saint who became the first Christian ruler of Russia, was the third of Maria’s six children.
In 1869, the year before Lenin’s birth, Ilya Ulyanov became Inspector and, five years later, Director of Schools for the Province of Simbirsk. He worked zealously training teachers and opening new schools, and he was away from home for long periods, but in twelve years the number of primary schools in the province rose from 20 to 434. In recognition of this work, Ilya was promoted to the rank of Actual Councilor of State, a rank in the hereditary nobility equivalent to an army major general. When Tsar Alexander II was assassinated in 1881, Ilya Ulyanov “sadly buttoned on his official uniform and went off to the Simbirsk cathedral to mourn the death of the Tsar-Liberator.”
Vladimir, called Volodya in the family, was a plump, red-haired boy with a large head, stocky body and short legs. In the summers, with his brothers and sisters, he swam in the Volga and hunted mushrooms in the birch woods; during the winters, he went ice-skating and sleighing. Unlike Alexander, his impulsive, idealistic older brother, Vladimir tended to be precise and sarcastic. When he played chess with his brothers and sisters, he established a strict rule: “Under no circumstances, take a move back. Once you have touched a piece, you have to move it.” He was an excellent student in school, and when the other Ulyanov children brought their marks home and solemnly reported them to their parents, Volodya simply burst through the door and up the stairs, shouting, “Excellent in everything!”
Within a span of sixteen months in 1886 and 1887, the comfortable Ulyanov household collapsed. In 1922, replying to a census questionnaire, Lenin wrote: “Nonbeliever [in God] since the age of 16”—this was his age when, in January 1886, his father died of a stroke before his eyes. In the spring of 1887, his older brother Alexander was arrested in St. Petersburg, along with four other university students, on the charge of trying to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. They had been apprehended with a crude, unworkable bomb concealed inside a hollowed medical dictionary. Alexander did not deny the charge. To his mother, who hurried to his side, he declared, “I tried to kill the Tsar. The attempt failed and that is all there is to it.” In May 1887, Alexander Ulyanov was hanged. His mother walked beside him to the gallows, repeating over and over, “Have courage. Have courage.”
The effect of his brother’s death on Vladimir is a subject of dispute. “The execution of such a brother as Alexander Ulyanov was bound undoubtedly to have a crushing and destructive psychological result upon any normal mind,” said Alexander Kerensky. But Lenin, of course, was very far from normal. In addition, there is evidence of friction between the two brothers, especially after their father’s death. “Undoubtedly, a very gifted person but we don’t get along,” said Alexander of Vladimir during this period. Alexander particularly disliked Vladimir’s impertinence, arrogance and mockery of their mother. Once when her two sons were playing chess, Maria reminded Vladimir of something she had asked him to do. Vladimir answered rudely and did not move. Maria insisted and Vladimir became ruder. At this point, Alexander said calmly, “You either go and do what Mama asks or I shall not play with you again.”
Alexander was hanged in the spring of Vladimir’s final year in the Simbirsk high school. Outwardly unperturbed, Vladimir took his final examinations and, wearing a tight-fitting blue uniform, graduated at the head of his class. When he did so, the school headmaster (at considerable risk, considering the scandal then hanging over the Ulyanovs) wrote a warm endorsement of Vladimir:
“Very gifted, always neat and assiduous, Ulyanov was first in all his subjects, and upon completing his studies received a gold medal as the most deserving pupil with regard to his ability, progress and behavior. Neither in the school, nor outside, has a single instance been observed when he has given cause for dissatisfaction by word or by deed to the school authorities…. Religion and discipline were the basis of this upbringing …, the fruits of which are apparent in Ulyanov’s behavior. Looking more closely at Ulyanov’s character and private life, I have had occasion to note a somewhat excessive tendency towards isolation and reserve, a tendency to avoid contact with acquaintances and even with the very best of his school fellows outside school hours.”
The signature under this document was that of Fedor Kerensky, headmaster of the school, and friend and admirer of the deceased Ilya Ulyanov. Because of this friendship, the court temporarily entrusted Fedor Kerensky with the management of young Vladimir’s affairs.
As the widow of a hereditary nobleman, Maria Ulyanov continued to draw her pension, but the scandal made it necessary for her to move from Simbirsk. Vladimir entered the University of Kazan and was quickly expelled for taking part in a mild student demonstration. Thereafter, hoping to save her second son from the course which had destroyed his brother, Maria bought a farm of 225 acres and installed Vladimir as farm manager. He did not like it. “My mother wanted me to engage in farming,” he recalled. “I tried it but I saw that it would not work. My relations with the moujiks were not normal.” The farm was sold and the family moved to Samara to live with Maria’s parents. There, sitting beside his grandfather’s fireplace, Vladimir read omnivorously: Pushkin, Turgenev, Dostoyevsky, Tolstoy. He began to study law at home and crammed four years of work into a single year; when he received permission to take his examinations, he was again first in his class. Despite his academic brilliance, he failed in his brief attempt at legal practice. He took a dozen cases in Samara on behalf of peasants and workmen accused of minor crimes; all were found guilty. For exercise, he swam every day. In the winter, he hung upside down and did gymnastics on a pair of cross-bars he made himself.
With the same intensity with which he had mastered law, he began to study Karl Marx. The totality of the Marxist dream and the compelling logic of Marx’s style appealed to Vladimir far more than the impulsive emotionalism displayed by his brother Alexander Ulyanov. Alexander thought of assassinating a single man whose death would alter nothing. Marx—and after him, Lenin—wished to change everything. To his mother’s despair, Vladimir turned every family meal into a heated discussion of Das Kapital. She despaired even more when he announced that, because Marx had declared that the core of the revolution would be the urban proletariat, he intended to follow his brother’s footsteps to St. Petersburg.
In 1893, just one year before the youthful Tsar Nicholas mounted the throne, twenty-three-year-old Vladimir wearing his father’s frock coat and top hat, arrived in St. Petersburg, where it was arranged that he would work in a law office. He joined a Marxist study group which met to debate in the evenings. At a traditional Russian Shrove Tuesday supper of blinis, Vladimi
r first met another dedicated Marxist, Nadezhda Krupskaya. A round-faced, snub-nosed schoolteacher with short hair, full lips and unusually large eyes, Krupskaya, as she was always called, was a year older than Vladimir. After the party, Vladimir walked her home along the banks of the Neva. Thereafter they attended meetings together. At one of these, someone suggested the establishment of literary committees to educate the masses. “Vladimir Ilyich laughed,” recalled Krupskaya, “and somehow the laughter sounded so wicked and dry…. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘anybody who likes to save the fatherland with a literacy committee, why, fine, we shall not interfere.’”
In 1895, Vladimir went abroad for the first time. He was eager to go to Geneva to meet George Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism and idol of all young Russian revolutionaries. Yet Plekhanov, after twenty years in exile, had begun to lose touch with the movement in Russia, and Vladimir, anxious to talk, found him cold and distant. He went on to Zurich, Berlin and Paris, where he admired the wide tree-lined boulevards. A few weeks later, he returned to Russia with a false-bottomed trunk stuffed with wads of illegal literature, and plunged into organizing strikes and printing anti-government leaflets and manifestoes. For the sake of expediency, he avoided personal attacks on the young Tsar, who had been on the throne for less than a year. “Of course, if you start right away talking against the Tsar and the existing social system, you only antagonize the workers,” he explained. Arrested in December 1895, he spent a year in jail in St. Petersburg and then was exiled for three years to Siberia.
The life of a political exile in Siberia during the last years of tsarist rule was not always a frozen nightmare. It could be and often was a remarkably permissive arrangement. Punishment consisted only in the requirement that the exile live in a prescribed area. If the exile had money, he could live exactly as he did in European Russia, establishing a household, keeping servants, receiving mail, books and visitors.
Vladimir, released from prison in St. Petersburg, was given five days in St. Petersburg and four in Moscow to prepare for his exile. He traveled alone across the Urals, taking with him a thousand roubles and a trunk filled with a hundred books. His three years in the quiet backwater Siberian village of Shushenskoe near the Mongolian border were among the happiest of his life. The river Shush flowed nearby and was filled with fish, the woods teemed with bears, squirrels and sables. Vladimir rented rooms, went swimming twice a day, acquired a dog and a gun and went hunting for duck and snipe. He was the wealthiest man in the village and demonstrated to a local merchant how to keep his books. His mail was enormous, and through it he maintained contact with Marxists in every corner of Russia and Europe. Several hours each day he worked on his lengthy work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia.
He had been there a year when Krupskaya joined him. Herself arrested for organizing a strike, she had arranged to be sent to Shushenskoe by telling the police that she was Vladimir’s fiancée. Vladimir was delighted to see her and to have the books she brought, but less happy to welcome her mother, whom she had brought along and whom he disliked. To his own mother he wrote that Nadezhda “has had a tragi-comic condition made to her; if she does not marry immediately, she has to return to Ufa.” On July 10, 1898, to solve the problem, they married. As newlyweds, they settled down to translate The Theory and Practice of Trade Unionism by Sidney and Beatrice Webb; their Russian version ran to a thousand pages. In the winter, they ice-skated on the frozen river. Vladimir was expert; with his hands in his pockets, he glided quickly away. Krupskaya tried valiantly and stumbled behind. The mother-in-law went once and fell flat on her back. But all three loved the whiteness of the Siberian winter, the clear, glowing quality of the air, the peaceful silence of the snowy woods. “It was like living,” said Krupskaya, “in an enchanted kingdom.”
Because his term ended before hers, Vladimir left his wife and her mother in Siberia and returned to St. Petersburg. Soon after, he drew up a petition from “the hereditary noble, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov” asking the authorities to permit him to return to Siberia to see his wife before going abroad. The petition was granted, Vladimir said goodbye and began a lonely life as a Russian revolutionary in the cities of Europe. His work as an underground organizer and a forceful writer had already brought him a significant reputation; this was enhanced when he became an editor and regular contributor to Iskra (The Spark), a revolutionary magazine published abroad for smuggling into Russia. It was at this point that Vladimir began to use the pen name “Lenin.” He wrote a pamphlet titled What Is to Be Done? which attracted wide attention, and drafted a program for the Social Democratic Party, as the exiled Russian Marxists had begun to call themselves. He no longer feared to attack the Tsar personally; “Nicholas the Bloody” and “Nicholas the Hangman” were favorite expressions.
When Krupskaya’s term of exile was ended, she joined her husband in Munich. In 1902 the offices of Iskra were moved to London, and Lenin and Krupskaya followed, arriving in a dense fog. For Krupskaya particularly, the transition from a peaceful Siberian village to an immense city with its noise and dirt and clanging traffic was painful. They rented an unfurnished two-room apartment at 30 Holford Square kept by a Mrs. Yeo, and Lenin, under the name “Jacob Richter,” applied for entrance to the Reading Room of the British Museum. In the mornings he worked, and in the afternoons he and Krupskaya took trips around London on the top of a double-decker bus. There was trouble with Mrs. Yeo, who protested that Krupskaya did not hang curtains and wore no wedding ring. Finally a Russian friend warned the landlady that her lodgers were legally married and that if she persisted in chattering, she would be sued for defamation of character.
By his implacable certainty and singleness of purpose, his overwhelming energy and self-sacrifice, Lenin rapidly became a dominant figure within the party. Once recognized as a leader, he was fiercely intolerant and unwilling even to discuss his views with others unless circumstances forced him to do so. On the rock of Lenin’s intransigence, the tiny party of exiles began to splinter.
It was to end this quarreling that the Social Democratic Party called a unity conference to be held in Brussels in July 1903. With forty-three delegates in attendance, the conference opened in an old flour warehouse draped with red cloth but infested with rats and fleas. The Belgian police, who had harassed the Russians by searching their rooms and opening their baggage, suddenly gave the exiles twenty-four hours to leave the country. In a body, they boarded a boat and crossed the English Channel to London, arguing all the way.
Continuing their sessions in a socialist church in London, the delegates soon realized that their momentous “unity” conference was leading to a dangerous split between Plekhanov and Lenin. Plekhanov’s speeches were lyrical and moving; Lenin’s were simpler, cruder, more logical and more forceful. The divisive issue was the organizational structure of the party. Lenin wanted the party restricted to a small, tightly disciplined, professional elite. Plekhanov and others wanted to embrace all who were willing to join. On a vote, Lenin was narrowly victorious; thereafter his followers took the name of Bolsheviks (Majorityites) and the losers became the Mensheviks (Minorityites). Half fearful, half admiring, Plekhanov looked at Lenin and said, “Of this dough, Robespierres are made.”
If Lenin was Robespierre, Alexander Kerensky was Russia’s Danton. Himself struck by the coincidence of their background and upbringing, Kerensky once wrote: “Let no one say that Lenin is an expression of some kind of allegedly Asiatic ‘elemental Russian force.’ I was born under the same sky, I breathed the same air, I heard the same peasant songs and played in the same college playground. I saw the same limitless horizons from the same high bank of the Volga and I know in my blood and bones … that it is only by losing all touch with our native land, only by stamping out all native feeling for it, only so could one do what Lenin did in deliberately and cruelly mutilating Russia.”
Fedor Kerensky, Alexander’s father, was a gentle, scholarly man, destined originally to become a priest, who instead became a teacher. Early in
his career, he married one of his pupils, an officer’s daughter whose grandfather had been a serf. As director of the high school in Simbirsk, Fedor Kerensky was a leading member of local society. “From my earliest glimpses of consciousness I remember an enormous, splendid flat provided by the government,” wrote Fedor’s son, Alexander. “A long row of reception rooms; governesses for the elder sisters, nurseries, children’s parties in other ‘society’ households.” At school, standing in chapel in a white suit and pink Eton bow, Alexander was an important boy, the headmaster’s son. “I see myself in my early childhood as a very loyal little subject. I felt Russia deeply … the traditional Russia with its tsars and Orthodox Church, and the upper layer of provincial officialdom.” In the same town of Simbirsk, the parish priest was Alexander’s uncle. Alexander himself dreamed of becoming a “church bell-ringer, to stand on a high steeple, above everybody, near the clouds, and thence to call men to the service of God with the heavy peals of a huge bell.”
In 1889, when Alexander was eight, Fedor Kerensky was promoted to become Director of Education for the Province of Turkestan, and the family moved to Tashkent. There, one night, Alexander overheard his parents discussing a pamphlet circulating illegally in which Leo Tolstoy protested the alliance of the backward Russian autocracy and the French republic which Tolstoy admired. But “my youthful adoration of the Tsar was in no way impaired through hearing Tolstoy,” said Alexander; “… when Alexander III died, I read the official obituaries … and I wept long and copiously. I fervently attended every mass and requiem held for the Tsar and assiduously collected small contributions in my class for a wreath to the Emperor’s memory.”
Nicholas and Alexandra: The Tragic, Compelling Story of the Last Tsar and his Family Page 11