Lenin
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Vladimir Ulyanov’s immediate family.
Lenin’s grandfather on his mother’s side, Alexander Blank, had already received noble or gentry status as a result of his impressive professional work as a doctor. Alexander’s father Moishe, Lenin’s great-grandfather, had grown up in a Jewish shtetl in Ukraine and managed to get out after long and bitter disputes with his coreligionists. He educated his own sons in Christian schools and finally, after the death of his religious wife, was baptized in 1835, taking the name of Dmitri. His efforts to rise up in the world had been noticed by some high-ranking bureaucrats who served as godparents to his two sons. And so it was that Alexander Dmitrievich, the offspring of the shtetl Jew Moishe/Dmitri, was able to hear Anna Grosschopf play the Moonlight Sonata and propose to her soon after. Anna’s family was representative of the Baltic Germans who had long served the tsar as a source of Western professionalism.
In Soviet days Lenin’s Jewish ancestry was a state secret. Lenin’s sister Anna discovered these facts doing archival research on her family in the 1920s (not through family tradition). In the early 1930s she personally asked Stalin to publicize the fact as a way of combating popular anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Stalin categorically refused, and the facts only became established in the glasnost era and after.
Today, Lenin’s Jewish genes are no longer the source for scandal that they seemed to be during the Soviet era. Perhaps more damaging to his family’s reputation is a remarkable letter of 1846 written by his great-grandfather Moishe/Dmitri when he was in his nineties and sent to no less a personage than Tsar Nicholas I. This letter shows the dark side of all this striving to get ahead: dislike of and contempt for those left behind. Lenin’s great-grandfather denounced the prejudices of the Jews, blaming the rabbis for Jewish backwardness. He suggested that the tsar prohibit the Jews from hiring Christians to perform essential tasks on the Sabbath, as a way of gently coercing the Jews into conversion – just like the coercion used to make a sick person take medicine. ‘I now hope that our Sovereign Emperor will graciously approve my suggestion, so that I, an old man of ninety years, with death and the grave before my eyes, will live to see the Jews freed from their prejudices and delusions.’2
Social advancement on Lenin’s father’s side was equally impressive. Lenin’s grandfather Nikolai managed to rise out of serf status somewhere around 1800. His wife, Anna Smirnova, might have been a Kalmyk freed from serf status and adopted as an adult by the Smirnovs (although this part of the story is not certain). Their offspring Ilya got his diploma from Kazan University in 1854 and, it is said, the great mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky encouraged him to pursue an academic career. But Ilya Ulyanov became a teacher and then an inspector of schools, with a special interest in setting up the village schools that spread the possibility of advancement through education. In his own family he and his wife Maria Alexandrovna were committed (unusually for the time) to complete equality of education between their three daughters (Anna, Olga, Maria) and their three sons (Alexander, Vladimir, Dmitri).3
Thus the Ulyanovs achieved noble status, but did so through all the bourgeois virtues: diligent training, hard work, a focused career and a credo of usefulness. One might look on the Ulyanovs as a success story, a Russian version of ‘log cabin to house on the hill’. But it was precisely their commitment to education and social advancement that put the family dangerously close to a high-tension wire in tsarist society. The tsarist state desperately needed these serious, inner-directed, upwardly mobile professionals but it was also scared of and distressed by them. They upset the orderly traditional organization of society by rank and soslovie (legally defined statuses for peasant, merchant, town-dweller, nobleman). They carried the stealthy virus of invidious comparison to Western Europe. They demanded a freedom of action that the autocratic system could ill afford them. They were never satisfied and seemingly could turn extremist at any moment. So Russia built schools for them and then harassed and irritated them. It invited them to serve the fatherland and then treated them like wayward children.
Surviving Ulyanovs in 1920. From left to right are Vladimir, Maria, Dmitri, Nadezhda Krupskaya (Lenin’s wife), Georgy Lozgachev (Anna’s adopted son) and Anna.
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in 1870 in Simbirsk on the Volga (Simbirsk was renamed Ulyanovsk in Soviet times and remains Ulyanovsk to this day). For most of his childhood he was isolated from these tensions and thrived in an atmosphere that combined intense application and individual expression. Once a teacher had difficulty carrying on a conversation with Vladimir’s mother because Vladimir was running all over the house as a Red Indian, screaming at the top of his voice. ‘Children are supposed to scream’, the mother told the teacher.4 But as Vladimir entered his teens, the tensions of the outside world began to close in on the family.
In 1881 the subversive potential of education and social mobility was confirmed when a handful of young intellectuals successfully assassinated the Tsar Liberator, Alexander II, who had emancipated the serfs twenty years earlier. In the new reign of Alexander III, the government immediately took fright and began clamping down on the education system. The new attitude was best expressed in 1887 when a circular from the Minister of Public Education stressed how dangerous it was to give education to ‘the children of coachmen, servants, cooks, washerwomen, small shopkeepers, and persons of similar type’. The government now felt safer giving its support to obscurantist church parish schools rather than to the village schools to which Ilya Ulyanov had devoted his career. This steady erosion of his life’s work helped bring Ilya to the grave in 1886 at the early age of 55.
The following year the contradictions of Russian modernization struck the Ulyanov family with an even more devastating blow.
From Worms to Bombs: ‘Another way, Sasha’
During Soviet times, a workman trying to find a better solution to some difficulty might say optimistically ‘Well, we’ll go another way, Sasha’. The Sasha of this semi-proverb is Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin’s older brother, who was hanged in May 1887 for his participation in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III.
Vladimir Ulyanov in 1887, the year of the execution of his brother Alexander (Sasha), wearing the uniform of the Simbirsk gymnasium (high school).
The origin of this saying goes back to an anecdote told by Lenin’s younger sister Maria at his funeral in 1924. According to Maria, when the seventeen-year-old Vladimir heard the news about his older brother’s unsuccessful attempt at terror, he said through clenched teeth, ‘No, we won’t go that way – that’s not the way we must go.’ Historians have been extremely sceptical about whether Lenin said any such thing, and with good reason. Among the difficulties, Maria herself was only nine years old at the time. Up to this time Vladimir had been concentrating on his studies and was hardly interested in politics, much less endowed with a determined revolutionary outlook. Yet as a summary of the next crucial seven years in Lenin’s life, Maria’s little anecdote is very insightful.
Picking up where his brother left off and trying to find a new way forward is exactly what Lenin did during these years.
Up to 1886 his brother Alexander had been a typical Ulyanov: an extremely gifted student with a brilliant future ahead of him. He had a particular passion for studying worms and was already winning prizes for his research. Yet in the last months of 1886 Alexander threw himself body and soul into a terrorist organization intent on killing the tsar. He tore himself away from his worms, sold the gold watch he received for his research and used the money to finance the preparation of a homemade bomb. After installing himself in a nearby cottage of a friend in a suburb of St Petersburg, he worked away at the dangerous task of making dynamite out of nitroglycerine. Alexander also penned what he hoped would be verbal dynamite – the manifesto of a group that called itself the Terrorist Faction of the revolutionary organization that assassinated Alexander II in 1881, Narodnaya volya. This name can be translated ‘People’s Will’ or ‘People’s Freedom’. Despite the name, Alexand
er Ulyanov’s group did not have any formal connection with the remnants of the original Narodnaya volya.
The underlying cause of the desperation of Alexander and his fellow students was the same fearful official attitude that had contributed to Ilya Ulyanov’s death the year before. The tsarist government was unable to forego either educating students or treating them with extreme suspicion. These contradictions were made manifest by a student demonstration in November 1886 to honour the memory of Nikolai Dobroliubov, a radical literary critic of the 1860s. The authorities refused to allow the large crowd of students to go in a body to the cemetery and lay wreaths on his tomb or – even more worrisome from the authorities’ point of view – to make speeches. When about 500 students then tried to hold an assembly in a public square they were all detained and questioned for hours by the police chief in person. About forty were arrested and exiled to their provincial homes. This is how the government treated what was supposed to be society’s future elite.
The idea of assassinating the new tsar and other high officials was not the brainchild of one small group of radicals. It was in the air, and many student groups, in St Petersburg and elsewhere, converged on this response to their frustrating situation. The plot of Sasha Ulyanov and his friends got further than might be expected. In late February, bomb in hand, one of the plotters walked through the crowded St Petersburg streets, waiting for the signal (a handkerchief raised to the nose) that the tsar was approaching. The tsar didn’t come that day. The police picked up some of the plotters for suspicious behaviour on 1 March and only when they were in custody did the police realize that they were carrying bombs. Since the tsar’s father had been assassinated on 1 March 1881, the 1887 plot became known as ‘the second first of March’.
All members of the conspiracy were quickly rounded up, and the Ulyanov family in Simbirsk received the devastating news that the pride of the family was a would-be regicide. Alexander’s mother hurried to Petersburg, was allowed to visit her son, and prevailed on him to make a perfunctory and predictably unsuccessful plea for clemency. On 8 May he and four others were hanged. The outcome of the assassination attempt was not a frightened government making concessions, as the conspirators had hoped, but further regimentation of student life.5
What was the thinking that led these young people to attempt murder in order to save Russia, throwing away their own lives in the process? In the manifesto he drafted for his group, Sasha Ulyanov gave the following explanation:
Without freedom of speech, propaganda that is in any way effective is impossible, just as there is no real possibility of improving the economy of the people without the participation of the people’s representatives in the administration of the country. Thus for Russian socialists the struggle for free institutions is a necessary means for attaining their final aims…. Therefore a party that is essentially socialist can only temporarily devote part of its forces to political struggle, insofar as it sees in that struggle a necessary means for making more correct and productive the activity devoted to their final economic ideals.6
Alexander (Sasha) Ulyanov, photographed in prison in 1887 while awaiting execution.
This passage tells us that Ulyanov’s goal was ‘free institutions’, that is, replacing tsarist absolutism with a constitutional regime and guaranteed political freedoms. But this passage also reveals a certain ambivalence about a merely ‘political struggle’. Ulyanov rather apologetically explains why a good socialist, someone whose primary goal is economic liberation, must ‘temporarily’ devote energy to goals espoused by the despised liberals.
Even this grudging acceptance of political struggle (= ‘the struggle for free institutions’) was the result of a hard-fought internal evolution of Russian socialist radicalism. In the 1860s and 1870s the first wave of Russian socialist revolutionaries saw little that was attractive about political freedom. Such things as freedom of the press were an irrelevant luxury for the largely illiterate peasantry. Indeed, political freedom was actively harmful, serving only to consolidate the rule of the up-and-coming bourgeoisie and to befuddle the masses. The Russian revolutionaries pointed to the eloquent writings of the learned German socialist Karl Marx, who showed just how devastating capitalism could be. Why do anything that would expedite the triumph of this disastrous system?
It followed that the coming Russian revolution could not aim at installing liberal checks and guarantees, thus handing over power to an unpleasant new elite. As the prominent Russian revolutionary Pëtr Lavrov explained, a truly social revolution would ‘overthrow at once the economic foundations of the present social order’.7 Perhaps the peasantry’s communal traditions endowed it with socialist instincts that would ensure an immediate transition to socialism, as Mikhail Bakunin argued. Or, if not, perhaps a determined minority could seize power and then use an undemocratic state to mould the peasantry – the ‘Jacobin’ solution of Pëtr Tkachev.
But these dreams of immediate socialist revolution were crushed by the problem pointed out by Sasha Ulyanov in his manifesto: ‘Without freedom of speech, propaganda that is in any way effective is impossible.’ By the end of the 1870s frustrating failures in making contact with the narod had persuaded many of the revolutionaries that the uncongenial task of a merely political revolution really was part of their job description. Perhaps paradoxically, the new interim goal of political freedom was the reason that the revolutionaries turned to terror as a method. Since the current lack of political freedom meant that a mass movement was not yet possible, the only way forward was for a ‘handful of daring people’ (the self-description of the terrorists) to force the autocratic government to make the necessary concessions. This new strategy upset many revolutionaries (including the future Marxist leader Georgy Plekhanov), not so much because of terror as a method as because of political freedom even as an interim goal.
In 1881 this new strategy led to the first ‘first of March’: the assassination of Alexander II by Narodnaya volya. But even this second wave of Russian socialist radicalism clung to hopes of using the political revolution as a launching pad for immediate socialism. They still could not resign themselves to the long-term existence of bourgeois economic and political institutions. As a result, they still had no plausible strategy for using political freedom, once attained, in the cause of socialist revolution.
Many socialists in Western Europe shared the distrust and disdain for ‘bourgeois’ political freedoms exhibited by their Russian comrades. One prominent strand of European socialism, however, did have a long-term strategy for using political freedom in the cause of socialist revolution. This was Social Democracy, a movement that seemed to combine a mass base with genuine revolutionary fervour (and so the connotations of ‘Social Demo cracy’ during this period were almost the opposite of what the term means today). The Social Democratic strategy was inspired by Marx’s teaching that the working class as a whole had a world-historical mission to win political power in order to introduce socialism. If working-class rule was the only way to get to socialism, then (as Marx put it, writing in English) the job of the socialists was to make sure that the workers were ‘united by combination and led by knowledge’ – that is, to help the workers organize and to imbue them with socialist ideology.8
This project would only be successful if undertaken on at least a national scale. The implications of Marx’s approach were described by a perceptive non-socialist English scholar, John Rae, in 1884, the year after Marx’s death:
The socialists ought to make use of all the abundant means of popular agitation and intercommunication which modern society allowed. No more secret societies in holes and corners, no more small risings and petty plots, but a great broad organization working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen to stir the masses of all European countries to a common international revolution.9
This strategy was implied by Marx’s whole outlook, but it took on institutional flesh only through the determined efforts of more than one generation of activists, starting
with Ferdinand Lassalle in the 1860s and continuing with German party leaders such as Wilhelm Liebknecht and August Bebel, along with unnumbered and anonymous agitators and propagandists. In this way was built the mighty German Social Democratic party (Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands or SPD), a source of inspiration for socialists around the world.
Alexander Ulyanov represented a third stage in the internal evolution of Russian socialist radicalism: overthrow the tsar in order to be able to adopt the Social Democratic strategy of ‘a great broad organization working in open day, and working restlessly by tongue and pen’. Nevertheless, Alexander considered it obvious that the Social Democratic strategy could only be adopted in the future, after political freedom had been won. For the present, terror still seemed to be the only possible method of obtaining political freedom in the absence of political freedom. The use of terror, claimed Ulyanov, was forced on ‘an intelligentsia that has been deprived of any possibility of peaceful, cultural influence on social life’. Under the present repressive circumstances, the workers could do no more than provide support for a preliminary political revolution that would be led by the terror-wielding intelligentsia.
This reasoning led Alexander to throw away his life with no result other than a hardening of government repression. Russian socialist radicalism had arrived at a dead end. The Social Democratic strategy of educating workers by mass campaigns was perceived as the only realistic way to get to socialism, but it could not be applied without political freedom – and there seemed to be no way to obtain the requisite political freedom. The Social Democratic strategy itself was inapplicable under tsarist absolutism, while terrorism had been tried and found wanting. This was the strategic dilemma facing Russian socialist radicalism, and it was presented to Vladimir Ulyanov in the most devastatingly personal terms.
Vladimir’s search in the years following his brother’s execution led him to the conclusion that a stripped-down, bare-bones version of the Social Democratic strategy could be applied even under tsarism as a way of obtaining the political freedom required for a full and unadulterated application of the same strategy. But, as we shall see, Vladimir’s ‘other way’ to achieving his brother’s goal was based on a heroic scenario shot through with optimistic assumptions about the inspiring power of class leadership.