Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  Like many children he had a destructive streak. Whenever he was given a new toy he began to take it apart. On one birthday, the nanny, Varvara Grigoryevna Sarbatova – a retainer who stayed with the Ulyanovs for twenty years and was part of the family – gave him a present of a papier-mâché troika, complete with horses. He disappeared to play with the gift on his own. ‘We began to look for him and found him behind a door. He stood there in deep concentration, twisting the legs of the horses until one by one they came off.’ Despite this mistreatment of her present, Sarbatova always stood up for him. She said that all the Ulyanov children ‘were gold…but my Voloden’ka is a diamond’.

  He was the loudest and worst-behaved child in a well-ordered family. When he did misbehave, as Sarbatova would say, ‘at least he owned up and didn’t do things on the sly’. Except once, on a visit to his aunt in Kazan, when he accidentally broke a vase while he was alone in one of the reception rooms of the house. He denied all knowledge of the breakage and the incident was forgotten. But a few months later, back in Simbirsk, he couldn’t go to sleep one night and his mother found him crying in his room. She tried to comfort him and asked what was wrong. ‘I lied to Aunt Anya,’ he confessed. ‘I told her it wasn’t me who broke that vase, when it was.’

  If he was closest to his sister Olga, his childhood hero was his elder brother (by four years), Alexander, a serious, somewhat sombre youngster who with a withering look could restrain Vladimir’s sometimes hot temper. ‘At first Vladimir started imitating his brother and then he began consciously to curb his quick temper,’ according to Anna. The two boys occupied adjoining rooms, worked together and played in the garden, walked by the Volga and often swam in its tributary, the Sviyaga. ‘Whatever Vladimir was asked – what game he wanted to play, whether he would go for a walk, or wanted milk or butter with his porridge – he would usually look at Sasha before answering. The latter would purposely take his time and look at his brother, a twinkle in his eye. “I’ll do as Sasha does,” he would say.’1

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  Home was a substantial house on Moskva Street, towards the top of the hill, in the smart area of Simbirsk where senior civil servants, a few army officers, doctors and lawyers lived in decent, stolid style, though not in luxury.

  Founded on the high bank of the Volga in 1648, Simbirsk was for a while important as a military garrison to provide defence against nomadic raids. Over the decades it became an unhurried provincial backwater. By the late nineteenth century there were 30,000 inhabitants, but as yet no railway. A few poor roads linked it with the rest of Russia, and the Volga connected Simbirsk with other, similar sleepy towns down to Astrakhan at the river’s mouth nearly 1,000 kilometres to the south. In the winter, people from Simbirsk grumbled that they felt isolated, as though they were living in the middle of nowhere. On the other hand, there was natural beauty. Apple and cherry orchards covered much of the countryside for miles around. At night thousands of nightingales sang. Not much had changed in Simbirsk for a century and a half at least. It had an impressive onion-domed cathedral, two good libraries and – to some extent thanks to the liberal-minded educator Ilya Ulyanov – two excellent ‘Gimnasium’ (grammar) schools. It had sizeable Chuvash and Tatar minorities, the majority of whom worked on the Volga riverboats.*1

  The most famous son of Simbirsk after Lenin was the novelist Ivan Goncharov, a near-contemporary, whose masterpiece Oblomov was much admired by the future Bolshevik leader. ‘The outward appearance of my home town represented nothing but a picture of slumber and stagnation,’ Goncharov wrote. ‘One wants to fall asleep, looking at this calm, at the sleepy windows and lowered blinds, at the sleepy physiognomy of the people…Over the city lay the torpidity of peace…the calm of the generous rural and urban Russian life.’*2

  The Ulyanovs’ comfortable two-storey wooden house had generous reception and living areas, a library full of Russian classics from Pushkin to Tolstoy, and fiction by the best foreign authors. All the children were encouraged by both parents to read widely, in a permissive way that would have shocked Ilya Ulyanov’s more conservative civil service colleagues. For most of his early teens Vladimir’s favourite book was Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin, an early influence on him pre-dating Marx or any of the Russian radicals. He kept the novel by his bedside for many years.

  The house had a big, broad balcony overlooking a garden full of apple, plum and cherry trees and lilac bushes surrounding a well-maintained lawn. The whole family were passionate about croquet and tournaments were highly competitive. Indoors, the children, even the older ones, loved to play with toy soldiers. Vladimir always chose the American side and took the part of Abraham Lincoln, or the Union generals Grant and Sherman. His brothers Sasha and Dmitry (four years his junior) were usually Italians, and his sisters Spanish soldiers fighting Napoleon.

  The game Lenin loved throughout his life, though, was chess. He was taught by his father from an early age on pieces that he had lovingly carved for his children. Ulyanov père was no mean player, one of the best in Simbirsk, but Vladimir was soon beating him and his older brother regularly. He became a serious player who could give the top names in Russian chess a decent game.*3, 2

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  Summers were spent at Kokushkino, the estate bought by Alexander Blank, which after his death was inherited by his five children. Lenin would remember Kokushkino all his life as a magical place where he had always been happy. He found peace and tranquillity there, ‘where the scent of mignonette, stocks, sweet peas and tobacco plant, nasturtiums, phlox, geraniums and hollyhocks suffused the garden’.

  In her memoirs Lenin’s sister Anna, who became a devout Bolshevik, spoke with the authentic voice of the Russian middle classes when she talked about Kokushkino and its gracious manor house surrounded on three sides by a verandah overlooking gardens – a house at the end of a long drive and an avenue of trees. ‘We began to dream about our move to Kokushkino each year and make preparations for it long in advance. We thought there was nothing better or more beautiful than Kokushkino, a little country place that is very picturesque. I think we inherited our love for Kokushkino, and our joy at seeing it again, from our mother, who had spent her best years there. The joy of country life, the open spaces were very attractive to us. Especially after the agony of our…prison-like high schools and the torture of the May examinations, summers at Kokushkino seemed lovely and happy beyond compare.’ Vladimir bathed in the river, took boat trips and rambled in the forest to pick berries and mushrooms. He flew kites and there were picnics.3

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  The education of their children was of paramount importance for the Ulyanov parents. All of them excelled at school, but Vladimir was by far the most competitive. He had immense charm when he chose to exercise it, and as a teenager a good sense of humour. He could also be unbearably bumptious and tactless. He was exceptionally clever and let everyone else know it. Towards the end of term at the Gimnasium, when the marks were awarded, he would go home and call out his marks as he passed his father’s study. ‘Greek – five [the top mark, naturally]; Latin – five; German – five; Algebra – five, and so on.’ his sister Anna recalled. ‘I can still see the scene clearly: I am sitting in my father’s study and I catch the contented smile which father and mother exchange as their eyes follow the bulky little figure in uniform with the reddish hair sticking out from under his cap.’ Yet the ease with which he coasted through school caused his parents some concern. Occasionally they worried that it might lead him to believe life was too easy and make him monumentally arrogant. But they didn’t agonise for long.*4

  The curriculum was tough but narrow. There was a lot of rote learning. Almost half the classes were on the classics, and most of the rest on mathematics and the natural sciences. Under the Russian autocracy, where no politics were permitted, the rulers were scared of allowing Russian children to read some of the masterpieces of Russian literature. Very little poetry was taught. Pupils were discouraged from reading most of the great modern Russia
n writers – Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Turgenev, Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol – because at one time or another they had all faced problems with the Tsarist censors. German, French and English were taught, but for the grammar and language. Pupils were banned from reading the European writers and thinkers of the Enlightenment and Romantic Movement – Goethe, Voltaire, Rousseau, for example. Pupils from the Simbirsk Classical Gimnasium were not allowed to use the main Karamzin Library in town, which had some volumes deemed too subversive for young eyes.

  Discipline was harsh at the school, but Vladimir seldom complained or expressed any hint of a rebellious spirit. He found himself in trouble only once, and even then it was a minor offence, when he was overheard by a school monitor mimicking the French teacher, whom he believed was inadequate. Discipline was only slightly more relaxed at home, at least during term time. Ilya was a hard taskmaster. Strict silence was enforced during homework hours and time was set aside each day for serious reading. Offenders who broke the ‘no talking’ rule were sent to the ‘black armchair’ in Ilya’s study for calm, silent reflection on misdemeanours. Once Vladimir was found asleep there.4

  Alexander Naumov shared Vladimir’s desk at the Gimnasium. In most years he was silver medallist in the school, runner-up to Ulyanov, who invariably won gold. ‘Vladimir Ilyich was rather short but powerfully built, with slightly hunched-up shoulders and a large head, slightly compressed at the sides…he had irregular and, I would say, unhandsome features: small ears, prominent cheekbones, a short, wide and slightly squashed nose, and in addition, a large mouth with yellow, widely spaced teeth. With no eyebrows on his freckled face, Ulyanov had longish, blond, soft and slightly curly hair which he combed straight back. But all these irregularities were redeemed by his high forehead, under which burned two fierce little brown eyes. His ungainly appearance was easily forgotten in conversation under the effect of these small but unusual eyes which sparkled with extraordinary intelligence and energy…he differed considerably from all of us. Neither in the lower forms nor later did he take part in the childish and youthful games and pranks, always keeping to himself, busy either with his studies or some other written work. Even when walking between classes, Ulyanov kept to his books, reading as he walked up and down past the windows. The only thing that he liked as a distraction was playing chess, a game in which he usually came out victorious, even when playing against several opponents simultaneously.’

  Another schoolfellow described the young Lenin as ‘a walking encyclopedia, extremely useful to his comrades…as soon as he appeared in the form, Ulyanov was immediately surrounded by his schoolmates, who asked him for a translation or a solution to a problem. He helped everybody willingly, but it seemed to me as though he nevertheless resented those who tried to live and do their schoolwork at the expense of another’s labour and intellect. Ulyanov had an even and on the whole a jovial temperament, but he was extremely secretive and cool in his relations with his fellows. He had no real friends. He said “you” to everybody [children invariably spoke to each other as “thou”] and I do not remember a single time when he would unbend and allow himself to be intimately outspoken. On the whole he commanded respect and displayed businesslike authority, but one couldn’t say that he was liked, rather that he was esteemed.’5

  At no time while he was growing up did he show any interest in politics. ‘Volodya would never have concealed them…at that time, in short, he had no political beliefs. We were surprised that he could read and reread Turgenev several times – in the months when he was sharing a room with Sasha, who was diligently studying works of political economy.’6

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  Vladimir’s idyllic childhood and teenage years were shattered, suddenly, just three months before his sixteenth birthday. His father had kept his ill health to himself, but he had been suffering from bad stomach cramps for some time and what would now be diagnosed as serious hypertension. In January 1886 he died from a stroke.

  His high blood pressure was not helped by major stress in his professional life. Ilya Ulyanov had been a conscientious, model civil servant for a quarter of a century. He had supervised the opening of nearly 400 primary and secondary schools in the Simbirsk region and believed wholeheartedly that backward Russia could be modernised and thrive only through better education for all. This was a view shared by the ‘Tsar Liberator’ Alexander II, who initiated a series of reforms and oversaw the expansion of Russia’s schools. But after he was assassinated the reforms were halted and a period of harsh reaction was established.

  The autocracy felt threatened and responded in a predictably Romanov fashion. Censorship was tightened, the secret police were given sweeping new powers of arrest and detention, and political activity of practically any kind was banned. A few months after ascending to the throne the new Tsar, Alexander III, placed education in the hands of a new minister, Ivan Delyanov, whose view of schooling, as he declared on his appointment, was that ‘the children of coachmen, servants, cooks, laundresses, small shopkeepers and suchlike should not be encouraged to rise above the sphere in which they were born’. The programme of opening village schools for the poor was halted; instead, a few church schools designed to prepare children for the Orthodox priesthood were established.

  The new ministry gave Ulyanov awards and medals, but soon retired him. His liberal activism did not chime with the tough new regime which was determined to retreat to the past. His supporters managed to get Ulyanov’s retirement deferred indefinitely and he was reinstated, but his working life was coming to an end, unhappily.

  The Russian winter of 1885–6 was one of the coldest for many years and Ilya developed a bad cough. Typically he carried on working regardless, at his usual pace. On 12 January 1886 he complained to Maria Alexandrovna that he was feeling unwell, yet he still had a meeting in his study with one of his team of inspectors until about 2 p.m. Unusually, he didn’t join the rest of the family for lunch. Briefly he appeared at the door of the dining room, but returned to his study. ‘He looked at us as if he had come to say goodbye,’ his daughter Maria recalled years later.

  After lunch his wife went to find him; he was lying on a sofa shaking, unable to speak. She called a doctor and fetched the children to see their father. He was in agony, shook several times violently and died before the doctor could arrive. He was fifty-four, a year older than his son Vladimir would be when he died.

  He was buried the next day and most of middle-class Simbirsk turned out at the funeral. Sasha was away studying at the University of St Petersburg and it would have taken him several days to get home. Vladimir, at fifteen, was the chief pallbearer; the others were leading dignitaries of the town.

  The death of Ilya Ulyanov at a relatively early age was a terrible blow for the family. But soon another, more serious, would fall on his widow and children – a tragedy that would set Vladimir on the road to becoming the revolutionary, Lenin.7

  *1 After Lenin died, Simbirsk was transformed into a grandiose Leninist altar and in 1924 renamed Ulyanovsk. Much of it was flattened in the late 1920s. The church where Lenin was baptised was razed – as was a fine classical-style house where Pushkin had stayed in the early nineteenth century. The cathedral, built in memory of those from Simbirsk who died in the war of 1812, was cleared in the 1920s to make way for a monument to Lenin. The cemetery of the Pokrovsky Monastery was bulldozed to make way for a cosy square, leaving only one grave – that of Lenin’s father, with its cross removed. It is still called Ulyanovsk.

  *2 By a curious twist of fate – it was such a backwater town – Alexander Kerensky was also from Simbirsk. He attended the same school, though they did not know each other, as he was eleven years younger than Lenin. In later years, he had deeply romantic memories of the town where he grew up – though he couldn’t wait to get out of the place as a teenager and head to somewhere with brighter lights. He left a highly coloured account of the town where, from the summit of the hill, ‘right down to the waterside stretched luxuriant apple and cherry orchards. In the spring t
he whole mountainside was white with fragrant blossom…night breathed with the songs of nightingales. The fields…during the heat of summer would be gay with the sounds of games being played, of peasants and townspeople come to mow the rich grass.’

  *3 At school he was good enough to play ‘simultaneous chess’ against several opponents at once on a number of chessboards; he nearly always won all the games. His wife Nadya said later that ‘Some games obsessed him to such an extent that he used to rave in his sleep.’ She once heard him calling out at night, ‘If he moves his knight there, I’ll counter with my castle.’

  *4 The only subject at school in which the future theoretician of Marxism did not excel was Logic. Occasionally he even failed to obtain the four mark. We don’t know – he never referred to it – but in later years he might have appreciated the irony.

  3

  The Hanged Man

  ‘The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no personal interests, no private affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property and no name. Everything in him is subordinated towards a single thought, a single passion: the Revolution.’

  Sergei Nechayev, The Revolutionary Catechism, 1869

  Late on the evening of 4 May 1887 five young men, all in their twenties, were chained and manacled in their cells at the Peter and Paul Fortress in St Petersburg, commonly known as Russia’s ‘Bastille’. They were marched to a steamer docked on the Neva riverside below and ferried twenty-five kilometres or so to another forbidding symbol of the power of the Tsars: the ugly and impregnable Shlisselburg Fort, built almost 200 years earlier by Peter the Great on the south-western shore of Lake Ladoga. The youths were unchained only when they were safely placed in their damp cells.

  For the next three nights, unknown to the five prisoners who could hear no sound through the thick walls, carpenters were hard at work erecting gallows and gibbets in the fortress courtyard. At 3.30 a.m. on 8 May they were woken by prison guards, shackled and chained again, and told that in accordance with the sentences imposed on them at a Special Session of the State Senate held three weeks earlier they were now to be hanged. Their offence: an attempted assassination of the Tsar. Jailers said later that the five young men, all of them students at St Petersburg University, were unusually calm as they dressed and prepared themselves for death.