Lenin

by Victor Sebestyen

  At around 4 a.m. they were led down stone staircases to the fortress’s courtyard. Only three scaffolds had been built, so two of the young men had to wait and watch their comrades hang before they too would die. The first to be executed were Vasily Generalov, twenty, a second-year student from a middle-class Don Cossack family, Pakhomi Andreushkin, twenty-one, a bright physics student from a well-off family in the Kuban, and Vasily Osipanov, twenty-five, son of a soldier serving in Tomsk, studying in the law faculty. All three refused the last rites, but they kissed the Cross. As black hoods were placed over their heads and they mounted the scaffold they cried as loudly and clearly as they could, ‘Long Live the Narodnaya Volya’. For all of them the last word on their lips was the name of the revolutionary group they belonged to: the People’s Will.

  The bodies swung free for several minutes while their two comrades stood below. When they were led to the scaffold, one angrily waved away the Cross offered by the priest; he was Pyotr Shevyrev, the twenty-three-year-old son of a rich merchant from Kharkov. The other calmly kissed the Cross before going to his death, nearly four weeks after his twenty-first birthday. He was Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov.*1, 1

  —

  Sasha’s younger brother Vladimir, now seventeen, was taking a geometry exam on the day of the hanging.*2 Nobody was told about the executions till late the following day. His mother believed until the last moment that the death sentence would be commuted to life imprisonment at the worst.

  Like the rest of his family, Vladimir had no idea that serious-minded Sasha, whose principal interest was thought to be in the natural sciences and who seemed destined for a glittering academic career, was so deeply and dangerously involved in radical politics. His mother and elder sister Anna knew that he was reading seriously on economic and political history, but not that he was involved as an activist – or that he knew any activists as friends.

  High-minded Sasha was all but deified by his siblings. He had a dreamy, romantic look, a refined, delicate face and was prone to melancholy. He was boringly well behaved, quiet and reserved even as a child. He studied so hard that he could barely be separated from his books for meals. In his last year at the Gimnasium he converted his bedroom into a laboratory. Out in the countryside he wanted to collect specimens of insects; he delighted in worms. There is something terribly priggish and sanctimonious about his earnestness to be seen as good. He seemed to have no sense of humour, let alone the irony possessed in abundance by his brother Vladimir. Asked by one of his sisters what was his ideal of feminine beauty, Sasha replied, po-faced, ‘Oh, just like Mother.’

  Vladimir worshipped Sasha as a child, but as he grew up the relationship became more complex. No criticism, not even a hint, was allowed of Sasha, but Vladimir sometimes appeared to resent the way his older brother would preach to all and sundry about what was right and good form. ‘When Volodya reached that transitional age when a youngster is especially sharp and quarrelsome he was very brash and self-confident, even more so after the death of our father,’ Anna wrote many years later. Alexander was unforgiving of the slightest faults, misdemeanours or irritable moods among his brothers and sisters. One day at home the two boys were playing chess. Maria Alexandrovna asked Vladimir to fetch something for her from the adjoining room. Vladimir replied petulantly that perhaps she could wait until the game was over. She asked again – and his reply was downright rude. Alexander raised his voice, something he seldom did. ‘Volodya. Either you will go right now and do as Mama says or I won’t play with you any more.’ Sheepishly, Vladimir did as he was told.

  ‘The different nature of the two brothers had already made its appearance in childhood,’ said Anna. ‘Thus they could never be close friends, notwithstanding the boundless respect and admiration which Volodya had for Sasha…It was absolutely clear that each had his own nature and that they were entirely different individuals.’

  For his part, Sasha was cool towards Vladimir. One day a few months before his execution Anna, herself a student at St Petersburg, asked Alexander, ‘How do you like our Volodya?’ He replied: ‘He is undoubtedly a very talented person but we don’t get on very well and we are not very close. In fact we are not close at all.’2

  —

  The assassination plot was laughably amateur. The surprise was that the conspirators came as close as they did to success. Several months in the making, fifteen people were involved in the plan – a foolishly large number if one of the objects was secrecy – and it turned out that many had spoken of it with sympathisers. Yet the political police, the much-feared and supposedly omniscient Okhrana, did not know of it until a few days before the attempt, and only then through a piece of luck. One of the plotters, Vasily Generalov, was arrested on suspicion of something entirely different and found by the police with explosives equipment and some incriminating letters.

  The money came from Sasha, who sold the gold medal he won from St Petersburg University for a paper he had delivered on the structure of freshwater annelid worms. It was Sasha who designed and helped build the three bombs intended to kill the Tsar as he left the Winter Palace for a service at the Alexander Nevsky Cathedral on 1 March, the sixth anniversary of the murder of Alexander II. He obtained all the necessary information from books in the university library, though whether the bombs would actually have exploded or not nobody will ever know. The main problem was obtaining the nitric acid that would detonate the device. Finally it was found and smuggled to St Petersburg from Poland.*3

  Alexander was arrested on Nevsky Prospekt, a few hours before the attack on the Tsar was due to take place. He had a Browning revolver in his pocket, which, unaccustomed to using guns, he had little idea how to fire. Immediately, he admitted his guilt and took sole responsibility for the plot, even though the idea had not been his, nor much of the planning.

  As soon as she heard of Sasha’s arrest the next day Maria Alexandrovna rushed to St Petersburg. She hoped to intervene personally to shorten what she thought then would be a prison term. She travelled by horse and wagon to the nearest train stop, 200 kilometres or so away at Syzran – alone. Vladimir was deputed to look for someone, almost anyone ‘respectable’, to be a companion for her on a long, arduous journey. But he could find nobody to go out of their way to help the family of a suspected terrorist. This was a snub which stayed with him for the rest of his life.3

  Maria Alexandrovna desperately wrote letters pleading on Sasha’s behalf to everybody she thought might help, from the Tsar downwards. At first she was refused permission to see him in prison, but was finally allowed a visit. The Emperor himself intervened, and scribbled on her petition: ‘It seems to me that it is desirable to allow her to see her son, so that she can convince herself what sort of person her dear little son is…and to show her what kind of convictions he has,’ he wrote.

  She saw him on 30 March. In a tearful interview, he broke down and begged her forgiveness. ‘But darling Sasha, why resort to terrorism, murder? How awful.’ He replied, ‘What can one do, Mother, when there are no other means available?’

  The trial began on 15 April, in camera, and took four days. Fifteen young men were charged. Sasha again admitted his guilt and assumed responsibility for his co-defendants’ actions. At one point in the court room, according to a guard who overheard, he whispered to Generalov, ‘If you need to, you can lay all the blame on me.’

  Before the verdict was recorded he was allowed to read a prepared statement.

  ‘Terror is the only form of defence, the only road individuals can take when their discontent becomes extreme,’ he said. ‘We…[students] are encouraged to develop our intellectual powers, but are not allowed to use them for the benefit of our country. Among the Russian people you can always find a dozen men or so who are so utterly devoted to their ideas and take the misfortunes of their country so much to heart that they do not consider it a sacrifice to die for their cause. There is nothing that can frighten or intimidate such people.’

  Sentence was passed on 25 April. All the
defendants were condemned to death. Maria Alexandrovna was again allowed to see him and she begged him to plead for a pardon. She had been told by some old friends of her husband, senior officials in the civil service, that the Tsar would be prepared to show clemency. Sasha refused: ‘I am sorry, Mother, but I can’t do that after everything I said at the trial. It would be insincere.’ Eventually she persuaded him and he wrote a petition appealing for mercy. But it was too late.

  Before the execution went ahead the Tsar took time to read the entire record of the case. He noted in the margin, at the transcript of Sasha’s speech: ‘This frankness…and honesty, is even touching!’ He commuted the sentences of ten defendants but ordered Sasha’s execution to go ahead. Alexander III commented in the margin of the last page of the report: ‘This time God saved us! But for how long?’4

  —

  The death of her son was a devastating blow for Maria Alexandrovna. ‘When she returned from St Petersburg afterwards, she didn’t ring or knock, but came in quietly by the back door,’ her daughter Maria recalled. ‘The younger children crowded around her and clung to her. I thought I had seen that her hair had gone quite grey.’

  Sasha and his execution were seldom mentioned among the Ulyanovs for several years afterwards – ‘it was just too painful’. But the profound and immediate effect it had on Vladimir was plain. He didn’t often show his feelings to outsiders and there seems to be only one contemporary record of his reaction, from a school friend who spoke to him a few days later: ‘The evening was so still, as if nature itself wanted to calm and reassure us. I said so to Volodya. After a moment’s silence he told me that…Sasha had been put to death. I was stunned. Droopingly, slouchingly, Volodya sat next to me. Under the rush of thoughts it was impossible to speak. We sat so for a long time in silence. At last he got up, and, saying nothing, we went towards the town. We walked slowly. I saw Volodya’s deep grief but also had the feeling of his determination not to show it…Before parting I strongly grasped his hand. He looked into my eyes, responded to the handshake and quickly turned and walked home.’5

  The Ulyanovs were shunned by bourgeois Simbirsk. The dignitaries of the town who a year or so earlier had attended the funeral of Vladimir’s father no longer visited. Long-standing family friends who came to play chess with Ilya, and since his death with Vladimir, no longer called. This triggered the vitriolic, sometimes uncontrollable, loathing for liberals and ‘middle class do-gooders’ that he would henceforth show until his dying day. ‘The bourgeois…they will always be traitors and cowards,’ he declared with monotonous frequency from now onwards. Politics is personal – and this was personal. A young boy who rarely thought about politics became radicalised almost overnight.*4 Maria Alexandrovna could bear the stares of former friends and the gossip of strangers no longer; she decided to move the family from Simbirsk and sold the Moskva Street house. It was bought by the town’s police chief, a man of indisputable rectitude, who nevertheless had no qualms about buying property from associates of a terrorist.6

  Vladimir began immersing himself in the political literature his brother had read and a new world opened up for him. One thing still perplexed him about his brother, though. Nearly a decade later, on the day he met his future wife Nadezhda, the two of them were walking in St Petersburg along the River Neva. He confided to her how bitter he was about Sasha’s execution and how much he hated the regime that sentenced him to death. Then he said that he never imagined his brother would become a revolutionary: ‘A revolutionary doesn’t give himself up to the study of worms.’

  Vladimir was now a marked man by the authorities – suspect by association with his brother and a potential troublemaker. He was set on a collision course with the Tsarist regime.

  *1 The great chemist Dmitry Mendeleyev, who created the periodic table, was briefly one of Alexander Ulyanov’s teachers at St Petersburg University. He was appalled by the execution, but not altogether sympathetic to Sasha’s aims. ‘These accursed social questions, this needless, I believe, enthusiasm for revolution – how many great talents is it destroying?’ he said after he heard about the hanging.

  *2 Naturally he received a five.

  *3 One of Sasha’s co-conspirators would many years later play a major role in Lenin’s life. The young man who bought the nitric acid to detonate the bombs was Józef Piłsudski, the Polish nationalist who in the 1920s would become the military dictator of Poland. Piłsudski wanted independence for his country from Tsarist Russia, and after the Revolution he was the hero of the Polish War of 1920 against the fledgling Soviet regime. The Poles heavily defeated and embarrassed the Soviet state – one of Lenin’s biggest setbacks. In the 1880s, the young Piłsudski was sentenced to five years in exile for his part in Sasha Ulyanov’s attempt to murder Alexander III. Piłsudski’s brother Bronisław, who smuggled the acid, was sentenced to fifteen years’ hard labour.

  *4 In most of the hagiographies of Lenin which appeared in the Soviet Union through to the late 1970s there appears an entirely bogus story, designed to show that seventeen-year-old Vladimir Ulyanov was already the revolutionary Lenin, thinking strategically. When he was told that Sasha had been hanged he is supposed to have told his sister Maria, ‘No we will not take that road…we will find another.’ Maria was only nine at the time and couldn’t have known what he was talking about. A more credible story (but again its veracity is uncertain) is a comment that came from one of his younger sister Olga’s tutors, Vera Kashkadanova, who claimed that Lenin said of Sasha’s actions: ‘It must mean that he had to act like that; he couldn’t act in any other way.’

  4

  The Police State

  ‘We Russians are slaves because we are unable to free ourselves and become citizens rather than subjects.’

  Alexander Herzen, (1812–1870)

  A majority of educated Russians, the intellectuals known as intelligenty, probably agreed with Alexander Ulyanov’s sentiments, if not his actions. Even if they were not prepared to throw bombs themselves, by the late nineteenth century they would have sympathised with his frustration at being denied any voice in the way Russia was run, any stake in the country’s future – ‘the very term intelligentsia was a synonym for opposition’, as one dissident put it.

  Around 85 per cent of the Russian population were peasants, the muzhiks, who were still essentially without civil rights at all, though some advances in their legal status had been made since the abolition of serfdom in 1861. On the whole they showed no interest in politics beyond a grudging acceptance of their lot; the regime felt no need to take any notice of their thoughts whatsoever.

  The small middle class and the intellectuals were different. The autocracy saw the spread of any ideas to modernise Russia along the lines of Western Europe as a direct challenge to the Romanovs’ near-300-year-old dynasty. The Crown created an entire organ of state to root out ‘subversion’ in all its forms. As Count Sergei Witte, Prime Minister for three years under the last of the Tsars, said, ‘The Russian empire…became a police state par excellence.’

  Both the last two Russian emperors imagined that tightened repression and censorship, exile for the mildest of political opponents, and the ban – until nearly the end of the ancien régime – of political activity of any kind would make the monarchy safer. They could not have been more wrong. The early Romanovs – Peter the Great, Catherine II, for example – understood the nature of power and knew how to run an absolutist state. So did Lenin. The last two Tsars, through terrible judgement, incompetence and the absence of any imagination, did not. They possessed the ruthlessness, but not the efficiency or the vision. At the turn of the twentieth century, their great hope was to take Russia back to the seventeenth. It should hardly be a surprise that they didn’t know how. Between them they made a series of fatal mistakes. Among the worst was to force moderate middle-class liberals, who had no real interest in revolution, to the extremes. They guaranteed the growth of a violent opposition, which they were too weak and incompetent to destroy. Students,
predictably, were at the forefront of the opposition to Tsardom and the regime was constantly in a state of generational conflict with educated young people.*1

  Nearly 20,000 ministers, provincial governors, senior civil servants and top army officers were assassinated by revolutionary groups in the last twenty-five years of Tsarist rule. Much moderate opinion did not blame the ‘terrorists’, but the government. ‘These…[murders] are not melodramatic whims or romantic accidents of Russian history,’ wrote the liberal Pyotr Struve, a one-time socialist, who believed in non-violent change. ‘These corpses mark the logical development of a moribund autocracy…which has stubbornly cut off, and continues to cut off, the country from all avenues of legal and gradual political development. The terrible thing for the government is not the liquidation of the Sipyagins and the von Plehves [two assassinated ministers] but the public atmosphere of resentment and indignation which the bearers of authority create and which breeds in the ranks of Russian society one “avenger” after another…[The government] thought that it was possible to have an autocracy which introduced the police into everything, an autocracy which transformed legislation, administration, scholarship, church, school and family into police organs…And the police were not even able to avert a bomb…pitiful.’1

  Some acute foreign observers noticed that the near-daily murders created little outrage among most people against the revolutionaries; they shrugged shoulders and complained about the regime. After one particularly loathed Interior Minister was blown up by a bomb in St Petersburg, the Austrian Ambassador to Russia, Count Alois Lexa von Aehrenthal – not exactly a liberal himself – wrote: ‘The most striking thing…is the total indifference of an event that constituted a heavy blow to the principles of the government. One could hardly have expected sympathy for a minister who because of his authoritarian bent must have made many enemies. But a certain degree of human compassion or at least concern and anxiety about the immediate future would be natural. Not a trace of this is to be found…only totally indifferent people or people so cynical that they say no other outcome was to be expected. People say that further catastrophes…will be necessary in order to bring about a change of mind on the part of the highest authority.’2