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 gene
ral 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 ne
ighbouring 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.
Lenin: A Biography Page 3