Although the family’s ethnic and religious background is not completely clear, Nikolai probably descended from peasants who came to Astrakhan from the upper Volga province of Nizhni Novgorod in the eighteenth century. Originally their name, it seems, was not Ulyanov but Ulyanin; such a shift in orthography was common in those years. The possibility that they came from near Nizhni Novgorod, one of Russia’s greatest cities, has given rise to the suggestion that they were Russians. Quite possibly they were. But the province of Nizhni Novgorod, like several provinces of the Volga region, was inhabited by a mixture of ethnic groups, and it cannot be excluded that the Ulyanovs belonged to one of the indigenous ethnic groups conquered by the Russian tsars in the sixteenth century. Thus the Ulyanovs could have been Chuvashes or Mordvinians. Even more obscure is their religious affiliation. If they were Russians, they may have been Orthodox Christians; but it is equally conceivable that they belonged to one or other of the local Christian sects. If Chuvash or Mordvinian, they could have been pagans or Moslems or even converted Christians. All that is beyond challenge is that Nikolai Ulyanov – Lenin’s grandfather – brought up his family as Russian Orthodox Christians and had them educated in Russian schools.23
There also remains uncertainty about the identity of his Astrakhan grandmother. Even her first name is problematical. According to some sources, she was Alexandra, whereas others have her as Anna. It cannot wholly be discounted that she was a Russian by birth. But certainly Lenin’s sister Maria was convinced that their Astrakhan forebears had a Tatar ingredient in their genealogy; and Maria may have had her grandmother in mind when she referred to this. Most writers have her as a Kalmyk but it is conceivable that she was a Kirgiz. The Kalmyks were a mainly Buddhist people living in the southernmost regions of the Russian Empire. Their ancestors were the nomadic tribes which had overrun the Russians in the thirteenth century with the Mongol Horde. Most of the Kalmyks and Kirgiz who lived in Astrakhan were poor; some were even slaves. Only a few rose to become urban traders. They were disliked and despised by the Russian authorities as ‘Asiatics’.
Nevertheless the possibility that she was a Russian is not wholly discountable since the records are so scanty and imprecise. Mysteries continue to exist. But later generations of the family believed that a non-Russian element (‘Tatar’, as Anna Ilinichna Ulyanova put it) entered their ancestry in Astrakhan and it is difficult to believe that they invented this.24 Alexandra was younger than Nikolai Ulyanov, who had delayed marrying until middle age. Indeed he reportedly bought his wife out from a prominent Astrakhan merchant family. This has encouraged the speculation that she had been converted to Orthodox Christianity. But in truth a cloud of unknowing covers the matter. Another piece of guesswork is even more peculiar. This is that Nikolai Ulyanov already shared a surname with his bride Alexandra. The suspicion has been aired that Nikolai and Alexandra were related by blood, even quite closely related. Nothing has been proven and, in the absence of documents, probably never will be. The only fair conclusion is that Lenin could not claim a wholly Russian ancestry on his father’s side; indeed it is possible, but by no means certain, that he lacked Russian ‘blood’ on both sides of his family.
Yet Nikolai and Alexandra, whatever their origins, brought up their family in Russian culture, raised them in the Orthodox Christian faith and sent the boys to Russian schools.25 The Ulyanov family was taking its opportunities to establish itself in the lower middle class of Astrakhan society. Its ambition survived the death of Nikolai at the age of seventy-five in 1838. The eldest son Vasili, who never married, took his family responsibilities seriously and paid for his brother Ilya – thirteen years his junior – to enter the Astrakhan Gimnazia and to proceed to the Imperial Kazan University, where he completed a mathematics degree in 1854. On graduation Ilya took a succession of teaching jobs. His first post took him to Penza, where he worked in the Gentry Institute. It was there that he met Maria Alexandrovna Blank, who was staying with her sister Anna, the wife of the Gentry Institute’s director I. D. Veretennikov.26
The marriage of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Blank took place in Penza in August 1863. They shared many interests and a general attitude to life. In particular, they had a common passion for education. This brought them together despite the many contrasts in their backgrounds. Ilya adhered to Orthodox Christianity whereas Maria was a tepid Lutheran. Ilya had an Asian background, Maria a north European. Ilya was a man of the Volga. He lived his whole life near that great river: in Astrakhan, Kazan, Penza, Nizhni Novgorod and finally Simbirsk. Maria had lived her early years in St Petersburg and the western area of the Russian Empire. Whereas the Ulyanovs had only recently become comfortable in material terms, the Blanks had always been so. Ilya was a university graduate; Maria had been educated only at home. None of these differences mattered to them. What counted was their educational commitment. Maria was as zealous about this as Ilya; she too trained as a teacher even though she did not proceed to teach in a school. Education was the focal point of their lives. The Blanks had been brought up this way. Not only Maria but also two of her sisters married teachers who rose up the hierarchy of educational administration. Ilya and Maria were united by their zeal, which they successfully transmitted to the next generation.
Ilya had intellectual pursuits outside schooling. He was fascinated by meteorology, and he published learned articles based on his scientific observations. His training at the Imperial Kazan University had sharpened his intellectual appetite. Wind, rain, sun and humidity were recorded by him. Ilya Ulyanov was devoted, as his children would also be, to the rational investigation of their environment. For Ilya the object of attention was the weather; for his offspring it would be the politics of the Russian Empire.
Although Ilya was academically gifted, Maria outshone him in at least one respect. When speaking German, he had trouble with his rs as if he were speaking French. (In fact he had the same problem with the Russian language.) The results could be comic to the ears of his school pupils. On one occasion, for instance, he asked some of them what the German word was for ‘very’. A pupil answered ‘sekhr’, with the heavy aspirate of the Russian language, instead of sehr. But when Ilya tried to put him right, his own attempt was no better: ‘sehl’. Ilya pretended not to notice the class laughing at his mispronunciation.27 Yet simultaneously he let everyone know that he was always looking for high standards. His standards were applied not only to pupils but also to teachers. He never failed to reprimand any of his protégés who did not come up to scratch. But the successful ones held him in admiring respect and were proud to be called the Ulyanovites (ulyanovtsy). Ilya’s accomplishments provided him and his family with prominence and status in Simbirsk. He had done well for the province.
His success was made possible by his wife’s efficiency in running the Ulyanov household. Ilya even left it to her to buy his suits.28 Although he was a tailor’s son, Ilya could not be bothered to try on clothes. His preoccupation was with his work, and everything was subordinate to it. At home Maria enjoyed his total confidence and Ilya received her unstinting support. They lived a rather isolated existence. Ilya liked the occasional game of chess and whist. But he could find only the elderly civil servant and accountant Arseni Belokrysenko – his son Vladimir’s godfather – as his chess partner;29 and he played whist only with the town’s teachers.30 Maria Alexandrovna was even more withdrawn from local society. A few friends came to the family house on Streletskaya Street, but she seldom paid them any visits in return. Ilya and Maria travelled around the Volga region in the summer. Yet their trips were always to members of one side or the other of their family. In Ilya’s case this took them to Astrakhan, in Maria’s to her relatives in Stavropol and Kokushkino. Thus the Ulyanovs rarely ventured outside the milieu provided by professional activity or by family. To that extent they remained, despite Ilya’s manifest achievements, on the margins of the provincial elite.
They do not seem to have minded much about their seclusion. Their wish was not t
o climb up the social hierarchy of old Russia so much as to help to construct a new Russia. They focussed their hopes on Ilya’s career and upon the education of their sons and daughters. Eight Ulyanov children were born in quick succession. First came Anna in 1864. Then there arrived Alexander two years later. These were followed by Vladimir in 1870, Olga in 1871, Dmitri in 1874 and Maria in 1878. These were not the only ones born to the couple. There had also been an earlier Olga in 1868 and a Nikolai in 1873, both of whom died as babies. This was not unusual for those days, when health-care was rudimentary by twentieth-century standards. In any case the deaths did not discourage the Ulyanovs from continuing to increase the size of their family.
Ilya was not a talkative person and often shut himself away in his study when he was at home. He showed enthusiasm when he was chatting about education and lived for his work. He did not yearn for praise from others, and was rather stingy in praising others when they did well at work. Indeed both Ilya and Maria were emotionally undemonstrative. It took something wholly extraordinary to make them show their feelings – when the younger Olga died as a baby, Ilya sobbed his heart out.31 But Ilya and Maria were otherwise stolid, quiet individuals. As young adults they already looked middle-aged. Ilya was self-conscious about his premature baldness, and tried to disguise it by brushing forward what was left of his hair. Yet his burning ambition as a kind of cultural missionary was unmistakable; and he and his wife Maria – whose inner calm was extraordinary – were a couple who impressed everyone with their commitment to cultural enlightenment.32
Ilya’s job as Inspector of Popular Schools was not one he could discharge from his study on Simbirsk’s Streletskaya Street. By the last year of his life there were 444 primary schools and more than twenty thousand pupils in Simbirsk province.33 He had to travel around an area of nearly sixteen thousand square miles, and was frequently away for weeks at a time. Ilya had been appointed as Inspector only eight years after the Emancipation Edict of 1861; his job in the early years lay not so much in the inspection of pedagogical standards as in the supervised construction of suitable buildings in appropriate locations. This required much initiative. In town and village he had to ensure that things were being done to a proper level of efficiency and safety. From spring through to early autumn Ilya would take a tarantas to visit the provincial schools. The tarantas was not the most comfortable horse-drawn vehicle of its day since it had no springs. But it was sturdy and the roads in Simbirsk province were primitive. In any case things were better for Ilya in the winter when he could travel by sleigh. Whatever the season, however, the energy he expended in his early and middle career was extraordinary.
The Ulyanovs spent their summers in the Blank house at Kokushkino. Before Vladimir was born, they had also taken a trip with their children Anna and Alexander to visit Ilya Ulyanov’s surviving relatives in Astrakhan. Ilya’s mother Alexandra and elder brother were still alive. Anna Ulyanova never forgot the affectionate fuss made of herself and her brother Alexander. It was so different from what she was used to at home. Her mother Maria, however, disapproved. As often happens in families, she applied a regime of emotional austerity to her children even though she thought her own parents had been too severe towards her and her sisters. Maria Alexandrovna also thought her children were being ‘excessively spoiled’ by her Astrakhan in-laws.34 The Astrakhan trip was not repeated, and when the Ulyanovs visited relatives from then onwards, it was always to Maria Alexandrovna’s side of the family.35 Dr Blank was delighted to see his new grandson Vladimir, who was brought to Kokushkino with the rest of the family in the early summer of 1870. Old Dr Blank was not at home when the party arrived, and had to ascend the stairs to find Maria Alexandrovna. She met him proudly on the landing with the baby in her arms. Her father proceeded to make a medical examination of Vladimir and to ask questions about his progress.36
But Vladimir was to have no memory of his grandfather because, on 17 June, Dr Blank suddenly died. The estate at Kokushkino passed into the joint possession of the old man’s daughters, who kept it as a place for their families to relax together in the summer months. Their joys did not include the obligations of manual work. July was the time when the harvest was taken in and when the peasants of Kokushkino worked their hardest. They sweated in the fields where food and drink was brought out to them at midday; in the evening, folk songs were sung with gusto. This environment was familiar to the visiting Ulyanovs, but they took no part in it. They were on holiday. They were escaping the cares of their urban existence; but they refused to romanticise their rural surroundings. Peasant life was not very appealing to them – and the distrust shown by the recently emancipated serfs to Dr Blank cannot have helped matters.
Meanwhile Ilya Ulyanov had risen still higher in society. In July 1874 he was promoted from Inspector to Director of Popular Schools for Simbirsk province. Automatically he thus emulated Dr Blank and became a ‘state councillor’ and hereditary nobleman entitled to be addressed as ‘his Excellency’. Ilya’s absences continued to be frequent and lengthy, but Maria was more than capable of handling the situation. Like other middle-class families of the period, the Ulyanovs employed a cook to relieve the burden upon Maria, and nanny Sarbatova looked after the children from 1870. Workers, too, were hired when snow needed to be cleared or wood sawn. The Ulyanovs were similar to any other middle-class family.
Ilya and Maria were also loyal subjects of Alexander II and were committed to the reforms initiated with the Emancipation Edict of 1861. During the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, Ilya patriotically collected voluntary contributions for the care of wounded troops.37 In turn he was proud to accept the various awards, including the Order of Stanislav (First Class) in January 1887, which were conferred in respect of his professional achievements. Ilya and Maria avoided contact with anyone who caused trouble to the authorities. But they made an exception in respect of Dr Alexander Kadyan, whose subversive political opinions had led him to being sent into administrative exile in Simbirsk. This meant that he was obliged to stay within the limits of the town and remain under police surveillance. Ilya and Maria became acquainted with him and asked him to act as their family physician. The relationship, however, remained strictly medical, and the Ulyanovs scrupulously declined to discuss public affairs with him. Throughout the 1860s Ilya and Maria acted on the assumption that a line of official reforms would be followed permanently in the Russian Empire, and they discouraged their children from showing any sympathy for revolutionary ideas.
If his father and mother were so loyal to their Imperial sovereign, how can they have had much influence upon the development of the world’s greatest revolutionary? The question is easily answered. Every substantial memoir points in the same direction. Lenin’s parentage and upbringing moulded his personality, and Ilya and Maria had a profound, lasting influence on every single one of their children. They gave them a model of dedication. They worked hard, and put a high value on the life of the mind. To the children they transmitted a burning ambition to succeed. Ilya and Maria were half inside and half outside the Simbirsk provincial elite. At that time plenty of capable, educated individuals rose to membership of the gentry. The Russian Empire was in flux. Large-scale social changes were still going on. It would have been astonishing in such a society if the Ulyanovs had undergone complete assimilation within a single generation. They had made a massive advance, but they had not yet ‘arrived’. This transitional status did not matter much to Ilya and Maria at the time. They could cope with the tensions.
It is not social but national and ethnic factors that have stirred controversy. Russian nationalists have always claimed that Lenin’s ideology is directly attributable to the fact that he was someone who had little Russian blood coursing through his veins. The Jewish ingredient in his ancestry is the object of particular attention. Such commentary itself is mostly xenophobic. For ethnicity is not an exclusively biological phenomenon; it is also produced and reproduced by the mechanisms of language, education and social and economic relat
ionships. The important thing about Ilya and Maria Ulyanov was that they thought, talked and acted as Russians – and so, too, did their children. Their ethnic origins barely affected them in their daily lives.
Indeed, according to Anna Ilinichna, she learned of the Jewish background of Dr Blank only in 1897, when she was thirty-three. This occurred in the course of a journey to Switzerland. Anna Ilinichna used her mother’s surname on foreign trips38 and the Swiss students she met asked her whether she was Jewish. She was surprised to hear that nearly all the Swiss Blanks were Jews. Anna Ilinichna made enquiries, presumably of her mother, and learned that their grandfather Dr Blank was of Jewish origin. Many years later, indeed after Lenin’s death, Anna Ilinichna also learned from a friend that a silver goblet that had once been owned by Dr Blank’s parents was of a type used in Jewish religious feasts.39 Neither Anna nor her siblings were disconcerted by their discovery. But they did not advertise it either. They already knew that their ancestry was not wholly Russian, and perhaps they added the Jewish ingredient to the existing list. It may be that a degree of caution was also at work. Anti-semitism was widespread in the Russian Empire, and the young Ulyanovs may have seen no reason to expose themselves to unnecessary trouble in society.
Yet Lenin, in later life, saw advantage in a cultural admixture having being made to their Russian heritage. He regarded Jews as a specially gifted ‘race’ (or plemya as he put it in the Russian fashion that was then conventional), and he took pride in the Jewish ingredient in his ancestry. As he remarked to his sister Anna, Jewish activists constituted about half the number of revolutionaries in the southern regions of the Russian Empire. According to the novelist Maxim Gorki, Lenin compared the Russians unfavourably with Jews: ‘I feel sorry for those persons who are intelligent. We don’t have many intelligent persons. We are a predominantly talented people, but we have a lazy mentality. A bright Russian is almost always a Jew or a person with an admixture of Jewish blood.’40 Nevertheless this was not a matter at the forefront of his attention. He may even have been unaware of it until Anna Ilinichna started to make her enquiries. Lenin primarily thought of himself as a Russian.
Lenin: A Biography Page 4