In fact it was less the Jewish than the Germanic aspect of Lenin’s mother’s background that continued to have an influence on the family. Maria Alexandrovna worshipped at the local Lutheran church while her husband attended Orthodox services just as she liked to celebrate Christmas in the German manner by having a fir tree in the house;41 and Lenin was to mark the season in the same manner whenever he and his wife had children among their guests.
German seasonal customs were not the only lingering element in the family’s ethnic ancestry. There was also the strong impetus of German and Jewish culture towards education and public achievement. The Blanks had this aplenty; and Ilya Ulyanov, coming from a non-Russian background and aspiring to a high career in the Russian Empire, reinforced the impetus: he knew that he would succeed on his merits and his qualifications or not at all. Maria and Ilya were alike in seeking fair treatment for those subjects of the Russian Empire who were not Russian. In this they differed from those many people of non-Russian descent who acquired a pronounced antipathy towards non-Russians who would not assimilate themselves to a Russian national identity. Thus Ilya was determined that the non-Russians should receive education in their native language. He was a pragmatist as well as a man of principle. He knew how difficult it would otherwise be to induce the Chuvashes to send their children to his schools. And so he insisted that the Chuvash children in Simbirsk province should be taught not in Russian but in Chuvash. This sensitivity towards other national and ethnic groups was passed on to the Ulyanov children, and was something that exercised Lenin’s mind to the very end of his life.
And so the Ulyanovs were Russians of a particular type. They were new Russians in the sense that they were of diverse ethnic ancestry. But Russians they had become. Although Maria Alexandrovna showed traces of her German origins, she had by and large assimilated herself to a Russian identity. Ilya Nikolaevich, too, had put his past aside. Both Ilya and Maria had about them the ambition that is often found disproportionately among people making a career in the midst of a society with a different national majority. Living by the Volga among Russians, the Ulyanovs were a bit like first-generation immigrants. They had a terrific zeal to succeed, and this zeal was passed on to their progeny. Furthermore, they were selective about the aspects of Russian culture with which they identified themselves. ‘Old’ Russia – the Russia of peasants, village customs, drunkenness, ignorance, arbitrary rule, social deference and hereditary privilege – held no attraction for them. Ilya and Maria wanted to get rid of those age-old traditions. They associated themselves with modernity and wanted Russia to become more akin to the countries of the West. They were hoping for the reforms of the 1860s to transform society. The Ulyanovs were believers in Progress, Enlightenment, Order, Cleanliness, Obedience, Hierarchy and Punctiliousness.
They were therefore attracted to trends in contemporary Russia that emphasised contact with Europe. All ‘progressive’ people wanted to learn French and German. Like other nobles, the Ulyanovs sometimes slipped out of Russian into French;42 perhaps, in contrast with an earlier generation of such Russians, they merely wanted to communicate without the servants knowing what they were saying. But their linguistic capacity was nevertheless considerable. So, too, were their musical inclinations. Not every house in Simbirsk took an interest in the operas of Richard Wagner.43 The Ulyanovs, moreover, read about the latest European artistic, philosophical and scientific developments. Ilya and Maria Ulyanov were ‘cultured’ Russians; they were patriots. They wanted to build a ‘modern’, ‘European’, ‘Western’ and ‘enlightened’ society. Lenin was the son of his parents.
2. CHILDHOOD IN SIMBIRSK
1870–1885
So what kind of child was Volodya? Until recently there was too little information for anyone to be confident of the answer. It was not that memoirs did not exist. Quite the contrary: Volodya’s family left behind a copious record and his sisters Anna and Maria wrote incessantly about him. But only the material published within a year or two of his death in 1924 is frank about anything even mildly critical of him. Censorship was quickly at work in support of the Lenin cult and the memoirs were heavily edited by the central party leadership before appearing in print. Only now can we examine the original drafts. From this material a picture emerges of a little boy who was energetic, brilliant and charming but also bumptious and not always very kind.
Volodya’s sister Anna, six years his senior, recorded the impact he made as a baby:1
He was the third child and very noisy – a great bawler with combative, happy little hazel eyes. He started to walk at almost the same time as his sister Olya [that is, Olga], who was a year and a half younger than he. She began to walk very early and without being noticed by those around her. Volodya, by contrast, learned to walk late; and if his sister tumbled inaudibly (or ‘shuffled over’, as their nanny put it) and raised herself up independently by pressing her hands down on the floor, he inevitably would bang his head and raise a desperate roar throughout the house.
The wooden structure of the house made it into an echo chamber and the floors and walls resounded as the little fellow went on crashing his head on to the carpet – or even on to the floorboards themselves. His mother Maria Alexandrovna wondered whether he might turn out to be mentally retarded. The midwife who had delivered him offered as her opinion: ‘He’ll turn out either very intelligent or else very stupid.’ At the time this was not very reassuring to Maria Alexandrovna, and later she remembered how fearful she had been about her little Volodya.2
The family could only make guesses as to why he banged his head, and reached the conclusion that it had something to do with his physical shape. Volodya as a baby had short, weak legs and a large head. He kept falling over, apparently because he was top heavy. Once he had fallen over, they believed, he flailed around to pull himself up and banged his head in sheer frustration.3
This did not explain why he continued to be so noisy even when he had learned to walk. He never stopped making a racket and according to Anna, he was boisterous and demanding throughout his childhood.4 He was much more destructive than the other Ulyanov children. When his parents gave him a small papier-mâché horse for his birthday, his instinct was to creep off with the toy and twist off its legs. Anna watched him as he hid himself behind a door. A few minutes later he was found, perfectly content, with the horse in pieces at his side. What is more, Volodya was not always pleasant to his brothers and sisters. At the age of three, he stamped over the collection of theatre posters which his elder brother Sasha had carefully laid out on the carpet. He ruined several of them before his mother could haul him away. A couple of years later he grabbed Anna’s favourite ruler and snapped it in two.5 By then he was old enough to understand that he had done something seriously wrong in this orderly family. There was a malicious aspect to his behaviour and the rest of the family did not like it.
But he also had much charm and was always forgiven by his nanny Varvara Sarbatova. When he misbehaved, he owned up quickly. This at least reassured his mother to some extent: ‘It’s good that he never does anything on the sly.’6 At the age of eight he proved her point. It was then that he was allowed for the first time to travel by paddle steamer to Kazan to visit his Aunt Anna Veretennikova (née Blank) in the company of his sister Anna and brother Alexander. This was a big occasion for him and he had difficulty restraining his tears as he waved his mother goodbye on the Simbirsk quayside. In Kazan he had a rare old time with his Veretennikov cousins and got up to some horseplay. Unfortunately he smashed a glass vase in the process. Aunt Anna heard the commotion, rushed into the room and quizzed everyone about the incident. Volodya, however, kept quiet and did not admit to what he had done. Three months after the event, when he had returned to Simbirsk, his mother found him sobbing into his pillow late at night. When she went upstairs to his bedroom, he blurted out to her: ‘I deceived Aunt Anya [Anna’s diminutive]. I said that it wasn’t me who broke the vase whereas it was me who broke it.’7
Volodya
was a stocky boy of moderate height with curly light-brown hair which turned ginger in adolescence. He still had shortish legs and a disproportionately large head. Although he was generally in good health, there was concern about the squint in his left eye. His mother took him to Kazan to be examined by the ophthalmologist Professor Adamyuk, who advised that the defect was irremediable and that he would have to manage exclusively with his right eye.8 Very late in his life, in 1922, Lenin learned he had been misdiagnosed. In fact the left eye was merely short-sighted,9 and Adamyuk’s failure to issue him with spectacles resulted in his habit – much noted when he became a famous politician – of screwing up his eyes when talking to people. His brothers and sister suffered from much greater problems. When Sasha became acutely ill with a stomach inflammation, Maria Alexandrovna fell to her knees before the icon in the sitting-room corner and called over to her daughter Anna: ‘Pray for Sasha.’10 Sasha recovered from his illness, but other Ulyanovs, including Volodya, suffered with their stomachs. There seems to have been a genetic predisposition in the family, possibly one that was inherited from the Blank side.
Yet for most of the time they were fit, active and full of purpose. The children were encouraged to take plenty of exercise. Their father Ilya Nikolaevich went on walks with them along the headland by the river Volga to the north of the town. He also bought season tickets for the family to bathe at one of the nearby beaches.11 But mainly the children were left to their own devices outside the home. A gap of fourteen years separated the eldest and the youngest of them – Anna and Maria. This meant that the smallest children almost treated the others as adults. But Volodya was different. Sometimes he and the younger children were left in the care of Sasha and Anna, who obeyed and applied the rules set by their parents. Volodya loved and admired Sasha, but still he would avail himself of the opportunity to play up. On occasion he ran into the hall in his muddy galoshes. Floor and carpet were dirtied and Anna and Sasha were horrified. Such antics marked him off from his brothers and sisters.12
The children paired off for companionship. Sasha and Anna, the two eldest, got together; then came the boisterous couple, Volodya and Olga; and the third pairing was of Dmitri and Maria. The closeness of Sasha and Anna endured beyond adolescence; they still saw a lot of each other when they became students in St Petersburg. Volodya and Olga were also contented playmates; nobody could remember them ever falling out. Their harmony probably resulted, at least in part, from the fact that Olga, who had a sweet nature, did as Volodya told her, and as their elder sister Anna recalled, ‘he liked to give commands [komandovat’].’13 Volodya and Olga raced about the large garden and played on the trapeze that Ilya Nikolaevich had bought after the family had watched a travelling circus in Simbirsk. On quieter days, Volodya and Olga might get out the croquet set. But always there was some palaver. Their mother’s friend Gertruda Nazareva was to write: ‘The whole day long you could hear Olga singing, hopping, spinning round or playing with Volodya, who I think caused greater bother than any of the others to his mother and elder sister.’14
Again he was hardly a delinquent, just the most mischievous child in a remarkably orderly family. Punishment was rarely thought necessary. Ilya Nikolaevich had a fiery temperament and his sons and daughters feared his disapproval even when his job took him off on lengthy trips around the province of Simbirsk. At such times Maria Alexandrovna punished any misbehaving child by sending them to sit on the chair in Ilya Nikolaevich’s study. This was known in the family as ‘the black chair’. The family never forgot an episode when Volodya, after a piece of naughtiness, was dispatched to the chair and his mother forgot all about him for hours. Mischievous though he was, he did not dare get down or make a sound until she returned to the study.15
And so life went on. Their growing number of children impelled the Ulyanov parents to look for a larger house, and in summer 1878, on Ilya’s appointment as Provincial Director of Popular Schools, they moved to 48 Moscow Street. This was the place Volodya was to remember as his Simbirsk home. Moscow Street was near the heart of the town and was one of the larger, more prestigious streets since it contained the official residence of the Simbirsk army garrison commander. (Even so, it was not supplied with a pavement and pedestrians had to walk along wooden duckboards if they wished to avoid the mud and puddles in wet weather.) The Orthodox Cathedral, the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia and the Karamzin Public Library all lay within a short distance. The location was convenient for the entire family, including Maria Alexandrovna, who could visit the Lutheran Church a few houses away. But the main attraction for the Ulyanovs was the house itself. Ilya had a capacious study on the ground floor; Maria, too, had her own room. Downstairs there were five large rooms and a kitchen and plenty of space existed in the children’s bedrooms on the first floor. The garden was substantial; large trees graced the lawn and the family employed a gardener to produce the fruit and vegetables they needed. Like all middle-class professional families, the Ulyanovs had servants.
As they settled into their new home, they were known by their acquaintances as ‘the beautiful family’. Ilya was esteemed for his achievements in educational administration and Maria was respected for her musical and linguistic accomplishments. The children without exception were successful at school and were noted for their good behaviour at home and in the town. It was a topic of local amazement that none of them strayed into the horticultural part of the grounds. No flower or vegetable was ever trampled, no tree branch broken. It was a matter of honour that no Ulyanov child, even the disruptive Volodya, should misbehave in public. Any such incident was a cause of local comment. For example, neighbours were surprised in winter when the Ulyanov children, like children in all other Simbirsk families, threw snowballs at passers-by through the wicker fence.16
They were not kept apart from other girls and boys because Ilya Nikolaevich and Maria Alexandrovna supplemented their income by taking in lodgers. Among these were the Persiyanov family, who occupied rooms on the mezzanine floor.17 Vyacheslav Persiyanov was in the same school year as Vladimir Ulyanov. So too was Nikolai Nefedev, whose mother had died and whose father pleaded with the Ulyanov parents to let his son live with them while attending school. The request was granted and space was found for him in a converted bath-house at the bottom of the garden.18 Vladimir played a lot with Nikolai Nefedev. But generally the Ulyanov children sought their closest companions within the family. The children had been brought up to make something of themselves, and each supported the efforts of the others. Perhaps the close ties of the family made it harder for the children to form deep relationships outside the family. Only four of the six grew to adulthood. Of these, Maria never married and seems to have been celibate; and although both Anna and Dmitri married, the weddings took place in their late twenties: there was no rush to leave the Ulyanov home. Vladimir, despite marrying in his mid-twenties, did so in circumstances that make it unlikely that he did this out of a passionate commitment.
The stable warmth of family life, however, did not stop Vladimir from being antisocial to his sisters and brothers. There was always a touch of malice in his character. Thus, although he got on well with his little brother Dmitri, he sometimes teased him badly. Vladimir used to say that Dmitri could cry ‘to order’. Dmitri denied this, but under further baiting from Vladimir he would break down in tears. Then Vladimir would announce that Dmitri indeed cried to order.19
Such behaviour annoyed his parents and the older children, particularly Alexander. Yet he was still popular with them and it was not thought that his faults outweighed his virtues, and his sister Olga continued to believe that he could do no wrong. His educational prowess was a source of pride to the family. The best schools in Simbirsk were the Classical Gimnazia for the boys and the Marinskaya Gimnazia for the girls. An entrance examination was obligatory and only very able students secured a place. The Ulyanov children were bright and had been prepared for the examination, and their father’s rank in the educational system exempted him from paying the regula
r thirty rubles per annum for each of them. Maria Alexandrovna had worked on them to get them through the examination. She took each child in turn and used the new-fangled method of phonics and flash-cards to teach them to read.20 Part-time tutors were also employed, mainly from among the young teachers trained by Ilya Nikolaevich. Several of them came to the Ulyanov home, including Vasili Kalashnikov, Ivan Nikolaev and Vera Prushakevich.21 The parents’ expectation of achievement was intense and an early start in literacy and numeracy was recognised as the most effective means of enhancing the children’s eventual educational attainment.
The eldest child Anna sought relief from the pressure of parental expectations:22
It was I who a year later often begged my mother with bitter tears to take me out of the gimnazia, assuring her that I would accomplish more at home; and sometimes I implored her permission to miss school, sitting down to work with considerable zeal. I sensed very painfully that father would look on this as a manifestation of laziness. I felt that this was unjust, but couldn’t explain this intelligently and did not dare talk about it to father.
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