Anna was an intelligent girl who had been promoted to the class a year ahead of her age. But she could not cope with the amount of homework and was suffering badly from headaches and insomnia.
Not daring to mention any of this to her father, she asked her mother to negotiate for her to study alone at home. But her father was implacable.23 Anna was too loyal to accuse her father of being insensitive; she did the opposite and reproached herself for being a ‘fiery, capricious’ girl.24 Yet a sense of resentment persisted. She thought that her father might have been a little more indulgent to his offspring when they did well. If Ilya Nikolaevich liked one of her essays, he used to mention it to her mother but not to Anna herself. Simbirsk’s leading educationalist was a poor psychologist. The occasional touch of praise, Anna concluded, would not have gone amiss.25 Not surprisingly, she grew up with a tendency to panic when faced with educational tests of various sorts. Maria, her younger sister, was the same. Both were intelligent and purposive girls, but Maria spent her early adult years starting course after course and not finishing them. Anna was clear in her own mind that the two of them had been pushed too hard as youngsters and that they had failed to pick up the confidence that seemed to come naturally to her brothers Alexander and Vladimir.
Certainly Vladimir was bright and confident. The succession of personal tutors prepared him for a couple of years and in summer 1879, at the age of nine, he sat the various tests for the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia. In the autumn he entered the first class, which consisted of thirty boys.26 In his dark-blue tunic with its upturned, military collar and nine brass buttons he looked just like the others. He was the second Ulyanov boy to enter the school: Alexander was already a pupil there and was the outstanding student of his year.
The kind of education received by Vladimir Ulyanov has not attracted much attention. But in fact it is of great significance for his later development. The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment had laid down statutes for all Russian gimnazii in 1871. The curriculum and timetable were set in St Petersburg. A preparatory class was introduced so that all pupils might start with a roughly equal opportunity of successful completion of their education. Thereafter, from the age of nine, each boy was expected to undergo a further eight years’ schooling. In the preparatory class attention was paid to the contemporary educational rudiments. Out of twenty-two hours per week, six were spent on the Russian language, six on handwriting, six on mathematics and science and four on religion. Other subjects were brought into the curriculum as soon as the boys entered the first full gimnazia year. In the first-year timetable of twenty-eight hours, eight were given over to Latin, five to maths and physics, four each to Russian and French, three to handwriting, two each to geography and religion. German was introduced in year two, history and ancient Greek in year three. Handwriting was dropped after year one, geography after year four. This balance of subjects was by and large sustained through to the eighth and final year.27
Latin and Greek constituted half the timetable in years six to eight. The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment saw Classics as purveying the ideals of belief, truth, endurance and courage; it regarded the ancient authors as promoting loyalty to the interests of the Romanov dynasty. As in the rest of Europe, the norm was to get pupils to translate the works of Homer, Herodotus, Thucydides, Xenophon, Livy, Horace and Cicero. Intellectual curiosity was discouraged. The accurate rendering of the authors into Russian was the requirement and the older classes were taught to transform Greek and Latin hexameters into Russian verse.
Russian literature was hardly studied; nearly all the country’s great poets and novelists – Pushkin, Lermontov, Gogol, Turgenev, Lev Tolstoi and Dostoevski – were harassed by the state censorship for supplying ideas subversive of the contemporary political system. But the Russian literary heritage was not entirely ignored. In the restricted time allotted by the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment the pupils were required to learn several poems by heart. The selection included not only politically ‘safe’ figures such as Krylov, Zhukovski and Koltsov but also even Pushkin and Lermontov. The appreciation of artistry was less important to the schoolteachers than the inculcation of patriotic pride and allegiance to the monarchy. Immense slabs of poetry had to be committed to memory and tested at the end of the school year. It was a tall order. In order to be permitted to move from the fourth to the fifth class in the gimnazia, Vladimir Ulyanov and his fellow pupils had to be able to recite over a hundred poems, including forty-five fables by Krylov and thirty-one of Pushkin’s poems. It is hardly astounding that only half the class passed the end-of-year oral test enabling them to proceed to the fifth year. Vladimir was among the successful pupils.28
Although the pupils studied French and German, the government strove to stamp out the potential for them to pick up revolutionary ideas. Grammar edged out literature. No Russian gimnazia taught Voltaire, Rousseau or Goethe, and Headmaster Fëdor Kerenski – who by an extraordinary quirk of history was father of Alexander Kerenski, who was to lead the Provisional Government in 1917 which Lenin and the Bolsheviks overthrew – banned his pupils from using the Karamzin Public Library where they might borrow disapproved works of literature. Kerenski was following the government’s guidelines. The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment, wishing to insulate gimnazia students from the contemporary world, reduced physics, chemistry and biology to a minimal presence in the curriculum (and the works of the world-famous chemist Mendeleev were withdrawn from libraries). The government also stipulated that gimnazia pupils should attend the Russian Orthodox Church services regularly. Discipline was rigorously enforced. Like other headmasters of the period, Fëdor Kerenski employed beatings, detentions, extra work and heavy moralising, and, as was the fashion in all tsarist schools, teachers encouraged pupils to snitch on their delinquent fellows.29
Such schooling was unpleasant for most pupils. The discipline was irksome and sometimes brutal, the workload immense, the curriculum disconnected from everyday life. Although none of the worst disciplinary sanctions was applied to Vladimir, it is difficult to believe that his experience at school left no negative mark on his consciousness. The state’s direct, heavy-handed interference in the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia had a pettifogging aspect and few bright pupils failed to draw the conclusion that if the schools were run in so bureaucratic a fashion, then so were the other state institutions. Vladimir must also have noted the contrast between his studies at home and the regime in the school. Under his mother’s tutelage his academic work had been more pleasurable; the fact that many fellow pupils abandoned the gimnazia because of the excessive requirements must surely have given him at least a rudimentary idea that all was not well.30 Yet, unlike elder brother Sasha at the same age, Vladimir did not rebel. Just once, when he was caught mimicking his incompetent French master Adolf Por, did he get into trouble.31 But his father made him promise never again to step out of line, and Vladimir reverted to his habits of obedience.
His general attitude, however, was positive and he made exceptional academic progress. Headmaster Kerenski was pleased with the adolescent, awarding him not merely 5s but 5+s in his school reports; he was so impressed that, according to Anna Ilinichna, he ‘forgave him certain acts of mischief that he would not so easily have forgiven in respect of others’. She added: ‘Of course, an influence here was exerted by his good attitude to Ilya Nikolaevich and the entire family.’32 The only person to express doubts about Vladimir was indeed his father Ilya Nikolaevich, who worried that academic success was coming to him too easily and that he might not recognise the need to be industrious.33
Vladimir’s obedience is unsurprising – and not just because of the pressure of parental expectations. The gimnazii were a pathway to the higher echelons of Imperial state and society. Vladimir Ulyanov, once he attained maturity, would automatically obtain noble status. But even the Ulyanovs needed to enhance their opportunities, and an education of this quality secured this. The prior work he had done with his mother and tutors at home meant that the curricul
um was already within his reach. He was accustomed to being diligent. Immediately he became the brightest boy of his year. Annual reports gave him the full five marks in subject after subject. Never did he obtain less than this except in the single subject of logic. No doubt it helped a little that he was the son of the Simbirsk Province Director of Popular Schools. In a setting where personal contacts played a large part in everyone’s career few teachers would have wanted to offend Ilya Ulyanov. But Headmaster Kerenski did not have to write a fictional account. Vladimir Ulyanov, like his brother Alexander, was a genuinely brilliant pupil. For Vladimir, it was natural to try his hardest at school. Work was a family duty and duty was a pleasure.
He was generally unobtrusive outside lessons but was noted for his sarcasm, and when a fellow pupil broke his pencils, Vladimir grabbed him by the collar and forced him to stop.34 Not himself a trouble-maker, he met trouble with a direct physical response. No one bullied Vladimir for long. He was strong and stocky, and it did him no harm that he shared his expertise when others could not understand the lessons. But he had no close friends at the gimnazia.35 Vladimir got on with his work, left people alone and expected to be left alone. He was a bit of a loner.
Meanwhile his education was inculcating an attentiveness to the precise meaning of words; the years of parsing Latin verbs and construing Greek iambics left their mark. The pernicketiness of Lenin the writer–revolutionary owes as much to the literary heritage of Athens and Rome as to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. It may even be that he first learned from the orators Demosthenes and Cicero how to discern a crack in the wall of an opponent’s arguments and prise it open – and perhaps the stories of heroism in the epic poetry of Homer and the prose of Xenophon and Livy predisposed him to give high value to the potential role of the individual leader. Nor can anyone who has made a close study of the historians Herodotus and Thucydides fail to be influenced by their insistence on delving below the surface of events to their hidden basic causes. But all this is speculation. Vladimir Ulyanov was reluctant to reveal much about his early life. What little we know about his reaction to the Classics comes from his relatives. His sister Anna, for example, wrote that his zest for Latin was such that he provided her – six years his senior – with coaching on the more difficult elements of grammar.36
Thus throughout the rest of his life he quoted sentences from the ancient authors even though most of his readers had not had the benefit of his education. This was not just a bit of exhibitionism; it was the unconscious behaviour of former Classicists everywhere in contemporary Europe. In later years he had no time for Latin and Greek. But then suddenly in 1914, at the outbreak of the Great War, he felt a compulsion to resume his philosophical research and (as we shall see) to include Aristotle among the authors he studied.
Yet the gimnazia education was as important in what it failed to do as in what it did to the pupils. In its attempt to avert attention from acute public problems, it vacated space to be filled by ideas that were not to the liking of the official authorities. The fact that a comprehensive training in the humanities was withheld from the pupils exposed them to the attractions of philosophies that incurred the government’s official disapproval. Headmaster Kerenski had tried to maintain a monopoly over the ideas available to his pupils by ruling that they needed his permission to use the public libraries. But the effort was counterproductive. Clever boys and girls, when reacting against the contents of their schooling, often identified any proposition opposed to the officially approved notions as being inherently worthy of their commitment. If the tsar thought one way, then the truth must lie in the opposite one. Ilya Nikolaevich, for once, declined to support the headmaster; he had always regarded the gimnazia curriculum as too narrow and had sent his children to gimnazii mainly because they offered an avenue for entrance to universities. While not condoning open subversive reading matter, he allowed his son Alexander to take out a subscription to the weighty Historical Journal.37
Ilya Nikolaevich himself not only followed the latest discussions of pedagogy but also kept a large general library in his study. He and Maria Alexandrovna were typical of most educated Russians in keeping abreast of the great works of contemporary literature, and Maria Alexandrovna particularly enjoyed the romantic poet Lermontov (who had written in the manner of Lord Byron). Ilya Nikolaevich imparted his cultural enthusiasms by visual as well as academic means. For example, he took Vladimir and a couple of classmates on a trip in the family horse-drawn trap outside Simbirsk to the spot described by the writer Ivan Goncharov in his novel The Precipice. There, at Kindyakovka, they gazed up at the precipice described in the novel and clambered about the bottom of it.38 Other authors, too, were read and discussed in the family. Thus the Ulyanov children read the novels of Nikolai Gogol and Ivan Turgenev. Characteristically they made a competitive game out of what they read. In the evenings, when they had nothing else to do, they would try to guess the name of the author of an excerpt from a poem or a novel. They were a studious lot even when they were having fun.39
Politics hardly impinged on Vladimir Ulyanov’s early life in any direct fashion. He saw the Turkish prisoners-of-war who were billeted nearby on Moscow Street during the outbreak of the Russo-Turkish War of 1877–8, and his father made a collection for the Red Cross while hostilities were going on. But the Ulyanov parents tended to avoid direct political discussion. At least they did so until 1 March 1881. It was on that day – a fateful one for subsequent Russian history – that terrorists assassinated the Emperor Alexander II. There had been several conspiracies against his life in recent years. But the People’s Will organisation, formed in 1879, was more competent than its predecessor and it was partly in response to their violent activity that Alexander II had begun to contemplate granting a consultative national assembly. But the People’s Will did not want merely a reformed monarchy. They wanted the Emperor dead, and at last they succeeded with a bomb that was rolled under a carriage bearing him through to the Winter Palace in St Petersburg.
Vladimir Ulyanov was still only ten years old when the family attended the service of commemoration to the deceased emperor in Simbirsk Cathedral on 16 March. All local dignitaries, including the province’s governor, did the same. Ilya and Maria were appalled by the killing. They were not revolutionary sympathisers and detested the spilling of blood. Both considered that Alexander II had played a useful role in pushing Russia down the road towards reform, even though he had regressed somewhat in the 1870s. In particular, he had trimmed the rights of the elective provincial administrative bodies (the zemstva); he had also restricted the system of trial by jury after the socialist terrorist Vera Zasulich, who had been caught in the act of trying to assassinate the Governor-General of St Petersburg Fëdor Trepov, failed to be convicted by due process. Yet an agenda of reform remained in place through to the end of Alexander II’s life. Indeed, under pressure of the terrorist campaign, he had begun to give thought to sanctioning a consultative national assembly as a means of rallying support for the throne. His assassination had the effect of convincing his son and heir Alexander III to abandon all further reform. He directed intense suspicion at any innovative measures; his emphasis, until his death in 1894, was upon traditional concepts of order.
Vladimir Ulyanov presumably shared the revulsion of his parents from the terrorist act. But, like other children, he can hardly have been preoccupied by thoughts about politics once the anguished excitement about the Emperor’s death and funeral had dissipated. His precocity was as a school pupil, not as a revolutionary theorist.
Even so, political themes were not entirely absent from his young life. The Ulyanov children learned from their brother Alexander how to make toy soldiers out of paper and to organise play-battles. Alexander made up his models in the uniforms of Garibaldi’s troops of the Italian Risorgimento. Anna and Olga chose the Spanish forces that struggled to free their country from the Napoleonic invasion. Vladimir plumped for the Union Army of Abraham Lincoln that fought against the pro-slavery South in
the American Civil War.40 Their cousin Nikolai Veretennikov was later to object that Vladimir had models of the contemporary ‘English’ army. But Dmitri Ulyanov, Vladimir’s younger brother, repudiated this version. By and large Dmitri was an accurate chronicler and there is all the more reason to believe him because of a second known political element in Vladimir’s early life. His favourite book, before he moved on to the Russian literary classics, was none other than Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin. This tale of a Negro slave’s attempt to flee the cruelties of a cotton plantation in the American South was given pride of place in his room.41 Such choices cannot have been coincidental. The Ulyanov children were brought up in a cultural environment that favoured national, political and social freedom.
Yet it is striking that Vladimir’s most cherished book described not Russia but the USA. This was in keeping with the desire of his parents to keep themselves and their children away from dangerous discussions of Russian public life. If so, they were a little naive. Uncle Tom’s Cabin contained ideas of universal significance; its sentimental style communicated ideals of universal human dignity. When we try to trace the origins of Vladimir’s political outlook, we often look to what he read in his late adolescence and early manhood. We focus on Chernyshevski, Marx, Plekhanov and Kautsky. But we need to remember that, before these Russian and German male authors imprinted themselves upon his consciousness, an American woman – Harriet Beecher Stowe – had already influenced his young mind.
Vladimir was a lively boy. Once he had completed his school and other academic obligations, he loved to get outside. At the age of nine or ten he gave up playing the piano. His mother was disappointed; she was a serious pianist herself and trained her daughter Anna to a high enough level to play the main classical works as well as the operas of Richard Wagner.42 But Maria Alexandrovna – for once – complied with Vladimir’s wishes, perhaps because he had so much schoolwork to prepare. Yet the rest of his family did not think this was the reason. His sister Maria guessed that her brother felt that the piano was too girlish an occupation for him.43 This little event is also noteworthy as an early sign of Vladimir’s clinical capacity to decide what was worth doing and to drop everything else. It also reveals the unattractiveness of artistic activity for him. In fact he was an able painter. An extant postcard he made for a friend is executed in vivid colours; and in particular not a drop of paint is spilled where it should not be: Vladimir was already a perfectionist about anything he was intending to show to others. The postcard had one of those coded messages where the painted figures of Red Indians, trees and someone drowning stood for something recognisable to the recipient.44 He also learned from his mother how to compose a letter in invisible ink with the use of milk – this was to prove specially useful in 1895 when he needed to smuggle messages out of the St Petersburg House of Preliminary Detention.45
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