Vladimir, unlike his brothers and sisters, had no hobbies. Carpentry left him cold. Philately and other kinds of collecting were not for him. In the summertime he was practically never out of the family garden. He and Nikolai Nefedev were always up to pranks. Crouching among the fruit trees and birches, they set cage-traps for blue-tits. They lacked the expertise and were driven to buying birds from a Mr Lapshin, who lived in the Alexander Gardens in Simbirsk. Lapshin also sold them more efficient trapping mechanisms, and in the winter they caught five or six birds. In the following spring, Volodya determined to set them free. Young Nefedev persuaded him to keep a small goldfinch.46
On another occasion things took a nasty turn. Nikolai Nefedev and Volodya had the habit of swimming in the shallows of the river Sviyaga in the centre of Simbirsk. Seeing how other youngsters were fishing off the Vodovozny Bridge, they went home to make their own nets with the idea of catching fish of their own. Foolishly they followed another boy’s advice to starting fishing in the nearby ditch at a point near the town’s distillery. Although the water was not very deep, it was covered in green slime which made it indistinguishable from the quagmire next to it. Volodya lost his footing in search of frogs and tumbled into the quagmire. Both he and Nikolai let out a shriek. A worker ran speedily out of the distillery to their aid, but by then Volodya was enmired to his waist and in grave danger. The unnamed worker waded in after him, dragged him out and settled him on the bank. Knowing that he would be in trouble when his mother found out, Volodya tried to smarten himself up before going home. But to no avail. Inevitably his mother noticed his muddy face and clothes and the upshot was a prohibition on going fishing again.47
There was still plenty for Volodya to do outside the house. He liked to skate on the rivers Sviyaga and Volga; this was still allowed. He also enjoyed himself amusing young Dmitri and Maria. His games of hide-and-seek with them were much appreciated. Meanwhile Volodya kept his eyes on his brother Alexander and tried to copy him. There was a family joke that his first question, whenever he was in a quandary about something, was what would Alexander do in similar circumstances. He even ate what he thought would meet Alexander’s approval. This was more than a normal wish to imitate. Alexander was the family’s pride and joy. It is difficult to avoid the thought that within the sinews of confidence there lurked a streak of diffidence even in young Volodya.
What is clear beyond a shadow of doubt is that his personality had been to a very large extent moulded by his experiences as an adolescent. He had attended, and been successful, at a school where the very highest demands were made in relation to a very restricted curriculum. He emerged – and this would probably have occurred in such a family in any case – as an extraordinarily ambitious and determined young man. His schooling was narrow, but it also had depth, a depth that gave him the lifelong confidence to tackle any intellectual problem that came his way. The mental manoeuvrability required by the study of the Classics was never to leave him. Nor was the belief in the importance of the written word – and especially of the printed word. At the same Vladimir Ulyanov had access to ideas and emotions that predisposed him to question the nature of the society in which he lived. He had this mainly from books. ‘The other Russia’, the Russia of barge-haulers, peasants, country priests and factory workers, was unknown to him except through reports from his father or the novels of Gogol, Turgenev and Tolstoi.
His intellectual challenge to the status quo had yet to emerge. He was mischievous and sharp-tongued, but these qualities did not express themselves in a political standpoint. For a boy of his age this was not unusual, even though it was not entirely unknown for gimnazia boys to adopt ideas of Revolution. In the eyes of his headmaster, Vladimir was an exemplar of academic devotion. He came from the sort of family that cultivated a spirit of industriousness and hopefulness; and he had gone to a school that gave him the opportunity to proceed to university and then to a career of public distinction. As yet there was no reason to predict that he would adopt an ideology markedly different from that of his father Ilya, who had his disappointments with the regime but flinched from that of any rebellious talk. Vladimir seemed set to achieve all the prizes that his father had achieved and more.
3. DEATHS IN THE FAMILY
1886–1887
Until 1886, the year when Vladimir Ulyanov turned sixteen, he had no outward troubles. His parents had continued to better themselves. They lived in a large town-house on Moscow Street and Ilya had risen to the post of Director of Popular Schools for Simbirsk province. The Ulyanov parents had six children who appeared to be on the threshold of rewarding careers.
Yet the situation was not as congenial as it seemed. Later accounts have neglected evidence in the published memoirs that Ilya Ulyanov was a controversial local figure for the province’s more conservative and powerful inhabitants. In 1880 he had completed twenty-five years’ service; although he was only forty-nine, his terms of employment compelled him to apply formally for an extension to his contract. In the event he was given an extra year and then a further five years.1 Matters had been worsened by the stand taken by Ilya in the contemporary Russian debate about schooling. Complaints were being made that, like other educationalists of his generation, he paid scant attention to religious instruction in schools. Ilya in fact complied with the curriculum, which included the teaching of Christian belief. But he did not approve of the Orthodox Church itself being allowed to regulate schools, and he disliked the switch in governmental policy towards the construction of Church schools. Ilya incurred hostility for the stand he took. In 1884 Archpriest A. I. Baratynski attacked him in the local newspaper Simbirsk Provincial News.2 All this cannot have improved his ability to cope with his increasingly frequent bouts of ill health. He was becoming dispirited and had ceased to believe that he would be able to work until the normal age of retirement.3
He had always been at his happiest when he could get out and about in Simbirsk province. His last such visit was to the Syzran district, a hundred miles away, in mid-December 1885.4 His eldest child Anna, who had travelled from St Petersburg where she had been training to be a teacher on the new Higher Women’s Courses, joined him in Syzran. Father and daughter returned to find the rest of the family preparing for Christmas. He had still to write up his annual report on education in the province and much of his time was spent in a feverish attempt to finish this off before the festivities.5
It was typical of the family that Alexander, who in 1883 had entered St Petersburg University in the Faculty of Mathematics and Physics, was not compelled to come home for the holiday. Already he was a student of promise. Alexander explained that he had to sit a zoology test in mid-December and a further one in organic chemistry in mid-January. In his letter to his parents he expressed no regret over his absence.6 He knew that they had hopes of his becoming a university professor7 and would approve of his wish to avoid disruption to his studies. In truth it would have taken several days for him to reach Simbirsk from St Petersburg. The railway system had still not been extended to Simbirsk, and in winter he could not use the steamship down the ice-bound river Volga.8 He would not have been able to do much studying on the way. Meanwhile Christmas at the Ulyanovs was organised by Maria Alexandrovna. The four youngest children – Vladimir, Olga, Dmitri and Maria – had finished their school term. A fir tree was erected in the sitting room and cards were painted and dispatched; presents were prepared. On Christmas Day the family went to St Nicholas Cathedral in Simbirsk.
Yet Ilya Ulyanov was not well. On 10 January 1886 he was coughing badly. Next day, when the Ulyanovs had visitors for afternoon tea, he did not join them. The family assumed that he was suffering from some temporary stomach malaise, and Anna Ilinichna talked unconcernedly about her plans to go back to her teacher-training course in St Petersburg. Ilya himself was determined to resume his administrative duties as the holiday came to an end. It was cold outside; snow was on the ground. Ilya refused to let up the pace of his work. On 12 January, although he still felt poorly, h
e arranged to be visited in Simbirsk by one of his inspectors, V. M. Strzhalkovski. They worked together until two o’clock in the afternoon. Yet Ilya Ulyanov did not come through to eat after Strzhalkovski’s departure. He had had another relapse. While the family was eating, he appeared in the doorway and gazed at everybody. They were to remember it as an occasion when he was trying to take his final leave of everybody. He made no direct comment in this vein, but simply went back into his study.9
His wife went to find him after lunch, and already he was shivering violently. She called out Dr Legcher and at five o’clock fetched Anna and Vladimir to see their father. By then he was in agony. He shuddered twice and then, just as suddenly, fell silent. Before Dr Legcher could arrive, Ilya Nikolaevich was dead. He was only fifty-three years old. Although there was no post-mortem, Legcher believed that the cause of death was a brain haemorrhage.10
Vladimir, in Alexander’s absence, performed a role of some responsibility for the family. While his mother and elder sister tended to the dead body and passed the news to relatives and acquaintances, Vladimir was sent out in the family carriage to bring back his brother Dmitri from a friend’s house. This was not a sign of Vladimir taking over responsibility for the household. Such a myth was Soviet-inspired, and was always ridiculous; in reality it was his mother and his sister Anna who were in charge of the main domestic arrangements. Vladimir could be spared to do the job of collecting young Dmitri and the fact that he was sent to do this in a carriage was a sign of Vladimir’s still rather junior status. The priority was to arrange the funeral, organise the family’s finances and generally plan the future for the Ulyanov children. Vladimir had yet to reach the age of sixteen years. His mother and his sister were not deferring to him: they were trying to protect him.
One of Maria Alexandrovna’s first needs was to write to the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment on 14 January 1886 requesting the delivery of the due payment of Ilya’s pension. According to the terms of her late husband’s pension, she could claim one hundred rubles for herself per month and a further twenty-five rubles for each of her children while they remained minors. This excluded Anna and Alexander. Maria Alexandrovna was entitled in total to two hundred rubles a month, a sum that would diminish as her younger four children attained maturity.11
The funeral of Ilya Ulyanov was held next day. The sudden death of a much admired local dignitary shocked teachers and educational administrators. Those who had been promoted by him were sometimes referred to as ‘Ulyanovites’; he was respected for the cultural benefit he had brought to his post as Director of Popular Schools. Ilya Ulyanov by his activity and his example had made a difference. Wreaths were prepared by schoolchildren and obituary notices appeared in the Simbirsk press. The chief bearer of his coffin, at the age of fifteen, was his second son Vladimir; it was traditional for coffins to be borne by the menfolk. The other bearers were Ilya’s closest friends and colleagues. Then the congregation processed to the Pokrovski Monastery in Simbirsk, where the remains of Ilya Ulyanov were buried in the grounds by the south-facing wall. His widow was offered possession of the medal of Stanislav, first class, which her deceased husband had been awarded a few days earlier, but she refused it. She preferred to remember him in a simpler fashion and arranged for a plain tombstone to be erected over his grave.12
Anna, her eldest daughter, considered abandoning her teacher’s training course in order to assist with the running of the family. Another possibility was for student friends to send on their lecture notes to her in Simbirsk so that she might return to take the exams in the autumn of 1886. Maria Alexandrovna would have none of it. Anna was told to return to St Petersburg to complete her studies. She departed in March.13 Meanwhile in an effort to stabilise her finances, Maria Alexandrovna rearranged the rooms in the house so that the family occupied only the half of it facing the river Sviyaga. The other half was rented first to a doctor, then to a lawyer.14
One of Maria Alexandrovna’s problems was the worsening behaviour of Vladimir. Although his father had often worked away from Moscow Street, his very existence had acted as a restraint upon the way Vladimir spoke to his mother. Ilya had not been a parent to be disobeyed and the mere possibility of paternal disapproval had usually been a sufficient deterrent to disrespect. All this changed after Ilya’s death. Vladimir became cheeky to his mother. Matters were made worse by his elder brother’s residence in St Petersburg: there was no one in the house whose disapproval he feared. When Alexander came home for the summer vacation, Vladimir did not even mind his brother witnessing his misbehaviour. This infuriated Alexander. After a contretemps between Vladimir and their mother while he and Alexander were having a game of chess, Alexander calmly but firmly declared: ‘Volodya, either you immediately go and do what Mama is telling you or else I’m not playing with you any more.’ Vladimir’s resistance crumbled. But he continued, more quietly, to assert himself more than the rest of the family thought seemly.15
Anna and Alexander talked about this after their father’s death as they tried to sort out their emotions. The pattern of relationships inside the family had been shattered by their bereavement, and the two eldest Ulyanov children – now in their twenties – were also having to come to terms with the fact that their brother Vladimir was entering late adolescence. Anna put the question directly to Alexander: ‘How do you take to our Volodya?’ His reply was negative: ‘Undoubtedly a very able person, but we don’t get on.’ Indeed when she wrote her memoirs, Anna was not confident that she remembered the exact words, and she wondered whether Alexander had not put it more forcefully, to the effect that ‘we absolutely don’t get on’.16
It was the domineering side of his brother that Alexander could not stand, especially when he was cheeky to their widowed mother. But this judgement on Vladimir, which many historians have eagerly endorsed, is too harsh. He was still a schoolboy. His father had suddenly died and naturally he was badly affected by the experience. Vladimir had not got over the shock. Any youth of fifteen in those circumstances, particularly one accustomed to the direct support of his elder brother and sister, might have been expected to exhibit some degree of uncongenial reaction. The fact that he did not go round maundering about his unhappiness does not mean that he managed to avoid being distraught. On the contrary, Vladimir was profoundly upset and withdrew into himself; the jovial boy of before had disappeared. Books were his consolation and he devoured many classics of Russian literature. His taste moved from Gogol to Turgenev. The wish for Gogolian caricatures of contemporary life had vanished. Now Vladimir Ulyanov preferred the steady and sensitive descriptions of provincial life offered by Turgenev. In Turgenev’s novels the public message of the writer was far from being self-evident. His readers assumed that somehow he wanted change in the regime. But was he a liberal, or an impatient conservative, or even a revolutionary?
How Vladimir Ulyanov interpreted the works of his favourite novelist is unknown. His later remarks were not necessarily a truthful reflection of what he had thought in his adolescence. But probably there was some similarity. To be an Ulyanov was to aim at educational improvement, at realistically possible improvement if only the Emperor consented. Vladimir in his adulthood would pick out situations in the novels that corroborated his Marxist interpretation of Russian reality. There were plenty of feckless landed noblemen and well-meaning but ineffectual intellectuals in Turgenev’s prose, and Lenin used them in his own writings to denounce Imperial society. Turgenev perhaps also had an influence through his stress that all the talk in the world would not change the world. What was required was action. Few of Turgenev’s characters were capable of action, but whereas the novelist pitied them for circumstances which they had little opportunity to alter, Lenin grew up to deride them.
The history of the Ulyanov family until 1886 provides several examples of its members engaging in activities that contributed to the improvement of life in the Russian Empire. Vladimir’s most respected forebears were doctors and teachers. They were not doctors and teacher
s who did little healing and teaching, as was the case in the novels of Turgenev or in the turn-of-the-century plays of Anton Chekhov. They were practical professionals. It was possible to read Turgenev in other ways. For example, he can appear as an advocate of kindness or the embodiment of Hamlet-like indecisiveness; he may also be regarded as an artist of the word, who was more interested in the manner of exposition than in the substance of his own thought. But, for Vladimir Ulyanov, Turgenev was a brilliant painter of the defects in Imperial society that needed correction.
While Vladimir was starting to ask himself basic questions about life in Russia, his brother Alexander in distant St Petersburg was already an enemy of the Romanov monarchy. The shock of their father’s death stayed with him for many weeks, and several people were concerned lest he commit suicide. But they underestimated the young man’s determination to continue with his research on the biology of annular worms. His dissertation, once submitted to the university authorities, won the approval of his professors, and he was awarded a gold medal for it. His mother was delighted, though the thought that Ilya Nikolaevich could not share in her joy caused her to burst into tears.
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