In his letters home Alexander chatted about the cost of lodging, the ghastly food and the unsavoury landladies. Unlike Anna, however, he did not offer to drop his studies out of worry about his mother’s widowhood; he intended to consolidate his base for a successful career. But he was troubled by his growing revulsion from the political conditions in the Russian Empire. He had hated the irksome regime in the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia. He had also lost his religious faith at about the age of sixteen. His purity of purpose was such that his father had made an exception of him and absolved him of the requirement to attend church services on Sundays. His spirit of intellectual challenge persisted in St Petersburg. By 1886 he was coming to agree with those of his generation who called for a root-and-branch transformation of the Russian political and social structure. He had turned into a revolutionary sympathiser. The very outcome feared by Ilya Ulyanov was being realised. Alexander Ulyanov, breaking with his father’s example, thought peaceful, evolutionary development of society impossible in Russia.
A large number of university students had the same attitude. In the 1880s there were only eight universities in the Russian Empire and the most prestigious of them was St Petersburg. The others were in Moscow, Kiev, Yurev, Kharkov, Warsaw, Kazan and Novorossiisk. Officials treated students as a necessary evil and suspected them of being extremely prone to subversive notions. The Ministries of the Interior and of Education refused to relax their tight control over them. There were no grants for impecunious students, and many of them barely survived the rigours of their courses by taking paid employment in order to pay for food and shelter. But there were no such worries for Alexander Ulyanov. As long as he reported how he spent his money, he was allocated exactly what he asked for. But more generally Alexander was as irked by the regimentation of academic life as any fellow student. There were regulations about everything from the curriculum and prescribed textbooks to comportment, dress and lodgings. Anything that might bring young men and women into contact with philosophies of liberalism, of socialism, of atheism or indeed of any kind of challenge to the institutional status quo was eradicated.
In reaching his stand as a revolutionary, Alexander mentioned his frustration at the obstacles put in the path of the development of scientific research in Russia. His general hostility to the monarchy, therefore, was induced by personal experience. He felt that the regime was obscurantist about science; he never forgot that science had been discouraged in his gimnazia education. He expanded this particular sensation into a comprehensive rejection of the regime and everything it stood for.
St Petersburg University, like all the great institutions of the Russian Empire, was a vantage-point for observing the power and majesty of the monarchy. Established by the tsars on Vasilevski Island, it was only a short distance from the bridge leading over the river Neva to the Winter Palace. From the university it was possible to glimpse the great statue of the Emperor Peter the Great near St Isaac’s Cathedral. Peter’s horse seemed about to hurl itself and its rider into the waters. The symbolism of monarchical determination to rule society in his own chosen fashion, to conquer nature and to make Russia into a power respected throughout northern Europe, was unmistakable. Also visible from St Petersburg University was the Winter Palace of the tsars, including the incumbent Emperor Alexander III. The building where he lived and governed stretched along the bank to the south of St Isaac’s Cathedral, and was fronted by a vast semi-circular space that gave visitors a view of a neo-Classical frontage with huge, pillared segments. The granite magnificence of the Winter Palace was known across the continent. Opposite it across the Neva stood the Peter-Paul Fortress, where rebels against the Romanovs were traditionally incarcerated.
St Petersburg itself had been created at the behest of Peter the Great; no village had existed on the site before he opted to transfer his seat of government there from Moscow. Marshes were drained. Institutions and dwelling-places were constructed. Moscow lost its status as the capital. Hundreds of thousands of peasants died in the programme of works commanded by Emperor Peter, perishing from exhaustion, malnutrition and disease. It was impossible to live in the central zone of the city, where the university lay, and not be conscious of the power of the Imperial state. And Alexander Ulyanov was an acute observer of his environment.
It was common at this time for the natural science and engineering faculties to attract young men who jibbed against the monarchy. What was different about Alexander and his friends was their willingness to adopt an ideology of violent opposition. Already before his father’s death he was taking up with friends who believed in instigating a general revolutionary transformation by assassinating the Emperor Alexander III. Initially he simply talked with them; but steadily they undermined his reluctance to become a participant in their conspiratorial group. The leaders were Orest Govorukhin and Pëtr Shevyrëv. Alexander was a useful recruit for them. His character was such that, once convinced that something was morally desirable, he would stick to his aim through thick and thin; and he had the inestimable advantage of being a scientist with a practical knowledge of chemistry: they wanted him to make up the nitroglycerine for the bomb with which they planned to kill the Emperor. Also important was Alexander’s facility with language. They wanted his help with the production of propaganda explaining the political objectives of the group. Late in 1886 he finally threw in his lot with them. The twenty-year-old Alexander Ulyanov intended to be a regicide.
What was the group’s rationale? The dominant ideology of Russian revolutionaries had been socialism – or, in some cases, anarchism. They were usually known as narodniki (roughly translatable as populists). The leaders and activists in the various clandestine groups had had many disputes, but generally agreed that the peasantry’s customs of communal welfare, collective responsibility and co-operation at work and at leisure should be the foundations of the ‘good’ society. Consequently this generation of revolutionaries can be regarded as advocates of an agrarian ideology; they wanted the transformation of society to begin in the countryside. But they also had a broader agenda. They believed in ‘the people’ and wished to win the nascent working class as well as the peasants to their cause. They had no time for the idea that Russia would be better off without industry; they were hostile, too, to privileging the Russians over the other nations of the Russian Empire and would have been enthusiastic supporters of the Socialist International founded in 1889 in Europe. Russian agrarian socialists aimed to enable Russia to avoid capitalism altogether. They wanted to establish a society that embodied socialism and to bring all oppression and exploitation to an end.17
The fearful revenge wreaked by Alexander II’s son and heir Alexander III had a number of consequences. In particular it discouraged many revolutionaries from persisting with a political strategy that prioritised the campaign to kill the Imperial family. Until Govorukhin’s group grew up in 1886, there had been no serious enterprise of the sort for five years.
Another development was of equal importance. This was that many revolutionaries concluded that the agrarian socialists had been deeply misguided in the way they thought about transforming the state and the society of the Russian Empire. A revision of strategy was demanded most notably by Georgi Plekhanov, who maintained that the future of the Revolution did not realistically lie with the peasant, the land commune and the countryside. Plekhanov was a lapsed agrarian socialist. For him, the hunting down of revolutionary activists after Alexander II’s death was just one defeat too many. He urged that success could no longer be achieved unless the clandestine groups recognised that Russia was undergoing an economic and social transformation. Railways were being laid to connect all the major cities. Factories were being financed and constructed. Mines were being sunk. Foreign investment was being attracted into the country in pursuit of the quick, high profits available in an economy rich in natural resources and cheap, willing labour. It was no longer feasible, wrote Plekhanov, to dream of transforming Russia into a socialist society without it first undergoi
ng the stage of capitalist development. Capitalism, he declared, had already arrived – and had arrived in force.
This led Plekhanov, who fled to Switzerland in 1880, to proclaim that revolutionaries in Russia should place their faith in the urban working class, in contemporary forms of industrial activity, in large-scale social and economic units. As a former leader of Black Redistribution, he remained an advocate of political change by means of revolution. In 1883 he and his friends Vera Zasulich, Lev Deich and Pavel Axelrod formed the Emancipation of Labour Group – and they announced that only Marxism offered a key to understanding and transforming Russia. Previous revolutionary trends, including their own earlier commitment to agrarian socialism, were rejected by the Emancipation of Labour Group as being based upon unscientific sentimentality. The future for socialists of the Russian Empire, the Group insisted, lay with Marxism.18
These niceties have greater political moment in retrospect than they appeared to have at the time. The differences are more of degree than of kind. For the agrarian socialists did not give themselves this name. They usually designated themselves simply as ‘revolutionaries’. Later they became known as narodniki; for they always claimed to be acting in the name of ‘the people’ as distinct from the governing authorities. As often as not, they referred to themselves as adherents of this or that revolutionary group such as Land and Freedom, Black Redistribution and People’s Will. Practically all these socialists, while seeing virtues in the ideas and practices of the people, were very far from repudiating the need for Russia’s industrialisation. They also found, through bitter experience, that workers were more responsive to revolutionary invocations than were the peasants. When a surge of students went out to effect revolutionary propaganda in the countryside in 1874, many of them had been turned over to the Ministry of the Interior by astonished peasants. Most such socialists regarded Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels as attractive exponents of the economic and social case for socialism. It is no coincidence that the first translation of Marx’s Capital into any foreign language was made by a Russian populist, Nikolai Danielson, in 1872.
But Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour Group challenged this eclectic attitude to the definition of the most desirable form of socialism. Plekhanov wanted revolutionaries in Russia to deny, once and for all, that the traditions of the peasantry had anything positive to offer. The remnants of the populist organisations that had survived the police hunts after 1881 were aghast at this, and condemned Plekhanov as an ill-informed betrayer of the revolutionary movement. Bitter polemics were exchanged in 1883–6.
The small organisation joined by Alexander Ulyanov in mid-1886 had as the first of its purposes to kill Emperor Alexander III and as its second to mend the rift between the two rival revolutionary tendencies. For this reason they drew up a statement of objectives which would demonstrably overlap the objectives of the new Russian Marxists – and Alexander Ulyanov was given the task of final literary elaboration. A number of points were primed to appeal to Marxists. Above all, Alexander Ulyanov wrote about scientific ‘laws’. He also called for an elective assembly for the whole country – Plekhanov had repeatedly demanded the same thing. He did not mention the peasantry. Alexander Ulyanov insisted that all the oppressed sections of society had an equal interest in the removal of the monarchy. Truth, science, freedom and justice: all were ideals of the revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire. Alexander Ulyanov was well placed to predict which aims would be attractive to Marxists, for he himself had recently used his facility in the German language to translate some of Marx’s works into Russian. His organisation’s members, poised to exploit a political crisis arising out of the Emperor’s annihilation, wished to have as many active supporters on the streets as possible.
Their primitive methods had a trace of theatricality. They kept their activity to anniversaries in revolutionary history. In November, before Alexander Ulyanov joined them, they organised a student demonstration commemorating the life of the anti-monarchy writer Nikolai Dobrolyubov. The group planned that their next venture would involve not a demonstration, which by its nature would mean that other students had to be alerted, but an attempt on the life of the Emperor. The date chosen was gruesomely symbolic: 1 March 1887, the sixth anniversary of the assassination of the Emperor Alexander II.
Nothing, however, went right for the conspirators. One of them was already in the last stages of tuberculosis and another left the country at the last moment. The group’s members nonetheless went ahead on the day, but luck played into the hands of the authorities. Two members were picked up in suspicious circumstances and the attempt to blow up the Emperor had to be abandoned. The Okhrana, the government’s secret police, interrogated the arrested men and succeeded, one by one, in apprehending virtually all the group’s members. Alexander Ulyanov was among them. The Okhrana took friends and relatives of the accused into custody, so Anna Ulyanova too was incarcerated despite having had no part in the conspiracy. The interrogations revealed everything the police needed to know, and when Alexander Ulyanov saw this he took an exceptionally brave decision. First, he determined to take the blame even for aspects of the conspiracy that did not involve him. Second, he made up his mind to use his trial as an opportunity to disseminate the basic ideas of the revolutionaries, an opportunity denied him in the legal press because of the official censorship. This decision, he knew, would probably cost him his life.
Still suffering from the loss of her husband, Maria Alexandrovna was stupefied by what had happened. Even more astonished was Alexander’s elder sister Anna. What on earth, she asked, had been going on? Her words expressed the depth of long-unstated emotions: ‘There is no one better on earth or more kindly than you. It’s not just me who’ll say this, as a sister; everyone who knew you will say this, my dear unwatchable little sun in the sky.’19 Anna was released, but put under police supervision until 1892.
Alexander’s mother was not at first convinced that her son had planned regicide. She wrote immediately to the Emperor himself pleading for him to be released. She lied on his behalf, claiming that Alexander had always been ‘religious’. But what mother would not have said this and a lot more to save her son from being hanged? In the Ministry of Interior it was recognised that the press might take up her cause unless she herself were to be shown the materials of her son’s confession. In a break with precedent she was allowed to come to St Petersburg and talk to the prisoner. Alexander made no pretence. He was guilty of the most heinous crime in Imperial law, and admitted it. His mother’s hope was that he would do as others in his group were doing by expressing remorse and begging for mercy. She reasonably thought that he might thereby secure himself a sentence of penal labour. If this happened, she intended to take the younger Ulyanov children – presumably including Vladimir – to Siberia and to assist Alexander in serving out his term. Maria Alexandrovna would stand by her eldest son regardless.
When mother and son met in the Peter-Paul Fortress, Alexander fell to his knees and implored her to forgive him. But he refused to plead for a pardon. The Emperor took note of the trial proceedings and was aware that Alexander Ulyanov was consciously increasing the degree of his responsibility for the assassination attempt, but he saw no reason to commute the court’s death sentence. Not only Ulyanov but also V. D. Generalov, P. I. Andreyushkin, V. S. Osipanov and P. Y. Shevyrëv were consigned to the Shlisselburg Prison and at dawn on 8 May 1887 were taken from their cells and hanged.
Alexander’s mother had returned to Simbirsk: there was absolutely nothing more she could do for him. After her husband’s death and the execution of her eldest son, she was distraught, and contemplated suicide. In her absence in St Petersburg, Anna Veretennikova, the children’s aunt, had come from Kazan to look after them. The teacher Vera Kashkadamova also visited the Moscow Street home. All the Ulyanov children were in a condition of deep shock. The two elder daughters were especially distressed. Anna Ilinichna had lost the brother she adored, but managed to keep her emotions from view. Olga
Ilinichna, however, threw herself to the ground and sobbed. Then she leaped up and shouted threats against the Emperor who had refused to spare Alexander. Aunt Anna was terrified. But then Olga, too, took herself in hand and strove not to let her mother see her distress. Maria Alexandrovna pulled herself together. She no longer thought of killing herself. When her youngest child, little Maria, climbed on to her lap on her return from St Petersburg, she knew that she had made the right decision. The Ulyanovs were determined to survive.20
They endured not only bereavement but also social ostracism. Vera Kashkadamova was one of the very few family friends who would still speak to them. Respectable Simbirsk – its doctors, teachers, administrators and army officers – indicated its abhorrence for any family that could feed and raise a regicide. When Olga went to the gimnazia, her teachers and classmates refused to have anything to do with her. Local society was closing its doors to the family. Most people were aghast at the plot to assassinate the Emperor. In 1881 the Ulyanov family had attended the Cathedral service commemorating the life of Alexander II. But a member of the same family had now been involved in a murderous conspiracy, and the Ulyanovs were treated as pariahs.
This terrible experience has never been accorded its true significance. The point is that the Ulyanovs had never been quite the same as most other noble families of Simbirsk. Ilya Nikolaevich was a newcomer to hereditary titled status. In a single generation, through his own professional efforts, he had clambered up the ladder of society and entered the nobility. The mass of Simbirsk province’s noblemen had enjoyed this status for several generations and there was little contact between them and the Ulyanov family. Snobbery was pervasive. Ilya and Maria had tried to surmount the difficulty mainly by ignoring it and getting on with their lives. The pressure on the sons and daughters to do well at school and gain formal qualifications was characteristic of parents who had come from the margins of and wanted to integrate the family into Imperial society. These hopes were shattered by Alexander’s rash affiliation to a group of terrorists. They were back in the margins of society, and all the children – from Anna down to little Maria – held the Emperor and his ministers to blame for their social exclusion. They could not think of Alexander without feeling bitter about tsarism.
Lenin: A Biography Page 8