Vladimir Ulyanov suppressed his emotions more effectively than his sisters Anna and Olga. The hurt was there, but he buried it. There is a story in every account of him that, on hearing of Alexander’s execution, he reacted not as a family member but as a revolutionary in the making. According to Maria Ilinichna, he concluded that the strategic bankruptcy of agrarian-socialist terrorism had been proven. ‘No,’ he allegedly said in her presence, ‘we must not take that road.’ This has been taken by Marxist–Leninists – and not just by them – as evidence of Vladimir’s principled decision at the age of sixteen to repudiate agrarian socialism. A less plausible story it is hard to imagine, even though generations of scholars have accepted it. Maria Ilinichna wrote her memoir after Lenin’s death, when it was obligatory to portray his career as a monolithic piece and Lenin himself as infallible, even as a youth. The usefulness of her testimony is anyway dubious since she was only eight years old when Alexander was hanged. It defies credibility that she would be able to recall the exact wording of a statement whose ideological resonance would have meant nothing to her in childhood.
More believable is the account given by their occasional private tutor Vera Kashkadamova. She was impressed by Vladimir’s willingness to play lotto and charades with his young brother and sister in order to distract them from their pain. The topic of Alexander inevitably arose in conversation, and, according to Kashkadamova, Vladimir expressed no opinion that distanced him from his elder brother. On the contrary, she remembered the following comment: ‘It must mean that he had to act like this; he couldn’t act in any other way.’21
This is surely the authentic voice of Vladimir Ulyanov. In the few years after his brother’s death, Vladimir joined groups dedicated to the ideas of agrarian-socialist terrorists. This is inexplicable if he had really already opted for Marxism of the kind that rejected what his brother had stood for. Even so, Kashkadamova’s account does not demonstrate that Vladimir was so impressed by the precedent of Alexander that he instantly adopted his ideas. There is really no reason to think that Vladimir had fixed thoughts about anything. More likely he was only beginning to know about the world of revolutionary ideas. Probably too he felt an instinctive but still unfocussed sympathy with the choices made by his brother. They had had their disagreements, and had latterly not got along very well, but this was no barrier to Vladimir’s surge of posthumous identification with him. It may even have deepened the flood. The phrase remembered by Kashkadamova – ‘he couldn’t act in any other way’ – is probably our best sign that Vladimir felt impelled to discover why his admired elder brother had acted as he did. Alexander’s disappearance had the consequence of hardening the thoughts of a brilliant youth into the posture of a revolutionary activist.
4. THE PLOUGHING OF THE MIND
1887–1888
Such was the family’s sense of duty that Vladimir and Olga Ulyanov continued to prepare for their gimnazia final-year examinations through the months of Alexander’s imprisonment and execution. The tenacity of these two youngsters was extraordinary. Although Simbirsk was not yet on any railway-line, the government ensured that everyone knew of Alexander Ulyanov’s crime and its punishment. The town authorities also pasted up posters about the event, and he was the subject of an article in a special issue of Simbirsk Provincial News two days after he was hanged.1
It was on these very days that Vladimir took the first of his final examinations at the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia. The examination had begun on 5 May 1887 and lasted a month. Vladimir’s concentration was impeccable, even though he and the rest of the family were engulfed by the terrible news from St Petersburg. His academic performance was very impressive; indeed in the circumstances it was almost inhumanly impressive. He had achieved a five, the maximum mark possible, in all ten examined subjects.2 Vladimir had come out top of his class of twenty-nine examinees and was eligible for the gimnazia’s gold medal, just like his brother before him. His sister Olga meanwhile achieved the same result at the Simbirsk Marinskaya Gimnazia.3 The awarding of these medals had become a delicate matter after the scandal of Alexander Ulyanov’s assassination attempt. But the two gimnazii were sufficiently insulated from political pressure for Vladimir and Olga to receive their prizes.
Kerenski wrote a supportive reference for Vladimir:
Extremely talented, consistently keen and accurate, Ulyanov in all classes was the top pupil and at the end of his course was awarded the gold medal as the most deserving pupil in performance, development and behaviour. Neither at the gimnazia nor outside did any occasion come to light when Ulyanov by word or deed attracted a disapproving opinion from the governing authorities or teachers of the gimnazia. His parents always carefully supervised Ulyanov’s education and moral development, and from 1886, after his father’s death, this involved his mother, who concentrated every concern and care on the upbringing of the children. Religion and rational discipline lay at the foundations of the education.
The good fruits of the domestic upbringing were obvious in Ulyanov’s excellent behaviour. Looking more closely at the domestic life and character of Ulyanov, I cannot but remark on his excessive reclusiveness and on his self-distancing from intercourse even with his acquaintances – and outside the gimnazia even with schoolmates who were the great flower of the school – and generally on his unsociability. Ulyanov’s mother does not intend to let her son out of her supervision for the entire time of his education at the University.
What was Kerenski’s purpose in his last paragraph? Maybe he was guarding himself professionally against the possibility that the boy would become involved in university student disturbances. But probably Kerenski was just telling the truth and his pupil really was rather antisocial. Vladimir had never been very gregarious, and those who knew him while his brother Alexander was in prison observed that he became very depressed and unfriendly.
Maria Alexandrovna needed to think fast. Her first decision was to sell the house on Moscow Street and move to Kazan province. This was sensible. The Ulyanovs faced unending social ostracism in Simbirsk whereas Maria Alexandrovna could count on the family being welcomed in Kokushkino. Dr Blank had added a wing to the Kokushkino mansion house specifically so that his daughters could bring their families on visits, and had bequeathed his estate jointly to his five daughters when he died in 1870. Thus the Ulyanovs had been in receipt of a share of the income derived from the peasants who rented the land. Until 1887 Maria Alexandrovna had left it to Anna Veretennikova and Lyubov Ardasheva, her sisters, to look after her Kokushkino interests.4 Maria Alexandrovna hurriedly alerted these sisters that she needed to move her place of residence to the estate. As soon as they had responded positively, she sold up the house on Moscow Street – as it happens, the buyer was the then Simbirsk police chief – and did not return to the town until her son Dmitri took a medical post there in 1905.
The children coped with their brother’s loss by not mentioning it. This was the way they had been brought up. It was years before the eldest, Anna Ilinichna, could speak about Alexander to anyone, and even then she spoke only to her mother and never to her brothers or her sister.5 The inner tension was terrible. Her mother asked Anna to give her younger sister Maria some academic coaching. But Maria dreaded the assistance:6
My sister was preparing me at that time for the exams for the gimnazia’s second class. Having recently suffered the cruel trauma of the tragic death of a brother she deified, she was very nervous. This was sometimes manifested also in the course of her work with me, bringing torment to both of us. I remember how Vladimir Ilich’s face darkened while hearing one of these outbursts, and he said, as if to himself: ‘This isn’t how to do things.’
Vladimir himself could be abrupt. When little Maria proudly showed him a notebook she had made, he told her that it was unacceptable to sew up white pages with black thread and compelled her to redo the operation.7 But at least he did not torment her emotionally – and she for her part liked to please him.
He had yet to decide w
hich university to enter and which degree to take. Had it not been for his brother’s notoriety, he would have gone to St Petersburg University, but Maria Alexandrovna was told this would not gain official approval. Consequently Vladimir sought admittance to the Imperial Kazan University, where his late father had studied. The choice of degree course caused some surprise. When Vladimir announced that he planned to study jurisprudence, his friends could not understand this. In these years it was the natural sciences which attracted the most able Russian students (such as Alexander Ulyanov). Vladimir’s teachers, noting his exceptional proficiency at Latin and Greek, would have preferred him to study in the Philological Faculty. But Vladimir insisted upon studying law. Unlike Alexander, he had never found biology and other sciences attractive. But why, with his interest in literature, did he not enter the Philological Faculty? The answer remains unclear. But perhaps he judged that he would more easily build a career as an independent lawyer than as a higher-education lecturer dependent on a state salary.
His mother Maria Alexandrovna hoped that she had kept him clear of politics and other dangers. She had even got him to stop smoking cigarettes. Her first argument had been that his physical condition would deteriorate if he continued to smoke and that he had not been in the best of health as a child. He ignored her entirely. Then in desperation she argued that, since he had no independent income, he had no right to squander the family’s funds on tobacco. He gave way and never put a cigarette to his lips again.8 Maria Alexandrovna was pleased not only by this but also by the gusto with which Volodya took to the rural sports at Kokushkino. He went shooting in the woods and skiing along the country paths, and often he took Dmitri along with him.9
But appearances were misleading. Alexander Ulyanov left behind books and articles that would have shocked his father. Chief among these were works by Nikolai Chernyshevski. When Vladimir talked about this episode later, he acknowledged that Chernyshevski had ‘ploughed him over and over again’. Vladimir was at an age when he was susceptible to deep influence from the reading he undertook. He had the technical facility of a rigorous linguistic training, but as yet he did not have beliefs. His Christian faith lapsed when he was sixteen years old. His mind was like an engine without a steering column: it was potentially very powerful, but would remain directionless until he decided what he thought about the world. Neither his father nor his brother was alive to guide him, and he no longer saw his teachers. Vladimir turned to bookcases for inspiration. He extinguished his passion for Latin, wanting no distraction from his political self-education.10 This was not the last time that he denied himself a pleasure. In future years he would give up chess, Beethoven and skating so as to concentrate on the revolutionary tasks at hand.
Chernyshevski was an odd writer to exercise such an impact. His prose was like a rash of nettles. Sprawling verbiage was covered with densely overgrown constructions, and he seemed immune to the models offered by the great novelists of mid-nineteenth-century Russia. But style was not what drew Vladimir to Chernyshevski. In any case, Chernyshevski’s constructions with their elongated sentences and thickets of subsidiary clauses were easily amenable to gimnazia students with their mastery of Latin.
Vladimir’s admiration was considerable. In 1864 the Ministry of the Interior banished Chernyshevski as an irreconcilable opponent of the Romanov autocracy to a forced-labour camp in eastern Siberia (and only in 1889, already very ill, was he allowed back to his native Volga city of Saratov). The Russian Empire was so large that it was not necessary to deport subversives from the country: they could be kept in a distant town and prevented from stirring up trouble from abroad. Chernyshevski refused to recant his opinions. In general he is considered to have been a revolutionary agrarian socialist, but nevertheless he was not an idealiser of the peasantry. Nor did he espouse the rural life. He wanted cultural development to be speeded up in his country and advocated industrialisation. He demanded a democratic political system based upon universal-suffrage elections. He supported women’s rights. He opposed the discriminatory legislation affecting the non-Russian nations and ethnic groups. He advocated the creation of a classless society. And he depicted the Imperial monarchy as barbaric, parasitic and obsolete.
Indeed, Chernyshevski saw himself as offering a vision of a Russian future congruent with the works of socialist thinkers elsewhere in Europe; he read widely in German and French, and was an enthusiastic reader of Karl Marx. But he was very far from thinking that Russia always had to learn from Germany without teaching something in return. He carried on a patchy correspondence with Marx, who began to learn the Russian language in order to acquaint himself with Chernyshevski’s writings on the agrarian question in the Russian Empire. For a young man such as Vladimir Ulyanov, who was at ease with exploring European culture, Chernyshevski embodied an intellectual ideal.
Vladimir Ulyanov was attracted to Chernyshevski emotionally as well as rationally. He was so affected by the heroic example of a man who suffered penal servitude in Siberia for the sake of political ideals that he obtained a photograph of his idol, which he carried around in his wallet. The book that deeply entered his consciousness was the novel What Is to Be Done? As a novel it is lamely constructed and unimaginatively written, but it offers a portrait of a group of socialist activists. Their solidarity with each other and their political commitment, dedication to educational self-improvement and irreconcilable hostility to tsarism captivated Vladimir Ulyanov. The main character of the novel was pure of spirit and endowed with the aura of an unchallenged leader. It is a good bet that Vladimir Ulyanov identified himself closely with him. Not all young intellectuals in the making were equally impressed by Chernyshevski’s book, and its clumsiness of style and structure made it the object of some mockery. But Vladimir Ulyanov would have none of this. Chernyshevski’s What Is to Be Done? helped him to define the direction of his life, and he was fiercely protective of Chernyshevski’s reputation.
Thus Vladimir Ulyanov was his brother’s brother. In the space of a year he had adopted the world-view and aspirations of a revolutionary. Insofar as he aimed to deepen his understanding of politics and society, he would do so at university but not at the feet of his university professors. Even before he entered the Imperial Kazan University, he was looking for trouble.
His mother’s guarantee that she would live near her son had been an important factor in getting him enrolled. So, too, were the funds she made available. The surviving Ulyanov children – Anna, Vladimir, Olga, Dmitri and Maria – liked to contend that their entire subsidy from Maria Alexandrovna took the form of the state pension of their late father. This was nonsense. Even the published financial figures reveal the opposite story. The will of Ilya Ulyanov left the 2,000 rubles in the Simbirsk Town Public Bank to his wife and children.11 This was no insubstantial sum, being a quarter of what the family was to pay in 1889 for the estate bought by the children’s mother in Alakaevka. The sale of the Ulyanovs’ Moscow Street house in Simbirsk in summer 1887 brought a further 6,000 rubles to the family.12 There was also Maria Alexandrovna’s share of the rent from the Kokushkino estate plus the sums in her bank account left to her by Dr Blank. (Her inherited land at Kokushkino was originally valued at 3,000 rubles.)13 To top it all, there was the legacy from Vasili, Ilya Ulyanov’s brother and benefactor, who had died at the age of sixty in 1878. The Ulyanov family was not bereft of ready cash.
Russian inheritance law entitled Vladimir to a share of his father’s capital. There is a record of this in relation to the above-mentioned 2,000 rubles in the Simbirsk Town Public Bank. The District Court ordered the following division of Ilya’s legacy. A quarter – only a quarter – was to go to Ilya’s widow. An eighth went to each of the two daughters who had not yet reached maturity, Olga and Maria. But a sixth went to each of the three sons, Alexander, Vladimir and Dmitri: the boys had a legal advantage over their sisters.
Lenin was later criticised for living comfortably on private capital while proclaiming himself as capitalism’s destroyer. The
re is something in this. But there is less in the criticism that he had a sumptuous style of life: cautious financial management was Maria Alexandrovna’s hallmark. At the end of August 1887 – with the start of the university year – she rented temporary accommodation in Kazan in order to search for a suitable ground-floor apartment. Her sister Lyubov Ardasheva, a widow since 1870, lived on the upper floor of the same house with her sons Alexander and Vladimir. The children of both women had spent previous summers at Kokushkino and enjoyed each other’s company. Kazan brought an end to the loneliness suffered in Simbirsk (and indeed in Kokushkino, since they scarcely saw any neighbours there either).14 But they could not stay in the apartment for long: they needed a larger place. After a month Maria Alexandrovna had found what she wanted and moved the family to New Commissariat Street.15 Dmitri and Maria went to the Kazan gimnazii and Vladimir started to attend lectures at the Imperial Kazan University. Meals were taken at home. Maria Alexandrovna hoped to settle the family into something near to the normality that they had enjoyed before 1886.
Lenin: A Biography Page 9