Yet Kazan was not the quiet city she had fondly imagined. It had been one of the fighting grounds between the Russians and the Tatars in the fifteenth century, and Russia’s history textbooks never failed to record that Ivan the Terrible’s defeat of the Tatars at Kazan in 1552 and Astrakhan in 1556 opened the way for Russian imperial expansion to the south and east. The city retained a strategic importance in subsequent centuries. Trade was its lifeblood. Perched on an elbow of the river Volga, Kazan was an important entrepôt for goods that required further shipment by railway to Moscow and St Petersburg. Hardly a street existed without its church. Kazan was a gem of Russian architecture. Historical triumphalism was not the only reason for this. The official authorities had also built magnificent churches because they worried about the significance of Kazan as the greatest centre of non-Christian faith in the empire. Moslems constituted a tenth of the city’s population. Islam had its various institutions there, including Arabic-script printing presses. The ethnic composition was equally worrisome to St Petersburg. Tatars amounted to 31 per cent of the province’s inhabitants – and there were also Bashkirs and Chuvash. The Ministry of the Interior consequently took no chances with the town’s affairs. Successive governors were renowned for their abrasive, military approach to civil administration. At times it was as if Kazan was treated like a far-off colony that needed a display of brutality to keep it in order.
The tensions in the city as a whole were evident in its university even though hardly any Tartars belonged to it. In 1884 the central authorities in the capital had tightened the rules for student behaviour, and these were resented as much in Kazan as elsewhere. Demonstrations were held against the rector. Kazan University was constantly on the verge of public disorder, and the rector’s response was always to reinforce discipline. But this in turn aggravated the feelings of the students. Compulsory uniforms were introduced in 1885 so as to make the police surveillance easier. Students were prohibited from forming associations not given prior approval by the authorities. Petty regulations about the kind of salutation owed by them to their administrators and pedagogues simply added fuel to the flames. The Ministry of Popular Enlightenment appointed new professors, and anonymous denunciations of delinquent students were encouraged. It had even been proposed that such students should be transferred to military disciplinary battalions. The suggestion was rejected, but the fact that it had been made at all was a sign of the distrust between government and students.
The only associations allowed by the Ministry of Popular Enlightenment were the so-called zemlyachestva. These were groups of students based upon geographical origin; they had official approval because they lent a sense of togetherness and stability to young men who were away from home for the first time. They were not a social organism peculiar to students. Travelling traders and workers formed them; they were just one example of the way Russia teemed with local traditions, local accents and dialects, local diets and local religious tenets. The zemlyachestva helped Russians to cope with novelty and uncertainty. Immediately upon entering Kazan University, Vladimir Ulyanov joined the Simbirsk–Samara zemlyachestvo in order to take advantage of the practical guidance and leisure facilities it provided.
The zemlyachestva also functioned as an organisation for students to debate with each other. The academic year was bound to be unsettled. The hanging of Alexander Ulyanov and his fellow students still caused bitterness, and immediately there was discussion of protests that should be made in all universities. Kazan was no exception, and the Simbirsk–Samara zemlyachestvo tried to play its part. The disturbances had already begun in Moscow. In each city there were grievances to be aired, and Inspector N. G. Potapov reported to Rector N. A. Kremlëv of Kazan University that his own student informers had warned him to expect trouble.16 Emotions ran so high that students secretly discussed whether to mount a physical assault on Potapov. On 4 December the outburst took place. It was a sharp winter’s day. The snow was on the ground but the sun shone brightly. About midday a crowd of students started to gather in the university buildings. Potapov tried to disperse them: ‘Gentlemen, where are you going, where? Don’t go!’ Yet he was thrust out of the way.17 among the crowd was the first-year student Vladimir Ulyanov. The students chanted slogans demanding university autonomy from the state and relief from the unpleasant aspects of regulation of the student body. The sacking of Potapov was an immediate aim.
Rector Kremlëv asked professors to mediate on his behalf. But the students were unmoved. At the back of their minds, however, was the knowledge that the rector would ultimately bring in armed troops to disperse the gathering. About ninety of the assembled students were so enraged that on the spot they decided to abandon their special student passes in the room as a sign that they no longer wished to belong to the university. The decision was taken on the spur of the moment. These students knew that, once the administrative staff picked up the passes, the rector would have no choice but to expel them.18
Police searches were instigated across the city. Students were stopped in the streets. The university was closed down until further notice, and it reopened only in February 1888. Consultations took place between the Kazan administration and its superior authorities in St Petersburg. A battalion of troops was distributed in units at appropriate points throughout the city. Vladimir returned home to New Commissariat Street and to his distraught mother and his even more distraught former nanny Varvara Sarbatova.19 What could Maria Alexandrovna do to prevent her second son from sinking still deeper into trouble? The ‘beautiful family’, as Ilya Ulyanov’s obituarist had characterised the Ulyanovs in Simbirsk, was no model for respectable folk. Their potential for brilliant, regular careers would not be fulfilled. In the course of the night of 4–5 December the police came for Vladimir as they came for other Kazan students. Held in custody, they were asked where else they wished to live. They would not be permitted to stay in Kazan. Maria Alexandrovna thought of the obvious solution: she would appeal to the Ministry of Interior for a mandate to return to Kokushkino with her children.
For the moment the family had to await the dispositions of the rector. These were announced on 6 December 1887. Thirty-nine students were expelled from Kazan University and Vladimir Ulyanov was among them. Only two other students were, like him, in their first year.20 His residence permit for Kazan was withdrawn and on 7 December he was ‘exiled’ to Kokushkino.
His mother’s ability to direct her children was fading. She could still exercise a degree of control over them by dint of their need for her financial support; but usually she gave them whatever they asked for. A more subtle instrument was the fact that the Imperial government granted concessions to Vladimir Ulyanov only if his mother stood as some kind of guarantor of his good behaviour. Thus he was allowed to return to Kokushkino only on condition that she lived there with him. But even this did not give her much leverage over him. She wanted to stay with him more than he wished to be with her. Maria Alexandrovna must have felt let down by Vladimir even if she did not express the sentiment – and there is no evidence that she ever reproached him. The question arises why she was so restrained. Why did she collude in his misbehaviour? One reason would seem to be that Ilya had acted as the family’s enforcer of discipline, the usual paternal role in contemporary Russian families. Another reason might well be that she intelligently concluded that nothing could have pulled Alexander back from his self-destructive course – and so why should she assume that curt prohibitions to Vladimir would be more effective?
She had much to put up with. Vladimir’s expulsion had disrupted the rest of the family. Dmitri, living in Kazan and going to its Classical Gimnazia, could not return with the family to Kokushkino but would have to lodge at the school. The same was true of her sister Maria; and even Anna, who had been directed to live at Kokushkino, would be affected if the Ministry of the Interior decided to banish her mother’s eldest surviving son from Kazan province.
He went home on 4 December 1887 to a mother who no longer controlled
him. During his residence in Kazan, he had already got in touch with revolutionary activists. The city was a place of exile used by the central government for the disposal of its enemies – and there were several such persons under police surveillance in this period. It was not unduly difficult for the brother of an executed revolutionary to find out who the local revolutionary sympathisers were and how to join in their discussions. The group that attracted Vladimir Ulyanov was led by Lazar Bogoraz, an agrarian-socialist advocate of terrorism. Bogoraz’s precise ideas are somewhat unclear. But he undoubtedly wanted an end to the monarchy and stood for the country’s social and economic transformation; and he seems to have hoped, like Alexander Ulyanov, to minimise the incipient divisions within the clandestine revolutionary movement. Vladimir was in the first stage of developing his thoughts about the politics of revolution. It was natural for him to start by learning what he could from people who were akin to his brother, and indeed people who were serious enough about their political commitment that they retained contact with similar groups in St Petersburg and elsewhere.
Indeed, if it had not been for the fracas at Kazan University, Vladimir would have become more deeply implicated in revolutionary conspiracy in the city. His summary expulsion saved him from becoming involved in activities that would have got him a much more severe sentence.21
Maria Alexandrovna was willing to support her children regardless of their extra-mural activities, but could not help fretting. Anna Ilinichna wrote to a friend: ‘We’re now very disturbed by Volodya’s fate. It will, of course, be hard for Mama to let him go off anywhere else, but he can’t be kept in the countryside.’22 His mother and elder sister agreed on one thing: he had to acquire a university degree. Somehow permission had to be obtained for him to re-enter the educational system. They spoke to him about it, and he told them of his desire to leave for a foreign university. This was financially possible for the family; but Maria Alexandrovna would not yet hear of it. On 9 May 1888, he therefore wrote to the Minister of Public Enlightenment seeking readmission to the Imperial Kazan University.23 Concurrently his mother wrote to the Director of the Police Department in similar terms. Both requests were refused. In September he asked permission to leave Russia to study abroad.24 Again he was turned down. The police objected to his ‘active participation in the organisation of revolutionary circles among the student youth of Kazan’.25 The Ministry of the Interior liked to keep enemies of the regime not only out of St Petersburg and Moscow but out of foreign countries too.
Yet indulgence was shown to the Ulyanovs. The Ministry of the Interior under the tsars was nothing like as systematically oppressive as the police force set up by Lenin at the end of 1917. In September 1888 the family was allowed to resume residence in Kazan. Vladimir had not been tamed by his experience. Full of audacity, he sent a letter to none other than the exiled Nikolai Chernyshevski in Saratov.26 Once he was back in Kazan, moreover, he searched out the local revolutionary activists. A clandestine circle organised by N. E. Fedoseev was functioning in the city, and Vladimir Ulyanov joined it.27
Fedoseev was on the way to declaring himself a Marxist. But such circles were usually still uncertain whether to identify themselves entirely with Georgi Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labour Group in Switzerland. In particular, Fedoseev – very much in contrast with Plekhanov – did not delight in the prospect of the disappearance of the peasantry at the hands of aggressive capitalist development. Fedoseev thought there was a chance that a large class of small-scale farmers might survive – and no doubt his residual sympathy for agrarian socialism meant that he welcomed this possibility on moral grounds.28 Vladimir Ulyanov was mightily attracted by the sheer intellectual dedication of Fedoseev, who arranged that his circle held frequent discussions on major aspects of economic, social and political trends. This was a period of intense mental effort. Young Vladimir, freed from any obligation to study for a university degree, was reading furiously on his own behalf. Using his brother’s ample library and building up his own, he took account of authors who were at the centre of European cultural discussion in the 1880s. Among them were David Ricardo, Charles Darwin, Henry Buckle, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Marx’s Capital was a topic of crucial interest.
Vladimir Ulyanov wanted to educate himself on a broader plane than had been encouraged at Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia or the Imperial Kazan University. He assumed that he could not take himself seriously in this project unless there were convincing intellectual foundations to it. At the same time he was not wholly immersed in politics. Together with his cousin Alexander Ardashev, he visited a chess club in Kazan. He also went to opera performances with his sister Olga and his brother Dmitri. Such was his fascination with chess that he played games by post with the Samara barrister Andrei Khardin.29 This was no mean attainment since Khardin was accomplished enough to be taken seriously by the world-famous player M. I. Chigorin.30
The sojourn of the Ulyanov family in Kazan, however, no longer commended itself to their mother; she was no doubt thinking that she could better steer Vladimir away from the dangers of politics if she removed him from his local revolutionary friends. She needed to find somewhere else to live. There was help at hand. Anna Ilinichna had acquired a male admirer in Mark Yelizarov, whom she had known as a friend of Alexander Ilich at St Petersburg University. Yelizarov negotiated the purchase of a separate estate on the Ulyanovs’ behalf. He looked around not near Kokushkino but in his native Samara province, where his brother – a successful peasant farmer – farmed 120 acres.31 Yelizarov secured an option on a house and land owned by the Siberian goldmine magnate Konstantin Sibiryakov. Samara province is further south down the Volga, between Simbirsk and Astrakhan. Sibiryakov had bought up not just one but several landed estates after making his fortune in the goldmines in Siberia. But he was an industrialist with a political and social conscience. He held left-of-centre opinions, and was a sympathiser with agrarian socialism. But also he believed in up-to-date methods, and introduced the latest agricultural technology to his land in Samara province.32
Low agricultural prices in the 1880s made it hard for him to make a profit, and he decided to sell up. His preference was for purchasers who, like himself, were on the left of the political spectrum. The result was that Sibiryakov sold his various estates at a cheap rate to owners who wanted to modernise agriculture without lowering the local peasantry’s standard of living. Some of these owners were agrarian socialists such as Alexander Preobrazhenski. There were also followers of Tolstoi in the locality, who were Christian and pacifist. The new owners, regardless of their specific orientation, were annoyed that the government had no interest in improving the lot of the peasantry. Sibiryakov welcomed the Ulyanovs as potential buyers of an estate at Alakaevka; and after he had come to terms with Yelizarov, the estate was paid for with the various legacies in the control of Maria Alexandrovna.33
But Vladimir’s political aspirations remained. He repeatedly visited the Fedoseev group, and also sought out the veteran People’s Freedom terrorist M. P. Chetvergova, who was then living in Kazan. In his book-reading and in his various conversations, he imbibed everything he could about the efforts of Russian revolutionaries to get rid of the Romanov dynasty. Chernyshevski had already captivated him. Other revolutionaries, too, endeared themselves to Vladimir. Great agrarian-socialist terrorists such as Stepan Khalturin and Ippolit Myshkin were his lifelong heroes.34 He was to become no less enamoured of the French novelist Émile Zola, who in 1898 was to make a stirring literary defence of the unfortunate Jewish officer in the French armed forces Alfred Dreyfus. Zola’s photograph, too, was kept in Vladimir’s wallet. Nor would it be entirely out of order to speculate that Vladimir had his deep hatreds as well as loves. His brother’s execution left him an abiding resentment of the Romanov dynasty; and his family’s problems after the 1887 assassination attempt must have added to his feeling that the respectable middle and upper social classes – the aristocracy, the landed nobility, the urban merchantry – were deserving of
no respect. The conventional picture of Vladimir as a coldly calculating figure is only part of the truth. He was also a young man of intense emotions, and the loves and hatreds in his opinions about politics were passionately felt.
For Vladimir, then, the Russian Empire was not merely too slow in its social transformation. Just as importantly it was oppressive. It was Europe’s bastion against the Progress; its troops had intervened directly on the side of the old regimes threatened by revolutions in 1848. Tsarism, insisted Vladimir, had to be overthrown. He could barely contain his anger and, although his revolutionary ideas were as yet unformed, the revolutionary commitment was already firm.
5. PATHS TO REVOLUTION
1889–1893
On 3 May 1889 the Ulyanov family took leave of their Veretennikov and Ardashev relatives in Kazan province and embarked on the paddle steamship that plied the route down the Volga to Samara. The boarding stage lay four miles from Kazan. The Volga flows southward to the Caspian in a slow and winding fashion, and the ferry captain had to avoid the shallows and the islands that lie across the river channel. The steamer needed two whole days to travel the three hundred miles from Kazan to Samara. The Ulyanovs might have enjoyed the trip more had they not been stopping at Simbirsk halfway along the route. Sad memories about Ilya Nikolaevich and Alexander Ilich would be revived. Fortunately the steamer would stop only for two hours, letting off those passengers who had a ticket for Simbirsk and picking up others. Nevertheless the members of the Ulyanov family would inevitably be reminded of their past. They could never forget Simbirsk and many people in Russia would never forget that the Ulyanov family had included a youth who tried to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. That youth’s younger brother would one day acquire his own notoriety.
Reaching Samara, the family took carriages to their estate at Alakaevka thirty-five miles to the east of the city. Maria Alexandrovna had made the purchase unseen, relying on Mark Yelizarov’s recommendation. She was not disappointed. Alakaevka was truly beautiful with its large wooden house and splendid setting. Forests and hills lay within walking distance; there was also a pond where the most inexpert fisherman could have success.1 The writer Gleb Uspenski immortalised the district in short stories that were revered by Russian readers, including Vladimir Ulyanov. Indeed Uspenski had lived on one of Sibiryakov’s estates in the late 1870s; his wife had taught in a school that Sibiryakov had built there. Sibiryakov was the financial patron of his works;2 he recognised the author as a brilliant portraitist of the local landscape and inhabitants. He also exposed the difficulties faced by poor peasants in coping with debt, land shortage and policemen. But, unlike many contemporary novelists, he did not idealise the peasantry. He saw how divided each village was by conflicts over land and money. He denounced the peasant proclivity for drunkenness, violence and intolerance of outsiders.3 All this made him unpopular with many contemporary socialists, but not with Vladimir Ulyanov. In later years Ulyanov and other Russian Marxists were notorious for vituperative attacks on peasant attitudes and practices. Usually their analysis has been traced to Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. In point of accuracy, the short stories of Gleb Uspenski should be recognised as having contributed to the intellectual development of Vladimir Ulyanov.
Lenin: A Biography Page 10