It was a time of change for the family. As she settled into Alakaevka, Maria Alexandrovna persuaded her son Vladimir to look after the new property. His Ardashev cousins – Alexander and Vladimir – had supervised the estate at Kokushkino, and Maria Alexandrovna wanted her eldest surviving son to do the same for the newly purchased property.4
At first he did as he was asked, going out to meet the peasants and making plans for the estate’s management. Meanwhile Anna Ilinichna was studying at home to become a teacher and helping with the running of the household. Olga worked harder than the rest of them. After leaving the gimnazia, she appeared to want to study twenty-four hours a day. Her ambition was to matriculate in medicine at Helsingfors (Helsinki) University, which – unlike the other universities in the Russian Empire – allowed women to take degrees.5 The younger children Dmitri and Maria went to the gimnazii in Samara. Dmitri, too, hoped to study medicine at university after finishing at school. Their mother was pleased by such purposefulness. She badly wanted to deflect her offspring from political involvement, especially Anna and Vladimir, who had already been in trouble with the authorities.
Yet Vladimir was always an unlikely farm manager. Poor, resentful peasants inhabited Alakaevka; this was the reality across the whole Volga region, especially among the peasantry of Samara province. The local landed nobles had seen the 1861 Emancipation Edict as an opportunity to keep the maximum of land and rid themselves of the slightest obligation to their serfs. The result was ‘land hunger’ among peasant households. The peasantry had a traditional proverb for their landowners: ‘We are yours, but the land is God’s.’ Russian peasants believed that the social order in the countryside was unnatural. They considered that only those persons who physically worked on the land should have the right to profit from its produce. This attitude prevailed even on the estates that had been owned by the benevolent Konstantin Sibiryakov. His several successors as landowners were no more likely to assuage peasant bitterness, and within a few years all of them had abandoned farming and sold up. Most of these owners had believed that they could turn their villages into socialist communities. But the peasants were defiantly uncooperative towards them. Resentment of middle-class proprietorship was never eliminated.6
There was a single exception to the exodus of the new landowners. This was Alexander Preobrazhenski, who believed until his dying day that socialism could be created in Russian peasant villages. Making the acquaintance of the Ulyanov family, he became a friend of Vladimir Ulyanov. But there was no convergence of minds. Vladimir was already concluding that socialism in Russia would need to base itself on a social class other than the peasantry, and he regarded Preobrazhenski as a companionable but misguided romantic.7
As a farmer, Vladimir merely went through the motions of filial obedience. Rather than farm he preferred – if he did anything – to teach, and he advertised his availability as a coach to local schoolchildren;8 but he did not pursue even this activity as a true priority. Ploughing, sowing, weeding and harvesting were of even smaller interest. He knew next to nothing about agriculture and made no effort to find out. His passion was restricted to revolutionary ideas and he quickly abandoned his activities as estate manager. For their part, the peasants spotted the opportunity offered by the arrival of an urban middle-class professional family. They got up to the usual trickery. They also thieved. The livestock of the Ulyanovs were easy targets: first a horse ‘disappeared’, then a cow – and when the second cow went missing, Maria Alexandrovna gave up trying to goad her son into taking managerial responsibility. Instead she rented out her Alakaevka property to the peasants, except for the family house.9 Eventually she sold her land to one of the richer local peasants, a certain Danilin, and thereafter the family took no interest in farming. This may have been the salvation of the Ulyanovs, since in the revolutionary tumult of 1905–6 Danilin was killed by the Alakaevka peasants, who detested him as much as they had hated the noble landowners whom he had replaced.10 If Vladimir Ulyanov had stayed on as estate manager, he could have suffered the same fate.
All this runs against the widely held notion that his later ideas were based upon his close regular experience of the peasantry of Samara province. Most of the time at Alakaevka he was studying, walking or hunting; he knew no peasant family and the fact did not trouble him. Indeed, Vladimir planned to leave what he called the ‘quiet provincial backwater’ of Alakaevka just as soon as the Ministry of the Interior’s restrictions upon his activities had been lifted. Although he spent five successive summers there, he had no intention of staying longer than he had to.11 His mother could command him no longer. When he made crude gestures, she might say: ‘Ah, Volodya, Volodya, can this be how to behave?’12 But she had to rely on guile and persuasion; orders were no longer effective.
Meanwhile Vladimir enjoyed himself. He went on long walks in the hills around the estate. He did some fishing in the pond either by himself or in the company of one of his brothers and sisters. Together with Olga Ilinichna he went on reading Gleb Uspenski’s stories about the local area; brother and sister spent a lot of time together until her departure to St Petersburg to further her education in the autumn of 1890.13 But he was also happy to be on his own. His greatest pleasure was to get down to his books. He hated to waste time and could be downright antisocial if he felt that his studies were being unduly disrupted. When his mother was expecting visitors to Alakaevka whom he did not already know, he barricaded himself out of sight and got on with his reading.14 As an exception he would allow his sister Maria to sit with him while he helped her with her schoolwork.15 She had transferred her affection from her late father to the eldest surviving Ulyanov male. But Vladimir was a stern taskmaster. He would check next day that she had memorised what he had told her and not simply written it down at his dictation.
He was acting as his own father Ilya had done towards him. By focussing intently upon his self-training he was again copying the paternal example. But Marxism and not pedagogy was Vladimir’s preoccupation. It so dominated his life that he began to translate The Communist Manifesto into Russian.16 He also worked to acquire a reading knowledge of English. For many years to come, such labour was a way of diverting himself. His training as a linguist had encouraged him to regard an hour spent in examining a foreign-language dictionary as one of life’s treats. Vladimir was trying, like others of his generation, to decide for himself how the revolutionary movement ought to try and reconstruct the Russian Empire. For this purpose it would not be sufficient by itself to read Marx and Engels or to browse through the latest interesting books in German, French and English. His obligation was to study the current trends in the Russian Imperial economy to discern what this revealed about the political and social possibilities.
A less bookish nineteen-year-old might have got acquainted with his peasants. But Vladimir’s transformation into a revolutionary came through volumes about the peasantry more than from direct regular experience. He wished to pursue his studies abroad, but in June 1889 the official authorities yet again turned down his request to travel. Yet in the following month he may have reflected upon his good fortune in no longer residing in Kazan when the police arrested the members of Fedoseev’s revolutionary circle.
By then Maria Alexandrovna had accepted that Vladimir would never become a farmer and decided to move the family into Samara. They left Alakaevka on 5 September 1889, eventually settling in a rented house on Voskresenskaya Street. Vladimir was delighted; he immediately sought out the public library and the local political dissenters. Critics of the tsarist political and social order used the same libraries, bookshops and coffee-houses. They welcomed a person of Vladimir’s intelligence and energy, and he in turn was pleased to get to know Alexei Sklyarenko, who headed one of the most serious discussion circles. Sessions were always held in Sklyarenko’s two-room apartment as Ulyanov, who lived with his mother, felt he could not offer his family’s residence for such a purpose. The circle was dedicated to the exploration of ideas, and Ulyanov read ou
t the papers he had drafted on Russian economic history.17 Sklyarenko and Ulyanov set the tone. As former gimnazia students, they insisted that the group studied in a very academic fashion. Only after dealing with culture, history and economics would they allow themselves to proceed to an examination of socialist theory.18 Thereafter they invited socialists of all persuasions from elsewhere in Russia to address them; and one of the most active contemporary figures in Russian terrorism, M. V. Sabunaev, had visited them in December 1889 (after staying for a while with Bogoraz’s group in Kazan).19
They wanted to change the world for the benefit of the lower social classes, and yet their group made no attempt to contact industrial workers or peasants. They were students devoting themselves to the study of topics which were absent from the syllabuses of their former schools and universities. Sklyarenko himself was professionally acquainted with the peasantry to the extent that his job as a civil servant required him to make investigative trips to the countryside. But, by and large, the group believed that the official economic statistics provided the most dependable basis for members to decide what to do about contemporary Russia. Ulyanov in particular concentrated on educating himself as a theorist.20 Books, not people, were thought to supply the answers. And so the group confined itself to going out at night in Samara and sticking up revolutionary proclamations on the walls – and Sklyarenko impressed Ulyanov with his skill at teasing the authorities verbally. But the main activity was inactivity: collective intellectual self-preparation.
To what ideas did the group adhere? Sklyarenko was an agrarian socialist with respect for the terrorists. Vladimir Ulyanov had been delighted to meet the visiting advocate of terrorism, Sabunaev; and in 1891 he took the opportunity to make the acquaintance of another terrorist sympathiser, Maria Golubeva, who was exiled to Samara in autumn 1891. They met through their friendship with yet another such terrorist, Nikolai Dolgov, who lived in the town and gave her the address of the family of the late Alexander Ulyanov. Already Vladimir Ulyanov, too, had impressed the veteran activist Dolgov with his anti-tsarist attitudes: ‘Yes indeed, in everything: both in dress and in behaviour and in conversations – well, in a word, in everything.’ Golubeva tried, unsuccessfully, to win him over to the doctrines of agrarian terrorism. She failed; but she noted nevertheless that several doctrines, especially those on ‘the seizure of power’, never gave him problems. Their basic disagreement was caused by her belief in the revolutionary potential of ‘the people’. Vladimir Ulyanov by this time had rejected the possibility of making revolution without a focus on class struggle. He urged the need to rely on specific social classes; and for him this could only mean the primacy of the working class in the making of a socialist society.21
He continued to meet former People’s Freedom adherents and supporters socially. One of them was Apollon Shukht, ten years his senior, who had come to Samara after serving a term of Siberian exile. Such was the friendship between them that, when their daughter Asya was born in 1893, Mr and Mrs Shukht asked Vladimir Ulyanov to become her godfather.22 This, by the way, was yet another indication of the way Vladimir Ulyanov maintained many external proprieties of contemporary Russian life while plotting to overturn them in bloody revolution. At any rate the close friendship with a former activist of People’s Freedom did not preclude him from seeking a different path to the construction of a socialist society in Russia. Hatred of tsarism was common to them, and Ulyanov was both intrigued and appalled by Anton Chekhov’s short story ‘Ward No. 6’, about a sane public figure incarcerated on the orders of the Okhrana: ‘When I finished reading this short story last night, I genuinely felt sick. I couldn’t stay in my own room, but got up and left it. I had the kind of feeling as if I’d been locked up in Ward No. 6.’23
Both Ulyanov and Sklyarenko went on studying contemporary works on the Russian Imperial economy. Sklyarenko was interested in the significance of small-scale industrial production – in artisanal workshops – for Russian economic growth, and Ulyanov enjoyed their recurrent discussions. But he held back in several other respects. He opposed Sklyarenko’s refusal to take a detached view of capitalist economic development. Sklyarenko could not bring himself to accept the ‘historical necessity’ for the disappearance of the peasantry; and, in line with not a few other revolutionary activists of his generation, he tried to think of ways of preserving a large social class of landed small-holders after the expected revolution against the monarchy. Among Ulyanov’s associates, too, there were those who wished to give priority to fostering socialism not so much among the workers as among the peasantry. The prime proponent of this was Alexander Preobrazhenski, who was still trying to build up his socialist agricultural colony near Alakaevka.24 Ulyanov argued with both Sklyarenko and Preobrazhenski. Capitalism, according to him, would follow the path mapped out by Marx and Engels in Britain and predicted for Russia by Plekhanov. There was no room for sentiment. There were only iron laws of economic development. Russia had stepped on to the capitalist road and could not avoid following the demands of the contemporary market economy.
Thus the peasantry as a class was destined to fracture into two distinct and antagonistic segments: a rural middle class (‘bourgeoisie’) and a rural working class (‘proletariat’). Throughout the winter months Ulyanov strove to expand his knowledge of basic Marxist texts: Capital and The Poverty of Philosophy by Marx; Anti-Dühring and The Condition of the Working Class in England by Engels; Our Disagreements by Plekhanov. All the while he was confirming his intuition that Russia’s future lay with industry, urbanisation and large-scale social organisation. Moral questions, for him, were an irrelevance. From Marx he had already taken a philosophy of history which stressed that the conventional ideas in society were always framed by the ruling classes in their own interest. Morality was consequently a derivative of class struggle. Every political, social and cultural value had only a ‘relative’ significance. There was no such thing as ‘absolute good’; the only guide to action was the criterion: does it facilitate the more rapid and efficient progress through the necessary stages towards the creation of a communist society?25
His associates Alexei Sklyarenko and Isaak Lalayants were taken aback by this repudiation of sentiment in politics. They had become revolutionary activists in part because they wanted to serve ‘the people’. They themselves were not workers or peasants, and they thought that the duty of a Russian intellectual was to bring benefit to the oppressed and downtrodden elements in society. They were typical members of the conscience-stricken intelligentsia. What they perceived in their newly arrived comrade was a person who revelled in his rejection of concepts such as conscience, compassion and charity.
It was only later that his harshness acquired an importance in their minds. At the time they were disconcerted, but no more than that. And they were comfortable with him as a comrade. For the first time he was a permanent member of a voluntary group of his contemporaries, and he took to them as well as they did to him. When he produced his reports, with their scrupulously drafted graphs and tables, they were simply pleased that so brilliant a figure was emerging in their midst. He could have shown off academically at their expense, but this was not his style. He participated enthusiastically in their social jaunts. Trips beyond the outskirts of Samara were enjoyed by all of them. They could talk and argue without worrying that they might be surprised by the police, and have fun while they were doing so. They evidently felt that time was on their side. Surely the existing structure of state and society could not last much longer! Whatever else divided them, they agreed about the rottenness of the status quo. They were determined to bring down the Romanov monarchy. Sklyarenko was so fierce in his commitment that he had thrown an inkpot at a gendarme during his last interrogation in Samara prison.
Vladimir Ulyanov restricted his escapades to the occasional sailing trip down the Volga on his own. This would take him miles downstream as far as the river Usa and then back up the Volga. Such a trip might take him away from his family for three or four d
ays at a time, and was not without danger from the unpredictable winds and currents. But he found that the physical exercise and the splendour of the Volga and the countryside removed his feelings of frustration at having to stay with his mother in Samara.
Meanwhile in his relations with the authorities he behaved with a prim civility. This was not just because he held to a gentlemanly code of conduct (except when in dispute with fellow revolutionaries); it was also out of a refusal to put himself at unnecessary risk. Nevertheless the inner fires were as strong in Ulyanov as in Sklyarenko, very probably even stronger. He had a visceral hatred for the slightest sign of illegality or corruption in contemporary Russia, and would never take it lying down, especially when he was personally affected. The existing social hierarchy he could tolerate temporarily. He cheerfully benefited from his own status as a nobleman until such time as the projected revolution inaugurated an entirely new order. Thus when his family vacated their estate at Alakaevka they entrusted their financial affairs to a bailiff by name of Krushvits, whose task was to collect the rents from the local peasants. The Ulyanovs lived off the profits; and Vladimir was unembarrassed, while he lived under a capitalist economic system, about easing his material conditions according to the rules of capitalism.
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