But any infringement of his legal rights provoked fury to a degree that astounded his friends and relatives. On a jaunt in Syzran, near his native town of Simbirsk, he and his brother-in-law Mark Yelizarov hired a boatman to row them across the river Volga. By doing this, they infringed the unofficial monopoly of a rich Syzran merchant, one Arefev by name, who owned a steam-ferry. As Ulyanov and Yelizarov got to mid-channel, Arefev sent out his ferry to block their passage and take them aboard. Before acceding to force, Ulyanov declared to the ferry captain: ‘It makes no difference that Arefev has rented the river crossing; that’s his business, not ours, and it doesn’t in any way give him or you the right to act lawlessly on the Volga and detain people by force.’26 Ulyanov punctiliously took down the names of the captain and his fellow employees for further reference while Arefev strutted around in triumph. His brother later recorded that anyone else would have calmed down ‘out of inertia and “Russian” indolence’. But Vladimir Ulyanov would not let the matter drop. On his return to Samara, he wrote a formal complaint to the authorities. Samara is sixty miles from Syzran, and Arefev exploited his own standing in Syzran to delay the legal case, and two hearings were held without result.
Maria Alexandrovna tried to get her son to back down: ‘Let go of this merchant! They’ll postpone the case again and you’ll be travelling there in vain. Besides, you should bear in mind that they have it in for you!’ With some justification she thought that Vladimir got too worked up about things. But he would not be denied. He took an early-morning train to attend the third hearing and at last got his revenge. Merchant Arefev, to general astonishment, was sentenced to a month’s imprisonment.27
Vladimir’s growing knowledge of Imperial legislation, as well as his character, assisted in this. As soon as the family moved to Samara, he resumed his requests to become a university student. His letter to the Minister of Popular Enlightenment started as follows: ‘In the course of two years since I finished my gimnazia course, I have had ample opportunity to become convinced of the enormous difficulty, if not the impossibility, of anyone getting an occupation who has not received a special education.’ Despairing of being allowed to study in the normal way inside a Russian Imperial university, he asked to be allowed to take the jurisprudence exams as an external student.28 His mother reinforced the plea with her own letter; and on 12 June 1890, having at last been granted the necessary permission, he began the process of registration at St Petersburg University.29 Accustomed to private study, he had no difficulty with this arrangement. He also had the money to order the necessary textbooks. Until such time as he could visit St Petersburg, he could get other family members such as Olga Ilinichna to go round the bookshops on his behalf; and his cousin Vladimir Ardashev advised him on the reading he needed to do for his degree.30
Such were the advantages of belonging to a closely knit, affluent family, advantages which were not shared by most contemporary revolutionaries. At last the sons and daughters of Maria Alexandrovna were finding their feet after the disasters of recent years. Olga Ilinichna had been thwarted in her desire to study medicine at Helsingfors University; she had learned Swedish to comply with the entrance qualifications but had recoiled from adding Finnish to her accomplishments and so could not be accepted for the degree.31 Instead in 1890 she left to take the Higher Women’s Courses in St Petersburg and become a teacher. Several of her Veretennikov, Ardashev and Zalezhski cousins were already students in the capital, and she saw them fairly often.32 There was no sign of Olga getting mixed up in revolutionary activities (although her friends Apollonaria Yakubova and Zinaida Nevzorova were soon to become Marxist activists).33 Maria Alexandrovna could feel increasingly relaxed as Dmitri and Maria went on working at their gimnazii; and Anna married her fiancé Mark Yelizarov in July 1889, with Vladimir as one of the formal witnesses.34 As for Vladimir, his mother knew that he would prepare himself properly for his tests at St Petersburg University.
His capacity for fast assimilation of data was so extraordinary that by March 1891 he was ready to go to the capital to take the first stage of his examinations. He rented a quiet room in a building by the river Neva. Vladimir and Olga saw a good deal of each other. Although Olga was his junior, she and their mother corresponded regularly about him. ‘It seems to me, Mama,’ she wrote on 8 April,
that you are worrying for no reason that he is ruining his health. Firstly Volodya is good sense incarnate and secondly the exams are very easy. He has already taken two subjects and has received a five for both of them. On Saturday (he had an exam on Friday) he took a break: in the morning he walked to Nevski Prospekt, and after lunch he came over to me and the two of us went for a walk by the banks of the Neva – we watched an icebreaker and then he set off to the Peskovskis.
He’s not going to stop sleeping at night since this would be completely unnecessary: a brain cannot work for a full 24 hours, so that rest is needed. He goes and has lunch every day – consequently he’s keeping on the go [progulivaetsya].35
This little excerpt shows the attentiveness given to Vladimir by the rest of the family – or at least by the female members. He was cherished as none other. More was expected of him and more was offered to support him.
He had not been ‘spoiled’ in the sense of being showered with presents or allowed to behave regularly in an ill-disciplined manner. But, although he was not an only child, he had been surrounded by what might be called an aura of warmly expectant encouragement. His mother was endlessly attentive and sisters Anna, Olga and – later – Maria gave him whatever assistance he required. Vladimir learned how to make use of the emotional interplay in his family. This was a trick that had an influence on his later political life. It was to give him a general presumption that others should indulge his wishes. Thus he appeared a ‘natural leader’. But it also limited his awareness of the difficulties he caused. He was so used to getting his way that, if balked in any fashion, he was altogether too likely to throw a fit of anger. He absolutely hated being thwarted. As a young man he belatedly became a sort of a spoiled child nurtured by four women.
One of these women, Olga, was not to be with him much longer. Unfulfilled by her teacher-training course, she was planning to go abroad and study medicine as she had always really wanted.36 At the end of April 1891 she fell ill in St Petersburg and was taken into the Alexander Hospital. This time it was Vladimir who communicated with his mother. His telegram ran as follows: ‘Olya [Olga’s diminutive name] has typhoid fever, is in hospital, nursing care is good, doctors hope for a successful outcome.’ For the moment he did not feel the need for Maria Alexandrovna to leave Samara. But Olga’s condition deteriorated with the onset of a febrile skin infection commonly known as St Anthony’s fire. At the beginning of May he sent another telegram to Samara: ‘Olya is worse. Wouldn’t it be better for Mama to travel tomorrow?’37 Maria Alexandrovna got rail-tickets for Moscow and then for St Petersburg. But she arrived too late. Olga died on 8 May 1891, which by a terrible coincidence was the anniversary of her eldest brother Alexander’s execution in 1887. She was only nineteen years old, and had been Vladimir’s playmate in their childhood. Olga was buried in the Lutheran cemetery in Volkovo on St Petersburg’s southern outskirts. After the funeral Maria Alexandrovna hurried back to Simbirsk to look after the rest of the family.
She had broken the law in choosing the Volkovo Cemetery. Anyone baptised as an Orthodox Christian was prohibited from crossing to another faith or denomination, and this applied in death as in life. Olga had been baptised by an Orthodox priest and should have been buried by one. The official state authorities seldom intervened to prevent or punish disobedience; but Maria Alexandrovna’s insistence on having her daughter buried by a Lutheran pastor was certainly a sign of the socially marginal status which characterised the Ulyanovs. She no longer worried about what was thought about her in high society. The ostracism confronted by the family since the hanging of Alexander Ulyanov left her no illusions, and she wanted to run her life in the fashion she felt comf
ortable with. Not that she had particularly strong religious beliefs. It was rather that she aimed to do things her own way. Her son Vladimir had abandoned religion entirely around the age of sixteen and, as a devotee of Russian revolutionary thought, was an atheist. For him, it counted for nothing whether the cemetery was Orthodox or Lutheran. His task as he saw it was simply to make the burial arrangements as unoppressive as possible for his mother.
Although he was considerate towards her, he did not make much display of his feelings. This was the way the Ulyanovs had been brought up. Self-control was a family virtue. Certainly both he and his sister Anna were very volatile; indeed Vladimir had an impulsive, choleric temperament that was notorious in the family. But he displayed it only when he was confronting someone who was challenging him. This was a different situation, which called for him to keep a tight grip on his emotions.
Vladimir accompanied his mother back to Samara and did not return to the capital until the second stage of his examination in September. The two stages involved one written and thirteen oral tests on subjects that included not only judicial proceedings but also ecclesiastical law and police law.38
His later hagiographers did not mention these subjects. Presumably it was impolitic to mention that the enemy of the Romanov police-state and founder of the world’s first atheist state should have chosen to study ecclesiastical law and police law. Nevertheless Vladimir achieved great success, receiving the highest possible grade in each and every subject. He was the sole student in his year to achieve this. His examiners’ recommended that he should receive a first-class diploma from the Imperial St Petersburg University, and he returned to Samara on 12 November 1891 with the qualifications to begin work as a lawyer. It was yet another of the oddities of tsarist public life. The young man whom the state empowered to practise law was himself still the object of the police’s secret surveillance on the ground that he was working to subvert the legal order of the state.
He arranged to begin in the barrister’s offices of Andrei Khardin, with whom he had played postal chess three years earlier. Since the move to Samara, the Ulyanovs and the Khardins had drawn closer to each other. Olga and one of Andrei Khardin’s daughters had been friends, and had written to each other when Olga was in St Petersburg.39 There was a political tinge to the situation. The authorities in St Petersburg regarded barrister Andrei Khardin as a figure of ‘doubtful reliability’ in the light of his political opinions, and he too was being kept under surveillance.40 He was the natural choice for Vladimir Ulyanov while he completed his five years of further training. The term of Ulyanov’s status as assistant barrister began on 30 January 1892.
In Samara, he rejoined his comrades in the group of Marxists founded by Alexei Sklyarenko. Work as an assistant barrister was never going to interfere with his revolutionary involvement. This was a moment of horrendous crisis in the society of the Volga region. In 1891–2 a famine afflicted the region, and cholera and typhus followed close behind. The main victims were the rural poor. According to reliable estimates, about 400,000 subjects of Alexander III perished. The assumption of most critics of the Imperial government was that the prime culprits were the ministers in the government. The novelist Lev Tolstoi championed a famine-relief campaign that raised a large sum of money to provide the region with basic foodstuffs. Abroad the reportage on the dying peasants made the Romanov dynasty less popular than ever. It was widely contended that, had it not been for the heavy direct taxation of the peasantry, the famine would never have occurred. In fact this was probably unfair. State revenues relied more upon excise duties than upon direct taxes, and consequently it would have been senseless for the Ministry of Finances to have deliberately impoverished the peasantry in pursuit of industrial growth. On the contrary, the central government’s budget depended vitally upon the continued capacity of peasants and others to buy vodka, salt and other taxed products. That there were millions of dreadfully poor peasants is beyond dispute. That the government’s fiscal callousness had produced this is a less likely explanation than the freak weather conditions and the backward modes of agriculture.
But most Russian radicals did not give the government the benefit of the doubt. They saw the famine as a ghastly indication of the regime’s ineptitude and brutality; they argued, too, that the whole country had been brought into disrepute across Europe. Handuts of food were inadequate. The hospitals were filthy and too few. The civil bureaucracy was extremely slow to react. Marxists, agrarian socialists and liberals concurred that tsarism’s rotten heart had been exposed and that, in the short term, opponents of the regime should lend a hand to voluntary organisations seeking to alleviate the famine.
Vladimir Ulyanov stood out against the rest of the intelligentsia; he would not even condone the formation of famine-relief bodies in order to use them for the spreading of revolutionary propaganda.41 His heart had been hardened. Virtually alone among the revolutionaries of Samara and indeed the whole empire, he argued that the famine was the product of capitalist industrialisation. His emotional detachment astonished even members of his family. His sister Anna Ilinichna went around the town to help the sick, giving them medicine and advice. Vladimir Ilich refused to join her.42 Maria Ilinichna was confused by all this; she could not reconcile her brother’s position with his adherence to an ideology that was meant to serve the poor and the oppressed. In a rare implicit criticism of him, she wrote the following comparison between her brothers Alexander and Vladimir: ‘But [Vladimir Ilich], it seems to me, had a different nature from Alexander Ilich, close though they were to each other. Vladimir Ilich did not have the quality of self-sacrifice even though he devoted his whole life indivisibly to the cause of the working class.’43
Nothing could shake Vladimir Ulyanov’s belief that mass impoverishment was inevitable. The peasantry had always paid a dreadful price for industrial growth – and so it would be in late-nineteenth-century Russia. For Ulyanov, capitalism was bound by its nature to hurt most people and to kill many of them. Humane counter-measures were not merely ineffectual: they would do harm by slowing down the development of capitalism and therefore of the eventual further progress to socialism. Thus the famine, according to Ulyanov, ‘played the role of a progressive factor’, and he blankly refused to support the efforts to relieve the famine.44 His hard-heartedness was exceptional. He lived in the very region, the Volga provinces, where the famine raged. Peasants were dragging themselves into the towns pleading for food and for work. Corpses were found lying in the streets. Yet Ulyanov, once he had formed his intellectual analysis, would not be deflected by sentiment. He was not just a witness to the horrors of mass starvation: he was a participant in it. His family derived income from a Samara provincial estate and yet still he insisted that Krushvits, who managed the estate for them, should pay up exactly what had been agreed; and this meant that the peasants would have to pay Krushvits in full regardless of circum-stances.45
This attitude demonstrates that, much as he was influenced by the ideas of Russian agrarian socialism, he never felt pity for the peasants. In this he was at one with his distant mentor Georgi Plekhanov. Ulyanov was following Plekhanov in his basic interpretation of Marxism, and Plekhanov was becoming an idol for him. For Ulyanov, Plekhanov’s interpretation of the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels was unrivalled. In fact there was much controversy among the revolutionaries of the Russian Empire as to whether Plekhanov had got it right. In 1881 Vera Zasulich, the agrarian-socialist terrorist, wrote to Marx himself asking whether he believed that the scheme of social development he had sketched out for the advanced capitalist states was necessarily applicable to agrarian Russia. In many of his works Marx had analysed how the capitalist stage came from the bowels of feudalism. He predicted that the internal processes of capitalism would engender crisis after crisis which in turn would induce the impoverished working class, equipped by capitalism itself with educational and organisational skills, to seize power. Thus the movement from feudalism to capitalism to socialism was not only
desirable, it was inevitable. But, asked Vera Zasulich, was this sequence of stages predestined to affect every country? Might there not be a chance for a largely pre-capitalist country such as Russia to avoid capitalism altogether and adopt socialism?
The reply she received from Marx was gratifying. Far from claiming that Capital offered a template for all countries, he accepted that Russia’s agrarian economy and peasant communal traditions might allow it to have a socialist transformation without capitalist industrialisation. Thus he appeared to condone the strategy of the Russian agrarian socialist. And indeed he and Engels were also known to admire the anti-tsarist terrorists and to dismiss the self-proclaimed Marxists such as Plekhanov as bookish and cowardly.
Thus the Russian controversy over capitalism between the agrarian socialists and the ‘Marxists’ seemingly encouraged Marx to side with the agrarian socialists. But Marx was not quite so unequivocal as Zasulich claimed. On the possibility of a socialist revolution being based on the egalitarian aspects of the peasant land commune, he had specified that this would not be at all practicable unless there were concurrent seizures of power by socialist parties in the advanced capitalist countries of the West. This was a very large reservation. Moreover, Plekhanov insisted that Marx and Engels should recognise that capitalism had arrived in Russia. The growth of activity in factories, mines and banks was an incontrovertible fact, as all the official statistics testified. Zasulich herself was one of Plekhanov’s leading converts and helped him to found the Emancipation of Labour Group in Switzerland. Marx died in 1883, and so Plekhanov’s attention was concentrated upon Engels. But Engels did not immediately yield to Plekhanov. Only in 1892, three years before he died, would Engels concede that Plekhanov and the generation of Russian Marxists – including the still obscure Samara writer Vladimir Ulyanov – might be justified in rejecting the agrarian socialism of their forebears. The Emancipation of Labour Group set the precedent for Russian Marxists to treat the Marx–Zasulich letters as a regrettable but temporary episode. The future, insisted Plekhanov, lay in applying Capital to Russia.
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