Vladimir Ulyanov agreed, and dedicated himself to becoming a revolutionary. In 1892 he took on only fourteen cases as a barrister, one of them being the prosecution of his personal tormentor Arefev. This was no heavy workload even if account is taken of his mild bout of typhoid in the course of the year.46 The burden got even lighter in 1893: from January to August he handled only a half-dozen cases.47 Most of his clients were from the poorer elements in society,48 but he was far from being a campaigning humanitarian lawyer. He continued to live off the family legacies; he knew that his mother would never insist that he should earn his own living. His real work, as he saw it, was to understand the economic realities and political opportunities in the Russian Empire and to insert his conclusions into a wider public debate across Russia.
To this end he was already engaged in a lively correspondence with Nikolai Fedoseev, his friend from his days in Kazan. Fedoseev was the first person he had met who could test him intellectually. The topic that engaged them was of acute importance: how to deal with the peasantry once the Romanovs had been overthrown and a democratic republic and a capitalist economy had been established. Fedoseev, unlike Ulyanov, did not recommend that peasants should be surrendered without compunction to the vagaries of the market. Instead he suggested that a very large class of small-holding cultivators was compatible with the medium-term development of capitalism. There were Marxists in Samara, too, who believed that Ulyanov had not taken proper account of the social and economic composition of the Russian Empire. Pëtr Maslov, Ulyanov’s senior by three years, built on Fedoseev’s analysis by contending that Russian capitalist development was being hobbled by the government’s heavy taxation of the peasantry. The result, according to Maslov, was that only the richest peasants could expand their purchasing power and thereby enable Russia to catch up industrially with the advanced capitalist powers. Moral and practical objections coalesced in his objections to the basic orientation of Western capitalism.
But Ulyanov wanted to spread his wings. In summer 1893 his brother Dmitri passed out from the Samara gimnazia. The decision was taken that the family as a whole should move to Moscow. Anna’s term of exile had ended in the previous year, and Maria Alexandrovna anyway wished to move to a metropolis. The estate at Alakaevka was still being run by Krushvits at a substantial profit, so the family took up rented accommodation in Moscow. The youngsters Dmitri Ilich and Maria Ilinichna had still to be helped through their higher education, and Maria Alexandrovna wanted to be near them while this occurred. But in the process she was loosening her grip upon Vladimir, who planned to make a name for himself in the intellectual salons of St Petersburg.
6. ST PETERSBURG
1893–1895
Vladimir Ulyanov left home on 20 August 1893, bound for St Petersburg. His journey began with the long steamer trip up the Volga to Nizhni Novgorod, where he stopped at the Nikanorov Hotel. For the first time he could travel around the country without having to explain himself to his mother. He could fill his time as he wanted.
Nizhni Novgorod stands at the confluence of the rivers Volga and Oka. The city experienced a growth in industrial production in the last years of the nineteenth century but was still best known as an important river port, and every year the country’s largest fair was held there from mid-July until early September. The Great Fair attracted Russian peasants and merchants as well as the Moslem traders who lived in the Volga provinces. Half a million visitors packed the streets to inspect the booths and stalls that creaked with everything from machine-tools to elaborate daggers and baskets of felt shoes and leather belts. It was all noise and bustle in the summer months. Traders did not bother to bring samples of their wares; they carried their entire stock on their back or by cow, horse or camel. The peasants from deep in the countryside, if they were coming for the first time, could scarcely believe their eyes. To them the large banks, the corn exchange and the railway station were exotic beyond their dreams. At the same time these peasants in bast shoes and rough smocks presented a bizarre spectacle to visitors who had seen only St Petersburg and its inhabitants. Nizhni Novgorod combined Russia ancient and modern.
Yet if Ulyanov walked around the Great Fair, he did not mention it. Admittedly he seldom described such events in his correspondence, preferring to crush the bustle and colour of Russia into a pulp of abstract economic data; but it is quite possible that he passed up the opportunity to inspect the booths and stalls. He looked up fellow Marxists in Nizhni Novgorod. Pavel Skvortsov and Sergei Mickiewicz were among them.1 Ulyanov had friends in common with them: Skvortsov had taught Fedoseev the rudiments of Marxism in Kazan before Ulyanov had arrived there2 – and Ulyanov was cheered by coming into contact with revolutionaries who shared a preoccupation with books and systematic analysis. They sat up late into the night discussing politics and economics. Next day he left by train for the town of Vladimir. There his purpose was to find Nikolai Fedoseev, who had befriended him in Kazan, and seek his opinion on his writings.3 Unfortunately Fedoseev was not merely in exile in Vladimir but in prison, and the meeting could not take place. Ulyanov set off to Moscow, where he stayed with relatives and worked in the great library in the Rumyantsev Museum before taking the train to the north. He arrived in St Petersburg on 31 August.4
The capital for him represented New Russia. There was, he thought, no hope for the country unless industrial and educational progress could be maintained – and St Petersburg was in the vanguard of that movement. He hated Old Russia. A few years later he reproached his sister Anna for choosing Moscow as her place of residence: ‘But surely you agree that Moscow’s a foul city? It’s a foul place to hang around, it’s a foul place for book publication – and why is it that you stick to it? I really went mad when Mark informed me that you were opposed to moving house to St Petersburg.’5
What especially attracted him to the capital were not its hundreds of thousands of factory workers but the little group of young Marxist authors who published on the Russian economy and society. In previous decades there had been many political writers who proffered a critique of tsarism. Among them had been Alexander Herzen, Nikolai Chernyshevski, Mikhail Bakunin, Pëtr Lavrov and Nikolai Mikhailovski. But they had much difficulty in co-operating with each other and greater difficulty in publishing their works in the legal press. Not so Vladimir Ulyanov’s generation of authors. Quite a number of them were active in the capital, most notably Pëtr Struve, Mikhail Tugan-Baranovski (a friend of Sasha Ulyanov) and Sergei Bulgakov. Others such as Pëtr Maslov were soon to join them. They were adept at analysing the official statistics on social and economic trends – and in Russia these records appeared in profusion. Such writers were exercised by the gamut of politics, economics, sociology and philosophy. They read major contemporary works in foreign languages and strove to apply the latest ideas to the Russian Empire; and they were the first intellectual generation without a sense of inferiority to the great poets and novelists who had emerged in Russia since the 1820s: Pushkin, Lermontov, Turgenev, Dostoevski and Tolstoi. The young men of the last decade of the nineteenth century felt that it had fallen to them to offer the definitive answers to questions about Russia’s future.
Ulyanov found a room for rent on Yamskaya Street. He was the sole lodger. The room was clean and the padded door into the hallway meant that the landlady’s young family did not disturb him. Yamskaya Street was handily situated, being only a quarter of an hour by foot from the state public library. As soon as he had settled in his lodgings, he went to pay his respects at his sister Olga’s grave in the Volkovo Cemetery and assured his mother by letter that the cross and flowers were in place. In a postscript he mentioned that he was running out of money. He had yet to receive his fees in full from Samara. (Not that they amounted to much because he had not been in regular work.) He asked his mother whether his Aunt Anna Veretennikova had sent the Ulyanovs their share of the Kokushkino estate rent and whether Krushvits, too, was paying up on time.6
Vladimir Ulyanov aimed to promote Revolution and to
be comfortable in the process. On 3 September he took the precaution of registering as assistant to the barrister Mikhail Volkenshtein. A letter of recommendation from Andrei Khardin had preceded Ulyanov, and he made arrangements to establish himself as a metropolitan lawyer. Yet, although he wrote to his mother that his first appearance in court was imminent, no such appearance took place. His legal work went no further than occasional informal advice to friends and associates. Indeed the only time he and Volkenshtein worked together was when Volkenshtein tried to get him bailed in 1896.7 In reality Ulyanov was preoccupied with Revolution, and saw this as requiring him to read and write about Russian economic development. The bookshops in St Petersburg were better stocked than those in Samara; he also had access to illegally printed political literature. Ulyanov sought out everything available by Marx and Engels. Works he could not obtain in St Petersburg, including the third volume of Marx’s Capital, he asked his brother Dmitri and sister Maria to find for him in Moscow.8 Vladimir’s appetite for such literature was insatiable.
His own first piece was entitled ‘New Economic Trends in Peasant Life’ and was devoted to a Marxist interpretation of the quantitative data on the peasantry of southern Russia collated by the economist V. E. Postnikov in a book that was currently the focus of intense public discussion. He sent a copy to Pëtr Maslov in Samara, and asked him to send it on to Fedoseev. Ulyanov’s confidence was rising fast. But he was still to prove his talent in the opinion of fellow economic commentators. Fedoseev’s reaction to his article was important to him. He wanted Maslov, too, to supply ‘as detailed an analysis and critique as possible’. By then he had already had his earliest literary disappointment. The prestigious St Petersburg journal Russian Thought, which was noted for its coverage of public affairs, turned him down flat. He thought of issuing it as a separate pamphlet;9 but this idea, too, came to naught.
On reflection he found his failure unsurprising. The journal had recently published an article by V. P. Vorontsov on the very same book by Postnikov, and Ulyanov reasoned to himself that Vorontsov’s liberal political outlook was always likely to appeal to a liberal journal such as Russian Thought. He explained to others that he had softened the conclusions in quest of publication, but that this could never be enough to assuage the hostility of the editor.10 Whether this alone would have prevented publication, however, is doubtful. In any case there were other major journals that he could have approached, including ones which were willing to take articles by Marxists. The Marxist thinkers of the 1890s had an intellectual eminence which was recognised even by their opponents. The problem for Vladimir Ulyanov was not so much the rivalry with Vorontsov as the cogency of the article’s arguments. Ulyanov had tried to demonstrate that Postnikov’s data confirmed that capitalism was already the dominant feature of the Russian rural economy and that the peasantry was being rapidly dissolved into two contending social classes: namely a landed middle class and an agricultural proletariat. He scoffed at the continuing influence ascribed by Vorontsov to the peasant land commune. For Ulyanov, the commune could no longer practically restrain the economic expansion of the rich peasant households at the expense of the impoverished majority of households.11
This was so selective a review of Postnikov’s data that Russian Thought might reasonably have rejected the article even if the journal had shared Ulyanov’s political orientation. But Ulyanov would not hearken to such criticism. He felt that he had compromised enough by toning down his language. His animus against Vorontsov was acute, and it is not difficult to understand why. Vorontsov was a public figure with agrarian-socialist leanings. But even in private he did not call for a revolution against the monarchy; he was resigned to campaigning for the alleviation of economic and social distress within the framework of the existing political order. This was not what most annoyed Ulyanov. His anger was aimed at Vorontsov’s contention – and Ulyanov had explained this at clandestine meetings of Marxists in Samara and St Petersburg – that Russian capitalism would always remain a stunted growth. Vorontsov pointed to the heavy level of taxation on the peasantry as the prime reason for this. Therefore, he argued, the domestic market would remain fragile and the peasantry could look forward only to perpetual impoverishment.12
Ulyanov was irritated further by the fact that several thoughtful Marxists shared Vorontsov’s economic standpoint on the matter. Maslov, despite agreeing with Ulyanov in rejecting agrarian socialism and in believing in the need for revolution, was nevertheless convinced that the poverty in the countryside was so widespread that capitalist development would not pass the incipient stage. Such ideas were also to be found among the St Petersburg Marxists. Ulyanov contacted a group of them who met in the house of Stepan Radchenko and included students from the Institute of Technology. A discussion evening was held at the end of the month, and a bright young engineer called Leonid Krasin gave a paper on ‘The Question of Markets’. Ulyanov was an unforgiving member of the audience,13 and had a verbal dexterity which the others lacked. He was also extraordinarily belligerent. In all such discussions his fellow Marxists learned to beware of him. In February 1894 another meeting was held. This time the apartment of the engineer Robert Klasson was the venue. Ulyanov yet again displayed his revolutionary fervour. He disliked a discussion if it lacked a sense of practical political commitment, and he criticised his friends for this. They reeled in the face of such intemperance. Like him, they were trying to discern the pattern of current economic development. But Ulyanov wanted more than this: he demanded that the group examine how best to bring down the Imperial order.
One of the participants was the Marxist activist Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. She detected ‘something evil and dry’ in his laughter when someone suggested that the group should form a ‘literacy committee’ for local industrial workers. Ulyanov asked how such proposals would aid the revolutionary cause. No one had talked to them in such a fashion, and Krupskaya was to recall: ‘Klasson came up; he was very upset and said, twitching his beard: “Well, the Devil knows what he’s talking about!” “What do you mean?” responded Korobko, “he’s right: what sort of revolutionaries are we?”’14 Klasson and Korobko felt chastened. For the first time someone had pointed out to them that revolutions did not happen by themselves.
Whether Ulyanov himself was in a legitimate position to criticise others, however, is a moot point. Although he called for a practical approach to revolutionary struggle, he had yet to meet factory workers in any number. He saw the factories and commercial offices of St Petersburg only from the outside. He lived as a middle-class rentier. And unlike his engineer associates, he lacked any professional training that might put him in touch with the industrial Russia that was coming into existence. Nor did he perceive a need to change his lifestyle. He still thought the most effective way to enhance the prospects of Revolution in his country was to engage in economic and political controversy with other middle-class intellectuals. While he enjoyed trouncing Krasin, Klasson and Korobko, he recognised that they were hardly the outstanding thinkers of their generation. He was not arrogant towards them but had no intention of remaining a modest member of their group. Despite his contretemps with Russian Thought, he kept up his determination to have a broad impact on informed public debates. This, after all, was why he had come to St Petersburg in the first place.
Luckily for him, Klasson had the connections to attract Pëtr Struve and Mikhail Tugan-Baranovski to his apartment in late February 1894.15 Ulyanov was at last exchanging ideas with thinkers of his own intellectual calibre. The three of them – Struve, Tugan-Baranovski and Ulyanov – were tackling basic questions of Russia’s future. Struve was on the point of making his name with his book Critical Remarks on the Question of Russia’s Economic Development, and Tugan-Baranovski was to publish The Russian Factory. Like Ulyanov, they scrutinised the latest economic data. They had independent means and were converts to Marxism. It was the hope of Ulyanov to get his own works into the legal press.
But their new friend disconcerted S
truve and Tugan-Baranovski. Ulyanov had never been abroad and witnessed the higher level of economic development in Britain, France and Belgium. This was not his fault. The Ministry of the Interior had turned down every request he had made to travel to foreign parts. Yet Struve and Tugan-Baranovski felt that Ulyanov had suffered intellectually from his insulation. In particular, they told him, he needed to drop his absurd over-statement of the degree of capitalist development that had occurred in the Russian Empire. His approach was altogether too schematic. To them it also appeared that Ulyanov was excessively keen to prove to Marxists that he was entirely ‘orthodox’ in his interpretation of Marxism. Struve and Tugan-Baranovski wished to use Marxism as a means of explaining the truth of Russian economic trends but not as an unquestionable creed; they thought Ulyanov was overly exercised by loyalty to Marx regardless of whether Marx was right or wrong. He refused to accept that Capital could be faulted in the slightest way. He was a secular ‘believer’.
Lenin: A Biography Page 13