Lenin: A Biography

by Robert John Service

  And at the same time they thought he had altogether too much of the Russian terrorist tradition about him. In his own family Alexander had been a practising terrorist and Anna and even young Dmitri sympathised with the terrorists.16 Vladimir himself went on being friendly with former activists of People’s Freedom. He might castigate agrarian socialism, but he did not keep his distance from people who advocated its most extreme practical variant. And so he seemed to them to be an extraordinary mixture of influences – and they assumed that further residence in St Petersburg and a foreign city or two was needed for him to mature in a normal fashion.

  There was an obvious paradox. Vladimir Ulyanov had been brought up as a European Russian. He was a fluent reader of German and French and had taught himself to read English. He was a brilliant student of the Classics. His parents, while rearing their family to be proud of Russian culture, had not imparted nationalist ideas. How on earth could such a boy have turned out to be so ‘Russian’ in comparison with many young Russians who had had much less access to the contemporary currents of European thought? Struve and Tugan-Baranovski were surely correct in saying that Ulyanov’s inexperience of Europe was a large part of the answer. But they overestimated the likelihood of him adjusting his ideas in reaction to a trip abroad. He had already made his mind up. From this period onwards, at least until he had held power for a couple of years, he would persist in seeing Russia as more advanced economically and socially than it really was. This was not all. He would also begin to contend that the policies he recommended for his own Russia should be applied to the rest of Europe. His Europeanisation of Russia was a first step on the path towards the Russianisation of Europe.

  Another area of division between them was the gap in status between Struve the Petersburg aristocrat and Ulyanov the parvenu. When Anna Ilinichna wrote to Struve in 1899, who still professed Marxism, on her brother’s behalf, she addressed him formally as ‘Gracious Sir’;17 this was not the way that revolutionary activists usually communicated with each other. The Ulyanovs had been rising up the ladder of Imperial society, but they had no friends among the higher hereditary nobility, and after Alexander Ulyanov’s execution there was no chance that they ever would. Anna’s formal respectfulness towards Struve was just one sign of this. Not that Vladimir minded about his family’s position. He had never aimed to ingratiate himself with Old Russia. Unlike his sister, he did not disguise his emotions. He talked to Struve on his own terms, and Struve and Tugan-Baranovski were horrified by what they took to be the crudity of his ideas. But Vladimir Ulyanov did not care. He even disconcerted the Radchenko-Klasson group, whose members were from middle-class backgrounds more akin to his own. Wasn’t Ulyanov, they asked, a bit too ‘red’?18 In their eyes, his Marxism retained an excess of the more violent aspects of Russian agrarian-socialist terrorism.

  He tried to reassure them that he was committed to ‘scientific’ Marxism and that he had put his agrarian-socialist phase behind him. But his heroes included precisely the terrorists that the Radchenko-Klasson group objected to. Ulyanov had a penchant for the works of Pëtr Tkachëv, who argued that Engels, after Marx’s death, had been insufficiently ‘Marxist’ inasmuch as his Anti-Diihring had offered an excessively deterministic analysis of world history. Tkachëv believed in revolutionary will, conspiratorial organisation and political violence, and thought such tenets congruent with Marxism. Eulogising dictatorship, he declared that if ever the revolutionaries got power they would need to carry out a mass terror against priests, policemen and landlords. More privately he harboured an admiration for Sergei Nechaev. This was an extraordinary hero for him. Nechaev had been the notorious arch-conspirator of Russian agrarian socialism who, in the interests of binding his adherents to their common cause, ordered the murder of one of them. The trial of Nechaev’s adherents in 1871 did much to alienate middle-class opinion from the nascent revolutionary movement, and Fedor Dostoevski put his version of the episode at the centre of his novel The Devils. The activists of the People’s Freedom organisation disowned Nechaev’s criminal and amoral self-aggrandisement.

  Yet Vladimir Ulyanov felt that Nechaev’s name should be honoured. He reasoned as follows: ‘He possessed special talent as an organiser and conspirator as well as the ability to enrobe his thoughts in astonishing formulations.’ Nechaev had once been asked who in the ruling house of the Romanovs should be liquidated. The reply was: ‘The whole house of the Romanovs!’ Ulyanov repeated the phrase, calling it a simple stroke of genius.19 Thus Ulyanov the Marxist did not exclude non-Marxist idols from his pantheon. The traditions of Russian agrarian socialists, especially the advocates of dictatorship, had a deep and enduring impact upon him.

  He shared a visceral hatred of every social prop of the tsarist political order. He detested the whole Romanov family, the aristocracy, the clergy, the police and the high command. He hated the mercantile middle class and the rising industrial and financial middle class. His zeal to smash down these props by violent methods was something he held in common with Zaichnevski, Tkachëv and Nechaev. In fact not all the terrorists he admired had felt this way. Indeed Vladimir Ulyanov’s terrorist brother Alexander had not forsworn concepts of morality or the goals of parliamentary elections. So what made Vladimir Ulyanov respond enthusiastically to the rhetoric and rationale of terror and dictatorship? The most obvious answer is the fate of that same elder brother. It had been within the gift of the Emperor Alexander III to commute the death sentence on Alexander Ulyanov. But Alexander Ulyanov was hanged. This would have been enough to turn many a younger brother against ‘the house of the Romanovs’ even though Alexander Ulyanov’s complicity in the assassination conspiracy of 1887 was undeniable. Moreover, the fate of his brother Alexander was bound to incline Vladimir to the bloody invocations of Zaichnevski, Tkachëv and Nechaev.

  Yet this is not the whole story. Vladimir’s family had always yearned for a transformed Russia. The Ulyanovs felt a certain detachment from the official Imperial culture – and not just because they had non-Russian elements in their genealogy. They wanted a ‘cultured’, ‘civilised’ Russia. They wanted an end to privileges. Much in Vladimir’s early life had already undermined any inhibition to turning Russia upside down. His education had had a similar effect. The gimnazia curriculum had insisted upon technical linguistic accomplishment dissociated from everyday Russian life. His university training was equally abstract. The purposes of government were transmitted to him in the form of irksome regulations. He saw nothing to lose in destroying his state and society.

  At the same time Vladimir Ulyanov was a complex individual who had not abandoned hope of general recognition as a writer on economics and society. Although Struve and Tugan-Baranovski remained uneasy about him, he refused to modify his analyses. He had stood up to his most severe intellectual test to date, and did not feel worsted. His confidence mounted in other ways too. His previous separations from his mother and family had been of short duration so that the move to St Petersburg marked a psychological break. He had all but lost his youthful appearance. Vladimir had inherited his father’s looks and one aspect of this gave him some irritation: early baldness. He discussed with his sister Maria Ilinichna whether there might be a way to reverse the process. Probably he was joking. But he kept his beard and what was left of his hair in proper trim. Indeed he hated untidiness – and he admonished family members if they failed to keep their buttons neatly sewn and their shoes repaired.20

  Yet he was no dandy. While wanting to remain tidy, he did not enjoy shopping for clothes; he got others to do this for him – or rather he wore his clothes until such time as one of his relatives became sufficiently exasperated to buy a new suit or a pair of shoes for him.

  The main women in his life were still his mother and sisters, and from St Petersburg he kept in regular contact with them by letter. He visited them in the summerhouse they rented near Lyublino railway station south of Moscow. The members of the Ulyanov family were good at supporting each other. On one of his trips to
Lyublino, Volodya learned to ride a bicycle under instruction from Dmitri.21 He himself encouraged Maria in her educational objectives when she took up a two-year science course in Moscow in 1896. Maria Ilinichna had not had an easy time. She had been refused admission to the St Petersburg Higher Women’s Courses taken earlier by Anna Ilinichna.22 She was not as bright as her exceptional elder brothers, but probably the reason for her rejection was political rather than academic and she was paying a price for being related to brothers and a sister who were troublemakers for the Imperial regime. But she struggled on and Vladimir kept in touch and gave her encouragement to go abroad and finish her education.

  Meanwhile his interest in members of the opposite sex was growing; many years later he referred to having chased after one or two of them. The rumour was widely believed that the beautiful Apollonaria Yakubova had caught his eye and become his sweetheart. Certainly he made a trip back to Nizhni Novgorod in January 1894 and met up with her; and in 1897, according to hints dropped by his sister Anna, there continued to be a feeling for him at least on Apollonaria’s part. The truth may never be known. By all accounts, however, he did not let affairs of the heart get in the way of public affairs – and this was to remain the case even during his involvement with Inessa Armand before the First World War.

  Nor had his childhood quirks vanished. Pencils were still kept (mercilessly) sharp and his desk remained smartly arranged; he cleaned it daily. He also detested waste. When he received letters with blank spaces, he cut off and kept the unused parts. He was careful with his money and warned Dmitri against being diddled by booksellers. Always he drafted articles in his neat longhand. Not for him the ‘Bohemian’ slackness of his revolutionary associates. There was only one aspect of his personal life, namely his health, where he failed to display due care. He could not be blamed for his typhoid when he was a young man. But he was less than careful in relation to other problems. Vladimir had terrible, chronic pains in the stomach and the head and could not sleep at night. Doctors diagnosed ‘catarrh’ of the stomach membrane; nowadays this would be called an ulcer. His brother Sasha had suffered from similar problems as a very small boy; Anna Ilinichna too had the same ‘catarrh’ at the age of nineteen and their mother had her own difficulty with her stomach.23

  Apparently there was a genetic susceptibility to severe gastric problems. But the environment, too, had an impact. Nearly always stomach illness occurred in those periods of his life when he was failing to stick to regular meal times and to a well-balanced diet; and any psychological tension arising from political disputes made the problems much worse.24

  Yet in politics he was less inhibited than any contemporary Marxist in Russia. He was undeterred by his oral disagreements with Struve and Tugan-Baranovski, and in late 1894 wrote a lengthy review of Struve’s Critical Remarks. This had a print-run of 2,000 copies. Ulyanov looked forward to publishing a work of his own, but the political radicalism of its contents induced him to adopt the pseudonym K. Tulin. He referred to ‘Mr Struve’ – the use of ‘Mr’ itself a term of abuse among Marxists – as a ‘petit-bourgeois’. Above all, he declared that the ‘bourgeois’ nature of the contemporary Russian economy had long been established and that capitalism had already been consolidated:25

  Is it really only ‘over recent years’? Was it not given clear expression in the 1860s? Did it not dominate in the entire course of the 1860s? The petit-bourgeois [Mr Struve] is trying to soften things by representing the bourgeois characteristics of the entire reform epoch [after 1861] as a sort of temporary distraction or fashion.

  The contrast between Ulyanov and Struve could only be hinted at in a legal publication. This consisted in Struve’s suggestion that the end of capitalism might come about peacefully and even without very much conflict among the various social classes. Ulyanov had objected to this in a pamphlet he had written and had had reproduced on a hectograph machine. Struve, according to Ulyanov, had erroneously overlooked the need for Marxists always to advocate ‘class struggle’ and violent methods of Revolution.26 Although he did not say this openly in the new article, he strongly implied it. And the censors in the Ministry of the Interior understood this well enough. They impounded the book before it went on sale. In 1895 all but a hundred of the extant copies were burned. Once again Ulyanov had been thwarted in his attempt to become a widely read author.

  Yet he still hoped for a greater future. He had always wanted to travel abroad, and now he had the additional incentive of the possibility of making direct contact with Georgi Plekhanov and his Emancipation of Labour Group. On 15 March 1895, to his surprise, the chance came his way when the Ministry of the Interior at last, for no particular reason, dropped its refusal to grant him a passport.27 He hurriedly made preparations for a trip to Switzerland, and packed materials about the Russian Imperial economy together with his clothes. On 24 April he set off from St Petersburg to Moscow with his Samara friend Isaak Lalayants, newly released from prison. Next day, alone, he took the train westwards to the Russian frontier across the lands of the Habsburg Monarchy.28

  Vladimir Ulyanov was under instructions from his mother to write to Moscow as he made his journey, and he dutifully posted a card from Salzburg:29

  I’ve now been travelling ‘in foreign parts’ for two days and am practising the language: I’m in a bad way; I understand the Germans with the greatest difficulty or, I should say, I don’t understand them at all. If I go up to the conductor with any question, I don’t understand when he replies. He repeats himself more loudly. I still don’t understand, and he gets angry and walks off. Despite such a shameful fiasco, I’m not disheartened and am pretty keenly mangling the German language.

  Crossing into Switzerland, he was entranced by the Alps and the lakes, and explored the possibility of renting a summerhouse and hiring a maid. He reported, however, that maids received as much as thirty francs per month and had also to be fed – and that they expected to eat well!30 This was the reaction of a man who, whatever his politics, expected to keep expenditure on employees to a minimum. He was more willing to spend money in connection with his own health and, when his stomach continued to give him trouble, he paid for a consultation with an expensive Swiss medical specialist. The advice to Ulyanov was mainly dietary. He was told to eat regularly, avoid oily foods and drink plenty of mineral water.31

  From Switzerland he made a trip to France, where he rented an apartment in Paris. Returning to Zurich, he found a place outside the city by the lakeside and amid greenery. Then finally on to Berlin, where he swam a lot and visited the Königliche Bibliothek.32 Whenever he began to run out of money, his mother helped him out. Within the family he was notorious for his reluctance to give presents. He wrote to her just before leaving Berlin offering to bring back a book on anatomy for his brother Dmitri. But what could he bring for his sister Maria? ‘I feel’, he added, ‘that I ought to buy various bits of rubbish.’33 Hardly the words of a sentimentalist. Yet for once he purchased a present for her. Maria never disclosed what it was, but she adored her brother and was so grateful that she never forgot this uncharacteristic act of generosity. Subsequently the sole presents she got from him were copies of books he had written.

  By contrast Vladimir Ulyanov was highly emotional about his politics. Among his purposes in going abroad was to arrange a meeting with his idol, Georgi Plekhanov. His first task in May 1895 had been to track him down in Geneva. The two got on very well. At last Plekhanov had evidence of his growing following in St Petersburg. The tiny Emancipation of Labour Group was encouraged by Ulyanov’s visit to consider ways of expanding its influence, and discussed a scheme to establish a journal of socialist theory, Rabotnik. Ulyanov had proceeded from Geneva to Zurich in order to discuss further arrangements with Plekhanov’s associate Pavel Axelrod. He stayed for a fortnight with Axelrod and his wife at the village of Adoltern. Ulyanov’s intelligence, dedication and loyalty impressed Plekhanov and Axelrod. His Marxist faith was unquenchable. While he was in Paris, he looked up Marx’s son-in-la
w Paul Lafargue; and in Berlin he conversed with the prominent German social-democrat Wilhelm Liebknecht. It may reasonably be supposed that he would have paid homage directly to Friedrich Engels if Engels had not died in 1895. Such meetings were not just occasions for mundane political business. Ulyanov, a man who was shy of expressing his feelings, nevertheless confessed to being in love (vlyublënnosf) with Karl Marx and Georgi Plekhanov. This young heterosexual revolutionary was more excited by ideology – and its leading exponents – than by women.

  He lived for politics. Back in St Petersburg, on 29 September, he brought the good tidings of the contacts he had made. On the way he had stopped over in Vilnius, Moscow and Orekhovo-Zuevo. In each of these places he forged links with local Marxists. He travelled with a yellow, false-bottomed leather suitcase which he had had made for him by a craftsman on Mansteinstrasse in Berlin; and he smuggled in plenty of illegal literature for his comrades.34 But the border crossing had not been as successful as had appeared at the time. The customs officers knew his identity and almost certainly refrained from searching his suitcase in order to enable the Okhrana to follow him back to St Petersburg and discover the names of the rest of his comrades.35 For Ulyanov personally, however, the trip was a memorable achievement. Organisation on a higher scale than clandestine discussion circles in Kazan, Samara or St Petersburg was in prospect. He expected the linkage with Switzerland to facilitate the construction of a network of political sympathisers across the Russian Empire.

  But still the perspective was primarily literary: the co-operation between Ulyanov’s comrades and the Emancipation of Labour Group would be focussed upon the production of the Rabotnik journal. The Russian word rabotnik (or ‘worker’) signalled the Group’s orientation towards the industrial labour movement in Russia. And yet neither Ulyanov nor any of his comrades had plans to meet workers. The St Petersburg Marxists were sincere, hard-studying intellectuals, but they lived in complete isolation from the urban ‘proletariat’ which they described as the future vanguard of the revolution against the Romanov monarchy. It was only a matter of time before one of the comrades would become frustrated by their political passivity. In fact it was an outsider who provoked them into action. This was the young Marxist Yuli Martov, a newcomer to St Petersburg from Vilnius. Enthusiastic and resourceful, Martov formed his own discussion group before making the acquaintance of Ulyanov and his associates; quickly he pointed out that the business of revolutionaries was not merely to think and to discuss or even to publish, but also to act. Martov laid before them a mode of operation which would give the learned Marxists of St Petersburg the chance to influence the nascent labour movement.