By April 1897 Ulyanov had learned that he was to be sent to the lakeside village of Shushenskoe in the Minusinsk district of Yenisei province.27 Delighted, he tried his hand at writing a poem about ‘Shu-shu-shu’ or ‘Shusha’, as he called Shushenskoe, before even seeing the place. The first line went as follows: ‘In Shusha, in the foothills of Mount Sayan…’28 But inspiration left him at this early point and he abandoned the attempt. Poetic expressiveness was anyway not his style. He was a passionate man, but his emotions were sublimated in ambitions of class struggle, economic analysis and Marxist ideology and were expressed in heavy, lumpy prose. He still loved literature, and yet increasingly he used it as an empirical source for his political ideas. He did not allow it to take him out of himself. He distrusted effusions of the imagination. He knew what he wanted to do in politics, and refused to be distracted.
But certainly Vladimir Ulyanov was looking forward to ‘Shusha’. The journey from Krasnoyarsk would be a pleasant adventure, involving a four-day trip by steamship southward along the river Yenisei to Minusinsk from Krasnoyarsk. Minusinsk was a district capital of 15,000 inhabitants, and it would be from there that the main decisions affecting the conditions of exile for Ulyanov would be taken. He was already far beyond the direct supervision of the St Petersburg ministerial authorities. On 30 April 1897, once navigation became practical after the raging springtime floods had subsided, he set off on the steamship St Nicholas.29 He was in congenial company. Travelling along with him were Gleb Krzhizhanovski and V. V. Starkov, friends from the St Petersburg Union of Struggle. They, too, petitioned about their ill health and had been allocated a village near to Shushenskoe. They took a cabin on board and, from the middle of the rushing Yenisei, admired the vista of mountains and woods. On reaching Minusinsk, the three comrades formally requested the monthly stipend of eight rubles to which each of them was entitled. This would be enough for an individual’s rudimentary needs: food, clothes and rented accommodation. Then they hired a carriage and horses to undertake the last stage of the journey. For Ulyanov, this meant a drive of nearly forty miles to his destination.
The village of Shushenskoe had over a thousand inhabitants and its own administration. The post from Russia was delivered on Thursdays and Mondays, and in an emergency it was possible for the Ulyanov family to send a telegram to Minusinsk.30 The river Shush ran along the outskirts of the village. There were woods in the vicinity and Ulyanov went bathing in an inlet of the great Yenisei river a mile from his house. He could look out of his window and see the snowy peaks of the Sayan mountain range. The food was cheap and nourishing and Ulyanov ceased to need to drink the bottles of mineral water he had brought with him on doctor’s advice. Soon he wrote to his mother: ‘Everyone’s found that I’ve grown fat over the summer, got a tan and now look completely like a Siberian. That’s hunting and the life of the countryside for you!’31
Martov was sent to Turukhansk just south of the Arctic Circle, probably because the authorities knew he was Jewish. Turukhansk would be extremely cold during the long winter and the mail would be delivered to him only nine times a year. Isolation and bickering among comrades were problems that would test Martov’s endurance. Ulyanov missed him a lot. Martov had an inspiring levity, and Ulyanov had already decided he wanted to work closely with him – and, apart from anything else, Martov loved to translate and teach others to sing revolutionary songs: in exile they would have had fun together. Instead Martov had to endure the worst conditions of exile with equanimity. Physical hardship was not the only problem for the exiles. Cut off from normal society in Russia, several of them became preoccupied by their own political disagreements and personal jealousies. Bickering sometimes became intolerably intense. Ulyanov’s correspondent Nikolai Fedoseev, who had been dispatched from his Vladimir prison to Verkholensk in north-eastern Siberia in 1897, could not endure the slanders heaped on him by some fellow exiles, and shot himself.32
The dark side of Siberian banishment did not touch Ulyanov, and it was in Shushenskoe that his skills as a leader were first glimpsed. Although he had striven to get the most comfortable conditions for himself, he did not forget the plight of his comrades, and did what he could for them by writing letters of encouragement to Martov, Fedoseev and others. Ulyanov also regularised his life in relation to women. At least this is how things appeared in his letter to the Police Department in St Petersburg on 8 January 1898, in which he appealed for permission for his ‘fiancée’ Nadezhda Krupskaya to move to Shushenskoe.33 Permission was virtually automatic even though Krupskaya had been sentenced to exile in Ufa, a town lying between the river Volga and the Urals mountain range. As Vladimir informed his mother, the plan was to use the projected engagement as a means of getting her transferred to mid-Siberia. The various activists wished to serve out their sentences in proximity.
The question arises whether there was much more to this than political calculation. It was Nadezhda Konstantinovna who had suggested herself as his fiancée when he moved into Siberian exile. According to Anna Ilinichna, Vladimir turned her down.34 At least at first. Later – perhaps at the end of 1897 – he changed his mind and became engaged to her. Yet she was not the sole woman with whom he was friends. For example, he and Apollonaria Yakubova (or Kubochka as he called her) had had a liking for each other. As he walked from the St Petersburg House of Detention, Yakubova ‘ran up and kissed him, laughing and crying at the same time’.35 Yakubova was a beautiful woman and a committed revolutionary, and Vladimir Ilich may have preferred her to Nadezhda Konstantinovna as his companion. There is a hint of this in an unpublished section of Anna Ilinichna’s memoirs. After Yakubova had left him, he declared ‘with great tenderness: “Ye-e-es, Kubochka!”’36 What are we to make of this tantalising passage? Certainly there is no sign whatever in Anna Ilinichna’s memoirs that Vladimir Ilich was attracted to Nadezhda Konstantinovna. But Anna Ilinichna was often spiteful about Nadezhda Konstantinovna and she was perhaps distorting the relative appeal of Lenin’s two female comrades.
Ulyanov’s motives in deciding to get married are not entirely clear. When he wrote to his mother on 10 December 1897, he implied that Nadezhda Konstantinovna had not definitively opted to apply to join him in his place of exile.37 Maria Ilinichna many years later gave a cool account: ‘She made her request to join V.I. [Ulyanov] as his fiancée and they had to get married or else N.K. [Krupskaya] would quickly have been returned to Ufa province, where she had originally been sentenced to stay in exile.’38 Maria Ilinichna, like her elder sister, played down the mutual attraction of Vladimir and his future bride. Not even Maria, however, denied that affection too was involved.
Several accounts have taken an almost prurient delight in the fact that the relationship was so tepid at the start; they use this to suggest that Lenin was emotionally inert. But recently available evidence shows this to be reflection of the cultural prejudice. The point is that romantic love, where a man and a woman fall passionately in love, was not a condition to which either Vladimir or Nadezhda aspired. Both wrote little about their feelings for each other; but after Vladimir’s death Nadezhda wrote a furious letter in 1927 to Bolshevik party historian Vladimir Sorin about the kind of relationships that had enjoyed approval among Marxist revolutionaries of their generation. She strenuously opposed Sorin’s suggestion that such revolutionaries fell ‘helplessly in love’ with each other. They consciously rejected contemporary bourgeois attitudes to matters of the heart and instead aimed to construct a new way of life – and they supposed that their own relationship should be focussed upon working collaboratively for the cause of Revolution. For them, the idea of a permanent marital union had distasteful connotations: tradition, religion, economic self-interest and the subjection of the wife to the husband. Russian Marxists, as Nadezhda pointed out, were keener than their counterparts elsewhere in Europe to form loose partnerships for the greater good of the cause. They were influenced by the revolutionary commune described in Nikolai Chernyshevski’s What Is to Be Done? and by the anti-b
ourgeois philosophy of Dmitri Pisarev.39 Krupskaya did not explicitly describe the feelings that she and Lenin had had for each other, but the hint is unmistakable: the two of them liked and fancied each other enough and thought that for the foreseeable future they could work with each other.
Nadezhda Konstantinovna, furthermore, was physically attractive even though no one could claim she was a beauty. Her face had a good bone structure. She was a couple of inches taller than Vladimir and was a year older. She dressed in rather dull clothes; her hair was plainly combed. She dressed like a typical contemporary schoolmistress (which, if she had not become a Marxist activist, would probably have been her career). Her family had gentry status but was not as comfortably off as the Ulyanovs. Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s father had got into trouble as an Imperial army officer: he had been found insufficiently severe on Polish dissenters after the 1863 Rebellion and had been cashiered. Thereafter he had taken whatever jobs came to hand, including work as an insurance agent. Nadezhda Konstantinovna’s mother had written children’s books in order to supplement the family’s uncertain income.40 The three of them moved frequently from place to place, but always the parents ensured that the daughter attended the local gimnazia. Nadezhda learned to cope with adverse circumstances and to be cheerful about it. She grew up to be a serious young women; at the age of eighteen she wrote to the novelist Lev Tolstoi asking to be allowed to work on his project for the translation of foreign classics.41
On coming to St Petersburg, however, she had become associated with students who rejected Tolstoi for his pacifism and his Christianity, and steadily she too had turned to ideas of Marxist revolution. She had few leisure pursuits outside Russian literature and the learning of foreign languages. She dedicated herself to becoming a revolutionary. More than anything else, this is what attracted Ulyanov to her. ‘He could never have loved a woman’, she recalled, ‘with whose opinions he disagreed and who was not a comrade in his work.’42 To a much greater extent than he, moreover, she had worked among ordinary labouring people. At Sunday schools and at evening classes she had given courses on reading and writing as well as Marxism, and she had a grasp of contemporary pedagogical theory. She was also a person of tact. Vladimir was moody and volatile and liked to get his way with other people, and anyone who became his wife would need to be patient. Nadezhda, according to nearly everyone who wrote about her, had these qualities in abundance.
Vladimir was not the only Ulyanov to suffer at the hands of the Ministry of the Interior. Dmitri was expelled from Moscow University in 1897 for involvement in the revolutionary movement; he was arrested and banished to Tula. Then the authorities arrested Vladimir’s sister Maria for revolutionary activity and banished her to Nizhni Novgorod.43 Their mother Maria Alexandrovna divided her time between Nizhni Novgorod and Tula. Soon she got permission for Dmitri to serve out his sentence in the family’s newly rented house in the little town of Podolsk on the Kursk Railway twenty-five miles south of Moscow, where her daughter Maria eventually joined them.44
The move to Podolsk, in spring 1898, was occasioned by the fact that Mark Yelizarov, Anna Ilinichna’s husband, had a post in the accountancy department of the Kursk Railway and needed to live locally – and his post had the advantage of offering free travel not only for himself but also for his wife and mother-in-law.45 Around Podolsk, with its four thousand inhabitants, there were forests and lakes. It was a wonderful spot, where Maria Alexandrovna hoped to stabilise herself mentally. Her ‘nerves’ were troubling her and she sought help from a medical specialist. She had also been suffering from a stomach ailment. One of the doctor’s questions was whether she had suffered recent ‘spiritual disturbances’. A more tactless enquiry is hard to imagine. Maria Alexandrovna’s husband had died prematurely. Her eldest son had been hanged. Three other children had been arrested, and one of them – Vladimir – was exiled in distant eastern Siberia. She had long since stopped dreaming that her family would continue along the normal paths of their professional careers. Each year seemed to bring a fresh crop of trouble to the Ulyanovs. No wonder Maria Alexandrovna showed signs of strain.
Meanwhile Nadezhda Krupskaya had asked permission to go to Shushenskoe. Before she departed for exile, she was not looking at all well. Her code name among revolutionaries was ‘Fish’. This was hardly a flattering designation for anyone, and in her case it probably referred to the incipient bulging of her eyes as a result of a goitre caused by Graves’s disease. Among the symptoms is a tendency for the neck to swell and the eyes to protrude. Anna Ilinichna, catching sight of Nadezhda before she departed for Siberia, said with cruel accuracy that she looked a bit like a herring.46
Already Nadezhda had negotiated the publication of her fiancé’s Economic Studies and Articles and acquired a commission for him to translate Sidney and Beatrice Webb on English trade unionism. The publishers, she explained to Maria Alexandrovna, had said that ‘even if Volodya has a poor knowledge of English, there is no problem since it’s possible to use the German translation and only check it against the [original] English book’. Nadezhda saw that Volodya needed someone near to him who could help to organise him. For example, he required money; but it took Nadezhda to obtain the commission for the Webbs’ book’s translation. She also made all the arrangements for herself and her mother Yelizaveta Vasilevna Krupskaya to leave Moscow along the Trans-Siberian Railway. Clothes, books, finance, official forms and food had to be put in order before they started. Then they made the long trip by train, steamer and carriage to join up with Volodya. On arrival in Shushenskoe in May 1898, furthermore, she tried to get him to take up new interests. She liked to go hunting for mushrooms; at first Volodya demurred, but soon mushroom-gathering became an obsession for him. ‘You can’t drag him out of the wood,’ Nadezhda reported to his mother. ‘We’re planning to arrange a garden for next year. Volodya has already contracted to dig out the vegetable beds.’47
Yet mainly it was Nadya, as he called her, who had to adjust herself to Volodya. Among her tasks before coming out to Shushenskoe was the purchase of the various books and journals he needed to complete the work. She also needed to get used to his passion for walking. While she liked to stay at her desk on Sundays, he customarily took a stroll. Nadya trained herself to accompany him.48 And in particular she had to learn how to handle his family. Anna Ilinichna plainly resented the intrusion of another woman into the family; she reproached her sister-in-law for writing frivolous letters and rudely surmised that Nadya was allowing Volodya to edit letters before dispatch. Nadya admitted to showing him such correspondence, but she stated that this was normal between man and wife. When Anna then moaned that he sometimes omitted to say that Nadya had asked him to pass on her respectful best wishes, Nadya replied that this was only because Volodya took it for granted that the Ulyanovs knew that she constantly wished them well.49 With almost superhuman patience, Nadya declined to comment on Anna’s failure to implicate Volodya himself in any breach of good manners.
Thus she was adopting a subordinate role to her husband. Discerning that his equanimity depended on her maintenance of at least half-decent relations with Anna, she bit her tongue. She would bite it again many times in the future since already she shared the reverence shown towards him by Anna Ilinichna and Maria Ilinichna. All three of them thought him a person of unique intellectual and political potential. They wanted to help him and serve him – and he was only too pleased to encourage them in their wish.
At Shushenskoe, Volodya was already living in some comfort and had prepared for the arrival of his prospective wife and mother-in-law by renting a larger house than his first one and employing a fifteen-year-old serving girl. He had allotted himself a study room, where he put his large collection of books as they arrived in packages from Russia. He also kept a photograph album containing pictures of his heroes. Among the heroes were the political prisoners sent out to hard-labour penal colonies in Siberia, a fate that he had escaped. He continued in particular to treasure the memory of Chernyshevski and b
y now had not one but two photographs of him in his album.50 Although Volodya Ulyanov professed a dislike for sentimentality in politics, he had a distinctly emotional attachment to certain political figures and to the revolutionary vocation. Not everything about this man conformed to the impression he tried to give. Like many other people, he needed heroes and to have a visual keepsake of them to hand. As yet none of his heroes had let him down, but it was to prove traumatic for him in later life when any of them in any way disappointed him.
There were also practical matters on his mind. He had heard from Moscow that his mother wished to sell the Kokushkino estate in Samara province. No one in the Ulyanov family lived there now, and Volodya’s arrest and exile made it sensible for Maria Alexandrovna to liquefy her financial assets. She decided to rent a house. Normally she would have turned to her son Volodya for help since he had had legal training. But luckily Mark Yelizarov, Anna Ilinichna’s husband, had professional experience as an insurance agent, and he advised on the sale of Kokushkino at an advantageous price. While handling this deal on behalf of his in-laws, Mark showed his solicitude for Volodya’s feelings by going through the formality of passing on details of the proposed transaction to him as the eldest male offspring; he also wished to send the Kokushkino estate dog to Volodya when the deal was at last done, but Volodya politely refused: he had already acquired his own Irish setter Zhenka in Siberia – and anyway it would be extravagant to send an unchaperoned dog from the Volga to mid-Siberia.51
Yet Volodya did not deny himself the country gentleman’s lifestyle. Thus he gladly accepted his brother Dmitri’s present of a Belgian two-barrelled rifle.52 Hunting for hare, rabbit and fox had become a passion; he also went across to the river Yenisei and fished. In the winter he skated and Nadya thought him rather too showy on the ice with his ‘Spanish leaps’ and his style of ‘strutting like a chicken’. But she admired his physical zest. When Vladimir got together with Krzhizhanovski, a much bigger man, they would sometimes have a wrestling contest. Both were among the small number of revolutionary activists who took an interest in bodily fitness. His ‘nerves’ were relaxed for the duration of his stay in Siberia and his stomach problems vanished. The fresh air and the healthier diet raised the spirits of those Union of Struggle members who had wangled themselves residence in the Minusinsk district. ‘Siberian Italy’ was everything they had hoped for.
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