There were, of course, unpleasant sides to exile even in this coveted district. Detainees had to ask permission to visit each other. Occasionally they had to send back to Russia for items of clothing that could not be obtained locally. Thus Volodya asked his mother for a good-quality straw hat for the summer and a leather coat for the winter. Hardmuth No. 6 pencils were the object of another request. (He quickly wore out the first ones sent to him.) Yet material inadequacies were not the main problem. Much more irritating were the local insects. The east Siberian mosquito was amazingly aggressive. After he made a net to cover his head, the mosquitoes simply attacked his hands at night. Volodya asked for kidskin gloves to be sent to him: ‘Gleb [Krzhizhanovski] assures me that the local mosquitoes chew through gloves, but I don’t believe him. Of course, the appropriate sort of glove needs to be chosen – not for dances but for mosquitoes.’53 Alas, the historical record does not tell us who was right, Ulyanov or Krzhizhanovski, in their heated discussion about the glove-chewing propensities of the east Siberian mosquito.
Not long after Nadya’s arrival in Shushenskoe, preparations for the wedding began. Volodya appreciated the more settled environment that Nadya and her mother brought about and went some way to befriend Yelizaveta Vasilevna and complimented her on her cooking.54 Ill-advisedly, however, he expressed his satisfaction with a goose she had roasted and remarked on the leanness of the flesh. Yelizaveta Vasilevna was annoyed since the bird on the dish was not a goose but a grouse. But perhaps, on reflection, she recognised that he was trying to be nice to her.
As the wedding day approached, a letter arrived from Anna Ilinichna asking for invitations to be sent to the Ulyanov family. Vladimir was exasperated:55
Anyuta [Anna’s diminutive name] is asking when the wedding’s going to be and even whom ‘are we inviting’!? She’s running ahead of things! For a start Nadezhda Konstantinovna must arrive here and then the administration has to give permission for the wedding – we are completely without rights as people. That’s what ‘invitations’ amount to here!
He denied being inhospitable, claiming to want the Ulyanovs to come to Shushenskoe for the ceremony.56 Although he relayed the concern expressed by Nadya’s mother Yelizaveta Vasilevna that the journey might prove too tiring for his mother, for his own part he suggested that this might not be the case if she bought at least a second-class rail ticket.57 Obviously he was distancing himself from a direct attempt to dissuade his mother from coming. This was in June 1898. In the same month he formally asked permission from the state authorities to wed his fiancée. A pair of copper rings had been hammered out for the couple by a Finnish fellow exile, Oskari Engberg. On 10 July 1898, they were married by Father Orest in the Peter-Paul Church in the village.58
Volodya’s excuse for haste was that the authorities would otherwise exile Nadya to Ufa province. Really he did not want a grand family wedding, but aimed to set himself up on his own terms. He let his new wife write letters to his family, and her tactful, friendly words relieved him of this obligation. Poor Nadya did not have an easy job. The Ulyanovs made it plain that her duty was to produce an Ulyanov of the next generation. She wrote back to her mother-in-law, barely eight months after the marriage, stating: ‘As regards my health, I’m completely healthy, but as regards the arrival of a little bird, there unfortunately things are bad; there is no sign of a little bird planning to come.’59 The ‘little bird’ was the hoped-for pregnancy. Nadya and Volodya always wanted to have children and it was Nadya who reported to her relatives about the lack of progress in this aspect of their marital life. She was accepting a submissive role from the start. She was expected to provide a child and Volodya did nothing to assuage her sense of guilt or protect her from the implied demands of the Ulyanov family.
Volodya’s pressing wish was to write and publish books. He was drafting The Development of Capitalism in Russia. In August 1898 he finished the text with its references to over five hundred books and articles. He asked his Minusinsk co-exiles for their criticisms of the chapters; he did not yet have his later confidence that enabled him to present his books to the world without such consultation.
The snag was that he was not an established author. Indeed he even considered arranging for the book to be printed independently. Pëtr Struve suggested dividing up the text and printing it in the form of journal articles. But Ulyanov wanted to have one last try at getting a contract with a commercial publisher. His thoughts turned to M. I. Vodovozova.60 Her small St Petersburg press had a tradition of publishing Marxist literature. Volodya asked Anna Ilinichna to explore the possibilities. He laid down conditions for the negotiation, but while encouraging his sister to obtain the maximum of royalties he confessed that ‘there’s no reason to hurry about the receipt of the money’.61 His greater concern was that the book should be decently produced with a clear typeface, neat statistical tables and no misprints. He expressed the desire, too, that publication should be swift and the print-run large. An agreement was signed for 2,400 copies to be published for the first edition and for Vodovozova to guarantee royalties sufficient for him to purchase the specialist literature he needed from Alexandra Kalmykova’s St Petersburg bookshop.
He published The Development of Capitalism in Russia, under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilin since he was a known revolutionary and wanted to evade problems with the official censorship. The erudition was considerable; the direct political commentary was kept to the barest minimum and the style was austere. But ‘Vladimir Ilin’ intended the book as a provocation. He had assembled a case that was extreme in its interpretation, and he knew it. But at the same time he expected the book to affirm his status as a major expert on contemporary economic trends. On Marxist philosophical and political theory he confessed his lack of education; and he admitted, for instance, that he had yet to read Immanuel Kant.62 But on the economy he felt he already knew his stuff.
The contents of the book covered the entire Imperial economy. It is worth looking at his argument not least because he used it to justify much of his later political orientation. Generally he repeated the tenets of Georgi Plekhanov. But he gave them a peculiar twist. Plekhanov had maintained that several trends among the better-off peasants indicated that capitalism was on the rise: the renting and buying of land; the hiring of labour; and the introduction of up-to-date agricultural equipment. Ulyanov went much further. Not only did he assert that capitalism in the countryside was already in an advanced stage of development. He also claimed that the better-off peasants – whom he labelled the rural ‘bourgeoisie’ – were so effective as farmers that their need for machinery, fertilisers and other such products could and did provide the main market for industrial companies across the Russian Empire. In its turn the manufacturing sector of industry was stimulating output in the mining sector – and this perforce required the support of the financial sector. Transport and communications had to be built up to cope with such demands. According to Ulyanov, the agricultural sector of the economy was not to be regarded as an auxiliary component but as the very motor of Russian capitalist development.
There were social ramifications to his analysis. In particular, the centuries-old category of ‘the peasantry’ could no longer be applied ‘scientifically’. Most peasants had become ‘proletarians’, who had no land or equipment and who existed by selling their labour in a capitalist market. A small minority of the peasantry was rich – and Ulyanov designated them as ‘bourgeois’, as rural capitalists, as kulaki (or ‘fists’, because they held their respective villages in their tight grasp). An intermediate group, the serednyaki, were about to be distributed between the vast proletariat and the small but dominant kulaki. Thus the agrarian-socialist notions of the solidarity and egalitarianism of the peasantry were poppycock. The Russian Empire’s immediate prospect was the maturation of an already robust capitalism in town and countryside.
Tucked into this analysis was a side-assault on non-Marxist economic theories current in Russia. Ulyanov felt he had demonstrated, for instance
, that the possession of overseas colonies was not a prerequisite of capitalist development. He had also shown that this development was not crucially dependent upon foreign investment and entrepreneurship. Russia, he declared, was generating its own transformation on the basis of its own resources. Furthermore, his exposition dwelt upon the need to take account of the regional concentrations of capitalist development: Petersburg and Warsaw had metallurgy; the Moscow area had textile factories; the Don Basin had coalmines and Baku had oil. Intensive grain cultivation was occurring in Ukraine and southern Russia. Dairy output was growing in western Siberia and in the Baltic region. While backward regions continued to exist, there were many regions of highly effective economic development, development that would soon bring about the transformation of traditional Russia into a country able to rival the advanced capitalist West. Ulyanov derided those economic commentators who argued that Russian material progress was entering a cul-de-sac. Russia, having started upon the capitalist road, would unerringly follow it entirely in accordance with the laws of economic development.
Yet The Development of Capitalism in Russia, for all its quirkiness, was a tour de force. Ulyanov had the ability to drive an analysis to the most extreme conclusion and to fuel it exclusively with data that corroborated his analysis. To those who thought about politics it was evident what he was up to. If Russia was already a capitalist country, then the time was long overdue for the removal of the Romanov monarchy. A capitalist country needed political democracy and general civic rights. Tsarism was obsolete. Furthermore, the advanced condition of Russian capitalism meant that it would not be long after the ‘bourgeois-democratic revolution’ against the Romanovs that a second, even deeper revolution could be attempted: socialist revolution. Ulyanov had issued an economic treatise which, he hoped, would attract thousands of converts to the Marxist cause in Russia.
One of his purposes was to demonstrate that Russian Marxists could share in the European socialist dream. What was being done in Germany today, he convinced himself, could be undertaken in Russia tomorrow. Even in exile, therefore, he scanned the available journals for information about Germany. After Engels’s death in 1895, Ulyanov’s hero in the German Social-Democratic Party was the theorist Karl Kautsky. Like Ulyanov, Kautsky wrote not only on economics but also on politics and philosophy. He took ‘theory’ seriously. He wanted a socialism with ‘scientific foundations’. He wanted systematic knowledge and systematic policy, and he saw himself as the posthumous defender of the legacy of Marx and Engels. Kautsky was a man after Ulyanov’s own heart. Ulyanov warmed in particular to his defence of Marx and Engels against the attempt by Eduard Bernstein, who had been a collaborator of Engels himself, to ‘revise’ certain key concepts of Marxism. Bernstein denied that advanced capitalist society was divided mainly between two social classes, the bourgeoisie and the proletariat. He disliked revolution, preferring evolution and peaceful reforms, and he believed that socialism would be impossible to construct if it depended upon capitalism bringing the economy to ruin beforehand. For both Kautsky and Ulyanov, Bernstein’s revisionism was a betrayal of the tenets of Marxism.63
Ulyanov was dismayed that this revisionism was not confined to Germany. It was also happening in Russia. In summer 1899 a document written by two Russian Marxist emigrants, S. N. Prokopovich and Yekaterina Kuskova, was passed on to Minusinsk by Anna Ilinichna for her brother’s scrutiny. In a casual aside she referred to it as the ‘Credo’. Prokopovich and Kuskova, drawing upon the experience of the labour movement in western Europe, contended that Russian workers – the poor and ill-educated workers of Russia – should not be encouraged to engage in revolutionary politics but should focus their efforts upon the immediate improvement of their working and living conditions. Plekhanov and his Emancipation of Labour Group were appalled by the document, which rejected not only the leading role of the working class in the overthrow of the Romanov monarchy but even politics altogether. Plekhanov denounced Prokopovich and Kuskova as renegades from Marxism. Ulyanov was even more ferocious. Anna Ilinichna’s unofficial designation of the document as the ‘Credo’ made it seem to be more important than it really was – and she regretted the fuss she had inadvertently created.64 Meanwhile her brother summoned sixteen exiled St Petersburg Union of Struggle members to Shushenskoe, and got their approval for a point-by-point repudiation of everything which the ‘Credo’ stood for.
Ulyanov’s anger over revisionism made even his sister Anna wonder whether he might have lost a sense of proportion. Once he had finished the text of The Development of Capitalism, he longed to return to the active revolutionary fray. The three years of his exile were scheduled to end at the beginning of 1900. In the meantime he published five reviews in 1899 in substantial St Petersburg journals, including one on Kautsky’s The Agrarian Question. His attack on Bernstein was also printed. He contributed a learned article on ‘The Theory of Realisation’ to issue no. 8 of the periodical the Scientific Review. Gradually the Shushenskoe author was becoming a public figure. His years in exile had allowed him to expand his cultural range. He had studied Marx, Engels and Kautsky. He had looked at Western non-socialist economic thinkers such as Hobson, List and Sismondi. He had taken a look at neo-Kantian philosophy (and quickly rejected it, on the ground that it abandoned the materialist standpoint of Marxism). He had gone on reading the writings of the Russian agrarian socialists and gone on ridiculing them on every possible occasion; and he had started to be vituperative about any Marxist who dared to propose major amendments to the version of Marxism elaborated by Plekhanov.
Yet he had to wait upon dispositions of the Ministry of the Interior. Nadya had not served her full term of exile and would have to proceed to Ufa (which was the place originally designated in her case). Nor was it clear what restrictions the Ministry might put upon Ulyanov’s freedom of residence. He found the tension difficult to bear; his ‘nerves’ started to play him up and he stopped eating sensibly.65 For most of his time in Shushenskoe he had taken plenty of exercise and acquired a ruddy complexion. Latterly, however, he grew pale and thin.
By 19 January 1900 he had at least been informed that he would be leaving Siberia. They loaded their books – all 500 pounds of them – into a trunk. They worried most about the first stage of the trip to Achinsk. The journey from Shushenskoe would have to be undertaken in a roofless carriage in temperatures that could easily be more than 30 degrees below zero. The fact that Nadya’s mother was already coughing badly was a cause for concern.66 But no one thought of delaying until the more clement weather of springtime. On 29 January they set off as best they could. By then Volodya had heard that he was banned from residing in St Petersburg, Moscow or any town with a university or a large industrial area. Nadya and he were going to split up for the duration of her sentence. Whereas she had come to support him in Shushenskoe, he had no intention of reciprocating in Ufa, seven hundred miles east of Moscow. Revolution, not romance, was his preoccupation and he chose Pskov, 170 miles by train from St Petersburg, as his place of exile.67 He would stay a day or two in Ufa to see that his wife and mother-in-law were settled properly before he moved on.
His destination was Podolsk, in the countryside south of Moscow, where his family awaited him. His mother and his elder sister were shocked by his physical appearance:68
First came the impression of disillusionment with his external appearance: thin and with a beard that he had allowed to grow [unacceptably? RS] long, he mounted the staircase. Mother was the most disillusioned. ‘How on earth’, she exclaimed, ‘did you write that you’d sorted yourself out and got fit in exile?’
It turned out that my brother really had sorted himself out in exile but had ‘given up’ in the last few weeks.
In his thirtieth year he was reaching new heights of achievement and acclaim. The Brockhaus-Efron Encyclopaedic Dictionary, which appeared in St Petersburg in 1900, included a brief entry on him as an economist. He was rising fast. He was not yet Lenin in the literal sense because he had not used that
particular pseudonym. But in other ways he was Lenin already. He was fiercely Marxist. He retained an enduring respect for the Russian terrorist tradition. He was a man of letters and his revolutionary expectancy was found more upon bookish study than upon direct acquaintance with the working class of Russia. But his confidence in Marxism was total. It stemmed from intellectual conviction. It also conformed to the needs and aspirations that had been created in him before ever he read Marx, Engels and Plekhanov. His parents were committed to Progress, Rationality and Enlightenment and to the making of a new, ‘European’ Russia. They did not quite fully gain social acceptance; and when Alexander Ulyanov was convicted of terrorism, they were treated as pariahs. Vladimir Ulyanov was deeply imprinted by this experience. Having been rejected by the powers of Old Russia, which he identified with ‘Asiatic’, ‘medieval’ and ignorant repressiveness, he yearned to have his revenge by playing his role – increasingly a leading role – in the making of Revolution.
As a child he had striven to get his own way. He needed help, and used his family and his young wife as a crucial means of keeping support. He was not the fittest of men; and although he showed no outward signs of self-doubt, he suffered badly from nerves and other ailments. He was choleric and volatile. He was punctilious, self-disciplined and purposive. He was awesomely unsentimental; his ability to overlook the immediate sufferings of humanity was already highly developed. But at his core he had his own deep emotional attachments. They were attachments not to people he lived with but to people who had moulded his political opinions: Marx, Alexander Ulyanov, Chernyshevski and the Russian socialist terrorists. He had peculiar ideas of his own. But he aggressively presented them as the purest orthodoxy. He had yet to mature as a political leader. But a leader he already was. He was determined to waste no more time in furthering the cause of Revolution.
Lenin: A Biography Page 17