Lenin

The Practice and Theory of Revolution

James D. White

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781350317529
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Russian History
• Index: History

A political and intellectual biographical study of Lenin which focuses on those aspects of his thought and political activities that had a bearing on the accession of the Bolsheviks to power in Russia in 1917 and the creation of the Soviet state. The book places Lenin in the context of his times and shows his relationship to other socialist thinkers. In particular it locates Lenin within the development of Marxist thought in Russia. Its historiographical chapter reveals the political factors which influenced the way biographies of Lenin were written in the Soviet Union. The book makes extensive use of first-hand materials including sources from the Russian archives.

1

THE MAKING OF A REVOLUTIONARY

The Ulyanov family

Writing in 1927, Lenin’s sister Anna recalled that when she was four years old or thereabouts, in 1868 or 1869, her parents took her and her little brother Alexander on a steamer trip down the Volga from Nizhnii Novgorod to Astrakhan, the home of her father’s relations. She remembered the small two-storey house in which her grandmother and her uncle Vasilii lived, the warm welcome they received there, and the great fuss made over Alexander and herself. The trip stood out in Anna’s memory because it was the first and last visit ever paid by the Ulyanovs to the Astrakhan branch of the family.¹

When Anna visited Astrakhan her grandfather Nikolai Vasilevich Ulyanov (1768–1836) had been dead for over thirty years. He had started life called not Ulyanov but Ulyanin and as a serf in the village of Androsovo in the Nizhnii Novgorod province. It is possible that, while Nikolai belonged to the Orthodox faith, he might have been not a Russian but a Mordvinian or a Chuvash.

The village of Androsovo, like most peasant settlements of the time, would have been a self-contained community or mir, in which the heads of households met to decide collectively on how to divide and cultivate the land at their disposal, how to keep order, how to support those in need, and how to meet the obligations imposed on them by the landowner. Androsovo formed part of the estate of the landowner Stepan Brekhov, whose property embraced not just the village and the lands surrounding it but its peasant population as well. Nikolai Ulyanov was one of Stepan Brekhov’s possessions.

As a landowner, Stepan Brekhov might demand two types of service from his serfs. He might require them to provide the labour needed to cultivate his fields. This kind of labour service was known as barshchina. Or he might demand that the serfs provide his household with a variety of goods, such as agricultural produce or items of local handicraft manufacture. This payment in kind was known as obrok. In this way the estates could be largely self-sufficient with little need to buy goods on the open market. Nevertheless, the payment of obrok in money could be demanded, and in that case the landowner might hire his serfs out to work for another employer and was paid some of the wages they received. This is what Stepan Brekhov did, and in 1791 he hired Nikolai Ulyanov out to work on obrok down the Volga in the Astrakhan province. The move turned out to be a fortunate one for Nikolai, because by the terms of a decree issued by the Astrakhan authorities he was freed from serfdom in 1799. He then settled in the village of Novopavlovsk, where he eked out a living as a tailor. In 1803, having received the consent of the provincial governor, Nikolai was able to move to Astrakhan and become a townsman (meshchanin), enrolled in the tailors’ guild.²

In 1811 Nikolai married Anna Alexeevna Smirnova, a baptised Kalmyk, nineteen years younger than himself. The couple had four children, Ilya, Lenin’s father, being the youngest. Although Nikolai’s earnings were extremely modest, the family were able to acquire a two-storey house of their own, albeit in the poorest district of Astrakhan. Perhaps in keeping with his new status as a homeowner, Nikolai began to have his name entered on official documents no longer as ‘Ulyanin’, but as the more solid-sounding ‘Ulyanov’, the form subsequently used by the family.³

Nikolai Ulyanov died in 1836 when Ilya was only five, leaving the family to be supported by the 18-year-old elder son Vasilii. Vasilii found employment as a salesman with a commercial firm in Astrakhan and earned enough money to support his mother, his brother and his unmarried sister. At the cost of working hard all his life and denying himself an education and a family life of his own, he was able to send Ilya to school and then to see him through Kazan University.⁴

On the recommendation of his teacher at Kazan, the famous mathematician N. I. Lobachevskii, Ilya Ulyanov was appointed principal teacher of mathematics and physics at the Penza Nobles’ Institute. When the Institute was closed in 1863 he moved to Nizhnii Novgorod to become principal teacher of mathematics and physics at the high school there. Throughout his life Ilya remained grateful to his brother Vasilii for the education he had received, and Vasilii for his part was highly gratified by Ilya’s success. Seeing Ilya, when he came on a visit to Astrakhan with his pretty young wife and his two little children, it must have seemed that all the self-sacrifice and the hard work had been worthwhile.⁵

Ilya’s wife Mariya also came from a family that had come up in society in the course of a generation. Mariya’s grandfather, Moishi Blank, had been Jewish and lived in the village of Starokonstantinov near Zhitomir in the Ukrainian province of Volhynia. Moishi had been a truly remarkable man with an exceptionally cantankerous nature. Moishi did not get on with his neighbours in the local Jewish community and, in pursuit of his vendetta, reported them to the police for neglecting to say prayers for the tsar in the synagogue.

Moishi was not a popular man in Starokonstantinov, and when a fire broke out in the village in 1808, the Jewish community assumed that Moishi once again had started it as some kind of reprisal against them. They reported him to the police and Moishi was arrested and imprisoned. But when the case was brought to trial Moishi was cleared of all charges and was set free. He then claimed damages from the people who had signed the letter accusing him of arson. The court eventually found in Moishi’s favour, and in 1828 the movable and immovable property of Moishi’s accusers was sold off to raise the money to pay his damages.⁶

To distance himself further from his Jewish neighbours, Moishi took the Orthodox faith and was baptised with the name of Dmitrii. He had his two sons enter the Orthodox church as well, Israel taking the name Alexander and Abel taking the name Dmitry. The two boys were sent to the Russian school in Zhitomir, to be educated as Orthodox Russians. This, on the one hand, cut them off from their Jewish community, but, on the other, it opened up career prospects which would otherwise have been closed to them. In 1820 Alexander and Dmitry went to study medicine at the prestigious St Petersburg Medical–Surgical Academy from which they graduated in 1824.

In 1846 Moishi – now Dmitrii – Blank sent a long letter in Yiddish to Tsar Nicholas I offering him advice on how to deal with his Jewish subjects. There was, Moishi said, a great deal of animosity shown by the Jewish population of the Russian Empire towards Orthodox Christians like himself. But there was a simple means by which the Jews could be made to convert to Orthodoxy. Since the Jewish faith prohibited its adherents to milk cows, start fires and so on on the Sabbath, the Jews had to rely on the co-operation of their Orthodox neighbours to perform such tasks. It only required the government to ban this type of co-operation and the Jews would be starved into conversion. This policy, seemingly, was too extreme even for the ultra-conservative government of Nicholas I, and Moishi Blank’s scheme was not followed up.⁷

Between 1824 and 1832 Mariya’s father Alexander Blank (1799–1870) served as a police surgeon in St Petersburg, and thereafter as a medical practitioner for various public bodies and business concerns in the provinces. In 1829 he married Anna Johannovna Grosschopf (1801–40), the daughter of a German father and a Swedish mother. Alexander Blank had the theory that it was very beneficial for women to have many children, but Anna Grosschopf gave up the ghost after her fifth. She had one son and four daughters, her third daughter Mariya being Lenin’s future mother. The son, Dmitry, for a time studied in the faculty of law at Kazan University, but committed suicide in 1850 at the age of nineteen.⁸ It fell to Anna Grosschopf’s widowed sister Ekaterina von Essen to bring up the girls. She gave them an education which went well beyond that which daughters of the nobility traditionally received. She taught them German, French and English besides giving them piano lessons. The seriousness with which these studies were undertaken is indicated by the fact that in 1863 Mariya Blank was able to pass the examinations which qualified her as a teacher of Russian, French and German.⁹

The year after his wife died, Alexander Blank took up the post of inspector of the medical board in Perm and moved there with his family. For a short time he acted as the doctor for the Perm high school, where he befriended its Latin teacher Ivan Dmitrievich Veretennikov, who in 1850 married his eldest daughter Anna. Subsequently Veretennikov became inspector of the Perm Nobles’ Institute. It was on a visit to her married sister’s home in Perm that Mariya Blank met the mathematics teacher at the Institute, Ilya Ulyanov, her future husband. Teaching colleagues of Veretennikov’s, Alexander Ardashev, Iosif Lavrov and Andrei Zalezhskii, also provided spouses for the remaining three of Alexander Blank’s daughters.¹⁰

Alexander Blank took early retirement in 1847 and, in respect of his standing in the medical hierarchy, was granted hereditary nobility some years later. Just before his retirement he bought the estate of Kokushkino near Kazan. Blank’s social standing was enhanced considerably by this purchase, as he now entered the ranks of the landowning aristocracy and had become the owner of serfs, the traditional mark of wealth and substance in Russia. Unlike many landowners, however, Blank treated the peasants on his estate with compassion and consideration, holding clinics for them in the manor house. When Russia’s defeat in the Crimean War brought home to the government the need to modernise the country and strengthen it internationally, it was decided that serfdom should be abolished. To avoid the social upheaval that might result when the 22 million former serfs began to use their freedom to roam about the country, it was resolved to retain the peasant commune and to provide the peasants with at least a small allotment of land and the opportunity to purchase additional amounts by ‘redemption payments’ spread over 49 years.

Many landowners tried to cling on to as much land as possible, making use of the regulations allowing them to keep at least one- third of their former estates. This could be done at the expense of peasants’ allotments, and the portions of these ‘cut-offs’ (otrezki) tended to include the most fertile and valuable tracts of land. Their removal often left the peasants with less land to cultivate than they had had at their disposal before emancipation and caused them considerable hardship as a result. Alexander Blank, however, was not a landowner of this type, and when his serfs were liberated he gave them the maximum allotments of land allowed for in the 1861 Liberation Edict.¹¹

In retirement at Kokushkino Alexander Blank helped Ekaterina von Essen with the upbringing of his daughters. He saw to it that they understood the value of taking cold baths, avoiding tea and coffee, and of having numerous children when they got married. These injunctions were dutifully carried out, so that all five daughters had large families, each having something between six and ten children.¹² All of Alexander Blank’s daughters and their families congregated at Kokushkino during the summer holidays, so that the ex-doctor had to extend his house to accommodate the rapidly multiplying Veretennikovs, Ardashevs, Zalezhskiis, Ulyanovs and Lavrovs. Alexander Blank died in June 1870, having lived long enough to see his daughter Mariya’s second son Vladimir, the future Lenin, who had been born on 10 April of that year.

It is worth remarking that although the Ulyanov family was untypical of Russian families as a whole in the value it attached to educating the children, it was entirely typical of the families of Alexander Blank’s daughters. In these it was common for both boys and girls to go to university and enter the professions, usually schoolteaching, but also medicine and the law. The Veretennikov girls were especially notable for entering professions that were traditionally practised by men. Anna Veretennikova studied medicine at the St Petersburg Women’s Medical Institute and subsequently worked as a doctor in the Ufa province, being one of the first women doctors in Russia. She died, however, in 1888 when she was only 33, at Kokushkino. Her younger sister Ekaterina studied at the St Petersburg Bestuzhev Courses, becoming a schoolteacher in Simbirsk, before moving to St Petersburg and there opening first a primary school and a kindergarten and subsequently a high school for girls. In 1906 she was to open the Juridicial Higher Women’s Courses to prepare women for the legal profession. Ekaterina was supported in these endeavours by her husband, the influential liberal journalist Matvei Leontevich Peskovskii, who was to rally to the aid of the Ulyanov family when Alexander and Anna were arrested for their part in the attempted assassination of the tsar in 1887.¹³

By the time young Vladimir was born the Ulyanov family had moved from Nizhnii Novgorod to Simbirsk. After fourteen years as a schoolmaster Ilya Ulyanov had secured the post of inspector of primary schools for the Simbirsk province. This was a major challenge because the Simbirsk province was comparable in size to a small country, and in 1870 had a population of 1 million 300 thousand people, one-third of whom were Chuvash, Mordva or Tatars. There were – at least on paper – 460 primary schools, with an average of 21 pupils per school. But as Ilya soon discovered, some of these schools were fictitious, and of those that actually existed, most were of a very rudimentary nature and staffed by people with no proper teacher training. It was Ilya’s job to bring these schools up to standard and to increase educational provision in the province. Ilya threw himself into the task with enthusiasm and dedication, travelling around the primitive roads of the province in all weathers, being absent from home for months on end. In recognition of his services he was promoted in 1874 to director of primary education for the Simbirsk province, first with two assistants and then five.¹⁴

One of Ilya Ulyanov’s proudest achievements of this time was the part he had played in advancing teacher training in the province, in particular the establishment of the teachers’ training college in 1872 in the village of Poretsk, 100 miles from Simbirsk.¹⁵ The measure was to prove controversial, however, because the college was to be criticised by the more conservative representatives of the local clergy and the nobility for its emphasis on the natural sciences rather than religious instruction. It was feared that teachers produced by the college might spread subversive...