Lenin: A Revolutionary Life (4 page)

What characteristics can we discern? What kind of life did Lenin lead? Paradoxically, the most accurate way to describe his way of life at this moment would be to say that he led the life of a gentleman, in the sense that he did not have to earn a living but lived on inherited family money and rents, but a gentleman with radical tendencies. His awakening political sense brought him to dabble increasingly in radical circles but, as yet, he was far from being what he later described as a professional revolutionary. In fact, he seems to have engaged on a massive programme of self-education, formal and informal. The formal side led to superb results in his law degree. The informal side built up a massive curiosity about the world, about society and about the state of knowledge of that epoch. He became a voracious reader and we will examine the results in due course. Before that, there are a number of points we can make about Lenin’s developing personality.

In 1886–8 the young Volodya had received a number of severe jolts, each of which would certainly be called ‘traumatic’ today. In January 1886 his father had died unexpectedly of a brain haemorrhage. Following that there was Alexander’s arrest in March 1887, followed by his execution two months later. Consider this conjuncture in Volodya’s life. On 17 May 1887 he began his final school exams which continued until mid-June. Three days later Alexander was hanged. In the harsh climate of the nineteenth century no concession was made for private grief. Today, all kinds of representations would have been made and postponements organized. This was not open to Volodya Ulyanov. Instead, he had to deal with his emotions and get on with his exams, which he did with great success. The experience did not appear to have fundamentally altered his personality in the direction of bitterness or cynicism, which would have been quite understandable in the circumstances. Lenin did claim later that it was in 1886 that he broke with religion and became a confirmed atheist – no halfway measures even for the young Lenin – but, otherwise, he remained much the same person he had been before in terms of his character. Despite the trauma, at the end of the exam period he was, as we have already seen, awarded a gold medal, the first of several significant intellectual achievements.

Sadly Volodya’s triumph over adversity was not the happy ending to his troubles. His acceptance and then expulsion from Kazan University was next in line and there were, as we shall see, further personal blows to be suffered a little further ahead. However, Lenin’s development continued to be extraordinarily normal from the point of view of personality, though exceptional in the sense he was drawn more and more onto the path of revolution.

It was not, however, inevitable that Volodya/Lenin should have become a revolutionary. Exclusion from university was followed by police surveillance and a refusal of permission to travel abroad or, indeed, to Moscow or St Petersburg. For the next few years Lenin was trapped in the provinces and, for long periods of time, in the countryside. His uncle’s estate at Kokushkino was replaced, in 1889, by a small estate inherited by his mother at Alakaevka, near Samara. For two years the only city in which he spent any time was Kazan. It appears that his mother harboured hopes that she might persuade her son to become a farmer. Volodya certainly spent time working on the Alakaevka estate but his recorded reason for not taking up the rural way of life is interesting. According to Krupskaya, he commented later that ‘My mother would have liked me to have taken up farming. I started but soon realized that things were not going right. Relations with the peasants were abnormal.’ [Krupskaya 35] What did Lenin mean? Most probably, he was complaining that it was impossible to have free and equal relations – person to person – with the peasants. It was already almost half a century since Turgenev had fallen foul of the authorities over his
Sportsman’s Sketches
, which suggested the peasants were human beings too, but, for Lenin, relations between peasants and gentry remained strained. What a difference it would have made to the world had Volodya become a farmer and Lenin would never have been heard of!

It is also a rare, indirect admission by Lenin of the significance of his nominally noble and landowning status. In cold-war historiographies, and in some more recent ones, critics of Lenin have made a great deal of his landowner status and inherited title to infer that he was an aristocrat in the western sense. However, this really shows a profound misunderstanding of the situation. In Russia, titles, like that of Lenin’s father, were given for state service, for being promoted as a civil servant. This was a long way from the life of the true aristocratic elite chronicled by, for example, Tolstoy in
Anna Karenina
. Lenin’s sisters were not presented at grand balls, nor were they courted by devil-may-care army officers. Their way of life was, as we have seen, privileged but much more modest than that of the aristocracy. Lenin was not above occasionally using his title and status, especially when appealing to the authorities for permission to move out of the provinces, but it never amounted to very much. Lenin’s upbringing was more akin to that of the comfortable middle class rather than the aristocracy.

If Volodya was not cut out for farming the same is not true of his other career near-miss, the law. In 1890 and 1891 the pace of his qualification as a lawyer speeded up. He was granted permission to visit St Petersburg to take his exams as an external student. He took his first exams in September 1890, intermediates in April–May 1891 and his finals in autumn 1891. In his finals he obtained first place with excellent marks and was awarded a first-class degree in law in January 1892. This has to be seen as a stupendous achievement for someone who never attended a regular class or course of lectures. Once again, it showed the developing intelligence and capabilities of Lenin’s mind.

He was not, however, much interested in putting those mental qualities to use in a law career. He was employed fitfully as an assistant in a legal practice in late 1893–4, but his real interests were elsewhere. Deep in the soul of Volodya Ulyanov, Lenin continued stirring, becoming more and more restless. When he was able to visit cities he made contact with revolutionary circles. When confined to the countryside, he immersed himself in revolutionary literature.

After his initial burst of eclectic reading, including his life-changing encounter with Chernyshevsky in late 1888, the emerging Lenin was taking a more explicitly Marxist path. At about the same time as he ‘read and re-read’ [Weber 3] Chernyshevsky’s
What is to be Done?
he also read Marx’s
Das Kapital
, with considerably less dramatic effect. The new direction coincided with his involvement with a small Marxist circle in Kazan led by N.E. Fedoseev. Luckily for Volodya, the family moved shortly afterwards, in May 1889, to Alakaevka and he thus avoided being arrested when police moved in on Fedoseev’s group in summer. [CW 33 452] Nonetheless, his Marxist reading continued and he translated
The Communist Manifesto
in late 1889. In summer 1890 he read Engels’
The Condition of the Working Class in England
and is recorded as having practised singing ‘The Internationale’ in French with his beloved sister, Olga, further evidence of the extraordinary solidarity of the Ulyanov family and of its increasingly radical hue.

One persistent, hostile ‘explanation’ of why people become revolutionaries is that they are social misfits who find it difficult to relate to real people rather than to abstractions of class, gender, race or whatever.
³
As far as Lenin is concerned nothing could be further from the truth. He had very close, warm, lifelong relationships with his family. It was family tragedy that had sparked his revolutionary interest and it was, most likely, the memory of Alexander that added limitless fuel to his hatred of tsarism and of Russian backwardness, as the radical intelligentsia saw it. According to what Lenin told Krupskaya later, part of his contempt for liberalism may have arisen from the same incident because, as a result of Alexander’s ‘disgrace’ in the eyes of the local community the Ulyanov family was shunned. When Maria Alexandrovna needed a riding companion to enable her to make the first stage of her journey to visit Alexander in jail, no one would accompany the mother of a convicted terrorist. ‘Vladimir Il’ich told me that this widespread cowardice made a very profound impression on him at the time. This youthful experience undoubtedly did leave its imprint on Lenin’s attitude towards the Liberals. It was early that he learned the value of Liberal chatter.’ [Krupskaya 17]

The execution of Alexander was not the last family tragedy of the formative years. While Volodya was in St Petersburg to take his exams in 1891 his sister Olga was also there studying and keeping an eye on him. On 20 April she wrote to reassure her mother that Volodya, who was prone to illness especially at moments of stress, was bearing up well.

I think, darling Mamochka, that you have no reason to worry that he is over-exerting himself. Firstly, Volodya is reason personified and sec
ondly, the examinations were very easy. He has already completed two subjects and received a 5 in both. He rested on Saturday (the examination was on Friday). He went early in the morning to the river Neva and in the afternoon he visited me and then both of us went walking along the Neva and watched the movement of the ice. [Weber 4]

The idyllic picture of family affection was soon to be shattered. Only a month later, on 20 May, Olga died of typhoid at the age of only nine
teen. Maria Alexandrovna came to St Petersburg for the funeral and, on 29 May mother and son travelled back to Samara, spending the rest of the summer quietly in Alakaevka remembering not only Olga, who had just died, but also, perhaps, the first daughter named Olga who had died shortly after her birth in 1868. Lenin’s life was marked by family tragedy, family affection and family solidarity throughout his life. One of the hardest consequences of his future exile was that he was out of Russia when his mother died in July 1916. On his return to Russia in the heat of the Revolution and his sensation-causing proposals for Party tactics, one of the first things he did was visit the graves of his mother and Olga.

Olga’s poignant letter of 20 April 1891 also reminds us of two other aspects of the developing Lenin’s outlook, his love of nature and his tendency to stress-related illnesses. While abroad for the first time in 1895 he showed great appreciation of the grandeur of the Swiss landscape, describing it, in a letter to his mother, as ‘splendid. I am enjoying it all the time … I could not tear myself away from the window of the railway carriage.’ [CW 37 73] He spent many hours walking in the mountains, an occupation he returned to whenever he was in Switzerland. He was also ill while he was there. Before his departure from Russia he had suffered a bout of pneumonia. In Switzerland, as he wrote to his mother in July 1895, he ‘landed up at a Swiss spa; I have decided to take advantage of the fact and get down seriously to the treatment of the illness (stomach) that I am so fed up with … I have already been living at this spa for several days and feel not at all bad.’ [CW 37 75] Ironically, as we shall see, his fast-approaching exile in Siberia helped him regain his health.

In addition to his immediate family, Lenin also had a circle of devoted friends, which amounted to a kind of extended family, with Nadezhda Krupskaya in the forefront. Her description of their first meeting in February 1894 is well known but remains very evocative. The occasion was a Shrovetide political gathering disguised as a pancake party.

I remember one moment particularly well
… Someone was saying that what was very important was to work for the Committee for Illiteracy. Vladimir Il’ich laughed, and somehow his laughter sounded quite laconic. I never heard him laugh that way on any subsequent occasion. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘If anyone wants to save the fatherland in the Committee for Illiteracy, we won’t hinder them.’ [Krupskaya 16]

Lenin’s sarcasm did not put her off. They became friends, attending meetings together and walking together through the city of St Petersburg. He also helped her revolutionary preparation. Krupskaya noted that, by the time of her meeting with him in February 1894, Lenin was already an expert in many conspiratorial techniques which he passed on to her. She tells us that in 1895

police surveillance began to increase. Of all our group Vladimir Il’ich was the best equipped for conspiratorial work. He knew all the through courtyards, and was a skilled hand at giving police spies the slip. He taught us how to write books in invisible ink, or by the dot method; how to mark out secret signs, and thought out all manner of aliases. [Krupskaya 22]

Krupskaya was not always the perfect pupil. After a group of six had taken a train journey out of St Petersburg during which they pretended not to know one another, they discussed how to preserve the group’s essential contacts. ‘We sat nearly the whole day discussing which con
tacts should be preserved. Vladimir Il’ich showed us how to use cipher, and we used up nearly half a book. Alas, I was afterwards unable to decode this first collective ciphering!’ [Krupskaya 23]

Why was Lenin so adept at conspiracy? Krupskaya drops a very large hint about what was fairly obvious but taboo in Soviet times – the early influence of the populist tradition. ‘In general’, she wrote, ‘one felt the benefit of his good apprenticeship in the ways of the
Narodnaya Volya
party. It was not for nothing that he spoke with such esteem of the old nihilist Mikhailov who had earned the name “Dvornik” (“the watchman”) by dint of his prowess at conspiracy.’ [Krupskaya 22]

Krupskaya also records that Lenin was admired by Lydia Knippovich, one of the most redoubtable former populists who had transferred her allegiance to the developing Marxist and social-democratic trend. ‘Lydia immediately appreciated the revolutionary in Vladimir Il’ich.’ [Krupskaya 23] The comment is all the more significant in that Lydia Knippovich organized the printing of many social-democratic works, including early pamphlets by Lenin, by means of the
Narodnaya Volya
printing press. Elsewhere, Krupskaya also records Lenin’s frequent defence of populist elders, while in Siberian exile for instance, though he was completely opposed to their younger successors who should, Lenin argued, have realized that the time had come to switch to social democracy.