The Family Romanov: Murder, Rebellion, and the Fall of Imperial Russia (10 page)

Considered undesirable subjects, Jews had not only been the victims of dozens of pogroms, they’d been subjected to endless imperial decrees meant to discriminate against them. By the time Nicholas took the throne, his predecessors had already created more than fourteen hundred laws meant to limit the way Jews lived. Among them was a law forcing almost all Russian Jews (some 5.2 million, or nearly half of all Jews in the world) to live within fifteen western provinces known collectively as the Pale of Settlement. Additionally, Jews were forbidden from owning land, serving as army officers, holding a bureaucratic job, or practicing law. They were subject to special and steep taxes on their businesses, on kosher meat, and on synagogues. There were even strict quotas limiting Jewish admittance to high schools and universities. Nicholas himself decreed that those same quotas be applied to grammar schools. Because of his action, one-third of all Jewish children aged twelve and under were forbidden from going to school. Nicholas—who believed the world’s Jews were conspiring against him—thoroughly approved of these restrictions.

By 1906, he also believed the uprising that had led to the October Manifesto had been entirely their fault.
“They [have] been putting on airs and leading the revolutionary movement,” he claimed. (While many Jews
did
join the ranks of revolutionaries, most were moderates who wanted to make changes through the Duma.)
Wrote Nicholas to his mother in November 1905: “
In the first days after the Manifesto the subversive elements raised their head … and because nine-tenths of the trouble-makers are Jews, the people’s anger turned against them. That’s how the pogrom happened. It is amazing how they took place simultaneously in all the towns of Russia and Siberia.… [It] shows clearly what an infuriated mob can do; they surrounded the houses where revolutionaries had taken refuge, set fire to them and killed everybody trying to escape.” Alexandra agreed with her husband. “
It’s the Jews,” she said. “[They have] filled the people’s ears with bad ideas.”

Meanwhile, the true revolutionaries—a handful of men and women who believed only a violent overthrow of the tsar could save Russia—still hoped to stage an armed insurrection. Most of them followed the teachings of the nineteenth-century German thinker Karl Marx. Marx saw all of history as a struggle between workers and property owners. That struggle, he believed, would end only when the people owned all natural resources (farms, forests, mineral deposits) as well as banks, railroads, utilities, and factories. Exactly how this commonly owned property would be organized was not addressed. Still, the goal was that everyone be equal. Because of this shared ownership, Marx called his new system communism. And it would come about, he theorized, only after total revolution by the working class.

Russian followers of Marx had been working toward this “total revolution” for almost thirty years. Calling themselves by the peaceful-sounding name Social Democrats (or SDs), they were, in fact, a radical group of communists who had done most of their work out of the country. Seen as a threat to the autocracy, SD party leaders had been forced by the tsar’s police to flee Russia. In 1880, they had set up their party headquarters in Switzerland. From there they published anti-tsarist pamphlets and newspapers that were smuggled into St. Petersburg and other cities. Their goal was to spread communist ideas to workers as well as to the intelligentsia (academics and college students). One Russian who seized upon this dream was a short, stocky lawyer named Vladimir Ulyanov.

Vladimir Ulyanov came from the very background he later claimed to scorn. His father was inspector of schools for Simbirsk province,
a bureaucratic job of the first rank, entitling him to be addressed as “Your Excellency.” His mother was a member of a landowning noble family. Born in 1870, little Vladimir was a difficult child. He told lies, cheated at games, and had a mean streak. But he was also smart, and an outstanding student. “
Excellent in everything!” he would shout when he brought home his grades.

In 1887, Vladimir’s older brother, Alexander, was arrested with seventy-two other university students for plotting to kill Tsar Alexander III (Nicholas’s father). As one of the group’s leaders, Alexander Ulyanov was hanged. No one knows how this affected seventeen-year-old Vladimir. Most historians believe it spurred him to join the revolutionary movement, although he never admitted as much publicly. That same year, he graduated from high school at the top of his class, without any outward signs of distress.

In the fall of 1887, he entered Kazan University. But within weeks, he was expelled for taking part in a small student demonstration. For the next five years, he lived on his mother’s family estate, earning his law degree from home while also studying the works of Karl Marx and other socialist writings. He soon considered himself to be a professional revolutionary, vowing to devote all his energies to overthrowing the tsar and establishing a people’s government. Since Marx’s theory claimed revolution would begin in the cities, Vladimir moved to St. Petersburg in 1893. There he joined a like-minded group of revolutionaries involved in organizing workers’ strikes and distributing antigovernment pamphlets. But in 1895, the police caught up with him. He spent one year in prison, followed by three years of exile in Siberia.

Because of his wealth and education, Vladimir’s time in this frozen landscape was not one of hardship. Allowed to choose where he lived, he selected a village near the Mongolian border, taking along one thousand rubles and one hundred books. This made him both the wealthiest and most educated man in town. From his cozy
rented rooms, he began a voluminous correspondence with other professional revolutionaries in Russia and across Europe. He wrote his own economic theories, and translated radical works from other countries into Russian. By the time his Siberian exile ended, Vladimir was no longer an obscure revolutionary—he was gaining a European-wide reputation as a leader of the communist movement.

He did not return to St. Petersburg. Instead, in 1901, Vladimir went abroad, where he wandered through Europe’s cities—Munich, London, and finally Geneva—meeting other Russian revolutionaries. From these places, he also wrote and edited a newspaper called
Spark
. Although published in Europe, the paper was smuggled into Russia in hopes of inciting workers to revolution. Afraid to use his own name—it was not uncommon for the tsar’s secret police to assassinate “enemies of the state” even when they lived outside Russia’s borders—Vladimir began to write under the name Lenin. It stuck.

All iron will and ambition, Lenin cared for little but politics and power. He dressed and ate simply and stuck to a precise daily schedule, allotting no time for what he considered useless leisure. Neat and orderly, he kept detailed accounts of the money he spent; shelved his books (only social and political titles) alphabetically; and allotted himself exactly fifteen minutes each morning to tidy his desk. This way of life, he claimed, gave him the discipline needed for revolutionary work. He would not allow himself even to listen to music: “
It makes me want to do kind, stupid things, and pat the heads of people,” he claimed. “But now you have to beat them on the head, beat them without mercy.”

Lenin agreed with most of Marx’s ideas. But unlike Marx, Lenin did not believe the workers could bring about a revolution on their own. Instead, a few strong leaders, drawn from the most enlightened workers and activist intellectuals, were needed to guide events
and encourage armed insurrection. This, Lenin insisted, was the only way Russia could move toward communism.

But many of his fellow Social Democrats disagreed. They wanted to take a more gradual approach to revolution. Immediate action to bring down the tsarist regime wasn’t necessary, they argued. Instead, they should give the workers time to discover for themselves—through the experience of labor strikes and other social struggles—the necessity of revolution. Until that time, Social Democrats should continue publishing revolutionary propaganda in an effort to educate them. Revolution, they said, would happen only when workers were ready.

Lenin sneered at this idea. And in 1903, his insistence on an immediate revolt led to a split in the Social Democrat party. From then on, SDs who followed Lenin’s lead were called Bolsheviks. Those who disagreed with him were called Mensheviks. But all were communists, intent on creating—in one way or another—a completely free, equal, and classless society.

Neither Bolshevik nor Menshevik leaders had much to do with the strikes of 1905. Their influence among the Russian workers was still too weak. In fact, news of the upheavals took Lenin completely by surprise. And yet he was in no hurry to leave Geneva for the fugitive life in Russia. As a known revolutionary leader, he would be arrested if the police found him. Instead, he tried to lead from afar, sending a stream of letters to the handful of Bolsheviks, urging them to armed insurrection.

Then Nicholas signed the October Manifesto. And Lenin grew worried. The newly granted rights, he feared, would let the pressure
out of the revolutionary movement. He had to get home and rally Bolshevik Russians before their chance completely slipped away.

In mid-November—just two weeks after the October Manifesto was declared—Lenin crossed the border and made his way to St. Petersburg. Along with a small group of Bolshevik men and women, he began planning an uprising. But could it possibly succeed? Since the manifesto, most workers were not behind them. Lenin claimed it didn’t matter.
“Victory?” he cried. “The point is not about victory, but about giving the regime a shake and attracting the masses to the movement.”