Lenin: A biography

Ilya’s youngest daughter, Maria, also attested to his civic loyalty: ‘[He] was not a revolutionary, and we don’t know enough to say what his attitudes were to the revolutionary activities of the young.’27 It would, however, be safe to assume that, as a teacher with a profound sense of vocation, he did much to create a democratic, humane atmosphere in the household. The harmony between husband and wife, their concern for the children, the equality between the siblings, the culture of hard work and diligence, all helped to form an extremely favourable soil for the seeds of free thinking, should they fall there. Ilya Ulyanov, in other words, created the preconditions for his children, above all Alexander and Vladimir, to be receptive to radical ideas. Ilya Ulyanov did not make Lenin a revolutionary; he and his wife merely cultivated in their children the ability to change, to feel the need for change. When Lenin’s father died in January 1886, Vladimir was not yet sixteen.

Even before she had buried her husband, Maria Ulyanov applied for a pension for herself and her children, and a little later asked the Kazan schools district for a special grant. From now on she would live only on her pension and the rent from Kokushkino, of which she was a joint owner. In September 1886 the Simbirsk district court confirmed that Ilya’s estate should pass to Maria and her children.

In April 1887, when Lenin reached the age of seventeen, he registered for military service,28 but as he was now the eldest son and potential breadwinner, he was exempted.29 He was not in fact the family breadwinner. On the contrary, thanks to his mother’s pension, and with her strong encouragement, he pursued his studies.

If it was the family culture that created the preconditions for Lenin to become radically minded, it was the fate of his brother Alexander that provided the catalyst. It is doubtful if Alexander’s tragic end changed Lenin’s revolutionary direction, since there was none to change. Vladimir’s supposed words to his sister on hearing of his brother’s execution also raise a question. ‘No, we will not go that way.’ Why ‘we’? He belonged to no secret society or circle. Perhaps Maria misremembered his words after so many years, or perhaps the heavy weight of Soviet experience suggested the words to her mind. In any case, it is hard, in purely human terms, to believe that Vladimir’s response to the news of his brother’s death would prompt him to pronounce the slogan that would make him forever a ‘proper’ revolutionary.

Alexander was a gifted youth, as the gold medal he attained on graduating from high school indicated. At school he had shown an interest in zoology and acquired three European languages, and at St Petersburg University, which he entered in 1883, he quickly became one of the top students. A month before his father’s premature death he won the University gold medal for work on annelid worms. Nothing indicated that he had been seized by the forces of social protest.

In his first years at university, Alexander was indifferent, if not sceptical, towards the political circles, but he became more involved when friends introduced him to the writings of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov. For them, Marxism emphasized the need for violence to change the existing conditions. One of the more radical members of the group, P. Shevyrev, declared that only by the removal of tyrants could life be reorganized on just principles. At first Alexander, who was wrapped up in his scientific plans and discoveries, merely listened, but gradually he was won over by the apparent logic of his friends’ radicalism, and came to feel it was morally unacceptable to stand aside from ‘the ideas of progress and revolution’, as they put it.

While Alexander was at university his contacts with Vladimir were sporadic, limited to the occasional letter with greetings to all. And when he came home on vacation, there was no particular intimacy between them. They were a close-knit family, but the children tended to pair off, and Vladimir was closest to his sister Olga, though he deferred to Alexander’s intelligence. Anna, the eldest sister, recalled once talking with Alexander after their father had died, and asking him: ‘How do you like our Volodya?’ Her brother replied: ‘He’s obviously very gifted, but we don’t really get on.’ Anna was intrigued, but Alexander refused to explain.30 This may be the only hint in all the apologist literature that relations between the siblings might not have been entirely flawless.

The 1880s in Russia were a time of harsh reaction against the assassination in 1881 of the ‘tsar-liberator’, Alexander II. Students in particular were more closely watched and harassed by the police than ever before, and Alexander’s entry into a group of conspirators who were planning the assassination of Alexander III is commonly explained by the violent dispersal by the police of a student demonstration in memory of the radical thinker Dobrolyubov on 17 November 1886. The arrest and deportation to Siberia of several student friends confronted Alexander with the moral question of how to behave in such circumstances. According to Shevyrev’s view: ‘When the government takes our closest friends by the throat, it is especially immoral to refuse to struggle, and under the present circumstances real struggle with tsarism can only mean terrorism.’ Of this dilemma Nikolai Valentinov, an early Bolshevik who knew Lenin well during the time of his first period abroad, between 1900 and 1905, and a valuable historical source in himself, wrote: ‘Painfully sensitive to suggestions of immorality, Alexander, after agonizing hesitation, began to share these views, and once he did so, he became an advocate of systematic, frightening terrorism, capable of shaking the autocracy.’31

The group of conspirators under Shevyrev’s leadership grew. Their watch on the tsar’s route from the palace to St Isaac’s Cathedral began on 26 February 1887, but they were utterly inexperienced, and when on 1 March the police intercepted a letter from one of them, the entire group was arrested. The Ulyanov family was devastated, but placed their hope in the emperor’s clemency. Alexander’s mother rushed to St Petersburg and handed in a letter to Alexander III which said, among other things, that she would purge her son’s heart of its criminal schemes and resurrect the healthy human instincts he had always lived by, if only the tsar would show mercy.

The drama caught the attention of society, and received much publicity. Maria Ulyanova’s entreaties failed, however, not only because of the tsar’s intransigence, but because Alexander refused to ask for clemency. Those who found it possible to do so had their death sentences commuted to hard labour. The trial was very short, lasting only from 15 to 19 April. Five unrepentant comrades were sentenced to hang. Even when Alexander was saying goodbye to his mother there was still the chance of salvation, but he told her in a quiet, firm voice, ‘I cannot do it after everything I said in court. It would be insincere.’ Alexander’s lawyer, Knyazev, was present at this meeting, and after the October revolution he recalled that Alexander had explained: ‘Imagine, Mama, two men facing each other at a duel. One of them has already shot at his opponent, the other has yet to do so, when the one who has shot asks him not to. No, I cannot behave like that!’

Alexander had proved himself to be extraordinarily brave. His last wish was that his mother should bring him a volume of Heine to read. On the morning of 8 May 1887 the prisoners were told they were to be hanged in the courtyard of Shlisselburg Fortress in two hours’ time. This was their last chance to appeal for clemency, but even now these young people, misguided as history may judge them to have been, proved themselves morally worthy of the nation’s memory. They were not fanatics, they believed that their country’s future could only be altered by revolutionary acts against tyrants. Alexander’s group seemed then and seems now naive, but it is impossible not to admire their willingness to sacrifice their lives in the name of freedom.

The day Alexander was hanged, Vladimir was doing his geometry and arithmetic exams, for which he got his usual top marks. The family still believed the widespread rumour that the death sentence would be commuted at the last minute. His mother’s last words to him were, ‘Be brave, be brave.’32 She was in deep mourning for a long time, comforted perhaps by the fact that, as she told her children, before his execution Alexander had bowed before the cross and so would receive God’s forgiveness.

Vladimir Ulyanov was shaken by his brother’s death. Later he would learn that Alexander had had a hand in formulating the programme of the Narodnaya Volya (People’s Will) terrorist faction, a document bearing the stamp of Marxist influence, but simplistic and ‘barracks-minded’. Still reeling from the shock of the family tragedy, Vladimir was, however, less concerned with the young terrorists’ ideas than with the stoicism and strength of will they had shown. The sharp turn that now took place in his mind was not about methods of struggle – terror or a mass movement. He still had no views on this issue. But, somewhere in the depths of his mind, the soil was now prepared for the notion that nothing would be achieved on the way to revolution without radicalism, plus the will to succeed, and it was this that became the nucleus of his outlook. His remark ‘We will not go that way’ meant – if he said it – that he realized it was not necessary to be a bomb-thrower oneself, like the unfortunate Alexander, nor was it necessary to man the barricades oneself, or put down rebellion oneself, or go to the front in a civil war oneself. And he never would do any of these things himself. The action of individual units was not important. The main thing was to command huge, virtually unwitting masses. It was a more effective way, if less noble than Alexander’s.

The Forerunners

The list of those who have been proposed as Lenin’s ideological precursors is long, and it starts with the radical nineteenth-century philosopher Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Arrested in 1862 for seditious agitation, Chernyshevsky was to spend the next twenty years in prison and in Siberian exile, where he served seven years of hard labour. Before his deportation from St Petersburg, however, he managed in 1864 to write his novel What is to be Done? and to have it smuggled out and published. It was to inspire an entire generation of Russian youth with ideas of self-emancipation and the duty to bring knowledge to the peasants. Other suggested early sources of Lenin’s revolutionary awakening include various Populist thinkers and Plekhanov’s Marxist ‘Emancipation of Labour’ Group. It is interesting to note what Lenin himself thought of the origins of his political thinking. In an essay on Lenin in 1933, Karl Radek, a brilliant pamphlet-writer and juggler of paradoxes, wrote: ‘When Vladimir Ilyich once saw me looking at a collection of his 1903 articles … his face lit up with a cunning grin and he said with a chuckle, “Interesting to see what fools we were.”’33

The sources of Lenin’s political outlook were complex, and there can be no argument about the formative effect of his brother’s death, which sent a ray of white light through the prism of his mind, a ray which, to paraphrase Winston Churchill, was refracted by that prism into red.34 The ‘prism’ was in fact a constellation of circumstances. The first of these was the government’s treatment of Vladimir and his family. When Lenin entered Kazan University in 1887, he went with a glowing testimonial from his headmaster in Simbirsk, Fedor Kerensky, who wanted to protect him from adverse association with his brother’s notoriety: ‘Neither in school nor outside did Ulyanov ever give occasion, either by word or deed, to arouse an unfavourable opinion among the school authorities or his teachers.’35 Even when Lenin was expelled from the university in the December of his first year for taking part in a student demonstration, Kerensky, both to defend the young man and to justify his confidence in him, wrote: ‘[Vladimir Ulyanov] might have lost the balance of his mind as a result of the fatal catastrophe that has shattered the unhappy family and, no doubt, has also influenced the impressionable youth disastrously.’36 But on the first occasion when Lenin attended a student meeting, during his first term at the university, he had already been ‘marked’ by the authorities.

The administrator of the Kazan educational region noted that, two days before the demonstration took place, ‘Ulyanov was up to no good: he was spending his time in the smoking-room, chatting and whispering …’ It seems that the ‘demonstration’ amounted to little more than running up and down a corridor,37 but in view of the fact that he was the brother of a condemned ‘state criminal’, Ulyanov was not merely expelled but also sent away from Kazan to the family estate at Kokushkino.

By labelling him as unreliable and suspect, the expulsion effectively excluded the young Lenin from the state educational system altogether. When his mother applied for him to be reinstated at Kazan, the Director of the Police Department in St Petersburg, P.N. Durnovo, noted, ‘We can scarcely do anything for Ulyanov.’38 The Director of the Education Department was more emphatic: ‘Isn’t this the brother of that Ulyanov? He’s also from Simbirsk high school. Yes, it’s clear from the end of the document. He should certainly not be admitted.’39 By thus ostracizing him, the tsarist authorities were steadily narrowing Lenin’s range of choices. His solidarity with his dead brother became more firmly fixed. The letters he wrote, in which he respectfully requested ‘Your Excellency’s permission to enter the Imperial Kazan University’, or had ‘the honour most humbly to request Your Excellency to allow me to go abroad to a foreign university’, and which he signed ‘Nobleman Ulyanov’, were at first unsuccessful.40 The spirit of protest grew as the regime rejected him.

Expulsion did not mean Lenin now had to earn his living as a docker or shop assistant, like his grandfather. He was ‘exiled’ to Kokushkino, and the family then moved to their farm at Alakaevka, about thirty miles from Samara. His mother acquired the property of some two hundred acres in early 1889 for the sum of 7500 roubles. Lenin now immersed himself in reading a wide range of Western and Russian social-political literature, including Marx’s Capital. The police kept their eye on him, but he gave them no trouble. Apart from attending an illegal meeting and occasionally seeing some Marxists, it is difficult to find any evidence of the so-called ‘revolutionary period in Samara’. It would be more accurate to describe this time as one of intensive preparation for the examinations to enter St Petersburg University as an external student. By the time he reached the age of twenty-two, Lenin had acquired a first-class diploma from St Petersburg and been accepted as a lawyer’s assistant on the Samara circuit. He was not destined to succeed at this profession and he soon cooled towards the busy life of a defence attorney. The few cases he was given to handle were only petty thefts or property claims, and he accomplished even these with variable success, although he did defend his own interests twice, winning on both occasions. In one case he sued his peasant neighbours for damage to the Ulyanov estate, and, much later, during a period of residence in Paris, he sued a vicomte who ran him over when he was riding his bicycle. His legal career was not something Lenin was ever keen to recall.

Returning to the question of his revolutionary roots, the time at Kokushkino was one of intensive study of the widest range of ideas. In conversation with Valentinov in 1904 in Geneva – one of the many European cities where he spent seventeen years as an émigré, with a brief interval back in Russia during the 1905 revolution – Lenin recalled reading non-stop from early morning until late at night. His favourite author was Chernyshevsky, whose every word published in the journal Sovremennik he read. ‘I became acquainted with the works of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov,’ he stated, ‘but it was only Chernyshevsky who had an overwhelming influence on me, beginning with his novel What is to be Done?. Chernyshevsky’s great service was not only that he showed that every right-thinking and really decent person must be a revolutionary, but something more important: what kind of revolutionary, what his principles ought to be, how he should aim for his goal, what means and methods he should employ to realize it …’41

Valentinov suggests that it was Chernyshevsky, who had in Lenin’s own words ‘ploughed him over’ before he had read Marx, who made the young man into a revolutionary. It is a view contested by the Menshevik writer Mark Vishnyak, who pointed out that Lenin read Chernyshevsky a month or two after the execution of his brother, and therefore ‘the soil was ready for ploughing over’, and it was the news of that event, Vishnyak claimed, that gave Lenin the charge he had needed, not Chernyshevsky’s ‘talentless and primitive novel’.42 These two views boil down to the same conclusion, namely that Chernyshevsky was Lenin’s John the Baptist thanks to the tragedy of Alexander.43 Chernyshevsky, whatever else Lenin took from him, made it possible for the young man to absorb a profound hostility towards liberalism, as one of his earliest works (1894) shows. ‘Who are the “friends of the people” and how do they fight against the social democrats?’ was published (unsigned) in mimeographed form in St Petersburg, and in it Lenin repeatedly cited Chernyshevsky and called his judgments ‘the foresight of genius’, while the ‘loathsome’ compromise of the ‘liberals and landowners’ could only hamper ‘the open struggle of the classes’ in Russia.44 He wanted to use Chernyshevsky’s writings in his attacks on the liberal bourgeoisie, particularly in order to expose the existence of ‘an entire chasm’ between the socialists and the democrats.45

In effect, Lenin used Chernyshevsky to ‘russify’ Western Marxism, which had too much of the liberal and democratic and too little ‘class war’. The split that was to take place among the Russian social democrats would be precisely over attitudes to democracy, to legal, parliamentary means of struggle, to the place of political parties in a democracy and the strength of liberal persuasion. Lenin’s forebears were, thus, those thinkers who fostered notions which reinforced the coercive, harsh, class elements in Marxism. It would therefore be true to say that Lenin was guided by pragmatic considerations in becoming a revolutionary. While worshipping classical Marxism, he could borrow concepts and ideas, arguments and rebuttals from Chernyshevsky, Peter Tkachev, Sergei Nechaev, Mikhail Bakunin, Carl Clausewitz, Peter Struve, Peter Lavrov and Alexander Herzen. He reinforced his ‘mainline’ Marxism with everything that made that teaching uncompromising, harsh and radical. Recalling the first weeks of the Soviet regime, Krupskaya wrote: ‘Closely studying the experience of the Paris Commune, the first proletarian state in the world, Ilyich remarked on the pernicious effect of the mild attitude of the workers and proletarian masses and the workers’ government towards their manifest enemies. And therefore, when speaking about struggling with enemies, Ilyich always “tightened the screws”, so to speak, fearing the excessive mildness of the masses, as well as his own.’46

The presence of Nechaev among the names of Lenin’s sources should give pause. Both Marx and Engels had condemned Nechaev’s doctrine of individual terror – just as Lenin himself would on numerous occasions. But Nechaev was more than an advocate of terror, he was synonymous with conspiratorial politics, entailing secret plans for the overthrow and merciless extermination of hated authorities and governments. In the terminology of the time, such tactics were called Blanquist, after Louis Auguste Blanqui, a radical activist in France during the 1830s and 1840s. While condemning this approach, Lenin would unhesitatingly resort to it at decisive moments. As Plekhanov wrote in 1906: ‘From the very beginning, Lenin was more of a Blanquist than a Marxist. He imported his Blanquist contraband under the flag of the strictest Marxist orthodoxy.’47 The Bolshevik Vladimir Bonch-Bruevich recalled Lenin discussing Nechaev, who had been depicted by Dostoevsky in his novel The Possessed, which fictionalized the murder of a student by Nechaev and his ‘Secret Reprisal’ group: ‘Even the revolutionary milieu was hostile to Nechaev, forgetting, Lenin said, “that he had possessed a special talent as an organizer, a conspirator, and a skill which he could wrap up in staggering formulations.”’ He also approvingly quoted Nechaev’s reply to the question of which of the Romanovs should be killed: ‘The entire House of Romanov!’48

Vladimir Voitinsky, an economist and active Bolshevik in 1905, recalled discussing Lenin’s abandonment of liberalism in conversations at the time. Lenin used to talk about the need to combat ‘liberal pompous triviality’. ‘Revolution,’ Lenin would say, ‘is a tough business. You can’t make it wearing white gloves and with clean hands … The Party’s not a ladies’ school … a scoundrel might be what we need just because he is a scoundrel.’49 Nechaev’s famous dictum, ‘Everything that helps the revolution is moral. Everything that hinders it is immoral and criminal,’ was echoed by Lenin at the III Congress of Communist Youth in 1919 when he said that everything is moral that promotes the victory of Communism. In 1918 he declared to Maria Spiridonova, the doyenne of terrorists and a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, that there was no room for morality in politics, only pragmatism.

Lenin adopted Marxism as a weapon, ‘freeing’ it of its ‘liberal’, ‘democratic’ trivialities, because the steel fist of the proletarian dictatorship had no need of gloves. Following the Bolsheviks’ forcible dispersal of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, Plekhanov, ‘the father of Russian Marxism’, could write in his last article: ‘The tactics of the Bolsheviks are the tactics of Bakunin, and in many cases those of Nechaev, pure and simple.’50 The question of who were Lenin’s ideological forebears, therefore, is answered simply: he used anything and anyone if it helped him achieve his aim.

The Discovery of Marxism

There may be many reasons why Lenin became captivated by Marxism. In my opinion, his powerful and already extremely well informed mind was searching for a universal explanation of human existence. In any event, some time on the eve of 1889, when the family was still living in Kazan, he got hold of the first volume of Capital. It must have been a revelation simply in terms of the scale of its grasp, regardless of its rôle in history. Nietzsche once remarked on the ‘attraction of the distance’, and for the young Lenin, with his radical outlook, Capital’s historical distance captured his imagination, seeming to lead to the solution to all of life’s eternal and ‘accursed’ questions of justice, freedom, equality, oppression and exploitation. But who introduced Lenin to Marxism?

At the time he was expelled from university, there was a convinced young Marxist, called Nikolai Fedoseev, living in Kazan. Lenin was to meet him only once, nearly ten years later, when they were both on their way to exile in Siberia. Fedoseev had compiled a reading list for social democrats, and Lenin told Gorky in 1908, when they were together on Capri, that ‘it was the best reference book anyone had yet put together’, and that it had helped him find his way through political literature, opening the path for him to Marxism.51 Lenin’s first known writing was a piece written in 1893 called ‘New Economic Movements in Peasant Life’, in effect a review of V.E. Postnikov’s book The South Russian Economy.52 The article, which was unsigned, read like a schoolboy’s attempt at Marxist analysis. There is little of Lenin’s own ideas in it and it was rejected by the journal, Russkaya mysl’. He had greater success with a second review-article, also written in 1893 and similarly unsigned, called ‘On the So-called Question of Markets’, in which he contrasted Marxist and Populist (Narodnik) ideas on the development of capitalism in Russia, in effect arguing that ‘class’ and impersonal historic need had replaced the ‘critically thinking individual’. This article was also not published, but Lenin read it at a meeting of Marxist students in St Petersburg in the autumn of 1893, and received the praise of the engineering students present.