Conspirator

For many centuries this remote region, unmapped by geographers, was inhabited only by fur traders and Cossacks. During the nineteenth century the czarist authorities found a new use for Shushenskoe as a suitably remote destination for political exiles. Closed to the outside world, the area was hundreds of miles from the railroad and accessible only to the intrepid few.

Siberian exile for political prisoners in those days did not have the ominous overtones it acquired under Stalin, when the prospect of Siberia and the Gulag became a virtual death sentence. For those lucky enough to be sent to Shushenskoe under the czars, however, life was not always unpleasant or arduous. The climate here was kinder than in the primeval, frozen east of Siberia, where prisoners endured appalling conditions. In comparison to the repressive prison system the Soviets would later institute, Shushenskoe was a virtual holiday camp. No wonder that part of the Minusinsk district where the village lay came to be called the Siberian Italy.

On January 31, 1900, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov prepared to leave Shushenskoe after spending three years there as a political exile. It was a timely moment in the new century and in the life of an extraordinary man whose political thinking would come to dominate most of the century.

In many ways Vladimir was sorry to leave. After ten years as an activist in the Russian revolutionary underground with all the uncertainties that such a life involved, he had found a degree of peace here and, paradoxically, freedom. Police surveillance had been lax and there were few restrictions on movement. Although short on money, he had recovered his often febrile health and had grown fit and well as he enjoyed vigorous outdoor pursuits such as hunting, shooting, ice skating, and swimming in the nearby River Shush during the short-lived Siberian summers. And he had benefited too from the comfort and companionship of his wife and political comrade Nadezhda Krupskaya, herself an exile.

There was no reason for the robust and boisterous Volodya, as he was known in the family, to be other than ordinary, for he came from a loving, stable home that valued learning and respected intellectual enlightenment. His early life as one of six children—Anna, Aleksandr, Vladimir, Olga, Dmitri, and Mariya (two others had died young)—had been far from rebellious or controversial. However, after the revolution, and particularly after Lenin’s death in 1924, Soviet hagiography suppressed the true details of the great leader’s less than working-class ancestry.

Vladimir Ulyanov was not a full-blooded Russian; the narrow, Asiatic-looking eyes always gave him away. The man who became Lenin, like many other Russians, was of mixed race, his ancestors being Jewish, German, Swedish, Slav, and Kalmyk. On his father Ilya’s side, Vladimir’s grandfather, Nikolay Vasil’evich Ulyanov, was possibly of Tatar or Kalmyk descent. The son of a former serf, Nikolay Vasil’evich had worked as a tailor in Astrakhan and married a Kalmyk woman. Vladimir’s mother, whom Ilya had married in 1863, had more upwardly mobile antecedents. She was born Mariya Aleksandrovna Blank to a family of good Lutheran merchants from Germany and Sweden on one side and middle-class Jewish converts on the other. Vladimir’s Jewish grandfather, Aleksandr Blank, was a medical man with progressive if somewhat eccentric views on hydropathy who imposed his water cures on his children. Strict, authoritarian, and frugal, he bought an estate at Kokushkino near Kazan, complete with serfs. With its flower beds, fruit bushes, and graceful linden trees, it would become a happy holiday home for the Ulyanov children as they grew up, a place where the young Volodya reveled in the bucolic pleasures of the Russian country estate, as epitomized in the novels of his favorite writer, Ivan Turgenev.

Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov attained the status of minor nobleman, as did many others in Russia in the nineteenth century, by dutiful service to the state. He was in many ways that archetypal Chekhovian figure, a loyal chinovnik, one of a breed of czarist bureaucrats who ran the vast, antiquated machinery of state. After completing his studies at the University of Kazan, he had started out as a math and physics teacher. He went on to serve as a primary school inspector and then from 1874 as director of public schools in Simbirsk province. In later years he was promoted through the fourteen ranks of the Russian civil service to number four and was accorded the honorific of Actual State Counselor (the civilian equivalent of a major general) in later years. With the honorific came the right to be addressed as “Your Excellency.” One of the perks of the system was that the father’s entitlements extended to his sons, thus ensuring that Vladimir could later claim noble status to lessen the harshness of his exile in Siberia.

Photographs of Ilya Nikolaevich sitting in his high-buttoned uniform reveal that Vladimir inherited his high cheekbones, domed Socratic forehead, and patrician look, as well as a strong work ethic, and with it the stern mentality of the pedagogue and the moral puritan. Both parents were well educated and politically enlightened. They supported the liberal reforms of Alexander II, who had emancipated the peasants in 1861. Ilya Nikolaevich was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church, a staunch patriot, and a conscientious public servant loyal to his czar. Mariya Ulyanova was less religiously observant but thrifty and long-suffering. The Ulyanov family believed in self-education and the liberating power of scientific progress. The Ulyanov children were encouraged to be curious about the world.

From both parents Vladimir learned to be frugal and unostentatious, to work hard and persevere, despite a propensity to be loud and clumsy, with a habit of breaking things. From his cultured mother he learned to appreciate music. She taught him languages—French, German, and English; his sisters Anna, Mariya, and Olga played the piano and sang. There was much joy and laughter and shared amusement in their young lives.

A humane and conscientious man with a mission to modernize the czarist school system, Vladimir’s father drove himself relentlessly at the expense of his health. His work involved long periods away from home. Yet the reward for his diligence in trying to raise education standards throughout Simbirsk province was to be forced into early retirement in 1885, as a result of the political retreat that occurred after Alexander II was murdered. Ilya Ulyanov’s dedicated, progressive work was suddenly cut short. His premature death in 1886 spared him the agony and humiliation of his son Aleksandr’s involvement in a plot against the czar. Years of overwork and stress culminated in a cerebral hemorrhage that carried him off at fifty-three.

Vladimir Ulyanov’s early life in Simbirsk, a regional trading port of 30,000 inhabitants stretched out along the slopes of the River Volga, was uneventful. Life in the Russian provinces in the nineteenth century was legendary for its hidebound tradition and lethargy. But being stuck in a provincial backwater did not seem to worry Vladimir, nor did the fact that his family was not rich enough to live on the leafier, more salubrious side of town where nightingales sang in the apple and cherry orchards. His attachment to the broad flowing waters of the Volga dominated his early years and would stay with him throughout his life, as would a love of the outdoors. Being out in the natural world became for the adult Lenin an essential release from stress and anxiety, as well as the setting for vigorous and regular exercise. But such moments became increasingly few and far between as he grew older. His mind, his time, and his prodigious energy were, from young adulthood, focused entirely on his work and the demands of an exacting classical curriculum.

Quiet, studious, and solitary, he absorbed himself in his books and had few friends. He gave up his favorite subject, Latin, because it got in the way of his more important political and economic studies. He even abandoned ice skating until he rediscovered it in Siberia. Such interests were “dangerous addictions.” As he grew older, with his highly rational and logical mind he developed his great passion for statistics.

At school he garnered the respect of his peers and teachers, if not their affection, for his diligence. His family losses—Aleksandr’s execution, his father’s death, and the tragic death in 1888 of his favorite and extremely gifted sister Olga from typhoid—crushed his natural joviality and drew down the shutters on all discussions of his personal life, creating a lifelong reticence in him. He became, as his younger brother Dmitri later observed, “grimly restrained, strict, closed up in himself, highly focussed.” He was crippled by remorse about the strained relationship he had with his older brother, whom he had tried to emulate. The truth was that Vladimir and the dreamy, ascetic Aleksandr had been rivals. Aleksandr was revered in the family for his quiet intelligence, modesty, and moral integrity, and finding his brother too disruptive, had been offended by Volodya’s arrogance and his rudeness toward their mother.

Despite this, Vladimir took his brother’s death in pursuit of political change very hard and became bitter when his loyal mother and siblings were subsequently ostracized in Simbirsk. The situation prompted the family to move to the Blank estate at Kokushkino near Kazan. Here Vladimir enjoyed the rural pleasures of hunting, swimming, sailing, and walking, combined, as always, with extensive reading, shut away in his sparsely furnished room. In August 1887 he moved into the city of Kazan to study law. Four months later his involvement in relatively low-key student demonstrations against a university inspector ensured his prompt expulsion from the university and banishment by the Ministry of Internal Affairs back to Kokushkino, where his elder sister Anna had already been confined for political activities. As the brother of a would-be regicide, Vladimir would remain under close police surveillance.