By any measure, Lenin’s father was an educated, cultivated man. For all his traditional religiosity, he was in many ways liberal in his broader outlook. He admired Russia’s liberalizing czar Alexander II, who had emancipated Russia’s serfs, laid the foundation for local self-government, and would have carried out more reforms if an assassin’s bomb, on March 1, 1881, had not stopped the reforming czar in his tracks.
The assassination of Alexander II was a harsh blow to Lenin’s father, and a tragedy for Russia. If the American Civil War was the one great formative event shaping Woodrow Wilson’s life, the apparent failure of Russian liberalism forms the backdrop for understanding Lenin.
For centuries, Russians had felt themselves far behind the West in terms of economic, political, and social development. (Some would argue that they still are.) The big question was how to close the gap.At first, it was left to autocratic rulers such as Peter the Great and Catherine the Great to use their virtually unlimited power to push Russia forward on the path to becoming respected as an equal by the Western powers. Then, following the French Revolution, Czar Alexander I opened the way to thinking about a different route to Russian greatness. It was not through building bigger armies or navies (although the drive for military power continued nonstop), or through acquiring territories that would give Russia sea routes to the West. Alexander’s approach was to introduce some of the ideas and concepts flowing into Russia from the European Enlightenment, ideas that paralleled trends in France and Britain that we usually identify with classical liberalism: individual rights, free trade and social mobility, freedom of thought and expression, representative government, and the rule of law.
This intellectual “window to the West” didn’t stay open very long. By the time of Alexander’s death in December 1825, it had been firmly shut. Yet enough of this Westernizing liberalism had made its way into Russian thought and culture to lay the foundation for a series of programs pushing important social and political reforms, including freeing Russia’s vast population of serfs. It also spawned a class of educated individuals ready to advocate for this Western-style reform through books, articles, and seemingly endless discussions in coffeehouses and university classrooms.
In an autocratic empire that was still largely feudal in nature and overwhelmingly illiterate, the Russian intelligentsia’s ineffectiveness was matched only by its frustration with failure. Every proposal for reform (including any in fictional works) was met with scrutiny from the czar’s censors and secret police. What they judged as going too far could lead to exile in Siberia or imprisonment. The failure over several decades to advance changes in a liberal, Western direction spurred those who believed change in Russia was more necessary than ever to look at a more drastic solution—namely, revolution.
The Russian revolutionary tradition found its roots in the days after Alexander I’s death, when a handful of young Russian army officers led a coup in St. Petersburg to prevent the late czar’s conservative successor, Nicholas I, from assuming power. The so-called Decembrist Revolt ended in arrests and executions, including that of the poet Kondraty Ryleyev. Still, it had blazed a trail for other radicals to follow, and over the years those radicals would agree with Ryleyev’s testimonial before the revolt: “An upheaval is essential. The tactics of revolution may be summed up in two words, to dare. If we come to grief, our failure will serve as a lesson to those who come after us.”13
And so it did, as one group of revolutionaries and conspirators was succeeded by the next. There were the Russian anarchists, led by a renegade aristocrat, Prince Kropotkin, in the 1840s and ’50s; the Narodniks, or agrarian socialists, in the 1860s and ’70s; a violent breakaway faction of the Narodniks, who dubbed themselves the People’s Will, in the late 1870s and early ’80s—it was one of their number who planted the bomb that killed Alexander II.
That act embodied the revolutionary paradox: choosing to kill a liberal czar because reforms were no longer considered enough. Only revolution, the People’s Will assassins were saying, could bring about the drastic changes Russia needed to become a modern nation. Liberals like Alexander II were bound to be trampled in the violent tracks.
But how would revolution happen in a backward country such as Russia? Some, the Narodniks, for example, saw Russia’s peasantry as the potentially decisive force to bring about a violent overthrow of the existing system; others saw terrorist attacks as the way to propel Russia’s ramshackle empire into chaos, from which a new order would somehow emerge. Theorist P. N. Tkachev speculated in the 1870s about what it would take to bring about a total collapse of his country. His conclusion? “Not much . . . Two or three military defeats . . . some peasant uprisings . . . open revolt in the capital.”
He might have been describing events in Russia in 1917, some forty years later.
Needless to say, these terrorist conspirators (vividly captured on paper in Fyodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Devils) did not bring about actual revolution. The only change they managed to achieve, especially after the failure of an attempt to assassinate Czar Alexander III in 1887, was to make the government more reactionary and repressive. The rigid autocracy of Alexander’s son Nicholas II, with its inflexible rejection of any notion of reform, froze Russia in time politically. By 1900, Lenin’s country was in many ways more isolated from the main currents of Europe than at any time since Peter the Great.
In literary terms, the clarion call to revolution had reached its climax earlier, in 1863, with the publication of Narodnik spokesman Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? (Even though it was a novel, it earned its author a lengthy spell of exile in Siberia.) Chernyshevsky called on his fellow intellectuals to lead Russia’s toiling masses on a path to socialist revolution, bypassing the capitalist phase of social development that Karl Marx had said was necessary to prepare the way for the working class to seize power and overthrow capitalism’s class-based society.
In the novel, Chernyshevsky’s two principal enemies are the czarist reactionaries, who are incapable of accepting progressive change; and Russian liberals, who are too slow and cowardly to impose it. Lenin was perhaps seventeen when he first read What Is to Be Done? It coincided with some traumatic experiences in his own young life, and became a decisive influence. “It completely transformed my outlook,” Lenin wrote later. The book, he said, “taught me how to be a revolutionary.” He even stole the title for his own programmatic work on revolution.14
Chernyshevsky’s work contained one arresting line that Lenin could have adopted as his own motto: “A man with an ardent love of virtue can only be a monster.”
IN A FAMILY of remarkably obedient and orderly children, including the eldest, Alexander, Volodya was a regular discipline problem, often spending hours in the “black chair,” the stool in the corner where misbehaving children in the Ulyanov family were sent to sit. At school, his native ability was such that, as Lenin’s sister Anna recalled, the Gymnazia’s headmaster “forgave him certain acts of mischief that he would not so easily have forgiven in respect of others.” The headmaster wrote one glowing report after another. Vladimir Ilyich’s success in the wider world seemed guaranteed, like that of his equally brilliant brother Alexander.
By 1886, when Vladimir Ilyich turned sixteen, Ilya Ulyanov could look proudly on no fewer than six children on the threshold of rewarding middle-class lives and careers. Then came the watershed event that changed the Ulyanov family, and Vladimir’s life, forever.
It’s not clear exactly when his brother Alexander, who had entered St. Petersburg University in mathematics and physics, fell under the spell of a cell of revolutionaries headed by Orest Govorukhin and Pyotr Shevyrev.15 The assassination of the czar five years earlier had precipitated an extensive crackdown by his reactionary son Alexander III, and the radical revolutionary impulse among groups such as the Narodniks had all but died away. Then Alexander Ilyich and his friends hatched their own amateurish plot to revive the revolution by killing the czar. Instead, the czar’s secret police, th
e Okhrana, easily caught on to the threads of the plot and arrested the would-be assassins one by one, including Alexander Ilyich. On May 8, 1887, he was hanged in Shlisselburg Prison in St. Petersburg—but not before he was permitted to kneel before his mother and beg her forgiveness.
It was a family tragedy. Vladimir’s father was not alive to see it unfold; he had died of a sudden stroke the January before last, in 1886. Perhaps the death of that traditional but warm and understanding father figure had something to do with Alexander’s turn toward revolution and violence. It is certainly true that Vladimir Ilyich’s turn against religion came shortly after his father’s death.
Yet the death of his beloved older brother was more traumatic for Vladimir, and the impact greater. It is very likely that he was already exposed to radical revolutionary ideas before Alexander went to the gallows. The official story told years later was that he turned to his sister afterward and said stoically, “No, we must not take that road,” meaning solo assassination.
There’s no reason to believe that version, though. More likely is the one given by his tutor Vera Kashkadamova, in which, in the same stoical vein and showing the same political sympathies as his brother, Vladimir Ilyich exclaimed, “It must mean he had to act like this; he couldn’t act in any other way.”16
So, how would Vladimir Ilyich act, in the shadow of his brother’s death? He was barely seventeen. He had been admitted to Kazan Imperial University; he seemed likely to study law. A career leading to steady government service lay open to him if he kept his nose clean and avoided political controversy. Yet, for the brother of a convicted and executed would-be regicide, that would not be easy. Indeed, the entire family found themselves ostracized in Simbirsk. Virtually the only person who would speak to the Ulyanovs was Vladimir Ilyich’s former schoolmaster from the Gymnazia, who remained supportive of young Vladimir through thick and thin, even in the darkest days leading up to and following Alexander Ilyich’s execution.
The schoolmaster’s name? Fyodor Kerensky. His own son, Alexander, grew up almost side by side with Vladimir Ilyich—the same Alexander Kerensky who would become Lenin’s most dangerous opponent.
After his brother’s death (or, rather, his martyrdom, in Vladimir’s eyes), Lenin’s turn to revolutionary radicalism was probably inevitable. So was his turn to Marxism. Leading the way was former Narodnik Georgi Plekhanov, now in exile in Switzerland, who organized the first Marxist political circle and who proclaimed that Marx’s theory of proletarian revolution was the best path to revolution in Russia. By the mid-1890s, Marxism would be the dominant ideology among the Russian intelligentsia.
In some ways, this was a strange development. Marx had spent a lifetime despising Russia and all its works. He saw the country as a cesspool of ignorance and reaction, rather than a possible centrifuge for socialist revolution. Marx had scornfully dismissed peasants everywhere as a “sack of potatoes; all different shapes but all the same.” In his view, revolution was possible only in a country with a fully developed capitalist economy and a widespread working class; Russia flunked on both counts. For Marx, it might take at least another forty or fifty years of struggle before the working class in western Europe was even ready for socialism. The idea of Russia getting there first appeared ridiculous.
Yet Plekhanov and his colleagues were saying: take another look. Marx had been wrong. Russia was indeed well advanced on the capitalist path, with growing numbers of factories and railroads crisscrossing the country, and a revolutionary vanguard indeed taking shape. This was Russia’s tiny but steadily growing urban working class. Plekhanov urged his fellow Russian revolutionaries to put their faith in the embryonic proletariat in cities such as Moscow and St. Petersburg.
With the right leadership, Russia’s industrial workers would be poised to strike. There would be no need to wait for the long-drawn-out process of capitalist development, as had happened in the West. And forget about the peasants, the Marxists were telling their Narodnik rivals. Revolution would come to Russia’s cities first, and would then spread steadily as the working class took over the reins of power.
Marx had been right about revolution but wrong about Russia. That was the position of Russian Marxists by the time Lenin first read The Communist Manifesto in 1890–91 and took his first steps toward becoming an orthodox Marxist. Proving his intellectual master wrong about his home country became Lenin’s self-appointed task, in the one scholarly work he wrote in his life (his one book that is comparable to Woodrow Wilson’s output): Development of Capitalism in Russia. The book was a long time in gestation; it appeared in print only in 1899, by which time Lenin’s life had gone through many drastic changes.
The first had come with his expulsion from the Kazan Imperial University for participating in an antigovernment demonstration only months after matriculating, in 1887. He withdrew to his mother’s large estate at Kokushkino, a comfortable country residence she had inherited from her wealthy father, Alexander Blank, ostensibly to continue his plans to study law but also, increasingly, to immerse himself in the radical literature of the era. It was at Kokushkino that he first read The Communist Manifesto and began translating it into Russian; it was at Kokushkino that he learned to read English and also read the works of Georgi Plekhanov, which, paradoxically, were rather easier to find in Russian than the works of the Marxists’ Narodnik rivals.17
By January 1892, Lenin emerged from this period of enforced study with enough knowledge of Russian ecclesiastical and police law to receive a first-class certificate from St. Petersburg University and to join a local law firm in the Ulyanovs’ new hometown, Samara, with the title of assistant barrister. On the surface, he was a promising young white-collar professional. Beneath the surface, however, he was a budding Marxist revolutionary, waiting to join whatever conspiratorial circle seemed most committed to overthrowing the empire of the czars.
He did not wait long. In 1893, he moved to St. Petersburg, where he worked as a barrister and continued his Marxist studies. There he met Julius Martov, later leader of the Marxist Menshevik Party, and in 1895 he obtained permission from the government to travel abroad to Switzerland, where he finally met Georgi Plekhanov and his circle.
The two would later be bitter rivals—but in Lenin’s life, virtually everyone who did not become his unquestioning acolyte and disciple would become a bitter rival. For now, though, Lenin followed in the ideological path the older man had laid out. Russia was ripe for revolution, they both believed; the only question was how to find the right levers to bring it about. When Lenin returned to Russia, he founded his first political organization, the St. Petersburg League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. It had a short shelf life. In a few months, the czar’s police rounded up and arrested Lenin and the group’s other members. Lenin was sentenced to the dismal fate that he and virtually every other Russian rebel against the czar had to face sooner or later—namely, exile to Siberia.
We have to note: exile, not imprisonment or execution. By contrast with the way Lenin himself dealt with dissidents or opponents when he came to power, the czarist government was remarkably lax and quaintly old-fashioned in the way it chose to punish those who plotted its overthrow. From this perspective, the hanging of Alexander Ulyanov and his colleagues was exceptional. Declared enemies of the regime usually got herded out to the desolate wastelands of Siberia for a specified time, even as the Marxist tracts that inspired them were allowed to circulate more or less freely in Russia. (The czarist police focused more on conventional antigovernment pamphlets by Narodnik or anarchist writers.) Hence, a strange irony: by 1900, Siberia had become as much an incubator of revolution inside Russia as the radical Russian circles in Western cities such as Geneva and London where Plekhanov and his friends talked and wrote and talked and talked.
That irony certainly applied to Lenin. His “exile” sent him to the town of Shushenskoye, near the confluence of the Yenisei and Big Shush Rivers, and known to other exiles as the Siberian Italy because of its relat
ively mild climate. A lighthearted Lenin even wrote a poem that began, “Shu-shu-shu, the place where I will eventually find peace,” when he learned this would be his home for the next three years, although he never finished his first and last effort at verse.18
Nor did the authorities disappoint him in another matter. Lenin was allowed to have his fiancée, Nadezhda Krupskaya, join him in Shushenskoye. “Nadya” Krupskaya was herself a budding revolutionary and a member of the St. Petersburg League. She had been given her own sentence of exile, to the more remote town of Ufa, but the czarist authorities gave her permission to join Vladimir Ilyich. They would also be joined by her mother, who voluntarily moved to Shushenskoye to be with her daughter, something unimaginable in the later days of Lenin’s own gulag, or Stalin’s.
In July 1898, Nadya and the twenty-eight-year-old Volodya were married by a Russian Orthodox priest. From that point on she would be an inseparable part of his life: his housekeeper and cook, his secretary, his all-around workhorse, even when Lenin turned to other women as mistresses. Nadya Krupskaya would follow him unfailingly down the revolutionary path, until the very end.
The three years of enforced sabbatical from political organizing allowed Lenin to finish his latest work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia. When his sentence ended in January 1900 and he returned to St. Petersburg, he was something of a minor intellectual celebrity. An Encyclopedic Dictionary published that year gave him a brief entry, listing him as an economist.19
Yet Lenin’s real desire was to be known as a revolutionary, not as an academic: a professional revolutionary whose career would be to create the conditions—ideological, organizational, and political—in which the existing order in his country could be destroyed and a new, Marxist order could take its place, as prelude to the larger, worldwide workers’ revolution Marx and Friedrich Engels had confidently predicted. To this task Lenin brought a sense of fierce urgency that the other Russian Marxists, accustomed to talking revolution while surrounded by vodka bottles and tea samovars until late in the night, never felt. During his exile, he had read Evolutionary Socialism, by the German Marxist Eduard Bernstein, which presented the argument that current trends in bourgeois Europe—the development of trade unions, the rise in workers’ wages, the creation of government social welfare, such as Germany’s workers’ compensation program—indicated that capitalism itself would inevitably lead to a peaceful transition to socialism, without the need for violent revolution.
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