1

Homeland

Amid so much else, the revolution upset also the old administrative structure of the country. The gubernias – created in the reign of Catherine II, and in the course of a century and a half so closely woven in with the political establishment, the mores, and the literature of the country as to become almost subdivisions of nature itself – disappeared. Simbirsk gubernia, in which the future Lenin passed his childhood and early youth, was part of the vast region united and dominated by the Volga, queen of Russian rivers.

Whoever is born on the Volga carries her image through life. The uniqueness and beauty of the river lie in the contrast of its shores; the right a high, mountainous barrier against Asia, the left a level plain sloping away to the endless east. Five hundred feet above the motionless mirror of the river rises the hill upon which Simbirsk, the most backward and provincial of all the Volga capitals, spreads its wandering streets and green orchards. This slight elevation forms the watershed between two rivers, between the Volga and its tributary the Sviyaga. Although parallel for seventy miles, these two rivers flow – such is the caprice of the topography – in opposite directions, the Volga to the south, the Sviyaga to the north. At Simbirsk, moreover, the Sviyaga comes so near to the Volga that the city actually stretches over the right banks of both rivers.

At the time our tale begins, with the moving of the Ulyanov family to Simbirsk in 1869, the city was about two hundred and twenty years old. The Great Russians were stubbornly penetrating the rich middle reaches of the Volga, already occupied by the Chuvash, the Mordva, and the Tatars. They were seizing lands, driving the nomads eastward, and building wooden forts. In the same year that England achieved her ‘great rebellion’ (1648), by order of the Moscow tsar Simbirsk was founded on the right bank of the Volga as an administrative centre of the colonized region and as a military bulwark against the natives. This wide ring of colonizers, frontiersmen, and Cossacks was not only a mobile guard, but also a threat to the tsardom. For out here to the frontier fled the landlords’ serfs, the miscreant soldiers and clerks – in short, everybody who could not get along with Moscow, or later with Petersburg – schismatics and sectarians of all kinds and not a few ordinary criminals as well. Here in the spaces of the Volga ranged the dashing highwaymen, preying upon merchants, boyars, and local governors, forming into regular cavalry detachments, raiding towns, holding up tax collectors – In gratitude for which an oppressed people, forgiving their own injuries at the bandits’ hands, praised and glorified them in song.

A little more than twenty years after the founding of Simbirsk, there broke out here the famous rebellion of Stepan Razin, who assembled countless armed freemen ‘to wipe out the notables and the boyars’, and for five years dreadfully triumphed along the Volga and the Caspian Sea, plunging Moscow into a fever fright Tsaritsyn, Saratov, Samara – one after the other, the Volga towns surrendered to the rebels. Simbirsk held out The nobles and scions of the boyars withstood the siege until regular troops came to the rescue from Kazan. Here, near Simbirsk, the rebel bands suffered a cruel defeat at the hands of the tsar’s European-trained army. The shores of the Volga stood thick with gallows; eight hundred were executed. Razin himself, covered with wounds, was carried captive to Moscow, and as was the custom, was drawn and quartered. The memory of Razin lived, though, on the Volga – yes, and throughout all Russia. The hills near Kamyshin, where the rebels camped, retain his name today – the 'mounds of Stenka Razin’. In folk epics he remains one of the most beloved figures. With great fervour the radical intelligentsia used to sing romantic songs about Stenka composed by radical poets.

One hundred years or so later, under Catherine, when France was approaching her great revolution, a new thunderstorm swept over the Volga in the form of the Don Cossack Yemelyan Pugachev heading a great army of the discontented and rebellious, seizing one city after another, not touching Simbirsk but moving as far south as Tsaritsyn. There he was shattered by the regular army, betrayed by his own comrades, and sent in an iron cage to Moscow, where he shared the fate of Razin.

These two Volga rebellions constitute the authentic peasant-revolutionary tradition of old Russia. In spite of their portentous scope, however, they brought no relief to the people. An iron law of history decrees that a Jacquerie left to itself cannot rise to the stature of a real revolution. Even when it is completely victorious, a peasant revolt is only able to set up a new dynasty and establish new feudal castes. Such is the whole history of old China. Only under the leadership of a revolutionary urban class can a peasant war become a tool of social transformation. But the old Russian cities, mere accumulations of the nobility, the bureaucrats, and their retainers, contained no progressive forces of any kind. That is why, after each of these grandiose movements of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the Volga washed the bloodstains into the Caspian Sea, and the tsar’s and landlords’ oppressions weighed heavier than ever.

In both rebellions Simbirsk held out. One of the reasons was undoubtedly its character as a strong nest of boyars and of gentlefolk, This middle-Volga city, where Lenin was to first see the light of day, kept its reactionary role to the end – both in the period of the October coup d’état and afterwards during the Civil War.

Old Russia was almost completely rural, and Simbirsk gubernia was the quintessence of old Russia, Even toward the end of the last century, thirty years after the days just described, the urban population was still below 7 per cent of the gubernia’a total, and even that small percentage differed little in quality from the rural. In the steppes and forests, social contradictions were even more apparent and brutal. The Simbirsk peasants were considerably poorer in land than were peasants elsewhere in the Volga region. A third of the peasant households were classified as horseless – that is, as truly poverty-stricken, real pauper farms. The most destitute group were the aborigines – the non-Russians – who endured a double yoke. The principal and better lands were in the hands of the landlords; 73 per cent belonged to the nobles. The forest map of the gubernia looked even more malignant: out of four million acres of forest, more than half belonged to the appanage estates – that is, to the tsar’s family – and about one third to the landlords. One fiftieth was left to the peasants, who constituted 95 per cent of the population. Truly, anyone who wanted to learn to hate feudal barbarity should have been born in Simbirsk.

Even to the casual observer, the town reflected with admirable clarity the social structure of the gubernia, and indeed of the whole country. Old Simbirsk consisted of three distinctly different sections: that of the nobles, that of the merchants, and that of the townsfolk The best section, that of the nobles, occupied the summit of the hill called “the Crown’. Here were the cathedral, the administrative institutions, the schools, the promenade. Signs read not only ‘Noble Assembly Hall’ and ‘Noble Tutelage’, but also ‘Noble Rooming House’, even ‘Noble Baths’, On the spacious streets with modem side-walks, the landlords’ houses stood uncramped amid their surrounding orchards, rather like rural estates. On the promenade above the river, a military band played in the evenings for the well-to-do public.

The Volga herself, as seen from the promenade a score of miles in either direction – the Volga with her poverty, her epidemics, the slavery of her peasants and penal labour of her barge haulers – was transformed into an incomparable panorama of gentle, smooth waters, small wooded islands, and beyond the river, plains stretching off into the distance.

The Simbirsk nobility gave the fatherland no small number of high-ranking bureaucrats and military men; none of them, however, attained any distinction. The Crown prided itself most of all on the historian Karamzin, who in the caustic words of Pushkin demonstrated with elegant simplicity ‘the necessity of the autocracy and the charms of the whip’. A favourite during the life of Nicholas I, this official historian was much pampered and earned for himself after death an allegorical monument in his home town. This antique Muse of History, harmonizing badly with the climate and the flora and fauna of the Volga region, was known among the people as the 'Pig-Iron Woman’. Peasant women coming to Simbirsk for annual welcomings of the icon of the Holy Virgin of Kazan would pray fervently to the pagan Clio, taking her in their simplicity of mind for the martyred Saint Barbara.

The slopes of the hill were covered with orchards, many of which were tilled by the Beloriztsy, then a persecuted religious sect. Beyond the little Simbirsk River, which cleft the town, lay the trading squares, where on market days, bark and tar, dry and salt Volga fish, wheat loaves, sunflower seeds, pastry, and other delicacies would be set out and piled up in the dust Commercial activities centred around the square. In the sturdily built houses with heavy locks lived the merchants – dry-goods, flour, vodka, grain, and lumber dealers. Some of them already handled roubles by the hundreds of thousands, and had their eye on the aristocratic upper parts of the hill. And finally, the townsfolk, ignorant and downtrodden, inhabited the outskirts, Their little cabins and huts with cracks for windows, with dovecotes and birdhouses, were thrown about hit or miss, in pits or mounds, alone or in bunches, along narrow, winding streets and alleys, between tottering woven fences. Gaunt, dirty hogs and mongrel dogs with matted fur enlivened this unappealing town landscape. And a little farther on began the peasant village, equally poverty-stricken whether in the forest or the prairie section.

Cruel and ugly was this belated social gothic of old Russia – especially here on the Volga, where the forest, cradle of the great Russian state, met the nomad steppe in hostile confrontation. Social relations had neither finish nor stability; they were like those homely structures the Russian colonizers threw together for living quarters out of hastily felled forest trees. Russia's wooden cities, too, bore the mark of something temporary, burning down periodically and being hastily put up again. In 1864 an enormous fire, burning steadily for nine days, destroyed almost three quarters of Simbirsk; hundreds of people died in the flames. But in a few years the pinewood phoenix rose again from the ashes with twenty-nine churches. On the whole, though, Simbirsk grew slowly; in the 1870s its population was still below thirty thousand. This primitive and hungry gubernia, scraping the earth with its old wooden plough, had no need, and indeed no power, to sustain a big city.

As if to compensate for all this, in the spring Simbirsk would become quite beautiful. The old hill would grow into a flowering orchard. A fragrance of lilacs, cherries, and apple blossoms would hang above the city’s lordly cupola. The Volga would twinkle at the street ends, overflowing its banks for two or three miles, and the nightingales would sing in the orchards at night. This town seemed a lost paradise to former inhabitants of the Crown. But nature’s spring festival would pass; the sun would scorch the green orchards, and the neglected city would lie exposed in the dust of streets and alleys that in the rainy autumn would disappear completely in mud and in winter would slumber under a heavy carpet of snow. ‘It is not a town but a graveyard, like all those towns,’ says Goncharov of his own native Simbirsk’

On the heights, life proceeded leisurely, with food and drink in abundance. There was, decidedly, nothing to hurry toward. It is no accident that it was Goncharov, a man born and brought up in Simbirsk, who created the character of Oblomov, that incarnation of lordly sloth, fear of effort, blissful inactivity – a genuine and authentic old Russian type, a product of serfdom that did not die with serfdom, in fact one that is not totally extinct even today. Fifteen hundred kilometres from Petersburg, nine hundred from Moscow, Simbirsk had no railroad until the end of the 1880s. The official Gubernia News, which appeared twice a week, was its only political newspaper. To the very end of the last century the town did not know the use of the telephone. Truly an ideal capital of all-Russian Oblomovism!

Two allied and hostile hierarchies, the bureaucratic and the aristocratic, dividing the influence, dominated the town and the gubernia. First came the governor, the eye of St Petersburg, repository of power, protector of the landlord’s sleep against the ghost of Pugachev. Officially, of course, the church came first, but in reality the priests stood somewhere below the merchants. Only the archbishop was still an acknowledged figure on Olympus, something in the nature of a spiritual governor with a consultative vote. Officialdom had its unalterable Table of Ranks, which established, once and for all, thirteen degrees of recognizable human worth. The nobles were also guided, over and above that, by delicate shades of aristocratic blue blood, and tried to look down on these upstart government officials. Questions as to who should occupy what place in the cathedral or what order should be followed in approaching to kiss the cross or the hand of the governor’s wife, stirred great passions and belligerent side-takings, which ended invariably in grandiose drinking parties and not infrequently in fist-fights as well. To settle questions of honour, the knights of Simbirsk, especially after a drink, would spare neither their own nor others' jaws. Upon the landlords’ estates, meanwhile, there bloomed those gentle maidens of Turgenev’s novels, who would subsequently, as decreed by nature, turn into avaricious mistresses of landed estates or into envious wives of government officials.

In the very beginning of the 1860s, when our muck-raking literature burst forth at full force, Minayev, a radical poet and himself a nobleman of Simbirsk gubernia, celebrated his homeland at the capital in satiric verse: ‘Abode of dried fish, mud, and gossip.’ The most blue-blooded among the nobles, with their ‘impudent luxury’, their jesters and snobbish pranks, and their feudal harems, indulged in the sport of losing serfs at the gaming table. Some were liberals making speeches ‘in honour of the whip’, others were churchgoers breaking the jaws of their servants. There was also the archbishop roughing up the deacons during mass, and there was the director of the high school, a ‘bureaucratic scoundrel’ cursed by the whole town. All these were openly identified by name in Minayev’s sufficiently sonorous iambics. And when, ten years later, the poet, a sick old man, humble and subdued, returned to his home town – where by that time a whole new generation had grown up – none of the nobles would return his calls, and ultimately nobody went to his funeral. Those people knew how to stand up for the honour of a family tradition!

However, the hour struck. It was some ten years before the one-hundredth anniversary of Pugachev’s rebellion and the bicentennial of Razin’s, and serfdom, already deeply undermined by the development of bourgeois relations, had to be abolished from above. The tsar compelled the serfs to pay their landlords not only for personal freedom, but also for the lands that had been the serfs’ own from time immemorial – filching the lands from them, moreover, by means of reforms that benefited the landlords. The act of ‘emancipation’ was converted into a gigantic financial operation doubly ruinous to the peasantry. Moreover, the redemption payments contributed to the landlords’ economy the one thing that was always in short supply: ready cash. Those noble gentlemen held sumptuous wakes in memory of the Golden Age wherever they could – in Paris, on the Riviera, in Petersburg and Moscow, and less ostentatiously on their own estates or in Simbirsk, that common estate of the gubernia’s nobility.

However, these redemption payments melted away like wax; a repetition was not in sight. The more enterprising landlords, those capable of keeping step with the age, got hold of the zemstvos, or a little later took to railroad construction. Others married their sons to merchants’ daughters, or gave their daughters to the merchants’ heirs. A far greater number entered into historic liquidation – mortgaged their lands, mortgaged them again, then sold their city houses and family estates, with all their wings and shady gardens and plaster-of-paris muses and croquet grounds. In their ruin they cursed the ‘reforms’, which had pampered the people, depleted the lands, killed off the martens and ermine in the Simbirsk forests, and even caused the Volga to cease producing good fat sturgeon as of old. The reactionaries demanded the restitution of the lash, and sent formal memoranda to Petersburg about the timeliness of a restoration of serfdom. The liberals fumed at the slowness of progress and secretly contributed money to the revolutionary Red Cross. The partisans of the lash were incomparably the more numerous.

In the merchant section of Simbirsk, where the conservative stagnation took even cruder forms than among the nobles, the period of reform and dummy business ventures gave a hitherto unknown scope to the traditional greed. It was from this section that the buyers of the landlords’ property and the nobles’ city residences generally came. These bearded merchants moved up into the sacred precincts of the provincial Olympus, still shy about changing their padded cap for hats and their high boots for French shoes, but already free of the obsequiousness of their class. Thus there began to install itself even on the Simbirsk Crown that not very harmonious, but nevertheless enduring, symbiosis of nobility, merchantry, and bureaucracy which in various incarnations determined the aspect of official Russia for more than half a century – the period, that is, between the abolition of serfdom in 1861 and the collapse of old Russia in 1917.

Economic progress moved from west to east and from the centre to the circumference; political influences followed the same road. The Volga region, a backward section of a backward country, could not remain immune to those ideas and attempts at action which were clearing the path for a revolutionary transformation of the country. During the first quarter of the nineteenth century the cultivated Simbirsk nobleman and state counsellor N. I. Turgenev, an admirer of the French Encyclopedists and an enemy of serfdom, joined a Petersburg secret society, one of those which were preparing the famous semi-insurrection of the guard regiments of 14 December 1825. That heroic and hopeless constitutional flare-up of progressive military youth, which no doubt included in its ranks the flower of Simbirsk’s noble families, was routed with a shower of bullets. Escaping abroad, Turgenev was condemned to death in absentia; he was to win fame in Europe with a French book about Russia. The uprising of the Decembrists gained an enduring place in Russian history as the watershed separating eighteenth-century palace revolutions from the subsequent struggle for liberation to which it was a dramatic introduction.

It was the tradition of the Decembrists that nurtured the so-called generation of the forties, which, in the words of another Turgenev, the famous novelist, took a ‘Hannibal’s oath’ to struggle against serfdom. The most celebrated publicist of this generation was A. I. Herzen. On the extreme left wing rose the monumental figure of the democratic Slavophile and future father of world anarchism Bakunin, a Russian nobleman, Simbirsk, forming an exception, gave the generation of the forties, instead of a liberal landlord, a conservative merchant’s son, Goncharov, His politics notwithstanding, it was Goncharov’s good fortune to pronounce in his portrait of Oblomov what was, in effect, an irrevocable death sentence upon the culture of serf-owning Russia.

The Crimean War (1853-6) ended with a collapse of the alleged military power of tsarism: the screw propeller triumphed over the sailing vessel, and capitalism over the serf-owning economy. The system of starched-up braggadocio, established on the bones of the Decembrists and lasting for a good thirty years, was decomposing with a stench. The mysterious death of the tsar, whom Herzen had nicknamed Nicholas the Bludgeon, opened the sluices of social discontent. Suddenly the press began to speak up with unaccustomed candour. The usurious emancipation of the peasants inaugurated the epoch of the so-called ‘great reforms’. Deceived in their hopes, the villages grew darkly agitated. Progressive social thought arrived at an open split, the radicals coming out against the moderates. This clash of political tendencies was consecrated by a touchy Turgenev in his novel Fathers and Sons as a decisive break between the men of the 1840s and those of the 1860s. Turgenev’s reduction of the question to a generation gap was only a part of the truth, however, and that part disguised the whole. At its roots the struggle had a social character. The cultivated landlords, elegantly repenting of their noble privileges, were replaced by a new social stratum, without privileges and therefore without repentance, lacking in aesthetic upbringing and hereditary good manners, but more numerous, resolute, and self-sacrificing. These were the sons of priests, of lower-ranking officers, of petty functionaries, of merchants, of ruined nobles, sometimes of townsfolk and peasants – students, seminarians, schoolteachers — in short, the so-called raznochintsy, the casteless intelligentsia, who just at that time got hold of the idea of guiding the destinies of the country. The front of the stage was immediately occupied by acts of protest from student youth, and the word student became for many years a popular synonym for the nickname ‘nihilist’, coined by Turgenev.

At the same time, the abolition of feudal servitude freed the older generation from its ‘Hannibal’s oath’ and relegated them politically to the back benches. The liberal westernizers were of the opinion that Russia would now, step by step, draw near to European civilization. The raznochintsy, on the other hand, brusquely raised the question of a special destiny for the Russian people, the possibility of avoiding capitalist slavery, and of direct struggle with the oppressors. Although it contains a large admixture of utopianism, the gospel of the men of the sixties sounds immeasurably more courageous than the stale ‘oath’ of their fathers. It was with a degree of defiance that Turgenev answered in 1863 some of his well-meaning advisers, ‘I have never written for the people. I have written for that class of the public to which I belong… ’ Meanwhile, new men were fervently seeking roads to the people. Instead of addressing humanitarian pleas to the rulers, they decided to appeal to the hatred felt by the oppressed. Turgenev, like Goncharov, turned away from these ‘sons’ as if they were unloved stepchildren. Turgenev did this with a degree of coquetry that was so characteristic of him, while Goncharov did so spitefully and slanderously. In his novel The Precipice, set on a nobleman’s estate near Simbirsk, Goncharov publicly pilloried a nihilist, Mark Volokhov, who had dared to replace God with the laws of chemistry, had borrowed money from liberal nobles without paying it back, undermined respect for authority among the young, and seduced the nobles’ daughters. The real-life Volokhovs, however, proved not of the timid sort; they were not intimidated by the disapproval of the 'fathers’, but on the contrary took the offensive. The 1860s opened a period of unceasing and ever more resolute revolutionary struggle.

That Simbirsk made early acquaintance with the nihilists is confirmed not only by belles lettres but also by historical evidence. Some were exiled there from more important cities by the police. Others developed locally under the influence of the exiles. It is worth noting in general that some of the sturdiest revolutionaries of that period often hailed from the dreamiest backwoods parts of the country. For example, among the leftist students a notable place was occupied by Don Cossacks and by Siberians – people, that is, from an utterly conservative milieu of prosperous peasantry, or from such God-forsaken gubernias of the landed gentry as that of Simbirsk. The sharp clash of new influences with the inertia of these rural rustic backwaters created in the more sensitive of the younger generation that bold and sometimes frenzied break with old bonds and beliefs which would drive them finally into selfless service to the revolution. In general, backwardness is apt at a certain moment to swing over to progress with a catastrophic determination. This is demonstrated by the destinies of Russia.

The great Simbirsk fire of 1864, like a number of other fires that during those years swept St Petersburg and provincial cities, had a mysterious political background. The government looked for the culprits among the Poles and revolutionaries, but found nothing. The serf-owners accused the nihilists of arson and insisted, for that reason, that the peasant reforms be postponed. To make their case more convincing, they apparently went in for arson themselves. Baron Wrangel, who investigated the causes of the Simbirsk fire, found nothing. Nevertheless, as scapegoats, two soldiers were sentenced to death. Whether they were ever executed is not known. Senator Zhdanov, who replaced Wrangel, allegedly collected, in the course of two years of investigation, incontrovertible evidence of the guilt of a reactionary gang; but Zhdanov died suddenly while on his way to St Petersburg and his briefcase was never found. The third investigator, General Den, set free all the suspects rounded up by his predecessor and discontinued the investigation itself as hopeless. Finally, in 1869, when the Ulyanovs moved to Simbirsk, the government senate resolved to ‘consign the matter to oblivion’; this was successfully accomplished.

At the edge of the noble section of Simbirsk – in a wing on the court of a two-storied wooden house at the spot where, as tradition has it, Razin’s army was smashed – on quiet, deserted Streletsky Street, not far from the prison square, a third child was born, on 10 April 1870, to the inspector of public schools Ulyanov. The wing itself has long ceased to exist, and it is not even known exactly where it stood, but we may assume that it differed in no way from all other wings of wooden houses on the Volga. The boy was christened with the sonorous Slavonic name Vladimir, which means lord or ruler of the earth. The parents and the priest hardly suspected that the name contained a prophecy. This boy born on the Volga was destined to become the leader and ruler of a people. Simbirsk was to become Ulyanovsk. The Simbirsk Assembly Hall of Nobles was to become the Lenin Palace of Books. And Russia of the tsars was to be transformed into the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.