10

The Preparations Begin

For reasons of ‘political hygiene’, students expelled from universities were supposed to be banished ‘to their home towns’. But in Simbirsk, where Vladimir had lived for over seventeen years, almost a third of his life, he had no relatives left He was graciously permitted to go to the former estate of his grandfather Blank: his mother, Maria Alexandrovna, had inherited a fifth of that property, In December he departed for Kokushkino, some thirty miles from Kazan. He was to live there under unofficial surveillance until autumn of the following year. His elder sister was already there. At first she was to be exiled to Eastern Siberia – for the crime of being a sister of Alexander, there being no other grounds whatever – but through the fervent efforts of her mother, the sentence was commuted to exile in Kokushkino under official police surveillance. Maria Alexandrovna arrived from Kazan with the younger children a little later. The family lived in the cold and badly built wing belonging to one of the aunts. The neighbours could not have shown any great eagerness to make the acquaintance of the Ulyanovs. From time to time the police captain would drive up to make sure the criminal element was in its place. The alarmed aunts would entertain the captain, as was the custom, with tea and preserves, or perhaps even cherry brandy, and that would be all. At rare intervals an unremarkable cousin would also show up. Winter was peaceful in Kokushkino. The winds howled, the blizzard raged, the house was snowed in. The mother would heave a secret sigh, the aunts on occasion would shake their heads reproachfully: Why, after all, should Vladimir ruin his own life? Wasn’t what happened with Sasha enough? They did, however, refrain from mentioning Sasha by name.

Vladimir grew to manhood, becoming quite attentive to his mother, who, as before, lavished an inexhaustible fountain of love and care upon her children. Anna, always distinguished by her uneven temperament, had grown more nervous since her prison experience. The family lived unhappily, not knowing what to expect from day to day. By good luck, there turned out to be an old bookcase in the wing, containing the books of a deceased uncle, considered in his time a well-read man. Such uncles, often of the type of Turgenev’s ‘superfluous men’, were to be found in many landowners’ families. Departing for the cemetery they would bequeath to their nieces and nephews a couple of hundred stray volumes and some sets of old Russian journals. Vladimir fell upon his uncle’s bookcase. This first spell of ‘serious’ reading was thus of necessity chaotic. The choice of books was accidental; there was no guide, The young eyes roved thirstingly.

In making his acquaintance with progressive journals of previous years, Vladimir first came into contact with the struggle that surrounded the question of Russia’s economic destiny. His knowledge of the journalism of the 1860s and 1870s – which he continued to expand in years to come – proved very useful to him subsequently in debates with the Populists and in his first efforts as a writer. But this village bookcase was not enough. He had to resort to the Kazan library. At the same time, the family subscribed to a newspaper, most likely Moscow’s Russkie Vedomosti, whose misty liberal gleam shone timidly in the twilight of the 1880s. It was evidently during these ten months in Kokushkino that Vladimir first learned to read a daily newspaper – a complicated art in which he subsequently became a virtuoso. For keeping in touch with the outside world, there were happy occasions all looked forward to: the arrival of a woven basket with books, newspapers, and letters was each time an event of importance. Vladimir, by the way, carried on no correspondence at this time, Only once did he attempt to inform a former high-school friend about his recent clash with the university authorities, honouring his foes with some verbal uppercuts; but the ever-cautious elder sister began to argue the folly of exposing himself and his correspondent to such a risk, and Vladimir, although he heartily disliked to give in to other people’s arguments, refrained finally from sending off the letter which he had so enjoyed writing.

What with his uncle’s bookshelf and the woven basket of mail from Kazan, he passed the days of his police-supervised life at Kokushkino. The family wounds were gradually healing – quickly with the children, slowly with the mother. Vladimir tutored his younger brother Dimitri. He went sledding, and hunted rabbits and other game, gun in hand, although unsuccessfufiy. On the subject of Vladimir’s unsuccessful hunting, Anna writes, ‘Like my two other brothers, he was never a hunter at heart.’ We can hardly agree. Lenin was in reality a passionate hunter, but too impatient. In this endeavour he yielded with difficulty to discipline. Later, too, that excessive impatience prevented him from becoming a good hunter, although in exile he did achieve a degree of prowess.

Spring came, Vladimir’s first spring in the country. He was just turning eighteen, the springtime age. Now he must have better understood why Sasha so loved nature, and loved contemplating her in solitude. In summer his cousins came and the family continued to recover. Kokushkino came to life again; there were walks together, games of chess, songs, and hunting expeditions. Among the summer relatives there was no one with whom it would be worth while to exchange opinions upon troubled themes. Still, with cousins one could trade wisecracks with impunity. Even though they were older, they ‘were completely helpless before Volodya’s well-aimed jibes and sly grin’.

In May, five months after his expulsion, Vladimir made an attempt to regain entrance to the university. The head of the Kazan district schools sent a report to the minister in which it was made clear that the former student Ulyanov, ‘notwithstanding his distinguished abilities and excellent scholarship could not for the time being be considered a reliable person in either a moral or a political sense.’ The words ‘for the time being ’ implied that the director had not lost hope. The director of the department, without reading the report through, wrote in the margin: ‘Isn’t this one a brother of that Ulyanov? Also from Simbirsk’ – and then, having glanced at the latter part of the document, he saw that ‘the applicant is a brother of the executed Ulyanov,’ and he wrote beneath it: ‘Not to be accepted under any circumstances.’ The minister of education was Count Delyanov. Witte described him as ‘a gentle and good man’, and at the same time as ‘a shifty Armenian’ who manoeuvres in all directions. With Ulyanov it was not necessary to manoeuvre; the minister simply turned down his petition.

Two months later. Maria Alexandrovna approached Delyanov in her own name. Before the certain refusal of the ‘gentle and good man’ arrived, Vladimir sent a request to the Minister of Interior for permission to go abroad to continue his education. News of the refusal of the director of the police department to issue a foreign passport had already been sent through the Kazan police, since by then the authorities, as a result of the tireless efforts of the mother, had permitted Vladimir to take up his residence in Kazan once more. The family moved there in the autumn of 1888, all except Anna, who was permitted to leave Kokushkino only some time later.

Since the death of Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, they had lived on a pension. The twelve hundred roubles a year issued by the treasury to the widow and children was a considerable sum of money in the provinces, but with so large a family it was still necessary to live frugally. The money received from the sale of the Simbirsk home constituted a reserve. Maria Alexandrovna took an apartment on the outskirts of town with a balcony and an orchard on the hill. In the lower storey there were for some reason two kitchens. Vladimir occupied one of them and, enjoying comparative privacy, sat down to his books. For him the period of preparation had begun. From his expulsion from the university until his departure for Petersburg for revolutionary work, it lasted nearly six years. It was here, on the Volga, in Kokushkino, in Kazan, and later in the province of Samara, that the future Lenin was formed. For the biographer, those critical years 1888 to 1893 are of great interest, but at the same time they are the most difficult.

There are secret-police reports about each physical move of young Ulyanov. These reports, like little flags on the biographical chart, mark out his external course and ease the task of the researcher. But for Vladimir’s inner course in that preparatory period, when he had not yet begun writing, there are no such flags. There are scattered bits of testimony, of some interest, but they are shapeless and some of them simply apocryphal. There was no politically mature person near him, no guide or even attentive observer, except for his elder sister, who has told us all she could of the growth of her brother. Only his schoolmates came in contact with Vladimir, but they were, in essence, his pupils. Moreover, the majority of them have retired from the scene without leaving behind any reminiscences. As an author, Vladimir did not appear on the stage until 1893. No documentary record of his evolution has been preserved, neither his ever so careful outlines of books nor even personal letters.

To the oft-repeated complaints about the paucity of material characterizing these critical years in Lenin’s life, Yelizarova offers a rejoinder: ‘There wasn’t much to say, anyway. He read, he studied, he debated.’ The note of irritation in these words makes it only more apparent that Yelizarova observed Vladimir’s intellectual life only from the outside. For her, no question seems to arise about what he read, what he studied, what he debated. What was his attitude toward Populism, toward People’s Will: how did his attitude change under the impact of his study of Marx, his personal observations, encounters, and influences? In short: How did the Simbirsk high-school boy, still remote from politics, barely emancipated from Eastern Orthodoxy, taking a carefree delight in Turgenev, become in those remote Volga provinces a full-fledged Marxist, an unbending revolutionary, a future leader? ‘I do not remember the names of his friends,’ writes Anna, who no more entered into Vladimir’s inner life than she had earlier into the circle of Alexander’s interests. Hence the meagre content and the unreliability of this closest witness to the intellectual evolution of Vladimir.

The general direction of Vladimir’s development was not, to be sure, exceptional. At the beginning of the 1890s, many of the young generation of the intelligentsia were turning abruptly to Marxism. The historic causes of this turn are no secret, either: the capitalist transformation of Russia; the awakening of the proletariat; the dead end in which the independent revolutionary course of the intelligentsia found itself. But a biography must not be overshadowed by history. We must show how the general historic forces and tendencies were refracted in a particular individual with all his personal traits and peculiarities. No small number of Russia’s young men and women studied Marx in those years; some of them lived on the banks of the Volga. But only one of them succeeded in absorbing the doctrine into his flesh and blood, in subordinating to it his thoughts and his feelings, ultimately rising to tower above it, to feel himself the master, with the doctrine as his tool. This young man was Vladimir Ulyanov. Although the data for plotting the course of his preparatory development are scant, the position of the biographer is not altogether hopeless. Certain important signs exist with which to map his spiritual course. As for the gaps in the picture, we will have to resort to psychological speculation, while providing the reader with the data necessary for its evaluation.

The family continued in Kazan still quite isolated although probably not to the same degree as during the last months in Simbirsk. Maria Alexandrovna had broken with one milieu and not yet found another. Anna was living in her thoughts outside the family: she was about to marry Yelizarov. Vladimir was not new to Kazan. He sought out some of his old acquaintances and through them made new ones. Vladimir, as far as we know, brought nobody to the house. He had not brought any visitors even in his high-school years, and since his expulsion from the university he carefully protected his family from politically suspect visitors and any possible trouble they could bring. Besides, radically inclined young people must have avoided the family of Alexander Ulyanov to avoid attracting the attention of the police.

Among Vladimir’s new acquaintances, we find the name of an old member of People’s Will, Chetvergova, of whom, we are told, the young man was ‘very fond’. Yelizarova writes that in general Lenin did not disavow the ‘heritage’ of the old People’s Will, Still, she obviously falls into one of her usual anachronisms in this case. In later years, when Lenin carefully appraised the constituent parts of the revolutionary past, he did in fact embrace some of the tenets of People’s Will, such as centralism, conspiratorial tactics, and ruthlessness in the struggle against tsarism. But if in 1888 he ‘did not disavow’ the heritage, then it was only because he had not yet approached it in a critical spirit. Ideas and tendencies were not yet marked off in his mind. To others, as to himself, he was still the younger brother of Alexander Ulyanov, a hero and martyr. He looked upon Chetvergova as a green recruit looks at a scar-covered veteran.

How and when did Vladimir first come into contact with his future teacher, Karl Marx? Alexander read Das Kapital during his last vacation. In connection with his brother’s fate, the name of Marx may well have emerged for Vladimir from that indifferent realm where so many names reside. One of his high-school friends states that after the death of Alexander, he and Vladimir, both in their last year of high school, attempted to translate Das Kapital from the German. If this recollection, on which the older sister casts doubt, is not a simple lapse of memory, the attempt at any rate could only have been of an episodic character and did not go beyond the first pages. As Yelizarova aptly comments, ‘How could two green high-school boys carry out such an undertaking?’

Another testimony, more reliable notwithstanding its factual errors, estimates Lenin’s first acquaintance with Marx at approximately a year later. On the basis of conversations with Lenin in Western Europe during the First World War, Radek says: ‘While still a high-school student, Vladimir Ilyich joined a circle of People’s Will. There he first heard of Marx. The student Mandelshtam, a future Constitutional Democrat, read a paper developing the views of the Emancipation of Labour Group … As though through a mist Ilyich caught sight of the mighty revolutionary theory. He got hold of the first volume of Das Kapital which revealed to him the external world.’ All this happened not in Simbirsk but in Kazan; Vladimir was not a high-school student but a student expelled from the university. As for the rest of the story, although somewhat fictionalized, it evokes no great doubts. This is the first time we have encountered – in this particular connection – the name of Mandelshtam, a future liberal lawyer, who in his youth actually did go through the measles of Marxism. Such an interesting detail Radek could only have learned from Lenin himself. His mention of the People’s Will circle confirms the fact that it was toward that milieu that the brother of the terrorist gravitated.

It would be a great mistake, however, to visualize the Kazan circle as a conspiratorial, let alone a terrorist, organization. It was merely a few young people gathered around someone under police surveillance – perhaps around that same Chetvergova. If we take literally Radek’s statement that on that evening Lenin, first heard the name of Marx, then we must not only regard the story about an attempt to translate Das Kapital in Simbirsk as apocryphal, but also concede that in the summer of 1886 Vladimir had absolutely no interest in the fat book that Alexander was poring over during the evening hours. There is nothing impossible in this. While busy with Turgenev or chess, the schoolboy might easily have glanced at the cover without even remembering the name of the author.

In the university city of Kazan, there were perhaps a dozen copies of the first Russian edition of Das Kapital, most of these were removed from public libraries or confiscated during searches of private apartments. The book had long since become a rarity. We have no way of knowing whether Vladimir succeeded in getting hold of the treasure from the secret shelf of some educated liberal, or through some exiled members of People’s Will, or from local students. Perhaps it was the search for Das Kapital that brought him into contact with his first Marxist circles, either through Mandelshtam or in some other way.

However it may have come about, the student expelled from the Imperial University became a student in the secret university of Marx. And what a student! The biographer would pay a high price for an opportunity to take a peek at young Lenin reading the first chapter of Das Kapital in the extra kitchen of the Kazan apartment. When in the evening Anna would happen into his field of vision, he would immediately make her his audience. Vladimir could not shut his thoughts up inside himself as Alexander had. Ideas took hold of him, subjugated him to themselves, and demanded that he subjugate others to them. Seated on a cold kitchen range covered with old newspapers and gesticulating furiously, he would explain to his elder sister the mysteries of surplus value and exploitation.

Very little is known of the Kazan circle in which Vladimir took part. Anna Yelizarova, probably guessing, writes, ‘There was no authoritative leader in that circle.’ A few students read good books together and exchanged ideas about what they had read. Toward the spring of 1889 these studies assumed, it would seem, a more systematic character. Vladimir began to absent himself more often in the evenings. He had succeeded during these months in getting ahead with the study of Das Kapital and in maturing generally. We may assume with confidence that he had become first among equals in the circle and that he took his duties as unofficial leader seriously. But, for the time being, it was still only a search for roads.

In the university town there were several such circles. Most serious and important was Fedoseyev’s group. The leader of this circle, who was born in 1869 and died tragically in 1929, was a truly remarkable figure. While still in the eighth grade in high school he was expelled for revolutionary agitation among his comrades. This lesson did not cure him; on the contrary, it impelled him to broaden the scope of his work. ‘Fedoseyev’, a local gendarme officer reported, ‘enjoyed, in spite of his youth, considerable authority in revolutionary matters among local students.’ Fedoseyev’s circle possessed a small illegal library and set up its own underground press. For those inert times this was a great and bold undertaking, although, to be sure, it did not get very far.

Vladimir, who did not belong to the inner circle, heard of these plans but took no part in them. He wanted to study. Alexander’s fate not only beckoned to the revolutionary road but also warned him of its dangers. To throw himself in headlong, to become a martyr through sheer carelessness – such thoughts were alien to him even in those early years. A consciousness of his own significance had already awakened in him. He was getting ready without haste or feverish gestures.

Not, to be sure, because of a lack of passion. But the ability to harness his passions was one of his most outstanding qualities, and it was this trait that made him a leader of others.

Without any concrete evidence, Anna Yelizarova places ‘the beginning of the formation of Vladimir Ilyich’s Social Democratic convictions’ in the winter of 1888-9. That circumspect formula, ‘the beginning of the formation’, is almost meaningless. But we have at least moved quite a way from the assertion of the younger sister that the choice of the Social Democratic path had been made as early as 1887. However, the elder sister, too, is anticipating events. He was still only studying the economic theory of Marx, which was also recognized, after a fashion, by the Populists, Vladimir studied it more seriously than the others, but he was still far from drawing the necessary political conclusions from it. This is proven in part, although indirectly, by his relations with Fedoseyev. Anna Yelizarova thinks that ‘it is not necessary to assume an influence of one upon the other’, since it is a question of ‘approximately equivalent magnitudes’. For our purposes, there is no need to compare the calibre of the two young men, of whom Fedoseyev was the older by a year. It is a question of the dates of development in the direction of Social Democracy. All that is known about Fedoseyev implies that in this respect he was well ahead of Ulyanov. According to Maxim Gorky, who lived on the Volga in those years and moved in radical circles, Fedoseyev had proclaimed his support of Plekhanov’s Our Disagreements as early as 1887. True, when it comes to ideas or dates, Gorky’s memory is not particularly reliable, but his testimony is indirectly confirmed by other contemporaries. ‘ By then [1888] Fedoseyev was already maturing as a Marxist’, writes the former Kazan student Lalayants. In answer to a question, Lenin wrote a few years before his death: ‘N. E. Fedoseyev was one of the first to declare his adherence to the Marxist tendency.’ Under the influence of the old Social Democrat Skvortsov, Fedoseyev, moreover, decisively condemned the terrorist tactics of People’s Will, a position that was by no means taken as a rule in Marxist circles in those years. It was precisely this point that must have been the great stumbling block for the brother of Alexander Ulyanov.

We may quite confidently assume that it was in connection with Fedoseyev’s propaganda activities that Vladimir first entered the orbit of Marxist interests. It was probably from these same circles that he received the precious volume of Das Kapital. Vladimir did not make Fedoseyev’s acquaintance, however, and never met him even once during his entire stay in Kazan, although he did come in close contact with less-committed members of his group. This fact, to which the memoirists and biographers have paid no attention, requires some explanation. Lenin himself says: ‘I had heard of Fedoseyev during my stay in Kazan but never met him personally.’ We shall see further on that Lenin was always seeking closer acquaintance and connections with those who shared his beliefs. Shortly thereafter, he was to enter into correspondence with this same Fedoseyev on theoretical questions of Marxism and was to make a special trip to the city of Vladimir in order to try to meet him personally. Why, then, in Kazan, where making his acquaintance would have been so simple, did he not seek out Fedoseyev? One almost wants to say: Why did he avoid him? The idea that Fedoseyev himself, occupying a central position in the Marxist ‘underground’ of the time, avoided making Lenin’s acquaintance for conspiratorial reasons seems wholly improbable. Fedoseyev’s name, as the citizen of Kazan Grigoryev relates, was widely spoken among the youth and ‘not entirely in secrecy’. On the other hand, Vladimir, expelled from the university, was the brother of an executed terrorist That was too strong a recommendation for Fedoseyev to disregard. It is far more probable that Vladimir himself shrank from the acquaintanceship. In taking up the study of Das Kapital, he did not intend at all to break with the traditions of People’s Will. At the same time, he could not have felt sufficiently well grounded to defend that tradition from the criticism of a Social Democrat who rejected terror. If you add to this his distaste for surrendering to other people’s arguments, especially people his own age, it becomes understandable why Vladimir might have preferred not to expose himself prematurely to an opponent’s attacks. Through the other members of the circle, he found himself sufficiently au courant with the thoughts and arguments of Fedoseyev in order to take them into consideration as he studied. In later years Lenin resorted to such methods of cautious reconnoitring on more than one occasion. This testified first of all to his immense restraint and then to that quality which is best described as shrewdness. The psychological soundness of these conjectures permits us to put forth the hypothesis – and we shall soon find a number of corroborating factors – that for at least four years, from 1887 to 1891, Vladimir’s revolutionary inclinations did not take on a Social Democratic colouring, and his study of Marxism did not imply, to him, a break with the cause of his elder brother.

Without knowing the works of Plekhanov, Vladimir could not even have seriously raised the question of a choice between Social Democracy and People’s Will. To be sure, Kamenev, the first editor of Lenin’s works, expresses his certainty that the writings of the Emancipation of Labour Group, then circulating in the radical circles of Kazan, were ‘undoubtedly read by Vladimir Ilyich'. We are not at all certain of that. Vladimir spent only seven months in Kazan. The name of Plekhanov still meant nothing to him. The publications of the Emancipation of Labour Group, if they were circulating there, did so only in single copies. Vladimir was sufficiently engrossed in Das Kapital. Finally, even if Plekhanov’s Our Disagreements also fell into his hands, he could hardly have gotten much out of a polemical book not addressed to beginners without some familiarity with the elements of political economy and the history of the Russian revolutionary movement.

As to the question of when Vladimir first came to read Russian Social Democratic literature, we have, aside from Kamenev’s conjecture, one single affirmative indication: Lenin told Radek on a walk they took together that he had studied not only Das Kapital but also Engels’ Anti-Dühring before he got hold of any publication of the Emancipation of Labour Group. We can consider it an established fact that Vladimir obtained Anti-Dühring in Petersburg not earlier than in the autumn of 1890. Therefore, his acquaintance with the works of Plekhanov, without which one could not have arrived at Social Democratic positions, must have taken place in 1891. Without setting aside rapturous anachronisms, one cannot establish the actual landmarks of Vladimir’s development and demonstrate, if only approximately, how this young man, who began to study the social sciences at the age of nineteen, emerged four years later as a young warrior, armed to the teeth. The dates indicated above will gradually be filled in with some striking content. For the time being we will merely repeat: Lenin was no prodigy; his genius was organic, stubborn, at certain stages even slow, because it was profound. Must we not again advise the writers of memoirs, the biographers, worshippers, and sisters: Do not hurry Lenin along with childish whips; allow him to set his own pace. Rest assured; in good time he will come out on the road.

The winter spent in Kazan was a time of a burning passion for chess. Two considerations fed this passion: his youth, which required all kinds of exercise and disinterested expenditure of physical and mental energies, and the ambiguity of his position. Vladimir was an expelled student and did not know what to do with himself. For an amateur chess player he had attained considerable prowess even in high school, leaving his father far behind. During Alexander’s last vacation, the brothers had played in the evenings – stubbornly, in silent concentration. In playing with Dimitri, the younger brother, and with weaker players in general, Vladimir did not show that weakening magnanimity which permits the opponent to take back a move, demoralizing them both. Observance of the rules of the game was for him an essential element of its very enjoyment, Lack of foresight and carelessness ought to be punished and not rewarded. A game is a dress rehearsal for a fight, and in a fight no moves are taken back. Vladimir regularly visited the Kazan chess club and at home tested his power to play without looking at the chessboard. During that winter, Anna Yelizarova arranged a match by correspondence for him with Khardin, a Samara lawyer and prominent amateur player. The duel, conducted on post cards, eventually reached a critical point: Vladimir thought that with his last move he had driven his opponent into a hopeless position. While awaiting an answer, he rearranged the pieces more than once and convinced himself again and again that nothing could save his opponent. Khardin answered with so unexpected a move that Vladimir gazed at it in bewilderment, which after careful analysis turned into a respectful exclamation: ‘Well, that is one hell of a fine player!’ He always discovered real strength with an aesthetic satisfaction – even in an opponent. Three years later, the lawyer Khardin was to become the employer of the law clerk Vladimir Ulyanov.

Lenin’s sister relates a curious incident from the Kazan period. Vladimir began to smoke, probably under the influence of his friends from the circle, where cloudy debates about capitalism were enveloped in the inevitable clouds of smoke. The mother was disturbed, as every mother should be. When her arguments about health proved to no avail, Maria Alexandrovna resorted to the claim that since he did not have any income of his own, he ought not to cause the family unnecessary expenses. Vladimir apparently felt keenly the reproach for unfulfilled hopes concealed in these words. He instantly gave up smoking and, moreover, conclusively – for the rest of his life.

A fear lest Vladimir should get into trouble impelled his mother, according to Anna, to acquire ‘a small farm in Samara gubernia and to secure permission to move there for the summer’. Anna’s story is incomplete. The ‘small farm’ – as governor Sverbeyev immediately reported to the Police Department – comprised a plot of nearly 225 acres of land and a mill: for a summer residence, that was far too much. In reality, Maria Alexandrovna was moved by economic considerations. One had to think of means of subsistence for the family. Maria Alexandrovna’s father, although a physician by training, busied himself with agriculture in Kokushkino, and her mother was descended, in all likelihood, from the German settlers of the Volga, who were model farmers. Maria Alexandrovna herself had always assumed the care of the family gardens and orchards. It is no wonder she conceived the idea of buying a piece of land and settling there for good. To convert Vladimir into a landowner and farmer offered an additional inducement: it was a means of protecting him from political temptations and dangers.

Anna was then about to marry one of Alexander’s university friends, the former Petersburg student Yelizarov. To him fell the task of buying the piece of land in his native Samara gubernia. With the help of his brother, a prosperous peasant, Yelizarov successfully carried out the task, purchasing the farm at a bargain price from an owner of gold mines named Sibiryakov. An expansive extrovert and man of wealth, proponent of education and left-wing liberal, Sibiryakov had earlier intended to establish streamlined business enterprises in Samara gubernia, experimental farms and model schools. Nothing had come of his plans, and the gigantic property had had to be sold little by little. Seventy-five hundred roubles was paid for the 223 acres with the mill and buildings, some thirty miles from Samara. For those times, this was a tidy sum of money. It included the cash received from the sale of the Simbirsk house, as well as Maria Alexandrovna’s share of the Kokushkino property. Thus the Ulyanovs became small land-owners of the steppes.

Anna Yelizarova’s silence about the economic side of the operation was evidently intended to protect the image of Vladimir from associations with mundane problems of human existence. In reality it only removed a very interesting link from his life’s chain. Fortunately, Krupskaya cites a very brief but highly enlightening observation on the subject by Lenin himself: ‘Mother wanted me to run a farmstead. I had given it a try, but I saw that it wouldn’t work. My relations with the peasants were becoming unnatural.’ We know nothing else about this incident. Only from Vladimir’s later letters to his mother is it evident that the business dealings and difficulties at Alakayevka were not entirely unknown to him. We are doubly grateful to Krupskaya for her two scanty lines. We know from them that Vladimir had tried to participate in the business plans of his mother, and even that he had become convinced through first-hand experience that his ‘relations with the peasants were becoming unnatural’. This incident is more important than the ornate prose and verse about little Volodya and the peasants’ children watching horses graze at night, and about the high-school boy’s encounters with the peasants during his walks at Kokushkino. The agricultural experiment occupied, it appears, only the first summer, because in the spring of 1890 Vladimir was permitted to take the examinations, and the agricultural plans, naturally, were laid aside. But they did leave an imprint on Vladimir’s personality. During that short time he not only observed the peasants but also came into business contact with them. These two things are by no means the same!

The farm had no implements or hired hands. It could be cultivated only by contracts with peasants from neighbouring Alakayevka, a poor and wretched little village. Out of thirty-four householders, nine had neither horses nor cows, four did not even have huts of their own; their plots of land were pitifully small; there were no schools, but there was a saloon. Out of a population of two hundred, only four boys learned something somewhere; the rest of the population could neither read nor write. Only a few prosperous kulak households rose above this poverty. They, too, were wretched enough, but they held the village in a tight grip. Profitable farming was possible only by working hand in glove with the kulaks and by ruthless exploitation of the poor. If in the future Lenin was to reveal an unusually penetrating ability to discern all forms of enslavement in agrarian relations, no small role in this was played by his own first-hand experiences with the peasants of Alakayevka.

It was necessary to give up the attempt at managing one’s own farmstead and to rent the land, but the estate served the family as a haven for the four or five summer months. The expanse of the steppes and their silence, the old garden run to weeds, the precipice going down to the brook, the pond for swimming, the forest not far off where one could gather raspberries, all made for a splendid summer home. In the garden each one had his chosen corner for reading and work. The family was less isolated than in Kokushkino; the fear of contact with the Ulyanovs had lost its original acuteness. Still, at first, visitors were none too frequent. Maria remembers the shyness of her brothers and sisters, among them Vladimir, who, during visits by relative strangers, would hide in the garden, after going through the window. A distaste for strangers, and an inclination to enter and exit through windows, are characteristic of the young, and especially so in the country, where strangers are rare and windows are close to the ground. It is possible that the cover of shyness had not yet been shed by this self-confident youth, But in any case a desire not to waste himself on people who were not worth it was an increasingly prevalent element in this shyness.

In the district of Alakayevka the Populists had tried at the end of the 1870s to carry on propaganda, and in the 1880s they had established an agricultural commune on land acquired from that same Sibiryakov, From their anxiety to save the peasants through revolution, they had gone on to saving themselves through peasant work. The government viewed these schemes very suspiciously; but these communes and cooperatives of the intelligentsia springing up in various parts of the country led such a peaceful and sleepy life that for the most part they gave no reason for police action. A few of the more successful ones converted themselves in the course of events into capitalist enterprises, but the majority fell apart in short order. Such was the commune in the neighbourhood of Alakayevka. Its members soon scattered in various directions, except for the stubborn organizer, Preobrazhensky. Vladimir became acquainted with him, and through him with certain other representatives of backwoods Populism. With Preobrazhensky he had long conversations, often lasting until the wee hours, walking back and forth on the road between the farm and the commune. Vladimir listened and observed. No, these subdued people who ploughed the earth badly, partly for the sake of communism and partly for the salvation of their souls, could not win him over to their cause.

Alakayevka, it goes without saying, was not outside the field of vision of the police. The chief of the Samara gendarme administration reported to the department of police the arrival on the farm of the Ulyanov family, among them Anna, who was under official police surveillance, Vladimir, under unofficial surveillance, and Yelizarov, a former student ‘of doubtful political reliability’. The Ministry of Public Education received, at regular intervals, detailed reports about the Ulyanov family from the head of the school district, Maslennikov. The high-school student Dimitri was also included in the round of observations, and the superintendent sent monthly reports about him as well. The matter was complicated by the fact that the Ulyanovs lived on one of the former farms of Sibiryakov, a friend of political exiles and patron of agricultural communes. ‘A series of coincidences have brought about a situation’, reported Maslennikov to Petersburg, ’in which the problem of the Samara farms and of the Ulyanov family have become closely intertwined.’ In short, there was no lack of observers and, in the language of the superintendent, the surveillance ‘was no secret to those under surveillance’. The results, however, were modest. ‘Nothing suspicious’, the Samara gendarme reported, ‘was observed.’ It was difficult to observe anything, for the suspicious processes were developing, for the time being, only in the most hidden convolutions of the brain. These were, however, dangerous processes.

Although it did not turn Vladimir into a gentleman farmer, the transfer to Alakayevka saved him from an untimely arrest along with his Kazan friends in July 1889, when not only the central circle of Fedoseyev was seized, but also the members of the auxiliary circle to which Vladimir belonged. He wrote many years later: ‘I think I might easily have been arrested as well, had I remained that summer in Kazan.’ In that particular respect his mother’s calculations were justified, at least for the time being. The news of the arrests in Kazan made a deep impression on Vladimir. It must have strengthened him in the conviction that one must not fall into the hands of the enemy uselessly and on account of trifles; one must organize work properly so as to cause the enemy as much harm as possible. And that requires preparations.

In the garden, under the shade of the linden trees, Vladimir had his own permanent corner, with a table and a bench planted in the earth. Here he spent his working hours. ‘For five years, from 1889 to 1893,’ writes Dimitri Ulyanov, ‘that was a regular workroom’ for Vladimir. Nearby, on two posts, was a horizontal bar for gymnastic exercises. The younger brother observed with astonishment what energy and passion Vladimir extended in order to lift himself to the bar, not facing it but with his back to it. It took him a long time to master this feat. Finally he summoned Mitya to witness his triumph: ‘I have balanced myself at last – look!' And, all in a glow, he was sitting on the bar. To overcome an obstacle, to discipline his own effort, to lift himself up and sit on that bar – ‘to balance himself’ – there was nothing better than that! To show Mitya this new acrobatic feat was as necessary as to expound to Anna the mysteries of surplus value.

Vladimir swam much and skilfully in the Alakayevka pond, and went hunting in the neighbouring forests for partridges, especially when this meant a good long walk. But he couldn’t endure sitting still with a hooked line. At that time, sports were by no means fashionable among the democratic intelligentsia. But Vladimir had an untiring urge to keep his spiritual and physical powers in equilibrium. In exercises on the river, in swimming, in walking, in singing, he displayed an inexhaustible and at the same time disciplined enthusiasm. As in early childhood, life was, above all, motion. With this difference: now the motion of the mind was given priority.

Vladimir helped his younger sister Maria in her work, taught her to sew her notebook with white thread and not black, showed her how to draw parallels and meridians for a map. He revealed in these small tasks that conscientiousness which distinguished all of his work and which Maria remembered for the rest of her life. After dinner, in the same corner of the garden, Vladimir would read something light; sometimes it was fiction. He was often joined by Olga, who was preparing for the university in Petersburg, and they read together from Gleb Uspensky, the bard of Populism.

A roofed porch took the place of a terrace. Here they drank tea and read in the evening, in order not to attract mosquitoes into the house with the light. Here, too, they had supper in almost biblical simplicity. A big pitcher of milk was brought up from the cellar, and the children broke their whole-wheat bread into it. The evenings were often devoted to singing and music. They sang in chorus, and Yelizarov, the husband of the elder sister, sang solos accompanied by Olga. Occasionally, Vladimir would be the soloist. A prominent place in his repertory was occupied by the romance ‘You Have Charming Little Eyes’. And when he reached the grandiloquent stanza ‘I perish for the love of them’ the singer’s voice would invariably break on the high note. Vladimir would wave his hands in despair and shout out amid laughter: ‘Perished! Perished!’

We have noted that, immediately on his arrival in Alakayevka, Vladimir renewed his request for permission to go abroad, supposedly ‘for medical treatment’ but in reality to enter one of the foreign universities. The department of police, however, preferred that the treatments take place in the Caucasus, and refused him a passport. The refusal was, of course, vexing, but still it was no great misfortune. Those two and a half years, which Fedoseyev spent in solitary confinement, Vladimir spent under his mother’s wing in conditions favourable to his physical and intellectual health. Fate was obviously kind to this young man, as though he had been chosen in advance for some special purpose. But the young man knew how to make use of the indulgence of fate. They had concluded, it seemed, a secret treaty of mutual assistance.