13

A Year of Famine. Law Practice

The summer of 1891 was hot and dry; the sun burned out the harvest and the grass in twenty gubernias, together having a population of thirty million. When Vladimir came home after his fall examinations, Samara gubernia, which had suffered more than others, was writhing in the pangs of famine. True, the entire history of peasant Russia is one of periodic poor harvests and mass epidemics, but the famine of 1891-2 stands out not only because of its dimensions, but also because of its influence on the political evolution of society. Later, looking back, the reactionaries would recall nostalgically how stable the order had been under Alexander III, who could break a horseshoe with his bare hands, and they would blame on the weak Nicholas II the cataclysms that came later. In actual fact, the last three years of the reign of the ‘unforgettable progenitor’ already heralded the beginning of a new era, a direct preparation for the revolution of 1905.

The danger crept up from where the source of power really resided: the villages. During the thirty years that had elapsed since the abolition of serfdom, the condition of the mass of peasants had greatly deteriorated. In land-rich Samara gubernia, more than 40 per cent of the peasants held only starvation allotments of land. Their parcels, depleted and poorly cultivated, were continually exposed to the adversities of nature. A feverish industrialization accompanied by the re-introduction of semi-serfdom in the villages, along with the rapid growth of the kulak class, resulted in a frightening impoverishment of the peasant masses. Outwardly, the might of the state appeared unshakeable: factories and railroads were built, the budget was balanced, and gold reserves piled up in the cellars of the state bank. And suddenly, against the background of these successes, the peasant fell to the ground and let out the agonized howl of one who is starving.

The government, taken by surprise, at first tried to deny that there was a famine, calling it merely a poor harvest, but then it lost its head and, for the first time since 1881, slightly loosened its hold on the reins. The dark aura of unshakeable power that had surrounded Alexander III's regime began to evaporate. The calamity stirred public opinion, so long inert. A fresh wind swept through the country. A part of the wealthy classes and broad sectors of the intelligentsia were caught up in a sudden desire to help the peasants: to give bread to the hungry and medicine to those sick with typhoid. The zemstvos and the liberal press sounded the alarm. Donations were collected on all sides. Leo Tolstoy began to open up canteens for famine relief. Once more, hundreds of intellectuals went to the people, this time with more modest objectives than in the 1870s. The authorities believed, with some justification, that the philanthropic movement concealed subversive tendencies: this peaceful form of aid was the line of least resistance for those forces of opposition which had been forming during the years of the new reign.

The revolutionaries could not take that road. For them, the problem was not merely to mitigate the consequences of a social calamity, but to remove its causes. Ten or fifteen years earlier, the Populist intelligentsia, in contrast to the liberals and the philanthropists, viewed things in exactly this way. But the revolutionary spirit had deserted the Populists; now, coming out of their long hibernation, they were glad to merge with the liberals in a common ‘service to the people’. But a sharp struggle had already erupted among the intelligentsia on the question of the prospects of the country’s further development, even prior to the catastrophe. The Marxists, who were few in number, had found themselves opposed to the broad circles of educated ‘society’ on the burning question, What is to be done right now? Some thirty years later, Vodovozov, to whom we have already referred, wrote in the Emigré press: ‘…the greatest and most profound conflict of views I had with Vladimir Ulyanov was over the question of attitude toward the famine of 1891-2.’ At a time when Samara society as a whole responded to the appeal for aid, ‘ only Vladimir Ulyanov with his family and the small circle of people who echoed his views took a different position.’ Ulyanov, it seems, welcomed the famine as a progressive factor: ‘In destroying peasant economy … the famine creates a proletariat and promotes the industrialization of the region.’ Vodovozov’s reminiscences on the subject represent not so much Ulyanov’s views as their distorted reflection in the minds of liberals and Populists. The idea that the ruination and decimation of the peasants could promote the industrialization of the country is too absurd in itself. The ruined peasants became paupers, not proletarians; the famine fed the parasitic, not the progressive, trends of the economy. The very tendentiousness of Vodovozov’s story, however, gives a fair idea of the heated atmosphere of those old controversies.

The accusation commonly levelled in those days against Marxists, to the effect that they viewed the national calamity through the spectacles of their doctrine, was indicative only of the low theoretical level of the debates. In point of fact, all forces and groupings took political positions: the government, which, in the interest of its prestige, denied or underestimated the famine; the liberals, who, while disclosing the existence of the famine, were at the same time eager to prove by their ‘positive work’ that they would be the best of the collaborators for the tsar if he would only give them a crumb of power; the Populists, who, by rushing to the canteens and typhoid wards, hoped to find a peaceful and legal way of enlisting the sympathies of the people. The Marxists, of course, opposed not aid to the starving, but the illusion that a sea of need could be emptied with the teaspoon of philanthropy. If, in a lawful committee or canteen, a revolutionary takes up a place that rightfully belongs to a zemstvo member or an official, then who will take the revolutionary’s place in the movement? It is clear beyond dispute from ministry memoranda and directives made public later that the government was increasing allocations for the starving only because it feared revolutionary agitation, so that from the point of view of actual aid the revolutionary policy proved to be far more effective than neutral philanthropy.

The Marxist Akselrod, then an émigré, was not alone in championing the view that ‘for the socialist … a genuine struggle against hunger is possible only within the framework of the struggle against the autocracy.’ Even the old moralist of the revolution, Lavrov, proclaimed in print: ‘Yes, the only “good cause” we can possibly embrace is not the philanthropic but the revolutionary cause.’ However, in the centre of a starving province, in an atmosphere of general enthusiasm for canteens, it was far harder to demonstrate revolutionary steadfastness than in the emigration, which in those years was isolated from Russia. Ulyanov was obliged for the first time, and quite independently at that, to take a stand on a burning political question. He did not join the local aid committee. More than that: ‘At the meetings and gatherings … he conducted a systematic and outspoken propaganda against the committee.’ It should be added: not against the committee’s practical activities, but against its illusions. He was opposed by Vodovozov. Ulyanov was backed by ‘a very small minority, but this minority stuck to its positions’, Vodovozov did not win away a single one of them; on the other hand, there were cases when Ulyanov was able to win over an opponent: ‘They were few in number, but they existed.’

It was precisely at that time that the skirmishes with the Populists were to take on the character of a struggle between two divergent tendencies. It is not by accident that the image of Vodovozov floats up in Yelizarova’s memory when, without giving dates, she speaks of the Samara disputes: they began, precisely, late in 1891. Thus, the disastrous famine became an important landmark in Vladimir’s political evolution. By this time he must certainly have familiarized himself with Plekhanov’s writings; toward the end of that year or the beginning of the next he, as Vodovozov reports, spoke with great respect of Plekhanov’s Our Differences of Opinion. If he still had any lingering doubts as to Russia's economic development and the revolutionary path, they must have been entirely dissipated in the light of that disaster. In other words, from a theoretical Marxist, Vladimir Ulyanov definitely was on the way to becoming a revolutionary Social Democrat.

According to Vodovozov, on the question of aid to the hungry the entire family shared Vladimir’s position. Yet we learn from the younger sister that in 1892, when the famine had brought cholera in its wake, Anna ‘expended considerable efforts in helping the sick with medicine and advice’. And surely Vladimir would have been the last to oppose her. Yasneva’s story, too, does not entirely coincide with Vodovozov’s. ‘Of all the Samara exiles,’ she writes, ‘only Vladimir Ilyich and I did not take part in the work of these canteens.’ It appears, then, that at this time Vladimir did not as yet have any circle of adherents who shared his views. This is not hard to believe. Social Democratic propaganda had not yet begun for him. The only way to undertake it was to break with those who represented the old faith and the stagnant elements. ‘Peaceful at first,’ says Vodovozov, ‘our disputes gradually became very acrimonious.’

The political test of the divergent views was not long in coming. The liberals did not, in the end, succeed in worming their way into the government’s confidence; on the contrary, quite soon, and with some reason, the government accused the Samara zemstvo of having purchased rotten grain for the starving. The Populists failed to bring about a rapprochement with the people. The peasants mistrusted city folk. They had never seen anything but evil come from the educated. If the hungry are being fed, that must be on the tsar’s orders, and the gentry are surely lining their pockets. When a cholera epidemic came in the wake of the famine and patients died en masse in the barracks where they were devotedly cared for by doctors and university students, the peasants decided that the landlords were poisoning the people in order to clear as much land for themselves as they could. There ensued a wave of cholera riots, when doctors, university students, and nurses were murdered. The authorities then ‘came to the defence’ of the intelligentsia by armed force. The year of famine thus showed up the net results of educational work in the villages. In Simbirsk gubernia, which Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov had tirelessly sought to educate for sixteen years, the cholera riots were particularly widespread; the consequence was that entire villages were flogged – every tenth man – and there were cases of death from flogging. It was only when their brother, the worker, who held an allotment of land in the village, would come to them from the city and begin to explain who was in the right, that the Russian peasants would begin to listen to the socialists with a little more trust. But before that could happen, the city worker himself had to be won over to socialism.

During that year of famine and cholera, one other conflict of principle contributed to the parting of political groupings. Vodovozov proposed that an expression of sympathy be sent to the governor of one of the Volga gubernias; a certain Kosich, who had been dismissed because of ‘liberalism’. Vladimir sharply opposed such philistine sentimentality, always ready to shed a tear at the least manifestation of ‘humaneness’ on the part of a representative of the ruling classes. This episode, incidentally, shows once again how absurd it is to try to draw a line of direct succession between the director of public schools Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, who unlike Kosich was never even dismissed for liberalism, and his all-out intransigent son, whose heart was not touched even by the most humane of governors, Vodovozov seems to have been defeated; his message was never sent.

As he himself reports, Vodovozov began to call his young antagonist Marat – behind his back, naturally. The nickname shows a certain insight – unless it was really invented later. According to his older sister, present opponents, only recently his friends, considered Vladimir ‘a very gifted but excessively self-assured young man’. The man who only the other day seemed to be merely ‘Alexander Ulyanov’s brother’ was now becoming a person in his own right and was showing his claws. Vladimir not only would not adjust his position to the political attitudes of his opponents, but, on the contrary, made it as extreme, uncompromising, cutting, and thorny as possible. In so doing, he experienced a double joy, caused by his own inner self-assurance and also by the expression of indignation on his opponents’ faces. According to Vodovozov’s admission, ‘A profound faith in his being right could be discerned in all his speeches.’ This made him seem doubly intolerable. ‘All this more respectable public’, as Yelizarova says, were ‘quite shocked by the great arrogance of this young man during disputes, but often bowed to him.’ What was particularly held against him was the derogatory tone in which he now spoke of the greatest authorities of Populism. However, these were only the first blossoms; the fruit was yet to come.

‘It is hard to say’, Vodovozov says modestly in summing up his debates with Ulyanov, ‘which side carried off the victory.’ In reality, there was no need even to wait for the October Revolution to guess the answer to this. When famine recurred seven years later, there were immeasurably fewer political illusions, and the intelligentsia, having in the meantime found another course, did not go to the villages. Russkaya Mysl, a very moderate liberal journal, wrote at that time that all those who returned from the famine-stricken areas were extremely dissatisfied with their own work, seeing it as a ‘pitiful palliative’, whereas ‘general measures’ were heeded. After a little political experience, even the meek constitutionalists were forced to translate into liberal lingo, bits and pieces of those ideas which a few years earlier had sounded blasphemous.

But Vladimir had to think of his own lot, his own future. He had won his diploma. He had to make use of it. Vladimir joined the bar, with the intention of making the law his profession. ‘After all,’ as Yelizarova reminds us, ‘Vladimir Ilyich had no means except his mother’s pension and the farm in Alakayevka, which was gradually being mortgaged.’ As his sponsor he chose the same lawyer with whom he had played chess by correspondence when he was still living in Kazan. Khardin was a prominent figure, not only as a lawyer and chess strategist of whom the then king of Russian chess players, Chigorin, spoke with respect, but also as a man active in provincial affairs. Having become, at the age of twenty-eight, chairman of the province zemstvo administration, he was shortly dismissed ‘by His Majesty’s order’ as politically untrustworthy, the order becoming effective within twenty-four hours. Not many were found worthy of such an honour! According to N. Samoilov, who has given so colourful a description of his first encounter with Vladimir, Khardin in his mature years still retained his sympathies with the radicals and managed to avoid taking a hostile stand toward Marxist ideology. According to Yelizarova, Vladimir respected Khardin as a very intelligent man. As a chess player, he had appreciated his ‘devilish’ ability back in Kazan, and he became a regular participant in the weekly contests at his sponsor’s home.

Admission to the bar, however, was not entirely smooth. The Samara District Court required a certificate of Ulyanov’s political trustworthiness; St Petersburg University, which had issued the diploma, was unable to provide the required certificate, since it had not known Ulyanov as a student. In the end, the court, at Vladimir’s insistence, went straight to the Police Department, which generously replied that it had ‘no objections’, After the matter had dragged on for five months, Vladimir at last, in July 1892, received a certificate entitling him to appear in court.

He appeared as counsel for the defence in a total of only ten criminal cases, by appointment in seven and by agreement in three. These were all petty cases involving petty people, hopeless cases, and he lost them all. He had to defend peasants, village workers, semi-paupers, mainly for minor thefts prompted by extreme poverty. Some of the defendants were: a few peasants who together had stolen 300 roubles from a rich peasant of the same village; several hired hands who tried to steal grain from a barn but were caught red-handed; a peasant who had been reduced to utter misery and who had committed four petty thefts; another of the same type; and, again, a few village hired hands who, ‘after breaking and entering’, stole effects valued at 160 roubles. All these crimes were so uncomplicated that in each case the hearing lasted from one and a half to two hours, and the secretary did not even bother to take minutes but merely made the perfunctory note: after the charge was made by the assistant prosecutor, counsel Ulyanov spoke for. the defence. Only two thirteen-year-old boys, who had been accessories to thefts committed by their elders, were acquitted – on the ground of age and not through the defence counsel’s arguments. All the other defendants were found guilty and sentenced. Ulyanov also took on the case of Gusev, a Samara townsman who had severely beaten his wife with a whip. After a short hearing in court in which the victim testified, defence counsel Ulyanov refused to appeal the sentence as overly severe. In this case, as in all such cases throughout his life, he was a merciless prosecutor.

In three cases, also run-of-the-mill, Ulyanov appeared as counsel for the defence at the request of the accused. A group of peasants and townspeople were tried for stealing rails and a cast-iron wheel from a Samara woman merchant. All were found guilty. A young peasant was accused of disobeying and insulting his father. The case, postponed on a plea from the defence, did not come to trial: the son gave his father a written promise to obey him unquestionably and the two sides settled on that. Lastly, Ulyanov appeared as defence counsel for a station master accused of negligence, as a result of which empty freight cars had collided. The defence counsel was of no help here either, and the accused was found guilty. These are the court cases of assistant attorney Ulyanov. They were grey and hopeless cases, just as the life of the classes from which the accused came was grey and hopeless. The young defence lawyer – can we possibly doubt this? – gave keen attention to each case and each accused. But they could not be helped singly. They could be helped only en masse. For this, however, another forum was needed, not the forum of the Samara District Court.

Ulyanov won only one court case; but here – as though by the hand of fate – he acted not as counsel for the defence, but as prosecutor. In the summer of 1892 Vladimir and Yelizarov were going from Syzran, on the left bank of the Volga, to the village of Bestuzhevka, where Yelizarov’s brother had a farm. The merchant Arefyev, who ran a ferry on the Volga, regarded the river as his fief: every time a boatman took on passengers, he would be overtaken by Arefyev’s little steamboat, which would take them all back by force. That happened in this case as well. Threats of court action for arbitrary behaviour did not help. They had to bow to force. Vladimir wrote down the names of the participants and witnesses. The case was heard by the zemstvo chief near Syzran, some seventy miles from Samara. At Arefyev’s request, the chief postponed the hearing. This was repeated once again. The merchant apparently decided to fight his accuser by attrition. The third date of the hearing came much later, in winter. Vladimir had to face a sleepless night on the train and tiring periods of waiting at railway stations and in the zemstvo chiefs chambers. Maria Alexandrovna tried to persuade her son not to go. But Vladimir would not be moved: the case had been begun and must be finished. On this third occasion the zemstvo chief was unable to continue his evasive tactics: under the young lawyer’s pressure he found himself obliged to sentence a well-known merchant to one month in prison. It can be imagined what music was in the victor’s soul as he returned to Samara!

The experiment with law practice was unsuccessful, as earlier the experiment with agriculture had been. Certainly not because Vladimir did not have the necessary qualities for these professions. He had persistence, a practical eye, attention to detail, a capacity to evaluate people and put them in their right place, .and finally a love of nature. He would have been a first-class farmer. His ability to analyse a complicated situation, to find its main threads, to appraise the strengths and weaknesses of the opponent, and to marshal the best arguments in defence of his thesis made itself apparent even in his youth. Khardin had no doubt that his assistant could become ‘an outstanding civil lawyer’. But it was precisely in 1892, when Vladimir entered law practice, that his theoretical and revolutionary interests, heightened by the disastrous famine and political turmoil in the country, were becoming more intense and demanding from day to day.

It is true that, despite the young lawyer’s conscientiousness, the preparation of petty court cases barely distracted him from his study of Marxism. But surely his law career could not continue to be limited in the future to cases concerning the theft of a cast-iron wheel by a criminal band of three townsmen and two peasants! It was written in the book of fate that Vladimir Ulyanov could not serve two gods. A choice had to be made. And he made his choice without difficulty. Having begun in March, his brief series of court appearances came to an end in December. True, he obtained a court certificate of his right to practice law for the year 1893, but by now he needed this document solely as legal cover for an activity directed against the fundamental laws of the Russian Empire.