14

Landmarks of Growth

Let us set down here against the background of the country’s political development young Lenin’s most important biographical landmarks. The backward and remote shores of the Volga. The generation of yesterday’s slave-owners and slaves is still alive. The People’s Will’s attack has been fought off. The political impasse of the 1880s. In a patriarchal and close-knit official's family, Vladimir grows, studies, and gains in intelligence without cares or upheavals. The critical faculty awakens in him only toward the end of his studies in high school, after his father’s death, and is at first directed against the school administration and the church. His elder brother’s unexpected death opens Vladimir’s eyes to politics. Participation in a student demonstration is his first response to Alexander’s execution. The temptation to avenge his brother by the brother’s own methods must have been especially acute in those days. But the most hopeless times had come: the year 1888, when it was impossible even to think of terror. The reaction not only saved Vladimir physically, but it also prompted him to give deeper attention to theory.

Years of revolutionary apprenticeship. In Kazan Vladimir begins to read Das Kapital. Understanding of the theory of labour value does not mean to him that he must break with the Populist tradition: Sasha, too, was an adherent of Marx. At first in Kazan and later in Samara, Vladimir comes into contact with revolutionaries of the older generation, mainly members of People’s Will; he is an attentive student, one inclined, certainly, to examine things critically, but not an opponent. The fact that, despite his revolutionary attitudes, amply manifested both in his choice of acquaintances and in the direction taken by his intellectual interests, he did not join any political group in those years shows unmistakably that he did not yet have a political credo, not even a youthful credo, but was still only searching for one. Nevertheless, the search began on the basis of the Populist tradition, a fact that left a marked imprint on the course of his future development. Even after he had become a militant Marxist, Vladimir continued for several years to sympathize with individual terrorism, an attitude that set him distinctly apart from other young Social Democrats and was unquestionably a vestigial remnant from the period when Marxist ideas were still intermingled in his mind with Populist sympathies.

From the spring of 1890 to the autumn of 1891 Vladimir was almost wholly absorbed in studying for his examinations. Intensive study of law seemed to be an external interruption to the gradual formation .of his over-all view of life. There was, of course, no complete break. In his hours of leisure Vladimir read Marxist classics, met friends, exchanged views. Besides, he used legal scholasticism, by the inverse method, to check and strengthen his materialist views. But this critical work was done only on the side. Unresolved problems and doubts had to be put off until there was more free time. Vladimir was in no hurry to define his position. An indirect but interesting confirmation of this is furnished by the fact that early in 1891 two Samara ‘Jacobin’ women had still not lost hope of enlisting Ulyanov in their ranks: obviously they did not regard him as a fixed quantity politically.

Late in 1891 Vladimir got his diploma and thus found himself at a crossroads. The courtroom arena could not but attract him. According to his sister, he was seriously considering the legal profession at that time, as one ‘that in the future could provide a means of livelihood’. However, the political excitement in the country and the course of his own development placed him face to face with other problems, which demanded all of him. His hesitation did not last long. Law had to give way to politics and at the same time become a temporary cover for it.

The year and a half of legal fever relegated the first stage of his revolutionary apprenticeship to the background and made his thinking more independent of the recent past, which had been overshadowed by Sasha’s influence: this created the conditions for a bold termination of the transitional period. The winter of the famine year must have been a time for drawing the final balance. Gradual spiritual development does not exclude sudden jumps, provided they have been prepared for by an accumulation of ideas.

The shaping of Vladimir’s revolutionary personality in part reflected, and in part anticipated, a shift in theoretical sympathies among the provincial leftist intelligentsia. Marxist doctrine began to arouse keen interest among Samara youth beginning with 1891, the year of the famine. A lot of people then became eager to master the first volume of Das Kapital, but the majority, to quote Semyonov, ‘broke their teeth’ on the first chapter. There began discussions on the mysteries of dialectics. The Hegelian triad was hotly debated on a special ‘Marxist’ bench in the city park on the bank of the Volga.

The older generation of the Samara intelligentsia became agitated. Both its groups, the moderate and the radical, which had been living peacefully together surrounded by familiar ideas, paid respectful lip service to Marx, of whose works, incidentally, they remained blissfully ignorant. They reacted to the first Russian Social Democrats as if there had been an unfortunate misunderstanding. Most sincerely indignant were the former exiles, who had brought with them to the Volga traditional views that had remained well preserved in the harsh Siberian climate.

A political crack may easily widen into an unbridgeable gap. Vladimir now spared no sarcasm in regard to the Populist complaints that the Marxists, allegedly, ‘do not love the peasant’, ‘welcome the ruination of the village’, etc. He soon learned to despise the substitution of moralizing and sentimental laments for realistic analysis. Literary tears, which were of no benefit to the peasants, blurred the intelligentsia’s eyes and prevented it from seeing the road that was opening up. Increasingly embittered clashes with the Populists and the ‘educators’ gradually split Samara’s radical intelligentsia into two warring camps and greatly strained personal relations. Little wonder, then, that that last year and a half, when Vladimir emerged from the shadows into the light, has decisively coloured the reminiscences of contemporaries about the Samara period as a whole. The young Lenin as he arrived in Alakayevka in May of 1889 a prospective farmer, and as he left Samara in the autumn of 1893, is portrayed identically as a revolutionary Marxist, thus excluding from his life that which has been its main element – motion and change.

P. Lepeshinsky, for once coming close to the truth, writes of Lenin’s preparatory period in Samara: ‘There are reasons to think that even in 1891 he had already worked out his Marxist philosophy in general outline.’ This view is seconded by Vodovozov :

In questions of political economy and history, his knowledge was surprising in its scope and depth, especially, for a man of his age. He read German, French, and English fluently, was already familiar with Das Kapital and a large amount of Marxist literature (German) … He declared that he was a confirmed Marxist…

Such intellectual equipment might have sufficed for a dozen others; but this young man, so strict with himself, did not consider himself prepared for revolutionary work, and with good reason. In the chain that ties doctrine to action he still lacked a number of important links. Here, too, the facts speak for themselves: if Vladimir had thought himself fully armed in 1891, he could not have remained two more years in Samara.

True, his elder sister maintains that Vladimir stayed with the family out of concern for his mother, who, after Olga’s death, had once again won her children’s devotion by the combination of courage and tenderness she displayed. But this explanation is clearly inadequate. Olga died in May 1891, but it was not until August 1893, more than two years later, that Vladimir tore himself away from his family. Out of consideration for his mother, he might have postponed his revolutionary duties for some weeks or months, while the new wound was still too fresh, but not for years. In his attitude toward people, and his mother was no exception, there was no passive sentimentality. His living in Samara brought practically nothing to his family. If Vladimir had the self-control to remain so long away from the great battlefield, it was only because his years of training were not yet over.

From now on, side by side with the basic works of Marx and Engels and the German Social Democratic publications, more and more room would be taken up on his desk by Russian statistical compilations. He began his first independent monographs aimed at shedding some light on the contemporary Russian scene. Once the subject of study, historical materialism and the labour theory of value now became for Vladimir tools, of political orientation. He studied Russia as a battlefield and noted the disposition on it of the main contending forces.

To help us determine a most important landmark in Vladimir Ulyanov’s evolution, we have one absolutely invaluable piece of testimony which official biographers generally ignore because it contradicts the myth. In a 1921 Party questionnaire, Lenin himself indicated as the beginning of his revolutionary activity: ‘1892-3. Samara. Illegal groups of Social Democrats.’ This information, supplied by a witness whose accuracy cannot be questioned, leads to two conclusions: Vladimir did not take part in the political work of the People’s Will, or he would have so indicated in the questionnaire. Vladimir did not definitely become a Social Democrat until 1892; otherwise he would have engaged in Social Democratic propaganda earlier. Disputes and doubts are thus resolved once and for all. In the interest of impartiality we should point out that a Soviet scholar who is, by virtue of his office, head of mausoleum historiography – we are referring to Adoratsky, the present director of the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute – arrives at roughly the same conclusion on the question.‘ During his last years in Samara, 1892-3,’ he writes with all due caution, ’Lenin was already a Marxist, although he still retained traits associated with People’s Will (e.g., a special attitude toward terror).’ We can now bid farewell for ever to the amusing legend according to which Vladimir, ‘after nibbing his forehead’, condemned terrorism in May 1887, on the same day he received the news of Alexander’s execution.

The stages of young Lenin’s political formation as outlined above find a possibly somewhat unexpected but very lively confirmation in his history as a chess player. According to his younger brother, during the winter of 1889-90 Vladimir ‘became interested in chess more than ever’. An expelled student who could not. gain admission to any university, a potential revolutionary without programme or guidance, he sought in chess a release for his inner turmoil. The one and a half years that followed were taken up with studying for examinations, and chess was temporarily relegated to the background. It came again to the fore when, after obtaining his diploma, Vladimir, hesitant about choosing a career, did not take on many court cases, but found his sponsor a first-class chess partner. Another year or year and a half of preparation, and the young Marxist began to feel that he was armed for the struggle. ‘From 1893 on, Vladimir Ilyich began to play chess less and less frequently.’ Dimitri’s testimony on this matter can be accepted without question; himself a keen devotee of the game, he followed closely his elder brother’s passion for chess.

While in Kazan, Vladimir, in search of an audience, tried to share the first ideas he had borrowed from Marx with his elder sister. He did not get very far, however, and Anna soon lost track of her brother’s studies. We do not know when he mastered the first volume of Das Kapital. In any event, it was not during his short stay in Kazan. In later years, Lenin used to astound people with his ability to read quickly and grasp the essence of what he read at a glance. But he had developed this faculty by learning, when necessary, to read very slowly. Beginning in each new field by laying down a solid foundation, he worked like a conscientious mason. He retained to the end of his life the capacity to re-read a necessary and important book or chapter several times. Indeed, he truly valued only those books which have to be re-read.

No one, unfortunately, has told us how Lenin passed through the school of Marx. Only a few superficial impressions, and very sketchy ones at that, have been preserved. Yasneva writes: ‘He spent entire days poring over his Marx, making abstracts, copying excerpts, and jotting down notes. At times like that, it was difficult to get him away from his work.’ His abstracts of Das Kapital were not preserved. It is only on the basis of his notebooks of later years that one can partly reconstruct the young athlete’s labours over Marx. Even back in high school, Vladimir always began his compositions with a complete outline, which he then gradually clothed with arguments and quotations. This creative method reflected that quality which Ferdinand Lassalle had aptly defined as the physical strength of the intellect Study, when it is not mere rote memorizing, is also a creative act, but of a reverse variety. To summarize another person’s book is to lay bare its logical skeleton by removing arguments, illustrations, and digressions. Vladimir took this difficult course as a fierce but joyful effort; he made a summary of each chapter and sometimes each page, analysing and verifying the logical structure, dialectical transitions, and terminology. In mastering the result, he assimilated the method. He proceeded from one step to the next in the other person’s system as if he were erecting it anew. Everything remained solidly lodged in that remarkably shaped head with the powerful dome of its skull For the rest of his life Lenin never departed from the Russian political-economic terminology he had acquired or worked out during his Samara period. This was not merely from stubbornness – although intellectual stubbornness was a salient characteristic of his – but because even in those early years he made his selection after weighing and thinking through each term from every angle until it merged in his mind with an entire series of concepts. The first and second volumes of Das Kapital were Vladimir’s, main textbooks in Alakayevka and Samara; the third volume, at that time, had not yet been published: old Engels was still putting Marx’s drafts in order. Vladimir studied Das Kapital so thoroughly that every time he looked at it again he was able to discover new ideas in it. Even during his Samara period he learned, as he himself said later, to ‘confer’ with Marx.

Before the master’s books, impertinence and mockery automatically left that questioning mind, which was in the highest degree capable of the emotion of gratitude. To follow the evolution of Marx’s thought, to experience its irresistible force upon oneself, to discover under introductory sentences or notes lateral galleries of conclusions, to become convinced over and over of the aptness and depth of his sarcasm, and to bow in gratitude before a genius who has been merciless to himself became for Vladimir not only a necessity, but a delight. Marx has never had a better reader, one more penetrating or more grateful, nor a more attentive, congenial, or capable student.

‘To him, Marxism was not a conviction, but a religion,’ says Vodovozov. ‘In him … one sensed that degree of certainty which … is incompatible with truly scientific knowledge.’ Only that sociology is scientific which allows the philistine to retain his inalienable right to hesitate. It is true that Ulyanov, as Vodovozov admits, ‘was greatly interested in objections to Marxism, studied them and thought about them but he did so ‘not for the purpose of seeking out the truth’, but only in order to find in those objections error ‘of whose existence he was convinced a priori’. One thing is correct in this description: Ulyanov mastered Marxism as the summation of the previous development of human thought; from this highest level yet attained, he did not wish to descend to a lower one; he fiercely defended what he had thought through to the end and had tested out day after day; and he mistrusted in advance the attempts of self-satisfied ignoramuses and well-read mediocrities to replace Marxism with some other, more portable theory.

In the fields of technology or medicine, backwardness, dilettantism, and obscurantism meet with the contempt they deserve; in the field of sociology, they invariably claim to embody freedom of scientific inquiry. Those for whom theory is merely an intellectual pastime easily move from one revelation to another or, what is more common, content themselves with a hash made of bits and pieces of all revelations. Immeasurably more exacting, disciplined, and stable is he for whom theory is a guide to action. The drawing-room sceptic may with impunity make fun of medicine. The surgeon, however, cannot function in an atmosphere of scientific hesitation.

The more a revolutionary needs a theoretical basis for his action, the more stubbornly he will defend it, Vladimir Ulyanov despised dilettantism and hated obscurantism. He admired in Marxism, above all, the method’s power of discipline.

The last books of V. Vorontsov and N. Danielson (published, respectively, under the pseudonyms ‘V, V.’ and 'Nikolai-on’) came out in 1893.’ Both of these Populist economists proved with enviable obstinacy the impossibility of bourgeois development in Russia at the very time when Russian capitalism was on the verge of a particularly rapid expansion, One doubts whether the faded Populists of that day read the belated revelations of their theoreticians with the same attention as did the young Samara Marxist. Ulyanov had to be familiar with his opponents not just for the purpose of refuting them in print; he sought, above all, to be sure of his own correctness in order to struggle more effectively. It is true that he studied facts polemically, and directed all his arguments against Populism, which he believed to be a living anachronism; but to no one was pure polemics more foreign than to the future author of twenty-seven volumes of polemic writings. He had to know life as it was.

The more attention Vladimir paid to the problems of the Russian revolution, the more he learned from Plekhanov and the more respect he felt for the latter’s critical work. The latter-day falsifiers of the history of Bolshevism speak of ‘ the spontaneous birth of Marxism on Russian soil without any direct influence from the émigré group and Plekhanov’ (Presnyakov). They might as well have eliminated Marx himself, that émigré par excellence, and made Lenin the founder of that home-grown, truly Russian ‘Marxism’ out of which the theory and practice of ‘socialism in one country’ were later to grow.’

The doctrine of the spontaneous birth of Marxism as a direct ‘reflection’ of Russia’s capitalist development is in itself a malicious caricature of Marxism. Economic processes are reflected not in ‘pure’ consciousness, with all its natural ignorance, but in historical consciousness, enriched by all the achievements of the history of mankind. The class struggle of capitalist society was able to lead to Marxism in the mid-nineteenth century only because it had already found a fully prepared dialectical method: the culmination of classical philosophy in Germany, the political economy of Adam Smith and David Ricardo in England, and the revolutionary and socialist doctrines in France, all raised by the yeast of the great revolution. Thus, the international character of Marxism was inherent in its very sources. The rise of the kulak class on the Volga and the development of metallurgy in the Urals were completely insufficient for these same scientific conclusions to be reached independently. It was not accidental that the Emancipation of Labour Group was formed abroad: Russian Marxism came into the world not as an inevitable consequence of Russian capitalism (along with beet sugar and calico, which, incidentally, required imported machinery). But rather, it was a complex merger of the entire preceding experience of Russian revolutionary struggle with the theory of scientific socialism which had arisen in the West. The Marxist generation of the 1890s stood on the foundations laid down by Plekhanov.

To appreciate fully Lenin’s historic contribution, there is certainly no need to make it seem that from his youth he had had to plough only virgin soil. Yelizarova, following Kamenev and others, writes, ‘Comprehensive theoretical works were almost non-existent; it was necessary to study primary sources and base one’s conclusions on them. It was in Samara that Vladimir Ulyanov undertook this giant task never before attempted.’ There could be no greater insult to Lenin’s scholarly conscientiousness than to ignore the work of his teachers and predecessors. It is not true that Russian Marxism possessed no comprehensive theoretical works in the early 1890s. The publications of the Emancipation of Labour Group were in themselves a concise encyclopedia of the new trend. After six years of brilliant and heroic struggle against the prejudices of the Russian intelligentsia, Plekhanov proclaimed in 1889 at the International Socialist Congress in Paris: ‘The revolutionary movement in Russia can triumph only as a revolutionary movement of the workers. We have no other way out, nor can we possibly have one.’ These words contained the most important generalization of the entire preceding epoch, and it was on the basis of this ‘émigré’ generalization that Vladimir Ulyanov completed his training on the banks of the Volga.

Vodovozov recalls that ‘Lenin spoke of Plekhanov with great sympathy, particularly of Our Disagreements.' The sympathy must have been expressed very vividly if Vodovozov was able to remember it for thirty years. The main strength of Our Disagreements lies in the fact that it treats questions of revolutionary policy without ever losing sight of the materialist conception of history and the analysis of Russia’s economic development. Ulyanov’s first Samara attacks on the Populists are thus closely linked with his glowing praise of the work of the founder of the Russian Social Democratic Party. Next to Marx and Engels, Vladimir owed the most to Plekhanov.

Late in 1922, writing on another subject, Lenin said of the early nineties: ‘Marxism as a trend began to broaden, moving in the direction of the Social Democratic trend which had been proclaimed much earlier in Western Europe by the Emancipation of Labour Group.’ These lines, which sum up the development of an entire generation, incorporate a particle of Lenin’s own biography: he began by using Marxism as an economic and historical doctrine, and then, under the influence of the ideas of the Emancipation of Labour Group (which was far ahead of the Russian intelligentsia’s development), he became a Social Democrat. Only the poor in spirit can imagine that they add to Lenin’s stature by ascribing to his natural father, the civil counsellor Ulyanov, revolutionary views he never held, while minimizing the revolutionary influence of Plekhanov, the Emigré whom Lenin himself considered his spiritual father.

In Kazan, in Samara, and in Alakayevka, Vladimir thought of himself primarily as a disciple. But even as great painters in their youth show an independent style even while copying the canvases of old masters, so Vladimir Ulyanov brought to his apprenticeship such a power of intellectual curiosity and initiative that it is difficult to draw a line between the mastering of other people’s work and his own independent elaborations. During the last year of the Samara training, this line was completely erased: the pupil had become a scholar.

The dispute with the Populists quite naturally took up the assessment of specific processes: is capitalism continuing to develop in Russia or is it not? Tables listing factory smokestacks and industrial workers acquired a tendentious meaning, as did tables on the class stratification of the peasantry. In order to ascertain dynamic movements, today’s figures had to be compared with yesterday’s. Thus, economic statistics became the science of sciences. Columns of figures concealed the answer to the fate of Russia, of her intelligentsia, and of her revolution. The registration of horses, carried out periodically by the Ministry of War, was called upon to provide an answer to the question of who was stronger, Mane or the Russian peasant commune.

The statistical data in Plekhanov’s early works could not help but be sparse: zemstvo statistics, which alone were of value in studying the economy of the village, began to be compiled systematically only in the 1880s. Moreover, such materials were not readily accessible to an émigré who in those years was almost completely cut off from Russia. Nevertheless, the general orientation toward scientific processing of statistical data was quite correctly indicated by Plekhanov. The course he charted was to be followed by the first statisticians of the new school. The American professor I. A. Gurvich, himself a native of Russia, published in 1888 and 1892 two monographs on the Russian village, which Vladimir Ulyanov studied and held in high esteem. He himself never failed to note with gratitude the work of his predecessors.

During the last year or so of his life in Samara, statistical compilations occupied a place of honour on Vladimir’s desk. Although his major work on the growth of Russian capitalism did not appear until 1899, it was preceded by a considerable number of preliminary theoretical and statistical studies on which he had begun to work back in Samara. From the records of the Samara library just for 1893, a year for which they were accidentally preserved, it may be seen that Vladimir did not miss any publications relevant to his subject, be they official statistical compilations or economic studies by the Populists, He summarized most of these books and articles, and he reported to his closest associates on the most important of them.

Vladimir Ulyanov’s oldest surviving study dates back to the last months of his stay in Samara. It is a digest of a recently published book on peasant economy in the south of Russia by a former government official, Postnikov. This article dealt with statistics on the class stratification of the peasantry and the proletarianization of its weakest layers – developments that were particularly noticeable in the South. It reveals the young author’s remarkable ability to handle statistical data and to make the details disclose a picture of the whole. The legally published journal for which this carefully and dryly worded article was intended rejected it, most probably because of its Marxist bias – this in spite of the fact that the author had refrained from entering into open polemics with Populism. A copy of the article, given to the student Mitskevich, was confiscated by the police during a search. It was preserved in the archives of the gendarmerie, where it was discovered in 1923 and published thirty years after its writing. This article is the first item in the present edition of Lenin’s Collected Works.

Was he planning to become a writer, once he had given up the idea of practising law? It is unlikely that he considered writing as such a goal in life. True, he was a confirmed ‘doctrinaire’: ever since his youth he had understood that even as heavenly bodies cannot be observed without a telescope or bacteria without a microscope, so public affairs must be viewed through the lens of doctrine. But he also knew how to work the other way around and look at doctrine through the isolated fragments of reality; he knew how to observe, question, listen to, and watch life and living people. And he performed these complicated functions as naturally as he breathed. It may well have been that, if only unwittingly, he was preparing to become not a theoretician, not a writer, but a leader.

Back in Kazan, he had served an apprenticeship with revolutionaries of the older generation, people under police surveillance and former deportees. Among them there were many simple-minded people whose development had been arrested and who had no intellectual pretensions. But they had seen, heard, and lived through things the new generation knew nothing of, and this made them significant in their way. Yasneva, the Jacobin, who was nine years older than Vladimir, wrote, ‘I remember I was surprised to see Vladimir Ilyich listen so attentively and seriously to the simple-minded and sometimes rather quaint reminiscences of V. Yu. Vitten’, Livanov’s wife and herself an old member of People’s Will. Others, gazing at the surface, might notice only what was quaint, whereas Vladimir would sweep away the chaff and select the grain. He seemed to be conducting two conversations simultaneously: the first, an overt one, which depended not only on himself but on his interlocutor as well and contained of necessity much that was superfluous; and the other, an internal and far more significant conversation, which he alone directed. And his slanting eyes would flash, reflecting the one and the other.

In seeming contradiction with Yasneva, Semyonov reports: ‘Vladimir Ilyich was acquainted with the Livanovs but did not attend their gatherings; instead, he listened very attentively to our tales of the old folks’ grumblings.’ The explanation is that Semyonov’s story relates to a later period, perhaps a year later. Vladimir visited the old people as long as they had something to teach him, but to argue to no purpose, continuing the same arguments and losing one’s temper, was not in his nature. Once he felt that the chapter of personal relations was closed, he firmly put an end to it. To act in such a way required a great deal of self-control, a quality Vladimir never lacked. Although he stopped seeing the Livanovs, he continued to take an interest in what was going on in the enemy camp: war requires military intelligence, and Vladimir was already at war with the Populists. He listened with great attention to the tales told, or rather the reports made, by those co-thinkers of his who were less economical in their use of time. Here, in this young man of twenty-two, we observe already a capacity for manoeuvring flexibly in the sphere of personal relations – a trait that is to be observed throughout his political life. No less remarkable in young Lenin’s intellectual make-up is the wide scope of his observations. The overwhelming majority of radical intellectuals lived the life of their little circles, beyond which existed an alien world. Vladimir’s vision was not limited by blinkers. His interests were unusually wide-ranging, but at the same time he was capable of the greatest concentration. He studied reality wherever he found it, and now he transferred his attention from the Populists to the people. Samara gubernia was populated almost entirely by peasants. The Ulyanovs spent five summers in Alakayevka. Vladimir would never have started by propagandising the peasants – even if he had not been paralysed by his position as a man under police surveillance in the remote steppe. Therefore, he observed the village all the more attentively, verifying theoretical assumptions on living material.

It is true that after his brief experience with farming, his personal contact with the peasants was sporadic and distant, but he knew how to turn his friends’ attention in a desired direction and make use of other men’s observations. Sklyarenko, who was close to him, worked as a clerk for the village judge Samoilov, who, before the appointment of zemstvo chiefs, was totally involved in peasant litigations. Yelizarov was of Samara peasant stock and had retained contacts in his native village. To subject Sklyarenko to an interrogation, to question the village judge himself, to go with his brother-in-law to the latter’s native Bestuzhevka, to talk for hours with a cunning and self-satisfied kulak (Yelizarov’s elder brother) – what an inexhaustible textbook of political economy and social psychology this was! Vladimir would seize on a casual but indiscreet remark and slyly urge on the speaker: he would listen closely, pierce his captive with a glance, chuckle, or sometimes lean back and laugh, as his father did. The kulak found it flattering to converse with an educated person, a young lawyer, His Excellency’s son, although perhaps it was not always clear to him why his merry interlocutor was laughing as he drank his hot tea.

Vladimir obviously inherited from his father the knack of talking easily to people of different social levels and backgrounds. Without boredom or having to force himself, often without any definite purpose, but simply prompted by his un-tameable intellectual curiosity and nearly perfect intuition, he was able to extract what he needed from every casual conversationalist. That is why he listened so contentedly when others were bored. None of those around him could guess that his guttural chatter concealed a vast amount of subliminal activity: he was collecting and sorting out impressions, filling the storehouse of his memory with invaluable factual material, using petty facts to verify vast generalizations. The partitions between books and life were thus removed: even at this time, Vladimir had begun to use Marxism as a carpenter uses his saw and axe.