4

The Elder Brother

Alexander, especially in childhood, was like his mother both in looks and character. ‘The same rare combination’, writes the elder sister, ‘of extraordinary firmness and serenity, with wonderful sensitivity, tenderness, and fairness: but he was more austere and single-minded, and even more courageous.’ The children’s tutor, Kalashnikov, asserts that behind the milk-white face of Alexander, his quiet voice and calm demeanour, even in his childhood a great inner force shone out. The isolation of the family in Simbirsk during the early period, the absence of playmates, and in part also the strictness of the father, could only increase the natural introversion and single-mindedness of the boy.

There was no lack of painful and coarse impressions. To begin with, the house in which the Ulyanovs lived on the Old Crown was situated not far from the prison square. The mother was busy with the younger children; there was no nurse for the older ones, and they wandered in the square alone. On holidays ‘plain folk’ would assemble on the Old Crown – so different from the New Crown, where ‘society’ took its walks. The square would be thoroughly sprinkled over with sunflower shucks, relics of dried fish, and other foods. At Easter they would roll coloured eggs. Bright dresses and red shirts would cling to the merry-go-round, and accordions compete with each other. Toward evening, drunken songs and fierce fights would be heard on the square. On holidays, to be sure, children were not admitted to the Crown, but on weekdays, when digging in the dust, admiring the Volga, or listening to the birds singing in the orchards, they would often be distracted from their games by the clanking of chains, by a coarse shout, or by torrents of abuse. With pained curiosity Sasha would catch glances from behind the bars, experiencing a surge of fear and pity.

It was very fine in Kokushkino, on the estate of their maternal uncle in the Kazan gubernia, where the married daughters came with innumerable children for the holidays. Here there were lively games, walks, boat rides – and, later, hunting parties – into which Sasha threw himself with enthusiasm. But the poverty of the peasants was all around them; the whole environment was still imbued with the mores of serfdom. A neighbouring peasant, Karpei, a hunter and fisherman, told Anna and Sasha how with his own eyes he had seen them marching ‘little Yids’ through Kazan gubernia on the way to Siberia – ten-year-old boys torn forcibly from their parents’ homes for conversion to Eastern Orthodoxy and induction into the tsar’s service. Karpei’s tale was more painful and burned more deeply than had the poems of Nekrasov. Later, in the university, Alexander read in an underground book of Herzen’s how the author on his way to exile had come across a convoy of Jewish boys being driven to Siberia. Among them were eight-year-olds who fell in their tracks from weariness and died on the road. Herzen tells how he shrank back into his carriage, wept bitterly, and impotently cursed Nicholas and his regime. Did Sasha weep? According to his sister he almost never shed a tear, even in childhood. But he felt injustice the more sharply, and knew the bitterness of inward grief.

To the question ‘What are the worst vices?’ Sasha answered as a child: ‘Lying and cowardice.’ He always had opinions of his own, usually unspoken, but based on experience, and therefore firm. This taciturn boy spoke to no one in the family about his loss of religious faith. But when the believing father, suspecting something, questioned him: ‘Are you going to Mass today?’ Sasha answered ‘No’ with such conviction that his father had not the courage to insist.

Sasha entered high school in 1874, in the preparatory class. Notwithstanding the preceding epoch of reform, the high schools of that time were still a kind of penal battalion for boys. The chief implement of torture was the classics. ‘The study of the ancient languages,’ explained the creators of the educational system, ‘because of the very difficulty of mastering them, inculcates modesty, and modesty is the foremost attribute, and the foremost requirement of a genuine education.’ The classics were called on to play the role of ball and chain fastened on to the child’s intellect. Church attendance was rigorously enforced, and poisoned all holidays. When not touching his forehead to the ground, the principal would be glancing around sharply at upper-grade students to see if anybody was impudent enough to remain standing, while he, the principal, went down on his knees before his God. Card playing, drunkenness, and other similar diversions were considered innocent trespasses in comparison with joining a study circle, reading liberal journals, visiting the theatre, or not getting a sufficiently military-looking crew-cut. Reticence or a proud walking posture were, in the eyes of the authorities – and not always unjustifiably – regarded as external signs of secret protest. These everlastingly tense relations led to stormy explosions in several high schools, and even to conspiracies against particularly hated teachers. It went so far that in 1880 Count Loris-Melikov, who had at one time played the role of liberal police dictator for the frightened Alexander II, reported to the tsar that the Department of Education had succeeded in arraying against itself ‘high dignitaries, the clergy, the nobility, the professorial caste, the zemstvos, and the towns.’ The authorities hastily dismissed Count Dimitri Tolstoy, the hated creator of the ‘classical system’, replacing him with a ‘liberal’ minister, Saburov. But this breath of air was temporary. With fluctuations now this way, now that — and most often in the direction of reaction – the school system lasted for a quarter of a century, and with some liberalization right up to the last days of the monarchy. Hatred for high schools became a sort of national tradition. It is no accident that the satiric poetry of Polezhayev, already quoted by us, devotes its bitterest stanza to the director of the Simbirsk High School. Another poet, Nadson, of the same generation as Alexander Ulyanov, wrote of the school period of his life:

Curses upon you, boyhood years!

You passed without love, without friendship or freedom.

The crudeness and cruelty of the school regime was felt more deeply by Alexander than by the majority of his schoolmates. But he gritted his teeth and studied. On his visits home Ilya Nikolayevich would attentively supervise his son’s studies, demanding that his homework be completed flawlessly. The father’s insistence coincided with the inborn qualities of the boy, who, while very able, was also a hard worker. In that family, everybody worked hard.

Sasha entered fifth grade just as Vishnevsky, the pre-reform principal, was replaced by Kerensky, father of the future hero of the February revolution. The new director slightly freshened up the stagnant police-barracks atmosphere in the high school, but the basic principles of the school regime remained, of course, unchanged. On 1 March 1881, when Alexander was in the sixth grade, stupefying news arrived from St Petersburg. The revolutionaries had killed the tsar. The town was full of rumours and speculations. The principal, Kerensky, made a speech about this evil deed perpetrated against the tsar/liberator. The school priest described the martyr death of the anointed of God, calling the revolutionaries ‘outcasts of the human race’. But the authority of the priest, like that of the high-school administration, already stood low in Alexander’s estimation. At home the father spoke against the terrorists with the alarm of a citizen, a state functionary, and the head of a family. Ilya Nikolayevich had returned deeply shaken from the church, where masses had been said for the murdered tsar. His student days had chanced to fall in that darkest of periods which followed the suppression of the revolution of 1848. The coronation of Alexander II had entered his consciousness for ever as the beginning of an era of freedom. For the educator, at least, there had opened a field of action not to be dreamed of under Nicholas I. In years to come he spoke with passion on more than one occasion of the reaction that began after 1 March, extending banefully even into school affairs. In his father’s criticisms Alexander could not have failed to detect the voice of the liberal government functionary frightened by this gloomy drama. But the event was so unusual, the pressure of philistine indignation so overwhelming, that Sasha found no words for his confused thoughts. His sympathies, at any rate, were on the side of the executed revolutionaries. He did not speak them aloud, because of inadequate self-confidence, a fear of influencing the younger children, the dread of a sharp comment from his elders. He was like that always.

During nine years of school work there was never a complaint against Alexander. He was an excellent student, was promoted from one grade to the next with first honours, was never impudent or rude to anybody – not through lack of courage, but through self-restraint. The high school was for him only a bridge to the university, and he passed over the bridge without joy but with brilliance, graduating at the head of his class with a gold medal, a year, and even two years, ahead of his peers.

Alexander’s high-school years coincided exactly with the main cycle in the revolutionary movement among the intelligentsia. He entered the preparatory class in 1874 at the height of the movement ‘to the people’, and finished high school in 1883, when the People’s Will seemed still at the peak of its powers, Simbirsk did not remain completely untouched by that movement. Persons under suspicion were exiled here from larger cities, and exiles returning from Siberia would stay here for a time. Mysterious travellers were from time to time driven through Simbirsk in troikas or on horseback by mustachioed gendarmes. In 1877 and 1878 the Simbirsk high-school teacher Muratov, an active member of Chorny Peredel, implanted Populist ideas here, and under his influence groups of schoolboys and military youth were formed, which even included some teachers. Although after a year and a half in the schools Muratov himself was exiled from Simbirsk, the youth circles continued to exist for some years. But Alexander had no contact with them. The atmosphere of his own family, with its interest in education and its love of Nekrasov and Shchedrin, evidently provided, for the time being, sufficient satisfaction to the ideological needs of the boy, the adolescent, and the young man. Even in the first three years of his university life, however, Alexander continued to shy away from revolutionary circles. We must seek the cause in Alexander’s character, in his special, self-contained quality and a certain aversion to haste.

All forms of intellectual and moral dilettantism were alien to him – the easy acceptance and easy abandonment of people and ideas. He did not make up his mind lightly. Having made it up, he knew neither fear nor hesitation.

The summer of 1882, the vacation preceding his final year, Alexander spent principally in the unused kitchen of a wing of the house, which he converted into a chemical laboratory. He was always the last to come down for tea, finding it difficult to tear himself away from his work; often he had to be called twice. Ilya Nikolayevich made jokes about his son’s preoccupation with chemistry. Alexander remained silent and smiled ‘indulgently’. ‘In a general conversation he would take little part.’ Hardly waiting to finish his tea, he would hasten back to his room. According to Anna, Alexander’s preoccupation with chemistry began to come between them at the end of his high-school years. In reality the cause of this growing estrangement was not only, and not even primarily, the natural sciences. Alexander had come into that period of the re-evaluation of values when boys and young men appraise those who were only recently closest to them, and not infrequently find them wanting. Alexander was taking less and less part in family diversions, preferring the hunt, or conversations with a girl cousin for whom his affection had grown into a timid early love.

In a novel by Chirikov dedicated to the life of his native Simbirsk, Alexander’s preoccupation with chemistry is depicted as a conscious preparation for the activities of a terrorist – one of the many liberties with facts taken by this author, who began with a sympathy for Bolshevism and ended up among the White émigrés.® Alexander loved chemistry for chemistry’s sake. His eyes, thoughtful, serious, somewhat lingering, were the eyes of a born experimental scientist. In 1883, Alexander left Simbirsk. In sending his son off to Petersburg, Ilya Nikolayevich urged him to be careful of himself – the dying rumble of the terror was still fresh in the memory of all. The son was able quite sincerely to say a few reassuring words to his father: his thoughts were still far from the revolutionary struggle. Alexander was excited about science; his head was full of Mendeleyev’s formulas. The capital meant to him, above all, the university.

It was still the old Petersburg, not yet having reached its first million in population. From a venerable old woman Alexander rented a room, equipped, according to his sister, with ‘silence, cosiness, and the smell of an oil lamp’. That vague feeling of dissatisfaction with the social system which Alexander brought with him was not strengthened or sharpened during his first university years. If it did not grow weaker, at least it withdrew into the depths of his consciousness. The university opened new horizons to his youthful mind. Alexander was possessed by the demon of knowledge. He plunged deep into the natural sciences, and soon attracted the attention both of his fellow students and of professors.

The father had set aside forty roubles a month each for the living expenses of his son and daughter. This sum, we must suppose, was twice if not three times more than the average budget of students of that time. In spite of assurances from Alexander that thirty roubles was enough, his father continued to send his son as much as he sent his daughter. Alexander made no protest, but on his arrival in Simbirsk for the holidays he turned over eighty roubles for the eight months past. The most significant item in this little story is the fact that during the whole winter Alexander had not spoken a word to his sister of what he was doing. He did not want to exert pressure upon her or to prejudice his own freedom of action. Besides which, he no longer felt close to his sister. The father, knowing there was no lack of temptation in the capital, admired his son’s self-restraint. This same episode shows, on the other hand, how far Alexander stood, in the first period of his student days, not only from revolutionary organizations but from all kinds of young men’s associations. Otherwise, he would surely have found something to do with those ten extra roubles a month.

According to the student Govorukhin, whose testimony may be wholly relied upon, even at the end of 1885, when he was in the third year of his studies, Ulyanov refused to join any student circles, saying: ‘They jabber a lot, but study little.’ Just as a layman ought not to practise medicine, so in his pedantic opinion it was criminal for one ignorant of social conditions to embark on the revolutionary road. Other observers describe Alexander during this period in the same terms – particularly, except for certain conventional phrases, his elder sister.

There is, however, other testimony, which may perhaps go better with the abstract image of the born revolutionary, though it does not correspond to the facts. In a book dedicated to the memory of Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, the younger daughter, Maria, writes that her father ‘knew, and could not ' help knowing of the revolutionary intentions of his eldest son’. In reality the father could not have known anything about these intentions because they did not exist They began to take form only in the autumn of 1886, when the father was no longer among the living. At the time of Ilya Nikolayevich’s death, Maria was not yet eight, and there can be no question of independent political observations on her part. She herself does not refer to personal memories, but to general psychological considerations. ‘Their love for each other was too great. Their friendship was much to close…’ That filial love was just what compelled many a revolutionary son to conceal from his parents up to the last moment the dangers hanging over him. It happens in this particular case, however, that the son had nothing to conceal; this much may be considered firmly established. But besides this, the words ‘close friendship’ hardly correspond to the actual relationship between Ilya Nikolayevich and Alexander. The elder sister often refers to the reticence Alexander displayed toward other members of the family even in early childhood, and notes the effect upon this trait of the excessive demands made by the father. From her, too, we know that Alexander did not confide his religious doubts to his believing father. The son’s first refusal to go to Mass startled Ilya Nikolayevich; and both sides, it seems, avoided a showdown on the question. Could it have been otherwise in the sphere of politics, where a collision, had it ripened during the life of the father, would have been infinitely more sharp? Maria adduces the testimony of the brother Dimitri, who at the age of eleven was present during a long conversation between the father and Alexander in a garden path. This happened half a year before the father died, and a year and a half before the death of the son. The child did not understand the subject of the conversation, but throughout his life there remained with him the impression of something extremely weighty and important. ‘At present I am absolutely convinced,’ says Dimitri, ‘that the conversation I describe dealt with politics, and doubtless it was not accidental and not the only one.’ This guess of Dimitri’s – and it is a guess made forty years after the event – must be interpreted in the light of the farewell advice sent through Anna, who was already living in Petersburg: ‘Tell Sasha that he must be careful of himself if only for our sake.’ At the time of his last meeting with his father, in the summer of 1885, Alexander was in that transitional state when in talks with revolutionaries a young man is inclined to defend his right to devote himself to science and in clashes with advisers wisened by life’s experiences he feels compelled to defend revolutionary activities. Here too, however, we must add that Alexander could not feel the need of opening his mind to his father, who was the last man from whom he could expect ideological support in revolutionary questions.

But entirely apart from any confession on the part of Alexander, the father could not help feeling alarmed. The threat of the gallows and of hard labour stood inexorably before the eyes of many a father and mother. Ilya Nikolayevich must often have asked himself: will not my beloved son be lured into some kind of irremediable disaster? The last conversations of the vacation might, and indeed must, have travelled along this line – especially on the eve of the son’s departure. How many such words of counsel must have been spoken in all the remote corners of Russia by conservative and liberal parents to their more radical children! One side was seeking a way out of the cruelty and lies of the regime; the other was threatening them with the consequences. The final fatherly adjuration, ‘Have pity at least on your mother and me’, caused pain, but was rarely persuasive.

During his first three and a half years at the university, Alexander did nothing but study. It seemed as though he were storing up knowledge enough for a long life. But he could not elude his destiny … The resistance that Alexander at first put up against revolutionary influences, as well as the form taken by his brief revolutionary work thereafter, were determined by profound changes that had been going on in the political atmosphere of the country, and especially in the moods of the intelligentsia. This is where we must seek the key to Alexander Ulyanov’s fate.