8

The Stricken Family

‘Happy families are all alike’, says Tolstoy. ‘Each unhappy family is unhappy in its own way.’ The Ulyanov family had lived a happy life for almost twenty-three years, and been like other harmonious and fortunate families. In 1886 the first blow fell, the death of the father. But misfortunes never come singly. Others followed swiftly: the execution of Alexander, the arrest of Anna. And beyond these there were more, and still more, misfortunes to come. Henceforth everybody, both strangers and intimates, began to consider the Ulyanovs an unhappy family. And they had truly become unhappy, though in their own way…

When Ilya Nikolayevich had completed twenty-five years of service, the ministry retained him for but one supplementary year, and not five as was usual with important government officials. Ilya Nikolayevich was pained by this failure of the authorities to recognize his services, Anna Yelizarova, in advancing the hypothesis that her father suffered – or, rather, came close to suffering – for his excessive interest in public education, makes a patent error in dates. The minister who refused to retain Ulyanov for the additional five years was that same ‘liberal’, Saburov, who in 1880 was to represent the ‘dictatorship of the heart’ in the domain of public education. It is even possible that, in order to bring in some new blood among his personnel, Saburov began by getting rid of some unimaginative old officials, and that through an oversight in the ministry Ilya Nikolayevich was listed in that category. Saburov was himself, however, very soon dismissed, together with his chief, Loris-Melikov; and his successor, after investigating the affair, retained Ulyanov for an additional five-year term. There is no doubt, at any rate, that these unexpected vicissitudes were very trying for Ilya Nikolayevich. Premature retirement threatened not only to tear him away from his accustomed work, but also to create financial difficulties for his family.

In fact, the change of governmental policy in educational affairs took place only after this incident concerning Ulyanov’s retirement. The zemstvos then fell into disfavour, and together with them the zemstvo schools. In 1884, simultaneously with the new university constitution, new rules were issued for parish schools. Ilya Nikolayevich was opposed to this reform – not out of hostility to the church, of course, for he zealously saw to it that religion was regularly taught in zemstvo schools – but out of loyalty to the cause of education. As the winds of reaction grew strong, the Simbirsk superintendent of public schools, by the very fact that he felt concerned for the cause of literacy, willy-nilly found himself opposing the new course. What had formerly been considered his merit had now, it seemed, become a fault. He was compelled to retreat and adapt himself. His whole life’s work was under attack. When an occasion presented itself, Ilya Nikolayevich was not averse to pointing out to his older children the disastrous consequences of revolutionary struggle, and how instead of progress it produced reaction. This was the mood of the majority of peaceful educators of the time.

A Simbirsk landowner, Nazaryev, in sending in his regular dispatch to the editor of the liberal journal Vestnik Yevropy, wrote to him confidentially about Ulyanov: ‘He is not in the good graces of the ministry, and is far from doing well.’ Ilya Nikolayevich took to heart the government’s attack upon the elementary schools, although he obeyed the new policy. His former buoyancy had vanished. His last years were poisoned with uncertainty and anxiety. He fell sick suddenly in January 1886, while preparing his annual report. Alexander was in Petersburg, wholly immersed in his zoology term paper. Vladimir, only a year and a half away from high-school graduation, must have been thinking already about the university. Anna was at home for the Christmas holidays. Neither the family nor the physician took Ilya Nikolayevich’s illness seriously. He continued to work on his report. His daughter sat reading some papers to him until she noticed that her father was becoming delirious. The next morning, the twelfth, the sick man did not come to the table, but only came to the dining room door, and looked in – ‘as though he had come to say good-bye’, remembered Maria Alexandrovna. At five o’clock, the mother, in alarm, called Anna and Vladimir. Ilya Nikolayevich lay dying on the sofa which served him for a bed. The children saw their father shudder twice and go still for ever. He was not yet fifty-five years old. The physician described the cause of his death – ‘hypothetically although with overwhelming probability’, to quote his own words – as a cerebral haemorrhage. Thus the first heavy blow fell upon the Ulyanov family.

‘Father’s funeral’, says Anna Yelizarova, ‘showed what great popularity he had enjoyed in Simbirsk.’ The obituaries, as is the custom, enumerated the services of Ulyanov to the cause of education. Most affectionate of all were the recollections of Simbirsk teachers. The superintendent had been demanding, and sometimes even severe, but he had spared no effort to improve their financial well-being. ‘There will never be another Ilya Nikolayevich’, repeated the teachers as they returned from the funeral.

Anna remained in Simbirsk for a time in order to be near her mother. It was at that time, as we have seen, that the elder sister and Vladimir grew close to each other. The winter walks together date from that time, and the long conversations in which her brother revealed himself to her as a rebel and nonconformist, the embodiment of protest – so far, however, only in relation to ‘high-school authorities, high-school studies, and also to religion’. During the recent summer vacation, these moods had not yet existed.

The death of the father had suddenly destroyed the lulling flow of life in a family whose well-being had seemed sure to go on indefinitely. How can we avoid assuming that it was this blow that imparted a new critical direction to Vladimir’s thoughts? The answers of the church catechism to questions of life and death must have seemed to him wretched and humiliating, confronted with the austere truth of nature. Whether in reality he threw his cross into the garbage, or whether, as is more likely, Krzhizhanovsky’s memory converted a metaphorical expression into a physical gesture, one thing is beyond doubt: Vladimir must have broken with religion abruptly, without long hesitation, without attempts at an eclectic reconciliation of truths with lies, with that youthful courage which was here for the first time spreading its wings.

Alexander was staying up nights engrossed in his work when the unexpected news came of his father’s death. ‘For several days he dropped everything,’ relates a fellow student at the university, ‘pacing his room from corner to corner as though wounded.’ But wholly in the spirit of the family, in which strong feelings went hand in hand with discipline, Alexander did not leave the university, and did not hasten to Simbirsk. He pulled himself together and went back to work. After a few weeks his mother received a letter, brief as always: ‘I have received a gold medal for my zoological study of annelids.’ Maria Alexandrovna wept with joy for her son and with grief for her husband.

Henceforth the family would have to live on the mother’s pension, pieced out perhaps with some small savings that the father had left. They crowded themselves a little and took in boarders. But the regimen of life remained the same, Maria Alexandrovna watched over the younger children, and waited for the elder to graduate from the university. They all worked hard. Vladimir delighted her with his successes, but alarmed her with his arrogance. So passed the year of mourning. Life was beginning to move again in its new, narrowed channel, when a totally unexpected blow, and a double blow at that, descended upon the family: Both son and daughter were involved in a trial for an attempted assassination of the tsar. It was dreadful even to breathe those words!

Anna was arrested on 1 March in her brother’s room, which she had entered while a search was in progress. Shrouded in dreadful uncertainty, the girl was locked up in prison in connection with a case in which she had no part. This, then, is what Sasha was busy with! They had grown up side by side, played together in their father’s study with sealing wax and magnets, often fallen asleep together to their mother’s music, studied together in Petersburg – and yet how little she knew him! The older Sasha grew, the more he withdrew from his sister. Anna remembered bitterly how, when she visited him, Alexander would tear himself from his books with evident regret. He did not share his thoughts with her. Each time he heard of some new vileness of the tsarist authorities his face would 'darken, and he would withdraw more deeply into himself.‘ A penetrating observer could have predicted even then his future course. But Anna was no penetrating observer. During the last year, Alexander had refused to share an apartment with her, explaining to his companions that he did not want to compromise his sister, who showed no desire for public activity. During that winter Anna saw Alexander with some strange objects in his hands. How far she was from the thought of bombs! Soon after that, she stumbled upon a meeting of conspirators in his apartment. But his friends were not her friends. She was not let in on anything. On one of the last days, 26 February, when his spirit was grieving mortally, he came to her himself, unexpectedly, and sat thinking, waiting, as though expecting the miracle of intimacy. But she did not understand her brother’s mood and tried to talk about everyday things. The miracle did not occur, and Alexander went away again, shut in, alien, doomed. And she was left with a feeling of frustration that they were concealing something from her. Only in her solitary cell did she understand that her brother had come to her for a last communion, and that she had not given him what he sought. From childhood she had been accustomed to seek in his eyes either approval or reproach. Now she felt clearly that she had not found approval, and that this was for ever. She wrote to her brother from one prison cell to another: ‘There is no human being on earth better, more noble, than you.’ But her belated outcry of acknowledgement was never delivered.

A Petersburg relative of the Ulyanovs wrote of the arrest of Alexander and Anna to a former teacher of the children, asking her to prepare the mother cautiously. Narrowing his young brows, Vladimir stood silent a long time over the Petersburg letter. This lightning stroke revealed the figure of Alexander in a new light. ‘But this is a serious thing,’ he said. ‘It may end badly for Sasha.’ He evidently had no doubt of Anna’s innocence. The task of preparing the mother fell to him. But she, sensing tragedy in the first words, demanded the letter, and immediately began to prepare for a journey.

There was still no railroad from Simbirsk; one had to travel by horse and wagon to Syzran. For the sake of economy and for safety on the journey, Vladimir sought a companion for his mother. But the news had already spread through the town. Everyone turned away fearfully. No one would travel with the mother of a terrorist. Vladimir never forgot this lesson. The days that followed were to mean much in the forming of his character and its direction. The youth became austere and silent, and frequently shut himself up in his room when not busy with the younger children left in his charge. So that is what he was, this tireless chemist and dissector of worms, this silent brother so near and yet so unknown! When compelled to speak with Kashkadamova of the catastrophe, he kept repeating; ‘It means Alexander could not have acted otherwise.’ The mother came back for a short time to see the children and told them of her efforts and her dream of a life sentence to hard labour for Sasha. ‘In that case I would go with him,’ she said. ‘The older children are big enough and I will take the younger with me.’ Instead of a chair at a university and scholarly glory, chains and stripes now became the chief object of the mother’s hopes.

Maria Alexandrovna finally had her first meeting with her son on 30 March, a full month after his arrest. Sasha cried, embraced her knees, asked her forgiveness, justified himself by saying that besides his duty to his family he had a duty to the fatherland, and tried to prepare his mother for the fate awaiting him. ‘You must be resigned, Mama!' he said. But Mama would not be resigned. From her son she went to her daughter, and from her daughter to the authorities and to men of influence. Her grief was immeasurable, but her courage rose to the same heights. She did not weaken. She knocked at every door. She tried to awaken some hope in her son and to keep up the hopes of her daughter. She was admitted to the sessions of the court. In his month and a half of confinement, Alexander had grown more manly; even his voice acquired an unfamiliar impressiveness. The youth had become a man. ‘How well Sasha spoke – so convincingly, so eloquently.’ But the mother could not sit through the whole speech; that eloquence would break her heart. On the eve of the execution, still hoping, she kept repeating to her son through the double grating: ‘Have courage!’ On 5 May, on her way to an interview with her daughter, she learned from a leaflet given out on the street that Sasha was no more. The feelings that the bereaved mother brought to the grating behind which her daughter stood are not recorded. But Maria Alexandrovna did not bend, did not fall, did not betray the secret to her daughter. To Anna’s questions about her brother, the mother answered: ‘Pray for Sasha.’ Anna did not detect the despair behind her mother’s courage. How respectfully the prison authorities, who knew already of the execution of Alexander, admitted this severe woman in black! The daughter did not yet guess that the mourning for her father had become a mourning for her brother.

Simbirsk was fragrant with all the flowers of its orchards when news came from the capital of the hanging of Alexander Ulyanov. The family of a full state counsellor, until then respected on every side, became overnight the family of an executed state criminal. Friends and acquaintances, without exception, avoided the house on Moscow Street. Even the aged schoolteacher who had so often dropped in for a game of chess with Ilya Nikolayevich no longer showed his face. Vladimir observed with a keen eye the neighbours around them, their cowardice and disloyalty. It was a precious lesson in political realism.

Anna was set free some days after the execution of her brother. Instead of sending her to Siberia, the authorities agreed to have her restricted, under police surveillance, to the village of Kokushkino, the home of her mother. A new life now began for Maria Alexandrovna. She had to reconstruct not only her relations with other people, but her inner self as well. The slow and stern movement of the Russian revolution over the bones of the young generation of the intelligentsia re-educated more than one conservative mother. Women of noble, bourgeois, or townsman origin would be torn away from their domestic rounds to spend long hours in the waiting rooms of the gendarmerie, in the offices of prosecutors, and in prison offices. They did not become revolutionaries, but in order to defend their children they waged their own battle with the tsarist regime in the rear guard of the revolution. They made the government hated solely by their complaints against its vengefulness and cruelty. The role of these mothers became a revolutionary role. Truly heroic figures arose among them, people of higher spiritual mould than the Christian Mater Dolorosa, who could only prostrate herself before the autocrat of heaven. For the remaining thirty years of her life, Maria Alexandrovna belonged to the holy order of suffering and militant mothers.

During the very weeks when the elder brother’s fate was being decided in the capital, the younger had to prepare himself for his high-school final examinations. Like Alexander after the death of his father, so Vladimir after the execution of his brother interrupted his intense labours for only a few days. The faculty council gave a most positive evaluation to the student of the eighth class, Ulyanov: ‘He studies all subjects, and especially the ancient languages, with love.’ In ten subjects Ulyanov received the grade ‘excellent’, and only in logic ‘good’. Could it be because Hegel, his future teacher, had called school logic dies tote Gebein and scornfully compared the game of syllogisms with the child’s game of picture puzzles? Or had the logic of the future revolutionary already begun to diverge by one grade from official logic? Notwithstanding a still-fresh rebuke from Petersburg for graduating the future state criminal, Alexander Ulyanov, with a medal and the highest recommendations, the faculty council could not deny a gold medal to his younger brother. In his final examinations Vladimir’s grades were straight ‘excellent’. He graduated from high school at the age of seventeen years and two months.

In the zemstvos, in the press of those times a complaint was often voiced that the classical system of education was giving the country ‘weak-chested, nervous people, spineless and rather feeble-minded. And no wonder: the entire system was aimed at twisting people’s minds and spines. Vladimir Ulyanov, however, emerged from high school unharmed. Although ‘Kubyshkin’ had grown pretty thin, his chest was well developed and his nerves were in good shape. His brain, like his spine, was strong and straight. Handsome was the last thing you could call him, with his greyish-coloured skin, Mongoloid eye-slits, protruding cheekbones, large and at the same time nondescript features, and reddish hair on a sturdy and big head. However, the small hazel eyes under the auburn brows glittered with verve and penetration, and the mobility of facial expressions spoke unmistakably of inner powers. Vladimir would not have stood out in any way in a group of high-school students frozen in front of a camera. But in lively conversation, at play, and still more at work, he was invariably first, and the second was far behind.

An official letter of recommendation given to Vladimir Ulyanov by his high-school principal, Fyodor Kerensky, deserves to be quoted in full: ‘Quite talented, invariably diligent, prompt and reliable, Ulyanov was first in all his classes, and upon graduation was awarded a gold medal as the most meritorious pupil in achievement, growth and conduct. There is not a single instance on record, either in school or outside of it, of Ulyanov’s evoking by word or deed any adverse opinion from the authorities and teachers of this school. His parents always watched carefully over the educational and moral progress of Ulyanov, and since 1886, i.e., after the death of his father, the mother alone has devoted all care and labour to the upbringing of her children. The guiding principles of this upbringing were religion and rational discipline. The goodly fruits of Ulyanov’s upbringing were obvious in his excellent conduct. Upon closer examination of Ulyanov’s home life and character, I could not but observe in him an excessive introversion and lack of sociability even with acquaintances, and outside the school even with fellow students who were the school’s pride and joy, in short, an aversion to companionship. The mother of Ulyanov intends to remain with him throughout his stay at the university.’ Fyodor Kerensky himself, judging by his annual reports, directed his educational efforts toward ‘the nurturing of religious sentiments, reverence for elders, obedience to authority, and respect for the property of others.’ In the light of these irreproachable principles it is hard to believe that this model reference described a future subverter of religion, authority, and property. To be sure, the high-school principal was at that time a friend of the family and, in the opinion of Anna Yelizarova, had hoped that his favourable report would help Vladimir overcome those obstacles which the fate of his older brother might put in his path. But whatever may have been the oblique motives of Fyodor Kerensky, he would never have dared, in full view of the entire faculty council, to give his pupil such a favourable reference had he not been sure that it corresponded to the facts. The respected principal acted with all the greater confidence since his closeness to the Ulyanovs – which had not, of course, grown up accidentally – had allowed him to supplement observation of Vladimir at school with impressions of him in his home surroundings.

The statement in the recommendation that ‘religion and rational discipline’ were the foundation of Vladimir’s upbringing is supported by Anna Yelizarova:‘Ilya Nikolayevich was … a sincerely and deeply devout man, and brought up his children in the same spirit’, demanding of them, moreover, ‘conscientiousness to the point of pedantry’. Vladimir retained his religious faith up to the age of sixteen. It follows from the conditions of development of Russian social thought, and from the distinguishing traits of his own character, with its absolute integrity, that so long as he clung to his religious beliefs, he could not possibly, at the same time, have entertained subversive political views. Hypocrites of the revolution notwithstanding, we must accept facts as they are. The kernel of Vladimir’s personality, while filling with vital fluids, concealed itself for a time under the defensive shell of tradition.

Vladimir had learned, especially since the unpleasant adventure with the ‘Frenchman’, to put a muzzle, when necessary, upon his natural sarcasm. He did not seek adventures, and did not love excitement for its own sake. Without surrendering his natural inclinations, he was able to adjust smoothly to the high-school system, pitting against it his moral resilience, quickwittedness, and buoyancy.

A year earlier, to be sure, Vladimir had turned his back upon religion, thereby adopting a starting point for a reconsideration of all traditional views. But this process still had a concealed character. Vladimir had only begun to become ‘a critically thinking personality’. At the same time, what he had learned of the world in his seventeen years prompted him to conceal the change taking place within, even from a mentor who observed him closely. There is not a shred of evidence, therefore, for suspecting the esteemed principal of having betrayed, even if only for an instant, his loyal civil servant's principles for the sake of personal friendship.

Certain doubts are provoked not by the laudatory, but the critical part of this recommendation. A temporary state of depression caused by family tragedies certainly did not justify classifying this talkative and jolly youth with the loners and the anti-social types. One can only suppose that Kerensky the father was just as bad a psychologist as the son subsequently proved to be – unless, indeed, the very precise phrase ‘aversion to companionship’ concealed some other trait the principal had noticed but could not understand and call by its true name. The problem was in truth not an easy one. Behind the self-restraint and discipline of Vladimir, some irreducible psychic element was to be felt. The same was true of his relations with his schoolmates. Everything seemed to go well, but nevertheless not quite as it should. Vladimir generously used his knowledge to help others. He successfully tutored his elder sister in Latin. For two years he gave free lessons to a Chuvash teacher, coaching him for his final examinations. He willingly wrote compositions for others, trying to phrase them in a style foreign to himself. But he brought nobody into his home. Vladimir Ulyanov was separated from his schoolmates, even from those who were ‘the school’s pride and joy’, by some invisible partition excluding both intimacy and familiarity. There were pleasant enough relations with many, but friendship with none. ‘Brother often made fun both of his companions and of certain teachers,’ writes Anna Yelizarova. His jokes, we may believe, were well aimed, and did not always spare the self-esteem of the victim. But what was more important, they made clear the distance between the victim and his mocker. ‘He had no great friends during the high-school years,’ acknowledges Anna Yelizarova. Bragging, self-importance, and putting on airs were completely alien to him both as a boy and as a young man; the very scope of his personality excluded such qualities. But the enormous personal superiority of this future fisher of men prevented those intimacies which demand, if not equality, at least commensurability. It was in spite of his sociability that Vladimir stood alone. In so far as he was capable of understanding it, the principal was noting this trait of his personality, which in the future was to cause so many reproaches and condemnations, until at last it compelled its own recognition. Maybe the best thing to do is to name this inconvenient trait ‘genius’. The high-school student Vladimir Ulyanov was the larva of Lenin.

Fyodor Kerensky had a reason for writing about the mother’s intention ‘to remain with’ Vladimir. The director of the Police Department had ‘suggested’ to Maria Alexandrovna, during her ceaseless efforts in behalf of Sasha, that she place her younger son far away from the source of infection, far away from the capital, in one of the more peaceful provincial universities. It was decided that Vladimir should study in Kazan. Maria Alexandrovna made up her mind to move there with her entire family. She wished to believe that under her protection Volodya would not be so easily drawn off on to the fatal road. Moreover, to remain in Simbirsk would be unbearable. There everything reminded her of the recent past, and what with the cowardly hostility of yesterday’s friends, the family was pretty well forced to leave their home of many years. Maria Alexandrovna made haste to sell the house, and arrived with the other children in Kazan a few weeks after Vladimir. In its new location the family found itself again, as in the first Simbirsk period, isolated – and, moreover, under the black cloud of governmental disapproval.

The city of Kazan with its nearly 100,000 inhabitants, though called ‘the capital of the Volga’ and possessing a university, had retained a completely provincial character. The ideas and hopes that had excited educated society two decades before, had now faded and decayed. ‘The boredom devouring the life of Kazan’, writes a newspaper observer of that time, ‘has penetrated everywhere, and has introduced into its public institutions, its duma and its zemstvos, a deadening apathy.’ Kazan University, founded at the beginning of the nineteenth century, had a dramatic history of its own. When the ‘Holy Alliance’ spread its black wings over Europe, Russian universities, notwithstanding their humility, fell under the suspicion of the court hypocrites. Inspector General Magnitsky discovered to his horror that natural rights were deduced by the Kazan professors from reason and not from the Gospels, and proposed to close the university and raze its buildings to the ground. Alexander I found another way to accomplish the same goal; he appointed the inspector general the university’s rector. Magnitsky instituted the strictest code of regulations for all the sciences – written by a corporal and supplemented by a drunken monk. From that time on, parabolas were described in the name of the Holy Trinity, and chemical reactions took place only with the consent of the Holy Ghost. Thus reduced for a long time to a state of complete abjection, the university experienced a certain revival during the twenty-year rectorship of the famous Lobachevsky, creator of a non-Euclidian, or ‘imaginary’, geometry. Ulyanov the father had been a pupil under Lobachevsky – but this at the time of a new decline in the Russian universities caused by the fright of Nicholas I at the revolutions of 1848. While teaching school in Penza, Ilya Nikolayevich had, on Lobachevsky’s recommendation, worked hard and successfully for several years at the management of a meteorological station.

Vladimir entered Kazan University thirty-seven years after his father, choosing not physics and mathematics, but the Law School. The director of the Simbirsk High School regretted the choice; he had hoped his favourite pupil would study philology. But a teaching career had little attraction for Vladimir; he wanted to be a lawyer. The student body in Kazan was perhaps even more democratic than in other universities. But there was complete panic in the institutions of higher learning in those days. Only three months had passed since the execution of Alexander Ulyanov and his comrades. The government, with its all-powerful police system and its million soldiers, remained in constant fear of the students, who numbered fifteen thousand in all. The regulations of 1884 were now rigidly enforced. Liberal professors were dismissed, innocent home-town clubs dissolved, suspected students expelled and those remaining compelled to wear hated uniforms. The Minister of Education, Count Delyanov, a malicious nonentity, issued a special memorandum forbidding high schools to accept ‘the children of cooks' as students. Leonid Krasin, Lenin’s contemporary and future associate, writes in his memoirs: ‘In the autumn of 1887 when I first came to Petersburg for the entrance examinations to the Technological Institute, Petersburg was going through a time of the very blackest reaction.’ Things were certainly no better in Kazan.

Nevertheless the student body found enough strength to register a protest. The first notes of protest had sounded within the walls of Petersburg University in the spring, when Rector Andreyevsky in a speech devoted to the plot of Ulyanov and his comrades couched in the language of grandiloquent obsequiousness so characteristic of professorial heroes, said: ‘Why did these wretches use the door of our university? They crept into our delightful student family in order to disgrace it…’ etc., etc. The next day a proclamation of the Union of Home-Town Clubs declared the university disgraced for having ‘followed its rector in slavishly crawling at the feet of despotism.’ The execution of the five students had stunned the university. The vacation months had somewhat relieved the mood of tension. But in the autumn the students again felt themselves caught in a vice. The atmosphere in the classrooms and corridors suddenly grew heavy. In November, a wave of ‘disorders’ began to spread. Starting at Moscow, it reached the Volga in December.

The students of Kazan University held a meeting on their own initiative on 4 December, demanded that the inspector appear before them, and noisily presented him with their demands, refusing to disperse. An inspector observed in the front row a young student who, as he went out, presented an identity card with the name of Ulyanov. On the same night, Ulyanov was arrested in his room. Had he really distinguished himself by his protesting conduct, or was he included in the list of forty arrestees because of his odious family name? It is not easy to decide. The role of leader was, in any case, more than this newcomer was up to. The organizers of these ‘disorders’ were always more experienced upperclass-men who had coordinated their own activities and also formed ties with other university centres. However, official documents of that time attempt to shed a different light on the conduct of the young student.

The superintendent of the district reported to the ministry, quoting the inspector, that during his short stay at the university Vladimir Ulyanov had distinguished himself by ‘secretiveness, inattention and even impoliteness’. Only two days before the meeting, he had, it seemed, attracted the attention of the staff. He had been conversing in the smoking room with ‘the most suspicious of students’ and kept going out and coming back with something in his hand. At the meeting of 4 December, he had rushed into the auditorium with the first group, running through the corridor with a shout, ‘waving his arms as though desiring in this way to inspire others’. From this colourful sketch at least one thing emerges clearly: from the first hour of his arrival at the university, Vladimir had been under close police surveillance. And this police surveillance had immediately discovered in him three vices: ‘secretiveness, inattention and even impoliteness’. One may fully rely on the published testimony to the effect that Lenin, as he said in his own subsequent account, ‘played no significant role’ in the disorders. On the other hand, the inspector, with his spyglass trained on Ulyanov from the start, was probably not far off in claiming to have ‘discovered him in the first group’. Perhaps, too, the experienced eye of the policeman caught a hot glimpse of hatred in the glances of this young man with the inconvenient name. ‘In view of the exceptional circumstances affecting his family,’ adds the supervisor in his report, ‘this attitude of Ulyanov toward the meeting moves the inspector to consider him fully capable of various kinds of unlawful and criminal demonstrations.’ The arrest, then, was preventive in character.

In the fact that Ulyanov, when leaving the meeting, had handed the inspector his student identity card, Anna Yelizarova and others see yet another demonstrative act of protest. In reality the meaning of the gesture remains unclear. It is possible that the more experienced students had managed to avoid presenting their cards and that Ulyanov was caught unawares. But it is also possible that in a state of excitement he drew out his card under the nose of the inspector as though handing him a calling card. While escorting Ulyanov to the precinct, the policeman tried to reason with him: ‘Why are you causing trouble, young man? You’re breaking your head against a wall…’ ‘The wall is rotten,’ answered the young man quickly. ‘One good shove and it will collapse.’ This nimble answer was excessively optimistic. More than one shove was required. But the rebel was only seventeen years and eight months of age. A more realistic appraisal of the task would come with years. After some days in prison Vladimir was expelled from the university, which he had attended for only four months, and was banished from Kazan. Thus within six months of the execution of Alexander a new blow had fallen upon the family – not so tragic, but heavy enough. The career of the second son was shattered.

It was only in the spring of that same year that the director of the high school had solemnly testified that ‘not a single instance’ had been observed of Vladimir Ulyanov’s 'evoking by word or deed any adverse opinion’. But the streets of Kazan were hardly covered with snow before Ulyanov had shown himself a subverter of society’s foundations. He was hiding in the smoking room hobnobbing with suspicious students, waving his arms to inspire others. Is it true that the change was so abrupt? Or did the testimonies of high-school and university authorities distort the young man’s image in opposite directions? There was doubtless some distortion. But that was not the most important thing. In the intervening months, Vladimir had lived through a tremendous internal upheaval: the tsar had hanged his brother.