9

The Father and his Two Sons

In Soviet sources it has become almost a rule to describe the revolutionary tendencies of the Ulyanov brothers as a result of the father’s influence. The legend was created as follows. Everyone who ever came in contact with the family of the Simbirsk superintendent of public schools has deemed it his duty in recent years to express in print his retrospective understanding of the revolutionary character of the family. Just as in Christian hagiography not only the holy men themselves, but their ancestors, too, as far as possible, were endowed with the attributes of sublimest piety, so now the modern Muscovite-Byzantine evangelists consider it inadmissible to see in Lenin’s father merely what he was, i.e., a government functionary devoted to the cause of education. This is pointless! Nobody demands poetic gifts from the father of a poet. And the father of a revolutionary need not be a conspirator. It is good if parents do not hinder their children in developing their gifts. But a biographer should not impose demands on his subject’s parents. He ought to portray them as they weep. What lessons can be learned from a life story if it is based on data that are not true? ‘Ilya Nikolayevich was very sympathetic to the revolutionary movement.’ The house of the Ulyanovs on Moscow Street was, it seems, something of a political club; in the debates on revolutionary questions, ‘Alexander set the pace.’ But Vladimir – could it be otherwise? – ‘often took part in the disputes, and with great success, too’. Such an authoritative writer as the late Lunacharsky writes that Ilya Nikolayevich ‘sympathized with the revolutionaries and brought up his children in a revolutionary spirit.’ Going even further, he reaches the conclusion that Lenin was ‘bound by blood ties through father and brother with the preceding revolution, that of the People’s Will generation’.

We learn with astonishment from the younger daughter Maria Ulyanova that Ilya Nikolayevich trained the rising cadre elements among his public-school teachers ‘in the spirit of the best ideas of the 1860s and 1870s’. There is no doubt that his lectures were beneficial. But the phrase ‘best ideas of the 1860s and 1870s’, in the history of Russian social thought, is understood to mean the ideas of the revolutionary Populists. These ideas meant: a break with the church, recognition of the doctrine of materialism, and implacable war with the exploiting class and with tsarism. There could have been no question of such instruction in official courses for schoolteachers even had their organizer himself shared in the ‘best ideas of the 1870s’. But Ilya Nikolayevich did not share them at all. A reverent attitude toward education was characteristic of him. But it did not preclude a faith in the Holy Communion. This cannot be explained by mere references to ‘the times’. Progressive people not only of the 1860s, but also of the 1840s, were both atheists and utopian socialists. Ilya Nikolayevich was not one of their number, either in the nature of his work or in his manner of thought. Suffice it to note that at the very beginning of his work as inspector he anxiously called the attention of his superiors to the sloppiness of the priests in their teaching of religion. Teachers educated by Ulyanov became, according to trustworthy reports, the best teachers of the gubernia; but at no point did they enter into the history of the revolutionary movement. The ideas of Ilya Nikolayevich and his pupils were not the revolutionary ideas of Chernyshevsky, Bakunin, Zhelyabov, but those of moderate, liberal cultural pedagogues such as Pirogov, Ushinsky, Baron Korf.

It so happened that many revolutionaries in those years were educators. Ilya Nikolayevich came into close contact with some, early in his career. But not one of them remained at his post; they were all expelled from the teaching profession. This happened to one of the teachers of the Noble Institute of Penza, who had the audacity to express dissenting views at the graduation ceremonies of 1860. Such an exploit, or such ‘madness’, would never have occurred to Ilya Nikolayevich. As early as 1859 he received a prize of 150 roubles ‘for distinguished and zealous service’. Soon thereafter a supervising senator singled him out for his ‘conscientious fulfilment of his duties’. Three years later a new inspector general referred to Ulyanov with praise while making adverse comments about a number of other teachers. The following year, in 1863, when in connection with the Polish uprising Adjutant General Ogaryov was hunting for subversives among teachers of the Volga and arrived at the conclusion that ‘the spirit of disbelief and opposition’ had its centre at Kazan University, Ilya Nikolayevich, a graduate of the infected university, remained, as before, in good standing. Three years later, one of Ulyanov’s colleagues and friends became embroiled in the affair of Karakozov. Not even the slightest accidental or unfounded suspicion fell upon him in this case either. His religious faith constituted in the eyes of the authorities – and they were quite right – a sure barrier between him and the world of the revolutionaries. Thus, even at the dawn of his activities, while still young and unmarried, Ilya Nikolayevich kept strictly within the confines of his functions as a teacher. Never in anything did he reveal the slightest inclination to take the forbidden road.

The establishment of the office of inspector of public schools was in itself an indication of bureaucratic reaction, directed against the independence of the zemstvos in the realm of education. A pedagogue whose political ‘morality’ was in the least suspect could not possibly have been named to such a trusted post. In his 1901 article tracing the history of the government’s struggle with the zemstvos, Lenin singles out two dates, 1869 and 1874, when the bureaucracy pushed aside local organs of self-government and decisively took over supervision of public education. Both dates are not only of historical but also of biographical interest. In 1869 Lenin’s father was appointed inspector, and in 1874 superintendent of public schools. Ilya Nikolayevich was in the best possible standing with the ministry, rose steadily up the hierarchical ladder, and received in due time the rank of ‘Excellency’ and the Order of St Vladimir with the hereditary nobility that it bestowed. No, this curriculum vitae in no way resembles the life pattern of a revolutionary, or even of a peaceful citizen of dissenting views. We can place our trust in Ulyanov’s elder daughter when she states that ‘father was never a revolutionary.’ If the same daughter, Anna Yelizarova, compelled like everyone else to pay homage to the official legend, writes in her later essays that Ilya Nikolayevich was by conviction a ‘Populist’, this label must be understood very broadly. Elements of Populism were to be found in the ideology not only of liberals, but also of independent conservatives. Under the influence of intensified revolutionary struggle in the latter half of the 1870s Ilya Nikolayevich, like the majority of liberals, moved not to the left but to the right of his already moderate views. He once presented his older children with a collection of poems by Nekrasov, and Sasha drank in this plebeian poet’s verses, which burned like nettles. But three or four years later, when Vladimir was growing up, the father not only did not spur on the young but began to pull back his older progeny. And soon thereafter he completely withdrew into his official shell. When a niece indignantly complained to him of the unjust dismissal of a public-school teacher whose activities were not in the least anti-governmental, Ilya Nikolayevich sat speechless, ‘withdrawn into himself, with his head down’. He met the cross-questioning of his fourteen-year-old daughter with silence. This incident from real life sheds much light on the figure of the father and the general atmosphere in the family.

There can be no question of revolutionary debates in which ‘Alexander set the pace.’ ‘Father, who was never a revolutionary,’ continues Anna Yelizarova, ‘was by then forty years old. Burdened with a family, he wanted to save us, the younger generation.’ Those simple words should once and for all put an end to the legend of the father’s revolutionary influence. But it is this irrefutable testimony of the elder daughter that is most often forgotten.

Yuli Tsederbaum, the future Martov, tells us that in 1887 some young lawyer secretly brought the indictment in the Lopatin case into his father’s house and that he, Martov, then fourteen, listened with bated breath and with all the powers of his mind attuned to the nocturnal reading of the prosecutor’s story of assassinations, escapes, and armed resistance. The Tsederbaums were a peaceful, liberal family, in no way linked with revolutionary circles. Nevertheless, such a reading of a secret document pertaining to a terrorist trial would have been unthinkable in the house of the state counsellor Ulyanov. Although in the first years of his Simbirsk service Ilya Nikolayevich, as a stranger and a ‘liberal’, found himself isolated in the little world of the provincial bigwigs, the general consensus was that he became, toward the end, ’a very popular, beloved, and respected personality in Simbirsk’ – that is, he moved closer to the bureaucratic milieu. It is no accident that the high-school principal, Fyodor Kerensky, a staunch conservative whose educational philosophy rested ‘on the Holy Gospels and Church services’, found the Ulyanov family very congenial. As for the last years of Ilya Nikolayevich’s life – those under the reign of Alexander III – perhaps the most realistic testimony is that of Delarov, a Simbirsk citizen and a deputy in the second State Duma: 'I. N. Ulyanov was a man of conservative views, but he was no reactionary, not a conservative of the old type – he had certain aims in life … a desire to promote the welfare of the people.’

If it is a question of Ilya Nikolayevich’s direct influence upon his children’s future, it was felt for a time only by the eldest daughter: her first conscious aspiration was to become a teacher. For about two years prior to going away to the university, she taught in public school. But it was this elder sister that Alexander found lacking in any revolutionary interests. As for the sons, during their high-school years, when they experienced their father’s influence most directly, neither Alexander nor Vladimir belonged to any secret circle where future revolutionaries pored over tendentious books. It is very likely that no one even attempted to entice them into underground work, sons of an important government functionary as they were, invariably at the top of their classes and with irreproachable records in deportment. But there was another reason for this, one of a deeper kind. In a family of a serf-owning landlord, or a bribe-taking functionary, or a greedy priest, a son and daughter, once they were caught up by the new influences, would be compelled to break with their parents abruptly at an early point and seek, so to speak, a new family. The Ulyanov children, on the contrary, long found satisfaction for their spiritual needs within the walls of their parental home. Moreover, inclined by nature to take everything seriously, they must even have regarded with some suspicion the rash solutions to serious problems proposed by certain schoolmates, often not very knowledgeable ones. In this family, too, however, the conflict between the two generations was preordained: the children thought through, and talked through, those conclusions which their parents hesitated to reach. Only an early death spared Ilya Nikolayevich the inevitable conflict with his children over politics.

‘Who does not know’, wrote Lenin eleven years after the death of his father, ‘how easy it is in Holy Mother Russia for a radical intellectual, a socialist intellectual, to be transformed into a functionary of the imperial government, a functionary who consoles himself with the thought that he is doing “good” within the framework of office routine, a functionary who uses the “good” he is doing to justify his political inertia, his kowtowing to the government’s whiplash?’ If an application of these stern words without qualification to Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov would constitute an injustice, it is only because he was in youth neither a socialist nor a radical in the true sense of the word. But there is no questioning the fact that he remained his entire life an obedient functionary of autocracy. Those immoderately zealous admirers who, for the sake of the son, are trying to paint up the political countenance of the father, reveal an excessive reverence for Lenin’s blood ties and a lack of respect for his real ideas.

The now generally accepted thesis that Vladimir received his first revolutionary impulses from his terrorist brother appears so obvious from all circumstantial evidence as to require no proof. In reality, that hypothesis is also false. Alexander introduced no member of his family into his inner world, and least of all Vladimir. ‘These two’, says Anna Yelizarova, ‘were undoubtedly brilliant, each in his own way, but they were totally different personalities.’ A comparison of the two brothers, even at the risk of running a little ahead of our story in regard to the younger, is required here by the course of our narrative, The radical writer Vodovozov, who knew Alexander in Petersburg and afterwards often visited the Ulyanovs in Samara, wrote many years later, when he was already an anti-Soviet Emigré, that the ‘unusually attractive’ Ulyanov family was divided ‘into two clearly expressed types’. The first, best represented by Alexander, with a pale oval face and thoughtfully penetrating eyes, charmed everybody with its youthful freshness and spirituality. The second, a type hateful to Vodovozov, was most fully expressed in Vladimir, whose ‘whole face struck the observer with a combination of intellect and crudeness, I would almost, say a kind of animalism. Most noticeable was the brow – brainy but slanting. A fleshy nose. Vladimir Ilyich was almost completely bald at twenty-one or twenty-two.’ This contrast, obviously inspired by the images of the deities Ormuzd and Ahriman, is not the exclusive property of Vodovozov. Alexander Kerensky, who, incidentally, was not personally acquainted with either of the brothers, being only six years old when Vladimir was about to graduate from high school, calls them ‘moral antipodeses’. He contrasted the ‘charming and brilliant’ Alexander with the ‘unsurpassed cynic’ Vladimir. Approximately the same colours are employed by the Simbirsk littérateur Chirikov and others.’ A sympathy for the older brother – sincere or feigned – adds weight to the hatred of the younger. Nevertheless, the contrast itself is not invented. It is easy to see in it a reflection of a natural contrast, though one distorted by hostility.

‘The different characters of the two brothers’, writes Anna Yelizarova, ‘were already evident in childhood; they were never close to each other.’ Volodya’s attitude toward Sasha was one of ‘unlimited respect’, but he obviously did not enjoy the sympathy of Sasha. (Yelizarova expresses this more cautiously: ‘Of the little ones, it was Olya who enjoyed Sasha’s affection far more than the others.’) On the basis of remote, badly remembered, and fragmentary stories of childhood recounted by her husband, Krupskaya attempts to describe in a few lines the relations between these brothers in their youth: ‘They had many tastes in common; both felt the need to be left alone for long periods of time … They lived habitually together … And when some of the innumerable young people came to see them … the boys had a favourite phrase: “Delight us with your absence.’” This ‘favourite phrase’ alone unmistakably demonstrates that Krupskaya had no clear notion of Alexander’s personality or of the relationship between the two brothers. ‘Delight us with your absence’ – it was quite possible for Vladimir to say that. But Alexander, who did not use sarcastic expressions, could only frown when hearing this from Vladimir.

Both in looks and personality, Alexander was more like his mother. The father’s traits predominated both in the face and mentality of Vladimir. However, this contrast, although basically very important, is too simplistic to exhaust the question. Courage – in Russian this word, muzhestvo, has been appropriated by the male (muzhchina) – constituted the most important trait of Maria Alexandrovna’s personality. But this was the courage of the mother who gives herself wholly to her family and children until the very end. The courage of Alexander, too, was, above all, the courage of self-sacrifice. Imperiousness, quick temper, humour, guttural r’s, early baldness, and early death – all those features Vladimir derived from Ilya Nikolayevich. But if the elder brother was not a duplicate of the mother, still less was the younger an exact reproduction of the father. They received from their parents, and through them from more remote ancestors, certain ‘genes’ which, combined, produced these two extraordinarily outstanding but dissimilar human beings.

The two brothers indubitably had certain traits in common: both were highly gifted (though not equally so), both loved work, both tended to devote themselves completely to a cause, both were careful and solicitous, astoundingly so at such a young age. And finally, last but not least, both became revolutionaries. Reactionary writers never tired of portraying Russian revolutionaries as semi-educated mediocrities. Even Turgenev and Goncharov were not, essentially, averse to this tendency. But it was not mediocrities who established the principal features generally shared by the revolutionary ranks. Not at all.

The Ulyanov brothers – both Alexander and Vladimir – as before them the leaders of the Decembrists, the men of the Enlightenment, the Populists, and the members of People’s Will, were the genuine cream of the Russian intelligentsia.

‘In all of my life – which, by now, means quite a span of time,’ writes Vodovozov, ‘I can count few people whom I found as charming, in the full sense of the term, as I did Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov,’ Those who knew the older brother unanimously report the disarming integrity of his character. There was not in him ‘the slightest pose or affectation’. A sense of justice and a most meticulous thoughtfulness of others, even in trivial things, were part and parcel of his personality. We can easily believe that in personal relations Alexander was incomparably more winning than young Vladimir. To be sure, in freedom from falsehood and pose, and in hatred of cheap embellishments, Vladimir was in no way second to Alexander. The same was true of the integrity of his personality, except that his personality was wholly different, not designed by nature for personal relations. Each of the brothers was shaped out of a solid block of material, with nothing added, but the kind of material in each was different. And when Lunacharsky expressed his magnanimous conviction that Alexander ‘was not second to Vladimir Ilyich in genius’, one cannot refrain from saying: These people measure genius with too short a yardstick. The application of this weighty epithet to Alexander is in reality a retrospective reflection from the historic figure of Vladimir.

Even in his high-school days the older brother was reading Dostoyevsky with emotional delight. The tortured psychology of the novelist was congenial to the spiritual universe of this thoughtful and sensitive boy who found his surroundings offensive. To Vladimir, the author of Crime and Punishment remained alien even in his mature years. Instead, he avidly read and reread Turgenev, who was so hateful to Dostoyevsky, and then Tolstoy, the mightiest of Russian realists. The contrast between Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky was not accidentally a favourite theme of traditional Russian literary criticism, and had many different facets. Still, most important is the contrast between a tragic introspection and a joyous perception of the external world. It would be an oversimplification to project this contrast on to the two brothers in its entirety. But it is of considerable relevance to the understanding of their personalities.

Alexander was of melancholy temperament: Ilya Nikolayevich considered Vladimir’s temperament choleric. Anna depicts her older brother as anti-social, often downright gloomy in his inexpressible sensitivity.

’I never saw him carelessly happy’, writes one of the members of the conspiracy. ‘He was always meditative and sad.’ A complete contrast to Vladimir, whose most striking trait was an ever-overflowing joy in life, an expression of self-confident strength. Speaking of Alexander as a thoughtful organizer, another of the conspirators cautiously remarked: ‘He was perhaps a little slow-moving.’ In contrast, Vladimir (and not only in his youth, either) was distinguished above all by a vigorous assertiveness and a quick dexterity in work – qualities nourished by the richness, variety, and rapidity of subconscious associations. Are these not among the chief resources of genius?

‘A very characteristic trait’, writes Anna Yelizarova of Alexander, ‘was his inability to lie. If he did not want to say something he remained silent. This trait manifested itself so clearly at his trial.’ One wants to add: ‘Unfortunately.’ In irreconcilable social struggle such a psychic make-up means political defencelessness. Notwithstanding all the philosophizing of stern moralists (those liars by calling), a lie is an expression of social contradictions, and sometimes also a weapon in the struggle against them. It is impossible through individual moral effort to leap out of the framework of the social lie. As a type, Alexander was more like a knight than a politician. This created a psychic barrier between him and his younger brother, who was far more elastic, more opportunistic in questions of personal morals, better-armed for the struggle, but in no way less implacable toward social injustice.

Of Nikolai, the brother of Tolstoy, a subtle observer and psychologist, Turgenev said that he lacked only a few faults in order to become an admirable writer. Leo Tolstoy himself considered this paradoxical description ‘very true’. Maybe obliquely he found in it a justification for those traits which made it difficult to communicate with him, even for members of his own family. Turgenev’s words mean that, for the carrying out of some important public functions, certain supplementary attributes are necessary, attributes that by no means always serve to adorn one’s personality. If this is true in regard to a writer, it is still more true of a statesman and – multiplied to the nth power – of a leader. But Turgenev’s appraisal does not in any way imply that on the moral scale, if scales do exist for the weighing of imponderable substances, Leo Tolstoy weighed less than his brother Nikolai. The influence of Alexander on people close to him was great. But it could hardly have extended beyond them. Alexander had not the will to power, the ability to harness for a cause not only the virtues but the weaknesses of others and, should need arise, to proceed despite considerations of individual personality. He was too subjective, too much a prisoner of his own experiences, too much prone to consider a problem solved when he had solved it only for himself. He lacked the aggressive and tireless spirit of a missionary. And it was precisely the presence in his younger brother of the attributes of a future public figure, writer, speaker, agitator, tribune, that made him alien and perhaps even unattractive in Alexander’s eyes.

In Vladimir one sees in all situations the instigator, the reformer, the leader of human masses. Alexander, under more civilized circumstances, could easily be pictured as a peaceful scientist and father of a family. Drawn into the revolution by the course of events, he took over the terrorist method sanctified by tradition, made bombs on the model of Kibalchich, and, shielding others with his own body, went to his death. The figure of Alexander was that of a saint; Vladimir was every inch a leader. One went down in the history of the revolution as the most tragic of her failures, the other as the greatest of her accomplishments. Lev Kamenev, the original editor of the complete collection of Lenin's works, cautiously writes: ‘It is possible that it was from the lips of his elder brother that Lenin first heard about the teachings of Marx and about those ideas and aspirations which preoccupied the revolutionary intelligentsia of those years.’ Another prominent Soviet writer, the former editor of Izvestia Steklov, speaks far more categorically: ‘Just a short time before his arrest the elder brother gave to the younger the first volume of [Marx’s] Das Kapital' By this act Alexander Ulyanov created not only his own successor but also the successor and continuator of Karl Marx.’ This story, though disseminated throughout the world, is in complete contradiction both with the facts and with circumstantial psychological evidence. ‘Sasha’, says Anna, ‘never disputed or denied anything in front of the young.’ Even to his elder sister, who lived side by side with him in Petersburg, he did not confide that which was most important to him. The brothers lacked any secret sphere of interests and conversations – about God, about love, about the revolution – which in other families can bind together children of different ages. We have already learned from Anna: ‘The differing personalities of the two brothers became apparent from childhood on and they were never close to each other.’ In the summer of 1886, the last one the brothers spent together, they were farther apart than ever.

Recovering comparatively soon after the death of the father, Vladimir felt himself the man in the family. His recent emancipation from religion must have suddenly elevated his self-esteem, As often happens with headstrong youths, the need for independence took a rough and tough form in him in that critical period – at the expense of others, and in particular, at the expense of his mother’s authority. 'Mockery was natural to Vladimir in general, and, at that transitional age, especially so.’ We can rely on these words the more surely since the elder sister, as she is portrayed in her own writing, would not easily have forgotten these mockeries. As for Alexander, he was painfully sensitive to jibes at the expense of others, and it would never occur to anyone to sneer at Alexander himself. He first came into contact with this in the summer spent with the fatherless family. His tender feeling toward his mother, made more acute by his previous absence and their common loss, was particularly intense. Besides the profound differences in their personalities, each brother was now tuned to a different key. The phase of childish worship, when Volodya wanted to do everything ‘like Sasha’, had given way to a struggle for independence; the inevitable rejection of his elder brother had begun; his concentration, his attentiveness to other people, his fear of revealing his superiority, Vladimir offset with a noisy aggressiveness, sneering, jibes, and an organic desire to dominate. The summer passed in disharmony.

Let us listen to Anna Yelizarova. Volodya’s abruptness and aggressiveness ‘became especially noticeable after the death of the father, whose presence had always had a restraining effect upon the boys.’ Vladimir began to ‘talk back to his mother, sometimes harshly, as he would never have dared while Father was with us.’ Perhaps this demonstrative impudence of Vladimir’s was also, in a way, a retroactive protest against the father’s authoritarianism. The mother subsequently remembered with emotion how Sasha had sometimes interceded on her behalf during that last summer. Once, while playing chess, Vladimir carelessly waved away his mother’s reminder about some task, and when Maria Alexandrovna insisted with some irritation, he answered with a wisecrack. Then Alexander intervened: ‘Either you will do immediately what Mamina tells you or I won’t play with you any longer.’ The ultimatum was presented calmly, but so firmly that Vladimir immediately did as he was told. Anna herself, although she was annoyed at the ‘sneers, impertinence and arrogance’ of Volodya, nevertheless fell under his influence, or at any rate willingly kept up a chatter with him full of jokes, digs, and laughter. Alexander not only did not join in these conversations, but found it difficult to tolerate them. He had his own moods, and Anna more than once brought upon herself his reproving looks. In the autumn, when they were in St Petersburg, she summoned up the courage to put a question to Sasha: ‘How do you like our Volodya?’ Sasha answered: ‘Undoubtedly a very able person, but we don’t get along.’ Maybe he even said, , don’t get along at all,’ adds Anna. At any rate, her brother said this ‘decisively and firmly’. ‘Why?’ the surprised sister asked. But Alexander evaded the question, thus merely emphasizing the profundity of the differences. The elder brother did not call the other ‘an able boy’ but ‘an able person’, speaking as of an equal, and there is every reason to think that Anna’s memory truthfully retained this nuance. At the same time, he surprised his sister by this special kind of moral dissociation from his brother. The absence of spiritual kinship was for Alexander more than enough to exclude the possibility of intimate conversation with Vladimir. There was, however, another and equally deep-seated reason. In the summer of 1886 Alexander had not yet decided anything for himself, He had read Marx, but had no clear idea what practical application he would make of the reading. Even in the autumn in Petersburg he was still trying to brush aside any revolutionary conclusion. Could he have confided these waverings and doubts to his younger brother, especially one with whom he was not getting along?

There can be no question, then, of Alexander’s having any direct political influence upon Vladimir. But the moral influence had to find its political expression, though not necessarily at once. By his entire being, Alexander inculcated into his brother higher demands upon himself and others, and thus, regardless of his own intentions, speeded up the, broadly speaking, inevitable conflict between Vladimir and his milieu. Anna recalls how Alexander, returning home on vacation, extended his hand ‘with friendly simplicity’ to an old messenger in the employ of the father, which ‘attracted attention because it was not done’. This interesting incident, which survived in the memory of the sister through no accident, sheds some reflected light on the social customs of the bourgeois bureaucratic circles of those times as they were practised even in one of the best families. The atmosphere was still saturated to suffocation with the vapours of serfdom! There can be no doubt that Alexander’s sincere ‘democratic’ gestures had a more serious effect on the formation of Vladimir’s personality than any haphazard conversations about People’s Will or about Marx. Besides, there never were such conversations.

What ideas and moods captivated Vladimir in the summer of 1886, on the eve of his last year at high school? In the preceding winter, according to Anna Yelizarova, he had begun ‘rejecting authority in the period of his first, so to speak, negative formation of personality’. But his criticisms, for all their boldness, still had limited scope. They were directed against high-school teachers, and to some extent against religion. ‘There was nothing definitely political in our conversations.’ On her return from the capital, Vladimir did not put any questions to his sister about revolutionary organizations, illegal books, or political groupings among the students. Anna adds: ‘I am convinced that with our relations being what they were at that time, Volodya would not have concealed such interests from me,’ had he had any. The tales about political debates in the home of the Ulyanovs, even during the father’s lifetime, with Alexander playing the leading role and with apt replies from Vladimir, are pure invention from beginning to end. Notwithstanding the fact that among these Simbirsk high-school students (as shown by recent discoveries in the papers of the gendarmerie) there existed even in the dullest period of the 1880s certain secret circles and tendentious little library collections, half a year after the death of his father Vladimir remained completely untouched politically and did not show the slightest interest in those economics books that filled Alexander’s shelf in their common room. The name of Marx meant nothing to this young man whose interests were almost exclusively in belles lettres. Moreover, he gave himself up to literature with passion. For whole days he drank in the novels of Turgenev, page by page, lying on his cot and carried away in his imagination into the realm of 'superfluous people’ and idealized maidens under the linden trees of aristocratic parks. Having read through to the end, he would begin all over again, His thirst was insatiable.

Thus, in spite of their proximity, each of the brothers lived his own life that summer. From dawn to dawn Alexander sat bent over a microscope. In this connection, Krupskaya places the following phrase on Lenin's lips: ‘No, my brother will never be a revolutionary, I thought then. A revolutionary cannot spend so much time investigating annelid worms.’ An obvious anachronism! The Vladimir of those times, remote from politics, could not have had such a thought about the brother to whom the whole family looked as a future scientist. Instead, after the arrest and execution of Alexander, Vladimir must have repeated to himself: Who could have thought that this brother would exchange his microscope for a bomb so quickly?

After her liberation from prison, Anna, sparing Vladimir, did not tell him what his dead brother had said of him. But Vladimir was neither deaf nor blind. In his relationship with Alexander he could not but detect an estrangement tinged with hidden irritation, if not distaste. Never mind, it is all temporary and subject to change – so he must have comforted himself – a closer association will surely ensue in the future; he, Volodya, will show what he is worth and Sasha will be compelled to recognize it. A whole life – that is, eternity – still lies ahead. As for today, we have Turgenev’s wondrous world on the agenda. But instead, the agenda turned out to contain the Peter and Paul Fortress and Sasha’s doom.

Some years later, the Social Democrat Lalayants questioned Lenin about the affair of 1 March. Lenin answered: ‘Alexander’s participation in a terrorist act was completely unexpected for all of us. Possibly my sister knew something – I knew nothing at all.’ As a matter of fact, the sister knew nothing either. The testimony of Lalayants fully corroborates Anna’s story and coincides with what we know on this subject from Krupskaya’s Recollections. In explaining this fact, Krupskaya refers to the difference in their ages, which wholly destroys her own account of the closeness of the brothers. But this reference, inadequate to say the least, does not alter the fact itself. Lenin’s grief for his brother must have been coloured with bitterness at the thought that Alexander had concealed from him what was deepest and most important. And with remorse over his own lack of attentiveness toward his brother and his arrogant assertions of his own independence. His childish worship of Sasha must have returned now with tenfold strength, sharpened by a feeling of guilt and a consciousness of the impossibility of making amends. His former teacher who handed him the fateful letter from Petersburg, says: 'Before me sat no longer the carefree cheerful boy but a grown man buried in thought…’ Vladimir went through his final high-school experiences with his teeth clenched. There exists a photograph evidently made for the high-school diploma. On the still unformed but strongly concentrated features with the arrogantly pushed-out lower lip, lay the shadow of grief and of a first deep hatred. Two deaths stood at the beginning of the new period of Vladimir’s life. The death of his father, convincing in its physiological naturalness, impelled him to a critical attitude toward the church and the religious myth. The execution of his brother awakened bitter hostility toward the hangmen. The future revolutionary had been planted in the personality of the youth and in the social conditions that formed him. But an initial impulse was needed. And this was provided by the unexpected death of his brother. The first political thoughts of Vladimir must inevitably have arisen out of a twofold need: to avenge Sasha and to refute by action Sasha’s distrust.

Why, in that case, did Vladimir take the road of Marxism and not of terror, ask the official biographers. They answer with unanimous references to his ‘genius’. In reality, not only the answer but the question itself is sheer invention. Vladimir, as will be seen, chose Marxism only after several years, after much intellectual labour; moreover, even after that, he continued for a long time to favour terror. Crude anachronisms are the disastrous price paid for the refusal to perceive a living man in his living development. Even Krupskaya was taken in by the notion of Lenin as a Marxist in 1887 In her attempts to explain why Alexander’s execution did not inspire in Vladimir ‘a desire and a determination to follow in his brother’s footsteps’, she advances an unfounded hypothesis that Vladimir ‘at that time was already thinking independently of many things and had already decided for himself the question of the necessity of a revolutionary struggle’. The youngest of the Ulyanovs, Maria, went still further along this road. At the memorial meeting for Lenin on 7 February 1924, she said that, upon receiving the news of his brother’s execution, Vladimir cried out; ‘No, we will not follow that road. That is not the road to take.’ One might pass over the obvious incongruity of Maria Ulyanova’s story (at the time the event took place she was not quite nine years old) had not this phrase, carelessly tossed out by her, been, quite literally, canonized. It was said to demonstrate the profundity of political thought in the Simbirsk high-school boy – who, only the day before, had broken out of the shell of Eastern Orthodox faith, who did not yet know the name of Marx, had not read a single illegal book, knew nothing and could know nothing of the history of the Russian revolutionary movement, and had not yet even discovered in himself any interest in politics. In these conditions, what could the words attributed to him by the younger sister mean? In any case, not an opposition of the revolutionary struggle of the masses to the terror of the intellectuals. Even if one were to assume for a moment that a similar phrase was actually uttered, then it could not have expressed a programme but only despair. Sasha should not have embarked on that path! Why did he not devote himself to science? Why did he doom himself?

Unlike coins, invented stories do not wear down with circulation, but, on the contrary, grow bigger. The old Bolshevik Shelgunov tells this story: ‘When they read the telegram that Alexander was executed, Vladimir Ilyich wiped his brow and said, "Well, then, we will seek a more effective road.’” All the laws of human psychology are here trampled on. Volodya is not thrown into despair upon receiving the dreadful news, does not grieve for the irredeemable loss, but wipes his brow and announces the need to find a ‘more effective road’. To whom were these words addressed? The mother was in Petersburg, Anna was still in prison. Evidently Vladimir imparted his tactical discoveries to the thirteen-year-old Dimitri and the nine-year-old Maria…

These loyal disciples step so lightly over facts and logic only because they are not satisfied with their teacher as he really was. They want a better Lenin. They embellish him in early youth with intellectual powers arrived at only as a result of Herculean labours. They endow him with supplementary qualities out of their own generosity. Thus they create for themselves a different, more perfect Lenin. We are satisfied with the one that really existed.

We have heard from Krupskaya that had young Vladimir not already possessed his own revolutionary views, he would have followed in his brother’s steps after the execution. But Vladimir, in essence, did exactly that! He did not go into the countryside to the peasants, nor to the factories to the workers, but, just like Alexander, he entered a university. There he found the same circle of democratic youth who began with a struggle for the right to have their eating places and reading rooms and ended in terrorist conspiracies. Expelled from the university merely for a student protest, Vladimir was strengthened in his belief in terror. If he did not take the road of practical conspiracy it was not from considerations of principle but because, after the catastrophe of 1 March 1887, such attempts became for a long time psychologically and physically impossible. Revolutionary individuals without experience or perspectives were so alienated from their social milieux, even one composed of students, and so isolated from each other, that not a single hand was lifted in a practical effort. The old path of the intelligentsia was conclusively blocked by the tomb of the five students. New roads were not yet discovered. Calls to battle were nowhere to be heard. Vladimir knew not how to approach the task of revenge. The intensified reaction and the political decline of the intelligentsia provided the young man with a deferment. As we shall see, he made good use of it.