The city of Simbirsk was founded on the western bank of the mighty Volga river in 1648 some 555 miles south-east of Moscow at what was then the fringe of Russian territory. Its function was to implant several thousand settlers and to serve as a military base for troops to keep at bay the nomadic tribes living across the Volga and to the east. Looking for it on a modern map is fruitless because it was renamed Ulyanovsk in honour of its most famous son after his death in 1924. He was born to Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov – a respectable teacher and school inspector – and his wife Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova, who ranked as minor nobility in the strictly hierarchical tsarist society due to Ilya’s position in the administration. The Ulyanov family’s impeccable record was irretrievably blotted just a year after his death when his eldest son Alexander was arrested in March 1887 for plotting with other members of the Narodnaya Volya, or People’s Will, terrorist group at St Petersburg University to assassinate Tsar Alexander III on the capital’s famous Nevsky Prospect. Ten of the conspirators were saved from the gallows by the Tsar’s clemency, but 21-year-old Alexander Ilyich had not only used his knowledge of chemistry to make the ‘infernal machine’ or bomb they were intending to use, but was also arrogant enough to make a defiant political rant in court instead of pleading for his life. He and four of the other students were hanged in the grim fortress-prison of Shlisselburg on an island in Lake Ladoga – the Alcatraz of St Petersburg.
Alexander Ulyanov’s 17-year-old brother Vladimir had hero-worshipped him, but returned to his studies and graduated one month later as the Simbirsk Gymnasium’s best pupil. Further education should have been barred to him as the brother of an executed terrorist, but his school’s director had been named guardian of the family in Ilya’s will. He vouched for Vladimir’s good behaviour so that he could commence studies at Kazan University in the autumn of 1887. Once there, the formerly ‘best pupil’ gravitated to the company of extremist students, a group of whom protested in December at the expulsion of some professors who expressed liberal political views and demanded a new and more relaxed regime. At the confrontation between the student activists and the dean, Vladimir Ilyich and forty others were briefly arrested and then expelled.
Internal unrest had seen the tsarist secret police reorganised in 1881 – the year Alexander II was assassinated – as Otdeleniye po Okhraneniyu Obshchestvennoi Bezopasnosti i Poryadki, or the Department for Defence of Public Security and Order. Under the acronym of Okhranka or Okhrana, this forerunner of the KGB was tasked with infiltrating and subverting trade unions, political parties and discussion groups – and generally spying on the whole population, for the last generations of Romanovs were fatally intent on maintaining the quasi-feudal old order. Schools and universities excluded the lower classes and the judiciary was brought back under central control; Russian was imposed as the sole official language throughout the Empire; and other branches of Christianity were disadvantaged vis-à-vis the Orthodox Church. Under the ‘Temporary Laws’, Jews were more strictly confined to the Pale of Settlement.
Thanks to his mother’s persistence in lobbying for her problem son, although banned from Kazan University Vladimir Ulyanov was permitted to complete his law studies at St Petersburg University, where he graduated with honours. Going through the motions of starting a law practice in the city of Samara, where Maria Alexandrovna and her younger children were then living, he actually devoted more energy to reading the writings of Karl Marx and disseminating them clandestinely. This was tolerated initially because the Okhrana considered the Marxists likely to draw support away from Narodnaya Volya, already responsible for many assassinations, and judged their publications too boringly abstruse to influence many people anyway. ‘Nothing will come of them for at least fifty years,’ remarked the Samara chief of police in 1894.11
At 24, Vladimir I. Ulyanov was already called ‘the old man’. With his bald head and slit eyes that rarely gave away what he was thinking, that was understandable. All work and no play made this Jack an ill boy. After nearly dying of pneumonia early in 1895, he did what middle-class Russians did to recover their health, going abroad for a European tour – in his case to meet influential extreme socialists living in exile, including the so-called fathers of Russian Marxism, Georgi Plekhanov and Pinchas Borutch, who had taken the Russian name Pavel Axelrod. Both were impressed by a week of debate with Ulyanov, which demonstrated his unshakeable belief in the need for revolution.
Returning to St Petersburg in September 1895 Ulyanov joined Julius Tsederbaum, who used the Russian name Jules Martov, and other revolutionary socialists in Soyuz Borby za Osvobozhdenie Rabochevo Klassa – literally, the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. Tracked by Okhrana agents and informers, they were arrested on 20 December. Conditions in the prison were far from the repressive regime that Lenin would impose after the revolution: young Ulyanov was allowed visits twice weekly, when relatives might bring in books and other publications. When leaving, they were not checked for outgoing messages, so that Ulyanov’s mother and sister Maria Ulanova acted as postmen for his intensive correspondence with comrades outside. During his fourteen months’ incarceration, Ulyanov managed to organise from his cell at least one major strike involving 35,000 workers.
The sting in the tail of his sentence was a three-year exile to Shushenskoye, a village on the mighty Yenisei river in the Siberian province of Krasnoyarsk, more than 2,000 miles east of Moscow. With a weekly allowance12 that was adequate for his needs, he used the time and lack of civilised distractions for studying, thinking and writing. Although this may be partly Soviet propaganda, the record is that the local people respected and liked him after he gave free legal advice based on his law studies and even the gendarmes charged with watching the exiles came to treat him with respect. Love – at least in one direction – entered his life when a female comrade from St Petersburg arrived in Shushenskoye. Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya had been exiled to Ufa. Although also in Siberia, it was still 1,500 miles away, but the tolerant tsarist authorities accepted her story that she was Ulyanov’s fiancée and allowed her to join him in May 1898. Married in a local church, Krupskaya, as she was generally known, settled down to married life as Ulyanov’s tireless confidante and secretary for his extensive correspondence with other extreme socialists both at liberty in Russia, in internal exile all over Siberia and abroad. It was a busy life. During this period, the manuscript of one political text by Ulyanov was smuggled back to St Petersburg for publication there under a pseudonym and another – The Aims of Russian Socialism – was published in Switzerland under the name of Lenin, a name he took from the Siberian river Lena, and under which he would achieve worldwide fame.
The period was also crucial as it marked his absolute rejection of revisionist Marxist factions and the beginning of a war of words with them first evidenced in a periodical titled Iskra – meaning the ‘spark’ that Lenin intended to ignite worldwide revolution. The first edition, printed in Leipzig on thin onionskin paper in December 1900, was stored in Berlin by the German Social Democratic Party and inserted into small parcels sent to addressees near to the Russian frontier, then passed on to professional smugglers for onward transmission into the Russian Empire. Krupskaya, having been left behind in Ufa to complete her exile, and released at its end, did not find it easy to track down her absent husband, who used many aliases, changed his address frequently and did nothing to help her. Eventually catching up with him in Munich, she became again his maid-of-all-work, writing to his mother in August 1901:
Volodya [affectionate diminutive of Vladimir] is working diligently. I am very pleased with him. When completely engrossed in a certain work, he is in excellent spirits. His health is very good, no trace of his cold remains, nor does he suffer from insomnia. He invigorates himself every day with a cold water rub-down. In addition we go bathing almost every day.13
It reads like a message from the overprotective mother of a fragile child. By the following spring, the political risks of publishing Iskra had frightened off two printers. Among the expat revolutionaries, Plekhanov and Axelrod chose to move to Switzerland, while Lenin and Krupskaya opted for London, where he used the Reading Room of the British Museum as his office, as Marx had done, to produce another book titled Chto dyelat’? – Nabolevshie voprosy nashevo Dvizheniya, in English What is to be done? Urgent problems of our movement.
The revolution, as Lenin emphasised in the book, would have to be led by a single omnipotent leader, i.e. himself, controlling a rigid party structure. Also rejecting Marx’s philosophy of a classless society, Lenin was already more like Orwell’s Napoleon in Animal Farm, believing that the most important people in post-revolutionary society should be better treated than the mass. Equally intransigent on land ownership, although some colleagues considered that agriculture should be left to the peasants doing what they did best – growing food and raising beasts – Lenin insisted that all land be nationalised and collectivised, which was to prove a disastrous policy when put into force, condemning millions to death by starvation, since the political commissars who made all the decisions had no idea what they were doing.
Although Iskra and What is to be done? had focussed the attention of many revolutionary socialists inside Russia on what Lenin considered the right way to apply Marxism to existing social problems, his elders like Plekhanov and Axelrod were still stuck in the nineteenth-century intellectual style of writing and thinking – unlike Lenin whose style was that of the demagogue, hammering away at a few simple slogans, as he would later do to win over live audiences. A split in the editorial board between Lenin in London and the others in Geneva led Lenin to move there in April 1903, swiftly alienating even the comrades who admired his thinking and wished to work with him, but could not accept his demand for total, unquestioning obedience. One of them named Alexander Potresov summed up the problem, as did many others, by saying, ‘It is impossible to work with him.’14 But Lenin refused to deviate from his blueprint: a corps of lieutenants controlled with military discipline by their unquestioned leader, i.e. himself.
On 30 July 1903 an Iskra-organised conference of Russian and expat revolutionary socialists began in Geneva, but so heated were the debates that the Swiss police ordered the expulsion of four delegates, after which the venue was moved to London. Of the forty-three participants, only three or four were workers; all the others were what the police of the time termed ‘professional revolutionists’, whose socialist philosophies differed widely. Since they refused entirely to bow down to Lenin and the Iskra group, the Jewish Socialist Bund members and the Economists all walked out when Plekhanov demanded a coherent party structure. A new word for the world’s political vocabulary was coined after Lenin’s Iskra group won the debate of a slight majority of the motions tabled at the conference and grabbed the name Bolsheviki from the Russian bolshinstvo, meaning majority. By implication, their opponents were labelled Menshiviki – the minority. From then on, these two labels divided the movement. Essentially, the Bolsheviks were prepared to destroy every vestige of social infrastructure in Russia to achieve their ends, while the Mensheviks considered that socialism could be implemented by building on, and modifying, the framework of bourgeois society. Before long, the mere label Menshevik was enough to see thousands of sincere socialists executed for the crime of failing to agree with Lenin.
One of Lenin’s most enthusiastic supporters, a Belorussian doctor and political theorist named Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov, visited Finland in 1906 to meet Lenin, who already had a cast-iron vision of what a revolutionary socialist party should be: the ordinary members should pay dues, which would support himself and a few other important full-time activists. He had, in fact, a cast-iron opinion about everything, refusing to accept anyone else’s ideas, which made it very difficult for Bogdanov or anyone else to work with him for long. Initially regarded by Lenin as his political ‘favourite son’, well versed in the history of revolution, Trotsky later agreed with Plekhanov that: ‘[Lenin is] a despot and terrorist who sought to turn the Central Committee of the party into a Committee of Public Safety in order to be able to play the role of Robespierre.’15 Le comité du salut public was Robespierre’s tool for dictatorship during the bloody months of the Terror 1793–94. It was a pertinent comparison that caused Lenin, in a fit of pique, to resign all his offices and sever all connection with party colleagues, isolating himself totally. Instead of bringing the others to their senses, as he had hoped, he found himself without supporters, comrades or even friends except the ever-loyal Krupskaya. A man who sees himself obsessively as a leader is no good to himself, or anyone else, when he has driven away all his followers. The result was a disabling neurasthenia, as a severe mental breakdown was then called. His therapist was, as so often, the adoring and ever-faithful Krupskaya, who took him away for a month-long walking holiday across Switzerland staying in small, cheap country inns with nothing but rucksacks, in which to carry the barest necessities. The remote Swiss valleys were a wonderful sanatorium and health spa where he could forget the ungrateful world. Krupskaya wrote to Lenin’s mother on 2 July 1904:
Volodya and I have made a pact not to discuss [political] affairs. We sleep ten hours a day, swim and walk. Volodya doesn’t even read the papers properly.16