A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution, 1891-1924

Ilya Ul'ianov, Lenin's father, was a typical gentleman-liberal of the type that his son would come to despise. There is no basis to the myth, advanced by Nadezhda Krupskaya in 1938, that he exerted a revolutionary influence on his children. Anna Ul'ianova, Lenin's sister, recalls that he was a religious man, that he greatly admired Alexander II's reforms of the 1860s, and that he saw it as his job to protect the young from radicalism. He was the Inspector of Schools for Simbirsk Province, an important office which entitled him to be addressed as 'Your Excellency'. This noble background was a source of embarrassment to Lenin's Soviet hagiographers. They chose to dwell instead on the humble origins of his paternal grandfather, Nikolai Ul'ianov, the son of a serf who had worked as a tailor in the lower Volga town of Astrakhan. But here too there was a problem: Nikolai was partly Kalmyk, and his wife Anna wholly so (Lenin's face had obvious Mongol features), and this was inconvenient to a Stalinist regime peddling its own brand of Great Russian chauvinism. Lenin's ancestry on his mother's side was even more embarrassing. Maria Alexandrovna, Lenin's mother, was the daughter of Alexander Blank, a baptized Jew who rose to become a wealthy doctor and landowner in Kazan. He was the son of Moishe Blank, a Jewish merchant from Volhynia who had married a Swedish woman by the name of Anna Ostedt. Lenin's Jewish ancestry was always hidden by the Soviet authorities, despite an appeal by Anna Ul'ianova, in a letter to Stalin in 1932, suggesting that 'this fact could be used to combat anti-Semitism'. Absolutely not one word about this letter!' was Stalin's categorical imperative. Alexander Blank married Anna Groschopf, the daughter of a well-to-do Lutheran family from

* The alias and pseudonym 'Lenin' was probably derived from the River Lena in Siberia. Lenin first used it in 1901.

Germany and with this newly acquired wealth launched his distinguished medical career, rising to become a police doctor and medical inspector in one of the largest state arms factories. In 1847, having attained the rank of State Councillor, he retired to his estate at Kokushkino and registered himself as a nobleman.²⁴

Lenin's non-Russian ethnic antecedents — Mongol, Jewish, Swedish and German — may partly explain his often expressed contempt for Russia and the Russians, although to conclude, as the late Dmitry Volkogonov did, that Lenin's 'cruel policies' towards the Russian people were derived from his 'foreign' origins is quite unjustified (one might say the same of the equally 'foreign' Romanovs). He often used the phrase 'Russian idiots'. He complained that the Russians were 'too soft' for the tasks of the revolution. And indeed many of its most important tasks were to be entrusted to the non-Russians (Latvians and Jews in particular) in the party. Yet paradoxically — and Lenin's character was full of such paradoxes — he was in many ways a typical Russian nobleman. He was fond of the Blank estate, where he spent a long time in his youth. When young he was proud to describe himself as 'a squire's son'. He once even signed himself before the police as 'Hereditary Nobleman Vladimir Ul'ianov'. In his private life Lenin was the epitome of the heartless squire whom his government would one day destroy. In 1891, at the height of the famine, he sued his peasant neighbours for causing damage to the family estate. And while he condemned in his early writings the practices of 'gentry capitalism', he himself was living handsomely on its profits, drawing nearly all his income from the rents and interest derived from the sale of his mother's estate.²⁵

Lenin's noble background was one key to his domineering personality. This is something that has often been ignored by his biographers. Valentinov, who lived with Lenin in Geneva during 1904, recalls how he found a rare and deeply hidden source of sentiment in the Bolshevik leader. Having read Herzen's My Past and Thoughts, a work that frequently waxes lyrical on the subject of the Russian countryside, Valentinov had become homesick for his long-abandoned family estate in Tambov province. He told Lenin of these feelings and found him clearly sympathetic. Lenin began asking him about the arrangement of the flower-beds, but their conversation was soon interrupted by a fellow Bolshevik, Olminsky, who, having heard the last part of Valentinov's confession, attacked him for his 'schoolgirl' sentiments: 'Listen to the landowner's son giving himself away!' According to Valentinov, Lenin rounded on Olminsky:

Well, what about me, if it comes to that? I too used to live on a country estate which belonged to my grandfather. In a sense, I too am a scion of the landed gentry. This is all many years ago, but I still haven't forgotten the pleasant aspects of life on our estate. I have forgotten neither its lime trees nor its flowers. So go on, put me to death. I remember with pleasure how