The Dilemmas of Lenin. Tariq Ali
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in the Hall of Columns in the House of Trades Unions. Tens of thousands paid their respects and attended his funeral.
It was the last state funeral of a non-Bolshevik.
Kropotkin had not agreed with the terrorist wing of anarchism but, like Lenin and others, he was part of its shared history. It is to the history of what came after that we must now turn.
When the People’s Will decapitated the head of state in March 1881, the three oldest children of the Ulyanovs (Lenin’s family name) in Simbirsk – Anna, Alexander and Vladimir – were aged fifteen, thirteen and eleven respectively. It was a formative period for all of them. Their reaction to the event in St Petersburg was not recorded, but it’s safe to assume that they would have been, if not particularly surprised, shocked – though not to the extent of their liberal-conservative father, who denounced the terrorists as criminals, donned his official uniform and rushed off to attend Mass for the dead tsar at the local cathedral.
The oppositional political milieu had been dominated for so many decades by various forms of anarcho-Populism that its ideas were well-known and much discussed. Activist groups existed in nearby Kazan. Attempts to kill the tsar and other powerful figures of the autocracy were regular occurrences. Alexander II was not the first ruler to have been dispatched in this fashion. The fact that the Ulyanov family had never belonged to radical circles did not mean that the children were deaf to what was being discussed on the streets or at school. Even the parents had read magazines in which the ideas of the Populist intellectuals were prominently featured. Denunciations of the regicides became a ritual in schools and at church assemblies every Sunday.
Lenin’s father was a conservative and a strong believer in both church and state. His energies as a schools inspector in the region were directed exclusively towards improving and enlarging educational facilities in the region. He was highly respected for his incorruptibility and his devotion to educating the children of poor peasants. At home he was a patriarch, a believer in strict routines and described as fair-minded. There is little doubt that he was mortified by the killing of the tsar, though the counterreformation that sought to reverse the gains made in education angered him greatly.
Alexander Ulyanov was described by his sister Anna as being very much like their mother in both looks and temperament: ‘The same rare combination of extraordinary firmness and serenity, with wonderful sensitivity, tenderness and fairness: but he was far more austere and single-minded, and even more courageous.’ This judgement was confirmed and strengthened by their private tutor, Kalashnikov, who would speak of Sasha’s calm voice and gentle demeanour but added to this combination a powerful ‘inner force’ that was noticeable even at a young age.1
What of the middle brother? In Lenin’s Childhood, his first and only published chapter of what was intended to be a full-scale biography, Isaac Deutscher drew on Anna Ulyanova’s reminiscences to describe the very early years:
At first the child appeared to develop slowly: he was big-headed and top-heavy, bulky and red-faced, started walking late, constantly tumbling down and knocking his head. But soon he made up for this initial slowness and as a toddler was exceptionally vigorous and nimble, a great rascal, full of mischief and a lover of noisy games. He did not play with his toys, says his elder sister, he broke them. At five he could read and write; then for four years or so a parish teacher tutored him at home until he was ready at the age of nine, to enter the local gymnasium.2
The Ulyanov family: Sasha and Anna, resting on their father’s
shoulders; Lenin sitting on the right; Dmitri to the far left; Maria on
her mother’s lap.
The headmaster Fyodor Kerensky was, like the father of the brothers Ulyanov, both a conservative liberal and an exacting though stimulating teacher. The two men were good friends. Kerensky’s son Alexander, a decade younger than Lenin, would be catapulted into the leadership of the Provisional Government after February 1917, only to be replaced by the Bolsheviks in October.
The bulk of the school’s students hailed from the nobility and the upper echelons of the state bureaucracy. Middle-class kids formed just a third of the student body. The Ulyanov boys were spared the school fees (thirty rubles a year) as their father worked for the education department.
The headmaster was generous in his praise of the young Lenin, describing him as his best pupil and someone with the potential to become a classical scholar ‘of genius’. Scholarly in the classroom but boisterous and quick-tempered during breaks, Lenin’s progress, according to his older sister, greatly satisfied and pleased his father. There was just one worry: ‘In those years father would sometimes say to mother that everything was coming to Volodya so easily that he might never acquire the ability to work.’ When it was time for compositions in Latin and Russian, the headmaster’s motto was ‘non multa sed multum’: ‘Not many but much’ or, less literally, keep your words tight and your thoughts ample. Lenin stuck to this injunction all his life. He disliked flowery prose and the use of grandiose words designed to obfuscate rather than clarify. Latin became a passion bordering on obsession, and Cicero a favourite author. Lenin’s oratory, too, in years to come, revealed the mark of the ancient Roman senate. In her own memoirs written after his death, his widow, Nadya Krupskaya, wrote that Lenin had confessed to three dangerous addictions during his youth: Latin, chess and classical music. All three had to be overpowered in order to do full-time revolutionary work, but the passion for chess and music never left him.
Sasha was much more interested in biology and chemistry. Young Volodya would often join him in his study where Sasha was experimenting with chemicals and bury himself in a book. Volodya recognised Sasha’s worth and the temperamental qualities which he could never emulate. His short temper and intolerance of stupidity remained a constant throughout his life, and he found it difficult to control this side of himself. Deutscher writes:
His cousin, Veretennikov, recalls that when on one occasion Volodya, yielding to his satirical turn of mind, brought a simple and timid boy to tears with his mockery, he became contrite and did his best to soothe and console his victim.
Relations with his brother had become close. On occasions when they were both immersed in work and visiting cousins burst into the study demanding attention, the brothers would stand up and declaim in unison: ‘Please oblige us with your absence.’ It didn’t always work. Sasha was strikingly handsome and female cousins enjoyed his company. He was also witty and polite, unlike his younger brother who, even as a teenager, could be scathing and extremely rude.
Both were self-contained. Neither had close friends at school. Nor did Lenin display any hint of rebelliousness while at the gymnasium. Till he turned sixteen, he was a conformist as far as politics and religion were concerned. Sasha was much more political and disdained religion, calmly refusing to attend Mass and upsetting his fervently Orthodox father. He had encountered the works of Chernyshevsky, Dobrolyubov and the radical essayist Pisarev. His sister Anna would later write of the forbidden fruits they tasted when she and Sasha were in their last two years at school:
I read together with Sasha all of Pisarev’s works from cover to cover; they had a strong impact on us. These books were banned from libraries, but we borrowed them from an acquaintance, a doctor, who had the complete edition of them. These were the first forbidden books we read. We were so absorbed in them that when we finished the last volume we were deeply saddened to have to part from our beloved author. We walked in the garden and Sasha talked to me about the fate of Pisarev who was drowned – it was said that the gendarme who followed and watched him, saw him disappear in the waves, but deliberately did not call for help and let him die. I was deeply agitated … Sasha, walking by my side, lapsed into his usual silence, only his concentrated and darkened face showed how strong was his emotion