Long before Lenin there were other greats from Ulyanovsk. Simbirsk was the birthplace of Nikolai Karamzin, who became known as the father of modern Russian letters under Catherine the Great and Alexander I. The town also boasts of Ivan Goncharov, the renowned nineteenth-century novelist. A major nineteenth-century poet, Nikolai Yazykov, came from here. And so did the Slavophile writer Sergei Glinka, a relative of the famed Russian composer Mikhail Glinka, author of “The Patriotic Song”—the Russian anthem of the 1990s. The Tolstoy and the Vyazemsky families have roots in the region as well.
In the late 1700s Catherine the Great, understanding the town to be a crucial trade and military outpost on the Volga protecting European Russia from invasion from the east, designated it capital of the Ulyanovsk Guberniya (a political entity akin to a state or province) and handed out vast plots of land in the region to loyal aristocrats. The two most infamous peasant rebellions of the 1600s and 1700s (led by Stepan Razin and Yemelyan Pugachev, respectively) played out in and around Simbirsk. In 1833 Alexander Pushkin visited, searching for stories about Pugachev, who had aspired to replace Catherine the Great as ruler on the Russian throne.
Then came the Decembrists—the Russian nobles who formed a movement against the czar’s absolute monarchy. Their 1825 uprising drew in many officers and was brutally suppressed—some were hanged; others exiled internally, dispatched to the Simbirsk pochtovyi i katorzhnyi trakt (postal and penal servitude throughway), to trudge for months in rain and snow to their Siberian abodes of involuntary residence.
As we strolled down Ulyanovsk’s Goncharov Street on a sunny May morning, Sergei Petrov, an elderly historian, professor, and local celebrity, led us, root and branch, through the family trees of locally born Russian and Soviet luminaries, speaking rapidly and passionately. With his impish eyes, circle beard, and silvery aristocratic coif, Petrov, a voluble raconteur enamored of meandering discourse, seemed to have stepped from the pages of a nineteenth-century Russian play. His gray checkered suit looked too dressy for our morning tour and ill befitted his blue-red cardigan or his tattered brown loafers.
As we progressed down the street, passing by pastel-hued shops with fin-de-siècle facades, every fifteen minutes or so somebody recognized him and stopped us for a chat. Each time we expected Petrov to run out of words, or stories, or even breath itself, he surprised us by producing more facts about the town he so loved. Peasant rebel leader Stepan Razin, he said, was wounded during his assault on Simbirsk; he survived only to be captured and drawn and quartered on Bolotnaya Square in Moscow. The Volga Germans had always held leadership positions in town, as the drab, redbrick Lutheran Cathedral of Saint Mary he pointed out would attest. With these Germans often in charge, Simbirsk prospered, which augured ill for it after the 1917 Revolution. “One out of nine people here belonged to the gentry. Imagine what this meant when the Bolsheviks took over!” He paused. “People were burning their title deeds, they were so afraid! Most of them just fled to other parts of Russia.”
We stopped in front of the Simbirsk Classical Lyceum Number 1, where Lenin had studied and where, near the entrance, a plaque showed, in stark Social-Realist style, the iconic revolutionary with Alexander Kerensky, who was also born here and would head the provisional Russian government after the czar had abdicated in 1917.
“Lenin let him live,” Petrov told us. “I believe they may have shared Christmas goose together when they were growing up. Did he do so because both were born here, in this special town on the Volga? Could Lenin have showed him some compassion for this? I can’t prove it, but I think so. Now you see them together on the same plaque! You will find nothing like this anywhere else in Russia!” Kerensky eventually immigrated to the United States, where he died in 1970.
Petrov conjured up a lost world of landowners, high culture, and even cosmopolitanism—imagine, German gentry dwelling on the banks of Russia’s mighty Volga! That almost no trace remains of any of this mattered not to Petrov, who could verbally resuscitate the lost souls of the world the Bolsheviks destroyed—a world, we sensed, he would have been happy to inhabit.
The next day, alone, we visited the Lenin dom musei (house museum), located on—what else—Lenin Street, in central Ulyanovsk. A modest, two-story graying wooden house with a few bedrooms, a dining room, and a study was the greatest attraction for the seventy-five years of Soviet rule. And it was not just Lenin—other members of his family were revered, too, as studious and serious, the pinnacles of communist morality. His father, Ilya, was an inspector of public schools; his older brother, Alexander, a revolutionary radical, was executed in 1887 for trying to assassinate Czar Alexander III; his younger brother, Dmitry, was a doctor and a writer; his sister, Maria, another revolutionary who studied at the Sorbonne. Millions of people from all over the world had come here to admire Lenin’s childhood home and see the environs in which he came of age.
After the fall of the Soviet Union and the death of communism as a promising ideology, interest in Lenin almost disappeared. The authorities in Ulyanovsk, nevertheless, converted his neighborhood into a historical sanctuary, the Birthplace of Lenin, which encompasses all the landmarks connected to his era. At first glance, this might seem strange. Even the November 2017 centenary celebrations of the Bolshevik Revolution in Russia barely featured Lenin. Instead, festivities focused on centuries of heroism in Russian history and, of course, on the Soviet victory in the Great Patriotic War. Why? We can only surmise that Putin, approaching two decades in power, is concerned with preserving it, and therefore is not particularly fond of revolutions. Yet the Lenin sanctuary found unexpected saviors in hordes of Chinese visitors. It now forms part of their “Red Tour”—visits to the landmarks of the revolution’s history. Lenin did not direct the revolution from here, of course, but his sanctuary gives a good idea of what the world he destroyed looked like.
But, as we discovered, even the guides at the Lenin house museum no longer talk much about communism and revolution. They showed us the modest family bedrooms, a dining room that doubled as a game parlor and study, Ilya’s dark office with the dauntingly progressive books on the shelves, including Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s nineteenth-century guide to socialism, What Is to Be Done? As had Petrov, they spoke at length about the intellects the Volga region had produced, among whom just happened to be the intellects of the Ulyanov family. Their home impressed us with its unremarkable, bourgeois interior—a reminder that the man who led the revolution of proletarians and peasants was, by birth and upbringing, neither.
To learn more about Lenin in the town of his birth, we toured the Lenin museum on the eponymous square in the central Venets district. Typically Soviet in its mammoth dimensions, built of pink-red Soviet-era marble, the museum exudes grandeur of a sort and depicts Lenin in historical perspective that began with the role of Simbirsk in the Russian Empire. This perspective now emphasizes imperial coherency—centuries of Russian history peopled by firm, formidable leaders from the bygone times of Peter the Great to Catherine the Great (who gave Simbirsk its first coat of arms consisting of a crowned Greek column) to our day, the Putin era. From the double-headed eagle to the hammer and sickle to the double-headed eagle again. Coherency—and elision of all the wild and destructive detours Russia has made to end up where it is today.
The museum’s current account of Russia’s history almost grants Stalin a role as prominent as that of Lenin—something impossible from the time of Khrushchev’s Secret Speech to the beginning of the Putin era. Today it highlights Stalin’s program of crash industrialization (carried out in the 1930s) and the Soviet victory, under his command, in the Great Patriotic War. Velikiy vozhd i uchitel (the great leader and teacher) announces, without a hint of irony, the caption under one Stalin portrait. This is just what cult-of-personality propaganda called the dictator during his almost thirty years in power. The murderous Holodomor accompanying the industrialization, the devastating political purges, and the Gulag camps merit only brief mentions and are explained away by raisons d’état: to make a country great one needs to take tough—even brutal—measures.