My view of Lenin is not particularly original and chimes in closely with most observers of Lenin in his time as well as with a strong minority of post-war academic historians. Nevertheless, this view does clash on many points with what might be called the standard textbook interpretation. The central theme of the textbook interpretation is Lenin’s alleged ‘worry about workers’. According to this account Lenin was pessimistic about the workers’ lack of revolutionary inclinations and was therefore inclined to give up on a genuine mass movement. He therefore aimed instead at an elite, conspiratorial underground party staffed mainly with revolutionaries from the intelligentsia. Following from this, the textbook interpretation sees fundamental contrasts between Lenin and the rest of European Social Democracy. They were optimistic, he was pessimistic. They were fatalist, he was voluntarist. They were democratic, he was elitist. They were committed to a mass movement, he was conspiratorial.
In reality Lenin was driven by a highly optimistic, indeed romantic, scenario of inspiring class leadership that had strong roots in European Social Democracy. My scholarly self would like nothing better than to fully document this fact and provide extensive back-up for any disagreements with the mainstream. My writerly self realizes that such digressions would subvert the goals of the present book. I shall therefore restrict myself to informing the reader when I have said something that many experts will find surprising. A full scholarly defence of my interpretation can be found in writings listed in the Select Bibliography.
Only when we have a feel for the emotional glue that bound Lenin to his ideas will we be able to appreciate his life-long commitment to a heroic scenario of inspiring leadership. This scenario is the profound link between a passionate individual and his public persona – between Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov and N. Lenin.
1. Another Way
If a historical novelist had come up with Lenin’s genealogy, it would seem very contrived. The intention of the author would have been too obvious: to give Vladimir Ulyanov ancestors from all over the Russian Empire and from as many of its ethnic groups as possible. Among his grandparents and great-grandparents there are Russian serfs from Nizhni-Novgorod, Jews from the shtetls of Ukraine, Lutheran Germans from the Baltic and possibly Kalmyks (a people of Mongolian origin) from the lower Volga.
Looking at the life trajectories of these remarkable individuals, another theme imposes itself: the pathos of the ‘career open to talent’, individual social mobility, advancement through education and professionalism. This aspect was well brought out by Albert Rhys Williams in 1919, in the first factual biographical sketch of Lenin in English:
In some accounts he is the ‘son of a peasant’; in others he is the ‘son of a nobleman’. Both statements are correct.
In old Russia, a man who became a senior captain in the navy, a colonel in the army or a Councilor of State in the Civil Service automatically attained the rank of the nobility. Lenin’s father came from peasant stock and rose to the position of Councilor of State. So Lenin is referred to as the ‘son of a peasant’ or the ‘son of a nobleman’ according to the animus of the writer.1
Lenin’s grandfather on his mother’s side, Alexander Blank, had already received noble or gentry status as a result of his impressive professional work as a doctor. Alexander’s father Moishe, Lenin’s great-grandfather, had grown up in a Jewish shtetl in Ukraine and managed to get out after long and bitter disputes with his coreligionists. He educated his own sons in Christian schools and finally, after the death of his religious wife, was baptized in 1835, taking the name of Dmitri. His efforts to rise up in the world had been noticed by some high-ranking bureaucrats who served as godparents to his two sons. And so it was that Alexander Dmitrievich, the offspring of the shtetl Jew Moishe/Dmitri, was able to hear Anna Grosschopf play the Moonlight Sonata and propose to her soon after. Anna’s family was representative of the Baltic Germans who had long served the tsar as a source of Western professionalism.
In Soviet days Lenin’s Jewish ancestry was a state secret. Lenin’s sister Anna discovered these facts doing archival research on her family in the 1920s (not through family tradition). In the early 1930s she personally asked Stalin to publicize the fact as a way of combating popular anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union. Stalin categorically refused, and the facts only became established in the glasnost era and after.
Today, Lenin’s Jewish genes are no longer the source for scandal that they seemed to be during the Soviet era. Perhaps more damaging to his family’s reputation is a remarkable letter of 1846 written by his great-grandfather Moishe/Dmitri when he was in his nineties and sent to no less a personage than Tsar Nicholas I. This letter shows the dark side of all this striving to get ahead: dislike of and contempt for those left behind. Lenin’s great-grandfather denounced the prejudices of the Jews, blaming the rabbis for Jewish backwardness. He suggested that the tsar prohibit the Jews from hiring Christians to perform essential tasks on the Sabbath, as a way of gently coercing the Jews into conversion – just like the coercion used to make a sick person take medicine. ‘I now hope that our Sovereign Emperor will graciously approve my suggestion, so that I, an old man of ninety years, with death and the grave before my eyes, will live to see the Jews freed from their prejudices and delusions.’2
Social advancement on Lenin’s father’s side was equally impressive. Lenin’s grandfather Nikolai managed to rise out of serf status somewhere around 1800. His wife, Anna Smirnova, might have been a Kalmyk freed from serf status and adopted as an adult by the Smirnovs (although this part of the story is not certain). Their offspring Ilya got his diploma from Kazan University in 1854 and, it is said, the great mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky encouraged him to pursue an academic career. But Ilya Ulyanov became a teacher and then an inspector of schools, with a special interest in setting up the village schools that spread the possibility of advancement through education. In his own family he and his wife Maria Alexandrovna were committed (unusually for the time) to complete equality of education between their three daughters (Anna, Olga, Maria) and their three sons (Alexander, Vladimir, Dmitri).3
Thus the Ulyanovs achieved noble status, but did so through all the bourgeois virtues: diligent training, hard work, a focused career and a credo of usefulness. One might look on the Ulyanovs as a success story, a Russian version of ‘log cabin to house on the hill’. But it was precisely their commitment to education and social advancement that put the family dangerously close to a high-tension wire in tsarist society. The tsarist state desperately needed these serious, inner-directed, upwardly mobile professionals but it was also scared of and distressed by them. They upset the orderly traditional organization of society by rank and soslovie (legally defined statuses for peasant, merchant, town-dweller, nobleman). They carried the stealthy virus of invidious comparison to Western Europe. They demanded a freedom of action that the autocratic system could ill afford them. They were never satisfied and seemingly could turn extremist at any moment. So Russia built schools for them and then harassed and irritated them. It invited them to serve the fatherland and then treated them like wayward children.