Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in 1870 in Simbirsk on the Volga (Simbirsk was renamed Ulyanovsk in Soviet times and remains Ulyanovsk to this day). For most of his childhood he was isolated from these tensions and thrived in an atmosphere that combined intense application and individual expression. Once a teacher had difficulty carrying on a conversation with Vladimir’s mother because Vladimir was running all over the house as a Red Indian, screaming at the top of his voice. ‘Children are supposed to scream’, the mother told the teacher.4 But as Vladimir entered his teens, the tensions of the outside world began to close in on the family.
In 1881 the subversive potential of education and social mobility was confirmed when a handful of young intellectuals successfully assassinated the Tsar Liberator, Alexander II, who had emancipated the serfs twenty years earlier. In the new reign of Alexander III, the government immediately took fright and began clamping down on the education system. The new attitude was best expressed in 1887 when a circular from the Minister of Public Education stressed how dangerous it was to give education to ‘the children of coachmen, servants, cooks, washerwomen, small shopkeepers, and persons of similar type’. The government now felt safer giving its support to obscurantist church parish schools rather than to the village schools to which Ilya Ulyanov had devoted his career. This steady erosion of his life’s work helped bring Ilya to the grave in 1886 at the early age of 55.
The following year the contradictions of Russian modernization struck the Ulyanov family with an even more devastating blow.
From Worms to Bombs: ‘Another way, Sasha’
During Soviet times, a workman trying to find a better solution to some difficulty might say optimistically ‘Well, we’ll go another way, Sasha’. The Sasha of this semi-proverb is Alexander Ulyanov, Lenin’s older brother, who was hanged in May 1887 for his participation in a plot to assassinate Tsar Alexander III.
The origin of this saying goes back to an anecdote told by Lenin’s younger sister Maria at his funeral in 1924. According to Maria, when the seventeen-year-old Vladimir heard the news about his older brother’s unsuccessful attempt at terror, he said through clenched teeth, ‘No, we won’t go that way – that’s not the way we must go.’ Historians have been extremely sceptical about whether Lenin said any such thing, and with good reason. Among the difficulties, Maria herself was only nine years old at the time. Up to this time Vladimir had been concentrating on his studies and was hardly interested in politics, much less endowed with a determined revolutionary outlook. Yet as a summary of the next crucial seven years in Lenin’s life, Maria’s little anecdote is very insightful.
Picking up where his brother left off and trying to find a new way forward is exactly what Lenin did during these years.
Up to 1886 his brother Alexander had been a typical Ulyanov: an extremely gifted student with a brilliant future ahead of him. He had a particular passion for studying worms and was already winning prizes for his research. Yet in the last months of 1886 Alexander threw himself body and soul into a terrorist organization intent on killing the tsar. He tore himself away from his worms, sold the gold watch he received for his research and used the money to finance the preparation of a homemade bomb. After installing himself in a nearby cottage of a friend in a suburb of St Petersburg, he worked away at the dangerous task of making dynamite out of nitroglycerine. Alexander also penned what he hoped would be verbal dynamite – the manifesto of a group that called itself the Terrorist Faction of the revolutionary organization that assassinated Alexander II in 1881, Narodnaya volya. This name can be translated ‘People’s Will’ or ‘People’s Freedom’. Despite the name, Alexander Ulyanov’s group did not have any formal connection with the remnants of the original Narodnaya volya.
The underlying cause of the desperation of Alexander and his fellow students was the same fearful official attitude that had contributed to Ilya Ulyanov’s death the year before. The tsarist government was unable to forego either educating students or treating them with extreme suspicion. These contradictions were made manifest by a student demonstration in November 1886 to honour the memory of Nikolai Dobroliubov, a radical literary critic of the 1860s. The authorities refused to allow the large crowd of students to go in a body to the cemetery and lay wreaths on his tomb or – even more worrisome from the authorities’ point of view – to make speeches. When about 500 students then tried to hold an assembly in a public square they were all detained and questioned for hours by the police chief in person. About forty were arrested and exiled to their provincial homes. This is how the government treated what was supposed to be society’s future elite.
The idea of assassinating the new tsar and other high officials was not the brainchild of one small group of radicals. It was in the air, and many student groups, in St Petersburg and elsewhere, converged on this response to their frustrating situation. The plot of Sasha Ulyanov and his friends got further than might be expected. In late February, bomb in hand, one of the plotters walked through the crowded St Petersburg streets, waiting for the signal (a handkerchief raised to the nose) that the tsar was approaching. The tsar didn’t come that day. The police picked up some of the plotters for suspicious behaviour on 1 March and only when they were in custody did the police realize that they were carrying bombs. Since the tsar’s father had been assassinated on 1 March 1881, the 1887 plot became known as ‘the second first of March’.
All members of the conspiracy were quickly rounded up, and the Ulyanov family in Simbirsk received the devastating news that the pride of the family was a would-be regicide. Alexander’s mother hurried to Petersburg, was allowed to visit her son, and prevailed on him to make a perfunctory and predictably unsuccessful plea for clemency. On 8 May he and four others were hanged. The outcome of the assassination attempt was not a frightened government making concessions, as the conspirators had hoped, but further regimentation of student life.5
What was the thinking that led these young people to attempt murder in order to save Russia, throwing away their own lives in the process? In the manifesto he drafted for his group, Sasha Ulyanov gave the following explanation:
Without freedom of speech, propaganda that is in any way effective is impossible, just as there is no real possibility of improving the economy of the people without the participation of the people’s representatives in the administration of the country. Thus for Russian socialists the struggle for free institutions is a necessary means for attaining their final aims…. Therefore a party that is essentially socialist can only temporarily devote part of its forces to political struggle, insofar as it sees in that struggle a necessary means for making more correct and productive the activity devoted to their final economic ideals.6
