Lenin - Who Was He Really?

Who was Vladimir Ulyanov Lenin? How did he become the man who would help overthrow the Romanovs and begin the Bolshevik control of Russia and its neighboring countries?

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Episode 303 – Lenin - Who Was He Really?

Last time, we finished the series on the Great Game between Great Britain and Russia. Today, we will attempt to paint a picture of who Vladimir Lenin really was—not just his rhetoric or actions, but the person who began his life in Simbirsk as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

I will try to show several different sides of Lenin through the works I will lean on. My primary sources for today’s podcast include the book I introduced and one of my most popular episodes, number 216, Before Evil - An Interview with Author Brandon Gauthier about Young Lenin and Stalin. Also, I'll be using the monumental book Lenin: A Biography by Robert Service. On the other side, one more sympathetic to the man is A People’s History of the Russian Revolution by Neil Faulkner. 

We begin with Vladimir Ulyanov’s birth on April 22, 1870, in Streletskaya Ulitsa, Simbirsk, to Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Blank. To understand who Vladimir was to become, we need to learn a bit more about his childhood and parental influences. While Ilya was a devout follower of Russian Orthodoxy, Maria was born a Lutheran yet was not a practicing Christian. This was something that would influence all of her six children who survived childhood.

Lenin's father, Ilya, was an interesting character in his own right. Ilya’s father, Nikolai Vasilievich Ulyanov, was a former serf whose ethnicity is unclear, as he may have been Chuvash, Mordvinian, Russian, or Kalmyk. His mother was half Russian and half Kalmyk. After graduating from Kazan University's Department of Physics and Mathematics in 1854, Ilya would go on to teach mathematics and physics at Penza Institute for the Dvoryane and later at a gymnasium and a school for women in Nizhny Novgorod. From there, he would be appointed inspector of public schools in the Simbirsk guberniya and later promoted to the rank of Active State Councilor, giving him the privilege of hereditary nobility and accompanied by the Order of Saint Vladimir, 3rd Class award. 

Both parents were monarchists and, what may seem contradictory, liberal conservatives. They believed in the emancipation of the serfs and a number of reforms, but they still clung to a number of traditions, something that caused issues between their older children and themselves, including Lenin. While growing up, Vladimir was considered a bit of a troublemaker but quite intelligent. He was quite a sportsman and did very well in school.  

Things changed when his father died of a hemorrhage when Vladimir was just 15. His behavior changed. No longer was he the happy-go-lucky guy; Vladimir would become increasingly angry and confrontational. It would be something that would carry on for the rest of his life.

Back to Lenin’s father. As you can tell, Ilya was a highly educated man, something that he would pass on to his children. In my interview with Brandon Gauthier, he remarked that of the six men who would become dictators in the 20th century, Lenin, Hitler, Stalin, Mussolini, Mao, and Kim, there was one commonality among them: they were all educated. Lenin was no exception. 

As the third of eight children, he would come under the wing of his two older siblings, Anna and Alexander. The latter’s execution on May 20, 1887, for conspiring to assassinate Tsar Alexander III on the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Alexander II would inspire Vladimir to become a more radical revolutionary. 

Alexander was an extremely bright individual with a college degree in zoology from St. Petersburg Imperial University. While at the school, he became involved in a group known as the Narodnaya Volya, or People's Will party. They believed that it was imperative to undertake terrorist actions to overthrow the autocratic rule of the Romanovs. 

Alexander was one of the main ideologists of Narodnaya Volya, as well as the bomb-maker, which was how they were going to kill the Tsar. Three members of the group were arrested on March 1, 1887, carrying the bombs that Alexander had made. They, of course, told authorities who else were involved with Alexander being arrested days later. After the trial, some of the conspirators were pardoned, but five were not. Lenin would not forgive nor forget this, getting his revenge when Tsar Nicholas II and his family were executed in 1919.

Imagine, if you will, the anger that had built up inside Vladimir with the execution of his brother. Given his changed behavior after his father's death, this additional loss in his life would intensify his feelings, especially towards the whole of the Russian government and, in particular, the Tsar. Adding insult to injury, his sister Anna Ulyanova was arrested by the Okhrana even though she had nothing to do with the conspiracy. While she was released, the Okhrana continued to put her under surveillance until 1892.

Still, Lenin believed he needed to be educated as much as possible, so he enrolled in Kazan University in 1887. It became apparent early on that Vladimir was a born leader. He joined a zemlyachestvo, a society of men living away from their home regions. At the time, Alexander III had begun to crack down on student societies, so when they conducted a protest against these restrictions, Lenin would be arrested in December because of his part in the melee. He was immediately expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate.

Because of this and Alexander's participation in the assassination attempt on the Tsar's life, the family was shunned by their neighbors. This enraged Lenin even more. Here is an excerpt from Robert Service's biography of Lenin and how the family was treated. "Respectable Simbirsk – its doctors, teachers, administrators, and army officers – indicated abhorrence for any family that could feed and raise a regicide. When Olga went to gymnasia, her teachers and classmates refused to have anything to do with her. Local society was closing its doors to the family. In 1881, the Ulyanov family attended the Cathedral service commemorating the life of Alexander II. But a member of the same family had now been involved in the murderous conspiracy, and the Ulyanovs were treated as pariahs."

One of the hypocrisies of Vladimir Ulyanov's life is that after his father's death, he would be able to live off of his inheritance. What makes this so hypocritical is that as a son, he got a far greater percentage than his sisters and almost equal to his mother. Vladimir expressed no problem with this, which contradicts a major Bolshevik tenet that everyone is equal.

In May 1888, Vladimir Ulyanov asked to be readmitted to the University of Kazan, which was denied. He then asked to be able to leave Russia and study in a foreign country; this, too, was denied. Vladimir did return to Kazan, though, joining a clandestine group led by Nikolai Fedoseev. Fedoseev is considered by many to be the father of Marxism in Russia. While Nikolai Chernyshevsky’s and Georgi Plekhanov’s writings influenced the young Lenin, it was Fedoseev who would help mold the growing revolutionary fervor in him. Lenin would write this about him in 1922, "Fedoseev played a very important role in the Volga area and in certain parts of Central Russia during that period; and the turn towards Marxism at that time was, undoubtedly, very largely due to the influence of this exceptionally talented and exceptionally devoted revolutionary.”

While Lenin continued to study the works of revolutionaries, he didn't stop there. Since he was banned from attending university, Vladimir studied on his own, reading books authored by Charles Darwin, David Ricardo, Henry Buckle, and Marx and Engels. While Marx and Engels's Communist Manifesto impressed the young man, the three-volume Das Kapital was the most important book he read at the time.

By 1890, Lenin was different from the person who would emerge in 1917. He was a passionate man with a deep-seated hatred of the Romanovs. As Robert Service notes in his biography of Lenin, "…his family's problems after the 1887 assassination attempt must have added to his feeling that the respectable middle and upper social classes – the aristocracy, the landed nobility, the urban merchantry – were deserving of no respect. The conventional picture of Vladimir as a coldly calculating figure is only part of the truth. He was also a young man of intense emotions, and the loves and hatreds in his opinions about politics were passionately felt."

Service goes on to say, “For Vladimir, then, the Russian Empire was not merely too slow in its social transformation. Just as importantly, it was oppressive. It was Europe's bastion against progress; its troops had intervened directly on the side of the old regimes threatened by revolutions in 1848. Tsarism insisted Vladimir, had to be overthrown. He could barely contain his anger, and although his revolutionary ideas were as yet unformed, the revolutionary commitment was already firm." 

As we can see, the future Lenin has a firm base in revolutionary thinking and anger towards the Romanovs and everything they stand for. The years that would follow would see an increase in his rage and fanaticism in his beliefs. That would be tempered, though, with his fear of arrest and incarceration.  

Lenin would show off his temper in many non-revolutionary ways. One incident occurred while he and his brother-in-law, Mark Yelizarov, crossed a river on a boat they had hired. An unwritten rule was that a Syzran merchant named Arefev monopolized crossing the Volga in this area. When their boat was blocked from completing the trip, Lenin became infuriated. He tried to sue Arefev in a court in Samara, some sixty miles from Syzran, but it never made it as Arefev had friends in high places and blocked the trial. To his credit, Lenin, in his younger days, believed that he needed to fight for the right not to be taken advantage of. Lenin believed in his heart in his later years that he was still fighting for the rights of all Russians, regardless of who would suffer or die. 

In November 1891, Vladimir Ulyanov qualified for his legal license, and all the while, he was under surveillance by the secret police. They believed, and rightfully so, that he was trying to “subvert the legal order of the state.” 

Around this time, the future Lenin, working as an assistant barrister in Samara, witnessed a monumental crisis that hit the region. An outbreak of typhus and cholera struck, killing an estimated 400,000 people. Along with disease, a famine ensued as well. Blame was laid right on the doorstep of the Tsar and the entire Romanov reign. This episode shows the cruelty that Lenin experienced, as described by author Robert Service in his biography of Lenin. “Vladimir Ulyanov stood out against the rest of the intelligentsia; he would not even condone the formation of famine-relief bodies in order to use them for the spreading of revolutionary propaganda. His heart had been hardened. Virtually alone among the revolutionaries of Samara and, indeed the whole empire, he argued that the famine was the product of capitalist industrialization. His emotional detachment astonished even members of his family.”

Service further writes, “Nothing could shake Vladimir Ulyanov’s belief that mass impoverishment was inevitable. The peasantry had always pair a dreadful price for industrial growth – and so it would be in late-nineteenth-century Russia. For Ulyanov, capitalism was bound by its nature to hurt most people and kill many of them. Humane counter-measures were not merely ineffectual: they would slow down the development of capitalism and therefore of the eventual progress to socialism. Thus the famine, according to Ulyanov, ‘played the role of a progressive factor’, and he blankly refused to support the efforts to relieve the famine.”

This cold-heartedness would be at the forefront of Soviet policy when he took control of Russia in 1917. All the while, his heart was hardening, and his revolutionary fervor was increasing. Lenin lived off his family's money, barely working as a lawyer. In his mind, his real work was plotting to somehow overthrow the Romanovs and insert a socialist government in their stead.

It was at this time, in August 1893, that Vladimir Ulyanov decided to head for the Russian capital of St. Petersburg. When his family decided to return to Moscow, Lenin thought that the formed capital represented Old Russia and St. Petersburg represented New Russia. It was also the city with the most revolutionary-minded people that Vladimir wanted to talk to and debate with. People like Peter Struve, Mikhail Tugan-Baranovski, Sergei Bulgakov, and Peter Maslov would be the most important ones he would be in contact with.

The next few years of Lenin's life were spent arguing with other intellectuals about how Marxist socialism would become a reality in a poor agrarian society like Russia. This was also when he met his future wife, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. She would be an important factor in the evolution of Lenin’s revolutionary theories. 

Things would turn for the worse on December 9, 1895, when Vladimir would be arrested and interrogated by the Russian secret police, the Okhrana. It was because of his involvement in the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle that Ulyanov was taken into custody. In Lenin’s opinion, he had a rather pleasant time in jail. He would write a treatise on Russian economic development; his family delivered food to him and visited him regularly. On January 29, 1897, all members of the Union of Struggle were sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia.

Aside from the exile and the rough conditions he would have to live in, Lenin’s legal career was now effectively over. Still, his stay in exile wasn’t as bad as it could have been. Vladimir, along with two of his compatriots, Gleb Krzhizhanovski and Vasili Starkov, would spend their years in the village of Shushenskoe, a place known as Siberian Italy because of its pleasant climate.

Vladimir Lenin honed his leadership skills in Shushenskoe. It was also here, in what the locals called Shusha, that Vladimir became engaged to Nadezhda Krupskaya. She eventually moved to Shusha to be with Lenin, where she helped him with his writing. By the time his exile was up in 1900, his revolutionary fervor was at an all-time high. Vladimir Ulyanov was about to become the fierce Marxist Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin's personality, style, and demeanor were now set in stone. One of the best descriptions of him was done by Robert Service in his biography of the man. "As a child, he had striven to get his own way. He needed help, and used his family and his young wife as a crucial means of keeping support. He was not the fittest of men; and although he showed no outward signs of self-doubt, he suffered badly from nerves and other ailments. He was choleric and volatile. He was punctilious, self-disciplined, and purposive. He was awesomely unsentimental; his ability to overlook the immediate sufferings of humanity was already highly developed. But at his core, he had his own deep emotional attachments. They were attachments not to the people he lived with but to people who had molded his political opinions: Marx, Alexander Ulyanov, Chernychevski, and the Russian social terrorists. He had peculiar ideas of his own. But he aggressively presented them as the purest orthodoxy. He had yet to mature as a political leader. But a leader he already was. He was determined to waste no more time in furthering the cause of Revolution.”

With Lenin under surveillance by the Okhrana, he applied for permission to leave Russia and go to Europe. One reason he wanted out was that he was no longer permitted to take up residence in St. Petersburg. As he headed towards Switzerland, the Russian secret police carefully watched his every move. Finally, Lenin made it to Zurich, where he joined the Liberation of Labor Group led by Pavel Axelrod. 

It was here that Vladimir Ulyanov honed his intellectual revolutionary writing and chose his nom de plume, Lenin. His pamphlet, What Is To Be Done? , thrust him into the limelight. He took the name from the book by Chernyshevski, whom he admired. 

As one of the editors and writers for the journal Iskra, Lenin introduced the idea of the "dictatorship of the proletariat" in 1902. Vladimir also proposed that Russia was already a capitalist nation, which Marx felt was critical before a socialist revolution could take place. This was done despite knowing that Russia was still eighty-five percent agrarian. This created a massive debate amongst the socialist community, something that didn’t really matter to Lenin. 

Because of his notorious calls for revolution, Lenin and Nadezhda had to move from city to city until they reached the relative safety of London. This is also when we see the final development of the person who would overthrow the Russian Monarchy in 1917. Lenin’s combativeness, especially among those with similar beliefs, such as Plekhanov, Martov, and Gleb Krzhizhanovski, hardened him against anyone who would challenge him and his leadership. 

In his mind, he was the only one with a clear vision of how and when to commence overthrowing the Romanov dynasty. As he put it when looking at the state of the revolutionary cause in the early 1900s, "The party in reality had been torn apart, the rule book had been turned into paper rubbish, the organization had been spat upon. Only naïve bumpkins can yet fail to see it. But to whomever has grasped this it must be clear that the pressure exerted by the Martovites needs to be answered with real pressure (and not with tawdry whimpering about peace and so on). And the application of pressure requires the use of all forces.”

As you can see, Lenin was now a man who did not care about people's suffering but saw the need for extreme measures to get the job done. This would set up his reign of terror against any enemy he perceived to disagree with his plans of revolution and the creation of a Marxist state in Russia and eventually the entire world.

Well, I hope you enjoyed today’s episode. Join me next time when I cover the life of one of the most remarkable women not only in Russia but also in the world, Princess Ekaterina Dashkova, a close friend of Catherine the Great. I've been interested in pursuing this story for quite some time. 

So, until next time, Dasvidania eh Spasiba za Vinyamineya.