V I Lenin as a schoolboy
Lenin’s parents were representative of what was good in the Russian middle class in the 1860’s. Devoted to their work, liberal minded disinterested, sober in living, they were far removed from either the aristocratic neurasthenia that characterized the intellectuals among the nobility, or the narrow greed of the merchant and capitalist classes. Ilya Nikolaivich Ulyanov, Lenin’s father, was the son of a poor tailor at Astrakhan. The tailor died when Ilya was quite young, leaving his family unprovided for. Ilya was able to finish his school and enter the university entirely owing to the devotion of his elder brother Basil, who, though he himself longed for education, gave up all dreams of the university and learning, entered an office in the town, and supported the family on his earnings.
Basil’s devotion nearly proved fruitless, for the authorities refused to give a scholarship to Ilya since he was the son of a tradesman and not a member of the Chinese hierarchy of Russian officialdom. But Basil was determined— determination was a feature of the family— and, by what unheard of sacrifices on his part we shall never know, Ilya was entered at Kazan University, where he partly supported himself by giving private lessons. Here he studied mathematics and physics, and in 1855, on finishing his course, became senior physics master at the Penza Nobles’ Institute.
The institute was a bad one, though it served a vast district, and the noblemen of Penza were a particularly corrupt and indolent crowd, even for mid-nineteenth century Russia. It was a center of reaction, and at the time of the emancipation of the serfs in 1860-61 the noblemen of Penza signified their disapproval by starting great incendiary fires. For Lenin’s father, however, residence among them became bearable through his scientific interests, for he was made controller of meteorological observations for the province, a post of some importance in agricultural Russia and one which he filled with distinction. Nevertheless, he was glad when the opportunity came to move to yet another of the great Volga towns, to Nizhni-Novgorod., particularly as he was anxious to marry. His young wife, Maria Alexandrovna Blank, whom he married in 1863, was a girl of some beauty and much character. She was the daughter of a doctor of German descent who had tired of practice and bought a small estate in the country near Kazan, where he lived a retired, spartan-like existence. His daughter had a hard upbringing, with neither friends nor amusements, her only education received from her father and two old German aunts who taught her music and languages. By her own efforts, however, she passed the examination for elementary school teachers, and was preparing herself for this vocation when she met and married Ilya Ulyanov.
They were a happy couple, and two persons of such training and character were bound to go forward, not swiftly and sensationally, but firmly and wisely. Ilya was made inspector of primary schools in the province of Simbirsk in 1869, and in that year moved to this typical “nest of gentlefolks” on the high bank of the Volga. Like Penza, Simbirsk was a typical island of reactionary country squires and narrow, semi-Asiatic bureaucrats, in a sea of dark-minded peasantry. There seems no doubt that in going to such an uncompromising place from a great commercial center like Niznhi-Novgorod, Ulyanov was moved by the wave of enlightenment and education then sweeping over the best of the Russian intelligentsia. The “march to the people” of the advanced intellectuals and radically minded nobles like Tolstoy was beginning, and was taking precisely the apparently harmless form of a great enthusiasm for the education of the peasantry. Village schools and libraries were opening everywhere— of very varying quality, to be sure, but for a determined man there was big work to be done, and there is no doubt that Ilya Ulyanov succeeded triumphantly in organizing elementary education for the peasants of Simbirsk, so well indeed that in 1874 he was appointed director of elementary schools for the whole province.
In Simbirsk on April 22, 1870, a few months after the young Ulyanov couple had moved there, their second son, Vladimir Ilich was born. Lenin was like his father; the same pronounced cheek-bones and deep-set eyes, the same high-domed forehead, the same firmly set mouth and determined chin. His elder brother, the tragic Alexander, was good-looking like his mother, with none of the typically Russian, typically Volga features of Lenin and their father, Ilya Nikolaivich.
The two elder Ulyanov boys were far from ordinary, but Vladimir certainly was no unpleasant youthful “genius.” He never, like so many intellectual revolutionaries in both politics and literature, gave way to fits of subjective moodiness, and his home life was an exceedingly happy one. He was fond of all the games common to Russian boys; tobogganing, skating, and skiing; while in summer, as a boy, he enjoyed the polite nineteenth century pastime of croquet, which even after three revolutions and many wars still retains a certain place among Russian recreations.
But Vladimir was a boy of extraordinarily active and lively imagination. When the family moved out to the village in the summer and the grown-ups went off into the woods at night to hunt, he would try to follow them, stealing away into the deeper darkness on the edge of the forest, to be discovered and at last sent home. With his friends he enjoyed playing bandits and robbers, acting the heroic adventures of the impossibly exciting life of boyhood everywhere.
All those who remember him as a boy emphasize his extraordinary liveliness, his inexhaustible fund of stories and jokes. He liked teasing, not only his child friends, but grown-ups as well. Like all middle-class children, the Ulyanovs learned to play the piano, and forgot the art as soon as they went away to school. But Vladimir’s little brother Mitya was very sensitive, and could never sing through the song of “The Kid” without breaking down in tears. Volodya (Lenin’s family name) used to get him to summon up his manhood and sing the song, and as soon as Mitya reached the place where the grey wolves fall upon the kid— the danger-spot in the tragedy— He would join in with terrible mock pathos. This always proved too much for Mitya, who would at once break down in tears.
At school Volodya (Lenin) made no particular friends, but was on good terms with all. Boys generally, with or without approval of their masters, organize their work collectively, and none is more hated than the clever boy who refuses to share his knowledge, and help those who lag behind him, who hoards his scholastic virtue for the purpose of winning certificates and prizes, gaining the good will of the authorities and the best posts or scholarships on leaving school. There was nothing of this type of schoolboy capitalist about the young Ulyanov. His work came to him easily, and just as easily he shared his knowledge with his fellows, helping them in their preparation. Nor did this prevent him from winning a gold medal on leaving school.
For, while still a boy, Vladimir Ilyich showed that extraordinary diligence and application in mastering every problem that life put before him that later was to be his most distinguishing feature as a leader and inspirer of men. When the theme of an essay was given to the class, he carefully drew up his plan, then took paper, and down the left-hand side wrote the rough outline of his essay, according to the plan. On the right-hand side day after day he made additions, notes on new sources, references to literature, and so on. Finally, on clean paper, he wrote his last draft on the essay, using all the material which he had gathered and so carefully worked out.
This boy of sixteen, short and rather thin, with his unusually domed forehead, the strong, ironical mouth, was very far from ordinary. He was not good-looking, like his elder brother Sasha (a family name for Alexander), but he was much more talkative and lively, in a sharp, sarcastic way. His was no dreamy adolescence. He had many active interests, spending long hours of the hot summer months in fishing, in bird-snaring, in reading the orchard of the little summer farmhouse which was the property of the Ulyanovs. In winter he skated and went for long ski-runs through the forests, experimented with chemistry, and in the evening for endless hours played chess with his father or his brother.
When something captured his imagination, Volodya (Lenin) gave himself to it fantastically, wholeheartedly. Skating thus fascinated him as a boy, and he spent day after day on the ice, half drunk with the dry, frozen air of those middle-Volga steppes, till by a great effort of will he tore himself away from the ice altogether, completely gave up skating, which threatened to absorb his whole attention. A little later he did the same with chess, at which he became an excellent player. Once he found all his mental energies being absorbed by it, he threw it aside absolutely, and did not play chess again till he was shut up for most of the day in his exile’s hut during the long Siberian winters. A third such victim of his combined strength and weakness was Latin. As a schoolboy he was a first rate Latinist, and the language attracted him immensely, but once again he abandoned it because it took time which was needed for more important studies. There are competent Latinists who profess to see the influence of this early passion in the construction of his speeches.
Almost his only friend in the period of adolescence was his brother Sasha. Sasha (Alexander), tall, good looking, dreamy, serious, and studious, strictly fulfilling all his obligations, was Volodya’s (Lenin’s) idol. When still a little boy he copied Sasha in everything— played as he played, did what he did. If asked whether he wanted his porridge with milk or butter, if he wanted to play or go for a walk, he always looked first to see what Sasha was doing, answering that he would do “like Sasha.”
Volodya (Lenin) had his “difficult” period as a boy. The death of his father left this lively, uncontrollable boy of seventeen without a check on his exuberant moods at the very time when it was most needed. His noisy, lively, mocking chatter did not altogether please his more serious elder brother. His elder sister noticed once or twice that Sasha looked disapprovingly at her and Volodya as they talked together during one of Volodya’s outrageous moods. “What do you think of our Volodya?” she later asked him, curious. “He’s undoubtedly a very capable fellow, but you and I don’t look on things as he does,” was the reply. “Why not?” she pressed. Sasha shrugged his shoulders, not wishing to criticize his brother. “It’s just so,” was all he would answer. Indeed, at this time there was something impudent, arrogant even, in young Volodya’s (Lenin’s) character.
This arrogance showed itself even in his relations to his mother. Sometimes when he was playing chess with Sasha she would ask him to do some little thing, or remind him of some request he had forgotten, and he would reply off-handedly, sharply even, and go on with his game. When his mother insisted, he made a joke, but did not move. “Volodya, either you go and do at once what mother asks, or I shall stop playing with you,” Sasha would then say, quietly and firmly; and without further argument Volodya (Lenin) would get up and do as he was asked.
In his last years at school, like most boys of spirit, he began to despise the teachers at his school, their narrow, petty outlook, their little scandals and everlasting internal dissensions, their stupidity and snobbery. From despising the teachers was only a step to despising the teaching, and this step he also made. The whole system of education appeared to his clear and ruthless mind as something irrational, prejudiced and narrow. The whole school and its teaching staff rested on a religious, authoritarian basis. Therefore he began to despise and hate religion and authority. His mood was one of denial of all authority, a negation of everything, a period of formation, in which the personality of the man had not yet appeared while that of the boy was already disappearing. Religion both the brothers had abandoned almost as soon as they could think for themselves. Their father was a religious man, but the last to think of trying to force his views on his children. When the boys had made up their minds they simply told him they did not wish to go to church anymore, and that was all.
To what extent his brother Sasha influenced him politically it is hard to say. Certainly he must have had some influence, and Lenin at this age had no particular political views of his own. Both Sasha and Alexandra Ilynichna, his elder sister, noticed that he would lie on his bed reading and re-reading the sentimental novels of Turgeniev, though he was actually living in the same room as Sasha, who was passionately reading Marx and the classics of political and economic literature.
Sasha (Alexander) had great working capacity and great self-control. As a child neither of these qualities was very strongly developed in Volodya (Lenin). His school work was very easy for him and did not make great demands on his abilities, while he was hot-tempered, irascible almost. The example of Sasha’s even temper and passion for serious work was therefore of great importance for him. At first he just childishly copied his elder brother, but later the imitation became more conscious and he definitely set himself to achieve that same capability for hard word and self command. The first came the more easily; to subdue his temper meant a big struggle and effort of will, but it was made, and successfully.
The most remarkable feature of Volodya’s adolescence was this conscious effort of will to make himself a man, almost as though he had some forewarning of the unheard-of demands which life was later to make on his frail human organism. This lively, playful boy, so quick to note the weak or comical side of others, and to mock at it mercilessly, began also to note the strong and heroic in his fellows, and to consider how much of that he was capable of achieving himself. Twice his elder sister remembers him saying of the action of some other: “I wonder, have I got enough courage to do that? I don’t think so.”
Bold and lively he certainly was, ironical and sarcastic also, but even in childhood never boastful, never self-important, two qualities which in later life he could never tolerate in others.
After his father died and Alexander Ilyich was already in St. Petersburg, studying at the university, Volodya (Lenin) became the head of the little family in Simbirsk. It was not long before he was put to the most terrible trial in this new position, a trial that was to have lasting influence on his life.
Sasha (Alexander), the beloved brother, had joined one of the many circles of revolutionary students in the capital. The 80’s were years of the blackest, most hopeless reaction in Russia, a reaction which fell particularly strongly on the universities owing to the change in their constitution and the appointment of inspectors who “supervised” the political and social activities of the students and teachers alike, inspectors who looked upon themselves as, and in fact were, little more nor less than police agents. Almost the only section of the population to offer active resistance to the reaction was the students. Alexander II, the “liberator,” had been assassinated on March 1, 1881. Alexander III, a dull and hopeless drunkard whose intellectual powers not even his own father had trusted, and who succeeded in drinking himself to death by the time he was fifty, had practically re-instituted serfdom by the appointment of country magistrates with special punitive and economic powers.
The relics of the People’s Will Party determined to carry on their war of extermination against the Romanovs by the elimination of this crowned sot. Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov played a leading part in the conspiracy which led to the unsuccessful attempt of March 1, 1887.
The conspirators were quickly arrested and placed on trial. Relations in St. Petersburg at once wrote the terrible news to Simbirsk, not directly to his mother, but to a friend, V.C. Kashkadamova. She ran at once to the school to Vladimir Ilyich, then in the last class at the gymnasium. His brows knitted and he frowned darkly as he read, but for a long time he said nothing. He seemed suddenly to have grown from a happy schoolboy into a suffering man. When he spoke, it was not melodramatically, but simply, like a boy, or like a very strong man perhaps.
“Well, this is a serious affair,” he said. “It may end badly for Sasha.”
The arrest of his brother filled his whole mind; that lively, passionate mind that had been fascinated by chess, by skating, by Latin, to the exclusion of every other thought, was suddenly seized by a matter of life and death, by a terrible human and social tragedy.
He changed completely. No more jokes, no more teasing and irony. He sat by himself in his room, stern and silent, but when anyone spoke to him of his brother he answered simply: “it means that he had to act like that, that he could not act otherwise.”
His mother, Maria Alexandrovna, that heroic woman of many sorrows, who had only just lost her husband unexpectedly, must now prepare to lose her eldest son. She got ready to go to St. Petersburg— no light journey in those days for a young man going for pleasure or study, but a terrible prospect for an old woman going on the most tragic of all errands.
Their friends, all members of the “liberal” and “enlightened” bourgeoisie, fell away at once as the news of the arrest spread, and the family found themselves practically boycotted. Not, for sure, because the neighbors loved the drunken Alexander or condemned the terrorist act of the students, but simply through the fear of being compromised by acquaintance with the family of a revolutionary. Volodya (Lenin) wished to find a companion for his mother on her journey, and went fruitlessly from house to house. No on would go with her.
This boy of seventeen never forgot this cowardly hypocrisy of the liberal society of his town. He neither forgot nor forgave the cowardice of these revolutionaries in words who were afraid even to help an old woman in her agony.
The beloved brother was hanged in prison at St. Petersburg together with all the other leaders of the conspiracy, and the news of his end was carried to the family at Simbirsk. “I shall never forget the expression on the face of Vladimir Ilyich at that moment,” writes his sister. “He said: ‘No, we shall not go along that road. We need not go along that road.’” Indeed, the story of Alexander Ulyanov sums up all the heroic mistakes, the tragedy, of the flower of the Russian intellectuals in the 70’s and 80’s. That all that was best and bravest in the country should throw their splendid energies into the task of exterminating the rotten dynasty of the Romanovs and a number of inhuman generals and police chiefs was an unbearable folly, however heroic. For all the odds were against this handful of conspirators— a great army and police force, a horde of spies, the ignorance of the peasant masses, the indifference of the “enlightened” bourgeoisie. Seldom in history has so much patience, courage, and persistence been so tragically wasted.
It is doubtful if Lenin had ever accepted the Populist views of his brother, or even to what extent the two had discussed politics together, though both were undoubtedly of revolutionary sympathies. But the horrible end of his brother, a brother so close to him, so noble in every way, who might have played such a precious part in the liberation of enslaved humanity, convinced him that it was “not by those methods, not along this road” that he must go, and Russia must go.
The question of methods he set himself to solve. No more heroic youths must waste themselves as Sasha (Alexander) had done. The way of struggle and victory was different, slower, more tedious, but surer, and in the end more splendid: the struggle not of a few chosen heroes against a number of individuals but the tremendous battle of class against class. In this sense Lenin was to solve the problem of methods. But all his life there remained in his heart a tender spot for the leaders of the revolutionary struggles of the 70’s and 80’s, the terrorists and idealists of the People’s Will Party.
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