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Hello, and welcome to Revolutions.

Episode 10.22: Vladimir and Nadya

So here we are at episode 22 into our series on the Russian Revolution, and I am just now getting to the people who will be the main characters going forward, and to the guy who would probably be the main character if this were ever, say, adapted as a prestige television show, just throwing that out there. But if you have friends who like to wait until I am done with a series before bingeing it all at once, be sure to tell them that we are at episode 22 of the Russian Revolution and we have just gotten to the early life of Lenin.

So this new group of characters came from a generation who were too young to have been a part of the radical upheavals of the 1870s. They were just kids when Tsar Alexander the Second was assassinated; they were in grammar school through the reactionary 1880s. But by the time Tsar Nicholas the Second ascended the throne in 1894, it was their turn to be the young 20-something student radicals offended by the society within which they had been raised, and who were determined, in the face of, like, all of Russian history, to be the cohort that finally finally pulled off a revolution. And today we are going to introduce two of these up and coming revolutionaries who will, in fact, in the future, actually pull off the revolution: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to history as Lenin, and his wife, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born on April the 10th, 1870 in Simbirsk, a small provincial city on the Volga River. The Ulyanovs were an upwardly mobile family, not rich by any means, but fine specimens of a respectable and prosperous provincial middle-class. Vladimir’s paternal grandfather had been a serf who managed to transcend his status sometime around 1800. His son, Ilya Ulyanov, Vladimir’s father, had then received a good education and graduated in 1854, joining the civil service as an inspector of schools. An energetic and reform minded bureaucrat, Ilya Ulyanov entered state service just as Tsar Alexander the Second was ascending the throne and preparing his period of capital G capital R Great Reform. Himself only a generation removed from serfdom, ulyanov was thrilled by almost everything the Tsar Liberator did. The emancipation of the serfs was a work of profound, enlightened justice, and the directives to create the zemstvo and improve local primary education gave his life purpose. Settling in Simbirsk, Ulyanov traveled the region, setting up and monitoring new primary and grammar schools all through the 1860s and 1870s. He was happy, fulfilled and respected.

Vladimir’s mother, Maria Alexandrovna, came from a good family herself. Her father was a doctor and her mother, a German descended Protestant from the Balkans. Now, given that Vladimir’s paternal grandmother was probably of Kalmyk descent — the Kalmyk were people who trace back to the Mongolians on the Volga — Vladimir’s ethnic ancestry told the demographic story of the Russian empire. After his death, this demographic story was given additional drama when one of Lenin’s sisters discovered that their maternal great-grandfather had actually been a Jew who converted to Orthodoxy and then raised his kids Christian. When Stalin was presented with this revelation, he ordered the information suppressed. Now, Lenin himself had no real anti-semitic tendencies to speak of, and his sister actually wanted to publicize this genealogical revelation to cut down on anti-Semitism in Soviet Russia, but Stalin was an anti-Semite, so the information was suppressed.

But getting back to his mother, Maria Alexandrovna gave birth to eight babies, six of whom lived, of whom Vladimir was third oldest. She held small c conservative-ish bourgeois values, but insisted that her three boys and three girls receive equal and equally rigorous educations. She instilled in them a passion for learning, and a competitive spirit to succeed. And even though she never really understood her children’s politics, she was not surprised that they followed their mind and their hearts into radical revolutionary action. And whatever happened in the future, she would always support her kids with money and aid and the necessary begging of forgiveness from the authorities, which there would be quite a lot of. So the elder Ulyanovs had a conservative, liberal disposition; their children really did not.

Young Vladimir was raised by both his parents to work hard, study hard and excel at everything, and from an early age, he was blunt, sarcastic and arrogant, but he could always back this up with high marks and superior ability. A fellow student later said that Vladimir was esteemed, but he wasn’t exactly liked, and he had few real friends. He was on the verge of his 11th birthday when the Tsar Liberator was assassinated on March the first 1881. This was a shocking event that had his father weeping off and on for days. The emotional blow of his revered tsar getting killed paved the way for professional setbacks, as the new reactionary regime of Tsar Alexander the Third preferred returning primary education to the church, so dad’s career of opening more modern secular schools stalled out, and became far less fulfilling. But he kept working as hard as he possibly could, and probably working too hard, because his health began to fail him in his early fifties. In January, 1886, he went into his office one day, had a stroke, and died. Vladimir was just 15 years old.

I have yet to read a single biography of Lenin, or even the briefest biographical sketch, come to think of it that does not transition out of his father’s death with a line like, but his father’s death was immediately followed by an even greater emotional blow. And you know what, why reinvent the wheel? His father’s death was immediately followed by an even greater emotional blow: his older brother Alexander, known to all as Sasha, was the alpha of a brood of Ulyanov children who were something resembling a little band of prodigies. A deadly serious student, Sasha always got top marks, was head of his class, and went off to university in St. Petersburg, pursuing a degree in the natural sciences. All his professors agreed they were witnessing the beginning of a brilliant career.

Now Sasha’s academic focus was on the biology of worms, but kind of out of nowhere, his real passion suddenly became radical politics. Now, this is 1886, and remember the old People’s Will network has been broken, and the radical revolutionaries are at their nadir. So Sasha’s move into radicalism was self-directed and pretty self-organized. It was really just him and some friends. And though they would adopt the name People’s Will for their group, they had nothing whatsoever to do with the original People Will. Their tactics, however, did follow the original group’s line. Sasha and his friends wanted a mass mobilized socialist party operating out in the open, but that was simply not possible under the reactionary repression of the current regime. Without the opportunity to voice their opinions, or even put to work their elite educations on behalf of the country they loved, they had no choice but to attack the regime until it either collapsed or allowed for political freedom. So they followed in the spiritual footsteps of the original People’s Will: they formed a small cell of revolutionary comrades and concocted a terrorist plot to kill the tsar. Sasha sold a watch he had won as an academic prize and used the money to buy components and supplies to make bombs to blow up the tsar.

Now, usually in these days, a half-baked plot like this would be uncovered early by the Okhrana, or just as often, the would be assassins would find the job too hard or too risky. But Sasha followed through. He succeeded in acquiring the supplies and building the bombs, and he and his fellow conspirators planned to use them on March the first 1887, the sixth anniversary of the assassination of the Tsar Liberator.

But it did not work out.

Though the assassins were ready, the tsar did not appear where they thought he was going to appear. Then one of them was picked up on an unrelated charge of being suspicious in public, and it wasn’t until he was in custody that the police realized he was carrying a bomb. The guy confessed to everything, and the other fourteen conspirators who were in on this plot were picked up, including Sasha, who then proceeded to nobly attempt to take responsibility for everything, saying it was all his idea and all his work.

Back home in Simbirsk, the family was shocked at how far and how fast Sasha had gotten mixed up in such big trouble. His mother did everything she could to try to get him released, or merely exiled, or given some other reduced sentence. But this isn’t like he had been found with banned books, or busted leading a seditious discussion circle. By Sasha’s own admission, he was a bomb maker who was making bombs to kill the tsar, this is real life stuff. So ten of his fellow accomplices were ultimately sentenced to terms of prisoner exile, but Sasha and four others were sentenced to be hanged. And right to the very end, his mother thought there’s our would commute the sentence now that the boys had had the fear of God and death put in them. But clemency never came. On May the eighth, 1887, Alexander Ulyanov and four of his friends were hanged.

The execution of Sasha was a shock to the Ulyanovs and their neighbors. Though he and his younger brother, Vladimir were very different people, and were never exactly friends, Vladimir had always looked up to, to the point of worshiped, his older brother. Everyone in the family had. And though he almost never spoke about any of this in the future, it left Vladimir hostile and embittered towards the state that had murdered his brother. In his mind. Sasha’s only real crime had been bravely standing up to an evil regime. So, who knows how much of his life and career was personal.

Adding to this resentful bitterness was that after the scandal broke in town, the respectable and polite families in Simbirsk iced the Ulyanovs out. They stopped coming around, they stopped inviting the family to parties, or including them in anything but whispered gossip behind their backs. The social treatment was so bad that has only recently widowed mother sold the family house, and they all moved out of town for good. And it has been remarked on more than one occasion that this treatment may have played a role in Vladimir’s future deep, deep hatred of hypocritical, bourgeois liberals. Treacherous to face bastards who cannot ever be trusted, that was his consistent and unshakable belief. Now, perhaps this reads too much into it, but then again, deep-seated beliefs do have to come from somewhere.

Now we cannot go on before mentioning the story that Lenin’s sister Maria told after Lenin’s death. She said that upon hearing the news of Sasha’s execution, that Vladimir shook his head and said, “No, we will go another way, Sasha.” Which then became something of a colloquial aphorism in Soviet Russia.

Now the story itself is for sure, a later invention. Maria was only nine, Vladimir was a teenager who had never yet showed any interest in politics. But while the story and the quote were an invention, it did capture a basic truth: Lenin would always have a healthy disdain for the kind of elite People’s Will terrorism that Sasha had attempted, and in the attempt, proved once again how inadequate a strategy it was. And though he wouldn’t necessarily turn his nose up at plots to assassinate tsarist officials, the future Lenin would never think it was the main work of revolution.

One lesson Vladimir, or any of his siblings, did not take away from the execution of their brother was to stay out of politics. When Vladimir arrived at the University of Kazan in the fall of 1887, he immediately joined student activist groups and took part in demonstrations, one of which was so big that more than 150 kids were arrested. But even though he was not a leader of this demonstration, Vladimir was one of the few to be expelled for his involvement, because holy hell, this guy’s Ulyanov, and he’s the brother of that guy we just hanged for trying to kill the tsar. Now kicked out of school, Vladimir was ordered to confine himself to a country estate owned by his extended family, where he wound up spending almost the entirety of 1888. And he spent this time in forced idleness reading, and reading, and reading some more. And it was during this period that he finally came across What is to Be Done by Chernyshevsky. Vladimir loved What is to Be Done, he loved it so much he read it six times over the summer, and he was enthralled by the main ultra dedicated revolutionary character, the same character who had once inspired Nechayev. So Vladimir loved What is to Be Done, he loved it so much that in the future he literally carried a small picture of Chernyshevsky with him in his wallet, a claim that could not be made by Marx, or Engels, or even his wife. And in a very real way, it was Chernyshevsky more than Marx who turned Vladimir into Lenin.

But that is not to say he did not also fall in love with Marx and Engels. He did. In fact, he does it right now. His mother managed to get the defacto house arrest lifted, and the family moved back to Kazan. And though Vladimir was not allowed to return to university, he continued to educate himself, though he was assisted by local radical discussion groups that he continued to slip in and out of.

So in 1889, he got his hands on his first copy of Capital, and the Communist Manifesto, and some Plekhanov, which he read, and which thrilled him. From this point on he’s a full-throated Marxist. Now we will obviously have plenty of time to talk all about Lenin’s understanding of Marxism in theory and in practice, but suffice it to say that he believed what he was reading gave him a historical blueprint for a great heroic struggle that would inevitably see the people triumph over evil despotism.

Now understandably, his mother was not too keen on the direction he was headed and she purchased a country estate partly in the hopes of turning her son into a productive landed farmer. But Vladimir did not take to farming, and farming did not take to Vladimir. So instead, he managed to get permission to take law exams, even though he was not a graduate of any university, and after a year of intensive self-directed study, he aced the exam in the spring of 1891 with top marks, doing on his own in 12 months what it usually took a student about four years of law school to accomplish. Say what you want about Lenin, he was not dumb.

But this small triumph was knocked down by another tragedy. His sister Olga, the sibling with whom Vladimir was closest, and who I’ve read was considered the real genius of the family, which is saying something, slowly succumbed to typhoid. Vladimir lived with her at this point, and nursed her, but to no avail, and she died in may of 1891 practically in his arms. He was devastated. Shortly after passing the law exams and burying his sister came the great famine of 1891 to 1892. And here there are conflicting accounts about Vladimir’s attitude. All of these attitudes were reported much later, and all of them were meant to either attack or defend him. If you hate Lenin, the story is that he openly opposed relief efforts for the peasants, that he insisted the famine was a progressive historical force that would help destroy the archaic villages and drive the rural peasantry into the cities where they would grow the ranks of his beloved urban proletariat. This version has Lenin glorying in human suffering in order to have his way. Now, if you like Lenin, you say all of that is made up, and it doesn’t actually fit with his beliefs or his actions, because during these same years, he would be arguing in debates that any social democratic party worth its salt must address the daily miseries of the people they were trying to convert, and it feels off that he would say we should oppose something like famine relief.

Now both sides can point to Lenin’s later conduct, both cruel or compassionate, that backs up their version of the Lenin-opposed-famine-relief story. Now, do I think it’s at least plausible that he saw the failed relief and mass suffering as politically advantageous? Sure. Because it was.

In 1893, Vladimir finally moved to the big city for good. He arrived in St. Petersburg in August, got hooked up with a not-too-difficult associate lawyer’s position that allowed him to spend most of his time around the small but growing Marxist reading circles. And in these circles, he quickly earned a reputation for a ruthless debating style — withering, surgical, sarcastic acerbic, blunt, and supremely self-confident. He did not believe that debate was for persuading your opponent, it was for demolishing your opponent. And whether they liked him or hated him, the people in these radical circles started noticing this guy Vladimir Ilyich, this new guy who had just shown up. And one of those who heard of his growing reputation was a young woman who was already established inside the St. Petersburg Marxist circles: Nadya Krupskaya.

Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya was born in St. Petersburg on February the 14th, 1869. So she was just about a year older than her future husband. Her family had also been pretty respectable and upwardly mobile, at least at the time of her birth. Her father, Konstantin, was the orphan son of landless nobles whose upbringing had been underwritten by the state, and so he got funneled into the army officer corps. In 1863, Konstantin was shipped off to help suppress a revolt in Poland that saw him both perform well and probably emerge with some sympathy for the Poles. But the serving well part was more important, and he was transferred off to study law in St. Petersburg, where he met his wife, Elizaveta Vasilyevna. She too had been the orphan daughter of respectable nobility, and had gotten a good education that qualified her to serve as a governess, which is what she was doing for the ten years before she met Konstantin. And though she would always be a devoutly orthodox wife and mother, she had little good to say about the kind of noble family she had lived among. Certainly, she passed onto her young daughter a love of hard work and education, and a hatred of the casual cruelty of the idle rich.

Graduating with his law degree, Konstantin was then shipped back to Warsaw with his wife and new baby, little Nadya, to serve in the imperial administration in Poland. And during his tenure in Warsaw, he operated with something of an enlightened hand. He helped open a hospital, protect jews from persecution, and laid down rules that regulated labor practices. His wife, Elizaveta meanwhile, similarly engaged with the local culture, and she even wrote a successful children’s book in Polish, all of which seems to have caught the wary eye of somebody higher up in the bureaucratic chain of command, or more likely the eye of somebody who was complaining about the labor regulations, because in 1874, Konstantin was brought before an imperial assessor and officially reprimanded for exceeding his authority. He appealed the decision, but this appeal took time, and in that time, his career in the civil service was totally derailed. So while ages zero to five for little Nadya were stable and happy, ages five to ten were disjointed, difficult, and lonely, as the family followed her increasingly bitter and discouraged father from job to job, unable to find a place to settle down, all the while nursing a grudge against the state that had wronged him. Probably during these troubled years of the mid 1870s, Konstantin developed friendly relations with people who were at least adjacent to the radicals and people’s Will, though he never did wind up on anybody’s watch list.

As the family moved around chasing jobs, Nadya became a lonely bookworm. But she was first brought out of her growing shell in the summer of 1880 when she came into contact with an energetic and idealistic young teacher. The 11-year-old Nadya latched onto this teacher, and was allowed to hang out and sit in on classes that were above her level. And it was this teacher who first introduced Nadya to the poet Nikolay Nekrasov, an enormously influential and beloved Russian writer who had died just a few years earlier. Nekrasov did for Nadya what Chernyshevsky had done for Lenin, it was a passion stirring moment of contact with something special and magical, and right up until her death, it was Nekrasov who held pride of place in Krupskaya’s heart. And when she penned her own first political polemic, she opened it with one of his lines: “Thy lot is hard, a woman’s lot, a harder lot can scarce be found. ”

But Nadya’s summer in poetic bliss soon ended. The family moved on to St. Petersburg and shortly thereafter she learned that this beloved teacher had been arrested for owning subversive literature, and I have no idea what happened to her. After arriving in St. Petersburg though, Nadya found another place to flourish: the Obolensky Gymnasium was a progressive school run by reformist liberals with deep pocketed patrons. It was something resembling a permanent home after five years of itinerant wandering. Nadya made friends and started getting pretty good grades, and it was during this period that she herself read Chernyshevsky, though it never hit her as hard as some of her contemporaries, including of course her future husband. Her father’s health had deteriorated under the strain of his circumstances though, and while he eventually did win his appeal after six years persistent effort — it turns out he was wrongly disciplined — it was too late to save his career, and it was too late to save him. He contracted tuberculosis, and after a long period of wasting away, finally died in 1883 at the age of just 45. Nadya and her mother were left alone. And I hate to keep calling back to Lenin, but Nadya would never forgive the state for humiliating slandering and driving her father to ruin and then to death, so this is all personal for her too.

The immediate circumstances for mother and daughter were not terrible, though. Elizaveta was always able to get steady work as a teacher, and Nadya herself now picked up money tutoring and they lived in a respectable three room apartment, solidly if sparsely, middle-class. Elizaveta continued to instill in her daughter a love of education and a sense of social obligation to help and improve those around her, especially by passing her education along to others.

So eventually this mentality is going to take her towards radical Marxist politics, but Nadya Krupskaya took a bit of a detour through Tolstoy’s anarcho-christianity. Now, unfortunately we do not have the time nor do I have anything like a firm grasp on Tolstoy’s on anarcho-christianity to delve too deep into this, but luckily, neither did Nadya. She had no use for Tolstoy’s evangelical beliefs, his views on women, or his disdain for science, but she did like a lot of his other beliefs, most especially his thoughts on education, which stressed spontaneity and curiosity and emotional connection over rigid memorization and harsh discipline. Nadya admired Tolstoy enough that she wrote him what amounts to a fan letter and briefly participated as a proofreader in a program that Tolstoy spearheaded to publish cheap additions of great books, and she edited an edition of the Count of Monte Cristo. The possibility of using progressive education to improve the masses was alluring, and by the time Nadya was 20, it was poetry and literature and teaching that gave direction to her ambitions about how she could have an impact on the world.

Once she graduated from gymnasium though, Nadya arrived at her own famous conversion to Marxism moment, and every great Soviet biography has to have a great conversion to Marx as a moment. For Nadya, this came in 1890 at the age of 21. She joined a small radical discussion circle, and after reading and delivering a report on Lavrov’s historical letters, she asked about these guys Marx and Engels she had been hearing about, and was given a small bundle of books to read. Ironically though, this bundle was selected by a comrade who happened to be into narodism, and who hoped to prove to Nadya that Marx was full of beans. So along with Capital, she got a critique of Marxism by an narodist idealogue, and a few other books. And even after the revolution, Nadya admitted that reading the first two chapters of Marx’s Capital was like reading Greek, and she had no background in economics or philosophy or political science. But she kept reading and got to the parts that talked about the conditions that the workers had to endure, and that did grab her. And by the time she was done, she believed that Marx had effectively laid out an analysis of what was wrong with the world, what could be done about it, and most, especially who was to blame. And it was capitalism, and in Russia, the tsar. And in a straightforward way, Nadya Krupskaya accepted that they were the enemy and that she needed to spend her life fighting them.

On a more practical level, in 1891 she found her calling working as a night school teacher in the very poor working class districts of St. Petersburg, teaching anything from basic literacy to math, history, literature, and geography. She loved the work, and in 1893, she was elected director of the program by her fellow teachers. Now, given the nature of this work, it should come as no surprise that most of the faculty and administrators were reformist liberals. A few of them were narodist populists, and a handful, like Nadya, were Marxists. Now they could not use the classroom to organize politically, but lessons could be steered in certain directions, and if a particular worker was interested in learning more, then names and addresses could be surreptitiously passed along. Nadya’s own education continued through this period, as she both had to learn additional materials to teach her students, but she also learned from her students. What their life was like, who they were, what their problems were. And it gave her invaluable insight and judgment, insight that many of her bourgeois radical comrades never quite grasped, as many of them remained the kind of coffee house radicals who never met the people they supposedly idolized and were fighting for.

Now by this point, Nadya and a few of her friends had moved into a reading circle headed by an old Narodist turned Marxist named Stefan Radchenko. And it was in this group that she first heard about this character of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, brother of a hanged martyr, who was bulldozing his way through the radical debate circuit. And then it was in this Radchenko group that they met for the first time in February, 1894, and it could not have been a more classic meet cute. He read from passages from a book he was writing called What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social Democrats, which was an anti narodist track that would be the first book published under the pen name Lenin. Now Nadya thought this was all fine, but then after the reading, he made a sarcastic jab about the value of teaching the workers literature, which was clearly a pointless fool’s errand, and which happened to be her great passion in life. So as we know, from every romantic comedy ever written, this awkward moment of initial off-putting behavior was only ever going to result in wedding bells.

But the wedding was still a while off yet. For the next few years, Nadya and Vladimir would be merely comrades, at this stage, not fighting a war against the tsar so much as against other radicals who were trying to pitch the wrong brand of revolution. And so next week we will pick back up with them as they hook up with another key player in the fight against revolutionary philistines, Julius Martel.