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  Jury trials for alleged terrorists were rare in Russia and were halted altogether after the case of Vera Zasulich in 1878. The fiercely intelligent twenty-eight-year-old daughter of a penurious noble family, Zasulich, then a passionate anarchist, attempted to murder the Governor of St Petersburg, General Fyodor Trepov. She shot and wounded him after he had ordered the flogging of a radical student for refusing to salute him. In a celebrated trial, she was acquitted and hailed as a martyr. A skilful lawyer had managed to turn the proceedings into a trial of Trepov and the regime rather than of one radical defendant. Zasulich was unanimously cleared.*2, 3

  It was surprising how many of the terrorists were women – at a time when even the idea of Votes for Women in Western Europe or the US had barely yet become an issue of debate. That there were so many young women ready to kill and die for a political cause earned the radicals some sympathy among men, in a highly patriarchal society. Sophia Perovskaya – ‘a frighteningly single-minded’, fanatical member of Narodnaya Volya – was the lover of Andrei Zhelyabov, who led the plot against Alexander II. She gave the signal to the bomb-throwers, who were waiting for the Tsar on the St Petersburg street where he was murdered. One of her co-conspirators described her as ‘tiny, blonde, with pale-blue eyes and pink and white cheeks like a china doll…a beauty’. She was hanged aged twenty-seven in the last public execution in Russia on 3 April 1881, before a crowd estimated at 80,000 people. The hangman was drunk and there was no drop to the scaffold, just a wooden stool that the executioner managed in his stupor to kick away. Witnesses, horrified, said she took half an hour to die, in extreme agony.*3

  Vera Figner, one of the first women in Russia to train as a doctor, led a revolutionary group and planned two unsuccessful murder plots against Tsar Alexander II before her involvement in the successful attempt. She managed to evade arrest but was finally apprehended by police in the Crimea in 1883, aged thirty-one. She spent more than twenty years in jail or Siberian exile and made a speech at her trial the following year which it seems certain that Alexander Ulyanov had read and knew by heart. ‘Peaceful methods have been forbidden me. We have no free press so it was impossible to think of propagating ideas through means of the printed word. If any organ of society had pointed out to me another course than violence I would have chosen it.’

  Later, in exile in Switzerland, an equally passionate opponent of Lenin and Bolshevik tyranny, she recalled her life as a terrorist when ‘the cult of the bomb and the gun, of murder and the scaffold, took on a magnetic charm’.4

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  Vladimir Ulyanov was heir to a long tradition of revolutionary opposition to the Tsars. After his brother’s execution he steeped himself in the history of Russian radical politics, from the Decembrists’ uprising onwards. These were a group of aristocratic army officers who in December 1825, following the death of Alexander I – at dinner ‘between the claret and the champagne’, as Alexander Pushkin famously wrote – plotted to prevent Nicholas I acceding to the throne. Most of them had fought in the Russian army that reached Paris a decade earlier and helped to defeat Napoleon. Having seen Western Europe, their declared aim was to build a constitutional monarchy and they dreamed of ‘igniting a spark that will become a flame of liberty’.*4 The rebels attracted an army of 3,000 to their cause and nearly succeeded. But they were finally crushed the following year. Five of the conspirators were executed and dozens were sentenced to exile in Siberia, including members of some of the most famous noble families in Russia which were traditionally loyal to the throne, like the Trubetskoys and Volkonskys. The Tsar’s Act of Indictment against the Decembrists charged them with displaying ‘the insane lust for change’.

  For the rest of the nineteenth century – until the overthrow of the Romanovs – Russian political history was a repeating cycle of modest reforms, followed by periods of reaction when the throne felt threatened. Up to the abdication of the last Tsar one of the principal articles in the Fundamental Laws stated, simply, ‘His Majesty is an absolute monarch who is not obliged to answer for his actions to anyone in the world but has the power and the authority to govern his states and lands as a Christian sovereign, in accord with his desire and goodwill.’ And the emperors meant it. Konstantin Pobedonostev, Procurator of the Holy Synod and for decades one of Russia’s most senior civil servants, told Alexander III soon after his father’s assassination in 1881: ‘Russia has been strong thanks to Autocracy, thanks to the limitless mutual trust and the close tie between the people and the Tsar…we suffer quite enough from talking-shops, which simply stoke up popular passions.’5

  The structure of the police state had been established under Nicholas I in the 1820s. He built an entire organ of government – the Third Section of the Administrative Department – to combat subversion. Essentially it was a secret service of the monarch, whose interests were seen as different from those of his subjects. Laws protecting property or the lives of other Russians were handled by a separate policing system. The Third Section, which in the 1880s became the Okhrana, had draconian powers to detain people without trial and send them to ‘administrative exile’ in Siberia and the Arctic wastes at any hint of ‘political crimes’. Its power and scope were unlike anything elsewhere in Europe. It became the model for the Cheka, the NKVD and the KGB in the Russia of the future – or indeed the FSB of the post-Soviet era. It invaded the lives of ordinary people. There were thousands of bureaucrats in back offices throughout the empire opening people’s mail, which had been intercepted by an underworld of intelligence agents, stool pigeons and snoops. The public needed a special licence from the political police for a vast range of innocuous activities, from organising a party in a public place to opening a shop, operating any form of public transport or reading Darwin.6

  Again, unique to Russia, was the most rigid form of censorship in Europe which obliged all printed matter to be cleared by a censor before it was published. With direct political activity excluded and reading political matter by and large banned, ‘almost all literature became a criticism of Russian life, a social commentary, one way or another’. Writers found ways to get round the censors – not always difficult; on the whole, throughout history, good authors have been cleverer than censors and this has never been truer than of the imaginative giants in Russian literature. A highly developed form of samizdat publishing and of distributing illegal works existed in Russia decades before the Bolshevik Revolution. Over the nineteenth century, censorship, police surveillance and prison sentences were relaxed, tightened, relaxed again and became harsher once more depending on the political climate and the sensibilities of the monarch. But over the years thousands of people were jailed or sent to Siberia simply for reading ‘illegal’ books. This was no longer happening in the other European empires, Austria-Hungary and Germany.

  After liberating the serfs, Alexander II introduced a few other reforms: he permitted some jury trials and allowed an element of local government – the zemstvos, small-scale neighbourhood councils run by provincial gentry. He allowed travel into and out of Russia, which had been extremely limited. But after he was assassinated his son retreated into a paranoid absolutism. No substantial political freedoms were ever granted by the Tsars in the nineteenth century and the autocracy had no intention of conceding any. The Russian monarchy showed no ability to adapt or to modernise. The Tsars created the revolutionary movements, as one of the sharpest of the ‘terrorists’, Pyotr Tkachev – whom Lenin would quote often – prophetically observed in the 1860s. ‘It is Russia’s backwardness which is her great fortune, at least from the revolutionary point of view. In the West the social order is based on wide support of the middle class. In Russia this class [barely exists]…What holds things together in our country? Just the state – i.e. the police and the army. What is needed to make this state fall into fragments? Not much: two or three military defeats…some peasant uprisings…revolt in the capital.’

  The Populists were the first of the revolutionary groups to gain any influence. Initially they a
dopted entirely peaceful means. Their conviction was that revolution would come from the peasants. So from the 1860s bands of idealistic young men and women went to the country, tried to live in communes, attempted to open first-aid centres and educate illiterate peasants in a ‘back to the people’ movement that would lead them to a kind of pastoral socialism. Several of the type appear in Chekhov’s plays and stories. Most of them were from privileged backgrounds and were conscious of their wealth: ‘our awareness of the universal truths could only have been reached at the cost of the age-old suffering of the people. We are the people’s debtors – and this debt weighs down on our consciences,’ as one of them said.

  Almost universally these Populists from groups like Land and Liberty (Zemlya y Volya), were shunned by the peasants they were trying to help, who distrusted them because of their privilege, were wary of socialism and resented their paternalistic disruption of village life. In many cases they informed on the radicals to the police or threw them out of the neighbourhood – and in a few instances assaulted or killed them. ‘Socialism bounced off the peasants like peas against a wall. They listened to our people, as they do to the village priest, respectfully but without the slightest effect on their thinking or their actions.’7

  The next tactic was a resort to violence to destabilise the state. They still believed that revolution depended on the peasantry, and their targeted assassinations of Tsarist officials, provincial governors, police and army officers were carried out to make Russia ungovernable. From the ruins a republic of agrarian socialists would seize power and transform Russia. The biggest and most dangerous of these groups was Narodnaya Volya, whose principal theorist and leader was the charismatic Sergei Nechayev, on whom Dostoyevsky based Verkhovensky, the nihilistic central character in The Possessed.

  Nechayev was a charismatic leader who inspired a generation of followers with his fanaticism and asceticism. He spent ten years in jail, for long periods performing hard labour, and died a prisoner in the Peter and Paul Fortress.*5 His pamphlet The Revolutionary Catechism, banned but widely circulated, was a primer for young radicals who became the foot soldiers of the terrorist organisations. It offers a grim sort of life, but large numbers of young people were inspired by its appeal to self-sacrifice and its logic of fighting violence with violence. ‘The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no personal interests, no private affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property and no name. Everything in him is subordinated towards a single thought, a single passion: the Revolution. The revolutionary knows that in the very depths of his being, not only in words but also in deeds, he has broken all the bonds which tie him to the social order and to the civilised world with all its laws, moralities and customs and all its generally accepted conventions. He is their implacable enemy and if he continues to live with them it is only in order to destroy them more speedily. He must be prepared to destroy everyone and everything that stands in his way.’

  After the murder of Alexander II the People’s Will was all but wiped out by the Okhrana. But small bands of (mainly) students would form and adopt the same name, before disappearing again – such as the group to which Alexander Ulyanov belonged. Towards the end of the century the Socialist Revolutionaries (SRs) would be formed from the ruins of the Populists, a more sophisticated organisation but still with a belief that individual acts of terror would advance the Revolution.8

  From the 1870s rival groups would be launched, inspired by an import from the West: Marxism. They gave up on the idea of a revolution emerging from the peasantry in a semi-feudal country like Russia. They believed that the Revolution would be led by the working class, the proletariat. A problem that exercised Marxist theorists – and caused endless disputes with the agrarian socialists – was that Russia was far behind Western Europe as an industrial producer and at the end of the nineteenth century had a tiny working class compared to Britain, Germany or France. Ulyanov would join the Marxists: ‘I fell in love with Marx and Engels,’ he told his sisters. ‘Literally in love.’ As Lenin he would become the most famous of all the Marxists, creator of the first state founded on Marxist principles. But he would have a complex relationship with the object of his passion. He adapted the ideas to Russian conditions in ways Marx would never have imagined. Many historians have argued that the reason Soviet-style Communism developed as it did is that Lenin tried to import a Western creed and philosophy to a backward country, as Russia was. Rather, the opposite is true. Lenin transformed a set of European ideas into a very Russian creation. His version of Marxism – its intolerance, rigidity, violence and cruelty – were forged from Lenin’s experience as a nineteenth-century Russian. Lenin’s Bolshevism had deep Russian roots.

  *1 Alexander Kerensky recalled his first days studying law at St Petersburg University in the 1890s. ‘The very air of Russia seemed to be saturated with an intense desire for liberation. We became the enemies of the Autocracy almost as soon as we entered the university, and this seemed to happen naturally…there were no arguments among the students whether the Autocracy should be fought or not…the only argument was as to where the real truth was to be found, with the Marxists or with the Narodniki [the Populists].’

  *2 Zasulich went into hiding immediately after the verdict when the authorities announced they would try her again, this time without a jury. She escaped from Russia and went into exile in Switzerland and later, for many years, in London. She renounced individual acts of violence and argued later they were pointless. She became a famous Marxist and will appear in this story again as a close friend of Lenin’s wife Nadya, though she grew to loathe Lenin himself.

  *3 One of the saddest of all cases was the ghastly death of Maria Vetrova. Incarcerated in the Peter and Paul Fortress for subversive crimes involving the distribution of illegal literature, she was repeatedly raped by a police officer and by a prison guard. In February 1897 she poured lamp oil over herself and set herself alight.

  *4 When, at the start of the twentieth century, Lenin and his comrades launched their first socialist newspaper they called it Iskra – The Spark – as a deliberate echo of the Decembrists.

  *5 Not directly for revolutionary activity. He organised the murder of a follower who disobeyed his orders and publicly disagreed with him.

  5

  A Revolutionary Education

  ‘Don’t be too hard on Lenin…I think that much of his strange behaviour can be simply explained by the fact that he totally lacks a sense of humour.’

  Georgy Plekhanov (1856–1918)

  Vladimir’s demeanour and habits, his whole view of the world, were transformed around the time he was eighteen. His father’s death and the violent drama of his brother’s execution, soon followed by the fatal illness of his beloved sister Olga, seemed to drain away all the cheerfulness, lightness of manner and good humour that had characterised his early life. He was beginning to become the highly disciplined, tightly contained man people would know as Lenin. He seldom talked about his private feelings or inner life to anyone outside his family circle. ‘Vladimir became grimly restrained, strict, closed up in himself, highly focused,’ as his younger brother Dmitry explained.

  As expected, he won the gold medal at the Simbirsk Classical Gimnasium – top of his class. He should have had his pick of university places. But the authorities were wary of him and saw him as a guilty subversive simply by association with his brother. Attending either St Petersburg University or Moscow, the two best in the country, were out of the question.

  It was a Kerensky who obtained a place for him at the reputable University of Kazan. Vladimir’s school principal was Fyodor Kerensky, father of Alexander. He was one of the few respectable figures in Simbirsk society who visited the Ulyanov family and stood by them. He wrote a glowing encomium to the university: ‘Talented, invariably diligent, prompt and reliable, Ulyanov was first in all his classes, and upon graduation was awarded the gold medal as the most meritorious pupil in achievement, growth and conduct. There is not a single instance on record, e
ither in school or outside of it, of Ulyanov’s invoking by either word or deed, any adverse opinion from the authorities or teachers of this school. His parents always watched carefully over the educational and moral progress of Ulyanov and since 1886, after the death of his father, the mother alone has devoted all her labour to the upbringing of her children. The guiding principles of this upbringing were religion and rational discipline. The goodly fruits of Ulyanov’s upbringing were obvious in his excellent conduct.’ He did notice that Vladimir kept himself to himself, but he said this deliberately to suggest that he would be unlikely to turn into a ringleader of rebellion or consort with potential troublemakers. So he wrote, ‘Upon closer examination of Ulyanov’s home life and character, I could not but observe in him an excessive introversion and lack of sociability even with acquaintances, and outside the school even with fellow students who were the school’s pride and joy, in short an aversion to companionship. Ulyanov’s mother intends to remain with him throughout his stay at university.’1