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  The family moved to Kazan, as Maria Alexandrovna pledged. But Vladimir quickly found himself in trouble. Within months, he had joined an illegal group of radicals – moderate Populists, who met at each other’s homes and passed around underground literature. In December 1887 there was a wave of protests in Russian universities after a student demonstration in St Petersburg was banned; a series of arrests followed on campuses throughout the country. Some universities were closed down for several months from that winter.

  In Kazan Vladimir Ulyanov was one of around 130 students who joined a peaceful student demonstration at the university. His role was minor. All he did was take part in the protest; nobody suggested he was a ringleader. He had simply been in the wrong place at the wrong time. Even the police report into the incident appeared to acknowledge that he was hardly one of the chief troublemakers. Yet he was arrested and summarily thrown out of the university on 6 December. ‘During his short stay…he was conspicuous for his reticence, lack of attention and even rudeness. Only a day or two before the students’ meeting he gave grounds for suspicion that he was fomenting trouble and that he was meditating some improper behaviour: he spent much time in the common room, talking to the less desirable students, he went home and came back again with some object the others had asked for, and in general behaved very strangely. And on 4 December he burst into the assembly hall…and [was] among the first to rush shouting into the corridor of the second floor, waving…[his] arms as though to encourage the others…In view of the exceptional circumstances of the Ulyanov family, such behaviour…gave reason to believe him fully capable of unlawful and criminal demonstrations of all kinds.’ He was one of only three other students to be expelled and it was clear the police were picking on him because of who he was, not for anything he had done.2

  He was exiled to Kokushkino and, once again, his mother and the rest of the family moved with him, on this occasion happily, as they all loved the estate. Money was tighter than it had been, but still sufficient for a middle-class lifestyle. Maria Alexandrovna was a thrifty woman who had made some modest savings and she could live comfortably on her husband’s reasonably generous pension. She had made 6, 000 rubles from the sale of the house in Simbirsk – ample for a decent standard of provincial living, but hardly a fortune. Ilya had left each of his children a share of his estate, some of it inherited from his brother Vasily, who had died childless. Vladimir and Dmitry (when he came of age) would get a significantly higher proportion than his daughters, as was normal in Russia.

  Vladimir’s mother couldn’t stand waste or, as she saw it, extravagant expenditure. As a student Vladimir had taken up smoking. Maria Alexandrovna loathed the habit and at first tried to persuade him to give up on health grounds, but he wouldn’t. Finally, one evening after dinner at Kokushkino, he lit a cigarette and his mother, who hardly ever raised her voice or was curt to any of her children, spoke sharply. ‘Volodya, you have no income apart from the money I provide. You have no right to squander our family funds on tobacco.’ He stopped smoking from that moment – and later he disapproved of other people lighting up near him.

  If the authorities imagined that expelling him from university and keeping him holed up in the country would deter any revolutionary enthusiasm they were seriously misguided.3

  —

  His mother persuaded him to ask for permission to be readmitted to Kazan University. Reluctantly, he appealed ‘To his Excellency the Minister of Education most humbly’ and signed it ‘Vladimir Ulyanov, nobleman’. The minister refused. The official notification ‘Not to be accepted under any circumstances’ was written on his application.

  Then he wrote to the Interior Ministry, again pointing out that he was a noble by birth, asking for permission to study abroad ‘in order to support my family and to acquire a higher education’. The district inspector of police had sent the application to the Minister of Education with a covering note saying, ‘despite his remarkable abilities, Ulyanov cannot at present be regarded as a reliable person either as to morals or to politics’. The minister scribbled on the application, ‘Wouldn’t this be the brother of the other Ulyanov?…On no account should the request be granted.’

  Maria Alexandrovna was shocked that her son was denied the education she had expected for him. She went to St Petersburg and pleaded with former colleagues of her late husband to intervene on Vladimir’s behalf but got nowhere. She wrote a begging letter to the Minister of Education: ‘It is sheer torment to look at my son and to see how fruitlessly pass those years of his life most suitable for a higher education. Almost inevitably it must push him even to thoughts of suicide.’

  She knew her son well enough to be assured that he had no thoughts of killing himself. But it was typical that she would have said anything, tried anything, to help her family. Any humiliation was worth the effort. When she wrote to the Interior Minister asking for permission for the family to go abroad to take the curative waters of Vichy, she was told that there were excellent health resorts in the Caucasus. Vladimir said often that with all the blows she had received, ‘Mother’s courage was a thing to wonder at’.4

  So he educated himself, quietly in the countryside. ‘Never later in my life, not in prison in Petersburg or in Siberia, did I read so much as in the year after my exile to the countryside from Kazan,’ he said later. ‘This was serious reading, from early morning to late at night.’ Leon Trotsky later described it ‘as the crucial time that forged him as a socialist…the years of stubborn work in which the future Lenin was formed’. He pored over the socialist classics and works of philosophy, economics and history which his brother had read so avidly.

  But the work that influenced him most profoundly was a novel, What Is to Be Done? by Nikolai Chernyshevsky, a man whom he idolised. He kept a photograph of the author in his wallet throughout his life (which he didn’t of either Nadya or of Inessa Armand). Later, when he ruled Russia, a large portrait of Chernyshevsky took pride of place in his Kremlin office. He wrote a fan letter to Chernyshevsky and said once ‘that I was very pained’ when he never received a reply.

  What Is to Be Done? was as important an influence on him as anything by Marx or Engels. Written in 1862 while Chernyshevsky was in the Peter and Paul Fortress on charges of inciting subversion, nobody could claim that it had much merit as a work of art. Not even the author himself, who admitted, without false modesty, ‘I don’t have the shadow of an artistic talent. I even use language badly. But that’s not important…This reading will be useful to you…[as a revolutionary] and you will experience no deception, since I have warned you that you will find in my novel neither talent, nor art, only truth.’

  Somehow it evaded the censors and was legally published – a bad mistake. If an autocratic regime is going to impose supposedly strict censorship, this was the book to censor. It was phenomenally successful and inspired a whole generation of radical young people like Vladimir Ulyanov, who read it five times in the summer after he was expelled from university.*1

  Vladimir identified strongly with the hero, Rakhmetev, who dreams of a world where poverty has ceased to exist and everyone lives in total freedom. He forsakes all pleasure in the cause of Revolution and disposes of his large private income to support impoverished students. He builds his stamina by eating raw steak, performing strenuous gymnastic exercises and physically arduous work. He does not drink and abstains from sex. Not even the wiles of a beautiful woman who professes undying love for him can steer him from his course. Selflessly, he gives her up for another man. His only real lust is for knowledge. He reads voraciously – once non-stop for eighty-two hours. Rakhmetev is known to his comrades as ‘the rigorist’ and has no time for anything except making revolution. He divides up the day into units of a quarter-hour for each assigned purpose. He is unswerving in his dedication, brutally honest, clinically efficient, coldly rational.

  Ulyanov consciously modelled himself on Rakhmetev, as many of those who knew him well have said, including one of his earliest biographers. N
ikolai Valentinov was an intimate of the Bolshevik leader in Swiss exile in the 1900s before falling out with him – partly after he dared to criticise Chernyshevsky as ‘untalented’ and said the book was ‘crude and pretentious. Unreadable.’ Lenin flared up. ‘He sat up with such a start that the chair creaked under him. His face stiffened and he flushed around the cheekbones – this always happened when he was angry. “Do you realise what you are saying? How could such a monstrous and absurd idea come into your mind? To describe as crude and untalented a work of Chernyshevsky, the greatest and most talented representative of socialism before Marx…I declare it is impermissible to call What Is to Be Done? crude and untalented. Hundreds of people became revolutionary under his influence. My brother, for example, was captivated by him and so was I. He completely transformed my outlook. This book provides inspiration for a lifetime.” ’5

  * * *

  Unlike Rakhmetev, he took time away from books and the relentless work of an autodidact to enjoy his principal pleasures. Throughout his life Vladimir delighted in the countryside and nature. He took long walks in the woods and fields around Kokushkino, as he would later, wherever he was. He tramped up hills and mountains with relish. Increasingly over the years he would suffer from nervous exhaustion, raging headaches, insomnia and attacks of intemperate anger – the ‘rages’, as his wife called them. A few days in the mountain air, by the sea or amid fields would revive his spirit and restore his health. He loved the River Volga, the high banks of which he walked for mile upon mile as a child. Every April or May in exile he would write to his mother with the question, ‘What is spring like this year on the Volga?’

  He enjoyed the pleasures of a country squire’s life. Years later he defended such an existence when he was criticised for indulging in bourgeois pursuits. ‘Yes, I too used to live on a country estate which belonged to my grandfather,’ he told one comrade. ‘In a sense I am a scion of the landed gentry…I have never forgotten the pleasant aspects of life on the estate. I have forgotten neither its lime trees nor its flowers. So go on put me to death…I remember with pleasure how I used to loll about in haystacks, although I had not made them, how I used to eat strawberries and raspberries, although I had not planted them, and how I used to drink fresh milk, though I had not milked the cows.’*2

  He loved outdoor sports. That winter he sleighed and skated. He hunted – with a passion, though, as he sometimes acknowledged, with limited skill. ‘He was never a hunter at heart, though he spent so many hours at the sport,’ his sister Anna noted. In Kokushkino he went looking for game with his cousin Nikolai Veretennikov: ‘In the entire course of that winter he never brought back a thing.’ He was often teased about it within the family. One evening the following spring he returned to the house and said he had spotted a hare. His sisters retorted, ‘I suppose it was the one you have been after all season.’ He forced a laugh. In the spring and summer he fished.6

  He was rigorous about taking physical exercise and performing gymnastics. That summer, under lime trees in the garden, he erected a horizontal bar on two posts and he practised a tough routine daily. Once he called out to his brother Dmitry with intense excitement, ‘Look, I have managed to balance myself at last’, and showed how he could perform the splits astride the bar.

  In the autumn they were permitted to move back to Kazan. Vladimir immediately joined another band of dissident radicals, this time a Marxist organisation loosely connected to the newly formed Emancipation of Labour Group, most of whom lived in exile in various European cities. This was when he first read Marx. In various Soviet-era hagiographies it was said that he became converted to Marxism overnight, and his professed ‘love’ was a coup de foudre: ‘I can remember as of yesterday, he was sitting at the kitchen stove, newspapers all around him, and he was making violent jabbing gestures with his hands as he spoke of the new horizons opened up by Marx’s ideas,’ his sister Maria claimed about this supposed Damascene moment. But she romanticised. The truth is that he became convinced over time and was persuaded intellectually as well as emotionally, though his emotional attachment to Marx was always more powerful.*3

  Vladimir’s mother became worried that if nothing was done he would go the way of Sasha and there would be another family tragedy. She looked for an alternative career path for him other than that of clandestine revolutionary, which offered no rewards of a glittering income, but the prospect of jail or the hangman’s noose.7

  * * *

  Maria Alexandrovna bought a country estate and tried to turn Vladimir into a country squire. From the proceeds of the house in Simbirsk, and her share in the Kokushkino property, which was sold, she found a beautiful house outside the village of Alakayekva, fifty kilometres from Samara, with around 160 acres of prime agricultural land. She bought it from the Siberian goldmine millionaire Konstantin Sibiryakov, an interesting man with progressive social views, who wanted to introduce to Russia the kind of modern farming methods that were common in Western Europe. He owned several estates and lost money on all of them before deciding to sell – to people with liberal credentials like the Ulyanovs. The deal was handled on Maria Alexandrovna’s side by Mark Elizarov, a shipping insurance official who was the admirer (later the husband) of her eldest daughter, Anna.

  Vladimir loved the gracious wooden mansion with its terraces and verandahs on three sides and he delighted in the stunning position. The estate was surrounded by woods and hills to walk in and a pond full of fish. Though he knew nothing about agriculture, he dutifully agreed to try farming, but he didn’t take to it – and nor did he take to the peasants, whom he admitted he never understood. ‘My mother wanted me to farm. I tried it but it would not work. Things were not going right. My relations with the muzhiks got to be abnormal,’ he said later. It was his only known comment about the Alakayevka experience, though it lasted three planting seasons. He learned little about farming and showed no interest. He felt uncomfortable in the position of gentleman landowner. The peasants cheated him and his mother and the estate lost substantial sums of money. Livestock kept ‘disappearing’, including several cows and a horse which were stolen by their tenants. The whole experiment was a failure.*4, 8

  But he spent the summers voraciously reading under the linden trees. He translated The Communist Manifesto into Russian. He read the works of a growing number of Marxist scholars. Occasionally he went into Samara and attended clandestine revolutionary meetings. He made trips alone down the Volga on an expedition that demanded a high level of fitness. He would sail downstream for sixty kilometres, haul his boat a mile overland to the parallel river, the Usa, and travel back by boat to a point opposite where he had started. He made this journey several times.

  As farming wasn’t working his mother suggested another career. She persuaded him to read for the law and qualify as an advocate. He was barred from attending a university but was permitted to take the exams as an external student at St Petersburg University, and was allowed to go to the capital to do so. He crammed a four-year course into twelve months and passed top of his year, obtaining the highest marks in all fourteen papers. It was a phenomenal achievement intellectually – and in one of the Russian ironies he would delight in, he got the country’s most brilliant law degree while the organs of the police were keeping him under surveillance as a potential lawbreaking subversive.9

  *1 Nowadays it requires a superhuman effort to get through it once – as it did for this author. But Lenin always praised the book. ‘Before I came to know the works of Marx and Engels…only Chernyshevsky wielded a dominating influence over me and it all began with What Is to Be Done?…It is his great merit that he not only showed that any correctly thinking and truly honest person must be a revolutionary, but also something more important: what a revolutionary should be like, what rules he should follow, how he should approach his goal and what means and methods he should use to achieve it.’

  *2 Many revolutionaries whose goal was to destroy the old world could wax lyrical with nostalgia about their family e
states. Vera Zasulich spent her childhood and youth on her family’s idyllic manor at Byakolovo. She wrote not long before her death: ‘I did not imagine that I would remember Byakolovo all my life, that I would never forget a single shrub in the front garden, not a single one of the old cupboards in the passage, that for many, many years I would dream of the silhouettes of the old trees which I used to see from the balcony.’

  *3 Another book that got through the Tsarist censors, who had banned such ‘dangerous’ books as Spinoza’s Ethics, Hobbes’s Leviathan, Voltaire’s Philosophy of History and Locke’s History of European Morals, was Marx’s 674-page tome on political economy, Capital. One of the two censors who looked at it in March 1872 concluded: ‘It is possible to state with certainty that very few people in Russia will read it, and even fewer will understand it.’ The other said that it was ‘a strictly scientific work’ that had no relevance to Russia because it was mostly about the industrial system in Britain, which did not apply to Russia, where there wasn’t ‘capitalist exploitation’. Russian was the first foreign language into which Capital was translated – five years after it appeared in German. It quickly became popular among intellectuals hungry for a cause to believe in. Whether anyone actually read it all is dubious, but the role the book played in the destruction of the Romanovs is undoubted. Clever old censors – and clever Tsars.

  *4 Though there was a major upside to this rural interlude – what he called ‘this backwater existence’. Soon after the Ulyanovs left Kazan in 1889, the underground reading group of Marxists he had taken part in was broken up. Most of its members were arrested and sentenced to terms of five years in jail and exile to Siberia. ‘It was good fortune for me and I benefited from it,’ he said years later. ‘If I had stayed in Kazan at that point, I would undoubtedly have been arrested.’ The estate was leased out to a rich peasant called Krushvits, of the kind the Bolsheviks would later call ‘kulaks’ and whom they would murder wholesale as a capitalist-exploiting class. Vladimir was for years supported by the rental income from Alakayevka until Maria Alexandrovna sold the estate in the early 1900s.