did extremely well. As a child he would answer parental questions with two words: ‘Like Sasha’. Admiration and competition both played a part. He closely followed his elder brother’s activities, learning from and comparing himself to him. His brother’s death shook him to the very core. Everything changed. He was radicalised politically by the event and its aftermath. Isaac Deutscher concludes:
The name of Alexander does not occur in any of Lenin’s books, articles, speeches, or even in his letters to his mother and sisters. In all the fifty-five volumes … of the Russian edition Alexander is mentioned almost incidentally and only twice … So extraordinary a reticence could not be ascribed to frigidity of feeling: on the contrary, it covered an emotion too deep to be uttered and too painful ever to be recollected in tranquillity.
Sometimes, in a very relaxed mood and with friends, he mentioned Sasha’s influence, as recounted in Valentinov’s Memories of Lenin. Winston Churchill, a lifelong enemy of socialism and communism, was capable, on occasion, of rising above the fray and in his essay on Lenin five years after his death wrote perceptively:
He was at the age to feel. His mind was a remarkable instrument. When its light shone it revealed the whole world, its history, its sorrows, its stupidities, its shams, and above all its wrongs. It revealed all facts in focus – the most unwelcome, the most inspiring – with an equal ray. The intellect was capacious and in some phases superb. It was capable of universal comprehension in a degree rarely reached among men. The execution of the elder brother deflected this broad white light through a prism: and the prism was red.1
After the revolution the poet Mayakovsky wrote something similar, if from a completely different point of view:
He is earthly –
But not of those
Whose nose
delves only into
their own little sty.
He grasped the earth
whole,
all at one go.
Life for the family became difficult in Simbirsk. Socially they were boycotted by their peers; people they had known for a long time crossed the street when they saw the boys’ mother. This angered Lenin much more than the temporary suspension of the state pension due to his father’s widow because the family had produced a would-be regicide. It created in him a deep and pure hatred for liberals and their hypocrisies. How easily they were swayed by the changing moods of the establishment. How easy it was for them to hop from one opinion to another and express surprise when reminded of what they had said only a few months ago. This contempt for political chameleons stayed with him all his life, spreading effortlessly to include right-wing social democrats when they behaved in similar fashion.
Lenin in 1887, the year his brother was hanged.
After numerous petitions from his remarkable mother, the pension was restored. The family decided to leave Simbirsk for Kazan, where Lenin studied law at the university. His father had studied there too when the distinguished mathematician Nikolai Lobachevsky (immortalised by the Tom Lehrer song) had been rector of the university and intellectual life had flourished. It was different now. A deadening apathy enveloped the city and the university. Police spies roamed campuses throughout the country. The Ulyanov name was known to all, which meant that Lenin was watched closely from the minute he arrived at the university. His low-key participation in an orderly protest against oppressive conditions led to his first arrest. The gendarme escorting him to prison asked, ‘Why are you causing trouble, young man? You’re breaking your head against a wall.’
Lenin’s response was spirited and prescient: ‘The wall is rotten. One good shove and it will collapse.’ After four months (including three days in prison), he was expelled from the university.
What would he do? Avenge Sasha? The thought must have occurred to him, but he rejected it. Not because he had become a Marxist – he was still very far from all that. The book that changed him was not Capital, as official hagiographers would later maintain, but Chernyshevsky’s novel What Is to Be Done? In discussions of the book with fellow students and others, he was gradually coming to the conclusion that the sacrifice of his brother and the other five students hanged with him had been in vain. It was the last gasp of a party that was now dead. Not simply because of the repression, but also because the strategy had proved to be ineffective. No act of terror – not even the successful targeting of the tsar – had triggered any mass uprisings. A period of quiet had set in, a gloomy and melancholy time for the young and for the liberal intelligentsia. Nothing remotely progressive seeped through the long twilight of the 1880s. All the radical magazines had been suppressed. The newspapers of Moscow and St Petersburg were dull beyond belief. No critical voices could be published or heard. Time to read books. He devoured them.
Lenin had been banished to his hometown after the Kazan fracas, but since there was nobody left in Simbirsk, the authorities agreed that he could reside at his maternal grandparents’ farm in Kokushino, some thirty miles from Kazan. His sister, Anna, was sent there after her release from prison in St Petersburg and the rest of the family moved in as well. Memories of Sasha must have been strong. They had spent most of their summers here and Sasha, disgust written on his face, had once pointed out to his younger brother the enslaved Jewish boys being taken through the streets to unknown places, where they would be forcibly converted to the Orthodox faith. They all thought of Sasha, but did not talk about him much.
The aunts whispered to his mother that whatever else, young Vladimir should be actively discouraged from following in his brother’s footsteps. Some hope. It is not known exactly when he first came across a copy of Capital. The first Russian translation appeared in 1872. Sasha was reading it while on vacation in the summer of 1886, but Lenin at that time was absorbed in Turgenev and probably did not even notice the title. A dozen or so copies had been circulating in Kazan during his brief stint at the university. During the First World War, Karl Radek later claimed, Lenin told him that he had joined a circle of the People’s Will in Kazan, where he first heard of Marx from another student. Infected with Marxist measles at the time, this student, Mandelshtam, later became a liberal-conservative and joined the Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). This rings true. When asked about this period, his sister Anna, the most reliable source on his early life, would reply: ‘There wasn’t much to say anyway. He read, he studied, he argued.’
The family had received permission to move back to Kazan and Lenin renewed contact with some friends. Fearful of involving his family in any way, he invited none of these friends home. One can presume that none of them wished to visit him either, given the regular police surveillance of the Ulyanovs. Chetvergova, a veteran member of the People’s Will, lived in Kazan at the time. Lenin met her on a number of occasions and questioned her in detail about the organisation and its past. Reading Marx played a huge part in his own intellectual formation, but it did not become an immediate substitute for his People’s Will affinities. He never spoke about Sasha and was reticent when Sasha’s admirers attempted to engage him. Nor did he ever write about him. The only people with whom he talked about Sasha later and in some detail were his sisters, his wife Nadya Krupskaya and his close comrade and lover Inessa Armand. The tragedy left a deep scar inside him, which never disappeared. In silent homage he avidly read most of the books on Sasha’s shelves. Having ignored Chernyshevsky while Sasha was alive, he now read What Is to Be Done? and became extremely heated when it was criticised (which was often, because it did not work as literature). Valentinov, once a young Bolshevik, who became well acquainted with Lenin during his Swiss exile, recalled Lenin’s explosive response when he criticised the book:
Chernyshevsky’s novel
