Anatoly Lunacharsky’s Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is a documentary chronicle of the Bolshevik leader’s life, assembled in the late Soviet period by the historian Vasili Zverev from the vast day-by-day record compiled at the Marxism-Leninism Institute. Its method is cumulative rather than argumentative: dated entries, reminiscences by relatives and comrades, and editorial notes interlock to reconstruct Lenin’s career from his birth in Simbirsk in 1870 through the factional storms that followed the Second Party Congress. The book belongs to the tradition of Soviet commemorative scholarship—the first issue marked the 120th anniversary of Lenin’s birth—and it reads as much as a portrait of a temperament as a record of political events.
From Simbirsk to the Second Congress
A Life That Made an Epoch
The volume opens as a documentary chronicle of Lenin’s “brilliant, intense and eventful, dramatic” life, assembled by the historians of the Marxism-Leninism Institute from their twelve-volume Biographical Chronicle, which recorded hundreds of thousands of facts year by year, month by month, even hour by hour. The introduction insists that no figure in world history has drawn such contradictory verdicts, from admiration to fierce hostility, yet contemporaries and later generations agree on the uniqueness of the man. Gorky is quoted: the world lost a personality who “embodied genius more strikingly than any other great man of his day.” Great politicians, the argument runs, are bound to past and future alike, and a life that “constituted an epoch of revolutionary activity” cannot be consigned to oblivion, however much one disputes its ideas. To know Lenin one must see not only the intellectual legacy but the man in everyday life—his modesty bordering on asceticism, his iron will, his tenderness as son, husband and brother, the inconveniences of emigration and homesickness. The editors single out the entry recording that before September 14, 1888, the eighteen-year-old wrote to Chernyshevsky, “patriarch of Russia’s socialist thought,” a letter that determined much of his future course. Lenin was never a solitary hero: he stood at the heart of events, tied to Russia by a thousand threads even abroad, and the reminiscences woven into the chronicle—by his sisters Anna and Maria, his brother Dmitri, his wife Krupskaya—are treated as genuine historical documents.
Simbirsk, April 1870
The first issue opens in a sleepy provincial town in April 1870. The reform of 1861 lies nine years past; banks finance industry and railways; capitalism and the industrial proletariat grow. Chernyshevsky is in his sixth year of penal servitude in Siberia; Herzen died in England three months earlier; within two years a Russian translation of the first volume of Capital will appear. On April 22 a son, Vladimir, is born to Ilya Ulyanov, inspector of primary schools of Simbirsk Province, and his wife Maria—a household of mutual trust that reveres the humanists, where music fills the evenings and light burns late in the father’s study. The calm is a lull before a storm. The raznochintsi lead the movement, blaming the people’s poverty on capitalization and seeking to save Russia from capitalism through the rural commune, held to be the future socialist cell; peasants are deemed “socialists by their very nature.” Their attempts to ignite peasant rebellion fail, and peasant inertia drives some toward individual terrorism, though world experience refutes it. Those Narodnik decades were not wasted: they prepared the ground for Marxism, counted on the toiling masses, built secret networks—the largest, Narodnaya Volya—and formed a type of revolutionary combining vigor, staunchness and secrecy. Lenin himself, writing in 1920, said Russia achieved Marxism through “the seekings and vacillations, the errors and disappointments of revolutionary thought in Russia,” through “unparalleled torment and sacrifice.”
A Brother’s Execution
Lenin first took Capital in hand at sixteen and decided to devote his life to overthrowing the existing order. Then tragedy broke in: his beloved elder brother Alexander, who had reached the crossroads between Narodnaya Volya and Marxism, read Capital, accepted Marx’s path and conducted political classes among workers, was arrested for plotting to assassinate the tsar and executed at twenty-one. The soil was not ready for Social-Democratic work—the few industrial workers were disunited and backward, and tsarist oppression answered contact with the people by prison or Siberian exile—so people of honor sought to break down the walls of autocracy directly. Alexander left the university, though certain to become a professor, and died a hero’s death; the halo of his martyrdom lighted Vladimir’s path. In the questionnaire of the Tenth Party Congress he recorded: “1892-1893. Illegal Social-Democratic circles in Samara.” By the mid-1880s Marxism was a major trend while Narodism faced ideological crisis, and Plekhanov’s illegal works—he organized the Emancipation of Labor group in 1883, the first Russian Marxist—enhanced confidence.
Reading and the Break with Religion
Krupskaya recalls that Vladimir read and reread Turgenev and Tolstoy, loved the classics, and later, once the Bolsheviks held power, charged the state publishing house with reprinting them cheaply. His photograph album held relatives, old revolutionaries sentenced to penal servitude, and pictures of Zola, Herzen and several of Chernyshevsky. He loved What Is to Be Done? despite its naive literary level, and Krupskaya marveled at how thoroughly he read it and what fine nuances he noted. Meshcheriakov remembers that when selecting economics books to take abroad he also packed Nekrasov and Goethe; he adored Pushkin. Essen recalls him saying of his favorites—Saltykov-Shchedrin, Nekrasov and above all Chernyshevsky—”Here is real literature which teaches, leads and inspires,” and that one summer he read What Is to Be Done? five times, finding new thoughts each time. The chronicle records that in summer he first saw Capital, brought home by Alexander during the holidays. Before January 12, 1886, a guest told his father the children were poor church-goers and should be given the birch; infuriated, Vladimir ran out, tore off his cross and threw it down. On January 12 his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage; on March 1 Alexander was arrested, and Lenin asked a family acquaintance to help prepare his mother for the news.
School-Leaving Medal and Kazan University
In April 1887 his school essay “The Reasons for the Welfare of the People’s Life” discussed the oppressed classes, and principal F. M. Kerensky—father of the future head of the Provisional Government—asked which classes he meant. On May 8 Alexander and his comrades Shevyrev, Osipanov, Generalov and Andreyushkin were hanged at dawn in the courtyard of the Schlisselburg prison; Lenin learned of it before May 10. At the beginning of June he sought out Ivan Chebotarev, his brother’s fellow student, to ask about Alexander’s last days and his bearing in court. On June 10 he received his school-leaving certificate and gold medal, and before mid-June decided on the law department of Kazan University. Dmitri Ulyanov recalled schoolmates puzzled by the choice, seeing law only as career-making; Marx, too, had chosen to study law, and not by accident. On August 13 he enrolled, on August 25 began attending lectures, and by autumn had joined a revolutionary students’ circle the police called “a coterie of an extremely pernicious trend.” Elected his club’s representative to the university council of student clubs, he took part on December 4 in a meeting in the assembly hall supporting Moscow students against the reactionary statutes of 1884 and the circular of June 18, 1887, barring the children of “coachmen, lackeys, cooks, washerwomen, petty shopkeepers and people of this type” from secondary schools. When it ended about four o’clock, Lenin was among the first to lay down his student’s card; the inspector’s list of 153 participants marked those to be expelled, and entry No. 139 read: “Ulyanov, Vladimir Ilyich.”
Olga, Samara, and the Defense of Peasants
Little is known of Olga, yet she was Vladimir’s closest companion of childhood and youth, a year and a half younger but not behind him: at eighteen she spoke German, French, English and Swedish, read widely, wrote abstracts of serious books, began Capital and commanded mathematics, leaving her books only for music. On May 10 Lenin, with his mother and close friends, buried her at Volkovo Cemetery in St. Petersburg, and on May 17 left for Samara with his sister Maria. In September he went to St.
Prison as a Workshop
Lenin met his preliminary detention as a working interval rather than a rupture. He had already mapped out the study of the Russian economy, the formation of a capitalist market, and commodity-money relations, and he set about it inside his cell. At the same time he kept the League of Struggle in view, corresponding with comrades on the outside, drafting two leaflets and the booklet On Strikes, pressing for a Party congress, and preparing a draft Party programme with an explanatory commentary. The authorities never managed to cut him off from the country’s economic and political life or to break his will. After more than fourteen months, on 13 February 1897, he was handed “His Majesty’s order”: three years of exile to East Siberia under police surveillance, to be served at Shushenskoye, a village long accustomed to receiving undesirables, going back to participants in the December 1825 uprising who had lived there in the 1830s.
Shushenskoye and the Party Newspaper Idea
Shushenskoye was a large village of dirty, dusty streets out on the steppe, six hundred kilometres from the railway, with mail taking thirteen or fourteen days. Lenin’s relentless energy carried him through. He opened a wide correspondence with exiled Social-Democrats, wrote articles and reviews—thirty over three years—translated foreign books, and finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia, which he had begun in prison. Nadezhda Krupskaya, who had agreed in St. Petersburg to marry him, joined him early in May 1898 and brought news of the Minsk congress that March which had proclaimed the RSDLP. The elected Central Committee was arrested almost at once, leaving the Marxist organizations disunited. Worse, “economism” was spreading—the doctrine that the workers’ struggle should be confined to economic demands while political activity was left to “liberal-opposition elements.” Lenin answered that this abandoned the fusion of the working-class movement with Marxism and the building of a single political organization of the Russian working class. A Party newspaper, he concluded, was indispensable: a collective propagandist, agitator and organizer, a conductor of revolutionary ideas, a rallying point for like-minded Social-Democrats, and the chief means of reviving the Party.
Release, Pskov, and the Turn Abroad
In January 1900 the Police Department informed Vladimir Ulyanov that his exile was over, while barring him from capital and university cities and the major industrial centres. He chose Pskov, close to St. Petersburg and linked to both capitals by direct rail. Back from Siberia he made contact with Marxists in Ufa, Yaroslavl, Samara, Astrakhan and Smolensk, sharing his master plan. Police persecution, surveillance, constant arrests and the absence of political freedom convinced him the newspaper could only be produced outside Russia. In July 1900 he went abroad.
Testimony from Prison and Exile
Anna Ulyanova-Yelizarova remembered prison conditions as comparatively easy: food parcels three times a week, book parcels twice a week examined by court clerks who were evidently careless, monthly journals allowed, and a large donated prison library. Lenin meant to gather material for The Development of Capitalism in Russia, and she carried armfuls of books to his cell. Dmitri Ulyanov recalled him finishing a rough copy during fourteen months of solitary confinement; told his case was concluded, he exclaimed, “Too early! I haven’t yet collected all the material I need!” Gleb Krzhizhanovsky noted the leaflets and the strike booklet—unpublished, because the Narodnaya Volya secret press was discovered—and marvelled at the speed with which Lenin absorbed books. Krupskaya described the plan for her and Apollinaria Yakubova to stand on Shpalernaya Street so he might glimpse them at exercise; Yakubova could not come, Krupskaya went alone for several days, and the scheme failed. Krzhizhanovsky called Lenin’s letters a “moral tonic.”
The February Days of 1897
Before 25 November the St. Petersburg League of Struggle published his prison-written leaflet “To the Tsarist Government.” On 29 January came the imperial order exiling him to East Siberia under open police surveillance. Released on 14 February, he stayed in St. Petersburg with his mother until the evening of the 17th. In those days the League held conferences at Radchenko’s Vyborg flat and Martov’s flat on Nevsky Prospekt, where arrested “old” members and unarrested “young” ones argued fiercely over “economism”; Lenin sharply attacked the young members’ incipient opportunism. Anna Ulyanova-Yelizarova described the debate as a duel between Lenin, backed by the old timers, and Yakubova, who held that the newspaper should be a workers’ organ written by the workers themselves—she was moved to tears. On 14 February Lenin declared his love for Krupskaya in an invisible-ink letter to her prison. Leaving on the 17th by way of Moscow, he spent 18–23 February in the Rumyantsev Museum reading room, taking Maria Ulyanova along to copy extracts, and left Moscow by the Kursk railway on the 23rd with Dmitri seeing him off. In March he reached Krasnoyarsk, met political exiles, used the city library, read journals and went sightseeing. From 9 March to 30 April he worked in the merchant G. Yudin’s private library; on 4 April he met Vaneyev, Krzhizhanovsky, Martov and Starkov at the station, and on 11 April the Yenisei Governor placed him under police surveillance.
Minusinsk, Philosophy, and the “Credo”
Late in 1898 The Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats appeared in Geneva. On 24 December/2 January Lenin and Krupskaya travelled to Minusinsk, where exiled Marxists from the surrounding villages gathered to see in the New Year at the house of Krzhizhanovsky and the Starkovs. Lepeshinsky recalled the gatherings at Minusinsk and at Yermakovskoye, where Lenin was the liveliest and most cheerful of them; much attention went to Rabochaya Mysl, whose “young” economists bordered on lunacy. The winter’s best entertainment was skate racing on the frozen river, and Lenin was a fine skater. He corresponded with the exiled F. V. Lengnik on philosophy, opposing subjective idealism and defending Marx and Engels in letters Lepeshinsky said were as large as treatises; Lengnik, drawn to Hume’s scepticism and Kant, was gently but firmly shown that there can be no limit to human knowledge, and after a few letters abandoned his idealist philosophers. Lenin wrote to Martov that Rabochaya Mysl ignored revolutionary tasks and that the “young” members of the League Abroad attacked the Emancipation of Labor group; he drafted “A Note on the Question of Market Theory.” In February–March Silvin stopped at Shushenskoye and was given Rabochaya Mysl, the Manifesto of the First Congress and Tasks of the Russian Social-Democrats to read, with economics books recommended. Kurnatovsky and Silvin visited, and Lenin set them calculating for his factory-statistics review. The Development of Capitalism in Russia appeared under the pen-name Vladimir Ilyin. He wrote to his mother in Podolsk wanting to see her, planning the trip for the second half of May, and noted Yelizarov’s chess win over Chigorin.
In April–May he corrected the Moscow Committee’s May Day leaflet, learned of the November 1898 split at the League’s first congress caused by the economists’ growth, and in a letter to Potresov sharply criticised S. N. Bulgakov, the “legal Marxist” who seemed to criticise Kautsky while revising Marxism; he also explained “The Heritage We Renounce.”
The London Printshop and the Reading Room
Lenin’s London years were practical before they were doctrinal. He negotiated with Harry Quelch, editor of Justice, the central organ of the British Social-Democratic Federation, over the use of its printshop for Iskra. On April 8, signing himself Jacob Richter, he wrote to the director of the British Museum requesting a reading-room ticket to study the agrarian question; by April 12 the notification arrived that a six-month ticket could be issued once he presented it to the reading-room attendant. The machinery of exile—false names, borrowed presses, library cards—was already second nature.
On April 22 he added a postscript to Krupskaya’s letter to Pskov about setting up a staging post at Vardo in Norway for smuggling illegal literature into Russia, thanked the Pskov comrades for statistics books, and asked for material on land evaluation in Vladimir Province. The next day he wrote to Krzhizhanovsky in Samara suspecting that Dan, Iskra‘s delegate to a Social-Democratic conference in Belostok, had been arrested. He proposed going underground at once and named the main task: forming an organizing committee for the Second Congress, with Iskraist support secured from local committees, especially in central and southern Russia and the Urals. On April 25 he wrote to his mother in Samara hoping she would visit, recommending the most convenient route, and asking whether she had corresponded with Krupskaya in St. Petersburg.
Learning English, Learning London
After April 27, Lenin and Krupskaya took English lessons from Mr. Raymond, a publishing-house employee, Mr. Williams, a clerk, and Mr. Young, a worker, giving Russian lessons in return. Krupskaya remembered translating the Webbs at Shushenskoye without ever having heard spoken English; Lenin had been horrified at her pronunciation. In London they understood nothing and were understood by no one. They attended meetings and watched the speakers’ mouths, and Lenin found two Englishmen through an advertisement for language exchange; in time he learned the language fairly well. The editor’s footnote records them at Hyde Park debates, in museums—especially the museum of the 1848 revolution—in public houses, reading rooms, churches, notably Seven Sisters Church, in workers’ districts including Whitechapel, and in the suburbs of Primrose Hill and Highgate Cemetery, where they paid homage at Karl Marx’s grave.
The Draft Programme and the Move to Brittany
After May 8, Lenin read Ivan Radchenko’s letters from Samara and Pskov to Iskra‘s editorial board on distributing the paper and its literature and on contacts with agents. Radchenko wrote of badly needing copies of the latest issues and of What Is To Be Done?, which he said carried on an immense, splendid evolution. On June 1, Iskra No. 21 published the draft RSDLP programme drawn up by the Iskra and Zarya editorial board. On June 13 or 14 Lenin left London for Paris; from the second half of June until July 12 he lived at Loguivie in Brittany with his mother and sister Anna. After June 26 he received Martov’s letter from Paris with the text of the foreign department’s proposals to the Russian Organizing Committee for convening the Second Congress. On July 3 he wrote to Radchenko in St. Petersburg urging that workers themselves write to them not only for publication but to exchange ideas and keep contact and mutual understanding; he asked the workers’ opinion of What Is To Be Done? and discussed uniting the St. Petersburg organization along Iskra principles and the composition of the Russian organizing committee. On July 12 he left Loguivie for London.
Building the Nucleus
On August 2 Lenin held a conference of Iskraists in London representing the St. Petersburg Committee, Iskra‘s Russian organization, and the Northern Workers’ Union, forming an Iskra-oriented nucleus of the organizing committee for the Second Congress. On September 1 he wrote to his mother asking whether her return had been tiring and noting that Anna had sent photographs of his brother Alexander, which arrived intact. Between September 1 and 11 he wrote “A Letter to a Comrade on Our Organizational Tasks,” developing the plan for building the Party. On September 3, replying to the Southern Worker group, he stressed building an all-Russian organization to prepare “the ideological unity of committees and the practical organizational unity of the Party,” recommended a leaflet or statement in Iskra defining the group’s position, and advised against hurrying a local newspaper since all forces must concentrate on publishing Iskra. Krupskaya recalled the “Letter to Yerema”—better known as the “Letter to a Comrade”—as exceptionally important: it strengthened the worker element, ensured workers shared in deciding urgent policy questions, and broke down the wall the adherents of Rabocheye Delo had erected between worker and intellectual. On September 14 he wrote to his mother about her health and winter plans, noting he spent much time in libraries. That month he talked with Ivan Babushkin, who had escaped from prison in Ekaterinoslav and reached London at the beginning of September, with Plekhanov present from Geneva, about the immediate tasks of Iskra organizations in Russia; Lenin asked Babushkin to write his reminiscences. Krupskaya remembered Babushkin as an experienced, self-thinking revolutionary familiar with every type of working-class organization.
The Congress and the Split
At the Second Congress Lenin sat through the evening sessions, took detailed notes on the debate over the first clause of the Party Rules, and delivered a long speech setting out his principle of party construction: better that ten who do the work should not call themselves members—real workers do not hunt after titles—than that one who only talks should have the right and opportunity to be one. Martov opposed requiring each member to support the Party line through personal participation in one of its organizations. Lenin voted name-by-name against Martov’s formulation, and his own was defeated by a majority of Martovites, “economists” and Bundists. Krupskaya recalled the dispute as bitterly acrimonious; everyone with a grudge against Iskra, Plekhanov and Lenin fanned it into a fundamental issue. In early August, when a “center” delegate complained of the oppressive atmosphere, Lenin answered that the congress was splendid—a free and open struggle, opinions stated, shades brought out, groups shaped, hands raised, decisions taken, a stage passed. The delegate stared in perplexity; they were talking in different languages.
On August 4, during the discussion of national organizations, Lenin voted with the majority against the Bund clause claiming to be the sole representative of the Jewish proletariat; the Bund delegation withdrew and left the congress. He spoke against the “economists” Martynov and Akimov’s attempt to reopen accepted Rules; their walkout shifted the balance toward the firm Iskraists. Krupskaya noted that Lenin moved for a three-man editorial board, having told Martov and Potresov beforehand; Martov became convinced the idea was aimed at him, and Akselrod and Zasulich were greatly upset. Lenin’s nerves were keyed up; in London he had stopped sleeping altogether.
On August 7 he was elected to the Central Organ editorial board with Plekhanov and Martov. He welcomed a “compact majority” and insisted on immediately electing the Central Committee; the congress declined Martov’s proposal to postpone it, and Lenin voted by secret ballot for the majority’s list. His adherents became the Bolsheviks, his opponents the Mensheviks. Krupskaya observed that the rift appeared halfway through and deepened, though no serious differences had yet surfaced; many blamed Plekhanov’s tactlessness and Lenin’s vehemence and ambition, missing the essence by fixing on personalities. Between August 7 and 10 Martov refused to join the new board, and Lenin asked delegates to talk with him.
The Man Behind the Chronology
What distinguishes the book from a bare timeline is its insistence that Lenin cannot be understood through doctrine alone. The Introduction argues that one must know not only his intellectual legacy and convictions but what he was like in everyday life and with others, and the reminiscences are chosen to serve that end. Krupskaya, his wife, remembers him reading and rereading Turgenev and Tolstoy, adoring Pushkin, and later, once the Bolsheviks held power, ordering the state publishing house to reprint the classics cheaply. His photo album held pictures of old revolutionaries sentenced to penal servitude alongside Zola and Herzen. Essen recalls him saying of Chernyshevsky’s What Is to Be Done?—a novel he read five times in a single summer—”Here is real literature which teaches, leads and inspires.”
The same concreteness governs the portrait of his character. The Introduction speaks of modesty bordering on asceticism, an iron will, and tenderness as son, husband and brother, set against the inconveniences of emigration and homesickness. In Shushenskoye, the Siberian village where he served his exile, he skated races on the frozen river and was, by Lepeshinsky’s account, the liveliest and most cheerful of the exiles. In Munich he lived without a residence permit, took his midday meals at a German woman’s house, and made tea in a tin cup he washed and hung on a nail. The chronicle’s wager is that such details are not trivia but the texture of a life that “constituted an epoch of revolutionary activity.”
The Revolutionary as Organizer
Cutting across the whole record is a single preoccupation: organization. The book traces it from the small illegal circles of Samara, where the young Lenin set himself the task of arming Marxist theory with statistical data on Russian industry and agriculture, through the St. Petersburg League of Struggle, where he demanded that intimate study circles give way to agitation among the broader proletarian masses. In prison he refused to be isolated, writing leaflets and a booklet on strikes, corresponding with comrades outside, and completing the rough draft of The Development of Capitalism in Russia—exclaiming, when told his case was concluded, “Too early! I haven’t yet collected all the material I need!”
Exile sharpened the same instinct. Confronted with the “economists,” who wished to limit the workers’ struggle to economic demands and leave politics to liberal opposition, Lenin answered with the plan for a party newspaper published abroad—a collective propagandist, agitator and organizer, in his formulation, and the scaffolding for a party. The notes follow the plan through its execution: the negotiations with Plekhanov’s Emancipation of Labor group, the move of the editorial board to London, the smuggling of Iskra in double-bottomed suitcases, the English lessons taken in exchange for Russian ones. The Second Congress of 1903, where the party at last emerged from underground to state its goals openly, is the hinge of the whole narrative. There the dispute over the first clause of the Party Rules—whether a member must personally participate in one of the party’s organizations—split the delegates into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and the book treats the split not as a squabble over wording but as a contest over whether the party would be a disciplined whole or a loose association of groups free to ignore the rules of joint work.
A Life That Became a Standard
The Introduction makes a large claim for its subject: that great politicians are bound to past and future and set a standard by which later generations gauge their actions, and that one may dispute Lenin’s ideas and actions but cannot consign to oblivion a life of such scale. It quotes Gorky’s judgment that in Lenin the world lost a personality who embodied genius more strikingly than any other great man of his day. The chronicle’s own answer to the disputes is characteristically documentary—hundreds of thousands of facts recorded year by year, month by month, even hour by hour, so that the search for theoretical truths, the tactical mistakes, the victories and defeats, the hope and despair all stand on the record together. Whether or not a reader shares the editors’ reverence, the book’s method makes its case in the accumulation: a life reconstructed at the resolution of days, offered as evidence that the man and the epoch cannot be separated.
