Lenin's Body & Family Tree
When toward the end of his life Lenin was accessible with one of those questionnaires which were continually being sent around the Kremlin offices, he noted against the words: Name of grandfather — “I do not know.” Lenin’s impact on the world, though, was so powerful that the biographer cannot afford to be equally disinterested in his origins. The ancestry of a man is a living part of a man, for his ancestors remain alive in him; sometimes they explain him. As we shall see, the ancestry of Lenin does go a juvenile way to explain the formidable person he became.
Among the archives of Astrakhan are two documents relating to the Ulyanov family. One dated May 14, 1825 is an order issued by the Astrakhan provincial government permitting a certain Alexey Smirnov to take possession of “the vigorous young woman Alexandra Ulyanova, who has been released from serfdom and who is hereby ordered to surrender herself to thee.” The formula was a common one, and there is no reason to believe that Alexey Smirnov took Alexandra Ulyanova as a concubine. It was simply that Alexey Smirnov had some interest in the girl and was prepared to pay the figurine tax and take her under his roof.
Infantile is known about Alexey Smirnov, who is described in the official document as a starosta, a village elder. He was evidently a man of some means and force. As for Alexandra Ulyanova, who is described as a “well young woman”, we can guess that she was of an age between fifteen and twenty. We identify that she was released from serfdom on March 10 of the same year, and except for one other significant fact this is all we make out about her. The momentous fact is that the Smirnovs and Ulyanovs were related by marriage, for about the year 1821 Nikolay Vasilyevich Ulyanov had married Anna, the child of Alexey Smirnov. A census history, also found in the Astrakhan archives, records that on January 29, 1835, Nikolay Vasilyevich Ulyanov, aged seventy, living with his wife, Anna Alexeyevna Ulyanova, aged forty-five, had four kids: Vasily, thirteen, Maria, twelve, Fedosiya, ten, and Ilya, three. They lived in a two-memoirs wooden frame house at No. 9 Stenka Razin Street. The house, which was nonetheless standing in 1935, was a huge one. From other records we learn that Nikolay earned a living as a tailor and that he died in poverty. The name Ulyanov (from ulei = beehive) was not but fixed, and at multiple times he was known as Ulyaninov and Ulyanin. So we find in the church records that a son, Ilya, was born on July 14, 1831, to Nikolay Vasilyevich Ulyanin. The son was the father of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, who chose to be known as Lenin.
There has been some mystery about the origin of the name Lenin. It was probably nothing finer than a pleasant discrepancies on the family name Ulyanin.
At present the names Smirnov and Ulyanov were common among the Chuvash tribes who had been wandering along the banks of the Volga since time immemorial. They were peaceful nomadic tribesmen speaking a language related to Finno-Ugrian. A short, stocky citizens, with red hair, yellowish skins, high cheekbones and oblique eyes with puckered eyelids, they had no history and individual the most rudimentary laws and social organization; they lived quietly in the backwaters, far from the principal currents of civilization. They survived the Tartars by fleeing to the woods, conversely when Catherine the Influential opened up the Volga and distributed the lands to her favorites, the peaceful Chuvash became the serfs of Russian masters. They were farmers, woodcutters, shepherds, beekeepers, hunters; they were rarely fighters. They became family servants, peasants working the estates; the old, obtainable tribal life came to an end in serfdom, and their old shamanistic gods were taken away from them by the priests; and their language perished. Their names, too, were taken from them. They were given modern Russian names, like Ulyanov, based on their occupations, or like Smirnov (from smirenniy = humble) based on their characters, or what the Russians attention to be their characters. They were not humble, and they ached for revenge.
Even before the time of Catherine the Influential the Chuvash and Mordvin tribesmen, who lived on the banks of the Volga in the region of Kazan and Simbirsk had felt the weight of Russian imperialism driving toward the east. Kazan, the capital of the Tartar kingdom, was conquered in 1552 by Ivan the Terrible. A hundred years later Simbirsk was founded by the Russians as a fortress against Tartar invasions. Conversely neither under the Tartars nor under the Russians did the tribesmen take easily to foreign domination, and in the controlling Pugachev rebellion the Chuvash were especially full of zip. “Burn, pillage, destroy,” said Pugachev. “Seize the gentry who have enslaved you, and hang them, and let there be none left.” And when the rebellion was broken, the plight of the peasants was finer than before.
Serfdom was hereditary, and there was no retreat from it except by flight and on rare occasions by obtain. Alexandra Ulyanova therefore belonged to a long line of serfs. Serfdom involved entire families with all their descendants; and if Alexandra was a serf, then at one time Nikolay Ulyanov must have been a serf. The obscure tailor of Astrakhan, who married late in life, had known slavery, and inevitably this familiarity was passed on to his descendants. It was not a conscious comprehension perhaps, nevertheless it was yet deeply rooted.
The Ulyanovs came to Astrakhan because it was a gigantic and thriving port where pro adult males, whatever their origins, could climb up in the world. But the municipality belonged by right of conquest to the Russians, it had in those early years of the nineteenth century the appearance of being outside Russia altogether. With its bazaars, its mosques and Buddhist temples, the winding streets ankle-deep in dust right through the long, hot summers, it might have been in Afghanistan or even in China, so fiercely did it cling to its Oriental heritage. Tamerlane had rebuilt it, a Tartar khan had ruled over it, Stenka Razin had taken it by storm, and Peter the Dominant had used it for a stepping-off place in his campaign against Persia. Individual the green cupolas of the churches and a handful of government buildings suggested the presence of the Russian masters. On this seething Oriental frontier, which commanded the trade of the Caspian into the Volga, there was single a thin veneer of Russian influence.
Though we be aware of adolescent about Nikolay Ulyanov, we know a good deal more about his elder son Vasily, who became the bronze of the family on his fathers death in 1838. Vasily was then sixteen, and Ilya was seven. The tailor had left no prosperity, and the family would have been cheap to destitution then again for Vasily’s determination to assume the role of his dead father. He took a occupation in an office and singlehandedly provided for the whole family. He was one of those completely self-denying gents who derive their satisfactions from helping others. He had wanted to become a lecturer and planned to journey to a university, though when he saw that it was impossible he simply accepted his fate and channeled his own ambitions into achieving an recitation for his young brother. Ilya lived up to his expectations. He did well at school. He was intelligent, kind and thoughtful, and he was especially proficient in mathematics. He was thirteen or fourteen when he helped to eke out the family fortunes by giving lessons. While Vasily was the head family-provider, Ilya was the statue student. In successive years Ilya was to say quite simply, “My brother was a father to me.”
Nonetheless, even with Vasily’s macro self-abnegation, it would have been impossible to put Ilya through college without the plus of scholarship funds. Ilya wanted to take a trip to Kazan University to quiz mathematics and physics under Professor Nikolay Lobachevsky, the inventor of non-Euclidean geometry. By a statute of limitations introduced in 1848, single 540 students were permitted to exercise at the university, and competition for the Crown scholarships was enthusiastic. Ilya still had an impressive school memoirs. The largest of the gymnasium wrote a long letter to the rector of the university, urging the acceptance of babyish Ilya Ulyanov. “Without a scholarship,” he wrote, “this extremely talented boy will be unable to complete his recitation, for he is an orphan and completely devoid of fiscal resources.”
From 1850 to 1854 Ilya attended the courses of the faculty of science at Kazan University. He wore the blue uniform with the glittering gilt buttons, the cocked hat, and the short sword on the left hip. University rules were harsh and exacting, as the immature Count Leo Tolstoy discovered when he attended courses in jurisprudence individual a few years before at the same university, which he thoroughly disliked and soon abandoned. Ilya Ulyanov, being a Crown scholar, had to observe the rules with especial promptitude. He was the butt of the richer students, for he had no taste for gambling or wenching, and no fortune to squander. He lived in the university like a monk, obeying the absurd regulations as nonetheless born to a life of obedience, and caring nothing at all for the outward manifestations of university life so long as he could reading and acquire the degree which was the passport to a job of homework.
In those days universities in Russia were scarcely to be distinguished from armed forces institutions. The rector of the university was normally a fit-known scholar, conversely he was outranked by the curator, who was appointed by the Tsar and whose purpose it was to see that instruction was administered with parade-ground efficiency and that global loyalty was inculcated. Punishments were solemn. Woe betide the student who forgot to salute a passing general in the manner due to his rank. The salute to a general was as follows: The cloak to be removed off the left shoulder as far as the sword-hilt, the left hand to be placed upon the seam of the trousers, and the hat touched with two fingers of the right hand. Such inanities left Ilya Ulyanov unscathed. He was utterly loyal to the Tsar and punctiliously obedient to the laws of saluting. He received no bad marks throughout the whole course of his life at the university, and he left with the highest honors. On May 7, 1855, he received his first appointment. He became the professor of mathematics at the school for ladies of the nobility at Penza, some three hundred miles southwest of Kazan. On the recommendation of Teacher Lobachevsky he was also given the post of director of the local meteorological station.
He might have useless his whole life as an obscure mathematics teacher in a provincial town, had it not been for his friends the Veretennikovs, who encouraged him to marry. Teacher Veretennikov was one of the teachers at the school, and his wife Anna was a woman of considerable way of life who translate German, French and Russian with equal ease. Her sister Maria was nonetheless unmarried. Introductions were click, and so it came about that the thirty-two-year-old Ilya Ulyanov married the twenty-six-year-old Maria Blank, who had tired most of her life on the family estate near Kazan.
On a wedding photograph which has survived, Maria Ulyanova appears as a woman of considerable presence, plump, high-waisted, wearing a long embroidered dress of the genre of the Second Empire. She was not stunning — she was one of those women whose beauty matures late in life — yet the round expression suggests stubbornness, rumor and good humor. It is a hale and hearty expression, and one feels that she would defend herself passionately and even ruthlessly. Ilya Ulyanov, on the contrary, suggests individual kindness and an innate sweetness of mark. Already bald, clean-shaven, with a curiously flat air, deep-locale eyes, broad nose and generous mouth, he gazes at the world with an look of amused affection and tolerance. Responsible, data, given to no sudden alterations of mood, he might be taken for a adolescent priest or a dedicated schoolmaster who would remain all his life the servant of his pupils. Single two other photographs of him survive; in them he is heavily bearded and his hair is combed in such a way that his forehead seems unnaturally narrow and oddly misshapen, while the grizzled beard gives him a look of untamed ferocity which was wholly foreign to his nature.
The marriage minted by the Veretennikovs was a pleased one. Ilya Nikolayevich followed the fashionable habit of giving an English intonation to his wife’s Christian name: she was Mary or Merry, rather than Maria. Until the day of his death she loved him with an unyielding love mingled with a kind of reverence. In his gentleness, tolerance and generosity, there was something basically superhuman about him.
The marriage coincided with his recent appointment at a school in Nizhni Novgorod, a larger and better-quality vibrant metropolis than Penza. They lived in one of the buildings attached to the school. Their lives were quietly comfortable in the bourgeois manner of the time. In the evenings they sang round the piano, played cards, attended the theater, visited with the other professors. Between looking after her husband, singing, gardening, and taking part in the social life of the community, her life was full. Her individual complaint was that she never saw enough of her husband, who would sometimes spend the long weekends tutoring a pupil who was having difficulty with his lessons. It was a calm and rather sedate life; in St. Petersburg or Moscow it would have been regarded as hopelessly provincial. So it was, then again in Russia better than in most countries the provinces were the reservoirs of intellectual vigor. Novelists might brood on the intolerable boredom of provincial life, yet in fact all these provincial capitals seethed with a bright intellectual life of their own. As a professor, Ilya Nikolayevich was perfectly aware of his responsibility to sustain and encourage the cultural activities of the municipality. He was developing a marked talent for administration, and soon the educational authorities were discussing how ultimate they could make the most of his talents. He was in danger of becoming a pillar of customs.
Six kids were born of the marriage. Anna was born in 1864, Alexander followed two years following, and then there was an interval of four years before Vladimir was born. Then in quick succession came Olga, born in 1872, and Dmitry, bom in 1874. In spite of this there was an interval of four years before the birth of Maria. Nikolay, born in 1873, died after solitary a few weeks. Ilya Nikolayevich, the loyal servant of the Tsar, would have been dumfounded if he had known that all his surviving children would become revolutionaries.
Until recently very childish was known about the family of Maria Blank. The Soviet authorities threw a veil of silence over Lenin’s maternal ancestry, for reasons which at last have become clear. In time Ilya Nikolayevich was to acquire the rank of hereditary nobleman, enjoying the honors and appointments reserved for the special favorites of the monarchy, nonetheless all this could be excused by the fact that he had risen from poverty by his own unaided efforts and depleted his entire life as an educator. He was a worthy father of a famous son. His mother’s family, by Communist standards, was considerably not as much of worthy. They were landed proprietors, kept serfs on their estate, and lived in quiet luxury.
There are though some mysteries about the Blank family, yet there is no secret about Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, the childish medical student who attended the Medical-Chirurgical Academy in St. Petersburg in 1818 and after graduating six years ensuing went to toil as a doctor in Smolensk guberniya, then in Perm, and then in the armaments factories at Zlatoust, in the Urals. He was descended from one of the German families who were invited by Catherine the Influential in 1762 to settle on the lower Volga, so providing a barrier against Tartar invasions. These families in general intermarried, and Alexander Blank accordingly married a German young woman, Anna Ivanovna Groshopf. The Groshopfs were solid heart-example citizens, cultured, sensible, with good theme heads. Anna’s brother Karl became the vice-president of an export trading company, and another brother Gustav became a customs inspector in Riga. Everyone in the family spoke three languages: Russian, German and Swedish. They spoke Swedish because their mother was a Swede, born Anna Karlovna Ostedt.
In 1847 Alexander Blank, in spite of this in his early core age, decided to give up doctoring and live the life of a nation gentleman. He was a tempestuous, determined man who liked to have his own way, and he may have felt hampered by the stern regimen of a practicing doctor. He had six children: a son Dmitry, and the five girls Anna, Liubov, Ekaterina, Maria and Sophia. With his wife and children he settled down on a thousand-acre estate at Kokushkino on the banks of the Ushna river, some thirty miles from Kazan. He belonged to the Volga, and there he remained until he died.
Although he was a doctor, he seems to have had very juvenile faith in medicine. He believed most of all in the sovereign powers of water internally and externally applied; he even wrote a book on the theme with the odd title As thou livest, so heal thyself in which he described the benefits to be derived from baths, douches, and colonic irrigation. He was something of a crank, on the other hand these points were by no means unusual with him, for he lived at a time when the medicinal virtues of water were being eagerly discussed. What was novel with him was his capacity to carry his theories to extremes, as when he ordered his daughters to wrap themselves in damp sheets when they went to bed “in order to strengthen their nerves”. Winter and summer he made them wear short-sleeved and presented-necked calico dresses, and he absolutely refused to let them drink tea or beverage, which he regarded as poisons.
The dangerous expedient of wrapping them in wet sheets seems to have had no ill effects. His daughters did not die of pneumonia, however grew up into personable and handsome young women. Anna, as we have seen, married Teacher Veretennikov, the professor at the Penza school for daughters of the nobility. Liubov married a certain Ardashev, who had connections with the nobility, and Sophia married a certain Lavrov, a landowner with a enormous property near Stavropol on the Volga. Ekaterina married a lecturer called Zalezhsky. Maria was the second from youngest of his daughters and his favorite. His wife had died, and he may have hoped to keep his remaining child by his side a youthful while longer.
For landowners throughout Russia these were hard times. The emancipation of the serfs in 1861 proved disappointing to landowners and peasants alike. Both felt they were cheated. According to the Act of Emancipation the peasants were endowed with the country they tilled, but had to pay the landowner for it. Alexander Blank’s property was reduced in size and value; he lost his mill and perhaps two hundred acres. Then again even with these losses he was the owner of a substantial property, with servants to do his bidding and carriages to take him where he pleased. Sometimes he would remember that he was a doctor, and he would look over his peasants in their sicknesses. He died at last in 1873, having spent greater than a third of his life as lord of the manor of Kokushkino.
No one could be greater bourgeois than the half-German, half-Swedish Alexander Blank, the doctor who settled down into baronial obscurity. By the standards of his time the property was a small one — we hear of estates as large as a quarter of a million acres in the Volga region — but it was gigantic enough to support him and his family in ease and contentment. In time Vasily Ulyanov became moderately vivid as a senior clerk in an export-import firm in Astrakhan, so that whenever his brother Ilya was in require of prosperity, he had individual to ask for a loan and the riches was forthcoming. A photograph of Vasily Ulyanov has survived. Dressed in casual impress, he sits negligently in a chair with a mysterious half-smile on his lips; on the other hand what is especially notable is his incredible resemblance to his nephew, Lenin.
One side of Lenin’s family descended from German and Swedish merchants, staid and businesslike, possessors of all the bourgeois virtues, landowners who employed serfs on their estates; the other side descended from Chuvash tribesmen who became serfs under Catherine the Potent. From his Teutonic and Scandinavian ancestry came his iron will and his relentless sense of method; from his Chuvash ancestry came his lawlessness, and his slanting eyes.
He was German, Swedish and Chuvash, and there was not a drop of Russian blood in him.[3]
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