Tragedy struck the Ulianovs in 1887 when Lenin’s elder brother, Alexander, was arrested in St. Petersburg carrying a bomb with which, in a plot with friends, he intended to assassinate the Tsar. A passionate scientist, Alexander had shown no interest in politics until after he had been three years at St. Petersburg University. There he familiarized himself with the writings of Plekhanov and Marx and adopted an eclectic political ideology calling for the grafting on the program of the People’s Will (Narodnaia Volia) certain elements of Social-Democracy. According industrial labor a predominant role in the revolution, he accepted political terror as the means and the immediate transition to socialism as the objective. This peculiar amalgam of Marxism and Narodnaia Volia anticipated the program which Lenin would develop independently a few years later. Arrested on March 1, 1887, the sixth anniversary of the assassination of Alexander II, Alexander Ulianov was given a public trial and executed along with his co-conspirators. He conducted himself throughout with exemplary dignity.
Alexander’s execution, which occurred soon after the death of the elder Ulianov, had a profound effect on the family, which had known nothing of his revolutionary activity. But there is no evidence that it altered Vladimir’s behavior in any way. Many years later Lenin’s younger sister Maria claimed that on learning of his brother’s fate, Lenin exclaimed: “No, we will not go this way. We must not go this way.”2 Apart from the fact that Maria Ulianova was a mere nine years old when this alleged remark was made, it cannot be true, because when his brother was executed Lenin was entirely innocent of politics. The purpose of this invention is to suggest that already as a seventeen-year-old gymnasium student Lenin inclined to Marxism, which is at odds with the available evidence. Moreover, from family recollections it can be determined that the two brothers had not been close and that Alexander took strong objection to Vladimir’s rude manners and habitual sneer.
The striking fact about Lenin’s youth is that, unlike most of his contemporaries, he showed no interest in public affairs.3 The portrait which emerges from the pen of one of his sisters, published before the iron grip of censorship dehumanized Lenin, is that of an exceedingly diligent boy, tidy and punctilious—a type that modern psychology would classify as compulsive.4 He was a model student, earning excellent grades in nearly all subjects, behavior included, for which he was awarded gold medals year after year. He graduated at the top of his class. The scanty evidence at our disposal shows no trace of rebelliousness toward either his family or the regime. Fedor Kerensky, the father of Lenin’s future rival, Alexander, who happened to have been principal of the school which Lenin attended in Simbirsk, recommended him to the University of Kazan as a “reticent” and “unsociable” youth who “neither in school nor out of it gave his superiors or teachers by a single word or deed any cause to form of him an unfavorable opinion.”5 By the time he graduated from gymnasium in 1887, he held no “definite” political opinions.6 Nothing in his early biography hinted at a future revolutionary; rather, the indications were that Lenin would follow in his father’s footsteps and make a distinguished bureaucratic career. It is because of these traits that he was admitted to study law at Kazan University, from which his family’s police record would otherwise have barred him.
On entering the university, Lenin was recognized by fellow students as the brother of a celebrated terrorist and drawn into a clandestine People’s Will group. This organization, headed by Lazar Bogoraz, had made contact with like-minded students in other cities, including St. Petersburg, apparently with the intention of carrying out the deed for which Alexander Ulianov and his associates had been executed. How far its plans progressed and how much Lenin was involved is not possible to ascertain. The group was arrested in December 1887 following a demonstration to protest university regulations. Lenin, who was observed running, shouting, and waving his arms, was briefly detained. On returning home, he wrote a letter to the university announcing his withdrawal, but the attempt to forestall expulsion failed. He was arrested and expelled along with thirty-nine other students. Such savage punishment, typical of the methods which the regime of Alexander III used to stifle signs of independence or “insubordination,” kept the revolutionary movement supplied with ever fresh recruits.
