The Novel of Lenin

Chapter Two

1885-1893: The Death of the Brother, Marxist Circles, Nicholas II Ascends to the Throne

Vladimir is an adolescent when his older brother Aleksandr is arrested by the Tsarist authorities, judged, and hung in a square with four of his comrades. The event will mark Lenin for life.

We are in 1886. Vladimir's father dies of a cerebral hemorrhage, The child is now an adolescent, he is 16 and is reading Turgenev, the author of Fathers and Sons who has recently died not far from Paris. Vladimir sheds the cross that he had worn: if he still knows nothing of politics, he at least solves the question of all questions: life is lived on earth. His older brother, Aleksandr, has a few political ideas to work with. He joins what remains of Narodnaya Volya and, therein, its "terrorist faction," which he directs ideologically. The Tsar is dead, his heir is next on the list. Aleksandr makes the bombs, but the imperial police arrest him before his group can act. In court, he assumes full responsibility: he is hung on May 8, 1887, in a square with 4 of his comrades. He watches their final breaths one by one. He is 21. He dies at Shlisselburg, some 30 kilometers East of Saint Petersburg. Anna, their sister, is placed under house arrest. Their mother sinks into despair.

"The hanging of his older brother deeply shook Lenin," writes his biographer Jean-Jacques Marie in Lénine. Commentators have commented on this ad infinitum: should we detect in this tragedy the awakening of vengeance in a future Lenin? This is, in any case, the hypothesis of the Russian writer Lev Danilkin, who notes in his award-winning 2017 Lenin, Pantocrator of Solar Dust that Aleksandr's execution "is without a doubt at the origin of the neuroses" of the Bolshevik to be. A psychologizing hypothesis, to be sure. 8 years after the death of the amateur regicide, Vladimir would have confided that "My elder brother traced my path." We need to stick with the conditional tense. Only a few days after his brother's death, the young man still passes his exams with great success. He is decorated in gold. He is a brilliant, cold, strict, and friendless student. You don't talk with him for talk's sake.

In August, Vladimir leaves for Kazan to study law at the university. There, he is elected representative of a council. As the year comes to an end, he takes part in a modest rally against the ban on student clubs. He is arrested, accused of being the instigator, expelled from the establishment, and sent back to his mother and Anna in Kokushkino. That winter Vladimir hunts and skies; but above all he reads. In great quantities. Then he becomes bored. He pleads with the minister of public instruction to readmit him to the university: refusal. But the family is authorized to return to Kazan. Vladimir attends Marxist meetings and begins reading Capital. The first volume, at least, the only one translated at the time. It's quite successful in Russia. Marx died, ill, 5 years prior; he rests in a cemetery in North London and his friend Engels writes, in the preface to the 1888 English edition of the Manifesto that "the history of these class struggles forms a series of evolutions in which, nowadays, a stage has been reached where the exploited and oppressed class – the proletariat – cannot attain its emancipation from the sway of the exploiting and ruling class – the bourgeoisie – without, at the same time, and once and for all, emancipating society at large from all exploitation."

This growing interest in politics does not sit well with Vladimir's mother. She would prefer him to be a farmer in the village of Alakaevka where she has acquired land; this will fail. During this period his old Marxist companions are arrested. Vladimir keeps reading. He reads Marx and Engels, as well as peasant stories. He gives courses in Latin and Russian, does sports, swims, and attends a Marxism discussion circle. His existence is ordered. Nothing sticks out. Thick-headed, disciplined. He again requests to resume his law studies, this time remotely, but once more in vain. His mother insists. This time it works. The beloved child leaves for Saint Petersburg in the summer of 1890. The following November he is named first in his class. A liberal lawyer soon hires him as an assistant.

Russia is struck with famine. Drought hangs over the land, the regime continues to export grain and peasants rush to the city. However, famine is out of the question: the press is told to stick to the formula: "poor harvests." At first, the Tsar underestimates the disaster. The people eat raw flour and bad bread, hay destined for roofing goes back to the livestock. A charity plan is put into place, a princess donates 10,000 rubles, the State preaches to the peasantry, typhus and cholera strike. So thunders Tolstoy in a letter on the famine: "The population degenerates, the children die before their time, only that the wealthy gentlemen and merchants may be able to live their distinct lordly lives, with their palaces, dinners, concerts, horses, carriages, lectures, and so forth."

Vladimir does not intend to participate in such charitable works: charity is not justice. But there is more, notes the historian Nicolas Werth, according to whom the tragedy would have satisfied him. Citing a certain Beliakov, himself cited by a certain Heller: "Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov had the courage to come out and say openly that famine would have numerous positive results, particularly in the appearance of a new industrial proletariat, which would take over from the bourgeoisie [...] Famine, he explained, in destroying the outdated peasant economy, would bring about the next stage more rapidly, and usher in socialism, the stage that necessarily followed capitalism. Famine would also destroy faith not only in the Tsar, but in God too." Around 400,000 deaths will be reported.

In 1893, Lenin, under two borrowed names, facilitates two Marxist circles. His lodgings are spartan, his interlocutors recognize his seriousness. The following year, he publicly opposes a populist militant: no, assuredly no, there are no germs of communism in Russia to lean on. Everything remains to be constructed and it is only by overcoming capitalism, born in these lands, that communism will be achieved. He will continue this struggle against populism in May 1894, in his third work: "What the 'Friends of the People' Are and How They Fight Against Social Democrats." The former are populists; the latter, disciples of Marx, of which he is one. Vladimir, 24 years old, sets to methodically dismantle their "revolutionary" theories. And to do so, the young man admits to having to "wade through [the] filth."  His style is already fully deployed: cutting, mocking, brutal. One can almost hear his pen scratching the paper. It is urgent to convince the "educated representatives" of the working class of the pertinence of scientific–read Marxist–socialism, and, by international struggle, to march to the victory of communist revolution.

The year comes to an end; so does the Tsar. Alexander III's battered kidneys get the better of him. Nicholas II succeeds him and in his turn, swears that nothing will ever shake autocracy. Vladimir writes his first tract, which he pastes on the walls of a striking factory.


This text was originally published by L'Humanité in a special edition commemorating the centenary of Lenin's death. Translated from the French by Patrick Lyons.

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The Novel of Lenin

Chapter Three

1895-1900: Travels to Paris and Germany, the Creation of a Journal

At the turn of the century, Vladimir is authorized to travel. In Paris, he encounters Marx's son-in-law, Lafargue. Then he travels to Switzerland and Berlin. In January 1900, his exile ends, but he returns to Germany.

We are in 1895. Vladimir is finally authorized to travel. He heads to Switzerland where he meets Plekhanov. This offspring of the aristocracy had met Engels before sowing Marxism in Russia. Lenin has read and admired him. Together, they think about creating a Marxist review. Then Lenin is off to Paris. Here he meets Lafargue, Marx's son-in-law, and heads to Berlin after a treatment in Switzerland.  Of course, he is reading. His lodgings must imperatively be situated by a library. He returns to his home country in September, his Marxist readings hidden in the false bottom of his suitcase.

In Russia, the little working class has begun to raise its voice. Vladimir joins the offices of the brand-new League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Soon it is time to establish a journal, but the police put an end to these ambitions: the League's militants are imprisoned. In prison, Vladimir writes in invisible ink –with milk–, looks after his cell, does exercises, and concentrates on his next writing project. At the end of January 1897, he is condemned to 3 years of exile. Direction: eastern Siberia. He rents a room, bathes in the river, fishes, and hunts with passion. His family continues to support his financial needs; soon, a dog escorts him. Nadezhda Krupskaya joins him with his mother. The young Marxist with a lower nobility background had met him during a conference in Saint Petersburg in 1894. She too had joined the Union. They married in a church during the summer of 1897. In her Reminiscences of Lenin, she will write that: "Vladimir Ilyich was interested in every little detail that could help him to piece together a picture of the life and conditions of the workers, to find some sort of avenue of approach to them in the matter of revolutionary propaganda."

Together they struggled through the translation of a few English socialist texts and Lenin multiplied his articles. Under a pseudonym, he published two books. But exile torments him: he is painfully aware of his powerlessness. Especially as the Marxist world frows restless. Eduard Bernstein, the German translator of The Poverty of Philosophy, eminent theoretician of the German Social-Democratic Party, and executor of Engels' will, has published three articles in 1896 titled "Problems of Socialism," then, three years later, the book Evolutionary Socialism. What does he say? This, in substance: Marx was on the wrong track; capitalism will not collapse under the weight of its inner contradictions; the middle classes must no longer be neglected; the State can become the locus of struggle through universal suffrage. In sum: reform, rather than violent revolution. An upheaval, to be sure. Rosa Luxemburg doesn't hesitate to respond in articles that will become her celebrated Reform or Revolution? Bernstein is mistaken. Worse, it's pure opportunism ("revisionism," as it was called). "But now that it has shown its face in Bernstein's book, one cannot help exclaim with astonishment: 'What? Is that all you have to say?' Not the shadow of an original thought! Not a single idea that was not refuted, crushed, reduced into dust by Marxism several decades ago!"

Vladimir repeatedly demands that the book be sent to him. Then, once having read it alongside his spouse, hides none of his disdain. A cat comes to live with them and Vladimir's family laments that in his letters he tells them nothing of his day-to-day life. But he lacks this sort of spirit. What's important is work. Later, Gorki will say of Lenin that he was "A man of simple habits, a stranger to drinking or smoking, he was busy at his difficult and complicated work from morning till night and though quite unable to see to his own needs he kept a sharp eye on the well-being of his comrades." Finally, January 19, 1900 arrives: his exile is finished. The couple packs up 500 kilos of books and settles in Pskov. The police force him to. But he is certain that nothing can be done from within Russia. At the slightest move, he'll dive back in.

To unite the nascent protest movement, he needs a newspaper, but as soon as it is printed, it will be censored. Time to leave: he files a request with the authorities. Pleased with the idea of getting rid of such an important man, they accept. He leaves for Germany in July, where he meets with Plekhanov in the hope of working towards this union.

It is a deception. And a bitter one at that. Plekhanov is suspicious, irritable, intolerant, and authoritarian. On top of it all, he lapses into antisemitism. Never had Vladimir so respected a man; never, in leaving, had he been so wounded. "It shows him flexing his muscles for the first time, to become a leader in his own right. It taught him never to mix the personal and political aspects of his future alliances and quarrels – he learned to discipline the emotional side of his nature," writes the militant Trotskyist Tony Cliff in his Building the Party, Lenin 1893-1914 (Vol. 1). The century comes to a close and in Germany, Vladimir puts the final touches on the first issue of Iskra (The Spark). Its slogan? "From a spark a fire will flare up."

This text was originally published by L'Humanité in a special edition commemorating the centenary of Lenin's death. Translated from the French by Patrick Lyons.

The Source