The Life of Lenin [antikvár]

I. ©wo BROTHERS LENIN was the founder of the Soviet state and the father of Soviet politics. Communist thinking and methods bear the imprint of his vivid, forceful personality. Bom April lo, 1870, Lenin died on January 21, 1924, at the age of fifty-three, childless, but leaving many ideological heirs and millions of political offspring throughout the world. There is a pretty baby picture of Lenin at the age of four, round-faced, with thick, curly blond hair, a faint smile, and deepset eyes. The Soviets have distributed it in millions of copies. Pavel Popovich took one with him as he entered his space ship in August, 1962, to orbit the earth forty-eight times. In April of the next year he presented the picture to the Central Museum of V. L Lenin in Moscow. Before the communist revolution, an icon of the Virgin or of Christ or a saint hung between candles in a high comer of the living room of many Russian families. Communists welcome the substitution of a portrait of Lenin lit by an electric bulb. "Lenin Is Always With Us," reads a frequent headline in the Soviet press. The word "Lenin" or "Leninist" attached to a policy or theory lifts it beyond dispute. A quotation from Lenin wins an argument. The Kremlin encourages Lenin-worship. It projects a carefully shaped image of Lenin on the Soviet mind. Lenin might have become a professor of economics, a successful lawyer, or a chess champion. Nothing in his ancestry, childhood, or adolescence offers a clue to his subsequent career as revolutionary and dictator. He was, however, a child of Russia—turbulent, violent—and the frait of a tree with long roots in her varied soil. The nationalist content of communism requires Lenin to be pictured as an ethnically pure Great Russian. The fact that he had non-Russian ancestors is therefore hidden away from all but the most curious. A 602-page official biography of Lenin written by P. P. Pospelov and eight other authors under the auspices of the Soviet Insritute of Marxism-Leninism and published in i960 in Moscow (Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, Biografiya) found space for only eight words about Lenin's ancestors: his patemal grandparents were "poor lower middle class people in Astrakhan"; his maternal grandfather was "a physician." The second, 1963, edition is equally uncommunicative. The information lay at the authors' fingertips. Marietta Shaginyan, a well-known Soviet vrater of Armenian origin, inspected crumbling local files and yellowed tax receipts and published an article in the November, 1937, issue of the Moscow magazine Novy Mir (New World), including facsimiles of some of the documents, which proves that Lenin's patemal grandfather was Nikolai Vasilievich Ulyanov, a poor tailor, probably a former serf, in the smelly fishing town of Astrakhan, where the Volga flows into the Caspian Sea. In his fifties, Nikolai Vasilievich, a Great Russian, married Anna Alexeyevna Smimov, the illiterate daughter of a Kalmuck. In all the vast 1