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Read "Lenin: Power and Love" (2)
Continued by Victor SebeschenLenin, Power and Love.The following are some of the memorable passages from the
Lenin's origins - his father and wealthy family background
The last official biography of Lenin in the Soviet Union, published in the 1950s, describes his father Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov as coming from "the poor lower middle class of Astrakhan. Here, more is hidden than revealed. Lenin's paternal grandmother, Anna Alexeyevna Smirnov, was an illiterate Kalmyk woman of Central Asian origin, and her racial origins were clearly visible in her face. Most descriptions of Lenin's appearance mention his "Mongolian eyes" and high cheekbones, but the Soviets systematically concealed information about his grandparents. This would not have fit the image of the founder of Bolshevism. The founder had to be only a great Russian.
Hakusuisha, Victor Sebeschen, translated by Motohiro Miura and Tsukasa Yokoyama, Lenin: Power and Love, p46
In order to create an idealized image of Lenin, there was deliberate cover-up and falsification by the Soviet Union in the former biography of Lenin. A legend was created that Lenin came from a poor family, so any facts that did not conform to this legend were inconvenient information.
This quote alone is a little confusing, so I'm going to use H. Carrère-Dancorse's about Lenin's father.What Was Lenin?"I will refer to the biography of Lenin was born in 1870, the son of father Ilya and mother Marya of the Ulyanov family.
Contrary to what the legend tells us, young Ulyanov's home is neither poor nor working class. The house in which he grew up was a spacious and splendid one, with two floors, a sign of relative prosperity. A number of servants were in his service. This was just the normal way of life for the head of a family who had been appointed to the coveted post of math teacher and then optician at a public school in the Simbirsk region.
Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, the father of the future Lenin, has long been used as the basis for attributing the hero of the October Revolution to a serf background. It is true that his great-grandfather was a serf named Vasily Ulyanov, but he was emancipated much earlier than the reforms of 1861 (emancipation of serfs). He went to live in town, and his descendants further inherited the rise in social status that had thus begun.
His son Nikolai Vasilyevich ran a tailor shop in Astrakhan. His grandson, Ilya Nikolayevich, Lenin's father, studied mathematics at Kazan University, became a professor, as mentioned above, and then a general inspector, eventually rising to the position of State Counselor, thus attaining the status of hereditary aristocrat. His rise from serf to decorated aristocrat in just three generations was truly rapid.
Fujiwara Shoten, H. Carrère-Dancourse, translated by Harumi Ishizaki and Hideo Higashimatsu, "What was Lenin?" p. 22-23
Some line breaks have been made.
Lenin later became an enemy of the capitalists (bourgeoisie) and aristocrats and started a revolution, but it is hard to say that Lenin himself was a wealthy aristocrat. This is the same with Marx and Engels. They, too, came from wealthy families. This seems to me to be an important point in considering Lenin.
And Lenin's mother was also a religious Protestant, also from a wealthy landowner.
Nothing in Vladimir Ulyanov's childhood or adolescence foreshadowed his becoming one of the greatest rebels of all time. He grew up in a happy home, solidified by a loving family with solid bourgeois comforts, if not conspicuously wealthy. He was taught the importance of hard work, thrift, diligence, and education, and his parents demonstrated this firsthand.
Hakusuisha, Victor Sebeschen, translated by Motohiro Miura and Tsukasa Yokoyama, Lenin: Power and Love, p51
Vladimir Ulyanov is Lenin's real name.
It would have been natural that the Ulyanov children would have considered themselves privileged, since they were thus ensconced in a world where seemingly immovable social and economic status fixed the position of the individual in society. In the classical middle schools of Simbirsk, the children benefited from the prestige of their fathers. Their families were harmonious. A caring mother and a generous father. The father was a liberal thinker when it came to education, which encouraged the children to develop their abilities.
Fujiwara Shoten, H. Carrère-Dancourse, translated by Harumi Ishizaki and Hideo Higashimatsu, "What was Lenin?" p. 25
Lenin (Vladimir) grew up in a wealthy, warm family and received a liberal education. This is said to have been the reason why all the children of the Ulyanovs, including Lenin, excelled in their grades.
How did a revolutionary named Lenin come from a family seemingly unrelated to the revolution? It was the execution of his brother, which I will discuss next.
Execution of his brother Sasha for plotting to assassinate the emperor.
In 1887, when Lenin was 17 years old, his brother Sasha was arrested and executed for plotting to assassinate the Czar.
Sasha was the eldest son of the Ulyanov family and was a serious and outstandingly intelligent man. No one in the family trusted him enough to imagine that he was behind an assassination attempt.
Vladimir, Sasha's younger brother, who was now 17 years old, was taking a geography exam the day the hanging was carried out. No one was informed of the execution until late the next day. Until the very end, his mother believed that even in the worst case scenario, the death penalty would be commuted to life in prison.
Like everyone else in the family, Vladimir had no idea that the serious Sasha had become so deeply and dangerously involved in radical political activity. Vladimir's main interest seemed to be the natural sciences, and he seemed destined for an illustrious academic career. His mother and sister Anna knew that Sasha was a serious reader of books on the history of political economy, but they did not know that he was involved in the movement as an activist or that he had friends who were activists.
Noble Sasha was almost deified by her brothers and sisters. She had a dreamy, romantic demeanor, a refined, delicate face, and was often pensive. Even as a child she was bored good, quiet, and self-disciplined.
He was a great student, hardly letting go of his books even when eating. In his final year at the Gymnasium, his bedroom became a laboratory. When he went out into the countryside, he devoted himself to collecting insect specimens. He loved insects. In his earnest attempt to look good, there was something terribly moralistic and pious about him.
She had no sense of humor, and moreover, she seemed to have none of the humorous spirit that had filled her brother Vladimir. When asked by one of her sisters who her ideal beauty would be, Sasha replied in all seriousness, "Oh, it would be someone like my mother.
Hakusuisha, Victor Sebeschen, translated by Motohiro Miura and Tsukasa Yokoyama, Lenin: Power and Love, p64-65
Some line breaks have been made.
His brother, whom he respected, had been killed in an assassination attempt on the Czar... He stood up for the world, but the Czar mercilessly executed him without pardon. It is no wonder that Lenin felt hatred for his esteemed brother, who had been taken away from him. The execution of his brother cast a dark shadow over the Ulyanov family.
The aftermath of his brother Sasha's execution - how Lenin became a revolutionary
The Ulyanovs were ostracized by the bourgeois society of Simbirsk. The town dignitaries who attended Vladimir's father's funeral about a year ago no longer come to the house. The old friends of the family who used to come to play chess with Ilya (and with Vladimir after Ilya's death) no longer come.
This instilled in Vladimir a bitter and sometimes uncontrollable hatred of liberals and "middle-class visionary social reformers," a hatred that remained with him until his death.
The bourgeois ...... people have always been traitors and cowards," he would later repeat, as if it were a cliché. Politics is a personal matter-this was a personal matter. A young man who had rarely thought about politics was radicalized overnight.
Mariya Alexandrovna could no longer bear the gaze of her former friends or the insinuations of strangers. She and her family decided to move out of Simbirsk and sold their house on Moscow Street. The buyer was the town's police chief, a man known for his integrity, who felt no qualms about buying real estate from a man with terrorist connections.
A new world opened up to Vladimir when he began to immerse himself in the political books his brother was reading. One thing about his brother, however, still puzzled him. Almost ten years later, on the day he met his future wife Nadezhda, they were walking along the Neva River through the city of St. Petersburg. He confided to her how much he resented Sasha's execution and how much he hated the regime that had put him to death. He then told her that he never dreamed his brother would become a revolutionary. 'Revolutionaries don't become obsessed with studying insects,' he said.
Vladimir is now a man on the radar of the authorities. His ties to his brother are suspicious and he is a potential troublemaker. He was on a collision course with the tsarist regime.
Hakusuisha, Victor Sebeschen, translated by Motohiro Miura and Tsukasa Yokoyama, Lenin: Power and Love, p70
Some line breaks have been made.
The execution of his brother Sasha made his family a pariah in the town. He was abandoned by the people who had been coming and going, and he suffered from backbiting. Finally, he had to leave the town.
Lenin developed a deep resentment against the hand-wringing of the people. This hatred at the time was one of the things that made him a revolutionary.
Lenin was often thought of as a ruthless dictator who determined the direction of the subsequent Soviet Union. However, Lenin was an ordinary man who grew up in a wealthy, warm family. His life changed drastically when his brother was executed and he was ostracized in the town. This background is what led Lenin to become a revolutionary, and it gave me a slightly different impression of Lenin from the ruthless and cruel dictator he had been.
Of course, this is not to say that I am totally positive about Lenin or anything like that. However, I learned that Lenin was driven to the revolution by various factors, including the background that his relatives had been killed by the Czar, his sense of victimhood due to the destruction of his family, and his distrust of people due to the flip-flopping of those around him.
be unbroken
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