The Russian Empire, however, was a crucible of the most varied national and racial ingredients, as was to be expected in so vast a territory. I dwell on this aspect of Lenin’s biography because his ethnic background was carefully covered up to make sure that he was seen to have been, if not of ‘proletarian’, at least of ‘poor peasant’ origin. But if the ‘Chronicle’ was able to show – as it does – that his father’s father had been a serf, why was it not possible to reveal the background of his father’s mother, and his mother’s parents?
Lenin’s mother, Maria Alexandrovna, was the fourth daughter of Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, a doctor and a baptized Jew from Zhitomir. He had taken as his patronymic the name of his godfather at his baptism, Dmitri Baranov, dropped his original patronymic of Moishevich, and adopted the Christian name of Alexander in place of his original first name, Srul, the Yiddish form of Israel. According to research done by David Shub and S.M. Ginsburg, Lenin’s grandfather was the son of Moishe Itskovich Blank, a Jewish merchant from Starokonstantinov in the province of Volynia, who was married to a Swedish woman called Anna Karlovna Ostedt.7 Shub asks how a Jew could have become a police doctor, and later the owner of an estate. Referring among other things to the archives of the Holy Synod, Shub concluded that conversion to Orthodox Christianity removed many barriers to a career in state service. ‘There were,’ he writes, ‘baptized Jews in the reign of Nicholas I who occupied far higher positions than police doctor … Many such Jews were ennobled and thus achieved all the rights and privileges of that class.’8
In St Petersburg, Alexander Blank married Anna Grigorievna Groschopf, the daughter of prosperous Germans. The Blanks were evidently well off, since they were able to make several trips to Europe, notably to take the waters in Karlsbad in the Czech part of Austria-Hungary. Alexander Blank worked in various towns and provincial capitals of the Russian interior, for the most part in the Volga region, as district physician, police doctor and hospital doctor, finally occupying the prestigious post of hospital medical inspector of the state arms factory in Zlatoust, in the province of Chelyabinsk, Western Siberia. In 1847, having attained the civil service rank of State Counsellor, he retired and registered himself as a member of the nobility of Kazan, a major city on the Volga and centre of Tatar culture in the region. There he bought the estate of Kokushkino.9 This had been made possible by the large dowry his wife had brought with her. Anna Grigorievna never learned to speak fluent Russian and never abandoned her Lutheran religion. In Kokushkino she would raise five daughters: Anna, Lyubov, Sofia, Maria (Lenin’s mother) and Yekaterina.
Kokushkino was not the ‘smallholding’ of the official biographies, but was rather a small landowner’s estate where, until 1861, Blank owned serfs. This normal feature of the time was something Soviet historians were never allowed to mention. It was a busy, well populated place, and Blank was evidently a strong-willed and rather impulsive man. He was obsessed with the idea that hydrotherapy was a panacea, and wrote a book on it, stating that ‘water inside and out’ could sustain everyone in good health. He used to make his tearful daughters wrap themselves in wet sheets for the night, with the result that they couldn’t wait to grow up and marry to escape their father’s crazy experiments.
Anna Groschopf died young, and after her death her sister, Yekaterina, came to Kokushkino to take on the job of raising the children. She was an educated woman, and it was from her that Lenin’s mother acquired her ability to play the piano, to sing and to speak German, English and French. A frequent visitor to Kokushkino was Karl Groschopf, Yekaterina’s brother and a senior official in the department of foreign trade. His visits would occasion musical evenings, and the Blank girls were much attracted to their educated and exuberant uncle. Life on the estate was very much that of a typical, moderately well-off landowning family, with a strong German cultural tinge, thanks to the Groschopf connection. Unlike his Soviet biographers, Lenin never tried to hide his ‘landowner’ origins; indeed in April 1891 he signed an order inscribing his mother in the gentry register of Simbirsk province.10 And at the end of his exile in 1900, when he applied to the police department to allow his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, to serve out the remainder of her own term of exile in Pskov, he signed himself ‘hereditary nobleman Vladimir Ulyanov’.11 Lenin’s origins on his mother’s side were far from ‘proletarian’, a fact which underlines the absurdity of the Bolshevik practice of evaluating a person by their social class. This criterion reached grotesque proportions in the 1920s and 1930s, when people even committed suicide on discovering a ‘bourgeois’ or ‘landowner’ skeleton in their past. The Party leaders were, of course, excused as a ‘revolutionary exception’.
Lenin’s paternal lineage was plainly plebeian, and the ‘Biographical Chronicle’ makes much of the fact that his grandfather had been a serf. But this was not actually true. Lenin’s grandfather, Nikolai Vasilievich, was a Russian town-dweller12 of Astrakhan who earned his living as a tailor. He was the son of a serf, but at an early age had been released to work away from the village, and had never returned home, becoming a town-dweller – as distinct from a peasant, merchant or nobleman – by social status. It was Lenin’s great-grandfather, Vasili Nikitich Ulyanov, who had been a serf.13 He had remained single until he turned fifty, and it was only then, having saved up some money, that he married. His bride, who was almost twenty years his junior, was Anna Alexeevna Smirnova, a baptized Kalmyk, whose ethnic origin was responsible for Lenin’s somewhat Asiatic appearance. Five children resulted from this late marriage: Alexander, Vasili, Ilya (Lenin’s father), Maria and Feodosia. Ilya was the youngest child, and was born when his father was already past sixty and his mother was forty-three. His father died in 1836, leaving his wife, the five-year-old Ilya (Alexander had died in infancy), and his two daughters to his seventeen-year-old son, Vasili, to look after.
Vasili rose to the occasion and displayed exemplary enterprise, becoming a salesman for Sapozhnikov Brothers, a large commercial firm in Astrakhan. His willingness to work and his loyalty earned his employers’ trust, and he was able to look after his mother and younger brother, supporting Ilya through his studies at Kazan University until he became a teacher of mathematics, sending him money ‘for settling down’, ‘for the wedding’, ‘for the move’ and so on. Vasili, a bachelor all his life, and a diligent and enthusiastic salesman, may also have sent his cash assets to Ilya shortly before he died at a date historians have been unable to establish.14
It would not be worth dwelling on the Ulyanov family tree had the official picture not been so obscured by a mass of unnecessary trivia and painted in the colours of ‘class consciousness’, and had so much not been passed over in silence, distorted and blatantly falsified. A brief account, however, may suffice to show that Lenin’s background reflected the face of the entire empire. He had a general idea about his origins, but, although he was Russian by culture and language, his country was not his highest value – not that he particularly felt himself to be a German, a Swede, a Jew or a Kalmyk. He may have described himself as a Russian when filling in forms, but in his outlook he was an internationalist and cosmopolitan, for whom the revolution, power and the Party were to be immeasurably more precious than Russia itself. It is only important to clarify this matter because the Bolsheviks found it necessary to suppress evidence of the perfectly natural mixture of nationalities in Russia in order to present their leader as ethnically ‘pure’.
Lenin’s antecedents were Russian, Kalmyk, Jewish, German and Swedish, and possibly others, symbolizing Russian history, as it were: a Slavic beginning, Asiatic expansion, a Jewish accretion to the national intellect, and German or West European culture. Genetic selection in history is spontaneous and mysterious. But here a digression is called for. When Lenin died, the Central Committee Secretariat commissioned his elder