Nicholas and Alexandra

prepare for his exile. He traveled alone across the Urals, taking with him a thousand roubles and a trunk filled with a hundred books. His three years in the quiet backwater Siberian village of Shushenskoe near the Mongolian border were among the happiest of his life. The river Shush flowed nearby and was filled with fish, the woods teemed with bears, squirrels and sables. Vladimir rented rooms, went swimming twice a day, acquired a dog and a gun and went hunting for duck and snipe. He was the wealthiest man in the village and demonstrated to a local merchant how to keep his books. His mail was enormous, and through it he maintained contact with Marxists in every corner of Russia and Europe. Several hours each day he worked on his lengthy work, The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

He had been there a year when Krupskaya joined him. Herself arrested for organizing a strike, she had arranged to be sent to Shushenskoe by telling the police that she was Vladimir’s fiancee. Vladimir was delighted to see her and to have the books she brought, but less happy to welcome her mother, whom she had brought along and whom he disliked. To his own mother he wrote that Nadezhda “has had a tragi-comic condition made to her; if she does not marry immediately, she has to return to Ufa.” On July 10, 1898, to solve the problem, they married. As newlyweds, they settled down to translate The Theory and Practice of Trade Unionism by Sidney and Beatrice Webb; their Russian version ran to a thousand pages. In the winter, they ice-skated on the frozen river. Vladimir was expert; with his hands in his pockets, he glided quickly away. Krupskaya tried valiantly and stumbled behind. The mother-in-law went once and fell flat on her back. But all three loved the whiteness of the Siberian winter, the clear, glowing quality of the air, the peaceful silence of the snowy woods. “It was like living,” said Krupskaya, “in an enchanted kingdom.”

Because his term ended before hers, Vladimir left his wife and her mother in Siberia and returned to St. Petersburg. Soon after, he drew up a petition from “the hereditary noble, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov” asking the authorities to permit him to return to Siberia to see his wife before going abroad. The petition was granted, Vladimir said goodbye and began a lonely life as a Russian revolutionary in the cities of Europe. His work as an underground organizer and a forceful writer had already brought him a significant reputation; this was enhanced when he became an editor and regular contributor to Iskra (The Spark), a revolutionary magazine published abroad for smuggling into Russia. It was at this point that Vladimir began to use the pen name “Lenin.” He wrote a pamphlet titled What Is to Be Done? which attracted wide attention, and drafted a program for the Social Democratic Party, as the exiled Russian Marxists had begun to call themselves. He no longer feared to attack the Tsar personally; “Nicholas the Bloody” and “Nicholas the Hangman” were favorite expressions.

When Krupskaya’s term of exile was ended, she joined her husband in Munich. In 1902 the offices of Iskra were moved to London, and Lenin and Krupskaya followed, arriving in a dense fog. For Krupskaya particularly, the transition from a peaceful Siberian village to an immense city with its noise and dirt and clanging traffic was painful. They rented an unfurnished two-room apartment at 30 Holford Square kept by a Mrs. Yeo, and Lenin, under the name “Jacob Richter,” applied for entrance to the Reading Room of the British Museum. In the mornings he worked, and in the afternoons he and Krupskaya took trips around London on the top of a double-decker bus. There was trouble with Mrs. Yeo, who protested that Krupskaya did not hang curtains and wore no wedding ring. Finally a Russian friend warned the landlady that her lodgers were legally married and that if she persisted in chattering, she would be sued for defamation of character.

By his implacable certainty and singleness of purpose, his overwhelming energy and self-sacrifice, Lenin rapidly became a dominant figure within the party. Once recognized as a leader, he was fiercely intolerant and unwilling even to discuss his views with others unless circumstances forced him to do so. On the rock of Lenin’s intransigence, the tiny party of exiles began to splinter.

It was to end this quarreling that the Social Democratic Party called a unity conference to be held in Brussels in July 1903. With forty-three delegates in attendance, the conference opened in an old flour warehouse draped with red cloth but infested with rats and fleas. The Belgian police, who had harassed the Russians by searching their rooms and opening their baggage, suddenly gave the exiles twenty-four hours to leave the country. In a body, they boarded a boat and crossed the English Channel to London, arguing all the way.

Continuing their sessions in a socialist church in London, the delegates soon realized that their momentous “unity” conference was leading to a dangerous split between Plekhanov and Lenin. Plekhanov’s speeches were lyrical and moving; Lenin’s were simpler, cruder, more logical and more forceful. The divisive issue was the organizational structure of the party. Lenin wanted the party restricted to a small, tightly disciplined, professional elite. Plekhanov and others wanted to embrace all who were willing to join. On a vote, Lenin was narrowly victorious; thereafter his followers took the name of Bolsheviks (Majorityites) and the losers became the Mensheviks (Minorityites). Half fearful, half admiring, Plekhanov looked at Lenin and said, “Of this dough, Robespierres are made.”

   If Lenin was Robespierre, Alexander Kerensky was Russia’s Danton. Himself struck by the coincidence of their background and upbringing, Kerensky once wrote: “Let no one say that Lenin is an expression of some kind of allegedly Asiatic ‘elemental Russian force.’ I was born under the same sky, I breathed the same air, I heard the same peasant songs and played in the same college playground. I saw the same limitless horizons from the same high bank of the Volga and I know in my blood and bones … that it is only by losing all touch with our native land, only by stamping out all native feeling for it, only so could one do what Lenin did in deliberately and cruelly mutilating Russia.”

Fedor Kerensky, Alexander’s father, was a gentle, scholarly man, destined originally to become a priest, who instead became a teacher. Early in his career, he married one of his pupils, an officer’s daughter whose grandfather had been a serf. As director of the high school in Simbirsk, Fedor Kerensky was a leading member of local society. “From my earliest glimpses of consciousness I remember an enormous, splendid flat provided by the government,” wrote Fedor’s son, Alexander. “A long row of reception rooms; governesses for the elder sisters, nurseries, children’s parties in other ‘society’ households.” At school, standing in chapel in a white suit and pink Eton bow, Alexander was an important boy, the headmaster’s son. “I see myself in my early childhood as a very loyal little subject. I felt Russia deeply … the traditional Russia with its tsars and Orthodox Church, and the upper layer of provincial officialdom.” In the same town of Simbirsk, the parish priest was Alexander’s uncle. Alexander himself dreamed of becoming a “church bell-ringer, to stand on a high steeple, above everybody, near the clouds, and thence to call men to the service of God with the heavy peals of a huge bell.”

In 1889, when Alexander was eight, Fedor Kerensky was promoted to become Director of Education for the Province of Turkestan, and the family moved to Tashkent. There, one night, Alexander overheard his parents discussing a pamphlet circulating illegally in which Leo Tolstoy protested the alliance of the backward Russian autocracy and the French republic which Tolstoy admired. But “my youthful adoration of the Tsar was in no way impaired through hearing Tolstoy,” said Alexander; “… when Alexander III died, I read the official obituaries … and I wept long and copiously. I fervently attended every mass and requiem held for the Tsar and assiduously collected small contributions in my class for a wreath to the Emperor’s memory.”

In 1899, Kerensky arrived in St. Petersburg to study at the university. The city, bursting with creative excitement in every field of the arts and intellect, was packed with students from every social class and every province of the empire. “I doubt whether higher education before the war was so cheap and so generally accessible anywhere in the world as it was in Russia.… The lecture fees were practically negligible, while all laboratory experiments and other practical work … were completely free … one could have dinner for from five to ten kopecks … the poorest among us often lived in very bad conditions, ran about from house to house giving lessons and did not dine every day; still we all lived and studied.”

At first Kerensky, the loyal son of a government bureaucrat, had little interest in politics. But politics was a part of student life in St. Petersburg, and he became caught up in the waves of student agitation, mass meetings and strikes. Student opinion was split between the two leading Russian revolutionary parties, the Marxists and the Narodniki or People’s Party. Kerensky instinctively favored the latter. “Simbirsk, the memories of my childhood … the whole tradition of Russian literature drew me strongly towards … the Narodniki movement.… The Marxist teaching, borrowed in its entirety from abroad, deeply impressed youthful minds by its austere completeness and its orderly logic. But it tallied very badly with the social structure of Russia. In contrast … the Narodniki teaching was indistinct … inconsistent.… But it was the product of national Russian thought, rooted in the native soil, flowed entirely within the channel of the Russian humanitarian ideals.”

Swept along by his youthful enthusiasm, Kerensky one day found himself making a speech at a student gathering; the following day, he was summoned before the rector and deans and temporarily sent home. He