Authors

Discussion

In 1887, Aleksandr Ulyanov was executed for his participation in a plot to assassinate the tsar; his younger brother Vladimir was seventeen years old. In later years, Lenin rarely if ever mentioned his brother’s name in public. When I wrote my short biography of Lenin (Lenin, Reaktion Press, 2011), I discovered that Lenin in fact did talk about Aleksandr at various stages in his career – only he referred to Aleksandr under such pseudonyms as ‘the finest people of earlier generations’. These remarks always made the same point: Russian revolutionaries such as Aleksandr had failed because they were forced to act in isolation. The later victories of the revolution were possible because later revolutionaries had two things Aleksandr lacked: a genuine revolutionary theory (Marxism) and a mass movement that gave support to heroic leaders. Lenin thus saw the Russian revolution as a final vindication of his brother’s martyrdom. Lenin’s private martyr cult about his brother gives us a crucial clue to the emotional heart of his career and political outlook.