Being forcibly locked up is generally an unpleasant thing, but Lenin's stay in prison was furnished with such comfort that to a great extent it lost its painful sides. Contrary to the customary practice of painting the life of the "Tsar's prisoners" with the darkest colors, his sister is forced to admit that "the conditions of imprisonment for him, one might say, were favorable … even his stomach - about which he consulted abroad with a well-known Swiss specialist - was in a year, the jail is in better condition than in the previous year in prison"
This is how it happened and why it happened …
Ulyanovsk prosperity played a big role here too. His mother, sisters Anna and Maria came from Moscow to "serve" the arrested "Volodya". Lenin had a special paid lunch and milk in prison.
"His mother cooked and brought him parcels 3 times a week, guided by the diet prescribed by the specialist."
He also received the mineral water prescribed for him by the same Swiss specialist.
“I get my mineral water here too: they bring it to me from the pharmacy the same day I order it,” Lenin informed his sister Anna in a letter dated January 24, 1896.
Let us also recall the bundles of books that his sister Anna bought and delivered to him from different libraries so that he could write his book in prison. The tsarist government did not prevent the prisoners from studying literature. Chernyshevsky wrote "What to do?" In the Peter and Paul Fortress (an apology for the revolutionaries), Pisarev - his best articles, Morozov in the Shlisselburg Fortress - "Revelation in a Storm and Thunderstorm", and Lenin in a preliminary conclusion prepared "Development of Capitalism in Russia", of all his works - the most solid.
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Unlike his comrades who were arrested together with him in the same case, Lenin went into exile, too, in comfort. His mother procured for him the right to go there at his own expense.
Such an opportunity was not available to his comrades, who were forced to go to Siberia "by escort", in a carriage with an escort, to sit in transit prisons. The inequality in position was so conspicuous that it made Lenin feel uneasy. There was a moment when he even wanted to give up his benefits, but, in the end, overcame himself and … did not refuse. Leaving Petersburg on March 1, 1897, Lenin stopped by his mother in Moscow, stayed with her for several days, and on March 6 moved on. From Moscow to Tula - 200 kilometers - he was accompanied by his mother, sister Maria, sister Anna, her husband Elizarov. Stopping to rest in cities on the way, Lenin arrived in Krasnoyarsk on March 16, and while he waited for the destination of the settlement, and his mother was busy not to be sent to a settlement somewhere far away, he had a good time. He had the means for this.
On April 29, he wrote to his mother: “I live very well here: I have settled down in an apartment comfortably - especially since I live at full board. For my studies I got myself books on statistics (as I already wrote, it seems), but I study a little, and I hang around more."
The latter is not entirely true. Lenin not only "wandered" - at that time he diligently visited the vast library of the Krasnoyarsk merchant, bibliophile, GV Yudin, sold in 1907 to America and included as an independent part of the "Slavic Department" in the Washington Library of Congress.
His comrades - Krzhizhanovsky, Martov, Starkov, Vaneev, and others - were in a completely different and not very enviable position.
Lenin, in a letter dated April 17, 1897, informed his relatives about them: “Gleb (Krzhizhanovsky - NV) and Basil (Starkov - NV) will look out, they say, very badly: they are pale, yellow, terribly tired.”
Their journey to Siberia was painful. Moving uncomfortably in carriages under escort, after serving on the way in the Moscow transit prison, crushed by fatigue, they arrived in Krasnoyarsk on April 16, a month later than Lenin. And while he "wandered" around the city and sat in the library, his partners continued to be locked up in prison until May 5, awaiting the appointment of their place of settlement. "Ulyanovsk prosperity" helped Lenin escape much of what others experienced, and the same prosperity, as we shall now see, turned Lenin's exile from a punishment into a kind of partie de plaisir.
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The tsarist government gave the exiles 8 rubles a month for maintenance, clothing and an apartment. With the Siberian cheapness of food and apartments, that is, a room in a peasant's hut, such an allowance guaranteed against hunger, but it could only provide a peasant way of life with complete disregard for the cultural needs inherent in exiled intellectuals. At 8 rubles a month, it was impossible to buy clothes in general, and in particular those that are necessary in the Siberian climate: sheepskin coat, felt boots, a hat, etc. People without "income", having arrived in exile, had to immediately, especially if they were accompanied wives and relatives, to seek some kind of service, in which the government did not interfere with them.
"Gleb and Basil," Lenin informed his mother in a letter dated October 24, 1897, "now have a job, without it they could not live …".
But Lenin did not need to think about it: it was enough to hint his mother that he needed money, and they came to him.
In January 1898, Lenin wrote: “I received the finances, dear mummy, both the first and the second (ie, from 28 / XI and 20 / XII). Now we are getting the manuals correctly, so things in this respect have become quite normal, and I think that for a long time (relatively) no extra additions will be needed."
The break in seeking help was "relatively" short, and already in March 1898 the following message was sent to the mother:
"With NK, please send me more finances … Expenses can be hefty, especially if you have to acquire your own farm, so I intend to resort to a fair rounding of my debt and a second internal loan."
Two weeks before this request, Lenin also spoke of repaying his debt.
“I will repay all my debts. (You just have to not forget them.).
The phrase only testifies to the fact that Lenin felt some awkwardness to constantly turn to his mother for help. His debt will never be returned. He knew perfectly well that his mother would never agree to this and did not consider the money sent to her son a debt. Turning to his mother for money and receiving it, Lenin often pointed out that a fee for one or another literary work produced by him should go to repay the "debt". To what extent these are only kind words, can be judged by the following (one of several) cases.
On September 28, 1898, having arrived from Shushenskoye to Krasnoyarsk for dental treatment and various purchases, he wrote to his mother: “My finances, as a result of my trip, the need to help A. M. and make some purchases, are very worn out. Please send Elizaveta Vasilievna [10] (from whom I made a loan) about half of the amount that should have been sent for the entire Webb-'a transfer (sent to St. Petersburg on August 27)."
We are talking about the translation of the book by S. and B. Webb "Theory and Practice of English Trade Unionism." ON Popova's publishing house had to pay Lenin about 400 rubles for it. If the mother had sent Elizaveta Vasilyevna the required amount (“half” of 400 rubles) and reimbursed her with the received fee, she would only be an intermediary in this matter. In fact, she sent her money, since the specified translation was published only in 1900 - only then Popova began to pay the fee.
In November 1898, Lenin wrote to his sister Anna: “I am perplexed why this is not all the fee for the translation sent to St. Petersburg. yet 27 August! If a fee comes, please send 50 rubles to the book warehouse ….
Fifty rubles were sent to Kalmykova's book warehouse in St. Petersburg, from where Lenin received bundles of books he bought, and this expense, in the end, was also not covered by his fee.
On February 25, 1899, Lenin, again referring to the same non-arriving fee, asks to send him money: “I am surprised that O. Popova does not pay for Webb for a long time … Our finances have come to an end again. Please send 200 rubles. in the name of E. V. If there is still nothing from O. Popova, and it is not yet to come in 1–2 weeks, then I would ask to borrow it already, because we will not be able to wriggle otherwise.
There is no need to monitor further receipts of money to Lenin from his mother. We will return to their results later. We would only like to draw attention to how little his sister Anna has love for truth, since she, in the preface to the publication of Lenin's book Letters to Family, could assert without the slightest embarrassment:
“One can also see from the letters of Vladimir Ilyich his great modesty and undemandingness in life, his ability to be content with little; no matter what the conditions put him by fate, he always writes that he does not need anything, that he eats well; and in Siberia, where he lived on full support for one of his state allowances in 8 rubles. per month, and in emigration, where, when checking, during our rare visits, we could always establish that his food is far from insufficient."
How Lenin actually lived in exile - one can quite clearly imagine from the testimony of Krupskaya.
“The cheapness in this Shushenskoye was amazing,” wrote Krupskaya. - For example, Vladimir Ilyich, for his “salary” - an eight-ruble allowance - had a clean room, feeding, washing and repairing clothes, and it was considered that he pays dearly … However, lunch and dinner were simple - one week for Vladimir Ilyich they killed a ram with which fed him day after day until he eats everything; how to eat - they bought meat for a week, a worker in the yard - in a trough where they prepared fodder for the cattle - chopped the purchased meat into cutlets for Vladimir Ilyich - also for a whole week … In general, the link went well."
Little to say - not bad. She was wonderful. That the exile was not at all terrible - Lenin felt this very soon after his placement in Shushenskoye.
"Today is exactly a month since I have been here, and I can repeat the same thing: I am quite happy with the apartment and the table …" (letter dated June 20, 1897).
Sheep and cutlets with the addition of a mountain of potatoes, cucumbers, sauerkraut, beets, and as a dessert Siberian cheesecakes, obviously, went to Lenin for future use. About the mineral water prescribed for his stomach by a Swiss doctor, "I forgot to think and hope that I will soon forget its name" (letter dated June 20, 1897).
And four months later, in a letter to his mother, he adds: “Here, too, everyone found that I had grown fat over the summer, had sunburned and would look out for a Siberian. This is what hunting and country life mean! Immediately, all St. Petersburg side pains!"
Lenin in exile acquired such a well-fed look that her mother, who had arrived in Shushenskoye in May 1898, together with Krupskaya, seeing him, could not refrain from exclaiming: “You’re blown away!”.
"He has become terribly healthy, and his appearance is brilliant in comparison with what he was in St. Petersburg," Krupskaya reported to Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova in a letter dated May 22, 1898.
Having lived a little in Shushenskoye, she herself had to frankly admit that their exile was really just a pleasure.
“In general, our present life resembles a“uniform”dacha life, only there is no economy of our own. Well, yes, they feed us well, give us milk to drink, and we all prosper here. I am not yet accustomed to Volodya's present healthy appearance, in St. Petersburg I am used to seeing him always in a rather pretentious state”(letter dated June 26, 1898).
To make life even more convenient and meet their tastes and needs, the Lenin's spouses switched from a boarding house with strangers to their own farm, acquiring everything they needed to run it. Elizaveta Vasilievna took care of him, and a servant was hired to help.
“Finally we hired a servant, a girl of about 15, for 2.1 / 2 rubles. per month + boots, will come on Tuesday, therefore, our independent farm is the end. Have saved all sorts of things for the winter”(letter from Krupskaya dated October 9, 1898). On the same subject two weeks later: "We hired a girl who now helps her mother with the housework and does all the dirty work [11]."
This opportunity not to think about earnings, about daily bread, to throw off all the "dirty work" on servants, this amazing freedom that Lenin enjoys in Shushenskoye, turned his three-year stay in exile, according to Krupskaya, into a dacha life full of all sorts of pleasantries. "Prisoner of Tsarism" in exile is given over to sports, skating, hunting. Grouse, ducks, hares, snipe do not leave their table. He goes to visit other exiles and receives them at home, receives through his relatives bales of magazines, newspapers, Russian, German, French books, illegal publications.
He conducts extensive political correspondence, composes books, writes articles for magazines and revolutionary brochures for publication in Geneva. With the exception of the end of 1899, when he was eager to leave exile as soon as possible, did not sleep and lost weight, and the beginning of his stay in Shushenskoye, when he "bitterly" (in his words) felt the forced removal to Siberia, life passes under the sign of calmness and contentment with complete the freedom to take an interest in and study what attracted him. Only recently entered literature, Lenin, prompted by pride, a desire to win fame as soon as possible, hastens to appear in print with some collection of his works. Finding a publisher is not easy for a lesser known writer. Lenin is not embarrassed by this. The money will be found.
“As for the finances required for the publication, I think, one could make an“internal loan”from my mother …” (letter to M. Elizarov dated March 13, 1898).
Valentinov Nikolay. "Unfamiliar Lenin"