Extract of a fascinating article on
Lenin & Stalin entitled Contribution
from Soviet Archives to
Lenin's
and Stalin's Image and Legacy,
written by French historian
Jean-Pierre Cap, published
in a 2003
edition of the Ukrainian
Quarterly, which
"has been in circulation since 1944,
and remains the only
English-language scholarly
journal dedicated to Ukrainian and
Eastern European affairs."
I chanced across it on googlebooks,
with only a "snippet view", so had
to paste it
together and fill-in the gaps they
deliberately exclude on each page.
The original
article is 31 pages long, but I'm
trying to get hold of it, and will
upload if I do.
Some quotes
"The focus here will be on the indepth study of Lenin's ancestry,..."
"Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov's ethnic and cultural background, subjects on which Soviet times information was strictly inaccessible. Both his parents had heterogeneous backgrounds. Soviets tried to keep secret the fact that Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanov, Lenin's mother, was of partly Jewish ancestry. It is now a fully documented fact her paternal grandfather, Moshko Blank, was a Jewish trader in wine and spirits in Starokonstantinov in Volynia, Western Ukraine."
"The ethnic and religious background of his (Lenin's) father, Nikolai Ulyanov, is not entirely clear."Nikolai Ulyanov (Lenin's father's father) married in middle age, having brought his bride from a prominent Astrakhan merchant."
"Although he (Robert Service, Lenin biographer) does not say precisely when Lenin learned of his Jewish ancestry, Service does explain how his sister Anna learned of the fact in 1897, at the age of 33. Presumably shortly after she communicated this discovery to Vladimir, who was close to her in age."
"He regarded Jews as a specially gifted 'race' [...] and the took pride [sic] in the Jewish ingredient in his ancestry. As he remarked to his sister Anna, Jewish activists constituted about half the number of revolutionaries in the Southern region of the Russian empire ... Lenin compared Russians unfavorably with Jews. {...} A bright Russian is almost always a Jew or a person with an admixture of Jewish blood."
"As a revolutionary leader, it would have been natural for Lenin to have an affinity and solidarity for his Jewish comrades. At times, the majority of his supporters, collaborators and friends were Jewish. They shared most of his ideals and his goals."
Alexander Kerensky was a prominent
leader in the February Revolution,
he became
the very first democratically
elected Prime Minister of Russia,
but he was soon
disposed in the October Revolution
by the Bolsheviks who'd flooded in
from abroad.
Kerensky & Lenin both had Jewish
mothers, and both were from the same town.
Kerensky's grandfather, was also
Lenin's headmaster. He wrote an
"exceptionally,
positive and supportive statement
for the record" following Lenin's
final exams.
click
image to enlarge
