Forgotten Lives: The Role of Lenin's Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864-1937 by Katy Turton (review)

Abstract

REVIEWS 563 useful would be an edited collection of documents in English to facilitate research in the anglophone world. English speakers have waited almost a century for the appearance of a scholarly general history of Serbia's heroic and calamitous FirstWorld War experience. They have been well served by the translation and publication of Mitrovic's finemonograph. Department of Modern History, Politics, Jovo B. SuScevic International Relations and Security Macquarie University Turton, Katy. Forgotten Lives: The Role of L?nin,s Sisters in the Russian Revolution, 1864-1937. Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke and New York, 2007. ix + 257 pp. Illustrations. Notes. Appendices. Select bibliography. Index. ?50.00. At the height of the Cold War there was a fashion for explaining away revolutionaries as social misfits incapable of formingwarm bonds of love and friendshipwith other human beings. It ishard to imagine how such nonsense could have been given credibility in the face of one of the continent's leading revolutionary families in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, the modest Ulyanovs of Simbirsk. Katy Turton has done an excellent job putting the family in perspective against itsbest known member, Lenin. She skilfully describes the close interrelationship between theUlyanov siblings, all ofwhom were drawn into the revolutionary orbit. Dr Turton's chief focus is on the sistersAnna and Maria whose political involvement was lifelong. In many ways thesewere, indeed, forgotten lives.The author's aim, as she tells us on several occasions, is to break down the 'solar system' theory of theUlyanov family, that is that it orbited around Vladimir, and instead, to establish the political careers of Anna and Maria in their own right.While she is only partially convincing in that thewhole familywas inevitably deeply affected by its links to Lenin, she does succeed in showing thatAnna and Maria were their own women, demonstrated memorably by Anna's efforts to get her illustriousbrother tomake less of a fool of himself inhis philosophical treatise come-crude-polemic, Mate?alism andEmpi?oc?ticism. Sadly forposterity shewas only half successful. The whole familywas deeply devoted to the revolution, but the sisters interestswere verymuch focused on helping real people, often individuals, rather than in broad, abstract scheming. At no timewere they in the forefront of devising the party's political line, though, as Turton shows, they did have opinions about it. In particular, Maria, who often appears to be a Stalinist toady in certain accounts, is shown definitively to have been a Bukharinist who fell out of favour with the right opposition in general. The strongest aspect ofTurton's study is that itbrings the two sisters out of the shadows. It is to the author's credit that in doing so, she stimulates a whole variety of questions she does not herself answer. Most notably she records a good deal of the sisters' political writings and memoirs but seldom goes intomuch ofwhat was in them. This leaves the account as a valuable 564 SEER, 88, 3, JULY 20IO chronicle of their lives but one in which their opinions, and even their personalities, could be better defined and analysed. Also, focusing on two sisters is slighdy artificial leaving rather unclear borders. In particular, it becomes difficult to treatNadezhda Krupskaia properly in that she functioned verymuch as a third sisterand deserves to be treated as such. At times she is included, at others, ignored especially in the account of her lifeafterLenin, a timewhen she and Maria and Anna had a great deal in common. All three had a more practical, immediate, person-based view of the revolution that would have helped smooth the jagged edges of themore abstract formulations not only of the post-Lenin leadership but also ofLenin himself.All threewere increasingly alienated from the Stalinist turn of events and were treatedwith great suspicion by thenew leaders, fearful that theirprestige could make them embarrassing critics of the new line. However, the authorities need hardly have worried. All three were sufficiendyBolshevik to keep their criticisms within limits and were capable of themost abject deference to the existing line. Indeed, Turton's account ofMaria in 1929/30 trying to get herself reinstated in thePravda team she so loved to be part of is very illustrative of Bolshevik...