This post is in partnership with Worldcrunch, a new global—news site that
translates stories of note in foreign languages into English. The article
below was originally published in Le Temps.
— A recently opened exhibition in Moscow’s State Historical
Museum is shedding some light on a long-guarded Russian secret: the origins
of Soviet founding father Vladimir Lenin. Lenin’s maternal grandfather, the
exhibition revealed, was born Jewish.
This fascinating morsel of information, gleaned from declassified KGB files,
is not a minor detail in a country where anti-Semitism was a recognized
state doctrine for decades. Starting in the 1930s, the Soviet regime —spurred on by its leader Joseph Stalin — launched a violent discriminatory
campaign against Jewish citizens.
Born in 1870, Lenin identified himself simply as “Russian.” His official
biography only mentions his Russian, German and Swedish origins. But one of
the exhibition’s priceless pieces adds a key new element to the official
narrative.
In a letter written to Stalin in 1932 — six years after Lenin’s death — Anna
Ulyanova, Lenin’s older sister, wrote that their maternal grandfather “came
from a poor Jewish family and was, according to his baptismal certificate,
the son of Moses Blank.” Blank was born in Zhitomir, Ukraine. In her letter,
Anna Ulyanova said her brother “had always thought highly of Jews.” She also
urged Stalin to reveal Lenin’s Jewish background, concluding that “it would
be wrong to hide it from the masses.”
Stalin, however, ordered Anna Ulyanova to keep Lenin’s Jewish roots under
wraps. A few years later Stalin began to purge Jews from among the leaders
of the Russian revolution. Prior to his death in 1953, furthermore, he was
preparing to send the whole Jewish population living in the Soviet Union to
concentration camps in Siberia.
Most provincial Russian towns have a main road named “Lenin Street.” You can
usually find shops selling luxury goods and banking centers there. They tend
to contain all the flashiest symbols of the country’s now capitalist
society.
