Was Lenin's Mother Jewish?
Wyziemblo, Marcin
The full importance of Wyziemblo's report on Marietta Shaginian's discovery of Lenin's geneology can be grasped only by one who has lived in the Soviet Union. Deified after his death, Lenin...
...And now there was proof that even Lenin's origins were flawed...
...True, the Revolution created a basis for the Russian "Empire" to play an international role, but this was accomplished by "aliens": Jews, Poles, Latvians, who first overthrew the Russian Czar and then the Provisional Government...
...Of course, the name, Blank, is not Russian...
...In 1970, at the anniversary exhibit in Stockholm, Swedish relationships by marriage were devised for Lenin...
...And the director of Soviet Archives, a former general in the Security Forces, was told by an authoritative person, "There is a kind of disorder in your archives, Comrade Belov...
...A set of documents was swiftly obtained, confirming the baptism of Sender Blank, a former follower of the Mosaic religion...
...In their comments, people connected this event with the policies of the new government...
...To be sure, the names of Trotsky, Kamenev, Chkheidze, etc...
...Once I suddenly asked him, "Gennady Vasilyevich, how much is true and how much is false in the rumors in Moscow about Shaginian and her discovery...
...She began to investigate the origins of the legendary All-Russian Industry-Trade Fairs of Nizhni Novgorod which go back to the first half of the nineteenth century...
...Depending upon the knowledgeability, age, and intelligence of my informants, the problem was presented in lesser or greater detail, in depth or superficially...
...Reprinted, with permission, from Kultura, Paris, June 1970...
...As a piquant supplement, a letter was found, written in the name of a contemporary local priest, stating that after his baptism, Blank was so happy that he would no longer be an object of discrimination that he invited guests to a huge drinking bout...
...The rationale behind this was the work of Ilyichev, then secretary in charge of ideological problems...
...but the images of Commissar Kogan,' or Commissar Levinson,2 who introduced order into an anarchic Russian military detachment, are strongly commemorated in Soviet literature...
...If such a situation had arisen in Stalin's time, Shaginian, along with the editorial board of Voprosy Istorii, the employees in charge of the archives, and the censor, would have been shot...
...However, the final decision re garding the content of a Russian magazine lies with the censor...
...And Ilyichev was dropped from the Secretariat...
...At a relatively mature age, shortly before marrying the teacher Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, she became a convert to the Greek Orthodox faith...
...Gennady Vasilyevich probably felt like the Jewish accountant who was asked by an American rabbi touring Russia if a cow in the Soviet Union really costs only twenty rubles...
...A committee was immediately dispatched to the Leningrad Archives with the mission of putting things in proper order...
...Who could have foreseen that current state secrets lurked in provincial papers from the last century...
...Since he did not, he must have considered it improper to do so...
...It seems the strongest reason for national pride, yet everyone realizes what material and moral devastation, what bloodshed and savagery it has brought...
...The committee stated that an intolerable liberalism existed in the State Historical Archives in Leningrad and, to quash this liberalism, a decision was made to fire the head of the Department of Public facilities, Comrade Melamed...
...3 Within the framework of clandestine political life, gossip plays a much stronger role —informative as well as distorting—than in democratic states...
...Since he was the bearer of the title of Member of the Academy of Sciences of the U.S.S.R...
...The editors of the monthly magazine Voprosy Istorii shared her views, apparently unanimously...
...One does not require much intelligence to realize that this person was a Jewish merchant who had changed his first name...
...I wanted to check it...
...But its essentials were similar in all versions...
...Anyway, I received a similarly impeccable reply...
...The investigation proceeded, and this initial suspicion acquired the cloak of fact: Lenin's mother, Maria Alexandrovna Blank, had been born in Simbirsk in 1835, a Jew...
...Khrushchev was disliked in these circles, though it was realized that under his regime prisoners had been released...
...When he had finished reading the documents, submitted along with Shaginian's foreword, he immediately realized that the problem exceeded the limits of his authority...
...You'd be better off to spend ten rubles more and buy yourself a good goose...
...The ban was not intended to prevent publication of her findings in a monograph...
...To avoid accusations of anti-Semitism, it was also de cided to fire Comrade Pavlova...
...Although the intentions of the new government were subject to endless speculations, the problem of Marietta Shaginian's unusual discovery was discussed everywhere and seemed to obscure more fundamental issues...
...However, the staff of the Institute demonstrated much firmness...
...The delighted author, as late as 1965, in an interviewwith the Literaturnaya Gazetta, stated that despite recent difficulties her sensational monograph wouldsoon appear...
...People in Moscow remembered quite MARCIN WYCIEMBLO well the articles he had written as editor of Pravda under Stalin...
...Therefore, when compiling the register of the organizing committee of the first Fair, she noticed that at a certain point a member of that committee with the surname of Blank and the first name of Sender had disappeared...
...Marietta Shaginian is a Russian of Armenian descent, a journalist who had been writing for the central Soviet press for decades...
...But let us return to the events on the Soviet Olympus...
...Was the adjective, genialnii (of genius), used each time his name is mentioned the heritage of the proverbial "Jewish brain...
...At a strategic moment, it refused to submit to the decision...
...He had left behind him numerous blood stains and general public hatred...
...And Lenin's wish has always been sacred to us...
...I heard about this discovery from many sources...
...On the other hand, he was personally honest (this had been shown in 1937), and secretly critical...
...The Central Committee was forced to revoke its decision and Ilyichev became a Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs...
...The decision of the Cen tral Committee was negative...
...It showed that he was a merchant and physician living in the heart of Russia, in the provincial capital of Simbirsk...
...Shaginian's discovery seems convincing and authentic, but in all likelihood no longer verifiable through original documents...
...Wyziemblo's reference to a high Soviet official's disparaging remark about the disorder in the Soviet archives indicates that in all probability the archives have by now been completely purged of any documents that might reflect on the memory of the Soviet leader.—TRANSLATOR IN THE LATE AUTUMN OF 1964, Moscow was alive with political debate...
...One may presume that whether or not the decision-makers were Russian chauvinists, they made the only possible decision, given their position in the system...
...The rumor about Lenin was widespread, but this did not mean it was well-founded...
...Now that Soviet anti-Semitism officially termed anti-Zionism is increasing, the image of Lenin cannot be besmirched with such "shameful" details as having had a Jewish mother...
...Marietta Shaginian undertook a closer examination of the metamorphosis of Mr...
...2 The character of Commissar Levinson appears in the novel Razgrom ('The Rout), by Alexander Fadeev (1901-56), a leading Soviet writer and long-time chairman of the Union of Soviet Writers...
...It was suggested in literature about Lenin that it was German in origin—which, after all, is uplifting...
...It was explained to her that although the decision to prevent publication was a correct one, this decision applied only to the controversial documents...
...The merchant Blank might have something in common with the "leader of the international revolutionary proletariat" because Lenin's mother's maiden name was Blank, and her father's name, Alexander...
...Shaginian, in this tradition, also became involved in historical research upon her retirement...
...I chose Comrade X, a Member of the Academy, now deceased...
...Under Stalin he had succeeded Zhdanov as the Party's first secretary in Leningrad...
...With only the best of intentions, and presuming that she might help in the destruction of anti-Semitism in the Soviet administration, Shaginian prepared to publish the documents she had discovered in the summer of 1964...
...Ostensibly backward in ideology, poorly educated, he had for a long time been the laughing-stock of his young assistants...
...At that particular time in history such an event probably coincided with a conversion to Christianity...
...Lacking neither in vigor nor aggressiveness, this "twice-decorated and thrice mad woman," as people had called her for many years, had somehow avoided destruction in the thirties (such things did happen), and had been pensioned off at the beginning of the sixties...
...This infuriated that dignitary and resulted in his "increased alertness...
...The full importance of Wyziemblo's report on Marietta Shaginian's discovery of Lenin's geneology can be grasped only by one who has lived in the Soviet Union...
...Lenin remained the sole, absolute authority upon whom Soviet leaders could rely...
...We talked often and frankly, although it was difficult for me to adjust to the views and beliefs of my fellow conversationalist...
...The Central Committee did not believe the State Archives and demanded explanations of the Greek Orthodox Curia...
...People were also aware of his role at the Twentieth Party Congress...
...are anathema, WAS LENIN'S MOTHER JEWISH...
...The government had been taken over by Brezhnev and Kosygin, both still unknown quantities...
...At this point, however, the associations took on an astonishing and even political character...
...Then the executioners would have been shot in turn, and the whole problem would have had a relatively simple solution...
...Translated by MARK LrwszYc...
...News of these events spread throughout Moscow at approximately the time of Khrushchev's fall...
...Blank...
...Shaginian was also invited to the Central Committee...
...Despite appearances, this position offers significant possibilities in influencing political life by releasing various ideological pressures...
...Not wanting to lie and afraid to tell the truth, the accountant found a way out: "Rabbi, why do you need a whole cow...
...It has not...
...As every Soviet child knows, she was called Maria Alexandrovna...
...Only by luck did half of the city not burn down...
...Many of us knew about it a long time ago...
...To gain some popularity, the new government sacrificed two people...
...a title bestowed by Stalin upon all editors-in-chief of Pravda), Ilyichev was named director of the Institute of Philosophy of the Academy of Sciences...
...After Stalin's death, the Lenin myth became further magnified...
...It was just after Khrushchev's fall...
...Availing herself of the rich yet inadequately studied materials in the Leningrad MARCIN WYCIEMBLO State Historical Archives, she examined thoroughly the materials and scrupulously compared even those that seemed of slight importance...
...The Brezhnev-Kosygin team at first felt obligated to take measures to at least disarm the distrust in intellectual circles, if not to arouse their sympathies...
...Prerevolutionary Simbirsk, now called Ulyanovsk, happens to be the Soviet Mecca because it is the birthplace of Lenin...
...Lenin never wrote about his Jewish origins...
...In the mind of the average Russian, Communist or not, the Revolution is still something ambiguous...
...The non-Russian makeup of the first Soviet of People's Commissars must reverberate in the hearts of true Russians as discordantly as the creation of the original Russian state by the Scandinavian VikingVarengians in the early history of Russia...
...It was considered there on a par with international and agricultural problems...
...It was more or less formulated as follows: 1 The character of Commissar Kogan was created by the Soviet poet, Eduard Bagritsky (1895-1934) in his long poem, Duma pro Opanasa...
...This does not mean that the Political Bureau agreed to the author's wish to publish the documents...
...Frol Kozlov, who died shortly afterwards, was dropped from the Political Bureau...
...The staff at the Archives tried in vain to prove that they were not the ones who had made the regulations permitting 100-yearold documents to be readily accessible to researchers...
...O O NE CAN WELL IMAGINE how the members of this all-powerful body secretly regretted, neither for the first nor last time, that the "good old days" were over...
...In his place emerged one Alexander Blank...
...He turned to his superiors...
...Among the many people I could turn to, 3 This action was not intended to harm him seriously...
...What kind of discovery did Shaginian make...
...Such a solution, however, was no longer possible...
...They did the same, and the problem soon reached the agenda of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, at this time still chaired by Khrushchev...
...Deified after his death, Lenin became for Soviet youth a "knight without fear and beyond reproach," the greatest genius of world history who, coming from the depth of "the Russian soul," had created a new state and a new ideology...
...It was probably Isaac Babel who had once observed that retired Russian colonels embark on new careers as historians...
...But for Lenin's mother to be simply a Jew...
...Hope was intertwined with forebodings, yet all conjectures were based on frail, subjective calculations...
Vol. 18 • April 1971 • No. 2
