The Making of A Revolutionary

Writing in 1927, Lenin’s sister Anna recalled that when she was four years old or thereabouts, in 1868 or 1869, her parents took her and her little brother Alexander on a steamer trip down the Volga from Nizhnii Novgorod to Astrakhan, the home of her father’s relations. She remembered the small two-storey house in which her grandmother and her uncle Vasilii lived, the warm welcome they received there, and the great fuss made over Alexander and herself. The trip stood out in Anna’s memory because it was the first and last visit ever paid by the Ulyanovs to the Astrakhan branch of the family.1