chapter 1 Tula

1 Early Life

Reminiscing on his early life, Alexander Bogdanov considered himself to have an ordinary middle-class background. His grandfather had been a sexton in Vologda, and his father, Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky, had also stud- ied to be a priest. But before taking holy orders he was sent on a course of teacher’s training in Vilna (now Vilnius) and became a primary school teacher in Sokolko, a small town with a population of three and a half thousand people in the adjacent province of Grodno. Before its incorporation into the Russian Empire, Sokolko had been a Polish town, and under Russian rule had a mostly Catholic and Jewish population.1 Alexander Malinovsky had married a girl from the local minor gentry, Maria Komarowska, by whom he had six children (three boys followed by three girls) who survived into adulthood. The second of the surviving children was Bogdanov (Alexander Alexandrovich Malinovsky) who was born on 10 August 1873.2 Five days later he was baptised in the Sokolko Orthodox parish church of St Alexander Nevsky. In 1878 the Malinovsky family left Sokolko for Mologa in the Yaroslavl province, where Bogdanov began his education.3 In Bogdanov’s family background one is struck with the parallels with that of his rival Lenin. Lenin was born just three years earlier. He was the third of six surviving children, and his father too was a schoolteacher, later a school inspector. But the contrast between the two situations is even greater than the similarities. Whereas Lenin had grown up in a supportive family environment with parents who took great pains with the upbringing of their children, giv- ing them attention and encouragement, Bogdanov’s parents were strict and authoritarian, but undermined their authority by quarrelling incessantly. This deprived their children of the stable domestic environment which they needed. It was not, Bogdanov recalls, that his parents were bad people; it was just that they were incapable of sorting out their differences in a rational way. He adds that, in accord with Freudian principles, he always took the side of his mother against the authoritarian figure of his father. He believed too that as the second

1 Chlebowski and Walewski 1890, pp. 26–7. 2 Neizvestnyi Bogdanov 1995, 1, p. 25. 3 Letter from V.S. Klebaner to Douglas Huestis 31 May 1995.

© koninklijke brill nv, leiden, 2019 | doi:10.1163/9789004268913_002 2 chapter 1 eldest of the children he was to some extent shielded from the worst of his father’s outbursts of anger, the brunt of this being borne by his elder brother Nikolai, who took it upon himself to protect his younger siblings.4 Both Bogdanov and Nikolai were highly intelligent and precocious children and learned to read very early. They were fortunate in having access to the library of the local school where their father taught. Both boys became vora- cious readers and spent much of their time devouring books and journals in the school library. Bogdanov recalls that he read Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina when he was only seven, much to the annoyance of his father who considered him too young to be reading ‘romances’.The young Bogdanov, in his turn, was disturbed less by his father’s prohibitions on his reading than by the lack of consistency and predictability with which these prohibitions were exercised. The erratic conduct of his father left Bogdanov feeling he had been treated unreasonably and unjustly.5 The precocity of the two eldest boys led to a curious kind of reversal of roles with their parents. Bogdanov recalls remonstrating with his father in an attempt to make him understand the futility of arguing with his mother over trifles and allowing quarrels to gain in vehemence. In a manner which Bog- danov thought immature, his father refused to accept responsibility for the situation, putting the blame firmly on his wife. In retrospect when Bogdanov analysed the failings of his father, he was inclined to attribute them to weak- ness of character. He was a man who was frustrated in his ambitions. He had tried to make good the deficiencies in his education by reading a great deal after qualifying as a primary school teacher, but had been unable to advance in his career beyond becoming a school inspector. He had submitted articles to a newspaper, but they had been rejected. In Bogdanov’s opinion, his father was a failure because he did not have the determination and application to succeed.6 Bogdanov was more charitably inclined towards his mother. He believed that she had married too early, giving birth for the first time when she was only eighteen. There had then followed a succession of ten children, four of whom died in infancy. This, in Bogdanov’s opinion, had placed an intolerable strain on her nervous system and made it difficult for her to cope with the fraught domestic situation. Infant mortality was a common phenomenon in those days, and occurred in Lenin’s family as well as in Bogdanov’s. Bogdanov was six years old when his younger brother Vladimir died and was deeply distressed by the loss, which plunged the entire family into grief and despair. The trauma was

4 Neizvestnyi Bogdanov 1995, 1, p. 25. 5 Neizvestnyi Bogdanov 1995, 1, p. 26. 6 Neizvestnyi Bogdanov 1995, 1, p. 25.