Olga Ulyanova was Lenin’s niece, the last direct descendant of the revolutionary’s family, and one of the few surviving members of the wider clan, which includes a line from her father’s illegitimate son.
Ulyanova’s father, Dmitri, was the seventh of eight children, most of whom became revolutionaries. In 1887 the two eldest, Anna and Alexander, were involved in the assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander III and were respectively banished and hanged.
This radicalised the third child, Vladimir, who embarked on his revolutionary career, was exiled to Siberia and took his pseudonym from the nearby Lena River.
Dmitri shared his brother Lenin’s ideals but studied medicine at Lomonosov University, Moscow. Once qualified, he worked as a doctor, initially in the First World War and then for the revolution. He later became a senior member of the Soviet health system, and in later years wrote several memoirs of his family.
Olga Dmitrievna Ulyanova was born in 1922, in the first year of her father’s second marriage. Her uncle Vladimir’s health was already declining after the first of three, ultimately deadly, strokes and Fanny Kaplan’s assassination attempt in 1918. He would die in 1924 but not before he had commented approvingly on her inheritance of the family squint.
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Childhood in the Kremlin doubtless protected Olga from the Soviet Union’s harsher realities. She was close to Lenin and adored his wife Krupskaya, but her relations with some of the Kremlin’s secretariat were chilly. In the country’s difficult early years, Lenin authorised extra wood rations for the family, though Ulyanova did not learn about how “Uncle Volodya” had helped until many years later.
She studied chemistry at Moscow University, gaining a PhD and staying on to become associate professor in the chemistry department. However, she is better remembered as a memoirist.
During the Second World War the family was evacuated, appropriately, to the town where Lenin had been born, Simbirsk, which had been renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour in 1924. But in 1943 Olga went to Moscow, and her parents moved to Gorky where, that year, her father died. In 1949 she and her mother moved to Kuntsevo, but she maintained contacts with Ulyanovsk and became a stalwart supporter of the local museum.
She claimed never to have traded on the family connection — indeed, it was only in 1944, a year after her father died, that she joined the party. This may have been a response to her father’s death and rumours that Stalin had been behind the death of Lenin’s widow Krupskaya in 1939, a topic which her father refused to discuss.
After the deaths of Lenin and Krupskaya the family’s influence waned and, though they were sometimes asked to intervene on behalf of someone suffering at the hands of the regime, it was not always effective.
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Ulyanova was also a member of the journalists’ union and, like her father, she produced several memoirs of the family, to which she remained resolutely loyal, though some of her claims were surprising. As well as several books, including My Own Lenin, there was a stream of around 150 articles. This started as something of a duty but turned into a passion as, after perestroika, feelings ran against the Soviet regime, and she felt compelled to defend it.
Though many historians have come to the opposite conclusion, she claimed that Lenin disapproved of the execution of the Tsar and his family in 1918. Similarly she said that her father helped to protect another branch of the family in Ukraine.
Speaking to the Italian magazine Panorama in 2008 she reflected on Lenin’s posthumous reputation: “It was a mistake to turn him into an icon, but ideological distortions, falsification of his theories were even a bigger mistake. This was started by Stalin.”
On more recent leaders, she preferred Putin despite the inequalities over which he reigned: Yeltsin, she thought, drank too much and Gorbachev had destroyed the Soviet Union.
Post-Stalin, and with few of Lenin’s relatives living, her importance in the Soviet state grew though it was largely symbolic. If not quite the keeper of the flame, she took on the role of witness, and advised several of the numerous museums and institutions dedicated to Lenin. Although under Stalin her family’s advocacy often failed and family friends had been exiled, Ulyanova refused to criticise the regime and openly hankered after the return of the Soviet Union.
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When Lenin died his final political wishes were ignored as his letter advising against the promotion of Stalin was suppressed, before he was embalmed in the Red Square mausoleum. In 1953 Stalin died and joined him, only to be removed in 1961 but Lenin remained untouchable.
Since the fall of communism the number of visitors has fallen (though there is usually a short queue to enter the reverential space where the Soviet rituals still pertain). Though the theory grew that Lenin had wanted to be buried next to his mother, Ulyanova denied the existence of any document to support this and cited the burial rules of the Orthodox church to validate the status quo.
Nevertheless, moving the body has been regularly mooted — an online survey was set up in January of this year. Ulyanova had long restricted her public comments to the subject of Lenin and took care to favour sympathetic media outlets that would limit their questions to that area. Unsurprisingly she was resolutely against the move, describing those who proposed it as “malefactors”.
Olga Ulyanova, chemist and writer, was born on March 4, 1922. She died on March 25, 2011, aged 89