Ilyich and Kubochka’s stormy romance continued, but some kind of spark of camaraderie crept between him and Nadia. They easily found a common direction of thought in the most complex political issues and discussed hot topics at length. Krupskaya has become the third corner of a triangle – not yet in love …
Its heyday was the arrest of Ulyanov in 1895. The prisoner invited his beloved Appolinaria to come to a certain place on Shpalernaya Street at a certain time: prisoners of St. Petersburg Remand Prison were taken for a walk, along which a corner of the sidewalk was visible.
However, for some reason Yakubova could not come – one, two, three … Maybe she doubted that she needed a fiancé with serious problems with the law, or maybe did she just find something more interesting than watching over Shpalernaya.
Instead of Kubochka, Nadia came to the sidewalk. And she remained standing for a long time, waiting for the procession of prisoners.
Ilyich finally broke up with the frivolous Yakubova, but relations with Krupskaya reached a new level.
Companion or “expectation”?
There are “Leninist” and “Krupskaya” versions of how Ilyich made the offer. According to one of them, Lenin wrote a letter to his faithful friend asking him to come to Siberia and become his legal life partner. According to another, Krupskaya, herself sentenced to a three-year exile in 1897, proposed to the “interesting guy” to marry in order to serve the exile together, continuing to work for the benefit of the world proletariat and bringing the emergence of communism.
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We can only guess the background, but the story is known – Krupskaya petitioned the gendarmerie, and the authorities agreed to transfer her to Siberia to Ulyanov, on the condition that they get married “immediately”. Nadya brought the same green lampshade as a gift to her fiancé, which became an inseparable part of Lenin’s mythology. The wedding rings were carved by a local craftsman from copper nickels.
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Passion and betrayal
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In Krupskaya’s memoirs, the honeymoon is not only devoted to lines about common dreams of manifestations.
“We were newlyweds. And that brightened up the bond. The fact that I do not write about this in my memoirs does not mean at all that there was neither poetry nor young passion in our life … ”, wrote Nadezhda Konstantinovna.
Curiously, the family of the future leader was, to say the least, not happy with his choice. “Good people” whispered to Lenin’s sisters that in Shushenskoye his young wife allegedly had an affair with another political exile, Viktor Kurnatovsky. Anna and Maria tirelessly wrote to their brother about the “treacherous herring”, but Vladimir Ilyich dismissed only “women’s gossip”.
Despite everything, Ulyanov and Krupskaya lived together all their lives.
Photo: Getty images, Legion Media
