Vladimir Lenin mother Maria Ulyanova
Early life
Childhood: 1870–1887
Going back to his great-grandparents, Russian, German, Swedish, Jewish and reportedly some distant Kalmyk ancestry has been discovered. His father Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov was from a family of former serfs; Ilya's father's ethnicity remains unclear, while Ilya's mother, Anna Alexeyevna Smirnova, was half-Kalmyk and half-Russian. Despite a lower-class background, Ilya had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan University before teaching at the Penza Institute for the Nobility. Ilya married Maria Alexandrovna Blank in mid-1863. Well educated, she was the daughter of a wealthy German–Swedish Lutheran mother, and a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician. According to historian Petrovsky-Shtern, it is likely that Lenin was unaware of his mother's half-Jewish ancestry, which was only discovered by his sister Anna after his death. According to another version, Maria's father came from a family of German colonists invited to Russia by Catherine the Great.Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhny Novgorod, rising to become Director of Primary Schools in the Simbirsk district six years later. Five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. In January 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir, which bestowed on him the status of hereditary nobleman.After Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchev became leader of the Soviet Union and began a process of de-Stalinisation, citing Lenin's writings, including those on Stalin, to legitimise this process. When Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985 and introduced the policies of glasnost and perestroika, he too cited these actions as a return to Lenin's principles. In late 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered the Lenin archive be removed from Communist Party control and placed under the control of a state organ, the Russian Centre for the Preservation and Study of Documents of Recent History, at which it was revealed that over 6,000 of Lenin's writings had gone unpublished. These were declassified and made available for scholarly study. Since 1991, there has been some discussion about moving Lenin's body from the mausoleum to the Kremlin Wall Necropolis and burying it there. President Boris Yeltsin, with the support of the Russian Orthodox Church, intended to close the mausoleum and bury Lenin next to his mother, Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova, at the Volkov Cemetery in St. Petersburg. His successor, Vladimir Putin, opposed this, stating that a reburial of Lenin would imply that generations of citizens had observed false values during seventy years of Soviet rule.In Russia in 2012, a proposal from a deputy belonging to the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, with the support of some members of the governing United Russia party, proposed the removal of Lenin monuments in Russia. The proposal was strongly opposed by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation and was never considered. Russia retained the vast majority of the 7,000 Lenin statues extant in 1991; as of 2022, there were approximately 6,000 monuments to Lenin in Russia.In Ukraine, during the 2013–14 Euromaidan protests, Lenin statues were damaged or destroyed by protesters in various cities across the country, and in April 2015 the Ukrainian government ordered that all others be dismantled to comply with decommunisation laws. During the Russia's full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022, many Lenin statues which had been taken down by Ukrainian activists in the preceding years, were re-erected by Russian occupiers in Russian-controlled areas. These actions have less to do with communist propaganda and more with Lenin symbolizing Russia's domination over Ukraine.
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