Antonin Ramensky belonged to a family of country teachers, issued from petty village clergymen. His great-uncle Alexei Ramensky (1845–1928) was a high-ranked education official of Imperial Russia, who reached the rank of Active State Councillor, or civil general. In early 1880s Alexei Ramensky briefly taught in the same school in Simbirsk where Vladimir Lenin studied. This fact prompted the younger Ramensky to invent a story of Lenin's autographs ostensibly hidden in the family, and he presented some of these in 1961 to the 22nd Congress of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. This forgery, albeit ingenuous, was successful and first made him famous.