page_title: Isaak Lalayants
section_title: Work with young Lenin
hierarchical_section_title: Isaak Lalayants / Work with young Lenin
caption_attribution_description: Русский: Владимир Ульянов. Портрет. 1891г., не позднее 26 марта (7апреля). Самара. Позитив-оригинал. 4,9x7,4 см. Фотограф: И.А.Шарыгин. Первая публикация: «Красная летопись», 1924, №2. В двадцатых годах фотография была издана Госиздатом Украины в виде почтовой открытки. Обоснование даты: фотография была приложена к прошению В. И. Ульянова от 26 марта (7 апреля) 1891 года на имя председателя юридической испытательной комиссии при Петербургском университете о допуске его к сдаче экзаменов экстерном за курс университета (ЦПА ИМЛ, ф.2, оп.1, ед.хр.21, л.1), Примечание: оригинал фотографии «перевернут»-отпечатан в зеркальном изображенииEnglish: V. I. Ulyanov. Portrait. Not later than March 26th (April 7th), 1891. Samara. Original positive. 4.9x7.4 cm Photographer: I.A.Sharygin
context_page_description: Isaak Khristoforovich Lalayants was a Russian revolutionary, Marxist, Bolshevik and comrade-in-arms of Vladimir Lenin.
  He was a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party since 1898 and member of its Central Committee from 1905 to 1906.
context_section_description: In January 1893, Lalayants is arrested again and deported to Samara, where he spends the first days at the apartment of former Narodnaya Volya member Nikolay Dolgov, getting acquainted with Lenin and, through him, with Alexei Sklyarenko and other local Marxists. Lalayants recalls his first meeting with Lenin as follows: "The next day (after coming to Samara) I went to Dolgov's. [...] Then someone knocked on the door – a young man around 22-23 years old entered. In front of me stood a man with unusual appearance, somehow immediately disposing himself. It was V. I. Ulyanov. He really impressed me then. In this twenty-three-year-old man, simplicity, sensitivity, cheerfulness and shyness, on the one hand, and solidity and depth of knowledge, ruthless logical sequence, lucidity and clarity of judgments and definitions, on the other, were combined in an amazing way. Samara immediately ceased to seem to me such a wilderness, and after that first meeting I was glad that I chose it myself".
  In Samara, Lalayants enters the illegal social democratic circle led by Lenin. Together with Lenin and Sklyarenko, he conducts extensive propaganda work (mainly among students and workers in railway workshops), also against the representatives of Narodism.
  In June 1894, Lalayants receives a sentence in the Kazan case: 10 months of solitary confinement and 3 years of public surveillance. He is arrested and sent to Kresty Prison in Saint Petersburg. Learning about the fact that Lalayants is in the "Saint Petersburg Prison for Solitary Confinement" (official name under Imperial Russia), Lenin, through the student Olga Ivanovna Chachina, establishes contact with him, sending him literature (The Development of the Monist View of History (1895) by Georgi Plekhanov, among others). "Thanks to the care of Vladimir Ilyich, I was a bit aware of at least the newly published legal literature" recalls Lalayants.
  Upon liberation on 24 April 1895, Lalayants meets with Lenin and goes to Moscow, where he visits Lenin's relatives. "All... evening and part of the next day," writes Lalayants, "we were always together. From the stories of V. I., I learned a lot of interesting things about the life and work of the Petersburg circles; in particular, about the clandestine literary work of Vladimir Ilyich. From his words, I could conclude that in St. Petersburg, at that time, propaganda and even agitation work was quite firmly and widely established, especially among the workers of large factories; he also talked a lot about Materials for the Characterization of Our Economic Development (collection of articles), prepared for release, and about the disputes with Struve, about his relations with him. For me, the active and leading role of Vladimir Ilyich in all these works began to appear with sufficient clarity, although he himself did not stress it at all". Lalayants leaves for Penza.
  In September 1895, Lenin writes a letter to Lalayants about his return from abroad. Lalayants hastens to Moscow to meet with Lenin. Returning to Penza after his meeting, he brings with him Lenin's illegal Marxist literature of foreign publication and a copy of Materials for the Characterization of Our Economic Development, which includes Lenin's work The Economic Content of Narodism and the Criticism of it in Mr. Struve's Book, published under the pseudonym K. Tulin. Lenin commissions Lalayants to continue his revolutionary work in the proletarian center of Ekaterinoslav.
caption: V. I. Lenin in 1891.
exif: {}