Lenin lived

Namely twice, at the same time. This sensational discovery is the due to the Russian blogger alexiiru. It is to his merit that he has carefully studied the archive photo presented in our previous post, which so many had seen and overlooked, and from which through some tiny anomalies he reached such important conclusions, that the history of Russia in the 20th century must be fully rewritten.


In this photo there is apparently nothing special. Lenin in 1925, dressed in woman’s clothes together with his daughter Natasha, is traveling to the Finnish border. We know the critical mental status of the old Lenin, therefore we can understand his morbid passion for female clothes, as well as his desire to see once more before his death, and so that his little daughter might also see the nostalgic scene of his youth, where he first met his friend Stalin.

However, the blogger points out, Lenin, as his secret letter written to the CC of the Party attests, did not any more consider Stalin a friend at this time. And if that alone were not a convincing enough argument: we do not know that he would have had a daughter at all. What is more, by 1925 he had been dead for a year. So what is this mindboggling conundrum?

The blogger guessed with an instinctive sense, that the key to the solution lies in the initials of Lenin’s name. The caption calls him S. I. Ulyanov. However, our Lenin was V. I. This is therefore not our Lenin. This is another Lenin who is the spitting image of him. But who is he?

This question did not let the blogger rest. He began a long research, during which, like a jigsaw puzzle pieces, the randomly surviving pictures of a family album which had been assumed lost, were found all over the world. And as usual, persistent research is finally crowned with a stunning finding. On the site of the Russian painter Rinat Voligamsi, the blogger found twenty-one photos which undoubtedly belonged to the lost photo album, and which lit up, as with a bright beam of light, the darkness of the historical mystery. With the help of these, as well as documents from the archives of the KGB, he managed to reconstruct a breathtaking story, which Stalin and his henchmen believed had been consigned to eternal oblivion.

The photos and the documents clearly show that Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the future Lenin, had a twin brother, Sergei. The two children can be seen together in the original family photo of the Ulyanovs, from whose available copies Sergei, sitting at his mother’s feet, was later retouched out of the picture, following Stalin’s well known method.

The Ulyanov family, 1879

The earliest pictures of the album fragment surviving at Voligamsi reveal the shared childhood and the divergent paths of the two boys. While Volodya followed his revolutionary vocation, Seryozha settled in the Ufa governorship. He started trading in wax, married a local girl, and converted to Islam.

After the fall of the 1905 revolution, hard times came to the young Communist party. Amid this low point, in February 1906 Vladimir Ilyich wrote the famous letter to his rich merchant brother: “For lack of financial means, the revolution dies!” In response to his brother’s call, Sergei sold off his wax business, and with the money earned, he travelled to St. Petersburg, where he completely devoted himself to the revolutionary cause.

S. I. Ulyanov carrying money, 1906

After Lenin’s death, Stalin launched a manhunt for all the close relatives and comrades in arms of the leader of Communism. The bloody list had in the first place Sergei Ilyich, who thus decided to emigrate. As you can see in the first photo, he managed to cross the Finnish border in disguise together with his daughter. Then a long odyssey began. He fled to Lithuania, from there to the royal Romania, and then, following the route of the Russian exiles, to Switzerland. “I fear only that they would silence me, and I cannot serve my country any more, and I cannot continue the work of my brother”, he wrote in his diary. In search of allies, he toured all over the advanced world, from Mexico through Baghdad and Kabul to Cuba.

S. I. Ulyanov in his antiquarian shop in Zurich, 1937

Here, in Cuba ended the path of the revolutionary committed to the cause of internationalism unto death. He died in 1965, under the blow of Khrushchev’s replacement, with whom he forged a common plan to overthrow the citadel of imperialism, the United States. Had Khrushchev only remained slightly longer in power, the whole thread of 20th-century history would have been different.

In his garden in Santiago de Cuba, 1964