Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya

Lenin's wife and closest comrade, but an organizer in her own right. Born in Saint Petersburg into an impoverished noble family, she joined Marxist circles and taught and propagandized among workers before marrying Lenin in Shushenskoye exile in 1898. As Iskra's secretary in emigration she ran the network of codes, aliases and addresses through which the party held together, and after 1917 she built Soviet education: the likbez literacy campaign, the unified labor school and a nationwide library network. She helped found the women's journal Rabotnitsa in 1914 and stood at the origins of the Zhenotdel and of the Komsomol and Pioneer organizations. In 1925 she briefly backed the New Opposition, then publicly recanted, and in 1928 her attack on Chukovsky's fairy tales effectively barred him from children's literature. She also ran the purging of 'harmful' library stock, yet intervened for intended victims of the terror. She died of peritonitis on 27 February 1939, the day after her 70th birthday; her ashes rest in the Kremlin Wall.

Nadezhda Krupskaya was a revolutionary in her own right long before she was "Lenin's wife". As a teacher in a Sunday evening school for St Petersburg workers she spent five years teaching and became a Marxist among them, and in 1896 she was arrested for her work in the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class and sentenced to exile. Her 1899 pamphlet The Woman Worker was the first work of Russian Marxism devoted to the condition of women workers.

From 1901, in emigration in Munich, she became secretary of the newspaper Iskra. Letters written in code and invisible ink, newspapers smuggled inside book bindings, the aliases and addresses of hundreds of underground agents held in memory: all of it was her work. Without the communications network she ran between the exile editorial board and the underground committees across Russia, the party could not have existed. For the next two decades she served as the Bolsheviks' organizational secretary in all but name.

After 1917 Krupskaya became deputy People's Commissar of Enlightenment and chair of the Main Political Education Committee (Glavpolitprosvet), one of the chief architects of the Soviet educational system. On 26 December 1919 the Council of People's Commissars issued the decree on the liquidation of illiteracy, obliging everyone between the ages of eight and fifty to learn to read, and Krupskaya became the theorist and organizer of the likbez campaign. Networks of libraries, adult schools and reading rooms spread across the country.

The results survive in the statistics. In the census of 1897 roughly one in four subjects of the empire could read; the census of 1939 recorded literacy above 87 percent among those aged 9 to 49. Krupskaya also laid foundations for the unified labor school, preschool education, Soviet library science and the Pioneer organization, and to the end she held to the view that education was not the transfer of skills but the self-emancipation of the people. She died in Moscow in February 1939 and was buried by the Kremlin wall.