She built the Soviet school and library system from the shadow of her husband
Her room always smelled of burned paper. She heated secret letters over a flame to read them, holding hundreds of underground aliases and addresses in her head. —Trotsky, My Life
Lenin's wife and longest comrade, but never merely his spouse. Born into the minor nobility, she joined Marxist circles and married Lenin in Shushenskoye exile in 1898. As Iskra's secretary in emigration, she ran the secret communications network of hundreds of underground agents. After the Revolution she became chief architect of Soviet education, building the Likbez campaign, unified labor schools, and a nationwide library network, holding that education was self-emancipation. In 1925 she briefly backed the New Opposition against Stalin, then recanted; her dogmatic approach to children's literature banned Chukovsky's fairy tales. She died of peritonitis the day after her 70th birthday; her ashes rest in the Kremlin Wall.
Career Timeline
- 1887Graduated Obolenskaya Gymnasium with a gold medal
- 1889–1890Attended Bestuzhev Courses; joined a Marxist student circle
- 1891–1896Taught at an evening school for workers beyond the Neva Gate; propaganda work
- 1898Married Lenin in Shushenskoye exile; joined the RSDLP
- 1901–1905Exile in Munich and London; secretary of the newspaper Iskra
- 1905–1907Returned to Russia; secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee
- 1911Taught at the Party school in Longjumeau; co-founded the women's journal Rabotnitsa
- 1917–1920Participated in the October Revolution; designed Komsomol and Pioneer movements; chair of Glavpolitprosvet
- 1924–1927Member of the Central Control Commission; briefly supported the New Opposition at the 14th Congress (1925), then recanted
- 1927–1939Member of the Central Committee of the VKP(b)
- 1929–1939Deputy People's Commissar for Enlightenment of the RSFSR; led Soviet education, library and censorship policy
- 1931Elected honorary member of the USSR Academy of Sciences; awarded doctorate in pedagogy
- 1937Elected deputy of the USSR Supreme Soviet (1st convocation); member of its Presidium
Related historical events
- 1905–1907The Revolution of 1905Underground secretaryReturning as secretary of the party Central Committee, she ran the underground network of contacts and correspondence.
- 1917.02–07The February RevolutionEducator and organizerReturning with Lenin on the sealed train, she took up educational work and youth organizing in the Vyborg district.
- 1921–1928The New Economic Policy (NEP)Literacy campaignerAt the education commissariat she led the literacy campaign and adult education, underpinning the cultural construction of the NEP years.
- 1923–1927The Succession Struggle and the Left OppositionLenin's wife and guardian of the TestamentAfter taking Lenin's Dec 21 dictation to Trotsky, Stalin abused her by phone and threatened the Control Commission. After Lenin's death she delivered the Testament to the CC, but the triumvirate blocked its public reading.
- 1928–1937The Five-Year Plans and the Soviet TransformationLiteracy campaign organizerWithin the education commissariat, she led the organization of adult education and the literacy campaign.
Munich 1901, Running Iskra's Secret Network
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.
Likbez, Turning a Country into a School
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.