The wife of Vladimir Lenin, Nadezhda Krupskaya, was an outstanding personality of her era. Along with other leaders of the Bolsheviks, Nadezhda Konstantinovna participated in the revolution, and after 1917 she was engaged in education in the young state of the USSR.
The first years of life and acquaintance with Lenin
The revolutionary Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya came from a family of impoverished nobles. She was born in February 1869 in St. Petersburg (this city at that time was the capital of the empire).
In her youth, Nadya was considered a diligent student - she graduated from the gymnasium with the status of a gold medalist. Then Krupskaya became a student of the Bestuzhev courses - in this institution, the fair sex could count on a decent education. Nadezhda attended the Bestuzhev courses for only a couple of months, until she joined Mikhail Brusnev's Marxist circle. And in 1891, Krupskaya became a teacher at the St. Petersburg school for workers and carried on persistent propaganda work in this environment.
In February 1894, the Marxists held a regular meeting at the house of the Petersburg engineer Robert Klasson. This meeting was attended by Krupskaya, as well as a guest from the banks of the Volga - Volodya Ulyanov (Lenin). Here, a friendly relationship began between the two people, which later grew into a love affair.
In 1896, Krupskaya was arrested for political reasons and exiled from the capital to the Ufa province. And Lenin himself was soon exiled - to the village of Shushenskoye (it is located on the lands of the present Krasnoyarsk Territory).
Wedding and emigration
Lenin, while serving his sentence in Shushenskoye, corresponded with Nadezhda. Once in a letter, he invited her to officially become his wife. After a little thought, Krupskaya agreed. After that, Lenin began to petition for Nadezhda to be transferred to Shushenskoye. Soon this petition was granted. However, the couple was given a condition: they were obliged to get married according to Christian canons. The wedding ceremony took place in the nearest village church. Moreover, the rings that the newlyweds exchanged were forged by a blacksmith from copper coins.
In 1900, immediately after his exile, Vladimir Ilyich left for Switzerland. The term of exile for Krupskaya, as it happened, ended later, and she was able to get to Europe only in 1901. While abroad, Nadezhda Konstantinovna not only assisted her husband in all his affairs, but also acted as secretary of the editorial board of the printed edition "Proletary".
In 1905, when the first revolution broke out in the Russian Empire, Lenin and Krupskaya arrived from abroad to their native land - they could not stand aside. During this period, Nadezhda Konstantinovna was appointed secretary of the Party Central Committee - a very honorable and responsible position. But in December 1907, when the unrest in the country subsided, the couple again had to leave the borders of Russia.
During the years of emigration, Nadezhda Konstantinovna was greatly carried away by the issues and problems of pedagogy. In 1915, she completed and published her famous essay, People's Education and Democracy. It should be noted that Krupskaya is considered one of the main ideologists of the Soviet educational system. And in the thirties, for her services in this area, she was awarded the title of Doctor of Pedagogical Sciences.
Krupskaya after the revolution
In the eventful year of 1917, Nadezhda Konstantinovna (of course, again with Lenin) returned to Russia and took a noticeable part in dramatic revolutionary events. Soon Krupskaya entered the state commission on education, and in 1924 she became a member of the Central Control Commission of the RSDLP (b).
In the same 1924, the great husband of Nadezhda Konstantinovna died. Having become a widow, she devoted herself without reserve to public and journalistic work. Over the last fifteen years of her life, she wrote a huge number of texts about Vladimir Lenin and the RSDLP (b) party, about the practices of raising and educating children under the communist system, and so on. In addition, Krupskaya initiated the opening of several museums in the USSR (for example, the Lermontov Museum in Tarkhany).
Nadezhda Konstantinovna died in February 1939 from peritonitis. After her death, her ashes were buried in the Kremlin necropolis.
