A photograph of a woman who called him true love was found after the image was considered lost for more than a hundred years. Photos of Nadezhda Krupskaya's wife and Lenin's beloved Apollinaria Yakubova.
A London-based scientist discovered a photograph of a woman that some called the true love of Vladimir Lenin after the image was considered lost for more than a century, The Guardian reports.
Apollinaria Yakubova and her husband were close associates of Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, who periodically lived in London from 1902 to 1911, although it was known that Yakubova and Lenin had a stormy and tense relationship due to politics in the RSDLP, writes the author of the article Alexandra Topping. Robert Henderson, a Russian history scholar at the University of London, discovered a photograph of Yakubova in the bowels of the GARF in Moscow in April while studying the life of another young revolutionary, Vladimir Burtsev.
Henderson writes that "her spirit was indomitable and she possessed infinite energy."
Photo by Apollinaria Yakubov
“The daughter of a priest, she studied at the physics and mathematics department of the Higher Courses for Women in St. Petersburg, and then taught at evening and Sunday courses for workers. It was there that she became a close friend of Lenin's future wife,”the article says.
“Like Lenin, she fell into Siberian exile for her political activities, and fled to travel 7,000 miles to London, where she became an important figure in the party in exile,” the author notes.
“However, she is best known for the statement made in 1964 by the American journalist Louis Fischer that Lenin proposed to her and was refused,” Topping reminds.
Then, when the fates of Lenin and Yakubova parted - they fiercely argued over the direction in which the revolutionary movement was supposed to go - the letters indicate that Krupskaya's hostility was directed against her likely rival, the newspaper writes.
Photo. Nadezhda Krupskaya
“Yakubova and her husband returned to St. Petersburg in 1908, but according to Henderson, little is known about what became of her,” the author notes. The date of her death is either 1913 or 1917.
Does Scarlett Johansson look a bit like Nadezhda Krupskaya?
