Aleksey Yakovlev and Dmitry Ulyanov (from the Family History of Yakovlevs and Ulyanovs)

Abstract

The longstanding friendship between the Yakovlev and Ulyanov families is a wide-ranging topic. The Ulyanov family has been thoroughly studied by historians, but the Yakovlevs did not enjoy comparable attention. The most renowned of this last clan was Alexey Ivanovich Yakovlev, who kept up relations with Vladimir Lenin. But in the light of archival materials and memoirs, one could claim that interfamily relations extended beyond familiarity between these two individuals. The paper traces friendship between Alexey Ivanovich Yakovlev and Dmitry Il'ich Ulyanov. These friendly terms lasted for decades, since the childhood of the confidants, who maintained warm relations despite the circumstances and the vicissitudes of their fates. The source for the study of their friendship is the correspondence between them. A number of letters from both have been published, and the rest are in the Archive of the FSB Directorate of St. Petersburg and the Leningrad Region, in the investigative file of A. I. Yakovlev, who was arrested during the “Academic Case” of 1929–1931. The correspondence between Dmitry Ulyanov and Alexei Yakovlev began in 1893. Despite all the differences in their professional activity in the following years, their friendship continued even after the Revolution, when A. I. Yakovlev became a famous historian, author of several monographs, and a professor at Moscow University, and Dmitry Ulyanov held a number of high government positions, including the head of the government of the Soviet Crimea. The last letter of their many years of correspondence is dated 1943.