DEATH IN RUSSIA

New Zealand Herald, Volume LXXVI, Issue 23284, 1 March 1939, Page 11

DEATH IN RUSSIA

WIDOW OF LENiN A CHEQUERED CAREER MOSCOW Feb. 27 The death has occurred of Madame Lenin, formerly Nadeshda Krupskaya, widow of the former Russian leader. Madame Lenin, formerly Nadeshda Krupskaya, was bom in February, 1809, and was originally a teacher. She and Lenin, whom she met at a night school, founded the "League to Liberate the Workers" and subsequently the Bolshevik Party, of which she was secretary until 1917. In 189S their political activities led to their banishment for three years. On their return from exile she became secretary of the Russian Socialist periodical Iskra (The Spark). They were in Russia during the revolution of 1905-06, but after it was over had to escape abroad and lived in exile until 1917. The October revolution landed them both at the Smolny Institute, Petrograd, and then at the Kremlin in Moscow. Madame Lenin devoted herself chiefly to educational work. She helped to found the Commisariat for Education and initiated the school system, the Young Communist League and the Department of Political Instruction, to say nothing of reading rooms for peasants and the like. After nursing Lenin devotedly during the long illness that ended in his death she resumed her educational activities and interested

herself in the Women's International. Among her achievements was a measure for the official control of free libraries, from which she had all books at variance with the sprit of Leninism removed and placed on an index expurgatorius. All such books she ordered to be burnt, including the Bible, the Koran, the Talmud and the works of Tolstoy, Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Herbert Spencer. In 1928, when Lenin'ss brother Dmitri Ulianoff went over to the Opposition, Madame Leuin was one of the deputation sent, to induce him to repent of his "delusions." On her 60th birthday she was the recipient of many honours. She wrote books on education and the women's movement, and contributed to a life of Lenin a tribute to-her husband entitled "At the Bier," Her support of Zinovieff and KarnenefF and her efforts to secure a reprieve for the accused in the first Trotskyist trial led to periods of imprisonment for her in 1935 and 1936, while in 1937 she was said to have been suspected of. participation in a plot to trf.ll Stalin.'