Ulianova, Mariia Ilinichna

Born Feb. 6 (18), 1878, in Simbirsk (now Ul’ianovsk); died June 12,1937, in Moscow. Participant in the Russian revolutionary movement; Soviet party and state figure. Member of the Communist Party from 1898. Sister of V. I. Lenin.

After graduating from a Gymnasium in Moscow in 1895, Ul’ianova studied in the Advanced Courses for Women and took part in the student movement. In 1898 and 1899 she studied at the University of Brussels.

Ul’ianova became a professional revolutionary in 1899 and carried out party work in Nizhny Novgorod (now Gorky), Moscow, Kiev, Saratov, and St. Petersburg. In 1900 she became an Iskra agent and a member of the Bureau of the Russian Organization of Iskra in Samara (now Kuibyshev). In 1903 she joined the Secretariat of the Central Committee of the RSDLP. Ul’ianova lived in Geneva from 1904 to 1905 and in St. Petersburg from 1905 to 1907. In 1908 and 1909, as a member of the Bolshevik sections in Geneva and Paris, she carried out assignments from Lenin. In 1910, Ul’ianova undertook party work in Moscow and Saratov, but she was arrested in 1911 and spent from 1912 to 1914 in exile in Vologda Province. After joining the Moscow organization of the RSDLP in 1915, she conducted the organization’s correspondence with the Central Committee Bureau Abroad.

After the February Revolution of 1917, Ul’ianova was co-opted into the Bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(B). From March 1917 to 1929, she was executive secretary of Pravda and a member of the newspaper’s editorial board. One of the organizers of the worker and village correspondents’ movement, she was made the editor of the journal Raboche-krest’ianskii korrespondent in 1924. After becoming a staff member of the V. I. Lenin Institute in 1929, she prepared for publication Lenin’s letters to his relatives and a collection of materials on the essays he wrote in Europe.

In 1932, Ul’ianova became a member of the Presidium of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B) and of the Collegium of the People’s Commissariat of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate of the USSR; and in the same year she was made head of the joint bureau of complaints of the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorates of the USSR and the RSFSR. In 1934 she became a member of the Bureau of the Commission of Soviet Control and head of the bureau of complaints. Ul’ianova was a delegate to the Sixth Party Congress and to the Thirteenth through Seventeenth Congresses. She was elected a member of the Central Control Commission of the ACP(B) at the Fourteenth through Sixteenth Congresses and a member of the Commission of Soviet Control at the Seventeenth Congress. In 1935 she was elected to the Central Executive Committee of the USSR. She published her reminiscences of Lenin.

Ul’ianova was awarded the Order of Lenin. She is buried on Red Square at the Kremlin Wall.