Anna Ulyanova was the first child of
Maria Alexandrovna Blank and
Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov. In the trial of her brother
Alexander Ulyanov (for the planned assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander III in March 1887) she was sentenced to five years in exile. She organized Lenin's contacts from prison with the Petersburg
League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, supplied him with literature and copied the party documents he had secretly written in prison. In 1898 she joined the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. She arranged for the publication of Lenin's first work
The Development of Capitalism in Russia and other works. In 1909, she organized the publication of Lenin's book
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. From 1913, she worked on the
Pravda editorial board. In 1917, she was actively involved in the preparation and implementation of the
October Revolution as editorial secretary of
Pravda and editor of the journal
Tkach. After the revolution, she held senior positions in the People's Commissariat for Social Affairs and the People's Commissariat for Education. Ulyanova was one of the founders of the Commission for the Collection and Study of Materials on the History of the October Revolution and the Communist Party (
Istpart Commission) and the
Institute of Marxism-Leninism, and served as editorial secretary of the journal
Proletarskaya Revolyutsiya. In 2011 the
State Historical Museum in Moscow put on display a 1932 letter from Anna to
Joseph Stalin, in which she reveals that Lenin's maternal grandfather was a Jewish native of
Zhitomir who converted in order to leave the
Pale of Settlement. She asked Stalin to make this publicly known in order to counter increasing
anti-Semitism in the Soviet Union at the time, but he refused and told her to keep the matter secret. Anna Ulyanova died on 19 October 1935 in Moscow. She was buried at the Literatorskie Mostki of the
Volkovskoye Cemetery in Leningrad, next to her mother, husband and middle sister
Olga. ==References==