Lenin was Chuvash, Swedish, German, and I believe Kalmyk. I don't think he had any Russian blood. IIRC there was some issue surrounding the marriage of his grandparents because his German grandmother was a Lutheran and so could not legally marry an Orthodox Christian, so had to convert (the Jewish side having converted to Orthodoxy in the past), but held onto the Lutheran faith secretly or somnething like that. Look at his face -- he has the whole Kalmyk facial structure thing going on.
It's sort-of ironic since the Kalmyks were by and large adamantly anti-Bolshevik. They were imported into Europe from around China to serve as a Gurkha-like military ethnos, being attached to the Don Cossack host (Buddhist Cossacks!). So they tended to fight on the White side in the Civil War, and then were deported from Kalmykia by Stalin in WWII along with the Volga Germans, Chechens, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, and so forth, returning under Khrushchev. I actually have a collection of essays by Kalmyk schoolchildren on the subject of "what the deportation meant for my family."
--- On Thu, 7/9/09, RicardoStarkey at aol.com <RicardoStarkey at aol.com> wrote:
>
>
> I've heard of the Chuvash. I once read a book
> which stated that Vladimir
> Lenin's father was Chuvash, and that his mother was
> ethnically German, so
> that, actually, old Vlad wasn't Russian at all.
> Anyone know how accurate
> that is?
>
> Oh yeah. And during that late 70s/early 80s, I
> was a subscriber to
> _Soviet Life_, so I'm pretty sure I've read about all
> of the above ethnic groups.
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
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