Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova was the mother of Vladimir Lenin, the Bolshevik revolutionary leader and founder of the Soviet Union.
Background
Her father was Alexandr Blank (born Israel Blank), a well-to-do physician, who was a Jewish convert to Orthodox Christianity. Her mother, Anna Ivanovna Groschopf, was the daughter of a German father, Johann Groschopf, and a Swedish mother, Anna Östedt.
Career
Ulyanova was one of six children born in Saint St. Petersburg. Together they bought a country estate near Kazan and moved the family there. Ulyanova was educated at home, studying German, French and English as well as Russian and Western literature.
In 1863, she took an external degree and became an elementary school teacher.
Later, they moved to Nizhny Novgorod and then Simbirsk, where Ulyanov took up a prestigious position as an inspector of primary schools. She went abroad twice to meet with Vladimir Lenin (to France in the summer of 1902 and Stockholm in the fall of 1910).