65
" In any case, many of those who were exiled there were pleasantly surprised by what they found. In 1897 Vladimir Ulyanov, a hereditary nobleman who had embraced socialism in his student days, was sentenced to three years’ ‘administrative exile’ in Siberia for his involvement with the revolutionary Union of Struggle. He found life in Shushenskoe, in the Minusinsk district, remarkably pleasant. ‘Everyone’s found that I’ve grown fat over the summer, got a tan and now look completely like a Siberian,’ he wrote cheerfully to his mother. ‘That’s hunting and the life of the countryside for you!’ When not hunting, shooting and fishing, Lenin – as he would later prefer to be known – was free to read and write prolifically. He was even able to marry and to bring his wife and mother-in-law to live with him. "
― Niall Ferguson , The Abyss: World War I and the End of the First Age of Globalization-A Selection from The War of the World (Tracks)