Anna Ulyanova

Anna Ilyinichna Yelizarova-Ulyanova (Анна Ильинична Елизарова-Ульянова; 26 August 1864 – 19 October 1935) was a Russian revolutionary and a Soviet politician. The older sister of Vladimir Lenin and of Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, she married Mark Yelizarov (1863–1919), who became Soviet Russia's first People's Commissar for Transport (in office, 1917–1918). 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.