Youth
Born Sergei Mironovich Kostrikov (Ко́стриков) to a poor family in Urzhum (then in Vyatka Governorate of the Russian Empire), Kirov lost his parents when he was young. His father, Miron Kostrikov, had left him at a tender age; his mother, Yekaterina Kitun Kostrikova, also died the following year. Sergey was brought up by his grandmother before being sent to an orphanage at seven years of age. In 1901 a group of wealthy benefactors provided a scholarship for him to attend an industrial school at Kazan. After gaining his degree in Engineering he moved to Tomsk. As Russian society went into crisis, Kirov became a Marxist and joined the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in 1904.
Read more about this topic: Sergey Kirov
Famous quotes containing the word youth:
“Where the Youth pined away with desire,
And the pale Virgin shrouded in snow,
Arise from their graves and aspire,
Where my Sun-flower wishes to go.”
—William Blake (1757–1827)
“Meantime the education of the general mind never stops. The reveries of the true and simple are prophetic. What the tender poetic youth dreams, and prays, and paints today, but shuns the ridicule of saying aloud, shall presently be the resolutions of public bodies, then shall be carried as grievance and bill of rights through conflict and war, and then shall be triumphant law and establishment for a hundred years, until it gives place, in turn, to new prayers and pictures.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“I avoid talking before the youth of the age as I would dancing before them: for if one’s tongue don’t move in the steps of the day, and thinks to please by its old graces, it is only an object of ridicule.”
—Horace Walpole (1717–1797)