Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Premier of the Soviet Union
1870 CE to 1924 CE
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, 22 April [O.S.
10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924) is a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist who serves as the leader of the Russian SFSR from 1917, and then concurrently as Premier of the Soviet Union from 1922, until 1924.
Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin gains an interest in revolutionary leftist politics following the execution of his brother in 1887.
Briefly attending the University of Kazan, where he is ejected for his involvement in anti-Tsarist protests, he devotes the next few years to gaining a degree in law and to radical politics, converting to Marxism.
In 1893, he moves to Russia's capital at St. Petersburg, where he continues with his political agitation, becoming a senior figure within the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.
Arrested and exiled to Siberia for three years, he subsequently flees to Western Europe, living in Germany, England and then Switzerland.
Following the February Revolution of 1917, in which the Tsar is overthrown and a provisional government takes power, he decides to return home.
As the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, he takes a senior role in orchestrating the October Revolution in 1917, which leads to the overthrow of the Russian Provisional Government and the establishment of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the world's first constitutionally socialist state.
Immediately afterwards, Lenin proceeds to implement socialist reforms, including the transfer of estates and crown lands to workers' soviets.
Faced with the threat of German invasion, he argues that Russia should immediately sign a peace treaty—which leads to Russia's exit from the First World War.
In 1921, Lenin proposes the New Economic Policy, a system of state capitalism that starts the process of industrialization and recovery from the Russian Civil War.
In 1922, the Russian SFSR joins former territories of the Russian Empire in becoming the Soviet Union.
The Bolshevik faction later becomes the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which acts as a vanguard party presiding over a single-party dictatorship of the proletariat.
As a politician, Lenin is a persuasive and charismatic orator.
As an intellectual, his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produces Marxism–Leninism, a pragmatic Russian application of Marxism that emphasizes the critical role played by a committed and disciplined political vanguard in the revolutionary process, while defending the possibility of a socialist revolution in less advanced capitalist countries through an alliance of the proletarians with the rural peasantry.
Lenin remains a controversial and highly divisive world figure.
Critics label him a dictator whose administration oversees multiple human rights abuses, but supporters counter this criticism by citing the limitations on his power and promote him as a heroic champion of the working class.
He has had a significant influence on the Marxist-Leninist movement, which since his death had developed into a variety of schools of thought, namely Stalinism, Trotskyism and Maoism.
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It becomes even more oriented toward terrorism three years later, renames itself the People's Will
(Narodnaia volia), and in 1881 is responsible for the assassination of Alexander II.
In 1879, Georgi Plekhanov forms a propagandist faction of Land and Liberty called Black Repartition (Chernyi peredel), which advocates reassigning all land to the peasantry.
This group studies Marxism, which, paradoxically, is principally concerned with urban industrial workers.
The People's Will remains underground, but in 1887 a young member of the group, Aleksander
Uyanov, attempts to assassinate Alexander III and is arrested and executed.
Another Ulyanov, Vladimir, is greatly affected by his brother's execution.
Influenced by Chernyshevskys writings, he also joins the People's Will and later, under the influence of Plekhanov, will convert to Marxism.
The younger Ulyanov will later change his name to Lenin.
Narodnaya Volya, encouraged by its successful assassination of Alexander II, had begun planning the murder of Alexander III.
The plot is uncovered by the Okhrana and five of the conspirators—including Alexander Ulyanov, the older brother of Vladimir Lenin—are captured and hanged on May 20 [O.S. May 8], 1887.
Lenin—at this time Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov—has immersed himself in the radical writings of Marx and Chernyshevsky and continued his education.
His father had died in January 1886, when Lenin was fifteen, of a brain hemorrhage.
His subsequent behavior became erratic and confrontational and he renounced his belief in God.
Shortly afterward his older brother Aleksandr had been arrested in St. Petersburg for plotting against the tsar, convicted, and hanged in May 1887.
Lenin scores first in his class and passes law examinations at the University of Saint Petersburg in 1891.
He moves to Samsara to practice law.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, beginning to call himself Lenin and devoting himself full time to revolutionary activities from 1893, studies the problem of revolutionary change in Russia from a Marxist perspective.
Lenin and several other members of the Marxist organization known as the Union of Struggle are arrested, imprisoned, and sent in exile to Siberia in 1895.
Deemed only a minor threat to the government, he is exiled to a peasant's hut in Shushenskoye, Minusinsky District, where he is kept under police surveillance; he is nevertheless able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visit him, and permitted to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and to hunt duck and snipe.
Lenin had hoped to cement connections between his Social-Democrats and Emancipation of Labor, a group of Russian Marxist émigrés based in Switzerland; he had visited the country to meet group members Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod.
He proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and to research the Paris Commune of 1871, which he considers an early prototype for a proletarian government.
Financed by his mother, he stayed in a Swiss health spa before traveling to Berlin, where he studied for six weeks at the Staatsbibliothek and met the Marxist activist Wilhelm Liebknecht.
Returning to Russia with a stash of illegal revolutionary publications, he travels to various cities distributing literature to striking workers.
While involved in producing a news sheet, Rabochee delo ("Workers' Cause"), he is among forty activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition.
Refused legal representation or bail, Lenin denies all charges against him but remains imprisoned for a year before sentencing.
He spends this time theorizing and writing.
In this work he notes that the rise of industrial capitalism in Russia has caused large numbers of peasants to move to the cities, where they form a proletariat.
From his Marxist perspective, Lenin argues that this Russian proletariat will develop class consciousness, which will in turn lead them to violently overthrow Tsarism, the aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie and to establish a proletariat state that will move toward socialism.
In February 1897, he is sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia.
He is granted a few days in Saint Petersburg to put his affairs in order and uses this time to meet with the Social-Democrats, who have renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.
Vladimir Lenin goes abroad in forced exile in 1900 and with Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov and others organizes the clandestine newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), designed to “ignite” radical consciousness.
In his writings for Iskra, lenin emphatically rejects the idea of a political alliance with livberals or other elements of the bourgeoisie and stresses the importance of social democracy over political democracy as the foundation of individual freedom.
Due to political repression under Tsar Nicholas II, it is necessary to publish Iskra in exile and smuggle it into Russia.
Initially, it is managed by Lenin, moving as he moves.
The first edition is published in Leipzig, Germany, on December 1, 1900 (other sources say Dec. 11).