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Vladimir Lenin
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Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ле́нин
In office
8 November 1917 – 21 January 1924
Preceded by Position created
Succeeded by Alexei Rykov
In office
17 November 1903 – 21 January 1924
Preceded by None
Succeeded by Joseph Stalin
(as General Secretary)
Born 22 April 1870(1870-04-22)
Simbirsk, Russian Empire
Died 21 January 1924 (aged 53)
Gorki, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality Soviet
Russian
Political party Bolshevik Party
Spouse(s) Nadezhda Krupskaya (1898-1924)
Profession Politician, Revolutionary, Lawyer
Religion none (atheist)
Signature
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Владимир Ильич Ленин, IPA [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɪlʲˈjiʨ ˈlʲenʲɪn]) (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Russian: Владимир Ильич Ульянов, IPA [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɪlʲˈjiʨ ʊlʲˈjanəf]), was a Russian revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years (1917–1924), as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a socialist economic system.
As a politician, Vladimir Lenin was a persuasive orator, as a political scientist his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produced Marxism–Leninism, the pragmatic Russian application of Marxism.[1]
Early life and background
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, on 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870, to Maria Alexandrovna Blank, a schoolmistress, and Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov a physics instructor, at Simbirsk, a Volga River town in the Russian Empire of the nineteenth century; following family custom, he was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.[2][3] Later, the USSR renamed Simbirsk as Ulyanovsk.
In 1869, Ilya Ulyanov became the Inspector of Public Schools, and later the Director of Elementary Schools, for the Simbirsk Gubernia Oblast (province), a successful career in the Imperial Russian public education system. Yet, Tsarist cultural mores defined the Ulyanov family stock as "ethnically mixed" — "Mordovian, Kalmyk, Jewish (cf. Blank family), Volgan German, and Swedish, and possibly others"; none the less, being of the intelligentsia, the Ulyanovs educated their children against the ills of their time (violations of human rights, servile psychology, etc.), and instilled readiness to struggle for higher ideals, a free society, and equal rights. Subsequently, excepting Olga (dead at age 19), every Ulyanov child became a revolutionary. [4]
In January 1886, his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage; in May 1887 (when 17 years old), his eldest brother Aleksandr Ulyanov was hanged for participating in a terrorist assassination attempt against the Tsar, Alexander III (1881–94).[5] His sister, Anna Ulyanova, with Aleksandr when arrested, was banished to an Ulyanov family estate at Kokushkino, a village some 40 km (25 mi.) from Kazan — those events transformed Lenin into a political radical, which official Soviet biographies represent as central to his assuming the revolutionary track as political life.
Complementing these personal, emotional, and political upheavals was his matriculation, in August 1887, to the Kazan University, where he studied law and read the works of Karl Marx. That Marxism-derived political development involved Lenin in a student riot, and consequent arrest, in December 1887; Kazan University expelled him, the police authorities barred him from other universities, thence was under continuous police surveillance — as the brother of a known terrorist.[6] Nevertheless, he studied independently and earned a law degree; in that time, he first read Das Kapital (1867–94). Three years later, in 1890, he was permitted studies at the University of Saint Petersburg.[7] In January 1892, he was awarded a first class diploma in law;[8] moreover, he was an intellectually distinguished student in the Classical languages of Latin and Greek, and the modern languages of German, French, and English, but had only limited command of the latter two. In the 1917 revolutionary period, he relied upon Inessa Armand to translate an article of his into French and English; and wrote to S. N. Ravich in Geneva, "I am unable to lecture in French".[9]
Revolutionary
Lenin practised law in the Volga River port of Samara for a few years, mostly land-ownership cases, from which he derived political insight to the Russian peasants' socio-economic condition;[10] in 1893, he moved to St Petersburg, and practised revolutionary propaganda. In 1895, he founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, the consolidation of the city's Marxist groups; as an embryonic revolutionary party, the League were active among the Russian labour organisations. On 7 December 1895, Lenin was arrested for plotting against Tsar Alexander III, and was then imprisoned for fourteen months in solitary confinement Cell 193 of the St Petersburg Remand Prison.[11] In February 1897, he was exiled to eastern Siberia, to the village Shushenskoye in the Minusinsky District, Yenisei Gubernia. There, he met Georgy Plekhanov, the Marxist who introduced socialism to Russia. In July 1898, Lenin married the socialist activist Nadezhda Krupskaya, and, in April 1899, he pseudonymously published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), by Vladimir Ilyin, one of the thirty theoretical works he wrote in exile.[11]
At exile's end in 1900, Lenin travelled Russia and Europe (Munich, Prague, Vienna, Manchester and London, with a memorial plaque at Percy Circus WC1, King's Cross), but resided in Zurich, where he worked as a Geneva University lecturer. He and Julius Martov (later a leading opponent) co-founded the newspaper Iskra (Spark), and published articles and books about revolutionary politics, whilst recruiting for the Social Democrats. In such clandestine political work, Vladimir Ulyanov assumed aliases, and, in 1902, adopted Lenin as his definitive nom de guerre, derived from the Siberian Lena River.[3]
In 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (РСДРП) ideologically diverged as the Bolshevik and the Menshevik factions; the RSDLP party faction names Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) derive from the narrow Bolshevik electoral defeat of the Mensheviks to the party's newspaper editorial board, and to central committee leadership. The break partly originated from Lenin's book What Is to Be Done? (1901–02), which proposed a smaller party organisation of professional revolutionaries, with Iskra in a primary ideologic role.
