Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. As the Bolsheviks' founder, Lenin led the October Revolution, which established the world's first communist state and short-lived soviet democracy. His government won the Russian Civil War and created a one-party state under the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.
Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics after his brother was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. He was expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in student protests, and earned a law degree before moving to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and becoming a prominent Marxist activist. In 1897, Lenin was exiled to Siberia for three years, after which he moved to Western Europe including Switzerland and became a leading figure in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1903, the party split between Lenin's Bolshevik faction and the Mensheviks, with Lenin advocating for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat in establishing socialism. Lenin briefly returned to Russia during the Revolution of 1905. During the First World War, he campaigned for its transformation into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution. After the February Revolution of 1917 ousted Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin returned to Russia and played a leading role in the October Revolution.
Lenin's government abolished private ownership of land, nationalised major industry and banks, withdrew from the war by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. The Bolsheviks initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, but during the civil war, they centralised power in the Communist Party and suppressed opposition in the Red Terror, in which tens of thousands were killed or imprisoned. Responding to famine and popular uprisings, Lenin reversed his policy of war communism in 1921 and stabilised the economy with the New Economic Policy. The Red Army defeated numerous anti-Bolshevik and separatist armies in the civil war, after which some of the non-Russian nations which had broken away from the empire were reunited in the Soviet Union in 1922; others, notably Poland, gained independence. Lenin suffered three debilitating strokes in 1922 and 1923 before his death in 1924, beginning a power struggle which ended in Joseph Stalin's rise to power.
Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. Under Stalin, he became an ideological figurehead of Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive figure, Lenin is praised by his supporters for establishing a revolutionary government which took steps towards socialism, anti-imperialism, social reforms and worker's control, while his critics condemn him for establishing a dictatorship which oversaw mass killings and political repression. He is widely considered one of the most significant figures of the 20th century.
Early life
Childhood: 1870–1887
Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in Streletskaya Ulitsa, Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk, on 22 April 1870, and baptised six days later; as a child he was known as Volodya, the common nickname of Vladimir. He was the third of eight children, having two older siblings, Anna and Alexander. They were followed by three more children, Olga, Dmitry, and Maria. Two later siblings died in infancy. His father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was a member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although his mother, Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova, a Lutheran by upbringing, was largely indifferent to Christianity, a view that influenced her children.Ilya Ulyanov was from a family of former serfs; Ilya's father's ethnicity remains unclear, with suggestions that he was of Russian, Chuvash, Mordvin, or Kalmyk ancestry. Despite a lower-class background, he had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan University before teaching at the Penza Institute for the Nobility. In mid-1863, Ilya married Maria, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy Swedish Lutheran mother and a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician. According to historian Petrovsky-Shtern, it is likely that Lenin was unaware of his mother's Jewish ancestry, which was only discovered by Anna after his death. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhny Novgorod, rising to become Director of Primary Schools in the Simbirsk district six years later. Five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. In 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir, which bestowed on him the status of hereditary nobleman.
Lenin's parents were monarchists and liberal conservatives, committed to the emancipation reform of 1861 introduced by the reformist Tsar Alexander II; they avoided political radicals and there is no evidence that the police ever put them under surveillance for subversive thought. Every summer they holidayed at a rural manor in Kokushkino. Among his siblings, Lenin was closest to his sister Olga, whom he often bossed around; he was extremely competitive and could be destructive, but usually admitted his misbehaviour. A keen sportsman, he spent much of his free time outdoors or playing chess, and excelled at school, the disciplinarian and conservative Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium.
In January 1886, when Lenin was 15, his father died of a brain haemorrhage. Lenin's behaviour became erratic and confrontational, and he renounced his belief in God. At the time, Lenin's elder brother Alexander, whom he affectionately knew as Sasha, was studying at Saint Petersburg University. Involved in political agitation against the absolute monarchy of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III, Alexander studied the writings of banned leftists and organised anti-government protests. He joined a revolutionary cell bent on assassinating the Tsar and was selected to construct a bomb. Before the attack could take place, the conspirators were arrested, and Alexander was executed in May 1887. Despite the emotional trauma of his father's and brother's deaths, Lenin graduated from school at the top of his class with a gold medal for exceptional performance, and decided to study law at Kazan University.
University and political radicalisation: 1887–1893
Upon entering Kazan University in August 1887, Lenin moved into a nearby flat. While there, he joined a revolutionary cell run by the militant agrarian socialist Lazar Bogoraz, composed of leftists seeking to revive the . At the same time, he joined a, a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. The group elected him as its representative to the university's council, and he took part in a December demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested Lenin and accused him of being a ringleader in the demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate. He read voraciously, becoming enamoured with Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done?Lenin's mother was concerned by her son's radicalisation, and was instrumental in convincing the Interior Ministry to allow him to return to Kazan, but not the university. Soviet historiography would later claim that, on his return to Kazan, Lenin became involved with Nikolai Fedoseev's Marxist revolutionary circle, through which he would discover Karl Marx's 1867 book Capital. However, it was not until 1888 that Fedoseev founded a Marxist study group, at which time Lenin had already left the city; this meant that Lenin and Fedoseev did not meet.
In September 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to Samara, where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko's socialist discussion circle. Wary of his political views, his mother had previously bought a country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast, in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. He had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the house as a summer home.
While in Samara, Lenin began to embrace Marxism, producing a Russian translation of Marx and Friedrich Engels's 1848 political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. He began to read the works of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, agreeing with Plekhanov's argument that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat, or urban working class, rather than the peasantry. This Marxist perspective contrasted with the view of the agrarian-socialist Narodnik movement, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby bypassing capitalism. This Narodnik view developed in the 1860s with the Narodnaya Volya and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument but was influenced by agrarian-socialists like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev and befriended several Narodniks.
In May 1890, Maria, who retained societal influence as the widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he obtained the equivalent of a first-class degree with honours. The graduation celebrations were marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid. Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer. He devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, Lenin collected data on Russian society, using it to support a Marxist interpretation of societal development and counter the claims of the Narodniks. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought.