Vladimir I. Lenin

Source

• Born: 22 April 1870
• Birthplace: Simbirsk, Volga
• Died: 21 January 1924
• Best Known As: Founder of Bolshevism and the force behind the Russian revolution

Name at birth: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov

Vladimir I. Lenin was a driving force behind the Russian Revolution of 1917 and became the first great dictator of the Soviet Union. After his brother was executed in 1887 (for plotting to kill the Czar), Lenin gave up studying law and became a full-time revolutionary. He studied Karl Marx and formed workers' groups, but was arrested and exiled to Siberia in 1895. In 1900 he went to Europe, and in 1903 he led the Bolsheviks in the split of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' party. When revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, he led the Bolsheviks to control the government. Lenin had complete political control over the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.) until his death, and is remembered as the man who put Marx's ideas to practical use.

For decades after his death, Lenin's well-preserved body was on public display in a special mausoleum in Red Square... Lenin was born on 10 April under the old (Julian) calendar, on 22 April under the modern (Gregorian) calendar; Russia didn't adopt the modern calendar until after the Revolution.

For more information on Vladimir Ilich Lenin, visit Britannica.com.

(b. Simbirsk, Russia, 22 Apr. 1870; d. Gorki, near Moscow, 21 Jan. 1924) Founder and leader of the Bolshevik Party, chair of Council of People's Commissars 1917 – 24 Vladimir Ul'yanov came from a provincial middle-class family of mixed ancestry (Russian-Kalmyk and Jewish-German), his father being a school inspector (hence in the minor nobility). Soon after his father's death in 1886 Lenin's elder brother Alexander, a student, was hanged for participating in a plot by a revolutionary populist group to assassinate Alexander III. This event made a deep impression on the younger Ul'yanov and, after passing his final school exams with distinction, he too joined a populist group when he began studying at Kazan University, for which he was rusticated. His mother bought an estate in Samara province, but there too he joined a populist group, although he became increasingly interested in Marxism. He completed a first class degree in law at St Petersburg University as an external student in 1891. After a period as an assistant advocate in Samara he moved in 1893 to St Petersburg, where he joined the Marxists. In 1895 he was sent to Geneva to make contact with Plekhanov's group. Soon after he returned he was imprisoned and in 1897 sentenced to Siberian exile. While in Siberia he married Nadezhda Krupskaya and completed, in 1899, his first major work The Development of Capitalism in Russia in which he argued that Russia had irrevocably embarked on the capitalist road and rejected populism (though his ideas on revolutionary organization remained influenced by it). After his release in 1900 he joined Plekhanov in Switzerland and, now using the pseudonym Lenin, with him launched the newspaper Iskra ("The Spark"), in which they attacked the "Economists" (supporters of incremental reform). In 1902 Lenin published his notorious pamphlet What is to be done? in which he argued that a successful revolutionary party in Russian conditions had to be a highly centralized and conspiratorial organization of "professional revolutionaries" to be an effective vanguard of the workers who would not spontaneously develop revolutionary consciousness. This novel view of the Marxist Party provoked considerable opposition. At the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP, held in Brussels and London in 1903, Martov's more moderate views on the party won the day, but Lenin's group, with the support of Plekhanov, won the elections to the central party bodies. Lenin termed his group the "Majoritarians" (Bolsheviki) and Martov's group "Minoritarians" (Mensheviki) and increasingly treated his group as the real party.

The revolutionary events of 1905 in Russia caught Lenin unawares, like most other exiled socialists, and he returned to Russia only in November. In his work Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution he argued that the workers would have to take a leading role in the bourgeois revolution, co-operating with revolutionary elements in the peasantry. This latter point was unusual in Marxist thinking, perhaps showing underlying populist influence on Lenin. He made some moves towards reconciliation with the Mensheviks, putting forward the idea of "democratic centralism", in which his 1902 model of the party was modified by emphasis on the democratic electivity and accountability of the leadership. But, once in exile again in 1907, he resumed his policy of promoting schisms, designed to strengthen the revolutionary vanguard. Differences with the Mensheviks continued to widen, now reflecting disagreement on the whole approach to revolution, and the split became final in 1912. He spent the war years mainly in Switzerland, arguing for turning the imperialist war into a revolutionary civil war. In Imperialism (written 1916) he argued that the capitalist powers were driven into territorial imperialism by capital export and used the "super-profits" derived from colonial exploitation to bribe the working class into quiescence by wage increases and social benefits, but that Russia, though less developed, could be the "weakest link" from which general revolution might develop.

Lenin, like other socialists, was surprised by the February Revolution in Russia and the consequent abdication of the Tsar. He obtained German permission to travel across Germany in a sealed train to Russia (where the Germans hoped his anti-war propaganda would help undermine the Russian war effort). Arriving in Petrograd (as St Petersburg had been renamed) in April 1917, he brought out his April Theses in which he disconcerted the more gradualist domestic Bolsheviks by urging non-cooperation with the Provisional Government, rejection of any participation in the war, and active propaganda work in the soviets to achieve a Bolshevik-dominated soviet government which would create a revolutionary state. It took some months before these tactics paid off, but gradually the effectiveness of Bolshevik propaganda (with slogans like "Bread", "Peace", "Land") combined with the ineffectiveness of the provisional government and its continuance of the war compromised the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries who took part in it and increased Bolshevik support in the Soviets. After a near catastrophic premature uprising in July (as a result of which Lenin was forced to go into hiding in Finland) Bolshevik fortunes rose again because of their role in foiling Kornilov's attempted coup in August. In his work The State and Revolution, which appeared in the summer of 1917, Lenin argued that the bourgeois state had to be smashed and a "dictatorship of the proletariat" established which would move rapidly to create a new order, though this was not considered an immediate prospect. However, by October the popular revolutionary mood was intensifying, the Bolsheviks gained majorities in many of the town and military soviets, and Trotsky and his group had come over to the Bolsheviks. Lenin returned on 10 October and urged an immediate armed uprising against the provisional government. Masterminded by Trotsky, the seizure of power was effected on the night of 25 – 6 October in the name of the All-Russian Congress of Soviets, to which Lenin announced the setting up of a Council of People's Commissars, led by himself. However, contrary to the expectations of many, Lenin refused to share power with other socialists, though a few left-wing socialist revolutionaries were given minor posts. Some revolutionary decrees were quickly issued: the Decree on Peace withdrew Russia from the war; the Decree on Land sanctioned the peasant takeover of the estates; other decrees separated church and state and established workers' control in the factories (soon to be reversed); the armed forces were disbanded and a voluntary militia established. However, opposition soon made itself felt and Lenin was forced in December to create the Cheka, a secret police force, and to place "temporary" bans on non-Bolshevik newspapers and parties. Elections were held for the Constituent Assembly on universal suffrage in November, in which the Bolsheviks gained 24 per cent of the votes and the Socialist Revolutionaries 40 per cent. When the Assembly met in January and voiced strong criticisms of the Bolshevik government, it was not allowed to reconvene, an important symbolic act in the creation of the one-party state. In March 1918 Lenin was forced to sign the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, a separate peace with Germany and Austria, ceding huge amounts of territory, including the Ukraine. The Left SRs then resigned from the government and started resistance, soon afterwards foreign forces intervened and the civil war started. There developed a highly authoritarian and centralized system of rule known as "War Communism": all industrial enterprises were nationalized, all non-Bolshevik activity treated as counter-revolution, the economy run by central command, and military and civilian conscription employed. By 1920 the war was over, but with the economy in a state of collapse and millions dead. Following Trotsky's suggestion, Lenin introduced in March 1921 the New Economic Policy, a "breathing-space", though one that he thought could last for "a generation", involving denationalization of small-scale enterprises and restoration of an agricultural market. At the same time political discipline was increased with a ban on factional activity in the party and the maintenance of bans on non-Bolshevik parties and media. This "tactical retreat" rapidly revived the economy. But Lenin's health was now bad: after surviving an assassination attempt in 1918 he had his first stroke in 1921 and was more or less incapacitated from 1922. His last struggles were against the rising tide of bureaucracy (but his solution was a bureaucratic one — still more committees, like Rabkrin) and to prevent Stalin gaining power after his death (but his recommendation for Stalin's removal as General Secretary was suppressed). He died at the age of 53 in January 1924, his weak constitution broken by overwork.

Lenin had been obsessed with achieving socialist revolution in Russia, for which end he considered any means justified, including terror and deceit, and did not appreciate the long-term dangers of such methods. His emphasis on central direction and the party's vanguard role ("We know best what's good for you") never changed, despite the broadening of party membership, and produced the dangers of "substitutism" about which Trotsky warned. Once revolution was achieved he seemed trapped in short-term tactical changes, unclear about long-term strategy. Undoubtedly an outstanding political leader whose personal contribution changed the face of the twentieth century, his dogmatism and ruthlessness, even though partly compensated by approachability and rejection of hero-worship, provided a precedent for the excesses of Stalin.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilych (né Ulyanov) (1870-1924), Russian socialist and architect of November 1917 Russian Revolution. His destiny may have been carved in stone in 1887 when his elder brother Alexander was executed for complicity in a plot against the life of Tsar Alexander III. When Vladimir enrolled in the Legal Faculty of Kazan University the same year he was promptly arrested for taking part in student revolutionary activity and expelled. He moved to St Petersburg in 1893 but two years later he was arrested again and sent to Siberia where he produced some 30 polemical works including Tasks of Russian Social-Democrats and The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

In July 1900 he went into exile and founded the Marxist newspaper Iskra (Spark), in which in December 1901 he published his first article under the pseudonym by which he would be known to history. In 1903, the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP) resolved that it would become a Marxist revolutionary party. From the beginning, Lenin's views were sharply at variance with the orthodox Marxists, who foresaw a need to ally with bourgeois parties to bring about a democratic revolution, which would then be followed in due course by a proletarian socialist revolution. Lenin was adamant that the proletariat had no allies except the peasantry, and that the RSDWP must play a leading role in both revolutions, exacerbating contradictions during the first and leading the second. After the revolutionary events of 1905, he went further and argued that if the western European industrial proletariat, which he saw as far more ripe for revolution, should proceed to the second stage, then Russia could omit the bourgeois democratic stage altogether and proceed directly to the dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry. It was a vision from which he would not waver, and it is important to remember that he maintained his views over a prolonged period when the rest of European socialism departed from its commitment to social revolution. WW I revealed this clearly, as the socialist parties in general expressed nationalist solidarity with the governments leading Europe into what, pre-war, they had agreed was an imperialist conflict to be opposed and exploited to bring about the revolution.

Not Lenin. Even before the war he had split the RSDWP irrevocably by his doctrinal rigidity. The factions, which became in effect rival parties each with their own organizations, were the Mensheviks (which means the minority, which they were at the 1912 Prague conference where the split occurred, but not in the membership) and the Bolsheviks (the majority). The latter founded the newspaper Pravda (Truth), with Lenin as editor, and the one consistent feature of the publication over the next 80 years was that it rarely published a truthful word. However, it did provide a platform for Lenin, and although his intensity emanates from his writings, even in translation, it cannot convey the personal authority that accrued to him as almost the only man in Europe who lived the revolution 24 hours a day. He had a mesmeric effect on people: some would go away convinced, others repelled, none indifferent.

WW I not only split European socialism into majority pro- and minority anti-war factions, it divided the latter into the merely pacifist and a tiny minority within a minority, which included Liebnecht, Luxemburg, Lenin, and a few others, that advocated transforming the imperialist war into civil war. His views were set out in his (later) most influential work, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917). That it might have been convincing at the time is understandable, but to this day there are still those who believe that it represents an accurate analysis and illustrates Lenin's gift for tapping into the human need for simple, Manichaean explanations for complex realities. The war, he wrote, was a product of the expansionist nature of imperialism, the final stage of monopoly capitalism. Thus he held that colonialism, in fact an economically insignificant by-product of world dominance by the industrially developed West, was essential for the survival of capitalism. He completely missed the significance of the cosy cartels into which the world's largest industrial and financial institutions had settled and, more damningly, failed to see that even though presided over by kings and emperors, WW I owed both its ferocity and duration to the fact that it was a bourgeois war par excellence. The majority socialists were not, as he declared, a ‘labour aristocracy’ bribed by the imperialists to betray the proletariat at home and the even more exploited sub-proletariat abroad, but true representatives of their own super-patriotic lower middle class. Mussolini, another prominent socialist editor, perceived this far more accurately and rode the bandwagon to power and eventual infamy. Lenin required the prior services of the imperial German army, not only to put him in Petrograd (formerly and now St. Petersburg) at the opportune moment in the famous ‘sealed train’, but also to atomize Russian society to such an extent that his tiny faction was able to seize power in the coup d'état of 7-8 November 1917.

Thereafter there is no denying that his ruthless clarity of purpose affirmed the Russian Revolution. Others might say the words ‘peace at any price’ but he saw the absolute objective need for it, threatening to resign unless the Bolsheviks accepted the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, surrendering 60 per cent of European Russia and one third of the pre-war population. His realpolitik certainly saved the Bolsheviks from going the way of the tsar and the bourgeois Kerensky government, which had persisted in the war beyond all reason. Thereafter his enemies did as much to consolidate his dictatorship, the ‘White’ Russians seeking to impose traditional landownership on a peasantry that would otherwise have turned against the harsh impositions of the Bolsheviks, and foreign invasions reawakening the great power of Russian patriotism. Operationally, Trotsky was both the architect of the coup d'état and of victory in the civil war that followed, as well as being the father of what became the Red Army; but strategically, both in the mobilization of at times barely enough resources to survive and later in launching a disastrous offensive into Poland, Lenin's will was paramount.

Like any successful revolutionary, Lenin was an opportunist. Circumstances, unimaginable at the time he formulated his political philosophy, made it possible for him to preside over a sequence of events that permit one, in retrospect, to perceive a guiding principle. There was none except survival. However influential his views were to become, especially among the colonized peoples of the world, they were tactical in nature and related to seizing power. What he did with it embodied the worst of the Russian political tradition, with appalling consequences not only for Russia but also for the second Russian empire won in blood and maintained in cruelty and savage repression by his successor.

Bibliography

• Szamuely, Tibor, The Russian Tradition (London, 1974)

— Hugh Bicheno

The Russian statesman Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924) was the creator of the Bolshevik party, the Soviet state, and the Third International. He was a successful revolutionary leader and an important contributor to revolutionary socialist theory.

Few events have shaped contemporary history as profoundly as the Russian Revolution and the Communist revolutions that followed it. Each one of them was made in the name of V. I. Lenin, his doctrines, and his political practices. Contemporary thinking about world affairs has been greatly influenced by Lenin's impetus and contributions. From Woodrow Wilson's Fourteen Points to today's preoccupation with wars of national liberation, imperialism, and decolonization, many important issues of contemporary social science were first raised or disseminated by Lenin; even some of the terms he used have entered into everyone's vocabulary. The very opposition to Lenin often takes Leninist forms.

Formative Years

V. I. Lenin was born in Simbirsk (today Ulianovsk) on April 10 (Old Style), 1870. His real family name was Ulianov, and his father, Ilia Nikolaevich Ulianov, was a high official in the czarist educational bureaucracy who had risen into the nobility. Vladimir received the conventional education given to the sons of the Russian upper class but turned into a radical dissenter. One impetus to his conversion doubtless was the execution by hanging of his older brother Alexander in 1887; Alexander and a few associates had conspired to assassinate the Emperor. Lenin graduated from secondary school with high honors, enrolled at Kazan University, but was expelled after participating in a demonstration. He retired to the family estate but was permitted to continue his studies in absentia. He obtained a law degree in 1891.

When, in 1893, he moved to St. Petersburg, Lenin was already a Marxist and a revolutionary by profession, joining like-minded intellectuals in study groups, writing polemical pamphlets and articles, and seeking to organize workers. The St. Petersburg Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of Labor, which Lenin helped create, was one of the important nuclei of the Russian Marxist movement. The most important work from this period is a lengthy pamphlet, "What Are the 'Friends of the People,' and How Do They Fight against Social-Democracy?" In it Lenin presents the essentials of his entire outlook.

In 1897 Lenin was arrested, spent some months in jail, and was finally sentenced to 3 years of exile in the Siberian village of Shushenskoe. He was joined there by a fellow Marxist, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, whom he married in 1898. In his Siberian exile he produced a major study of the Russian economy, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, in which he sought to demonstrate that, despite its backwardness, the economy of his country had definitely transformed itself into a capitalist one. If Lenin had produced nothing else than this learned though controversial work, he would today be known as one of the leading Russian economists of his period.

Emigration to Europe

Not long after his release from Siberia in the summer of 1900, Lenin moved to Europe, where he spent most of the next 17 years, moving from one country to another at frequent intervals, periods of feverish activity alternating with those of total frustration. His first step was to join the editorial board of Iskra (>The Spark), then the central newspaper of Russian Marxism, where he served together with the top leaders of the movement. After parting from Iskra, he edited a succession of papers of his own and contributed to other socialist journals. His journalistic activity was closely linked with organizational work, partly because the underground organizational network within Russia to some extent revolved around the distribution of clandestine literature.

Organizational activity, in turn, was linked with the selection and training of personnel. For some time Lenin conducted a training school for Russian revolutionaries at Longjumeau, a suburb of Paris. A perennial problem was that of financing the movement and its leaders' activities in their European exile. Lenin personally could usually depend on financial support from his mother; but her pension could not pay for his political activities. Much of the early history of Russian Marxism can be understood only in the light of these pressing money problems.

His Thought

A Marxist movement had developed in Russia only during the last decade of the 19th century as a response to the rapid growth of industry, urban centers, and a proletariat. Its first intellectual spokesmen were people who had turned away from populism (narodnichestvo), which they regarded as a failure. Instead of relying on the peasantry, they placed their hopes on the workers as the revolutionary class. Rejecting the village socialism preached by the Narodniks, they opted for industrialization, modernization, and Westernization. Their immediate aim they declared to be a bourgeois revolution which would transform Russia into a democratic republic.

In accepting this revolutionary scenario, Lenin added the important proviso that hegemony in the coming bourgeois revolution should remain with the proletariat as the most consistently revolutionary of all classes.

At the same time, Lenin, more than most Marxists, made a clear distinction between the workers' movement, on the one hand, and the theoretical contribution to be made by intellectuals, on the other. Of the two, he considered the theoretical contribution the more important, the workers' movement being a merely spontaneous reaction to capitalist exploitation, whereas theory was an expression of consciousness, meaning science and rationality. Throughout his life Lenin insisted that consciousness must maintain leadership over spontaneity for revolutionary Marxism to succeed. This implies that the intellectual leaders must prepare the proletariat for its political tasks and must guide it in its action. Leadership and hierarchy thus become key concepts in the Leninist vocabulary, and the role and structure of the party must conform to this conception. The party is seen as the institutionalization of true consciousness. It must turn into the general staff of the revolution, subjecting the working class and indeed all its own members to command and discipline.

Lenin expressed these ideas in his important book What's To Be Done? (1902), the title of the work expressing his indebtedness to Nikolai Chernyshevsky. When, in 1903, the leaders of Russian Marxism met for the first important party congress, formally the Second Congress, these ideas clashed head on with the conception of a looser, more democratic workers' party advanced by Lenin's old friend luli Martov. This disagreement over the nature and organization of the party was complicated by numerous other conflicts of view, and from its first important congress Russian Marxism emerged split into two factions. The one led by Lenin called itself the majority faction (bolsheviki); the other got stuck with the name of minority faction (mensheviki). Lenin's reaction to the split was expressed in his pamphlet "One Step Forward - Two Steps Back," published in 1904.

Mensheviks and Bolsheviks disagreed not only over organizational questions but also over most other political problems, including the entire conception of a Marxist program for Russia and the methods to be employed by the party. Bolshevism, in general, stresses the need for revolution and the futility of incremental reforms; it emphasizes the goals of Marxism rather than the process, with its timetable, by which Marx thought the new order was to be reached; in comparison to menshevism it is impatient, pragmatic, and tough-minded.

The Revolution of 1905 surprised all Russian revolutionary leaders, including the Bolsheviks. Lenin managed to return to Russia only in November, when the defeat of the revolution was a virtual certainty. But he was among the last to give up. For many more months he urged his followers to renew their revolutionary enthusiasm and activities and to prepare for an armed uprising. For some time afterward the technology of revolutionary warfare became the focus of his interest. His militancy was expressed in an anti-Menshevik pamphlet published in 1905, "Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution."

The major impact of the aborted revolution and its aftermath was a decided change in Lenin's attitude toward the peasantry. Lenin came to recognize it as a class in its own right - not just as a rural proletariat - with its own interests, and as a valuable ally for the revolutionary proletariat. His pamphlet "The Agrarian Question in the Russian Revolution of 1905-7" presents these new views in systematic fashion.

Bolshevism as an Independent Faction

In the 12 years between the Revolution of 1905 and that of 1917, bolshevism, which had begun as a faction within the Russian Social-Democratic Workers party, gradually emerged as an independent party that had cut its ties with all other Russian Marxists. The process entailed prolonged and bitter polemics against Mensheviks as well as against all those who worked for a reconciliation of the factions. It involved fights over funds, struggles for control of newspapers, the development of rival organizations, and meetings of rival congresses. Disputes concerned many questions about the goals and strategies of the movement, the role of national liberation movements within the Marxist party, and also philosophic controversies. Lenin's contribution to this last topic was published in 1909, Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

Since about 1905 the international socialist movement had begun also to discuss the possibility of a major war breaking out. In its congresses of 1907 and 1912, resolutions were passed which condemned such wars in advance and pledged the parties of the proletariat not to support them. Lenin had wanted to go further than that. He had urged active opposition to the war effort and a transformation of any war into a proletarian revolution. He called his policy "revolutionary defeatism." When World War I broke out, most socialist leaders in the countries involved supported the war effort. For Lenin, this was proof that he and they shared no aims or views. The break between the two schools of Marxism had become irreconcilable.

During the war Lenin lived in Switzerland. He attended several conferences of radical socialists opposed to the war or even agreeing with Lenin's revolutionary defeatism. He read extensively on the Marxist theory of state and wrote a first draft for a book on the subject, The State and Revolution. He also immersed himself in literature dealing with contemporary world politics and wrote a book which may, in the long run, be his most important one, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), in which Marxism is effectively made applicable to the 20th century. By the beginning of 1917 he had fits of despondency and wrote to a close friend that he despaired of ever witnessing another revolution. This was about a month before the fall of czarism.

Lenin in 1917

It took a good deal of negotiation and courage for Lenin and a group of like-minded Russian revolutionaries to travel from Switzerland back to Russia through enemy country (Germany). Much has been made of Lenin's negotiations with an enemy power and of the fact that some Bolshevik activities were supported financially by German intelligence agencies. There is no convincing evidence, however, which might show that acceptance of funds from objectionable sources made Lenin an agent of these sources in anyway. And from his point of view the source of aid was immaterial; what counted was the use to which it was put.

The man who returned to Russia in the famed "sealed train" in the spring of 1917 was of medium height, quite bald, except for the back of his head, with a reddish beard. The features of his face were arresting - slanted eyes that looked piercingly at others, and high cheek-bones under a towering forehead. The rest of his appearance was deceptively ordinary: a man of resolute movements clad quite conservatively in a middle-class suit.

Versed in many languages, Lenin spoke Russian with a slight speech defect but was a powerful orator in small groups as well as before mass audiences. A tireless worker, he made others work tirelessly. Self-effacing, he sought to compel his collaborators to devote every ounce of their energy to the revolutionary task at hand. He was impatient with any extraneous activities, including small talk and abstract theoretical discussions. Indeed, he was suspicious of intellectuals and felt most at home in the company of simple folk. Having been brought up in the tradition of the Russian nobility, Lenin loved hunting, hiking, horseback riding, boating, mush-rooming, and the outdoor life in general. He sought to steel himself by systematic physical exercise and generally forbade himself those hobbies which he considered time-wasting or corrupting: chess, music, and companionship. While his life-style was that of a dedicated professional revolutionary, his tastes in art, morals, and manners were rather conventional.

Once he had returned to Russia, Lenin worked feverishly and relentlessly to utilize the revolutionary situation that had been created by the fall of czarism so as to convert it into a proletarian revolution which would bring his own party into power. These were the crucial 6 months of his life, but space does not permit a detailed account of his activities in the period. The result of his activities is well known: Opinions in Russia quickly became more and more polarized. Moderate forces found themselves less and less able to maintain even the pretense of control. In the end, the so-called provisional government, then headed by Kerensky, simply melted away, and power literally fell into the hands of the Bolsheviks. As a result of this so-called October Revolution, Lenin found himself not only the leader of his party but also the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (equivalent to premier minister) of the newly proclaimed Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic.

Ruler of Russia

During the first years of Lenin's rule as dictator of Russia, the major task he faced was that of establishing his and his party's authority in the country. Most of his policies can be understood in this light, even though he alienated some elements in the population while satisfying others. Examples are the expropriation of landholdings for distribution to the peasants, the separate peace treaty with Germany, and the nationalization of banks and industrial establishments.

From 1918 to 1921 a fierce civil war raged which the Bolsheviks finally won against seemingly overwhelming odds. During the civil war Lenin tightened his party's dictatorship and eventually eliminated all rival parties from the political arena. A spirited defense of his dictatorship can be found in his "The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky" (1918), in which he answers criticism from some more moderate Marxists. Lenin had to create an entirely new political system with the help of inexperienced personnel; he was heading a totally exhausted economy and had to devise desperate means for mobilizing people for work. Simultaneously he created the Third (Communist) International and vigorously promoted the spread of the revolution to other countries; and meanwhile he had to cope with dissent among his own party comrades, some of whom criticized him from the left. The pamphlet "Left-wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder" is a response to this criticism.

When the civil war had been won and the regime established firmly, the economy was ruined, and much of the population was bitterly opposed to the regime. At this point Lenin reversed many of his policies and instituted a trenchant reform, called the New Economic Policy. It signified a temporary retreat from the goal of establishing communism at once and a resolve to make do with the social forces available: the Communist party declared itself ready to coexist and cooperate with features of the past, such as free enterprise, capitalist institutions, and capitalist states across the borders. For the time being, the Soviet economy would be a mixture of capitalist and socialist features. The stress of the party's policies would be on economic reconstruction and on the education of a peasant population for life in the 20th century. In the long run, Lenin hoped that both these policies would make the blessings of socialism obvious to all, so that the country would gradually grow into socialism. The wariness, the caution, the fear of excessive haste and impatience which Lenin showed in the years 1921-1923 are expressed only inadequately in the last few articles he wrote, such as "On Cooperation," "How We Must Reorganize the Workers and Peasants Inspectorate," and "Better Less but Better."

In 1918 an assassin wounded Lenin; he recovered but may have suffered some lasting damage. On May 26, 1922, he suffered a serious stroke from which he recovered after some weeks, only to suffer a second stroke on December 16. He was so seriously incapacitated that he could participate in political matters only intermittently and feebly. An invalid, he lived in a country home at Gorki, near Moscow, where he died on Jan. 21, 1924. His body was preserved and is on view in the Lenin Mausoleum outside the walls of the Moscow Kremlin.

Further Reading

Numerous collections and selections of Lenin's writings have been published in English. No first-rate biography has as yet been written in English to match Gérard Walter, Lénine (1950). Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin (1964), was praised highly. It is based on exhaustive research, is fair and comprehensive, but is disorganized and poorly written. Interesting glimpses into Lenin's life are provided by his widow, N. K. Krupskaya, Memories of Lenin (trans., 2 vols., 1930-1932); Nikolai Valentinov's studies, Encounters with Lenin (1953; trans. 1968) and The Early Years of Lenin (trans. 1969); Richard Pipes, Social Democracy and the St. Petersburg Labor Movement, 1885-1897 (1963); Angelica Balabanoff, Impressions of Lenin (1964); and Leon Trotsky, Lenin: Notes for a Biographer (trans. 1971), with a good introduction by Bertram D. Wolfe. See also David Shub, Lenin: A Biography (1948; rev. ed. 1967); Moshe Lewin, Lenin's Last Struggle (1967; trans. 1968); and Isaac Deutscher, Lenin's Childhood (1970).

For a survey of Lenin's ideology see Leopold H. Haimson, The Russian Marxists and the Origins of Bolshevism (1955); Alfred G. Meyer, Leninism (1957); and Adam B. Ulam, The Bolsheviks (1965). A general appraisal of the man and his work is Leonard Schapiro and Peter Reddaway, eds., Lenin: The Man, the Theorist, the Leader (1967). For the broader political background see Arthur Rosenberg, A History of Bolshevism (1934); Leonard Schapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1959); Robert V. Daniels, The Conscience of the Revolution (1960); and Theodore I. Dan, The Origins of Bolshevism (1964).

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (1870-1924) Revolutionary leader and principal architect of the success of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917. Philosophically Lenin contributed a number of ideas to Marxism: these include emphasis on the role of a professional revolutionary vanguard, drawn from the intelligentsia, the moral absolutism whereby everything may be sacrificed to the revolution, and the association of imperialism with capitalism that partly explained why Russia, which was not a developed capitalist economy, might nevertheless be in the vanguard of the revolution. Influential works by Lenin include The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), What is to be Done? (1902), and Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). His earlier Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909) is an attack on what he saw as the subjective idealism of Russian thinkers influenced by Avenarius and Mach.

(1870 - 1924), revolutionary publicist, theoretician, and activist; founder of and leading figure in the Bolshevik Party (1903 - 1924); chairman of the Soviet of People's Commissars of the RSFSR/USSR (1917 - 1924).

The reputation of Vladimir Ilich Lenin (pseudonym of V.I. Ulyanov) has suffered at the hands of both his supporters and his detractors. The former turned him into an idol; the latter into a demon. Lenin was neither. He was born on April 22, 1870, into the family of a successful school inspector from Simbirsk. For his first sixteen years, Lenin lived the life of a child of a conventional, moderately prosperous, middle-class, intellectual family. The ordinariness of Lenin's upbringing was first disturbed by the death of his father, in January 1886 at the age of 54. This event haunted Lenin, who feared he might also die prematurely, and in fact died at almost exactly the same age as his father. Then, in March 1887, Lenin's older brother was arrested for terrorism; he was executed the following May. The event aroused Lenin's curiosity about what had led his brother to sacrifice his life. It also put obstacles in his path: As the brother of a convicted terrorist, Lenin was excluded from Kazan University. He eventually took a law degree, with distinction, by correspondence from St Petersburg University in January 1892. However, his real interests had already turned to serving the oppressed through revolution rather than at the bar.

All the indications suggest that Lenin was initially attracted to populism, and only later came under the sway of Marxism. He joined a number of provincial Marxist study circles, but first began to attract attention when he moved to the capital, St. Petersburg, and engaged in illegal political activities among workers and intellectuals. In February 1894, he met fellow conspirator Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya, who became his lifelong companion. After his first visit to Western Europe, in 1895, to meet the exiled leaders of Russian Marxism, Lenin returned to St. Petersburg and helped set up the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. He was arrested in December 1896 and, after prison interrogation in St. Petersburg, was exiled to the village of Shushenskoe, in Siberia. Krupskaya, who was exiled separately, offered to share banishment with him. The authorities agreed, providing they married, which they did in July 1898. Siberian exile, though rigorous in many respects, was an interlude of relative personal happiness in Lenin's life. His lifelong love of nature asserted itself in long walks, observation of social and animal life of the area, and frequent hunting expeditions. He read a great deal, communicated widely by letter with other socialists, and undertook research and writing. Direct political activity was not possible, and Lenin played no part in the formation, in 1898, of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDLP), to which he at first adhered to but from which he later split. His term of exile ended in February, 1900. In July of that same year, he left Russia for five years.

Up until that point much of Lenin's political writing, from his earliest known articles to his first major treatise, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, written while he was in Siberia, revolved around the dispute between Marxists and populists. The populists had proposed that Russia, given its commune-based peasant class and underdeveloped industry, could pass from its current condition of "backwardness" to socialism without having to first undergo the rigors of capitalist industrialization. Such a notion was an anathema to Lenin, who believed the Marxist axiom that socialist revolution could only follow from the overdevelopment of capitalism, which would bring about its own collapse. Lenin attacked the populist thesis in several articles and pamphlets. The main theme of his treatise on The Development of Capitalism in Russia was that, in fact, capitalism was already well-entrenched in Russia, and therefore the question of whether it could be avoided was meaningless. Nonetheless, it remained obvious that Russia had only a small working class, and much of the rest of Lenin's life could be seen as an attempt to reconcile the actual weakness of proletarian forces in Russia with the country's undoubted potential for some kind of popular revolution, and to ensure Marxist and proletarian dominance in any such revolution.

The Emergence of Bolshevism (1902 - 1914)

Lenin worked to develop theoretical and practical means to accomplish these closely related tasks. The core of Lenin's activity revolved around the organization and production of a series of journals. He frequently described himself on official papers as a journalist, and he did, in fact, write a prodigious number of articles, as well as many longer works. In 1902, Lenin produced one of his most widely read and, arguably most misunderstood, pamphlets, What Is to Be Done?, which has been widely taken to be the founding text of a distinctive Leninist understanding of how to construct a revolutionary party on the basis of what he called "professional revolutionaries." When it was first published, however, it was read as a statement of Marxist orthodoxy. Lenin asserted the primacy of political struggle, opposing the ideas of the economists, who argued that trade union struggle would serve the workers' cause better than political revolution.

It was only in the following year, 1903, that Lenin began to break with the majority of the social-democratic movement. Again, received opinion, which claims Lenin split the party at the 1903 social-democratic party congress, oversimplifies the nature of the break. Lenin's key resolution at the congress, in which he attempted to narrow the definition of party membership, was voted down. Later, by means many have judged foul, he garnered a majority vote on the issue of electing members to the editorial board of the party journal, Iskra, on which Lenin and his supporters predominated. It was from this victory that the terms Bolshevik (majoritarians) and Menshevik (minoritarians) began to slowly come into vogue. However, the split of the party was only fully completed over the next few months, even years, of arid but fierce party controversies. Lenin's bitter polemic One Step Forward, Two Steps Back: The Crisis in Our Party, published in Geneva in February 1904, marks a clearer division and catalog of contentious issues than did What Is to Be Done. It was criticized not only by its target, Yuli Osipovich Martov, but also by Georgy Valentinovich Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, Karl Kautsky, and Rosa Luxemburg. Lenin's remaining allies of the time included Alexander Bogdanov, Anatoly Lunacharsky, Grigory Zinoviev, and Lev Kamenev.

So much energy was involved in the dispute that the development of an actual revolutionary situation in Russia went almost unnoticed by the squabbling exiles. Even after Bloody Sunday (January 22, 1905) Lenin's attention remained divided between the revolution and the task of splitting the social democrats. With the latter aim in view, he convened a Third Party Congress (London, April 25 to May 10) consisting entirely of Bolsheviks. Only in August did Lenin's main pamphlet on revolutionary strategy, Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Russian Revolution, appear. Inevitably, the wrong tactic - the identification of the revolution as bourgeois - was attributed to the Mensheviks. The correct, Bolshevik, tactic, was the recognition of "a democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry," which put less reliance on Russia's weak bourgeoisie. It also marked a significant effort by Lenin to incorporate the peasantry into the revolutionary equation. This was another way in which Lenin strove to compensate for the weakness of the working class itself, and the peasantry remained part of his strategy, in a variety of forms, for the rest of his life.

In the atmosphere of greater freedom prevailing after the issuing of the October Manifesto, which was squeezed out of the tsarist authorities under extreme duress and appeared to promise basic constitutional rights and liberties, Lenin returned to Russia legally on November 21, 1905. Even so, by December 17, police surveillance had driven him underground. He supported the heroic but catastrophically premature workers' armed uprising in Moscow in December. As conditions worsened he retreated to Finland and then, in December 1907, left the Russian Empire for another prolonged west European sojourn that lasted until April 1917. Even before the failure of the 1905 revolution, the party split continued to attract an inordinate amount of Lenin's attention. The break with Leon Trotsky in 1906 and Bogdanov in 1908 removed the last significant thinkers from the Bolshevik movement, apart from Lenin himself, who seemed constitutionally incapable of collaborating with people of his own intellectual stature. The break with Bogdanov was consummated in Lenin's worst book, Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909), a naïve and crudely propagandistic blunder into the realm of philosophy.

Politically, Lenin had wandered into the wilderness as leader of a small faction that was situated on the fringe of Russian radical politics and distinguished largely by its dependence on Lenin and its refusal to contemplate a compromise that might reunite the party. Lenin was also distinguished by a ruthless morality of only doing that which was good for the revolution. In its name friendships were broken, and re-made, at a moment's notice. Later, when in power, he urged occasional episodes of violence and terror to secure the revolution as he understood it, although, like a sensitive war leader, he did so reluctantly and only when he thought it absolutely necessary.

For the next few years Lenin was at his least influential. Had it not been for the backing of the novelist Maxim Gorky, it is unlikely the Bolsheviks could have continued to function. He had close support from Grigory Yevseyevich Zinoviev, Lev Borisovich Kamenev, Inessa Armand (with whom he may have had a brief sexual liaison), and from his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya. He also remained close to his family. When possible, he vacationed with them by the beaches of Brittany and Arcachon, or in the Swiss mountains. Lenin's love of nature, of walking and cycling, frequently counteracted the immense nervous stresses occasioned by his political battles. He was prone to a variety of illnesses, which acted as reminders of his father's early death, convincing him that he had to do things in a hurry. However, the second European exile was characterized by frustration rather than achievement.

From Obscurity to Power (1914 - 1921)

The onset of the First World War began the transformation of political fortune which was to bring Lenin to power. His attitude to the war was characteristically bold. Despite the collapse of the Second International Socialist Movement and the apparent wave of universal patriotism of August 1914, Lenin saw the war as a revolutionary opportunity and declared, as early as September 1914, that socialists should aim to turn it into a Europe-wide civil war. He believed that the basic class logic of the situation, that the war was fought by the masses to serve the interests of the imperialist bourgeoisie, would eventually become clear to the troops who, being trained in arms, would then turn on their oppressors. He also wrote a major pamphlet, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism. A Popular Outline (1916). Returning to the theme of justifying a Marxist revolution in "backward" Russia, he argued that Russia was a component part of world capitalism and therefore the initial assault on capital, though not its decisive battles, could be conducted in Russia. Within months, just such an opportunity arose.

Lenin's transition from radical outcast to revolutionary leader began after the fall of tsarism in February 1917. A key moment was his declaration, in the so-called April Theses, enunciated immediately on his return to Russia (April 16 - 17, 1917), that the party should not support the provisional government. By accident or design, this was the key to Bolshevik success. As other parties were sucked into supporting the provisional government, they each lost public support. After the Kornilov Affair, when the commander-in-chief, Lavr Kornilov, appeared to be spearheading a counter-revolution in August and September of 1917, it was the Bolsheviks who were the main beneficiaries because they were not tainted by association with the discredited provisional government which, popular opinion believed, was associated with Kornilov's apparent coup. Even so, it took immense personal effort by Lenin to persuade his party to seize their opportunity. Contrary to much received opinion and Bolshevik myth, the October Revolution was not carefully planned but, rather, improvised. Lenin was in still in hiding in Finland following proscription of the party after the July Days, when armed groups of sailors had failed in an attempt to overthrow the provisional government and the authorities took advantage of the situation to move against the Bolsheviks. He had been vague about details of the proposed revolution throughout the crucial weeks leading up to it, suggesting, at different moments, that it might begin in Moscow, Petrograd, Kronstadt, the Baltic Fleet, or even Helsinki. Only his own emergence from hiding, on October 23rd and 29th and during the seizure of power itself (November 6 - 7 O.S.) finally brought his party in line behind his policy. The provisional government was overthrown, and Lenin became Chairman of the Soviet of People's Commissars, a post he held until his death.

October was far from the end of the story. The tragic complexity of the seizure of power soon became apparent. The masses wanted what the slogans of October proclaimed: soviet power, peace, land, bread, and a constituent assembly. Lenin, however, wanted nothing less than the socialist transformation not only of Russia but of the world. Conflict was inevitable. By early 1918, autonomous workers and peasants organizations, including their political parties and the soviets themselves, were losing all authority. Ironically, at this moment one of Lenin's most libertarian, almost anarchist, writings, State and Revolution, written while he was in Finland, was published. In it he praised direct democracy and argued that capitalism had so organized and routinized the economy that it resembled the workings of the German post office. As a result, he wrote, the transition to socialism would be relatively straightforward.

However, reality was to prove less tractable. Lenin began to talk of "iron discipline" as an essential for future progress, and in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government (March - April 1918) proclaimed the concept of productionism - the maximization of economic output as the preliminary to building socialism - to be a main goal of the Soviet government. Productionism was an ideological response to Russia's Marxist paradox, a worker revolution in a "backward" peasant country. Indeed, the weakness of the proletariat was vastly accentuated in the first years of Soviet power, as industry collapsed and major cities lost up to two-thirds of their population through disease, hunger, and flight to the countryside.

Like the events of October, early Soviet policy was also improvised, though within the confines of Bolshevik ideology. Lenin presided over the nationalization of all major economic institutions and enterprises in a crude attempt to replace the market with allocation of key products. He also over-saw the emergence of a new Red Army; the setting up of a new state structure based on Bolshevik-led soviets; and a system of direct appropriation of grain from peasants, as well as the revolutionary transformation of the country. This last entailed the taking over of land by peasants and the disappearance from Soviet territory of the old elites, including the aristocracy, army officers, capitalists, and bankers. To the chaos of the early months of revolution was added extensive protest within the party from its left wing, which saw productionism and iron discipline as a betrayal of the libertarian principles of 1917. The survival of Lenin's government looked improbable. However, the out-break of major civil war in July 1918 gave it a new lease of life, forcing people to choose between imperfect revolution, represented by the Bolsheviks, or out-and-out counter-revolution, represented by the opposition (called the Whites). Most opted for the former but, once the Whites were defeated in 1920, tensions re-emerged and a series of uprisings against the Soviet government took place.

The Final Years (1922 - 1924)

Lenin's solution to the post - civil war crisis was his last major intervention in politics, because his health began to fail from 1922 onwards, exacerbated by the bullet wounds left after an assassination attempt in August 1918. The key problem in the crisis was peasant disaffection with the grain appropriation system. Lenin replaced requisitioning by a tax-in-kind, which in turn necessitated the partial restoration of market relations. Nonetheless, the state retained the commanding heights of the economy, including large factories, transport, taxation, and foreign trade. The result was known as the New Economic Policy. It was Lenin's third attempt at a form of transition. The first, outlined in the April Theses, was based on "Soviet supervision of production and distribution," a system that had collapsed within the first months of Bolshevik power. The second, later called war communism, was based on iron discipline, state control of the economy, and grain requisitioning. Lenin believed his third solution was the correct one, arrived at through the test of reality. It was accompanied by intellectual and political repression and the imposition of a one-party state on the grounds that concession to bourgeois economic interests gave the revolution's enemies greater power that had to be counteracted by greater political and intellectual control by the party. Lenin remained enthusiastic about the NEP, and did not live to see the complications that ensued in the mid-1920s.

In his last writings, produced during his bouts of convalescence from a series of increasingly severe strokes beginning in May 1922, Lenin laid down a number of guidelines for his successors. These included a cultural revolution to modernize the peasantry (On Co-operation, January 1923) and a modest reorganization of the bureaucracy to get it under control ("Better Fewer but Better," March 1923, his last article). In his "Testament" (Letter to the Congress, December 1922), Lenin argued that the party should not, in future, antagonize the peasantry. Most controversially, however, he summed up the candidates for succession without clearly supporting any one of them. His criticism of Stalin - that he had accumulated much power and Lenin was not confident that he would use it wisely - was strengthened in January of 1923, after Stalin argued with Krupskaya. Lenin called for Stalin to be removed as General Secretary, a post to which Lenin had only promoted him in 1922. There was no suggestion that Stalin should be removed from the Politburo or Central Committee. In any case, Lenin was too ill to follow through on his suggestions, thereby opening up vast speculation as to whether he might have prevented Stalin from coming to power had he lived longer.

Lenin's last year was spent at his country residence near Moscow. In the company of Nadezhda Krupskaya and his sisters, he lived out his last months being read to and taken on walks in his wheelchair. In October 1923 he even had enough energy to return for a last look around his Kremlin office, despite the guard's initial refusal to admit him because he did not have an up-to-date pass. However, his health continued to deteriorate, and he died on the evening of January 21, 1924.

Bibliography

Carrère d'Encausse, Hélène. (1982). Lenin: Revolution and Power. London: Longman.

Claudin-Urondo, Carmen. (1977). Lenin and the Cultural Revolution. Sussex and Totowa, New Jersey: Harvester Press/Humanities Press.

Harding, Neil. (1981). Lenin's Political Thought. 2 vols. London: Macmillan.

Harding, Neil. (1991). Leninism. London: Macmillan.

Krupskaya, Nadezhda. (1970). Memories of Lenin. London: Panther.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich (1960-1980) Collected Works. 47 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich. (1967). Selected Works. 3 vols. Moscow: Progress Publishers.

Lewin, Moshe. (1968). Lenin's Last Struggle. New York: Random House.

Pipes, Richard. (1996). The Unknown Lenin. New Haven and London: Yale University Press.

Read, Christopher. (2003). Lenin: A Revolutionary Life. London: Routledge.

Service, Robert. (1994). Lenin: A Political Life. 3 vols. London: Macmillan.

Service, Robert. (2000). Lenin: a Biography. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

Shub, David. (1966). Lenin. Harmondsworth: Penguin.

Ulam, Adam. (1969). Lenin and the Bolsheviks. London: Fontana/Collins.

Volkogonov, Dmitril. (1995). Lenin: Life and Legacy, ed. Harold Shukman. London: Harper Collins.

Weber, Gerda, and Weber, Hermann. (1980). Lenin: Life and Work. London: Macmillan.

White, James. (2000). Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution. London: Palgrave.

Williams, Beryl. (2000). Lenin. London: Harlow Long-man.

—CHRISTOPHER READ

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin founded the Russian Communist party and led the 1917 Russian Revolution, which placed the Bolshevik party in charge of the government. The establishment of the Soviet Union can be traced to Lenin's study of revolution and the ruthless imposition of a one-party state based on Lenin's interpretation of Marxism. The Russian Revolution also profoundly affected U.S. society and politics.

Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk, a town on the Volga River. The son of a government official, Lenin was a bright student. He entered Kazan University at Kazan in 1887. That same year his brother Alexander Ulyanov was hanged for taking part in an unsuccessful plot to kill Czar Alexander III, of Russia. Lenin was deeply influenced by his brother's actions. Within three months, he was expelled from school for protesting the lack of freedom in the university. He moved to St. Petersburg and entered St. Petersburg University, from which he graduated with a law degree in 1891.

During his academic period, Lenin studied the works of Karl Marx and his political philosophy, Marxism. In 1893 Lenin joined the Social Democratic group, which believed in Marxist principles. A gifted writer and speaker, Lenin soon traveled to Western Europe to meet with other Marxists. He was arrested by the czar's police in 1896 for revolutionary activities and sent into Siberian exile in 1897. During his exile Lenin wrote one of his most important works, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899).

Lenin was allowed to leave Russia in 1900. He traveled to Germany, where he began writing for a revolutionary newspaper called Zarya (Dawn), which was smuggled into Russia. He took the pen name Lenin at this time, hoping to confuse the police. In 1902 he wrote what is considered a masterpiece of revolutionary organization, What Is to Be Done? In this work Lenin advocated the use of a highly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries to lead the masses in an uprising against czarist Russia. This revolutionary party would serve as the "vanguard of the proletariat." It would also assume supreme control during this revolutionary period.

Disputes within Russian revolutionary circles over Lenin's ideas led to a split in 1903 between Lenin's Bolshevik party and the Menshevik party, which favored moderation. Bolsheviks followed Lenin's instructions to commit acts of terrorism within Russia. They also worked hard to organize trade union members and Russian sailors and soldiers.

During most of World War I, Lenin stayed in Switzerland. When revolution broke out in Russia in March 1917, Lenin returned with the aid of Germany, which hoped he would gain power and agree to a peace treaty. Accused of being a German agent by the provisional government, Lenin fled to Finland. He returned to Russia secretly in October 1917 and led the October Revolution, which toppled the provisional government and placed the Bolsheviks in charge.

Once in power Lenin moved quickly to eliminate all political opposition. He organized the Red Army (named after the color of the flag of the world Communist movement). The Red Army fought a civil war with the Whites, who opposed one-party and one-man rule by Lenin. The civil war ended in 1922, with the defeat of the White Army. During this period the U.S. government supported the Whites, fearing that the Russian Revolution was a prelude to further Communist revolutions in Europe. This fear seemed confirmed in 1919 when Lenin formed the Communist International to export revolution to the rest of the world.

In 1919 and 1920, U.S. anxiety about the Russian Revolution and the dictatorship of Lenin produced a national hysteria that has come to be known as the first Red scare. President Woodrow Wilson's attorney general A. Mitchell Palmer created an antiradicalism unit and appointed J. Edgar Hoover to run it. In late 1919 and early 1920, Palmer raided suspected revolutionaries and subversives. Most of these suspects were not U.S. citizens. The largest "Palmer raid" occurred on January 2, 1920, when six thousand people were arrested. Palmer's agents abused the constitutional rights of these people, searching homes without warrants, holding individuals without giving specific charges, and refusing access to legal counsel. Many aliens were deported because of their radical political views.

Lenin's revolutionary zeal was tempered by the need to defeat the Whites and to establish a national government in the wake of the loss of lives and resources in World War I. Faced with economic ruin, Lenin instituted in March 1921 his New Economic Policy. This policy abandoned many socialist measures and permitted the growth of small businesses. Lenin also tried to get the United States and Europe to invest in the Soviet Union, but was refused because the Soviets had repudiated all foreign debts. The United States did, however, through its Commission for Relief, provide large amounts of food that may have helped save hundreds of thousands of lives.

Lenin's last years were marked by failing health and a concern about the direction of the Communist party and the Soviet Union. He worried about the increasing strength of the political bureaucracy and about Joseph Stalin's plottings to succeed him. In May 1922 he suffered a stroke, then returned to work against his doctor's advice. He suffered additional strokes in November 1922 and March 1923, the last one destroying his ability to speak clearly. Lenin died January 24, 1924, physically unable to appoint his successor. His body was preserved using special chemicals and placed in a tomb on Red Square in Moscow.

See: communism.

A Russian revolutionary leader of the early twentieth century, highly honored in the former Soviet Union as the founder of the modern Soviet state. Lenin, a founder of the Bolshevik party, contributed much to the success of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Lenin held that a dedicated group of intellectuals had to spearhead the revolution. He became chief of government of the Soviet Union after the revolution and served until his death in 1924. Joseph Stalin succeeded him. Lenin's real name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov.

Quotes:

"Despair is typical of those who do not understand the causes of evil, see no way out, and are incapable of struggle. The modern industrial proletariat does not belong to the category of such classes."

"It is true that liberty is precious. So precious that it must be rationed."

"Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners."

"When one makes a Revolution, one cannot mark time; one must always go forward -- or go back. He who now talks about the freedom of the press goes backward, and halts our headlong course towards Socialism."

"Any cook should be able to run the country."

"All our lives we fought against exalting the individual, against the elevation of the single person, and long ago we were over and done with the business of a hero, and here it comes up again: the glorification of one personality. This is not good at all. I am just like everybody else."

See more famous quotes by Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

"Lenin" redirects here. For other uses, see Lenin (disambiguation).

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Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Владимир Ильич Ленин
Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars
In office 8 November 1917 – 21 January 1924
Preceded by	Alexander Kerensky (as President of the Provisional Government)
Succeeded by	Alexei Rykov (Joseph Stalin as the Party Leader)
Leader of the Bolshevik Party
In office 17 November 1903 – 21 January 1924
Preceded by	None
Succeeded by	Joseph Stalin (as General Secretary)
Born	10 April 1870(1870-04-10) Simbirsk, Russian Empire
Died	21 January 1924 (aged 53) Gorki, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	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]) (10 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Russian: Владимир Ильич Ульянов, IPA [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɪlʲˈjiʨ ʊlʲˈjanəf]), was the Bolshevik Leader of the 1917 October Revolution, and the first Head of State of the Soviet Union; in the course of his political career, he used the pseudonyms Lenin, V. I. Lenin, Nikolai Lenin, and N. Lenin. His contribution to political science, Leninism, is his development and interpretation of urban Marxist theory, fitted to the agrarian Russian Empire of 1917, reversing the economics–politics Marxist prescription in allowing for a dynamic revolution led by a professional vanguard party.^[1]

Contents 1 Early life and background 2 Revolutionary 3 Russian return 4 Head of state 4.1 National security: the Cheka 4.2 Attempted assassinations 4.3 Combating anti-Semitism 4.4 Social reforms 4.5 Red Terror 4.6 Civil War 5 Later life and death 6 Post-mortem 6.1 Soviet censorship of Lenin 7 Writings 8 See also 9 References 9.1 Notes 9.2 Further reading 10 External links 10.1 Selected works

Early life and background

Infancy: V.I. Ulyanov, aged three.

Youth: c. 1887

Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, on 10 April 1870, to Maria Alexandrovna Blank, a schoolmistress, and Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov a physics instructor, at Simbirsk, in the Russian Empire (1721–1917) of the late nineteenth century; per family custom, he was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.^[2][3] Later, the USSR renamed Lenin’s Volga River home city, Simbirsk, as Ulyanovsk.

In 1869, Ilya Nikolayevich 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. Tsarist cultural mores defined the Ulyanov family stock as “ethnically mixed” — “Mordovian, Kalmyk, Jewish (cf. Blank family), Volgan German, and Swedish, and possibly others”; being of the intelligentsia, the Ulyanovs educated their children against the ills of their time (violations of human rights, servile psychology), 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] as such, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, in 1902, adopted the nom de guerre Lenin, derived from the Siberian River Lena, the usage in this biographic article.^[3]

In January 1886, his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage; in May 1887 (when Lenin was 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, who was 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 present 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 authorities barred him from other universities, and thence was under continuous police surveillance — as the brother of a known terrorist.^[6] Nevertheless, he studied independently to earn his 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; later, in the 1917 revolutionary period, he relied on Inessa Armand to translate an article to French and English, later writing to S. N. Ravich in Geneva, "I am unable to lecture in French".^[9]

Revolutionary

For a few years, Lenin practiced law in the Volga River port of Samara, mostly land ownership cases from which he derived much political insight to the condition of the Russian peasant,^[10] before moving to St Petersburg in 1893, where he pursued politics via 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, they were active among the labour organisations of Russia. On 7 December 1895, Lenin was arrested and imprisoned for 14 months in solitary confinement, in Cell 193 of the St Petersburg Remand Prison.^[11]

In February 1897, he was exiled to the village Shushenskoye, in the Minusinsk district, of the Yenisei Gubernia (Province) in Eastern Siberia. There, he met the notable Marxist Georgy Plekhanov, who had introduced socialism to Russia. In exile, he wrote more than 30 theoretical works; in July 1898, Lenin married socialist activist Nadezhda Krupskaya, and in April 1899, under the pseudonym Vladimir Ilyin, published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899).^[12]

Revolutionary portrait: Police photograph of Lenin, December 1895.

At exile’s end in 1900, Lenin travelled Russia and Europe — Munich, Prague, Vienna, Manchester and London (where Percy Circus WC1, at King’s Cross, London, bears a memorial wall plaque); but resided in Zurich, where he studied and worked as a lecturer at the Geneva University. In that time he and with Julius Martov (later a leading opponent) co-founded the newspaper Iskra (“Spark”), and published articles and books about revolutionary politics, whilst striving to recruit future Social Democrats. To effect such political work, he began assuming aliases, and, in 1902, settling upon “Lenin” — “N. Lenin” (Eng. “I. Lenin”), in full; Nota bene: The Western press misidentified him as “Nikolai Lenin”, mis-translating the Cyrillic letter “И” (English letter “I”) for the English “N”; thus Ilyich Lenin (Russian) metamorphosed to the (English) “Nikolai Lenin”.

In 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party RSDLP (Russ. РСДРП) ideologically diverged; Lenin headed the Bolshevik faction, consequent to breaking with the Menshevik faction. The RSDLP party faction names Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) derive from the narrow electoral defeat of the Mensheviks to the party’s newspaper editorial board and to the central committee. The break partly originated from Lenin’s book What Is to Be Done? (1901–02) — about concrete revolutionary strategy — and because of different opinions about the role of the Marxist Iskra faction within the RSDLP; reportedly, What Is to Be Done? was a most influential book in pre-revolutionary Tsarist Russia; Lenin claimed that three of five workers had either read it or had it read to them.^[13]

Exile: Lenin's residence, Zurich, Switzerland, 1920.

Exile: Memorial plate, Lenin's residence, Zurich, Switzerland, 2008: “Here resided, from 21 February 1916 to 2 April 1917, Lenin, the leader of the Russian Revolution”.

Exile: Lenin's residence, Zurich, Switzerland, 2008.

In November 1905, Lenin returned to Russia to support the 1905 Russian Revolution.^[14] In 1906, he was elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP; and shuttled between Finland and Russia, but after the Tsarist defeat of the November Revolution, resumed his exile, in December 1907.^[14] Until the February and October revolutions of 1917, he lived in Western Europe, where, despite relative poverty, he developed Leninism — urban Marxism adapted to agrarian Russia reversing the economics–politics Marxist prescription, to allow for a dynamic revolution led by a vanguard party of profesional revolutionaries.^[15] .^[16]

In 1909, to disambiguate philosophic doubts about the proper practical course of a socialist revolution, Lenin published Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909); which became a philosophic foundation of Marxism-Leninism. Throughout exile, Lenin travelled Europe, participated in socialist activities, (e.g. the Prague Party Conference of 1912). When Inessa Armand left Russia for Paris, she met Lenin and other exiled Bolsheviks. Rumour has it she was Lenin’s lover; yet Neil Harding notes that there is a “slender stock of evidence . . . we still have no evidence that they were sexually intimate”.^[17]

In 1914, when the First World War (1914–18) began, the large Social Democratic parties of Europe (and self-described Marxists), and intellectuals such as Karl Kautsky, each nationalistically supported their homelands’ war effort. At first, Lenin disbelieved such political fickleness, especially that the German Social Democrats had voted for war credits. Their war-authorising vote definitively broke Lenin’s connection with political mainstream that was the Second International (1889–1916). He opposed the Great War, because the peasants and workers would be fighting the bourgeoisie’s “imperialist war” — one that ought be transformed into an international civil war between the classes. At war’s start, the Austrians briefly detained him in Poronin, already his town of residence. On 5 September 1914, Lenin moved to neutral Switzerland, residing first at Berne and then at Zurich.^[18]

In 1915, he attended the anti-war Zimmerwald Conference, at the eponymous Swiss town. In the conference, Lenin led and headed the minority Zimmerwald Left, who unsuccessfully urged, against the majority pacifists, that the conference should adopt Lenin’s stance about transforming imperialist war to class war. Later, Lenin and the Zimmerwald Left presented a like resolution in the next conference, at Kienthal (24–30 April 1916), in Switzerland, that settled for a compromise manifesto.^[19]

In Zurich, in spring of 1916, he wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), which popularized (Lenin opponent) Karl Kautsky’s politico-economic perspective in the 1900s ^[20] — wherein the merging of banks and industrial cartels gives rise to finance capital — the final, highest stage of capitalism; pursuing greater profits than the home market can offer, capital is exported. That leads to the division of the world, among international monopolist firms, and to European states colonizing large parts of the world, in support of their businesses. Imperialism, thus, is an advanced stage of capitalism relying upon the rise of monopolies and on the export of capital (rather than goods), a global financial system of which colonialism is one feature.^[21]

Russian return

Revolutionary alias: Vilén, Lenin bewigged and clean shaven, Finland, 11 August 1917.

After the 1917 February Revolution, provoking the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II (1894–17), Lenin decided upon a Russian return; difficult, for he was isolated in neutral Switzerland, surrounded by belligerent countries fighting the Great War, nevertheless, the Swiss Communist Fritz Platten obtained Imperial German government permission allowing Lenin (and cohort) to traverse Germany in a diplomatically-sealed train. Geopolitically, the Germans expected his return to politically disrupt Imperial Russia — in aid of ending the Eastern front war (17 August 1914–3 March 1918), so that Germany could concentrate upon defeating the Western allies. Having traversed Germany, Lenin continued through Sweden, aided by Swedish Communists Otto Grimlund and Ture Nerman.

Historic artefact: Lenin’s locomotive to the Finland Station, Petrograd, in April 1917.

On 16 April 1917, Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, Petrograd, Russia — welcomed by many admirers,^[22] and assumed command of the Bolsheviks, and published the April Theses (1917), ^[23] calling for uncompromising opposition to the Provisional Government (March–November 1917). Initially, that leftist position isolated the Bolsheviks, yet it rendered the Bolshevik party a a practical political refuge for people disillusioned with the Provisional Government; the “luxury of opposition” to Kerensky’s government, exempted them from responsibility for that government’s policies.^[24] Meanwhile, Aleksandr Kerensky, Grigory Aleksinsky, and other opponents, accused the Bolsheviks — especially Lenin — of being Imperial German agents provocateur;^[25] and, on 17 July, in their defence, Leon Trotsky (a new Bolshevik leader), said:

An intolerable atmosphere has been created, in which you, as well as we, are choking. They are throwing dirty accusations at Lenin and Zinoviev. Lenin has fought thirty years for the revolution. I have fought [for] twenty years against the oppression of the people. And we cannot but cherish a hatred for German militarism . . . I have been sentenced by a German court to eight months’ imprisonment for my struggle against German militarism. This everybody knows. Let nobody in this hall say that we are hirelings of Germany.^[26]

In the event, after the tumultuous July Days in Petrograd — the Kerensky Government’s violent suppression of spontaneous anti-government demonstrations by industrial workers and soldiers — it arrested the Bolsheviks who had attempted to assume command of the demonstrations; Lenin fled to Finland. Although not the originators of the July Days demonstrations, Lenin said that to realise the revolution, the Bolsheviks needed the peasants’ support, not just that of the urban workers and soldiers. Meanwhile, he finished State and Revolution (1917),^[27] which proposed a government based upon the soviets (worker-elected councils revocable at all moments, by the workers). After General Lavr Kornilov’s failed coup d’état against the Kerensky Provisional Government in late August, the people turned to the Bolsheviks and their “Peace, Land, Bread” programme.^[28] Imprisoned Bolsheviks were freed, and, in October, Lenin returned to Russia from Finland — inspiring the October Revolution with the slogan “All Power to the Soviets!” From the Smolny Institute school for girls, he directed the deposition (6–8 November 1917) of the Kerensky Provisional Government and the storming (7–8 November) of the Winter Palace to realise the capitulation that established Soviet rule in Russia.

Head of state

Head of State: Lenin at his Kremlin desk, 1918.

On 8 November 1917, the Russian Congress of Soviets elected Lenin as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, as such, he declared that “Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country” in modernising Russia into a twentieth-century country:^[29]

We must show the peasants that the organisation of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism.^[30]

He initiated and supervised the realisation of the GOELRO plan (1920), the first Soviet national economic recovery and development project, establishing a free universal health care system, guaranteeing the rights of women, and educating the illiterate Russian people ^[31] — yet the Bolshevik government first had to withdraw Russia from the First World War (1914–18).

Facing continuing Imperial German eastward advance, Lenin proposed that Russia immediately sign a peace treaty withdrawing it from the Great War. Yet, other Bolshevik leaders (e.g. Nikolai Bukharin) advocated continuing in the war to foment revolution in Imperial Germany. Leon Trotsky, who led the peace negotiations, proposed the “No War, No Peace” intermediate position requiring a Russo–German peace treaty on condition that neither belligerents’ territorial gains be consolidated. When negotiations collapsed, the Germans renewed their advance into Russia, resulting in the loss of much west Russian territory. Resultantly, Lenin’s proposal — withdrawing from the war — gained the majority support of the Bolshevik leaders, and, on 3 March 1918, Russia withdrew from the First World War via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, costing much European Russian territory.

On 19 January, relying upon the supporting soviets, the Bolsheviks dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly, in alliance with the left-wing Socialist Revolutionaries. Moreover, the coalition collapsed consequent to the Social Revolutionaries opposing the Brest-Litovsk treaty — and then joined other political parties in deposing the Bolshevik government; Lenin responded with political persecution of, and jail for, the anti-Bolsheviks.

From early 1918, Lenin proposed a single leader (accountable to the Bolshevik government), in charge of each enterprise. Workers could request state measures resolving problems, but had to abide the leader’s decisions. Although contrary to workers' self-management, that administrative measure was essential for efficiency and expertise; proponents argued that said management was meant to strengthen state control of labour, and that self-management failures were owed to lack of resources — a problem resolved by licensing (for a month) all workers of most factories; thus S.A. Smith’s observation: “By the end of the civil war, not much was left of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers’ state.”

Analogously, Lenin admired the Irish socialist revolutionary James Connolly, thus the USSR was the first country to diplomatically recognise the Irish Free State that fought Irish War of Independence from Britain. In the event, Lenin developed a friendship with Connolly’s revolutionary's son, Roddy Connolly.

National security: the Cheka

Revolutionary troika: Joseph Stalin, Vladimir Lenin and Mikhail Kalinin, 1919

Main article: Cheka

In December 1917, to protect the revolution and their soviet government, the Bolsheviks established the Cheka (Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya, the “Extraordinary Commission”) to defend it against counter-revolution and other political opposition;^[32] thus, it quickly imposed censorship, by confiscating dissident literature: “[On] 17 November, the Central Executive Committee passed a decree giving the Bolsheviks control over all newsprint and wide powers of closing down newspapers critical of the régime. . . .”^[33] Independent soviets, re-organized by non-Bolshevik workers, were disbanded; anti-soviet, independent newspapers were closed, until the Bolshevik Pravda (“Truth”) and Izvestia (“The News”) newspapers established a news-media monopoly, because of their “refusal to come to terms with the socialists and the dispersal of the Constituent assembly led to the logical result that revolutionary terror would now be directed, not only against traditional enemies, such as the bourgeoisie or right-wing opponents, but against anyone, be he socialist, worker, or peasant, who opposed Bolshevik rule”.

Moreover, the Bolsheviks had planned to try the Tsar, Nicholas II, but, by July 1918, the counter-revolutionary White Army had advanced to Yekaterinburg, where the Bolsheviks had Romanov royal family under house arrest. Hence, Yakov Sverdlov agreed to the local soviet’s request to kill them forthwith — rather than risk their rescue by the Whites. Contemporarily, it remains historically undetermined who authorised the execution of the deposed Romanovs, either the Moscow central government, ^[34][35] or the Yekaterinburg soviet.^[36]

Attempted assassinations

Comrades: Lenin and Fritz Platten, 1919.

On 14 January 1918, in Petrograd, after a speech, assassins ambushed Lenin in his automobile; he and Fritz Platten were in the back seat when assassins began shooting — “Platten grabbed Lenin by the head and pushed him down . . . Platten's hand was covered in blood, having been grazed by a bullet as he was shielding Lenin”.^[37]

On 30 August 1918, Fanya Kaplan, of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, approached Lenin, again, after a speech, at his automobile; whilst he rested a foot upon the running board, in speaking with a woman, Kaplan called to Lenin, and, as he turned to face her in reply, she shot him three times. The first bullet struck an arm, the second bullet struck his jaw and neck, and the third bullet missed him — and wounded the woman with whom he was speaking; the wounds felled him, unconscious.^[38] Fearing in-hospital assassins, Lenin was delivered to his Kremlin apartment; physicians decided against removing the bullets — lest the surgery endanger his survival, which proved slow.

For public perception, Pravda publicly ridiculed Fanya Kaplan as a failed, latter-day Charlotte Corday (a murderess of Jean-Paul Marat) who could not, and would not, derail the Russian Revolution. It reassured readers that immediately after surviving the assassination: “Lenin, shot through twice, with pierced lungs spilling blood, refuses help and goes on his own. The next morning, still threatened with death, he reads papers, listens, learns, and observes to see that the engine of the locomotive that carries us towards global revolution has not stopped working. . . .”; despite unharmed lungs, the neck wound spilled blood into one of Lenin’s lungs.^{[39] [40]}

To control public knowledge of the physical gravity of wounded Soviet Head of State, other than such panegyric of immortality (viz. the cult of personality), the Russian folk were not much informed, about either the (second) failed assassination; or who was the assassiness, Fanya Kaplan (a Russian revolutionary); or of Lenin’s post-shooting health. Historian Richard Pipes reports that “the impression one gains . . . is that the Bolsheviks deliberately underplayed the event to convince the public that, whatever happened to Lenin, they were firmly in control”. Moreover, in a letter to his wife (7 September 1918), Leonid Borisovich Krasin, a diplomat and politician in the Tsarist and Soviet Russian régimes, describes the popular public atmosphere and social response to the 30 August failed assassination and Lenin’s having survived it:

“As it happens, the attempt to kill Lenin has made him much more popular than he was. One hears a great many people, who are far from having any sympathy with the Bolsheviks, saying that it would be an absolute disaster if Lenin had succumbed to his wounds, as it was first thought he would. And they are quite right, for, in the midst of all this chaos and confusion, he is the backbone of the new body politic, the main support on which everything rests.”^[41]

From having survived a second (failed) assassination originated the practice of the cult of personality, that Lenin, per his intellectual origins and pedigree, disliked and discouraged as superstition revived;^[42] nevertheless, his health, as a fifty-three-year-old man, declined from the effects of two bullet wounds, later aggravated by three strokes, culminating in his death.

Combating anti-Semitism

Modern technologies intrigued Lenin as vehicles for mass communication; as Bolshevik leader, he recorded eight speeches to gramophone records in 1919; later, during the Khrushchev era, seven were put on sale. Significantly, the suppressed eighth speech delineated the Bolshevik leader’s opposition to Christian anti-Semitism:^[43]

The Tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organized pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants, who were tortured by want, against the Jews. . . . Only the most ignorant and down-trodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. . . . It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters, and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations . . . Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob, and disunite the workers . . . Shame on accursed Tsarism, which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.^[44]

Social reforms

Further information: The Russian Revolution and the Emancipation of Women

Alexandra Kollontai and fellow feminist revolutionary Inessa Armand in 1919 together established the Zhenotdel (Женотдел), the first government department for women in the world. Lenin's administration was also one of the first governments to decriminalize homosexuality in 1917. The Russian Communist Party effectively legalized no-fault divorce, abortion, and homosexuality, when they abolished said Tsarist laws. The initial Soviet criminal code retained these liberal sexual policies; ^[45] but, a decade later, Stalin reversed that legal tolerance, and homosexuality remained illegal, under Article 121, until the Yeltsin era.

Red Terror

Main article: Red Terror

Bolshevik poster, 1920: “Comrade Lenin Cleanses the Earth of Filth”.

Once the Bolshevik Revolution was a fait accompli, the ideologically varied anti-Communist factions loosely associated as the counter-revolutionary White Movement to depose the Bolsheviks. In 1918, the Allies of World War I, sponsored the militarily-defeated Whites in launching the Russian Civil War (1917–23). Earlier in October, Kamenev and his supporters warned the Bolshevik party that rule by terror was inevitable with Lenin's seizure of power and rejection of democracy, ^[46] despite his having predicted the White counter-revolution.^{[citation needed]}

After the failed 30 August 1918 assassination attempt against Lenin, and the successful assassination of the Petrograd Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky, Stalin, in a telegram to Lenin, proposed a policy of “open and systematic mass terror” against “those responsible”. Lenin and the Bolsheviks agreed, and instructed Cheka chief Felix Dzerzhinsky to commence a “Red Terror” — publicly announced on 1 September 1918, in the Bolshevik newspaper Krasnaya Gazeta (“Krasnaya Gazette”);^[47] Lenin's Hanging Order, requiring the public hangings of one hundred kulaks on 11 August 1918 — before the second (30 August) assassination attempt against him — documents his authorization of the Red Terror.^[48]

During the Russian Civil War, anti-Bolsheviks faced torture and summary execution,^{[49][50][51][52][53]} and, by May 1919, there were some 16,000 enemies of the people imprisoned in the Tsarist katorga labour camps; by September 1921 the prisoner populace exceeded 70,000.^[54] After a clerical insurrection in the town of Shuia, in a 19 March 1918 letter to Vyacheslav Molotov and the Politburo, Lenin delineated the action to take against the clergy and followers defying the decreed Bolshevik removal of Orthodox Church valuables: “We must . . . put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. . . . The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing . . . the better.”^[55][56]

Although Lenin protected Bolshevik Russia with “mass terror against enemies of the revolution”, because the proletarian state was so organised against the capitalist establishment — intra-societal terrorism in post–Tsarist Russia was rooted in the popular anger of the working classes (peasant and worker) against the privileged classes of the deposed absolute monarchy.^[57] In September 1918, 25 former Tsarist ministers, high civil servants, and 765 so-called White Guards were shot in Moscow, per Lenin-signed execution lists.^[58] In late 1918, when Kamenev and Bukharin tried to curb the excesses of the Cheka, Lenin defended that as necessary, and in 1921, via the Politburo, expanded the Cheka’s discretionary application of the death penalty.^{[59] [60]}

Nonetheless, during the Russian Civil War (1917–23), the Reds and the Whites committed atrocities in pursuing their revolution and counter-revolution;^[61] historians disagree about equating the Red and White terrors, because the Red Terror was official government policy directed against entire social classes (e.g. Decossackization),^[62] whilst the White Terror was racial and political, against Jews, anti-monarchists, and Communists, (cf. White Movement).

Civil War

Red icon in action: Lenin addressing the folk.

Further information: Allied invasions of Russia: (i) Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War, (ii) the Polar Bear Expedition, (iii) the North Russia Campaign, and (iv) the American Expeditionary Force Siberia

In Moscow, during March 1919, Lenin and the Bolsheviks conferred with the world’s revolutionary socialists, and established the Communist International (1919–43), aka the Comintern and the Third International, wherein they renamed themselves as the Communist Party, to ideologically distinguish their revolutionary party from the mainstream socialist parties, and so broke from them. Later, in post–Revolutionary Russia, the Communist Party became the Russian Communist Party, which later metamorphosed into the CPSU.

White Army soldier: The Battalion of Death flag, later integral to the Volunteer Army.

Meanwhile, the civil war continued between the Communist Red Army and the White Army, of monarchists and traditionalists; despite foreign military sponsorship and direct military intervention by France, Britain, the US, and Japan, the anti-Communist counter-revolution failed for want of popular Russian support, because the people neither supported the Whites’ reinstatement to power, nor welcomed its restoration via foreign arms. Nevertheless, commanded by Leon Trotsky, the more professional Red Army defeated the Whites in battle — and won the Russian Civil War in 1920; yet sporadic fighting, “mopping up” of diehard Whites continued until 1923.

The Communist party’s birth: Trotsky, Lenin and Kamenev at the II Party Congress in 1919.

In late 1919, military success against the White Movement convinced Lenin to “probe Europe with the bayonets of the Red Army” and propagate armed proletarian revolution to Western Europe, especially by supporting the German Revolution (November 1918–August 1919), via the Spartacist League. In the event, when the Second Polish Republic (1918–39) secured its eastern lands — annexed by White Russia in its late 18th century partitionings of Poland — it fought the Polish-Soviet War (1919–21) for them. Poland was the bridge to Germany, and to the other Communists in Western Europe; however the Polish defeat of Soviet Russia in the Battle of Warsaw (1920) mooted that plan.

As an anti-imperialist, Lenin, in 1917, declared that oppressed peoples had the unconditional right to secede from the Tsarist Russian Empire; however, at Civil War’s end, he militarily integrated independent Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, to the USSR, supposedly because the White Movement were using them as bases from which to attack Russia.^[63] He defended said action as protecting them against capitalist imperial depredations.^[64]

During the civil war, to maintain the cities and the armies fed, and to avoid economic collapse, the Bolsheviks established war communism — via the Prodrazvyorstka, food requisitioning from the peasantry for little or no payment — which led the peasants to drastically reduce crop production. The Bolsheviks blamed the kulaks’ withholding grain to increase their profits, although statistics indicate most such traffic occurred in the black market.^[65][66] The resultant armed confrontations, between peasant and Communist, had the Cheka and the Red Army shooting hostages, using poison gas, deportations, and labour camps; nonetheless, Lenin increased the requisitioning, whilst the Cheka reported the Russian famine of 1921, which killed some 3–10 million people.^{[67] [68][69]}

The six-year long White–Red civil war, the war communism, the famine of 1921, and foreign military intervention reduced much of Russia to ruin, and provoked rebellion against the Bolsheviks, the greatest being the Tambov rebellion (1919–21). After the March 1921 left-wing Kronstadt Rebellion mutiny, Lenin replaced war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), and successfully rebuilt industry and agriculture. The NEP was his pragmatic recognition of the political and economic realities, and it was a tactical, ideologic retreat from the socialist ideal, that Stalin later reversed in consolidating his control of the Communist Party and the USSR.

Later life and death

Kamenev and Lenin, at the Gorki Leninskiye, south of Moscow, 1922.

The mental strains of leading a revolution, governing, and fighting a civil war aggravated the physical debilitation consequent to the wounds from the attempted assassinations; Lenin still retained a bullet in his neck, until a German surgeon removed it on 24 April 1922.^[70] In May 1922, Lenin suffered the first of three strokes, which diminished his governing. In December 1922, he suffered a second stroke that partly paralyzed his right side; he withdrew from active politics. In March 1923, he suffered a third stroke that left him dumb and bed-ridden until he died.

After the first stroke, Lenin dictated government papers to Nadezhda; among them was Lenin's Testament (changing the structure of the soviets), partly inspired by the 1922 Georgian Affair (Russian cultural assimilation of constituent USSR republics), and it criticized high-rank Communists, including Josef Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Leon Trotsky. About the Communist Party’s General Secretary (since 1922), Josef Stalin, Lenin reported that the “unlimited authority” concentrated in him was unacceptable, suggesting that “comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post”, because his personal rudeness would be “intolerable in a Secretary-General”.

Husband and wife revolutionaries: Lenin and his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, 1919. (detail)

Upon Lenin’s death, Nadezhda mailed his testament to the central committee, to be read aloud to the 13th Party Congress in May 1924, however, the ruling troika — Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev — suppressed Lenin’s Testament to remain in power; it was not published until 1925, in the United States, by the American intellectual Max Eastman. In that year, Trotsky published an article minimizing the importance of Lenin’s Testament, saying that Lenin’s notes should not be perceived as a “will”, that it had been neither concealed, nor violated;^[71] yet did invoke it in later polemics against Stalin.^[72][73]

Leader and usurper: Lenin warned the CPSU about Josef Stalin, but was unheeded. Whilst Lenin lay ill (1922–23), Stalin used this altered photograph as a bona fide establishing his claim to CPSU leadership.^[74]

The Bolshevik leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin died at 18:50 hrs, Moscow time, on 21 January 1924, aged 53, at his estate in Gorki Leninskiye. In the four days that he lay in state, more than 900,000  mourners viewed his body in the Hall of Columns; among the statesmen who expressed condolences to Russia (the USSR) was Chinese premier Sun Yat-sen, who said:

At the end: V.I. Lenin in 1923.

The end: V.I. Lenin in 1923.

“Through the ages of world history, thousands of leaders and scholars appeared who spoke eloquent words, but these remained words. You, Lenin, were an exception. You not only spoke and taught us, but translated your words into deeds. You created a new country. You showed us the road of joint struggle . . . You, great man that you are, will live on in the memories of the oppressed people through the centuries.”^[75]

Winston Churchill, who encouraged British intervention against the Russian Revolution, in league with the White Movement, to destroy the Bolsheviks and Bolshevism, said:

“He alone could have found the way back to the causeway . . . The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth . . . their next worst his death.”^[76]

Three days after his death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour, so remaining until 1991, when the USSR dissolved, yet the administrative area remains “Leningrad Oblast”. In the early 1920s, the Russian cosmism movement proved so popular that Leonid Krasin and Alexander Bogdanov proposed to cryonically preserve Lenin for future resurrection, yet, despite buying the requisite equipment, that was not done.^[77] Instead, the body of V. I. Lenin was embalmed and permanently exhibited in the Lenin Mausoleum, in Moscow, on 27 January 1924.

Post-mortem

A contemporary’s view: Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), drawing by Nikolai Bukharin, 1927

Since the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991, reverence for Lenin declined among the post-Soviet generations, yet he remains an important historical figure for the Soviet-era generations.^[78] Eastern European countries removed most statues of Lenin from their lands, yet Russia retains some; however, his historical importance merited the installation of one such statue, from Poprad, Slovakia, in Seattle, Washington, USA, as a kitsch reminder of the Cold War (1945–91).

In 1991, a Lenin statue was placed atop the "Red Square" apartment building, at Essex and Houston streets, in New York City. Furthermore, also in 1991, after a contested vote, between Communists and liberals, the Leningrad government reverted the city’s name to St. Petersburg, whilst the surrounding Leningrad Oblast remained so named;^[79] like-wise the city of Ulyanovsk (V. I. Lenin's birthplace) remains so named. Gyumri in Armenia was named Leninakan from 1924 to 1990, Khujand in Tajikistan Leninabad from 1936 to 1991.

Communist shrine: The Lenin Mausoleum, Red Square, Moscow.

Soviet censorship of Lenin

After his death, the USSR selectively censored Lenin’s writings, to establish the dogma of the infallibility of Lenin, Stalin (his successor), and the Central Committee;^[80] thus, the Soviet fifth edition (55 vols., 1958–65) of Lenin’s oeuvre deleted the ideological contradictions (between Lenin and Stalin) and all that is unfavourable to the founder of the USSR.^[81]

The historians Pipes and Brandenberger published a documentary collection (mostly letters and telegrams), excluded from the Soviet fifth edition, not notably different from the Collected Works, which does not suggest censorship.^[82] They proposed them as proof that the Soviet fifth edition is incomplete, an interpretation dependant upon the notion of “Lenin’s works”, because the Khrushchev-era edition contains documents considered “not for publication”.

Writings

Lenin the icon: A 1929 Laz language newspaper featuring Lenin’s writing.

Lenin’s significant writings are:

• What is to be Done? (1903) argues that a revolution requires a professional vanguard party.
• Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) explains why capitalism had not collapsed, as Marx had posited, presenting the First World War as a capitalist war for land, resources, and cheap labour.
• The State and the Revolution (1917) interprets the ideas of Marx and Engels, the October Revolution’s theoretic basis, and opposes the social-democratic tendency as indecisive in effecting revolution.
• April Theses (1917) propose the socio-economic need for a socialist revolution.

See also

• Anti-Leninism
• Decossackization
• Enemy of the people
• Lenin's stance on anti-Semitism
• Human rights in the Soviet Union
• Lenin's Hanging Order
• Lenin's national policy
• Leninade
• Leninism
• List of statues of Lenin
• Russian Civil War
• Russian Revolution of 1917
• Leningrad
• Ulyanovsk

References

Notes

1. ^ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/ess_leninscritique.html
2. ^ Read, Christopher, Lenin (2005) Abingdon: Routledge p. 4.
3. ^ ^{a b} Hill, Christopher, Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1971) Penguin Books:London p. 35.
4. ^ Volkogonov, Dmitri (1994). Lenin – A New Biography. Free Press. p. 8. ISBN 0-02-933435-7. 
5. ^ Christopher Read (2005) Lenin: 16
6. ^ Hill, Christopher, Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1971) Penguin Books:London p. 36.
7. ^ Service, Robert. Lenin: A Biography. London: Pan. ISBN 0-330-49139-3. 
8. ^ Read, Christopher Lenin (2005) p. 18.
9. ^ Danilov, Eugene (Moscow, 2007). Lenin: Secrets of Life and Death. Zebra E. p. 181. ISBN 978-5-17-043866-2. 
10. ^ J. Brooks and G. Chernyavskiy (2007) Lenin and the Making of the Soviet State. Bedford/St Martin's: Boston and New York
11. ^ Lenin, V.I. (Written in 1896–1899; First printed in book form in March 1899; Published according to the text of the second edition, 1908). "The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The Process of the Formation of a Home Market for Large-Scale Industry". http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/devel/index.htm. Retrieved 2007-03-16. 
12. ^ Lenin, V.I. (Written in 1896–1899; First printed in book form in March 1899; Published according to the text of the second edition, 1908). "The Development of Capitalism in Russia: The Process of the Formation of a Home Market for Large-Scale Industry". http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1899/devel/index.htm. Retrieved 2007-03-16. 
13. ^ "What is to be done?". http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1901/witbd/index.htm. 
14. ^ ^{a b} Read, Christopher, Lenin (2005) p. 81.
15. ^ http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitextlo/ess_leninscritique.html
16. ^ Read, Christopher, Lenin (2005) p. 86.
17. ^ Harding, Neil, Lenin's Political Thought (1986), p. 250.
18. ^ Clar, Ronald W. Lenin: the Man Behind the Mask (1988) p. 154.
19. ^ Read, Christopher, Lenin (2005) pp. 132-4.
20. ^ Lenin, V. I., Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (2000) New Delhi: LeftWord Books p. 34
21. ^ Paul Bowles (2007) Capitalism. Pearson: Harlow: 93
22. ^ Moorehead, Alan, The Russian Revolution (1958) New York: Harper, pp.183–87.
23. ^ "April Theses". http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/04.htm. 
24. ^ Read, Christopher (1996). From Czar to Soviets: The Russian People and Their Revolution, 1917–21. Oxford University Press. pp. 151–153. ISBN 0-19-521241-X. 
25. ^ (Russian) Biography of Grigory Aleksinsky at Hrono.ru
26. ^ Trotsky, Leon. "The Month of The Great Slander". The History of the Russian Revolution; Volume 2,Chapter 27. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/works/1930-hrr/ch27.htm. 
27. ^ Lenin, Vladimir (1917). "The State and Revolution". http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/staterev/index.htm. 
28. ^ Read, Christopher, Lenin (2005) p. 174.
29. ^ Lenin "Collected Works", vol. 31, p. 516.
30. ^ Lenin "Collected Works", vol. 30, p. 335.
31. ^ "Archive of Lenin's works". http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/subject/women/index.htm. 
32. ^ Christopher Read, Lenin (2005) p. 186
33. ^ Leonard Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union
34. ^ Figes, Orlando (1997). A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891–1924. Penguin Books. p. 638. ISBN 0198228627. 
35. ^ Volkogonov, Dmitri (1994). Lenin: A New Biography. Free Press. pp. 211–212. ISBN 0029334357. 
36. ^ King, Greg and Wilson, Penny (2003). The Fate of the Romanovs. Wiley. ISBN 0-471-20768-3. http://thefateoftheromanovs.com/. 
37. ^ Volkogonov, Dimitri. Lenin – A New Biography. New York: Free Press. p. 229. ISBN 0-02-933435-7. 
38. ^ Pipes, Richard, The Russian Revolution (Vintage Books, 1990) p.807
39. ^ ibid. p. 809
40. ^ Dr. V. Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin's attending physician, Tri Pokusheniia na V. Lenina, 1924.
41. ^ Krassin, Lubov, Leonid Krassin: His Life and Work, by his wife (1929) Skeffington: London
42. ^ Clark, Ronald, Lenin: The Man Behind the Mask (1988) p. 373
43. ^ Clark, Ronald Clark, Lenin: The Man Behind the Mask (1988) p. 456
44. ^ Lenin, Vladimir (1919). "Anti-Jewish Pogroms". Speeches On Gramophone Records. http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1919/mar/x10.htm. 
45. ^ Hazard, John N. Unity and Diversity in Socialist Law
46. ^ Orlando Figes. A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891 — 1924. Penguin Books, 1997 ISBN 0198228627 p. 630
47. ^ Red Terror
48. ^ Pipes, Richard (1996). The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive. Yale University Press. pp. 50–52. ISBN 0-300-06919-7. 
49. ^ Robert Gellately. Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf, 2007 ISBN 1400040051 p. 65
50. ^ Melgunov, Sergei, Red Terror in Russia (1975) Hyperion Pr, ISBN 0-88355-187-X. See: The Record of the Red Terror
51. ^ Lincoln, W. Bruce, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (1999) Da Capo Press.pp. 383-385 ISBN 0-306-80909-5
52. ^ Leggett, George (1987). The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police. Oxford University Press. pp. 197–198. ISBN 0198228627. 
53. ^ Orlando Figes. A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution 1891 — 1924. Penguin Books, 1997 ISBN 0198228627 p. 647
54. ^ Black Book of Communism, p. 80
55. ^ Pipes, Richard (1996). The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive. Yale University Press. pp. 152–154. ISBN 0-300-06919-7. 
56. ^ Figes, Orlando (27 October 1996). "Censored by His Own Regime". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E1DB1230F934A15753C1A960958260&sec=&spon=&pagewanted=2. 
57. ^ Figes, Orlando (1998). A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924. Penguin. pp. 524–25. ISBN 0-14-024364-X. 
58. ^ Gellately, Robert (2007). Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf. pp. 57. ISBN 1400040051. 
59. ^ Figes, Orlando (1998). A People’s Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891–1924. Penguin. pp. 649. ISBN 0-14-024364-X. 
60. ^ Volkogonov, Dimitri. Lenin – A New Biography. New York: Free Press. p. 238. ISBN 0-02-933435-7. 
61. ^ "Twentieth Century Atlas – Death Tolls". http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Russian. 
62. ^ Black Book of Communism, p. 82
63. ^ Pipes, Richard (1994). Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime. Vintage. pp. p. 141–166. ISBN 0679761845. 
64. ^ Lenin, Vladimir (1915). "The Revolutionary Proletariat and the Right of Nations to Self-Determination". http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1915/oct/16.htm. 
65. ^ "An exchange of letters on the BBC documentary Lenin’s Secret Files". World Socialist Web Site. 1998-03-06. http://wsws.org/correspo/1998/mar1998/leni-m06.shtml. Retrieved 2007-03-16. 
66. ^ Carr, E.H. (1966). The Bolshevik Revolution 1917–1923, Part 2. pp. p. 233.  Chase, W.J. (1987). Workers, Society and the Soviet State: Labour and Life in Moscow 1918–1929. pp. pp. 26–27.  Nove, A. (1982). An Economic History of the USSR. pp. p. 62.  "Flewers, Paul, War Communism in Retrospect". http://www.whatnextjournal.co.uk/Pages/Back/Wnext5/Warcomm.html. 
67. ^ Black Book of Communism pp. 92–97, 116–121.
68. ^ "Twentieth Century Atlas – Death Tolls". http://users.erols.com/mwhite28/warstat1.htm#Russian. 
69. ^ "Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions, VII". http://www.gmu.edu/departments/economics/bcaplan/museum/his1g.htm. 
70. ^ New York Times
71. ^ Trotsky, L.D., “Concerning Eastman’s Book Since Lenin Died”, Bolshevik 16; 1 September 1925; p. 68. Concerning Eastman’s Book Since Lenin Died minimizing its significance. “In several parts of his book, Eastman says that the Central Committee concealed from the Party a number of exceptionally important documents written by Lenin in the last period of his life (it is a matter of letters on the national question, the so-called 'will', and others); there can be no other name for this, than slander against the Central Committee of our Party. . . . Vladimir Ilyich did not leave any ‘will’, and the very character of his attitude towards the Party, as well as the character of the Party, itself, precluded any possibility of such a ‘will’. What is usually referred to as a ‘will’ in the émigré and foreign bourgeois and Menshevik press (in a manner garbled beyond recognition) is one of Vladimir Ilyich's letters containing advice on organisational matters. The 13th Congress of the Party paid the closest attention to that letter, as to all of the others, and drew from it the conclusions appropriate to the conditions and circumstances of the time. All talk about concealing or violating a ‘will’ is a malicious invention.”
72. ^ Trotsky, Leon. My Life (1930) The Marxists Internet Archive
73. ^ Trotsky, Leon (1932). On the Suppressed Testament of Lenin. The Marxists Internet Archive. http://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1932/12/lenin.htm. Retrieved 2007-03-16. 
74. ^ Gilbert, Felix and Large, David Clay, The End of the European Era: 1890 to the Present, 6th edition, p. 213.
75. ^ Gorin, Vadim, Lenin: A Biography (1983) Progress Publishers, pp.469-70
76. ^ Mauchline Roberts, Elizabeth, Lenin and the Downfall of Tsarist Russia (1966) p. 92.
77. ^ See the article: А.М. и А.А. Панченко «Осьмое чудо света», in the book Панченко А.М. О русской истории и культуре. St. Petersburg: Azbuka, 2003. p. 433.
78. ^ Pipes, Richard (May/June 2004). "Flight From Freedom: What Russians Think and Want". Foreign Affairs. http://www.foreignaffairs.org/20040501facomment83302-p20/richard-pipes/flight-from-freedom-what-russians-think-and-want.html. 
79. ^ Maryland Government, St Petersburg/Leningrad Oblast
80. ^ Trotsky, Leon (1930). Volume Three: The Triumph of the Soviets; Appendix No. 1. 
81. ^ Figes, Orlando (27 October 1996). "Censored by His Own Regime". The New York Times. http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9C04E1DB1230F934A15753C1A960958260. 
82. ^ R Pipes & D Branderberger The Unknown Lenin Yale 1996

Further reading

• Cliff, Tony (1986). Building the Party: Lenin, 1893–1914. Haymarket Books. ISBN 1-931859-01-9. 
• Hill, Christopher (1971). Lenin and the Russia Revolution. Pelican Books Ltd.. ISBN 978-0140212976. 
• Fischer, Louis (2001). The Life of Lenin. Orion Publishing Co.. ISBN 1-84212-230-4. 
• Gellately, Robert (2007). Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf. ISBN 1400040051. 
• Gooding, John (2002). Socialism In Russia: Lenin and His Legacy, 1890–1991. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-97235-X. 
• Leggett, George (1987). The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198228627. 
• Lenin, Vladimir (2002). Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 by V. I. Lenin. Verso Books. ISBN 1-85984-661-0. 
• Kolakowski, Leszek and Falla, P. S. (2005). Main Currents of Marxism. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-06054-3. 
• Pannekoek, Anton, and Richey, Lance Byron (2003). Lenin as Philosopher. Marquette University Press. ISBN 0-87462-654-4. 
• Payne, Robert (1967). The Life And Death Of Lenin. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-41640-5. 
• Pipes, Richard (1999). The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07662-2. 
• Read, Christopher (2005). Lenin: A Revolutionary Life. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-20649-9. 
• Service, Robert (2002). Lenin: A Biography. Belknap Press. ISBN 0-674-00828-6. 
• Shub, David (1965). Lenin: A Biography. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-020809-7. 
• Toynbee, Arnold (July 1970). "A Centenary View of Lenin". International Affairs 46 (3): 490–500. doi:10.2307/2613225. 
• Trotsky, Leon (1971). On Lenin: Notes Towards a Biography. Harrap Publishing. ISBN 0-245-50302-1. 
• Tucker, Robert C. (1975). The Lenin Anthology. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-09236-4. 
• Volkogonov, Dmitri (2006). Lenin: A New Biography. Free Press. ISBN 0-02-933435-7. 

External links

Find more about Vladimir Lenin on Wikipedia's sister projects:

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Learning resources from Wikiversity

• Marxists.org Lenin Internet Archive – Extensive compendium of writings, a biography, and many photographs
• Marx2Mao.org – Lenin Internet Library
• Lenin's speech (video) – Lenin's speech with subtitles
• Article on Lenin written by Trotsky for the Encyclopedia Britannica
• Reminiscences of Lenin by N. K. Krupskaya
• Impressions of Soviet Russia  by John Dewey
• Information on Lenin's Grave
• The Lenin Museum in Tampere, Finland
• Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions
• Lenin Internet Archive Biography includes interviews with Lenin and essays on the leader
• Mirrors of Moscow: Nikolai Lenin by Louise Bryant
• Nicolai Lenin His Life and Work by G. Zinovieff, Indiana State University
• The Personality and Power of Nikolai Lenin From Raymond Robins' Own Story by William Hard (1920)
• TIME 100: V.I. Lenin by David Remnick, 13 April 1998
• Statues and portraits of Lenin
• Re: Lenin in color - high quality edition at YouTube (requires Adobe Flash)
• The Ghosts of Lenin Abound by The Moscow News Weekly, January 15, 2009

Selected works

• The Development of Capitalism in Russia
• What is to be Done? [1]
• One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
• Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution
• Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
• The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
• Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
• The State and Revolution [2]
• The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
• Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder [3]
• Lenin's Testament
• Lenin's last letter to Stalin
• Reply by N. Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg
• How to Organise Competition?

Political offices
Preceded by None	Chairman of the RSFSR Council of People's Commissars 1917 – 1924	Succeeded by Alexey Rykov
Preceded by None	Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR 1922 – 1924
Military offices
Preceded by None	Chairman of the Council of Labour and Defence 1918 – 1920	Succeeded by Himself as Chair of the Sovnarkom

v • d • e Prime Ministers of Russia Russian Empire Witte · Goremykin · Stolypin · Kokovtsov · Goremykin · Stürmer · Trepov · Golitsyn Provisional Government Lvov · Kerensky Russian SFSR/ Soviet Union Lenin · Rykov · Molotov · Stalin · Malenkov · Bulganin · Khrushchev · Kosygin · Tikhonov · Ryzhkov · Pavlov · Silayev Russia as a part of the Soviet Union Syrtsov · Sulimov · Bulganin · Vakhrushev · Khokhlov · Pamfilov* · Kosygin · Rodionov · Chernousov · Puzanov · Yasnov · Kozlov · Polyansky · Voronov · Solomentsev · Vorotnikov · Vlasov · Silayev · Lobov* · Yeltsin Russian Federation Yeltsin · Gaidar* · Chernomyrdin · Kiriyenko · Chernomyrdin* · Primakov · Stepashin · Putin · Kasyanov · Khristenko* · Fradkov · Zubkov · Putin * denotes acting.

v • d • e Leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Vladimir Lenin · Joseph Stalin · Nikita Khrushchev · Leonid Brezhnev · Yuri Andropov · Konstantin Chernenko · Mikhail Gorbachev

v • d • e Significant works by Lenin The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) · What Is to Be Done? (1902) · One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904) · Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Social Revolution (1905) · Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909) · The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914) · Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) · State and Revolution (1917) · The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky · "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

v • d • e Russian Revolution of 1917 February Revolution · July Days · Kornilov affair  · October Revolution · Russian Civil War Major groups Provisional Committee of the State Duma  · Russian Provisional Government  · Petrograd Soviet · Council of the People's Commissars · Military Revolutionary Committee · Russian Constituent Assembly (elections)  · Red Guards · Tsentralna Rada and Ukrainian People's Republic Political parties Kadets  · Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) · Socialist-Revolutionary Party Major figures Nicholas II of Russia · Georgy Lvov · Vladimir Lenin · Alexander Kerensky · Lev Kamenev · Grigory Zinoviev · Leon Trotsky

v • d • e Kievan Rus' Grand Duchy of Moscow Tsardom of Russia Russian Empire Soviet Union Russian Federation Lists of Russians Leaders · before 1168 · 1168-1917 · 1917-1991 · 1991-present · Prime Ministers · Metropolitans and Patriarchs Foreign Ministers · Field Marshals · Cosmonauts · Explorers · Inventors · Architects · Artists Ballet dancers · Opera singers · Composers · Philosophers · Playwrights · Poets · Novelists

Persondata
NAME	Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov, Владимир Ильич Ульянов (Ленин) (Russian)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Russian politician, led October Revolution
DATE OF BIRTH	22 April 1870(1870-04-22)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Simbirsk, Russia
DATE OF DEATH	21 January 1924
PLACE OF DEATH	Moscow, Russia

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