Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov Lenin
"A revolution is impossible without a revolutionary situation; furthermore, not every revolutionary situation leads to revolution."
― Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, alias Lenin (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924) was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He served as leader of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917, then concurrently as Premier of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. Under his administration, the Russian Empire was replaced by the Soviet Union; all wealth including land, industry and business was nationalized. Based in Marxism, his political theories are known as Leninism.
Lenin, along with Leon Trotsky, played a senior role in orchestrating the October Revolution in 1917, which led to the overthrow of the Provisional Government and the establishment of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic. Lenin was elected to the position of the head of government by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets. Under Lenin's leadership the new government nationalized the estates and crown lands. Homosexuality and abortion were legalized; Lenin's Russia was the first country in the world to establish both of these rights. Free access was being given to both abortion and birth control. No-fault divorce was also legalized, along with universal free healthcare and free education being established.
Lenin supported world revolution and immediate peace with the Central Powers, agreeing to a punitive treaty that turned over a significant portion of the former Russian Empire to Germany. The treaty was voided after the Allies won the war. In 1921 Lenin proposed the New Economic Policy, a mixed economic system of state capitalism that started the process of industrialisation and recovery from the Civil War. In 1922, the Russian SFSR joined former territories of the Russian Empire in becoming the Soviet Union, with Lenin as its leader.
Early Life
Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin gained an interest in revolutionary leftist politics following the execution of his brother Aleksandr in 1887. Expelled from Kazan State University for participating in anti-Tsarist protests, he devoted the following years to a law degree and to radical politics, becoming a Marxist.
Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, came from a serf background but had studied physics and maths at Kazan State University, going to teach at the Penza Institute for the Nobility. Lenin great-grandfather was a serf, and he married Anna Alexeevna Smirnova, a baptized Kalmyk. He was introduced to Maria Alexandrovna Blank; they married in the summer of 1863. Hailing from a relatively prosperous background, Maria was the daughter of a Russian Jewish physician, Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, and his German-Swedish wife, Anna Ivanovna Grosschopf. Dr. Blank had insisted on providing his children with a good education, ensuring that Maria learned Russian, German, English and French, and that she was well versed in Russian literature. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhni Novgorod, rising to become Director of Primary Schools in the Simbirsk district six years later. Five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. Awarded the Order of St. Vladimir, he became a hereditary nobleman.
Entering Kazan University in August 1887, Vladimir and his mother moved into a flat, renting out their Simbirsk home. Interested in his late brother's radical ideas, he joined an agrarian-socialist revolutionary cell intent on reviving the People's Freedom Party (Narodnaya Volya). Joining the university's illegal Samara-Simbirsk zemlyachestvo, he was elected as its representative for the university's zemlyachestvo council. In December he took part in a demonstration demanding the abolition of the 1884 statute and the re-legalisation of student societies, but was arrested by the police. Accused of being a ringleader, the university expelled him and the Ministry of Internal Affairs placed him under surveillance, exiling him to his Kokushkino estate.
Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, came from a serf background but had studied physics and maths at Kazan State University, going to teach at the Penza Institute for the Nobility. Lenin great-grandfather was a serf, and he married Anna Alexeevna Smirnova, a baptized Kalmyk. He was introduced to Maria Alexandrovna Blank; they married in the summer of 1863. Hailing from a relatively prosperous background, Maria was the daughter of a Russian Jewish physician, Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, and his German-Swedish wife, Anna Ivanovna Grosschopf. Dr. Blank had insisted on providing his children with a good education, ensuring that Maria learned Russian, German, English and French, and that she was well versed in Russian literature. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhni Novgorod, rising to become Director of Primary Schools in the Simbirsk district six years later. Five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. Awarded the Order of St. Vladimir, he became a hereditary nobleman.
Entering Kazan University in August 1887, Vladimir and his mother moved into a flat, renting out their Simbirsk home. Interested in his late brother's radical ideas, he joined an agrarian-socialist revolutionary cell intent on reviving the People's Freedom Party (Narodnaya Volya). Joining the university's illegal Samara-Simbirsk zemlyachestvo, he was elected as its representative for the university's zemlyachestvo council. In December he took part in a demonstration demanding the abolition of the 1884 statute and the re-legalisation of student societies, but was arrested by the police. Accused of being a ringleader, the university expelled him and the Ministry of Internal Affairs placed him under surveillance, exiling him to his Kokushkino estate.
Revolutionary activities
"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."
― Vladimir Lenin
Early activism and imprisonment: 1893–1900
In autumn 1893, Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg. There, he worked as a lawyer's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell who called themselves the "Social Democrats" after the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Publicly championing Marxism among the socialist movement, he encouraged the foundation of revolutionary cells in Russia's industrial centres. He befriended Russian Jewish Marxist Julius Martov, and began a relationship with Marxist schoolteacher Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya. By autumn 1894 he was leading a Marxist workers' circle, and was meticulous in covering his tracks, knowing that police spies were trying to infiltrate the revolutionary movement.
Although he was influenced by agrarian-socialist Pëtr Tkachëvi, Lenin's Social-Democrats clashed with the Narodnik agrarian-socialist platform of the Socialist–Revolutionary Party (SR). The SR saw the peasantry as the main force of revolutionary change, whereas the Marxists believed peasants to be sympathetic to private ownership, instead emphasising the revolutionary role of the proletariat. He dealt with some of these issues in his first political tract, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats; based largely on his experiences in Samara, around 200 copies were illegally printed.
Munich, London and Geneva: 1900–05
The first issue of Iskra ("Spark"), official organ of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. Edited by Lenin from his base in Geneva, Switzerland, copies would be smuggled into Russia, where it would prove successful in winning support for the Marxist revolutionary cause. His exile over, Vladimir settled in Pskov, and began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra (The Spark), a new organ of the Russian Marxist movement, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In July 1900, Vladimir left Russia for Western Europe; in Switzerland he met other Russian Marxists, and at a Corsier conference they agreed to launch the paper from Munich, where Lenin relocated in September. Iskra was smuggled into Russia illegally, becoming the most successful underground publication for 50 years, and containing contributions from prominent European Marxists Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, and Leon Trotsky. Vladimir adopted the nom de guerre of "Lenin" in December 1901, possibly taking the River Lena as a basis,.
The 1905 Revolution: 1905–07
"The uprising has begun. Force against Force. Street fighting is raging, barricades are being thrown up, rifles are cracking, guns are booming. Rivers of blood are flowing, the civil war for freedom is blazing up. Moscow and the South, the Caucasus and Poland are ready to join the proletariat of St. Petersburg. The slogan of the workers has become: Death or Freedom!" -Vladimir Lenin
In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparking a spate of civil unrest known as the Revolution of 1905. Lenin urged Bolsheviks to take a greater role in the unrest, encouraging violent insurrection.[86] He insisted that the Bolsheviks split completely with the Mensheviks, although many Bolsheviks refused, and both groups attended the 3rd RSDLP Congress, held in London in April 1905. Lenin presented many of his ideas in the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, published in August 1905. Here, he predicted that the liberal bourgeoisie would be sated by a constitutional monarchy and thus betray the revolution; instead he argued that the proletariat would have to build an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish the "provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry". He used many SR slogans – "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "the expropriation of gentry land" – further shocking the Mensheviks, who believed he had departed from orthodox Marxism.
First World War: 1914–17
"The [First World] war is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out–and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of the thieves in order to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an unconscionable bourgeois lie." -Vladimir Lenin
Lenin was back in Galicia when the First World War broke out. The war pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, Lenin was arrested and briefly imprisoned until his anti-tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife moved to Bern, Switzerland, relocating to Zurich in February 1916. Lenin was angry that the German Social-Democratic Party had supported the German war effort, thereby contravening the Stuttgart resolution of the Second International that socialist parties would oppose the conflict. As a result, Lenin saw the Second International as defunct. Lenin attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915, and the Kiental conference in April 1916, urging socialists across the continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. He hoped the German army would greatly weaken the Tsarist regime in Russia, thereby allowing the proletariat revolution to succeed.
"The peaceful development of any revolution is, generally speaking, extremely rare and difficult ... but ... a peaceful development of the revolution is possible and probable if all power is transferred to the Soviets. The struggle of parties for power within the Soviets may proceed peacefully, if the Soviets are made fully democratic"
― Vladimir Lenin