Lenin
Nickname/Alias: born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov
Achievements: Leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and first head of the Soviet state.
Born: April 10, 1870; Simbirsk, Russia
Died: January 21, 1924; Moscow, Russia. Aged 53
Field & Discipline: Government & Politics; Communism; Marxism; Communist Party Leader
Language: Russian
Father: Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831-86)
Mother: Mariya Alexandrovna Blank (m. 1862; 1835-1916)
Siblings: Anna (1864-1935); Alexander ("Sasha"; 1866-87); Olga (1871-91);
Dmitrii (1874-1943); Mariya (1878-1937)
Spouse: Nadezhda Krupskaya (m. 1895; 1869-1939)
Children: None
Education: Simbirsk High School (1879-1887); University of Kazan (1887);
University of St. Petersburg (1891)
Major Work: “What Is To Be Done?” (1902)
Life & Times:
Lenin studied revolutionary political literature favoured by his brother, including the work of [influenced by] Moses Hess*, and [influenced by] Karl Marx's* “Das Kapital” and became committed to Marxism.
In August 1893, Lenin moved to St. Petersburg where he nominally practised as a public defender, but concentrated most of his efforts on developing links with other revolutionary Marxists, one of whom was his future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.
In March 1895 Lenin developed pneumonia, but a month later had sufficiently recovered to leave Russia for Switzerland, where he intended to make contact with Russian political exiles. He then returned to St. Petersburg in September 1895, where strikes were beginning to erupt. During the next three months, he succeeded in unifying Marxist groups in the capital through an illegal political organization, the Union for the Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class. However, a government informer soon infiltrated the group, and in December 1895 the leaders of the Union were arrested. Lenin was jailed for 14 months in an open prison from where he continued to correspond with revolutionaries, engineer strikes and walk-outs, and began writing his first major work, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia.”
In February 1897, Lenin was exiled to Siberia for three years, where he was joined by his fiancée, Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom he married in July 1898. During this period, Krupskaya became Lenin's devoted secretary and in exile the pair conducted much clandestine party correspondence, collaborated on a Russian translation of [translated work of] Sidney and Beatrice Webb's* “The History of Trade Unionism” (1894) and “Industrial Democracy” (1897), and copied by hand the completed text of Lenin's “Development of Capitalism in Russia.”
On release from his exile in 1900, Lenin travelled to Pskov and from there into self-imposed exile in western Europe where, in association with Russian Marxists abroad, he was to spend the next five years devoting himself to revolutionary activity. He moved first to Munich (where he was joined by his wife in April 1901), and here he established the Marxist newspaper “Iskra” (“The Spark”) in December 1900, to which he contributed a great many articles.
Lenin produced the newspaper, printed secretly and then smuggled into Russia, in the hope that its message would unify and strengthen the disparate Russian revolutionary movements. In 1902, however, the owner of the Munich printing plant refused to produce any more copies of “Iskra,” so Lenin moved to London, where he met an important future collaborator, [collaborated with] Trotsky*, and published probably his most important work: “What is to be done?” The work created significant divisions between many of his close allies, particularly his conception of a highly disciplined centralized party that would, presumably under his leadership, lead the proletariat to revolution.
As a result, during the Second Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party in Brussels and London (July-August 1903), the “Iskra” group split in two, and Lenin's aggressive delivery and controversial revolutionary ideas ultimately lost him support although he emerged in 1903 as the leader of the “Bolshevik” faction.
After the Congress, Lenin resigned from the board of “Iskra” and in Geneva in January 1905 established the first Bolshevik newspaper, “Vperyod” (“Forward”). Meanwhile, in Russia conditions were worsening, with resentment against Tsar Nicholas II and the government made worse by Russian losses in the Russo-Japanese War.
A revolutionary uprising followed in January 1905 when, during a peaceful demonstration to petition the Tsar for improved working conditions by 200,000 workers outside the Winter Palace in St. Petersburg, soldiers fired on the crowd, killing around 500 people. In June 1905 the famous Potemkin naval revolt took place, by October there was a general strike, and in mid-October the Tsar felt compelled to grant certain civil liberties and to establish a Duma (parliament). Meanwhile, Lenin had returned to Russia in October and took charge of the Bolsheviks, but he remained convinced that the time for revolution had not yet come.
By mid-1906, the Tsar had withdrawn many of his major concessions and had dissolved the First Duma, which was followed in 1907 by further repressive measures, and the arrest and deporting of the members of the Second Duma. In December 1907, Lenin was forced to flee from the Tsar's secret police, and he remained abroad for the next decade, studying works by political, military and industrial theorists (from [influenced by] Clausewitz's* “On War,” 1832-34 to [influenced by] Taylor's* “Principles of Scientific Management,” 1911), while developing and promoting the cause of a Russian Bolshevik revolution.
Moving from Finland (1906), to Geneva (1908), where he established another newspaper, “Proletary” (“The Proletarian”), and then Paris (1909), where two years later he set up a school for the training of underground revolutionaries, in 1910 Lenin met the revolutionary writer Maxim Gorky in Capri, who became an important supporter and sponsor of the Bolsheviks.
In 1916 Lenin moved to Zurich. During this period he also began what is generally regarded as his most significant work, “The State and Revolution,” in which he reaffirmed his total rejection of all the institutions of Western democracy, reiterated his belief that the dictatorship of the proletariat is the only true method for eliminating capitalism, and for the first time described his utopian vision following this dictatorship - a vision of men united in brotherhood by communism, with no longer any need for legal systems or the apparatus of government.
Then, late in February 1917, the situation in Russia again altered dramatically, when a spontaneous uprising against the Tsar by crowds in Petrograd (formerly St. Petersburg) was joined by most of the Petrograd garrison and became the first (February, or bourgeois-democratic) Russian Revolution.
By early March Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate and the monarchy had been abolished. A committee of the Duma appointed a liberal provisional government of Constitutional Democrats and Social Democrats led by Alexander Kerensky to succeed the autocracy, which between March and October was reorganized four times and was continually threatened by the increasing power of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies.
Meanwhile Lenin, who had vigorously opposed the war as an imperialist struggle between competing groups of capitalists that should in Russia be converted into civil war, had managed to persuade officials in the German government that, should he come to power, he would withdraw Russia from the war. As a result, in early April 1917 he was provided by [a deal with] Ludendorff*with a special sealed railroad car in which to travel through Germany, and in this fashion Lenin and several associates returned from Swiss exile and arrived at Petrograd. Greeted by many of his Bolshevik followers (whom he now called Communists), from his arrival Lenin vehemently preached total socialist revolution, with power in the hands of regional people's councils, or soviets, land in the hands of the peasants, and Russia out of the war ("peace, bread and land").
Meanwhile, Russia remained at war and as morale worsened, Lenin - supported by Trotsky (now his second-in-command), [assisted by] Stalin* and [assisted by] Molotov* - developed a plan for the proletariat to seize power by means of an armed uprising. Finally, angered and frustrated by the apparent reluctance of his Communist comrades to revolt, Lenin attended the session of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party (10 October), and managed to sway the vote in favour of armed insurrection. Then, on 24 October, Lenin arrived at Smolny and took charge of the October Revolution, during which the provisional government was overthrown and Lenin declared the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and the formation of the Congress of Soviets.
Lenin was then elected head of the Soviet Government, and on 11 March 1918, together with the Party Central Committee and the Soviet Government, he moved to Moscow, which then became the capital of the Soviet state.
Lenin concluded peace with Germany in 1918, and then commanded the Bolsheviks in the ensuing civil war (1918-21), during which he fought off both the White Army and foreign intervention, despite the anarchy and widespread starvation afflicting Russia. As chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (head of state), he founded the Third (Communist) International in 1919, and established the authority of the Bolshevik (Communist) Party in Russia (1921).
In 1921 he worked out a plan for the construction of socialism and developed the principles of his New Economic Policy, which emphasized economic reconstruction and education, and allowed a limited amount of free enterprise in order to give Russia respite before entering the era of giant state planning. He was interviewed by [interviewed by] H.G. Wells* in 1921. However, his health had been in decline since an assassination attempt in 1918, and in late 1922 he suffered a serious stroke. Shortly afterwards the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was organized, and from then until March 1923, Lenin dictated a series of articles which became his formal legacy to the Communist Party and the Russian people. He died on 21 January 1924, after a series of strokes, and his body was embalmed for veneration in a crystal casket in a mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow.
Extra Connections: He supported [supported] Pavlov*
He met [met] Russell*
He knew [knew] Kropotkin*
Assessment: One of the most important and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was a powerful orator, fluent in many languages, and wrote several major studies of socialist theory.
Oneliner: Lenin, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution
Bibliography:
- Encyclopedia Britannica.
- Topalian, Elyse, Lenin, London: Franklin Watts Inc., 1984.
- Williams, Beryl, “Lenin” (Profiles in Power series), Harlow, Essex: Pearson Education Limited, 2000.