Vladimir Lenin
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| Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Владимир Ильич Ленин
| |
|---|---|
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| Lenin in 1920 | |
| Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union (Premier of the Soviet Union) | |
| In office 30 December 1922 – 21 January 1924 | |
| Preceded by | Position created |
| Succeeded by | Alexey Rykov |
| Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian SFSR | |
| In office 8 November 1917 – 21 January 1924 | |
| Preceded by | Position created |
| Succeeded by | Alexey Rykov |
| Full member of the Politburo | |
| In office 25 March 1919 – 21 January 1924 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Владимир Ильич Ульянов) 22 April 1870 Simbirsk, Russian Empire |
| Died | 21 January 1924 (aged 53) (stroke) Gorki, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union |
| Resting place | Lenin's Mausoleum, Moscow,Russian Federation |
| Nationality | Soviet Russian |
| Political party | Russian Social Democratic Labour Party Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks) |
| Spouse(s) | Nadezhda Krupskaya (1898–1924) |
| Profession | Lawyer, revolutionary, politician |
| Religion | None (atheist) |
| Signature |  |
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Владимир Ильич Ленин; IPA: [vlɐˈdʲimʲɪr ɪlʲˈjitɕ ˈlʲenʲɪn] (
listen); born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Russian: Владимир Ильич Ульянов; 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924) was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist who served as the leader of the Russian SFSR from 1917, and then concurrently as Premier of the Soviet Union from 1922, until 1924.
listen); born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, Russian: Владимир Ильич Ульянов; 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924) was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist who served as the leader of the Russian SFSR from 1917, and then concurrently as Premier of the Soviet Union from 1922, until 1924.
Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin gained an interest in revolutionary leftist politics following the execution of his brother in 1887. Briefly attending the University of Kazan, where he was ejected for his involvement in anti-Tsarist protests, he devoted the next few years to gaining a degree in law and to radical politics, converting to Marxism. In 1893 he moved to Russia's capital at St. Petersburg, where he continued with his political agitation, becoming a senior figure within the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Arrested and exiled to Siberia for three years, he subsequently fled to Western Europe, living in Germany, England and then Switzerland. Following the February Revolution of 1917, in which the Tsar was overthrown and a provisional government took power, he decided to return home.
As the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, he took a senior role in orchestrating the October Revolution in 1917, which led to the overthrow of the Russian Provisional Government and the establishment of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the world's first constitutionally socialist state. Immediately afterwards, Lenin proceeded to implement socialist reforms, including the transfer of estates and crown lands to workers' soviets. Faced with the threat of German invasion, he argued that Russia should immediately sign a peace treaty—which led to Russia's exit from the First World War. In 1921 Lenin proposed the New Economic Policy, a system of state capitalism which started the process of industrialisation and recovery from the Russian Civil War. In 1922, the Russian SFSR joined former territories of the Russian Empire in becoming the Soviet Union. The Bolshevik faction later became theCommunist Party of the Soviet Union, which acted as a vanguard party presiding over asingle-party dictatorship of the proletariat.
As a politician, Lenin was a persuasive and charismatic orator. As an intellectual his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produced Marxism–Leninism, a pragmatic Russian application of Marxism that emphasized the critical role played by a committed and disciplined political vanguard in the revolutionary process, while defending the possibility of a socialist revolution in less advanced capitalist countries through an alliance of the proletarians with the rural peasantry. Lenin remains a controversial and highly divisive world figure. Critics labeled him a dictator whose administration oversaw multiple human rights abuses, but supporters countered this criticism citing the limitations on his power and promoted him heroically as a champion of the working class. He has had a significant influence on the Marxist-Leninist movement, which since his death had developed into a variety of schools of thought, namely Stalinism,Trotskyism and Maoism.
Early life
Childhood: 1870–1887
Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov (1831–1886), had been born the fourth and final child of a couple living in Astrakhan. Ilya's father, a poor tailor named Nikolai Vassilievich Ulyanov, had been born a serf of either Kalmyk or Tatar descent, before marrying a far younger illiterate Kalmyk girl named Anna Alexeevna Smirnova when in his fifties. Ilya had escaped the poverty of his family by gaining admittance to the University of Kazan, where he studied mathematics and physics, before gaining employment teaching those subjects at the Penza Institute for the Nobility in 1854.[1][2][3] Introduced through a mutual friend to a woman named Maria Alexandrovna Blank(1835–1916), they fell in love, and were married in the summer of 1863.[4][5][6] Having been born into a relatively prosperous background, Mariya was the daughter of a Russian Jewish physician named Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, and his German-Swedish wife, Anna Ivanovna Grosschopf. An eccentric, Dr Blank had insisted on providing his children with a good education, ensuring that Mariya learned English and French alongside Russian and German and that she was well versed in Russian literature.[7][8][9] Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job teaching in Nizhni Novgorod, before being appointed to the position of director of primary schools in the Simbirskdistrict 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. As a result, he was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir and given the position of an hereditary nobleman.[10][11][12]
The middle-class couple had two children, Anna (born 1864) and Alexander (born 1868) before the birth of their third child, Vladimir "Volodya" Ilyich (Russian: Владимир Ильич Ульянов), on 10 April 1870, who would be baptised in the nearby St Nicholas Cathedral several days later. They would be followed by three more children, Olga (born 1871), Dmitry (born 1874) and Mariya (born 1878). Another brother, Nikolai, had been born in 1873, but had died several days after birth.[10][13][14] Ilya was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and had his children baptised into it, although Mariya, who had been raised a Lutheran, was largely indifferent to Christianity, a view that influenced the beliefs of her children.[15][16][17] Politically, both parents were monarchists and liberal conservatives, being committed to the Emancipation reform of 1861 introduced by the reformist Tsar Alexander II and hoping that Russia would progress in much the same way as Western Europe had; they avoided associating with political radicals and there is no evidence that the Tsarist police ever put them under surveillance for subversive thought.[18][19] Every summer they would leave their home in Moscow Street, Simbirsk and spend a holiday at a rural manor house in Kokushkino that was shared with the family's Veretennikov cousins, relatives of Mariya.[20][21] Among his siblings, the young Vladimir was closest to his sister Olya, whom he often bossed around, having an extremely competitive nature; he could be destructive, but would usually admit to his misbehaviour.[22][23][24] A keen sportsman, he spent much of his free time outdoors or playing chess, but his father insisted that he devote his life to study, leading him to excel at school, the Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia, a strictly disciplinarian and conservative institution. By his teenage years, Vladimir was coaching his elder sister in his favourite subject, Latin, and gave private tuition to a student from the ethnic Chuvashminority.[22][25][26]
Ilya Ulyanov died of a brain haemorrhage on 12 January 1886, when Vladimir was 16 years old.[27][28][29] His behaviour becoming increasingly erratic and confrontational, shortly thereafter Vladimir renounced his belief in God, becoming an atheist.[30][31] At the time, Vladimir's elder brother Aleksandr Ulyanov, whom he affectionately knew as Sacha, was studying biology at St. Petersburg University, in 1885 having been awarded a gold medal for his dissertation, after which he was elected onto the university's Scientific-Literary Society. He had become involved in political agitation against the absolute monarchy of reactionary Tsar Alexander III which governed the Russian Empire, reading the writings of a number of banned leftist authors, including Dmitry Pisarev, Nikolay Dobrolyubov, Nikolay Chernyshevsky and Karl Marx. Helping to organise protests against the Tsarist government, he joined a small cell of socialist revolutionaries who were bent on assassinating the Tsar and with his scientific background was selected to construct a bomb for use in the plot. Before they had the chance to carry out the attack, the conspirators were arrested by police and put on trial. On 25 April 1887, Sacha was sentenced to death by hanging, and executed on 8 May.[32][33][34] Despite the recent deaths of his father and brother, Vladimir continued with his studies, leaving school with a gold medal for his exceptional performance, and decided that he wanted to study law at Kazan University.[35][36][37]
