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 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]

"Volodya", aged four. Following the foundation of the Soviet Union, this image would be widely published.
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]