Lenin, Vladimir Ilich

Lenin, Vladimir Ilich (b. 22 Apr. 1870, d. 21 Jan. 1924). Founder of the USSR Born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov in Simbirsk (later Ulyanovsk), he was inspired by the execution of his eldest brother in 1887 for an assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander III to become engaged in revolutionary underground movements. He was expelled from Kazan University for his part in student demonstrations later that year, but in 1891 graduated with top marks as an external law student from St Petersburg University. After working as a lawyer in Kazan for two years, he went to St Petersburg in 1893, and became active in Marxist circles. He formed important contacts with exiled Marxists in Switzerland during a tour there in 1895, but was arrested later that year and sent to exile in Siberia. There, he married Nadezhda Konstantinova Krupskaya (b. 1869, d. 1939), who subsequently exerted a considerable intellectual influence over him.

His time in Siberia allowed him to finish his first major publication, The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), which was a critique of the current populist Narodniki movement. After his release in 1900 he emigrated to central Europe, and founded the social democratic newspaper Iskra (The Spark). In his numerous newspaper articles, and his important treatise What is to be Done? (1902), he outlined his revolutionary ideas. Borrowing in large measure from Kautsky, he developed the concept of an elite party, which would have to assume the leadership of the proletariat in the fight for socialism and Communism. These views led to a split within the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party in 1903, whereupon he assumed the leadership of the more radical fraction (Bolsheviks) against the more moderate Mensheviks.

After a brief (but ineffective) presence in Russia during the 1905 Russian Revolution, he returned to central Europe, where he collected funds, organized the separation of Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, and continued his writings, the most important of which during this period was Materialism and Empirocriticism (1909). At the outbreak of World War I, he was imprisoned by the Austrian police, but was soon sent to exile in Switzerland. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), he blamed imperialism for World War I. In contrast to Marx, he argued that socialist revolution would occur first in the least, rather than most, developed capitalist society. Having almost given up hope of such a revolution occurring in Russia, he was surprised by the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in February 1917.

Due to his urgings for the ending of the war to consolidate the revolution, the Germans organized his return to Russia, where he arrived in April 1917. At first, demands in his ‘April Theses’ for an end to the war, the transfer of land to the peasants, and the transfer of power to the Soviets went unheeded. Accused of complicity in the coup attempt of July 1917, he even had to go into hiding in Finland. There, he wrote State and Revolution (1917) in which he developed his notion of the proletarian dictatorship and justified the use of terror. The breakdown of the Russian war effort, and the rapid deterioration of the economy worked in his favour, and on 25–6 October 1917 (7–8 November according to the Gregorian Calendar) he persuaded his lieutenants, led by Trotsky, to carry out the Bolshevik Revolution.

Lenin became the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, effectively the Premier of the new Soviet government. He immediately put into practice his idea of a small, elite leadership by creating the Politburo. This enabled him to impose upon a reluctant Bolshevik leadership the acceptance of the humiliating Peace of Brest-Litovsk. Thereafter, the Russian Civil War ensued, which he successfully directed from Petrograd (formerly St Petersburg) while his aides like Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Stalin organized the Red Army at the grass roots. His able leadership, and the terror executed by the loyal Cheka bands enabled him to stay in power after the devastating Civil War, and the disastrous Russo-Polish War. Despite his many writings, he was a pragmatist more than an ideologue, and calmed a lot of discontent through the New Economic Policy, which soon restored production to prewar levels. In 1922, he suffered two strokes. Paralysed in speech and movement throughout most of 1923, he was unable to stop the rise of Stalin who succeeded him.