Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Владимир Ильич Ленин
Photo of comrade Lenin
Born	Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870-04-22)22 April 1870 Simbirsk, Russian Empire
Died	21 January 1924(1924-01-21) (aged 53) Gorki, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	Russian Soviet
Political orientation	Marxism (developed what is now known as Marxism-Leninism)

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 — 21 January 1924), also known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary leader, political and economic theorist, and philosopher. He is considered one of the most important figures of the 20th century especially as it relates to the socialist movement. Author of several books contributing to Marxist theory, Lenin was responsible for the development of the understanding of the imperialist phenomenon in capitalist mode of production and was a key figure in the 1917 revolution that led to the establishment of the Soviet Union.

Life and work

Early life (1870–1888)

Photograph of Lenin's family in 1879. The 9 year old Lenin is positioned in the bottom-right corner of the photo.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk on 22 April 1870, the fourth of eight children of Ilya Ulyanov, a respected figure in public education and son of former serf, and Maria Alexandrovna, a woman who came from a family of nobility background. Although Lenin's father was not a revolutionary himself, he shared progressive views and opposed autocracies, and both his father and mother contributed greatly with his intellectual upbringing. Besides his mother and father, a big intellectual influence on Lenin was his brother Alexander, who first introduced him to Marxist literature.

Lenin's youth and childhood coincided with a reactionary period in Russia, when civilians were commonly arrested for expressing criticism of the czarist regime. In May 1887, when Lenin was 17 years old, his brother Alexander Ulyanov was publicly executed for an attempt to assassinate the tzar Alexander III, and event which had an impact in Lenin's radicalization towards revolutionary action.

Lenin was admitted to the Faculty of Law at Kazan University in 13 August 1886, and a month later he joined the Samara-Simbirsk Fraternity, a student society, at the time prohibited by the University Statutes and punishable by expulsion. A year after he began his studies, he joined student campaigns and demonstrations demanding that student socie­ties be permitted, that students who had been expelled be rein­stated and those responsible for their expulsion be called to account. As a result of participation in the student demonstrations, on December 1887, Lenin was arrested, expelled from University and exiled to a nearby village for one year, becoming under strict police surveillance since then.

Throughout his exile in the village of Kokushkino, Lenin studied extensively political economy works and other literature. Later in his life, he wrote about this period: “I don't think I ever afterwards read so much in my life, not even during my imprisonment in St. Petersburg or exile in Siberia, as I did in the year when I was banished to the village from Kazan; I read voraciously from early morning till late at night.”

In the autumn of 1888, Lenin was permitted to return to Kazan and shortly after returning, but unable to readmit to the university. He was also prohibited from attending universities abroad. Back in Kazan, he joined a Marxist study-circle organized by Nikolai Fedoseyev, beginning his political and revolutionary activities. It was during this period of 1888–89 that Lenin studied for the first time Karl Marx's Capital, vol. I.

Early revolutionary activities (1889–1904)

Lenin in 1891

In May 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to a village next to the city of Samara, with Lenin narrowly escaping another arrest by the secret police, which arrested and imprisoned members of Fedoseyev Marxist study-circles of Kazan a month later. In Samara, Lenin earned a living by giving lessons. Considering he was prohibited from attending university, Lenin sent several applications requesting permission to pass his university examinations without attending lectures, until 1890, when he received the permission to do so, along with the task of studying for 18 months independently. After hard work and intense study schedule, he took his examinations in 1891, achieving the highest marks in all subjects, receiving a first-class diploma.

Lenin began to practice law in the Samara Regional Court, and he appeared for defense in court about twenty times during the period of 1892–93. His legal practice, however, was secondary only to diligently studying Marxism to prepare himself for revolutionary work. In 1892, Lenin organized the first Marxist circle in Samara. The study group focused on the works of Marx and Engels, the works of Plekhanov and others.

Library works

• (1902) What is to be done?
• (1905) Two tactics of social-democracy in the democratic revolution
• (1908) Materialism and empiriocriticism
• (1913) The three sources and three component parts of Marxism
• (1916) Imperialism, the highest stage of capitalism
• (1917) The state and revolution
• (1918) The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky
• (1920) “Left-wing” communism, an infantile disorder

References