Lenin, V. I. (1870–1924)

Like many of his left-wing Russian compatriots, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov took a political pseudonym (in his case N. Lenin—the initial N not standing for anything) as a young revolutionary activist to escape detection and arrest by the czarist secret police. Such aliases were common in the Russian Marxist underground before World War I, and he first used Lenin (possibly after the River Lena of his just-completed Siberian exile) to sign an article he wrote in 1901. He adopted many other names over the years, but it was as Lenin that he became one of the most important political figures and revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century. He organized the Bolsheviks into a coherent political group, initiated the 1917 October Revolution in Russia, and served as the first head of the Soviet state. While steeped in the orthodox Marxist understanding of history, politics, and economics, Lenin revised the Marxist theory of revolution to apply to the predominantly peasant society of Russia. His most original contribution to Marxist theory and practice concerned the methods revolutionaries should use to secure and retain state power. Lenin was above all a practical man, and few social activists have so changed the world in which they lived.

Vladimir Ilyich was born on April 10, 1870, in the Volga town of Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) into a household that was not the typical provincial, middle-class Russian family of the time. His father, the director of the provincial school system, was regarded as politically liberal and his mother, a Volga German, was officially classified as a dissenter from Russian Orthodoxy because of her Lutheran beliefs. Vladimir had an older brother and an older sister as well as a younger brother and two younger sisters, all of whom were reared in an atmosphere of civic idealism and cosmopolitan culture. Tragedy struck the family in the mid-1880s: Vladimir's father died suddenly in 1886 and the next year Vladimir's older brother Alexander (1866–1887), whose revolutionary political views deeply influenced Vladimir's own political development, was hanged with four other conspirators for their involvement in a plot to assassinate Czar Alexander III (1845–1894). Lenin's wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya (1869–1939), later recounted that his beloved brother's execution turned Lenin into a lifelong revolutionary activist against the despotic czarist system.

Despite his brother's sedition, Vladimir was admitted to study law at the University of Kazan. He was [Page 841]soon expelled and banished to Kokuchkino for anti-government activities. Although his banishment was lifted in 1888, the authorities would not allow Lenin to attend the university as a resident student. After numerous inquiries, the authorities allowed him to take the law school examinations at the University of St. Petersburg. Preparing himself by independent study, he took the examinations at the 1891 session and received the highest marks. Lenin soon settled in St. Petersburg and registered for the bar. Continuing his activism against the czarist regime and attracted to Marxist analysis, he began to work out his ideas about how Marx's notions of proletarian revolution and human liberation could be applied to Russia.

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