Lenin, Vladimir Ilich (1870–1924)

The Russian revolutionary Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, who later adopted the name V. I. Lenin, was born to Mariya Blank, a doctor's daughter, on April 10, 1870, in Simbirsk, where his father was an educator, schoolmaster, and inspector of primary schools. He was one of six siblings.

The second child and oldest son, Alexander (Sasha), went to St. Petersburg University in the fall of 1882, where he majored in natural science. While there, he joined an organization known as Narodnaya Volya, or the People's Will. This terrorist wing believed in a socialist party led by the working class. Socialism was the logical extension of democracy, but czarists did not allow for peaceful development of democracy. Legal opposition was not allowed. The only option for purging the official hatred of any popular movement toward socialist democracy was terrorism. In February 1887, the People's Will planned the assassination of Alexander II, czar of Russia. The police discovered the plot, and as a result, Alexander Ulyanov was executed in 1887 for being a part of the group that attempted to kill Alexander II.

Because of this experience, young Vladimir was propelled into revolutionary activity. As such, [Page 779]Vladimir would become a leader in the Russian Revolution. A diligent scholar, Lenin attained a mastery of social theory and a sound understanding of the history of social movements and historical trends. As a leading activist, Lenin wrote a series of articles that would not only serve as a guide for revolution in Russia but also lay the intellectual foundation for what would become Marxism-Leninism. These articles included The Development of Capitalism in Russia. In this work, Lenin tried to prove that that by 1900, Russia had already been incorporated into the world capitalist system. As a result, the peasants were rapidly being divided into capitalist farmers and the rural proletariat. Russian industry was divided between traditional handicrafts, backward manufacturing, and a modern machine industry in which a great deal of foreign capital was invested.

In 1902, Lenin wrote the pamphlet, What Is to Be Done? “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement,” Lenin stated. He wrote that unions by themselves would only lead to struggles over wages and working conditions; a socialist consciousness needed to be introduced from outside the working class. This would require an organization of professional revolutionaries. The organization would need to be disciplined, conspiratorial, and centralized. The “party of a new type” would become the vanguard of the working class and would lead, but remain separate from, the broader democratic workers' movement.

In 1904, Lenin wrote One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. At this time, Lenin's writing was based upon the assumption that the workers' party needed to be taken over by those workers who were educated with a socialist awareness. The intellectuals were undependable, obsessed with eccentricity, anarchism, and egoism, and had an intense horror of discipline.

Materialism and Empiriocriticism was written in 1908 as a rebuttal to the physicist Ernst Mach, who had stated that reality was only the actuality of our experience, and therefore science could record only our subjective experiences. In Materialism and Empiriocriticism, Lenin affirmed that science is the observation of the material universe, existing independently of the observer. Physical sensations are the direct connection to the external world. Every ideology is conditioned by its historical setting. Science is no different, yet science is valid. It is independent of the observer to the degree it corresponds externally to tangible nature.

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