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V.I. Lenin)
Vladimir Lenin
Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ле́нин), original name Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Russian: Влади́мир Ильи́ч Улья́нов) (April 10 (April 22, New Style), 1870 - January 21, 1924), a Russian revolutionary, the leader of the Bolshevik party, the first Premier of the Soviet Union and the founder of the ideology of Leninism.
"Lenin" was one of his revolutionary pseudonyms. He is believed to have created it to show his opposition to Georgi Plekhanov who used the pseudonym Volgin, after the Volga River; Ulyanov picked the Lena which is longer and flows in the opposite direction. He is sometimes erroneously referred to in the West as "Nikolai Lenin", though he has never been known as such in Russia.
Early life
Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) circa 1887
Born in Simbirsk, Russia, Lenin was the son of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831 - 1886), a Russian civil service official who worked for increased democracy and free universal education in Russia, and his liberal wife Maria Alexandrovna Blank (1835 - 1916). Like many Russians, he was of mixed ethnic and religious ancestry. He had Kalmyk ancestry through his paternal grandparents, Volga German ancestry through his maternal grandmother, who was a Lutheran, and Jewish ancestry through his maternal grandfather (converted to Christianity). Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) himself was baptised into the Russian Orthodox Church.
Vladimir distinguished himself in the study of Latin and Greek. In May of 1887 his eldest brother Alexander Ulyanov was hanged for participation in a plot threatening the life of Tsar Alexander III. This radicalized Vladimir and later that year he was arrested, and expelled from Kazan University for participating in student protests. He continued to study independently and by 1891 had earned a license to practice law.
Lenin's mugshot, Dec. 1895
Revolutionary
Rather than settle into a legal career he became more involved in revolutionary propaganda efforts, and the study of Marxism, much of it in St. Petersburg. On December 7 1895, he was arrested and held by authorities for an entire year, then exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in Siberia.
In July of 1898 he married socialist activist Nadezhda Krupskaya. In April of 1899, he published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia. In 1900, his exile ended. He travelled in Russia and elsewhere in Europe, and published the paper Iskra, as well as other tracts and books related to the revolutionary movement.
He was active in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), and in 1903 he led the Bolshevik faction after a split with the Mensheviks that was partly inspired by his pamphlet What is to be Done?. In 1906 he was elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP. In 1907 he moved to Finland for security reasons. He continued to travel in Europe and participated in many socialist meetings and activities.
On April 16, 1917 he returned to Petrograd following the overthrow of Tsar Nicholas II, and took a leading role within the Bolshevik movement, publishing the April Theses. After a failed workers' uprising in July, Lenin fled to Finland for safety. He returned in October, inspiring an armed revolution with the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!", against the Provisional Government led by Kerensky. His ideas of government were expressed in his essay, "State and Revolution", which called for a new form of government based on the worker's councils, or soviets.
Head of the Soviet state
Lenin in his Kremlin office, 1918
On November 8, Lenin was elected as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Soviet Congress. Faced with the threat of German invasion, Lenin advocated that Russia immediately sign a peace treaty. Other Bolshevik leaders, such as Bukharin, advocated continuing the war as a means of fomenting revolution in Germany. Trotsky, who led the negotiations, advocated an intermediate position, calling for a peace treaty only on the conditions that no terrioritial gains on either side be consolidated. After the negotiations collapsed, Germany launched an invasion that resulted in the loss of much of the country's western territory. As a result of this turn of events, Lenin's position consequently gained the support of the majority in the Bolshevik leadership, and Russia signed the eventual Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under disadvantageous terms (March 1918).
In accepting that the soviets were the only legitimate form of a worker's government, Lenin shut down the Russian Constituent Assembly. The Bolsheviks lost the vote there, but had majority support in the Congress of Soviets. Initially, they formed a coalition government with the left wing of the Social Revolutionaries. However, their coalition collapsed after the Social Revolutionaries opposed the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and they joined other parties in seeking to overthrow the government of the soviets. With all non-Bolshevik parties, including other socialist groups, actively seeking the overthrow of the soviet government, Lenin's government shut down these parties.
On August 30, 1918, Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, approached Lenin after he'd spoken at a meeting and was on his way to his car. She called out to Lenin, and when he turned to answer, fired three shots, two of which struck him, in the shoulder and lung. Lenin was taken to his private apartment in the Kremlin, and refused to venture to a hospital, believing other assassins would be waiting there. Doctors were summoned, but decided that it was too dangerous to remove the bullets. Lenin eventually recovered, though his health declined from this point, and it is believed that the incident contributed to his later strokes.
Lenin's Bolshevik faction overcame the remaining factions and renamed itself into RCP(B), or Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), which eventually became the CPSU.
Lenin's first attempt to spread revolutionary socialism came in the form of an invasion of Poland in 1920 after Poland, led by Josef Pilsudski, invaded the Ukraine in what became known as the Polish-Soviet War. Lenin formulated a new idea of "revolution from outside", and ordered General Mikhail Tukhachevsky to spearhead a counter invasion to achieve these ends. Revolutionary socialism was to be implemented onto Western Europe with the aid of Soviet Army and the most direct route to Berlin and Paris led through the newly created Poland. Lenin in one of his telegrams exclaimed We must direct all our attention to preparing and strengthening of the Western Front. It is necessary to announce a new slogan: Prepare for war against Poland. After many initial successes though, the Soviet army was routed by the Polish and Lenin created the Third International or Comintern to spread Bolshevik influence into as many international socialist parties as possible and revolutionize western nations from within.
Lenin was greatly impressed by the Thereminvox after a demonstration by inventor Lev Sergeivitch Termen. He took lessons on the instrument, commissioned 600 of the devices to be made for distribution throughout the Soviet Union, and sent Termen abroad to demonstrate Soviet musical instrument technology to the world.
After the failures of the policy of War communism introduced during the Russian Civil War, in March 1921, on Lenin's initiative, the New Economic Policy (NEP) was adopted, allowing limited private enterprise, in an attempt to rebuild industry and especially agriculture. But the same month saw the suppression of an uprising among sailors at Kronstadt ("the Kronstadt rebellion").
Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin, and American journalist Lincoln Eure in the Kremlin, Feb. 1920
Lenin's health had already been damaged due to the assassination attempt and the intolerable strains of revolution and war. In May 1922, Lenin had his first stroke. He was left partially paralyzed (on his right side) and his role in government declined. After the second stroke in December the Politburo ordered that he be kept in isolation. The assassination attempt earlier in his life also added to his health problems. In March 1923 he suffered the third stroke and was left bedridden and no longer able to speak. Lenin died of the fourth stroke on January 24, 1924.
The official cause given for Lenin's death was cerebral arteriosclerosis, or a stroke, but out of the 27 physicians who treated him only 8 signed onto that conclusion in his autopsy report. A posthumous diagnosis by two psychiatrists and a neurologist recently published in the European Journal of Neurology was that Lenin died a slow and painful death from syphilis. This diagnosis was based on documents released after the collapse of the Soviet Union, 1991, and including Lenin's medical chart, autopsy results and personal notes from physicians who treated him.
The city of Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor; this remained the name of the city until the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, when it reverted to its original name, St Petersburg.
Lenin's preserved body is on permanent display in Moscow.
After his first stroke he published a number of papers indicating future directions for the government. Most famous of these is Lenin's Testament which criticised Joseph Stalin, who had been the Communist Party's general secretary since April 1922, claiming that he had "unlimited authority concentrated in his hands" and suggesting that "comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post". Many of these papers were suppressed for decades as Stalin and his supporters gained control. After Lenin's death, Stalin gained full control of the Party and leadership of the Soviet Union following a brief power struggle with Leon Trotsky and the Left Opposition.
Despite Lenin's expressed wish shorty before death that no memorials be created for him, after his death, various politicos sought to better their own position vicariously by association with Lenin, and his character was elevated to almost mythical status as statue after monument after memorial sprang up in his honor. His embalmed body is on permanent exhibition in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow.
See also
Selected works
Further reading
- Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 by V. I. Lenin, Slavoj Zizek (Editor), Verso Books, ISBN 1859846610
- Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin, ISBN B00005W8VC (This is an Amazon.com number; many other options are available through ABE)
- Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism
- Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography
- John Gooding, Socialism In Russia: Lenin and His Legacy, 1890-1991
- Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin: A New Biography
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