Vladimir Lenin Life

Introduction

Lenin, originally named Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, was born in Simbirsk, the son of a successful government official. The first breach in Lenin’s comfortable childhood came in 1887, when the police arrested and hanged his elder brother for plotting to assassinate Czar Alexander III. Later that year Lenin enrolled in the Kazan’ University (now Kazan’ State University), but he was quickly expelled as a radical troublemaker and exiled to his grandfather’s estate in the village of Kokushkino.

During this first exile from 1887 to 1888, Lenin became acquainted with the classics of European revolutionary thought, notably Das Kapital by German political philosopher Karl Marx, and he soon considered himself a Marxist. Finally granted the necessary permission, he passed his law examinations in 1891, was admitted to the bar, and worked as a lawyer for the poor in the Volga town of Samara before moving to Saint Petersburg in 1893.

Organizer

In St. Petersburg, Lenin joined the growing Marxist circle, and in 1895 he helped create the St. Petersburg Union for the Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Police soon arrested the leaders of this organization. After 15 months in jail, along with another union member, Nadezhda Krupskaya-soon to become his wife-Lenin went into Siberian exile until 1900. In 1901 he changed his name from V. I. Ulyanov to V. I. Lenin to confuse police.

At the end of his first period in Siberia, Lenin went abroad where he remained until 1917 except for a brief period during the 1905 Revolution. There he joined Leon Trotsky, Georgy Plekhanov, L. Martov, and other Marxists in creating a newspaper, Iskra (The Spark). The paper proved to be an effective device in uniting the existing Social-Democrats and inspiring new recruits. In exile Lenin wrote his masterpiece of organizational theory, What Is to Be Done? (1902). His plans for revolution centered on a highly disciplined party of professional revolutionaries, who would serve as the “vanguard of the proletariat”and lead the working masses to an inevitable victory over czarist absolutism.

Lenin’s insistence on the centrality of professional revolutionaries caused a split within the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party; at its second congress in 1903 it broke apart. Lenin’s faction emerged with a small majority of the congress, hence the name Bolshevik (from the Russian word for majority); the opposition became known as Mensheviks (from the Russian word for minority). Quarrels between the two factions dominated party politics until World War I began in 1914. See Bolshevism.

Vladimir Lenin in Exile

During his exile in Europe, Lenin lived a hard, bitter existence. He exchanged recriminations with the Mensheviks about the Revolution’s failure, and many of his most talented disciples deserted him. During this time he wrote his major philosophical tract, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909). Three years later, at a party conference in Prague, the break between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks became final.

When World War I broke out in 1914, Lenin opposed it on the grounds that workers were fighting each other for the benefit of the bourgeoisie. Instead, he urged socialists “to transform the imperialist war into a civil war.”He expounded and systematized Marxist views of the war in Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), arguing that only a revolution that destroyed capitalism could bring lasting peace.

Revolutionary Leader

The Russian Revolution of February 1917 that overthrew the czarist regime caught Lenin by surprise. However, he made his way to Russia in a sealed train. He was helped by German authorities who supported a further breakdown of Russia so Germany could win the war. His dramatic arrival in Petrograd (as St. Petersburg had been renamed) occurred one month after rebellious workers and soldiers had toppled the czar. The Petrograd Bolsheviks, including Joseph Stalin, and the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies had agreed to cooperate with the bourgeois provisional government. Lenin immediately repudiated this policy. In his “April Theses”he argued that only the Soviet could respond to the hopes, aspirations, and needs of Russia’s workers and peasants. Under the slogan “All Power to the Soviets,”the Bolshevik Party conference accepted Lenin’s program.

After an abortive workers’ uprising in July, Lenin spent August and September 1917 in Finland, hiding from the provisional government. There, he formulated his concepts of a socialist government in a famous pamphlet, State and Revolution, his most important contribution to Marxist political theory. He also bombarded the party’s Central Committee with demands for an armed uprising in the capital. His plan was finally accepted.

Premises

A few days after the October Revolution, Lenin was elected chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, that is, head of government. He acted pragmatically to consolidate the power of the new Soviet state. At his urging, private enterprise, except for such institutions as banks, was not nationalized. He charted a slow course toward socialism and avoided the opprobrium attached to one-party rule by including the Left-Socialist Revolutionary Party in his government. His overriding concern was the preservation of the Revolution and Soviet power against enemies both foreign and domestic. In line with these practical considerations Lenin accepted the onerous German terms for the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty. His tenacious struggle to maintain power, however, cost the young Soviet regime dearly in the civil war from 1918 to 1921. Together with Leon Trotsky, the genius behind the Red Army, he set the course that brought the country victoriously through the civil war.

In 1921 Lenin issued the New Economic Policy, returning the country to a mixed economy, partially nationalized and partially market based, and pluralistic society of early Soviet rule. At the same time, however, he called for a ban on factions within the Communist Party and insisted on the principle of one-party rule.

The first of three strokes incapacitated Lenin in May 1922. He recovered somewhat, but never again assumed an active role in the government or the party. After a partial recovery in late 1922, he suffered a second stroke in March 1923, which robbed him of speech and effectively ended his political career.

Source: “Lenin, Vladimir Ilich”Microsoft® Encarta® Online Encyclopedia

See Also

Bolshevism
Karl Marx
Socialist Legal Systems
Government Censorship
Absolutism
Overthrow of Government
Communism
Communist Parties
International
Russian Revolution