Highlights of statesman’s biography

The Russian statesman Vladimir Lenin was a profoundly influential figure in world history. As the founder of the Bolshevik political party, he was a successful revolutionary leader who presided over Russia’s transformation from a country ruled by czars (emperors) to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the name of the communist Russian state from 1922 to 1991.

Vladimir Ilich Lenin was born in Simbirsk (today Ulianovsk), Russia, on April 10, 1870. His real family name was Ulianov, and his father, Ilia Nikolaevich Ulianov, was a high official in the area’s educational system. Because Lenin’s father had risen into the ranks of the Russian nobility, Lenin grew up in fairly privileged circumstances.

Lenin received the typical education given to the sons of the Russian upper class. Nevertheless, as a young man he began to develop radical (extreme) political views in disagreement with the existing Russian form of government.

In 1893 Lenin moved to St Petersburg, Russia. By this time he was already a Marxist – an admirer of the German writer Karl Marx (1818–1883). In 1897 Lenin was arrested, spent some months in jail, and was finally sentenced to three years of exile (forced absence from one’s native country or region) in the remote area of Siberia. He was joined there by a fellow Marxist, Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya (1869–1939), whom he married in 1898. During his Siberian exile he produced a major study of the Russian economy, The Development of Capitalism in Russia.

Not long after Lenin was released from Siberia in the summer of 1900, he moved to Europe. He spent most of the next seventeen years there, moving from one country to another frequently. His first step was to join the editorial board of Iskra (The Spark), the central newspaper of Russian Marxism at the time.

His journalistic activity was closely linked with efforts to organize revolutionary groups, partly because the illegal organisational network within Russia was partly based on the distribution of illegal literature.

A Marxist movement had developed in Russia during the last decade of the nineteenth century. It was a response to the rapid growth of industry, cities, and the proletariat (a group of lower-class workers, especially in industry). Its first intellectual spokesmen were people who had turned away from relying on the peasants (rural poor people) of the Russian villages and countryside, and they placed their hopes on the proletariat. They aimed for a revolution that would transform Russia into a democratic republic. Lenin’s writings and work focused on the role of the proletariat as promoters of this revolution. However, he also stressed the role of intellectuals (people engaged in thinking) who would provide the movement with the theories that would guide the revolution’s progress.

Lenin expressed these ideas in his important book What’s to Be Done? in 1902. In 1905 an uprising now known as the Revolution of 1905 occurred in Russia. Widespread revolt against the Russian czar’s government spread throughout the country, but was eventually put to an end by the government. Over the years bolshevism, which had begun as a faction within the Russian Social-Democratic Workers party, gradually emerged as an independent party that had cut its ties with all other Russian Marxists. The process involved long and bitter arguments against Mensheviks as well as against all those who worked to reunite the factions. It involved fights over funds, struggles for control of newspapers, the development of rival organisations, and meetings of rival groups. Disputes concerned many questions about the goals and strategies of Marxism and the role of national (rather than international) struggles within Marxism.

Since about 1905 the international socialist movement had begun also to discuss the possibility of a major war breaking out among European nations.

During World War I (1914–1918) Lenin lived in Switzerland. He attended several conferences of radical socialists opposed to the war. He read a large amount of literature on the Marxist idea of state government and wrote a first draft for a book on the subject, The State and Revolution. He also studied literature dealing with world politics of the time and wrote an important book, Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism, in 1916.

It took a good deal of negotiation and courage for Lenin and a group of like-minded Russian revolutionaries to travel from Switzerland back to Russia through the enemy country of Germany. The man who returned to Russia in the spring of 1917 was of medium height, quite bald, except for the back of his head, with a reddish beard.