The Great Revolutionist:

Every citizen of the Soviet Union knew the year and date of birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by heart. He was born on April 10 (22), 1870 in the Volga provincial city of Simbirsk, later renamed Ulyanovsk, into a fairly wealthy family. Father Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831–1886) served as director of the provincial inspection of public schools. He was the son of a former serf, but by 1877 he managed to rise to the high title of actual state councilor, 4th class in the table of ranks, which gave the right to nobility not only to him, but also to his descendants born after this date.
Mother Maria Alexandrovna, née Blank (1835–1916), was involved in raising children – in addition to Volodya, there were two more boys and three girls in the family. Despite the fact that the difference between the oldest sister Anna (1864–1935) and the youngest sister Maria (1878–1937) was 14 years, all the children were very friendly. Volodya especially loved his brother Alexander (1866–1887), who was 4 years older than him. Calm and thoughtful, Alexander always remained a role model for the brothers Volodya and Dmitry (1874–1943). Volodya’s best playmate and playmate was his sister Olga (1871–1891), with whom they were the same age. Subsequently, her early death from typhus shocked the young man.

From early childhood, Volodya Ulyanov grew up as an active boy, with a sharp and inquisitive mind. At the age of 9 he was sent to a gymnasium, where he studied very well, regularly receiving encouragement. At the beginning of 1886, when Vladimir was 16 years old, the family suddenly lost his father, who died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and soon the Ulyanovs were in for an equally strong shock: in May 1887, the eldest son Alexander and a group of Narodnaya Volya members were executed by court verdict for preparing an assassination attempt. Emperor Alexander III.

Two great misfortunes undermined both the material well-being of the Ulyanov family and its reputation in provincial Simbirsk society. However, in the same 1887, Vladimir graduated from high school with a gold medal for knowledge and commendable behavior and entered the law faculty of Kazan University. There is a version that it was the death of his older brother that predetermined the future career of the revolutionary Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin), a former exemplary young man who was not interested in politics.

Career and revolutionary activities of Vladimir Lenin:

Immediately after starting his studies in Kazan, Vladimir Ulyanov joined the People’s Will circle, and three months later he was expelled from the university without the right to reinstatement for participating in student riots. An aggravating circumstance was the presence of an executed brother. Vladimir was included in the list of unreliable persons, surveillance was established over him and he was exiled to the village of Kokushkino, Kazan province – to an estate that belonged to his aunt on his mother’s side.

Maria Aleksandrovna Ulyanova repeatedly petitioned for her son to be reinstated at the university, but the authorities were adamant. However, in 1888, Vladimir was allowed to return to Kazan, and in 1890, he was allowed to take exams for a university course as an external student. Persistent independent studies allowed Vladimir Ulyanov to successfully pass qualifying exams at St. Petersburg University and obtain the position of assistant lawyer in Samara, where the Ulyanov family moved in 1889. He began his revolutionary activities earlier, joining a Marxist circle in Kazan in 1888. Here the young revolutionary was greatly influenced by the works of G.V. Plekhanov: after studying them, the views of Vladimir Ulyanov began to shift from populist to social democratic.

In 1893, Vladimir Ulyanov moved to St. Petersburg, where he continued to work in the legal field. In 1895, during a trip abroad, he personally met the founding fathers of the European social democratic movement: Wilhelm Liebknecht, Paul Lafargue and Grigory Plekhanov. Upon returning to his homeland, Vladimir Ulyanov made a lot of efforts to unite the scattered St. Petersburg Marxist circles. The result of the work done was the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class,” which he headed. The goal was the overthrow of the autocracy.

At the end of 1895, an arrest followed. After a year in prison in 1897, Vladimir Ulyanov was sent to the village of Shushenskoye, Yenisei province. His future wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom they met in 1895 at a meeting of a Marxist circle, went with him to Siberia for three years. In 1898, under the threat of sending Nadezhda to St. Petersburg, young people got married in a local rural church.

In the same year, another significant event took place for the party career of Vladimir Ulyanov – a congress was held in Minsk that established the first Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP). Already in exile, Ulyanov decided to publish the newspaper Iskra, which would serve the cause of uniting Social Democratic circles throughout the Russian Empire.

In exile, Vladimir Ulyanov did not waste time and worked on the book “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” directed against “legal Marxists” and populists. From Siberia, he managed to establish contacts with Marxists in St. Petersburg, Moscow and other cities, among whom he gained fame under the pseudonym K. Tulin.

In the summer of 1900, Vladimir Ulyanov and his wife, at the end of their exile, left for Switzerland. Here they published Iskra, whose editorial board also included P.B. Axelrod, V.I. Zasulich, G.V. Plekhanov, Yu.O. Martov, A.N. Potresov. Later, the scientific and political journal “Zarya” was established, in the first issue of which an article by V.I. Ulyanov “Critics on the Agrarian Question” under the pseudonym N. Lenin – over time, the surname taken from him will supplant the real one, although in total Vladimir Ulyanov used more than 150 pseudonyms. In April 1902, the editorial staff of Iskra moved to London. Here in the summer of 1903 the Second Congress of the RSDLP was held, at which the party split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks. Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) took an active part in the work of the congress.

In November 1905, Lenin illegally returned to St. Petersburg, where he led the preparations for an armed uprising, but in May 1906 he was forced to leave for Finland and then emigrate to Sweden. Lenin spent the next 10 years in exile, living in Switzerland, France, and Poland. In 1911, in the Parisian suburb of Longjumeau, Lenin created a party school where he lectured. With the outbreak of the First World War he lived in Galicia, then moved to Zurich.

Lenin did not expect the bourgeois revolution of 1917 and did not expect to live to see it. In April 1917, the German authorities allowed Lenin to travel to Russia. Upon arrival, Lenin spoke at a rally with the radical 10 “April Theses,” which was a declaration plan for the seizure of power adopted by the Bolshevik Party. In July 1917, the Provisional Government ordered Lenin’s arrest, and he fled to Finland. During this period he wrote his most important work, State and Revolution.

Participation of V.I. Lenin in the October Revolution:

In April 1917, Lenin arrived in Russia and soon went underground, and in October of the same year he returned to Petrograd. On the evening of October 24, wearing makeup, he made his way to the Smolny Institute, where the headquarters of the uprising was located, and began direct leadership.

On October 25, Lenin wrote an appeal about his overthrow of the Provisional Government; on the same day, at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, decrees on land and peace were adopted. On the night of October 26, the Provisional Government was arrested in the Winter Palace, and in its place a new government body was formed headed by Lenin – the Council of People’s Commissars (SNK).

Reforms and internal policy V.I. Lenin:

In January 1918, Lenin signed a decree on the creation of the Red Army, as well as the basis of the first constitution of the new state – the “Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People.” He considered it necessary for Soviet Russia to withdraw from the First World War. Despite the opposition of L.D. Trotsky and the supporters who joined him in an immediate attempt to organize a world revolution, the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty was concluded in March. In the spring of 1918, fearing the capture of Petrograd by the Germans, Lenin moved the Soviet government to Moscow.

In January 1919, a decree “On the separation of church and state” was issued; in March of the same year, on the initiative of Lenin, the Communist International was created, uniting parties of a similar kind from all over the world. When the policies of war communism and surplus appropriation did not justify themselves, surplus appropriation was replaced by a tax in kind, and war communism by a new economic policy (NEP). The economy of the young country began to recover, and thanks to the monetary reform carried out in 1922–1924, the ruble became a freely convertible currency. 

Lenin consistently insisted on the development of state-type enterprises, as well as widespread electrification. An important issue was the form of unification of the republics that joined Soviet Russia: if the People’s Commissar for Nationalities I.V. Stalin proposed to formalize them as national autonomies within Russia, then V.I. Lenin insisted on the independence and equality of all republics, albeit in a formal form – this will play a negative role in the collapse of the country after 70 years.

Foreign policy V.I. Lenin:

Soon after the Bolsheviks came to power, in November 1917, Lenin announced that Soviet Russia was abandoning the secret agreements of 1915–1916. with Great Britain and France on the post-war division of the world, and in 1918–1920. proclaimed recognition of the independence of Finland and the Baltic countries. In the spring of 1919, Lenin negotiated with a secret diplomatic mission arriving from the United States. The conditions for ending the Entente intervention in Russia and Western support for the White movement were discussed in exchange for the Soviet government paying the tsarist debts, but no agreement was reached.

In the same 1919, Lenin admitted that the world revolution was a matter of the distant future, therefore it was necessary to begin developing a policy of peaceful coexistence of Soviet Russia with the bourgeois world, as well as to develop international trade. At the same time, the head of the Soviet state believed that one should not abandon playing on the contradictions of the capitalist powers, pitting them against each other in every possible way and preventing them from consolidating against Russia.

With the end of the Civil War, the Bolsheviks managed to avoid international isolation, conclude peace treaties, and in 1920–1921. establish diplomatic relations with a number of states that, in one way or another, themselves were looking for external support – the first were Turkey, Afghanistan and Persia seeking independence from the Entente, Mongolia that broke away from China, Finland, Poland, Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania that emerged from the ruins of the Russian Empire. In 1922, they were joined by Germany, which had lost the war, and after Lenin’s death, in the winter and spring of 1924, the USSR was recognized by a whole group of states led by Great Britain.

Family and personal life of V.I. Lenin:

As mentioned above, the only wife of V.I. Lenin until his death was N.K. Krupskaya (1869–1939). The marriage turned out to be childless, although, according to some evidence, the couple dreamed of a child. Vladimir Ilyich considered Nadezhda Konstantinovna his main support in life, and therefore the affair attributed to him with the famous revolutionary Inessa Armand hardly took place in reality. This acquaintance, which took place in 1909 in exile in Brussels or Paris, subsequently became of a business and friendly nature.

Death of V.I. Lenin:

In May 1922, Lenin became seriously ill and suffered a stroke. The doctors who observed him believed that the reason for the general deterioration of the leader’s health was the wear and tear of the body’s circulatory and nervous systems due to chronic fatigue and the wound received during an assassination attempt in the summer of 1918. By the fall of 1922, the Soviet leader returned to work and public speaking, but in December a second stroke followed with partial paralysis of the body, and in March 1923 a third, which deprived Lenin of speech in the last year of his life. At the beginning of 1924, the Soviet leader’s condition deteriorated critically, and on January 21 he died at the age of 53. The immediate cause of Lenin’s death was a cerebral hemorrhage.

The country was plunged into unprecedented mourning. For the funeral scheduled for January 27, 1924, a temporary wooden mausoleum was built on Red Square, in which a coffin with Lenin’s embalmed body was installed. In the spring, the temporary structure was replaced with a more permanent one, but also made of wood, and in 1930 the remains of the “leader of the world proletariat” were transferred to the now well-known permanent mausoleum made of reinforced concrete, lined with red and black stone. Disputes about the need to rebury V.I. Lenin’s views are periodically raised in society, but they are not of a fundamental nature.

Results of the activities of V.I. Lenin:

The main result of the activities of V.I. Lenin was the creation of the world’s first Soviet state, which lasted three quarters of a century. During this time, Soviet Russia, and then the Soviet Union, were able to defeat the devastation that struck the country after the First World War and the Civil War, successfully repel large-scale external intervention and transform into a developed industrial state, capable of surviving another world conflict in two decades.

Despite the numerous mistakes and miscalculations made by the Soviet leadership, the idea proved its viability, and in more favorable conditions the development of the USSR could have followed a more successful scenario. The role of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin in Russian and world history still awaits a balanced and objective assessment.