"Lenin"

Vladimir Ilich Lenin, founder of the Russian Communist party, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917, and first head of state of the USSR, was also a masterly political thinker whose theories became a significant component of Communist thought and influenced all factions of the Marxist movement.

 Early Life

V. I. Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, Apr. 22 (N.S.; Apr. 10, O.S.), 1870, in the provincial city of Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk, renamed in his honor) on the Volga River.  By all accounts Lenin's middle-class family was warm and loving-- hardly the background one might expect for a militant revolutionary.  Lenin's father was a secondary-school teacher who rose in the civil service to become a provincial director of elementary education.  His mother also taught.  Both were deeply concerned with the popular welfare, and Lenin, along with his two brothers and two sisters, absorbed at an early age both a desire to learn and an intense commitment to improving the lives of ordinary Russians.

In 1887, shortly after the death of his father, Lenin's older brother Aleksandr was arrested in Saint Petersburg for plotting against the tsar.  He was convicted and hanged.  The tragic event affected young Vladimir deeply, but there is no reason to believe that it caused him to embrace the revolutionary movement.  Instead, he immersed himself in radical writings, particularly those of Karl MARX and Nikolai Gavrilovich CHERNYSHEVSKY, and continued his education.  Graduating from high school with a gold medal, he entered the University of Kazan but was expelled and exiled because of his own developing radical views.  In 1891, however, he passed the law examinations at the University of Saint Petersburg as an external student, scoring first in his class.  He practiced law briefly in Samara before devoting himself full time to revolutionary activities.

 Communist Theoretician

Between 1893 and 1902, Lenin studied the problem of revolutionary change in Russia from a Marxist perspective and worked out the essential features of what has come to be called Leninism.  Convinced with other Marxists that the development of industrial capitalism in Russia held the key to radical social change, Lenin remained troubled by the inability of Russian workers to develop spontaneously--as Marx had predicted--a radical consciousness capable of effective political action.  In this the workers behaved like the peasants, whose failure to respond to radical appeals had frustrated populist revolutionaries for years.  To solve the problem Lenin developed the notion that a radical consciousness had to be cultivated among workers through agitation by a well-organized revolutionary party.

It was during this period that he began using his pseudonym "Lenin" (sometimes "N. Lenin").  He also met and married Nadezhda Konstantinovna KRUPSKAYA.  In 1895, Lenin was arrested, imprisoned, and sent in exile to Siberia with other members of the Marxist organization known as the Union of Struggle.  Lenin went abroad in 1900 and with Georgy Valentinovich PLEKHANOV and others he organized the clandestine newspaper Iskra (The Spark), designed to "ignite" radical consciousness.  In Iskra, Lenin vigorously rejected the notion of a political alliance with liberals or other elements of the bourgeoisie (he was convinced that they would only preserve a position of dominance over workers and peasants) and stressed the importance of social, rather than political, democracy, as the basis for individual freedom.  This phase of Lenin's career culminated with the publication of his pamphlet What Is to Be Done?  (1902) and the organization of the Bolshevik (see BOLSHEVIKS AND MENSHEVIKS) wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor party in the summer of 1903.  Lenin, like his populist predecessors in the Russian radical movement, stressed the need for a vanguard to lead the revolution.

 Organizing for the Revolution

After 1903, Lenin struggled to develop this vanguard organization, a revolutionary leadership party that many historians regard as having mixed the concepts of populist Jacobinism with Marx's views of proletarian class revolution. Lenin became widely known in this period for his absolute dedication to revolution.  On political issues he was merciless, lashing out ruthlessly at opponents and castigating adversaries with biting sarcasm and scorn.  He also showed himself a masterly political tactician.  Although he was in forced exile until 1917 (except for a brief period--1905-07-- during and after the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION OF 1905) in London, Paris, Geneva, and other European cities, he maneuvered for control over party committees and publications.  He condemned his Social Democratic opponents as Mensheviks (the Minority Group) despite being outnumbered by them.

Many of the Mensheviks were as radical as Lenin.  They worried about the dictatorial propensities of his vanguard party concept, however, and urged instead the development of a mass popular base among the workers.  But Lenin remained characteristically impatient and optimistic.  He saw nothing to fear from a revolutionary elite genuinely dedicated to the welfare of workers and poor peasants;  the danger lay instead with political liberals and a capitalist bourgeoisie, whose social system, he maintained, skimmed society's wealth from the people and whose imperialist wars led them to death and destruction.

 Masterminding the Revolution

In 1917, Lenin published Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (Eng. trans., 1933, 1939, 1947).  In it he denounced World War I (in which Russia was engaged on the side of the Allies) as a fight among the imperialist powers for control of the markets, raw materials, and cheap labor of the underdeveloped world.  Since neither the Allies nor the Central Powers offered any benefits to the working class, he urged all socialists to withhold their support from the war effort. Following his lead Russian Bolsheviks refused to support their government in its war efforts.

The German government, looking to disrupt the Russian war efforts further, allowed Lenin to return to Russia from exile in Switzerland (traveling across Germany in a sealed train). He arrived at Petrograd (as Saint Petersburg was then called) on Apr. 16 (N.S.;  Apr. 3, O.S.), 1917, and received a tumultuous welcome from his followers.  In his "April Theses" (Eng. trans., 1951), published that year in Pravda, the Bolshevik newspaper, he denounced the liberal provisional government that had replaced the tsarist government, and he called for a socialist revolution.  It was at this time that he gained the important support of Leon TROTSKY.

An abortive uprising against the government in July forced Lenin into exile once again (this time to Finland).  It was a short-lived exile, however.  In September, correctly perceiving the increasingly radical mood in Russia, he sent a famous letter to the party's central committee calling for armed insurrection.  He slipped back into Russia and successfully brought the Bolsheviks to power through the "Military Revolutionary Committees";  and during the first week of November (N.S.;  October by the old-style calendar--hence the name October Revolution) he succeeded in bringing down the government of Aleksandr KERENSKY.  On November 7 (N.S.;  Oct. 25, O.S.) the first Bolshevik government was formed;  Lenin became its chairman.  Thus he brought about the final act of the revolution that had begun only months before (see RUSSIAN REVOLUTIONS OF 1917).

 Head of Government

Lenin moved quickly to consolidate Bolshevik power.  He reorganized the various party factions into the Russian Communist party, established a secret police (the Cheka), and totally reconstituted the desperate Russian economy along Marxist principles.  In order to bring the country out of the war, he accepted a humiliating peace treaty with Germany in 1918 (see BREST-LITOVSK, TREATY OF).  That same year civil war broke out, and he was forced to put a Red Army in the field against dissident forces.  The dissidents, known as the Whites, were supported by the Allies and were not defeated until 1921.

By that time the Russian economy was in shambles, and discontent among peasants and workers was dangerously widespread.  In the face of such problems Lenin was forced to back away from his pure Marxian policies, instituting the NEW ECONOMIC POLICY.  He granted economic concessions to foreign capitalists in order to encourage trade;  he placed some light industry and most retail operations back into private hands; and to appease the peasants he permitted them to sell their produce on the open market.  Despite these minor concessions, Lenin continued to press forward toward his goal of a Marxist Russia--and eventually a Marxist world.  He established the COMINTERN in 1919 to assure that the Russian Communist party would remain in control of the Marxist movement.

Although Lenin's power in the government was dictatorial and unquestioned, his control over party affairs was never absolute.  The great rivalry between Trotsky and Joseph STALIN, which was to tear apart the Communist movement in later years, was already being formed at this period.

On May 25, 1922, Lenin suffered a stroke that left him partially paralyzed.  He also suffered from complications of an assassination attempt dating to 1918.  After a series of strokes, Lenin died on Jan. 21, 1924, at the age of 53, the most revered personage--apart from Marx himself--in the world of communism.  The former capital city of Saint Petersburg (then Petrograd) was renamed Leningrad in his honor.

Lenin's mausoleum in Red Square, with his body embalmed and on display in a glass coffin, became the most renowned shrine in the Communist world.  Lenin's writings, along with those of Marx, for years formed the basis for Communist theory;  their legitimacy for years was accepted by all factions of the Marxist movement.  In the late 1980s, however, a new spirit of questioning of Lenin's doctrines appeared in Eastern Europe and even in the Soviet Union.  In March 1989, a writer in the Soviet monthly Science and Life declared that the abuses of the Stalinist period were a logical outgrowth of Marxist-Leninist theory.  A Soviet demographer in August 1989 estimated that Lenin's agricultural policies were responsible for a famine (1921-1923) that claimed 5.9 million lives.  A guest on a Moscow television program even suggested, in April 1989, that Lenin's body be removed from the Red Square mausoleum and given a normal burial elsewhere.  Communist traditionalists were outraged at the suggestion.

Signs of a revisionist attitude toward Lenin were illustrated in certain Eastern European nations and in the Soviet Union in a more concrete manner.  Early in June, 1989, a massive statue of Lenin was removed by Hungarian authorities from its site in Budapest's Procession Square.  Polish authorities removed a Lenin statue from a public site in the city of Nowa Huta early in December 1989.  In Bucharest, the capital of Romania, a 7-ton massive bronze statue of Lenin was removed on March 5, 1990, from its imposing site in Scinteia Square.  Scinteia (Romanian for "spark," after the title of Lenin's newspaper) Square was renamed Free Press Square.  On June 12, 1991, a referendum was held in Leningrad on the question of restoring the city's former name, and 55% voted to restore the name of Saint Petersburg.  On September 6, the legislature of the Russian republic ratified the name change.