Wiladimir Il’ich Ulyanov ( Wiladimir Lenin)

“You cannot make a Revolution in white gloves”

Outlines

 Biography of lenin
 Childhood of lenin
 The rising of lenin
 The russian revolution
 Leninism

Biography of Lenin and Russian Revolution

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, also known as Lenin (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924) was a Russian lawyer,
revolutionary, the leader of the Bolshevik party and of the October Revolution. He was the first leader
of the USSR and the government that took over Russia in 1917. Lenin's ideas became known as
Leninism. He is one of the founding fathers of communism. He made Russia a one party communist
state.

Childhood of lenin

 Lenin was not born, lenin was constructed. The child who was to become lenin, was born on 22
April 1870 in the town of Simbirsk on the Volga.
 He was the fourth child of a moderately prosperiouse family, his mother was a teacher and his
father was a education official.
 His father name was Ilya ulyanov (1831-86) and his mother name was Maria Alaxendar ulyanova
(1835-1916).
 Volodya was a brilliant child and became a passable piano player but gave up when he was of
ten years. Not only Viladimir but the entire family was intelligent and ulyanov sisters Anna,
Maria and olga were also very intelligent and acomplished.
 Like Alaxendar volodya shone at school, at the end of his secondary school he was given a
glowing report by his headmaster and achieved top marks in almost all his subjects.
 No actions of his childhood shone that he will become a revolutionary.
  What changed him completely was the hanging of his brother Alaxendar in 1887. He saw his
mother crying for Alaxendar and this is what made him curious.

Construction (Young Revolutionary)

Now the question was: Could Russia bypass Capitalism and go straight to the construction of a socialist
society? Marxism was very much established until then.

It was not Marx who made the greatest impact on volodya. The novel What is to be done? Tales of the
new people (1864). Written by Nikolai Chernyshevasky the academic Economist (1828-89) had greatly
effected him.

The first key problem was his educational career. As a top student Volodya would have been entitiled to
walk in the best of universities, but it took a long struggle for his headmaster Fyodor Kerensky to get him
admited to the local university of Kazan.

The young Volodya had recieved a number of severe jolts. In januray 1886 his father had died
unexpectedly of a brain haemorrhage. Following that there was Alaxendars arrest in march 1887.
Followed by his execution (hanging) two months later. This was the turning point of his life.

In 1890 – 1891 the pace of his qualification as a lawyer speeded up. He was granted permission to visit
St. Petersburg to take his exam as an external student. In finals he obtianed first place with excelent
marks and was awarded First-class-degree in law in january 1892.

Rise of Lenin

In December 1895, Lenin and several Marxist leaders were arrested. Lenin was exiled to Siberia for three
years. His Fiancee and future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, joined him and supported him tremendously.
The wedding duly took place on 22 july 1898.

For Lenin, peasants were the victims of unremitting repression by landowners and state. They were
poor, ignorant and often lived short, brutish lives curtailed by alcohol and domestic voilence.

In january 1901, for the first time, he used the name Lenin in place of Tulin and Ilyin which he had used
most freuently while escaping from the authority.

It sees curious that, at this time and Building a unified party was an obvious task. The problem for social
democrats in exile was that they had an excess of architects and bricklayers.

Russia, was to produce a Party newspaper. A major split was thier in the party on the ideology and
hence two newspapers came out. Iskra (the spark) was dominated by Lenin and Martov. The Elders
produced a less frequently appearing journal Zarya (The Dawn).

The compromise did not run smoothly. Party unity and harmony seemed far away. Frequently quarrels
and disputes broke out. Such arguments crop up with increasing frequency in he next phase of Lenin’s
life but none is more crucial than the upcoming debates whichled to the fateful split into Bolsheviks and
Mensheviks.

Political problems

After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900. There he began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra
(Spark), a new organ of the Russian Marxist Party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic
Labour Party (RSDLP).
Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country’s most successful underground publication for 50
years. He published the political pamphlet What is to be done? In 1902. Enraged at the Mensheviks,
lenin resigned from the Iskra Editorial board and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik tract ONE
STEP FORWARD, TWO STEPS BACK.

The stress made Lenin ill, and to recuperate he went on a hiking holiday in rural Switzerland. The
Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by the spring, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik,
and in Demeber they founded the newspaper Vpered (Forward).

Role in World War I

Lenin was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. During World War 1 Lenin went into exile
again, this time taking up residence in Switzerland. As always, his mind stayed focus on revolutionary
politics. During this period he wrote and published Imperialism, The Highest stage of Capitalism (1916).

He attanded the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916,
urging socialists across the continent to convert the “imperialist war” into a continent-wide “civil war”
with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy.

In July 1916, Lenin’s mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. Her death deeply affected
him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution.

Russian Revolution Begins

 In February 1917, the February Revolution began in St. Petersburg.

 A tired, hungry and war-weary Russia desposed the Tsars. Lenin quickly returned home and
perhaps sensing his own path to power, quickly denounced the country’s newly formed
provisional Government.
 In late 1917, Lenin led what was soon to be known as the October Revolution. Three years of
civil war followed. The Lenin-led Soviet Govt faced incredible odds. The anti-soviet forces, or
whies fought desperately to overthrow Lenin’s Red regime.

Leninism

According to his Marxist perspective, humanity would reach eventually reach pure communism,
becoming, becoming a stateless, classless, egalitarian society of workers who were free from
exploitation and alianation, controlled their own destiny, and abided by the rule “from each according
to his ability, to each accordin to his needs”.

Lenin’s Marxist beliefs led him to the vew that society could not transform directly from its present state
to communism, but must first enter a peroid of socialism, and so his main concern was how to convert
Russia into socialist state.

To do so, he believed that a “dictatorship of the proletariat” was necessary to supress the bourgeoisie
and develop a socialist economy. He defined socialism as “an order of civilized co-operators in which the
means of production are socially owned”.