Vladimir Ilich Lenin

Russian Communist Party leader (1917-1924)

• Born: April 22, 1870
• Birthplace: Simbirsk, Russia
• Died: January 21, 1924
• Place of death: Gorki, Soviet Union

Lenin adapted Marxist theory to the politics of late imperial Russia, creating and leading the Communist Party, which eventually seized power in November, 1917. From 1918 until his death in 1924, he was the main architect of the new socialist state that became the model for world communism.

Early Life

Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, better known by his revolutionary name Lenin, was the son of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, a regional school inspector, a government post that gave the family hereditary noble status, and Maria Aleksandrovna Blank, a member of a family broadly classified as “upper bourgeois.” Lenin was their third child and second son and was followed by the birth of three more children, two girls and another boy. All but two survived to adulthood and became members of the revolutionary movement.

Lenin’s childhood was uneventful. His mother, the heart of the family, looked after the children’s education, instilling in all a lifelong enjoyment of learning. The household also enjoyed a certain amount of individual freedom that allowed the children to explore the limits of their provincial world. This serene family life was shattered in 1886 with the sudden death of the father, followed the next year by the arrest of the eldest son, Aleksandr, in the capital of St. Petersburg, where he was attending the university. Aleksandr was associated with the terrorist organization The People’s Will, which plotted the assassination of Czar Alexander III. The young Ulyanov, refusing to show any remorse, was hanged on May 20, 1887. The family was subsequently ostracized. Although Lenin never admitted any direct impact of his brother’s execution on his own radicalization, there is no doubt that these two shocks played a determining role in his future career. When Lenin was enrolled at the University of Kazan to pursue a law degree, he was soon expelled for associating with an illegal student demonstration. He was singled out because of the fate of his brother and used as an example for the other students. For the next two years, he lived with his family on their small country estate on the Volga River, where he first read the works of Karl Marx. By the early 1890’s, he was a dedicated Marxist revolutionary.

While he studied Marxism, Lenin also continued his private study of law. In 1891, the authorities allowed him to take the law examinations at St. Petersburg University, where he passed with high grades. By 1893, he was in St. Petersburg, where he began propaganda work in local Marxist circles. Within two years, he was one of the leaders of a small but significant socialist movement in the capital.

Life’s Work

The years 1893 to 1895 mark the foundation of Lenin’s subsequent political career. In 1895, he went abroad, ostensibly for health reasons but actually to establish a link with the leaders of Russian socialism in exile. For the first time he met the founders of Russian Marxism, including Georgy Plekhanov, a veteran of the Russian Populist movement of the 1870’s who virtually single-handedly introduced Marxism into Russian radicalism.

On his return to St. Petersburg late in 1895, Lenin plunged again into propaganda work, only to be arrested by the police. After a year in jail, he was sentenced to three years’ exile in Siberia. Because of family connections, he was able to choose an area in southern Siberia that had a tolerable climate and a good reputation as an exile spot. The following years were peaceful and productive. The authorities allowed fellow conspirator and fiancé Nadezhda Krupskaya to join him as his bride. He also had access to a fine library where he completed his first major theoretical work, Razvitiia kapitalizm v Rossii (1899; the development of capitalism in Russia). In this book, which still remains his most scholarly, Lenin demonstrated that the country was taking enormous strides toward economic modernization. The peasantry, however, contrary to the revolutionary thought of the day, was not aspiring to socialism but instead to the bourgeois goal of private ownership of land.

In 1900, his term of exile completed, Lenin returned to St. Petersburg for a short time, then received permission to go abroad. Between 1900 and 1917, he and Krupskaya lived a lonely existence in European exile. It was during this time that Lenin developed the reputation and party structure that eventually brought him to power in 1917. By 1900, industrialization had given rise to many Marxist and other workers’ groups in Russia. The need to coordinate these organizations led in 1903 to the founding of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP) at a meeting held in Brussels and attended by the main leadership of the Russian socialist movement in exile, including Plekhanov and Lenin.

In 1902, in anticipation of the upcoming congress, Lenin produced his most important work, a pamphlet entitled Chto delat? (1902; What Is to Be Done? , 1929). This represents the first clear expression of what later became known as “Leninism,” a combination of Russian revolutionary thinking and Marxist economics and sociology. Lenin was concerned that many members in the newly formed RSDWP were more interested in struggling for petty economic reforms than outright revolution. He reminded them that there cannot be a revolutionary movement without revolutionary theory. Furthermore, he argued that the workers by themselves could not develop a revolutionary consciousness. Instead, as capitalism developed, the working class formed unions and bargained for economic gains such as higher wages and improved working conditions, thus losing sight of the revolution. Revolutionary consciousness, therefore, would have to be brought to the workers from outside by means of a tightly knit organization of revolutionaries. This party would have to be composed of a selected membership engaged in full-time revolutionary activities. Finally, the actions of the party would have to be secret and conspiratorial to avoid detection by the czarist police.

At the 1903 meeting, Lenin’s ideas became the crux of the organizational dispute that split the party into “Bolsheviks” (Majorityites) and “Mensheviks” (Minorityites). Although Lenin lost the vote on the crucial issue of party membership, his faction did gain a majority on the editorial board of the party newspaper, Iskra thus his claim to represent the majority. Because of his rhetoric and tactics, however, Lenin’s popularity was in serious decline by the end of the congress. Recognizing this, he resigned from Iskra, not realizing at the time that he had formed the nucleus of an organization that would eventually rule Russia.

When he returned to the Russian capital after the overthrow of czarism in March, 1917, his first address to the crowd outlined the direction that he wanted the party to take. He called for an end to Russia’s participation in World War I, opposition to the provisional government established on the abdication of the Romanovs, transfer of all power to the Soviets as the most representative new institution of the revolutionary state, nationalization and redistribution of land among the peasants, renaming the Bolsheviks as the Communist Party, and the creation of a new international to lead the world revolution. Thus, this speech, known as the April Theses , established the platform for the renamed Communist Party.

As Russia sank further into anarchy during 1917, the opportunity for the Communists came in October when they achieved a majority of seats in the Soviet. Lenin pushed for an armed uprising against the provisional government, and on the night of November 6-7 the world’s first successful workers’ revolution took place. Leadership of the country passed into the hands of an elected executive board, the Council of People’s Commissars, with Lenin as chair. The council undertook the task of implementing the Bolshevik program, negotiating peace with Germany, abolishing private land ownership while upholding the peasants’ right to use the soil they tilled, and building the first socialist society. In the course of the following years, Lenin and his party defended their new state in a brutal civil war, during which Lenin and his party established the major institutions of the Soviet state, including the political police and the Red Army. Lenin also tightened control of the Communist Party over the society, forbade the existence of opposition political parties, and condemned factions within his own party.

These efforts eventually took a toll on his health. In early 1922, he suffered his first stroke. While he seemed to recover, he had a second, more debilitating stroke later in the year. His health continued to deteriorate through 1923, removing him from any further party activity, and he died on January 21, 1924.

Significance

Vladimir Ilich Lenin’s last writings reveal an anguished man deeply troubled by the nature of the state structure he had done so much to create. In his earlier writings, Lenin described a workers’ state in which the people elected councils that would serve as both legislators and executors of the nation’s will. These “soviets” would be the instruments of a truly democratic government. The new nation had not evolved that way. Instead, party bureaucrats ruled the people from afar. This system was to harden under Lenin’s eventual successor, Joseph Stalin. Lenin also became preoccupied with the problem of choosing a successor. His “testament,” dictated in the winter of 1922-1923, revealed his anxiety about the succession but failed to solve this crucial problem. He also began to have second thoughts about the amount of power that Stalin had accumulated. Unfortunately, his health did not allow him to pursue these issues.

Lenin had committed his life to adapting Marxist philosophy to an agrarian Russia and to working for the proletarian revolution. In so doing, he introduced a fundamental change in Marxism by placing greater emphasis on politics than on economics as the means of change. Central to this was the creation of a highly organized, selective, and secretive political party composed of professional revolutionaries to lead the masses into the new egalitarian world that he foresaw. Once in power, this party ruled as a dictatorship, nationalized and centralized the economy, and controlled the population through police terror. Lenin succeeded so thoroughly that the Soviet brand of Marxism is called Marxism-Leninism.

Bibliography

Conquest, Robert. V. I. Lenin. New York: Viking Press, 1972. A well-written biography of Lenin aimed at the general reader that analyzes both his thought and his revolutionary career. Emphasis is primarily on the political side of his nature.

Fischer, Louis. The Life of Lenin. New York: Harper & Row, 1964. A thorough biography of Lenin written by a man who lived in Moscow in the early 1920’s and heard Lenin speak on a number of occasions. Emphasis is on Lenin’s personal and political struggles to establish the first socialist state.

Lee, Stephen J. Lenin and Revolutionary Russia. New York: Routledge, 2002. Provides information about the causes of the Russian Revolution, the course of the revolution, and Lenin’s subsequent regime in the Soviet Union.

Lenin, V. I. What Is to Be Done? Translated by J. Fineberg and G. Hanna. New York: International, 1969. This 1902 pamphlet argues the necessity of a party of professional revolutionaries for seizing power and is the best overview of Lenin’s thought about the nature of revolution in Russia. It remains basic to an understanding of Lenin’s contributions to Marxist theory.

Payne, Robert. The Life and Death of Lenin. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1964. Perhaps the most readable of the many biographies of Lenin, it is also the most superficial and sensational, including every story about Lenin without attempts to assess accuracy or impact. An exciting introduction for the casual reader.

Possony, Stefan T. Lenin: The Compulsive Revolutionary. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1964. An important biography by a specialist in the field. It approaches Lenin as a man striving for personal power and using all means as well as people to reach that goal. It also argues that, when Lenin died, his revolutionary dream was subverted by the dictatorship of Stalin.

Ulam, Adam B. The Bolsheviks: The Intellectual and Political History of the Triumph of Communism in Russia. New York: Macmillan, 1965. A detailed account of Lenin and his times written by one of the foremost scholars of Soviet history. While it spans the revolutionary movement from the Decembrist Revolt of 1825 to Lenin’s death in 1924, emphasis is on the period after 1890.

White, James D. Lenin: The Practice and Theory of Revolution. New York: Palgrave, 2001. Political and intellectual biography, focusing on Lenin’s thought and political activities, which enabled the Bolsheviks to rise to power and create the Soviet Union.

Wolfe, Bertram D. Three Who Made a Revolution. Rev. ed. New York: Dial, 1964. This highly readable study of the lives of Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and Stalin emphasizes the formative years of Russian Marxism. It has become a classic of its kind and is an excellent introduction to the subject.