Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich, originally surnamed Ulyanov 1870-1924
Russian revolutionary

Lenin was born into a middle-class family in Simbirsk. He was educated at Kazan University and in 1892 began to practise law in Samara (Kuibyshev). In 1894, after five years' intensive study of Karl Marx, he moved to St Petersburg, which was renamed Leningrad after his death in 1924, until reverting to being called St Petersburg in 1991. Lenin organized the illegal 'Union for the Liberation of the Working Class', was arrested for his opinions, and spent several years in exile, first in Siberia and then in the west. In 1900 in Switzerland, he edited the political newspaper Iskra ('The Spark') and developed, with Georgi Plekhanov, an underground Social Democratic Party, to assume leadership of the working classes in a revolution against Tsarism. His evolving ideas were set out in What is to be done? (1902), in which he advocated a professional core of party activists to spearhead the revolution. This suggestion was adopted by the party's majority, Bolshevik wing at the congress in London in 1903, but was opposed by the 'bourgeois reformism' Mensheviks (minority wing).

Lenin returned to Russia in 1905, and blamed the failure of the rising of that year on lack of support for his own programme. He determined that when the time came 'Soviets' (councils of workers, soldiers and peasants) should be the instruments of total revolution. Lenin left Russia in 1907 and spent the next decade strengthening the Bolsheviks against the Mensheviks, interpreting the works of Marx and Friedrich Engels and organizing underground work in Russia. In April 1917, a few days after the deposition of Tsar Nicholas II, Lenin, with German connivance, made a fateful journey in a sealed train from Switzerland to Petrograd (the name of St Petersburg from 1914 to 1924). He told his followers to prepare for the overthrow of the shaky provisional government and the remaking of Russia on a Soviet basis.

In the October revolution the provisional government collapsed and the dominating Bolshevik 'rump' in the second Congress of Soviets declared that supreme power rested in them. Lenin inaugurated the 'dictatorship of the proletariat' with the formal dissolution of the Constituent Assembly. For three years he grappled with war and anarchy. In 1922 he began his 'new economic policy' of limited free enterprise to give Russia respite before entering the era of giant state planning. His health having been in progressive decline since an assassination attempt in 1918, he died on 21 January 1924, and his body was embalmed for veneration in a crystal casket in a mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow.

Lenin was a charismatic figure. Shrewd, dynamic, implacable, pedantic, opportunist, and ice-cold in his economic reasoning, he lived only for the furtherance of Marxism.

Bibliography: Ronald Clark, Lenin (1988); Christopher Hill, Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1978); Adam Ulam, Lenin and the Bolsheviks (1965).