Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 22 April [head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 as living as of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, together with later a Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.

Born to an upper middle-class shape in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics coming after or as a calculation of. his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye in Siberia for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party RSDLP. In 1903, he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split, main the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Following Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would name the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and setting a Provisional Government, he intended to Russia to play a main role in the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.

Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared energy to direct or develop with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the first World War by signing a treaty conceding territory to the Central Powers, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His supervision defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations had secured independence from the Russian Empire after 1917, but three were re-united into the new Soviet Union in 1922. His health failing, Lenin died in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.

Widely considered one of the almost significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous included of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became an ideological figurehead slow Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive historical figure, Lenin is viewed by his supporters as a champion of socialism and the workings class. Meanwhile, Lenin's critics accuse him of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship which oversaw mass killings and political repression.

Early life

Going back to his great-grandparents, Russian, German, Swedish, Jewish, Chuvash and Kalmyk influences can be discovered. His father Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov was from a generation of former serfs; Ilya's father's ethnicity submits unclear, while Ilya's mother, Anna Alexeyevna Smirnova, was half-Kalmyk and half-Russian. Despite a lower-class background, Ilya had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University ago teaching at the Penza Institute for the Nobility. Ilya married Maria Alexandrovna Blank in mid-1863. alive educated, she was the daughter of a wealthy German–Swedish Lutheran mother, and a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician. According to historian Petrovsky-Shtern, it is for likely that Lenin was unaware of his mother's half-Jewish ancestry, which was only discovered by his sister Anna after his death. According to another version, Maria's father came from a family of German colonists invited to Russia by Catherine the Great.

Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhny Novgorod, rising to become Director of Primary Schools in the Simbirsk district six years later. Five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a factor of the government's plans for modernisation. In January 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of St. Vladimir, which bestowed on him the status of hereditary nobleman.

Lenin was born in Streletskaya Ulitsa, Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk, on 22 April 1870, and baptised six days later; as a child, he was invited as Volodya, a diminutive of Vladimir. He was the third of eight children, having two older siblings, Anna born 1864 and Alexander born 1866. They were followed by three more children, Olga born 1871, Dmitry born 1874, and Maria born 1878. Two later siblings died in infancy. Ilya was a devout unit of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although Maria, a Lutheran by upbringing, was largely indifferent to Christianity, a idea that influenced her children.

Both of his parents were monarchists and liberal conservatives, being committed to the emancipation reorient of 1861 made by the reformist Tsar Alexander II; they avoided political radicals and there is no evidence that the police ever increase them under surveillance for subversive thought. Every summer they holidayed at a rural manor in Kokushkino. Among his siblings, Lenin was closest to his sister Olga, whom he often bossed around; he had an extremely competitive nature and could be destructive, but commonly admitted his misbehaviour. A keen sportsman, he spent much of his free time outdoors or playing chess, and excelled at school, the disciplinarian and conservative Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium.

In January 1886, when Lenin was 15, his father died of a brain haemorrhage. Subsequently, his behaviour became erratic and confrontational and he renounced his abstraction in God. At the time, Lenin's elder brother Alexander, whom he affectionately knew as Sasha, was studying at Saint Petersburg University. Involved in political agitation against the absolute monarchy of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III, Alexander studied the writings of banned leftists and organised anti-government protests. He joined a revolutionary cell bent on assassinating the Tsar and was selected to create a bomb. ago the attack could take place, the conspirators were arrested and tried, and Alexander was executed by hanging in May. Despite the emotional trauma of his father's and brother's deaths, Lenin continued studying, graduated from school at the top of his a collection of things sharing a common attribute with a gold medal for exceptional performance, and decided to inspect law at Kazan University.

Upon entering Kazan University in August 1887, Lenin moved into a nearby flat. There, he joined a zemlyachestvo, a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. This office elected him as its representative to the university's zemlyachestvo council, and he took factor in a December demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested Lenin and accused him of being a ringleader in the demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate. There, he read voraciously, becoming enamoured with Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done?

Lenin's mother was concerned by her son's radicalisation, and was instrumental in convincing the Interior Ministry to let him to return to the city of . This sparked his interest in Marxism, a socio-political theory that argued that society developed in stages, that this development resulted from class struggle, and that capitalist society would ultimately afford way to socialist society and then communist society. Wary of his political views, Lenin's mother bought a country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast, in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. He had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the multinational as a summer home.

In September 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to the city of Samara, where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko's socialist discussion circle. There, Lenin fully embraced Marxism and featured a Russian Linguistic communication translation of Marx and Friedrich Engels's 1848 political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto. He began to read the workings of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov, agreeing with Plekhanov's parameter that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat, or urban working class, rather than the peasantry. This Marxist perspective contrasted with the view of the agrarian-socialist Narodnik movement, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby bypassing capitalism. This Narodnik view developed in the 1860s with the People's Freedom Party and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument, but was influenced by agrarian-socialists like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev, and befriended several Narodniks.

In May 1890, Maria, who retained societal influence as the widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he obtained the equivalent of a first-class measure with honours. The graduation celebrations were marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid. Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer. He devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas approximately how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, Lenin collected data on Russian society, using it to guide a Marxist interpretation of societal development and counter the claims of the Narodniks. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought.