1. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924)
Benedict Gombocz

2. Synopsis
• Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (April 22 [O.S. April 10]), 1870-January 21, 1924) was the
founder of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, one of the masterminds of the
Bolshevik Revolution (along with Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky), and the architect
and first leader of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death in 1924.
• He was the postmortem source of Leninism, the doctrine through which Karl Marx’s
works was categorized and conjoined by Lenin’s successors to create Marxism-
Leninism, which would become the worldview of communism.
• Seen as the greatest revolutionary leader and theorist since Marx, Lenin combined
lofty idealism and deadly ruthlessness through his rise to power in the Russian
Revolution.
• His theories and writings have influenced successful communist revolutions in
Vietnam (Hồ Chí Minh in 1945), China (Mao Zedong in 1949), and Cuba (Fidel
Castro in 1959); they have also influenced many other revolutionaries in countries
with oppressed and defenseless people.

3. Early Years
• Commonly viewed as one of the most powerful and controversial political figures of
the twentieth-century, Vladimir Lenin was a principal leader of the Russian
Revolution of 1917, after which he took over as the leader of the Union of Soviet
Socialist Republics (U.S.S.R.), or the Soviet Union, the successor state of the Russian
Empire.
• He was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on April 22, 1870 in Simbirsk, Russia (it was
renamed Ulyanovsk in his honor in 1924).
• In 1901, he adopted “Lenin” as a pen name while he was engaging in underground
work.
• He came from a well-educated family; the third of six children, he was close to his
parents and siblings.
• School was an important part of Lenin’s youth.
• His parents, both educated and very cultivated, invoked a desire for learning in their
children, particularly Vladimir.
• An insatiable reader, Lenin graduated at the top of his high school class, and showed
a particular talent in Latin and Greek.
• He also spoke German and French; he learned both from his mother at home.

4. Early Years (cont.)
• But life was not always easy for Lenin and his family.
• Two incidents in particular had a negative effect on his life.
• During the first incident, when Lenin was a boy, his father, an examiner of schools,
was threatened with early retirement by a distrustful government worried about the
effect public school was having on life in Russia.
• His father died in 1886.
• The more significant and more disastrous incident happened the following year when
Lenin’s older brother, Aleksandr, at that time a university student, was arrested and
hanged for his involvement in plotting to assassinate Czar Alexander III; he kept a
bomb, inside a medical encyclopedia, intended to kill the Czar.
• With his father and Aleksandr gone, Lenin, at age seventeen, was now the man of
the family.
• Aleksandr’s involvement in oppositional politics was not unique to him; in fact, all of
Lenin’s siblings, and Lenin himself, would, to a certain extent, participate in
revolutionary activities.

5. Young Revolutionary
• The same year that his brother was executed, Lenin enrolled at Kazan University to
study law.
• However, his time there was cut short; during his first term, he was expelled for his
involvement in a student demonstration.
• Exiled to his grandfather’s estate, Lenin assumed a living with his sister Anna,
whom police had ordered to live at the estate as a consequence of her own suspicious
actions.
• There, Lenin submerged himself in an abundance of radical literature, such as
Nikolay Chernyshevsky ’s What Is to Be Done? (Что делать?; Shto delat'?, also
translated as “What Shall We Do?”), which tells the story of a character named
Rakhmetov, who conveys a single-minded commitment to radical politics.
• Lenin also enjoyed the writings of Karl Marx, the German philosopher whose famous
book Das Kapital, Kritik der politischen Ökonomie (Capital: Critique of Political
Economy), originally published in 1867, would have an enormous impact on Lenin‘s
thinking.
• He declared himself a Marxist in January 1889.

6. What Is to Be Done? (1863) and Das Kapital (1867)

7. Young Revolutionary (cont.)
• Lenin eventually earned his law degree, completing his schoolwork in 1892.
• He moved to Samara, where his purchaser base was principally made up of Russian
peasants.
• Their struggles against what Lenin understood as a legal system that was class-
biased only strengthened his Marxist views.
• In time, Lenin turned his focus to radical politics.
• In the mid-1890s, he left Samara for a new life in Saint Petersburg, the capital of
Russia at the time; here, Lenin communicated with other like-minded Marxists and
started to take more of an active role in their activities.
• The work was not unseen; he and a number of other Marxist leaders were arrested
in December 1895.
• Lenin was sentenced to three years exile in Siberia; his fiancée and future wife,
Nadezhda Krupskaya (right), joined him.
• After he was released from exile and a stay in Munich, where Lenin and other
revolutionaries co-founded a newspaper, Iskra (И́скра, “Spark”), to unite Russian
and European Marxists, he returned to Saint Petersburg and advanced his role in
the revolutionary movement.

8. First issue of Iskra, Leipzig, December 1900

9. Young Revolutionary (cont.)
• At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in Brussels
in 1903, a dynamic Lenin argued for the need for a modernized party leadership
community, one that would lead a coalition of lower party organizations and their
workers.
• “Give us an organization of revolutionaries,” Lenin said, “and we will overturn
Russia!”

10. The Revolution of 1905 and WWI
• Events on the ground soon supported Lenin’s demand.
• Russia went to war with Japan in 1904-1905.
• The Russo-Japanese War, as the conflict is known, had a deep impact on the lives of
Russian citizens; following numerous defeats that caused concern for the country’s
budget, citizens from all areas of society started to express their dissatisfaction over
the country’s political structure, calling for change.
• The situation became more tense on January 22, 1905 [O.S. January 9], when a
group of defenseless workers in Saint Petersburg took their worries directly to the
city’s palace to send a petition to Czar Nicholas II.
• The workers were met with security forces, who opened fire on the group, and killed
and wounded hundreds.
• The crisis, Bloody Sunday, was the prelude to what would be known as the Russian
Revolution of 1905.
• In an effort to satisfy his people, Nicolas II issued the October Manifesto, and offered
numerous political concessions, most remarkably the establishment of an elected
legislative assembly known as the Duma, a word that originates from the Russian
verb думать (dumat’), meaning “to think” or “to consider”.

11. Bloody Sunday and October Manifesto

12. First Duma

13. The Revolution of 1905 and WWI (cont.)
• But Lenin was less than satisfied.
• His irritations affected his fellow Marxists, particularly the group calling itself the
Mensheviks (the minority), led by Julius Martov (right).
• The issues focused on party structure and the driving forces of a revolution to
completely take control of Russia.
• While Lenin’s allies believed that the power must side with the bourgeoisie again, he
had strong misgivings about that part of the population; he instead claimed that a
real and complete revolution, one that could lead to a socialist revolution that could
spread beyond Russia, must be led by the workers, the country’s working class.
• However, from the point of view of the Mensheviks, Lenin’s ideas, ironically, really
led the way for a one-man dictatorship over the people he said he wanted to liberate.
• The two groups had argued since the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party’s
Second Congress in 1903, which gave Lenin’s group, known as the Bolsheviks (the
majority), a slight majority.
• The bickering did not end until a party conference was held in Prague, where, in
1912, Lenin would officially split to form a new, separate entity.

14. Bolsheviks

15. The Revolution of 1905 and WWI (cont.)
• Lenin went into exile again during World War I; this time, he found residence in
Switzerland.
• As always, his mind was set out on revolutionary activity.
• During his time in Switzerland, Lenin wrote and published Imperialism, the Highest
Stage of Capitalism (Империализм как высшая стадия капитализма), a defining
work for the revolutionary and future leader, in 1916; he argued that war was the
usual consequence of international capitalism.

16. Russian Leader
• In 1917, a tired, hungry, and war-tired Russia forced Nicolas II to abdicate.
• Lenin quickly returned home; possibly feeling his own path to power, he condemned
the country’s provisional government, which was organized by a coalition of leaders
of the bourgeois liberal parties.
• Lenin instead demanded a Soviet government, a government that would be directly
run by soldiers, peasants, and workers.
• In late 1917, Lenin led what would be the October [N.S. November] Revolution, even
though it was principally a coup d’état that led to a three-year civil war from 1918-
1921.
• The Soviet government led by Lenin dealt with unbelievable chances.
• The anti-Soviet forces who were loyal to Nicholas II, or the Whites, led mostly by
former czarist generals and admirals, fought frantically to depose Lenin’s Red
régime; the Whites were supported by World War I allies, who provided the coalition
with money and troops.
• Determined to win no matter what the cost, Lenin presented himself as merciless in
his desire to assume power.
• He began what was the Red Terror, a brutal campaign he used to get rid of the
opposition within the citizen population.

17. White Army of the Russian Civil War

18. Street celebration after Nicholas II’s abdication

19. Russian Leader (cont.)
• Lenin barely survived an assassination attempt in August 1918, when a political
opponent, Fanny Kaplan, shot him twice, believing that Lenin betrayed the
revolutionary cause.
• His recovery only strengthened his exaggerated presence among his compatriots,
even though his health was never really the same.
• In spite of the size of the opposition, Lenin, now at the height of his power, was
triumphant.
• Yet the kind of nation that he wanted to rule was never achieved.
• His victory over an opposition that wanted to keep Russia tied to European
capitalism led to a period of international withdrawal for his government; Russia, as
Lenin saw it, would be devoid of class conflict and the international wars it fought
temporarily.
• But the Russia that Lenin led was succumbing to the bloody civil war he had been
involved in starting; famine and poverty made up most of society.
• In 1921, Lenin dealt with the same sort of peasant revolt with which he had rose to
power.
• Widespread strikes in cities and rural parts of Russia broke out, hindering the
steadiness of Lenin’s government.
• To relax the tension, Lenin instituted the New Economic Policy, permitting workers
to sell their grain on the open market.

20. Later Years and Death
• In May 1922, Lenin suffered a stroke; in December of the same year, he suffered a
second one.
• With his health worsening, Lenin turned his thoughts to how the newly created
U.S.S.R. would be ruled after his passing.
• He gradually saw a party and government that had abandoned its revolutionary
objectives.
• In early 1923, he gave his last testament, expressing regret over the authoritarian
power that controlled the new government.
• He was especially upset with Joseph Stalin, the new General Secretary of the
Communist Party since April 1922, who was becoming dangerous and more
powerful; it was no coincidence that Lenin’s final advice to the party was to caution
it against Stalin’s “disloyal” and “intolerant” misuse of power and to advocate
removing him from the office of General Secretary.
• On March 10, 1923, Lenin’s health deteriorated again when he suffered a third
stroke; this one took away his ability to speak and finish his political work.
• On January 21, 1924, Vladimir Lenin died at age 53 in the village of Gorki, renamed
Gorki Leninskiye (“Lenin’s Gorki”) after his death.
• In a testament to his role in Russian society, Vladimir Lenin’s body was preserved
and put in a mausoleum on Moscow’s Red Square.

21. Vladimir Lenin’s tomb

22. Bibliography
• http://www.biography.com/people/vladimir-lenin-9379007#video-gallery
• http://www.marxist.com/lenins-last-struggle.htm
• Vladimir Lenin: Voice of Revolution: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QswzQNcTAis