page_title: Vladimir Lenin
section_title: Legacy
hierarchical_section_title: Vladimir Lenin / Legacy
context_page_description: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party Marxist–Leninist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Leninism.
  Born to a moderately prosperous middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following 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 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.
context_section_description: Volkogonov claimed that "there can scarcely have been another man in history who managed so profoundly to change so large a society on such a scale". Lenin's administration laid the framework for the system of government that ruled Russia for seven decades and provided the model for later Communist-led states that came to cover a third of the inhabited world in the mid-20th century. Thus, Lenin's influence was global. A controversial figure, Lenin remains both reviled and revered, a figure who has been both idolised and demonised. Even during his lifetime, Lenin "was loved and hated, admired and scorned" by the Russian people. This has extended into academic studies of Lenin and Leninism, which have often been polarised along political lines.
  The historian Albert Resis suggested that if the October Revolution is considered the most significant event of the 20th century, then Lenin "must for good or ill be considered the century's most significant political leader". White described Lenin as "one of the undeniably outstanding figures of modern history", while Service noted that the Russian leader was widely understood to be one of the 20th century's "principal actors". Read considered him "one of the most widespread, universally recognizable icons of the twentieth century", while Ryan called him "one of the most significant and influential figures of modern history". Time magazine named Lenin one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, and one of their top 25 political icons of all time.
  In the Western world, biographers began writing about Lenin soon after his death; some—like Christopher Hill—were sympathetic to him, and others—like Richard Pipes and Robert Gellately—expressly hostile. Some later biographers, such as Read and Lars Lih, sought to avoid making either hostile or positive comments about him, thereby evading politicised stereotypes. Among sympathisers, he was portrayed as having made a genuine adjustment of Marxist theory that enabled it to suit Russia's particular socio-economic conditions. The Soviet view characterised him as a man who recognised the historically inevitable and accordingly helped to make the inevitable happen. Conversely, the majority of Western historians have perceived him as a person who manipulated events in order to attain and then retain political power, moreover considering his ideas as attempts to ideologically justify his pragmatic policies. More recently, revisionists in both Russia and the West have highlighted the impact that pre-existing ideas and popular pressures exerted on Lenin and his policies.
  Various historians and biographers have characterised Lenin's administration as totalitarian, and as a police state, and many have described it as a one-party dictatorship. Several such scholars have described Lenin as a dictator; Ryan stated that he was "not a dictator in the sense that all his recommendations were accepted and implemented", for many of his colleagues disagreed with him on various issues. Fischer noted that while "Lenin was a dictator, [he was] not the kind of dictator Stalin later became", while Volkogonov believed that whereas Lenin established a "dictatorship of the Party", it would only be under Stalin that the Soviet Union became the "dictatorship of one man".
  Conversely, various Marxist observers—including Western historians Hill and John Rees—argued against the view that Lenin's government was a dictatorship, viewing it instead as an imperfect way of preserving elements of democracy without some of the processes found in liberal democratic states. Ryan contends that the leftist historian Paul Le Blanc "makes a quite valid point that the personal qualities that led Lenin to brutal policies were not necessarily any stronger than in some of the major Western leaders of the twentieth century". Ryan also posits that for Lenin, 'revolutionary' violence was merely a means to an end: the establishment of a socialist, ultimately communist world—a world without violence. Historian J. Arch Getty remarked, "Lenin deserves a lot of credit for the notion tha
caption: Statue of Lenin erected by the East German Marxist–Leninist government at Leninplatz in East Berlin, East Germany (removed in 1992)
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