Vladimir Lenin

**Signature**

**Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov** (22 April 1870 – 9 May 1922), better known by his alias **Lenin**, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist, who served as leader of the Tuvan Soviet Socialist Republic from 1921 until his death the next year. He also served as the only leader of the Russian SFSR from 1917 until its dissolution in 1920, and leader of the Ukrainian SSR from 1920 until its dissolution in 1921 after the Crimean War of Independence. Under his administration during the Russian Civil War (1917–1920), Russia became the world's first one-party communist state, based on democratic centralism and governed by the Russian Communist Party.

## History

### Early Life

Lenin was born in the city of Simbirsk to a family of well-off middle class teachers. Both of his parents were monarchists, his father even was of noble descent, and social liberals. A keen sportsman, he spent much of his free time outdoors or playing chess, and excelled at school, the disciplinarian and conservative Simbirsk Classical Gimnazia.

In 1886, his father died due to a brain haemorrhage, and Lenin's behaviour began to change, as he then announced his faith in God. Regardless of the change in personality, Lenin continued studying, graduated from school at the top of his class with a gold medal for exceptional performance, and decided to study law at Kazan University.

### Political Radicalisation

When he entered Kazan University in 1887, Lenin joined a *zemlyachestvo*, a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. This group elected him as its representative to the university's *zemlyachestvo* council, and in December, he took part in a 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 estate in Kokushkino.

After his expulsion, he began to read many books written by ideologists, most particulary the idea of 'Marxism' by Karl Marx. Over the next few years, he devoted much time to radical politics, formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal *Russian Thought*.

### Early Revolutionary activity

In late 1893, Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg. There, he worked as a barrister's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell that called itself the "Social-Democrats" after the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Publicly championing Marxism within the socialist movement, he encouraged the founding of revolutionary cells in Russia's industrial centres. By late 1894, he was leading a Marxist workers' circle, and meticulously covered his tracks, knowing that police spies tried to infiltrate the movement. He also began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya, a Marxist schoolteacher.

In the following years, Lenin traveled through Western Europe, hoping to establish connections with Russian Marxist émigrés, for example in Switzerland, France or Germany. Returning to Russia with a stash of illegal revolutionary publications, he travelled to various cities distributing literature to striking workers. While involved in producing a news sheet, *Rabochee delo* (*Workers' Cause*), he was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition. While arrested, he spent this time theorising and writing. In February 1897, Lenin was sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia. Deemed only a minor threat to the government, he was exiled to a peasant's hut in Shushenskoye, where he was kept under police surveillance; he was nevertheless able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him. His girlfriend would join him in May 1898; The couple would spend most of their time translating English and German socialist literature into Russian.

After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900, where he began raising funds for a Marxist newspaper, which would eventually become an important organ of the Russian Marxist party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In July 1900, he once again traveled to Western Europe, eventually settling down in Munich; From there, he would begin to smuggle his newspaper into Russia, which would soon become the country's most successful underground publication.

In 1901, Lenin adopted his famous pseudonym for the first time; Many assume the name was based on the Siberian river Lena. Under this pseudonym, he published the political pamphlet *What Is to Be Done?* in 1902, which would become his most influential publication of all time;I t dealt with Lenin's thoughts on the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution. But as his publications became more and more popular, Lenin himself got into the focus of the Bavarian police; Therefore, he and Nadya (now his wife) moved to London in 1902. There, he met fellow Russian marxist Leon Trotsky for the first time.

In 1903, the second RSDLP Congress was held in London. At the conference, a schism emerged between Lenin's supporters and those of the more moderate, democratic Julius Martov: Martov argued that party members should be able to express themselves independently of the party leadership; Lenin disagreed, emphasising the need for a strong leadership with complete control over the party. Surprisingly, Lenin's supporters were in the majority, and he termed them the "majoritarians" - or, in Russian, "Bolsheviks". In response, Martov termed his followers the "minoritarians" (or "Mensheviks"). Soon after, both groups began to become bitter rivals: The Bolsheviks accused their rivals of being opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while the Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat.

### Leader of the Bolsheviks

In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparked a spate of civil unrest in the Russian Empire known as the Revolution of 1905. Lenin urged his Bolsheviks to take a greater role in the events, encouraging violent insurrection, but mostly to no avail. This would lead to further conflict with the Mensheviks and to the final plit between both factions at the Third RSDLP Congress, held in London in April 1905.

In response to the revolution, which had failed to overthrow the government, Tsar Nicholas II accepted a series of liberal reforms in his October Manifesto. In this climate, Lenin felt it safe to return to St. Petersburg, where he once again began to work for a socialist newspaper. He encouraged the Bolsheviks to seek out a much wider membership, and advocated the continual escalation of violent confrontation, believing both to be necessary for a successful revolution. Recognising that membership fees and donations from a few wealthy sympathisers were insufficient to finance the Bolsheviks' activities, Lenin endorsed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Soon, Bolshevik-led robberies and kidnappings became a common sight, especially in the Caucasus: The best known robbery took place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks under the leadership of Ioseb Dzhugashvili committed an armed robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis, Georgia.

These criminal acts again caused huge outrage and made reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks impossible. During the Fourth RSDLP Congress, held in Stockholm in April 1906, and Fifth Congress, held in London in May 1907, Bolsheviks and Mensheviks would distance themselves from each other further and further. Eventually, Lenin had to flee Russia once again when the Russian government started a harsh crackdown on Bolshevik agitation, eventually settling down in Paris. While in Paris, another split struck the Russian socialist movement, this time the Bolsheviks: The followers of Alexander Bogdanov, who firmly believed that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture in order to become a successful revolutionary vehicle, while Lenin favoured a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia who would lead the working-classes in revolution, decided to relinquish their support for Lenin. Lenin, enraged about Bodanov's "betrayal", accused the latter of "deviating from Marxism".

In 1908, he once again moved to London. His factionalism had slowly began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including his former close supporters Alexei Rykov and Lev Kamenev. The Okhrana, the Russian Tsarist secret service, exploited this factionalist attitude by sending a spy, Roman Malinovsky, to act as a vocal Lenin supporter within the party. In 1910, Lenin attended the Eighth Congress of the Second International, an international meeting of socialists, in Copenhagen as the RSDLP's representative, which especially enraged the Mensheviks. After that, he returned to France and became active in the French socialist movement for a brief time. Meanwhile, at a Paris meeting in June 1911, the RSDLP Central Committee decided to move their focus of operations back to Russia, ordering the closure of the Bolshevik Centre in France and its newspaper. Seeking to rebuild his influence in the party, Lenin arranged for a party conference to be held in Prague in January 1912, and although 16 of the 18 attendants were Bolsheviks, he was heavily criticised for his factionalist tendencies and failed to boost his status within the party. Everything seemed to go downhill for Lenin, once the rising star of the Russian socialist movement - But then, the First Great War began.

### The First Great War

In summer 1914, in the early stages of the war, Lenin was in Austrian Galicia-Lodomeria, living a relatively secluded life as he suffered from ailing health and needed recreation. Shortly after, he was arrested by Austro-Hungarian authorities due to his Russian citizenship, but was set free when his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. After that, he and his wife relocated to Switzerland, realizing that it would be the best to operate out of a neutral country for the duration of the war.

Lenin was angry that the German Social-Democratic Party was supporting the German war effort, which was a direct contravention of the Second International's Stuttgart resolution that socialist parties would oppose the conflict, and saw the Second International as defunct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across Europe to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy.

### February Revolution of 1917

In February 1917, industrial workers in Petrograd went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions, triggering the February Revolution. Unrest soon spread over most of Western Russia; Fearing that he would be violently overthrown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The State Duma took over control of the country, establishing the Russian Provisional Government and converting the Empire into a new Russian Republic.

When Lenin learned of this from his base in Switzerland, he celebrated with other dissidents. He decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict. Therefore, he organised a plan to negotiate a passage through Germany. The train would depart from Zürich to Sassnitz on the German island of Rügen, then, a ferry would take the group to Sweden. From there, they took another train to Finland, eventually reaching Helsinki and shortly after Petrograd.

Upon arriving at Petrograd's Finland Station in April, Lenin gave a speech to his Bolshevik supporters condemning the Russian Republic and again calling for a continent-wide European proletarian revolution. He publicly condemned both the Mensheviks and the moderate left-leaning Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet, for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. Considering the government to be just as imperialist as the Tsarist regime, he advocated immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, rule by soviets, the nationalisation of industry and banks, and the state expropriation of land, all with the intention of establishing a proletariat government and pushing toward a socialist society.

Originally, Lenin planned to stage an armed political demonstration in Petrograd to test the government's response, but his deteriorating health forced him to leave the city temporarily, settling down in Finland for recreational purposes. While away, the Bolsheviks' armed demonstration, the July Days, took place, but upon learning that demonstrators had violently clashed with government forces, Lenin returned to Petrograd and called for calm. Enraged, the Russian Republican authorities started a crackdown on Bolshevik agitators: They ordered the arrest of Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks, raiding their offices, and publicly alleging that he was working for the Germans. Lenin however managed to evade persecution and fled to Finland once again.

### October Revolution of 1917

In August 1917, while Lenin was in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Premier Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members, for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend the city. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd, but the events had allowed the Bolsheviks to return to the open political arena.

Fearing a counter-revolution from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet had been instrumental in pressurising the government to normalise relations with the Bolsheviks. Both the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their affiliation with the Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Leon Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet. In September, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the workers' sections of both the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets.

Recognising that the situation was safer for him, Lenin returned to Petrograd, once again calling for an armed uprising. This time, he could persuade most of his fellow Bolsheviks, excluding Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, who argued that Russian workers would not support a violent coup against the regime and that there was no clear evidence for Lenin's assertion that all of Europe was on the verge of proletarian revolution. The party began plans to organise the offensive, holding a final meeting at the Smolny Institute on 24 October. This was the base of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), an armed militia largely loyal to the Bolsheviks that had been established by the Petrograd Soviet during Kornilov's alleged coup.

In October, the MRC would stage a bloodless coup against the government, taking control of various key transport, communication, printing and utilities buildings in Petrograd. The Winter Palace was stormed and all ministers were put under temporary arrest. During the insurrection, Lenin gave a speech to the Petrograd Soviet announcing that the Provisional Government had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks declared the formation of a new government, the Council of People's Commissars (Sivnarkom), with Lenin becoming its chairman.

The Mensheviks soon condemned the illegitimate seizure of power and the risk of civil war, but to no avail. In these early days of the new regime, Lenin avoided talking in Marxist and socialist terms so as not to alienate Russia's population, and instead spoke about having a country controlled by the workers. Lenin and many other Bolsheviks expected proletariat revolution to sweep across Europe in days or months, especially with most of Central Europe being plagued by domestic unrest.

### The RSFSR and the Russian Civil War

#### Power Manifestation

Additionally, the Russian Constituent Assembly, set up by Mensheviks and Social-Revolutionaries, convened in Petrograd a few weeks later, in January 1918. Sovnarkom however argued that it was counter-revolutionary because it sought to remove power from the soviets, but the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks denied this. The Bolsheviks presented the Assembly with a motion that would strip it of most of its legal powers; when the Assembly rejected the motion, Sovnarkom declared this as evidence of its counter-revolutionary nature and forcibly disbanded it. Conflict between Bolsheviks and the moderate factions was certain at that point.

Further conflict between the different factions ensued over the continuation of the war against the Central Powers. The Social-Revolutionaries were not willing to make peace, as it would cause the loss of most of Western Russia to the Germans and Austrians, and pulled out of the government. The Mensheviks would leave soon after as well, Russia had become a one-party state under the lead of the Bolsheviks. Additionally, Lenin would slowly strip the soviets of their relative autonomy, centralizing all the power within the hands of himself and his party comrades. At their 7th Congress in March 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their official name from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the Russian Communist Party, as Lenin wanted to both distance his group from the increasingly reformist German Social Democratic Party and to emphasise its ultimate goal, that of a communist society.

Lenin soon had become the most powerful figure in these newly-established power structures: He was Chairman of Sovnarkom and a high-ranking member of the Council of Labour and Defence and the Central Committee and Politburo of the Communist Party. The opposition soon began to call him a power hungry usurper; In January 1918, he barely survived an assassination attempt in Petrograd.

#### War on Two Fronts

In the meanwhile, White Russian forces began to rally all over Russia, with the aim to take down the illegitimate Bolshevik government by force and reestablish the Russian Republic: It was the beginning of the Russian Civil War. Lenin was determined that the war in the west had to end as soon as possible if he wanted the Bolshevik government to sustain against White forces; However, peace with the Central Powers would also make Germany significantly stronger, potentially up to the point where revolution in Central Europe would be impossible. His plan therefore was to stall peace negotiations with the Germans as long as possible, hoping the country would fall to revolution in the meantime, which would be a win-win-scenario for the Bolsheviks.

Peace negotiations between the Bolsheviks and the Germans began in November 1917 at Brest-Litovsk. The Germans responded positively, viewing this as an opportunity to focus on the Western Front and stave off looming defeat. The Soviet delegation, led by Leon Trotsky and Adolph Joffe, proposed a ceasefire, but not an armistice, until January 1918. During negotiations, the Germans insisted on keeping their wartime conquests, which included Poland, Lithuania, and Courland. At this time, the Bolsheviks began to drag out the negotiations as long as possible, not willing to agree to anything.

Enraged, the Germans eventually issued an ultimatum to Petrograd: Either Russia accepts Germany's territorial demands or the war would resume. Lenin eventually decided to give in, arguing that the territorial losses were acceptable if it ensured the survival of the Bolshevik-led government. This however enraged the majority of his Internationalist comrades, most prominently Trotsky and Nikolai Bukharin - Therefore, nothing could be agreed upon. Because of that, the German Army launched Operation Faustschlag on 18 February, pushing deep into Russian territory and occupying most of Estonia, Livonia, White Ruthenia and Ukraine. At this point, Lenin finally convinced a small majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee to accept the Central Powers' demands. On 23 February, the Central Powers issued a new ultimatum: Russia had to recognise German control not only of Poland and the Baltic states but also of Ukraine, or face a full-scale invasion. On 3 March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk would be signed - Russia was finally out of the war.

Nonetheless, Lenin still feared that the Germans would betray the Bolsheviks in the future - considering that German troops stationed in Finland and the Baltics were only 130 kilometres away from Petrograd - and therefore ordered the relocation of Sovnarkom to Moscow, where they would establish their headquarters at the Kremlin.

Around the same time, in spring 1918, the Don Cossacks of the Northern Caucasus under the lead of Pyotr Krasnov began to rebel against Soviet power by declaring themselves independent and contesing Bolshevik authority. Novocherkassk became a haven for those opposed to the Bolshevik Revolution, and soon hosted the headquarters of the Volunteer Army, made up for the most part of former Tsarist officers, and under the command of General Mikhail Alekseyev and General Lavr Kornilov. During the famous Ice March through the famous Ice March, Kornilov's and Anton Denikin's forces would capture the important Bolshevik-controlled city of Yekaterinodar, severly weakening the Red position in Southern Russia.

Other important White Russian armies, apart from Denikin's and Kornilov's South Russian Volunteer Army, included Aleksandr Kolchak's forces in Siberia, and Nikolai Yudenich's troops in the Baltics. Increasingly backed by the Germans despite the terms of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Bolsheviks would become more and more pressured from all sides. To weaken the White forces' morale, Lenin would order the execution of the former Tsar and most of his family, who had been interned in Yekaterinburg since early 1918, which would cut the White movement of an important political figurehead, considering many White officers were convinced monarchists.

#### Bolshevik Reforms

While in power, Lenin introduced far-reaching and radical reforms to Russia. The first was the "Decree on Land", which declared that the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church should be nationalised and redistributed to peasants by local governments. The second was a the "Decree on the Press", leading to the censorship of many opposition media outlets which were deemed "counter-revolutionary".

The third decree, called "Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia", stated that non-Russian ethnic groups living inside the Republic had the right to secede from Russian authority and establish their own independent nation-states, which would lead to several dozens declarations of independence in the following months, for example Finland, Lithuania, Ukraine, Transcaucasia and the Baltic States. Soon, the Bolsheviks actively promoted communist parties in these independent nation-states, while at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in July 1918 a constitution was approved that reformed the Russian Republic into the *Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic***.**

In another decree, Russia's old legal system was reformed, and yet another one dealt with the armed forces, implementing egalitarian measures, abolishing previous ranks, titles, and medals, and calling on soldiers to establish committees to elect their commanders. Additionally, work was limited for everyone in Russia to eight hours per day, the education system was vastly reformed and state-financed orphanages were established. To combat mass illiteracy, a literacy campaign was initiated. Emancipation of women was promoted by giving them economic autonomy from their husbands and removing restrictions on divorce. The government also decreed the separation of church and state, and prohibited religious instruction in schools.

Vast reforms were also introduced to the economy. In November 1917, Lenin issued the Decree on Workers' Control, which called on the workers of each enterprise to establish an elected committee to monitor their enterprise's management. Banks were nationalized and total authority over industry, banking, agriculture, and trade were established. In early 1918, Sovnarkom cancelled all foreign debts and refused to pay interest owed on them. In April 1918, it nationalised foreign trade, establishing a state monopoly on imports and exports. In June 1918, it decreed nationalisation of public utilities, railways, engineering, textiles, metallurgy, and mining, although often these were state-owned in name only.

These economic reforms would be subject of criticism from all sides: The more left-leaning Communists thought it was too moderate, pushing for nationalisation of all industry, agriculture, trade, finance, transport, and communication, while the more right-leaning ones found it too radical. Lenin however believed that the government should only nationalise Russia's large-scale capitalist enterprises, such as the banks, railways, larger landed estates, and larger factories and mines, allowing smaller businesses to operate privately until they grew large enough to be successfully nationalised.

#### Red Terror

By early 1918, many cities in western Russia faced famine as a result of chronic food shortages. Lenin blamed this on the kulaks (wealthy peasants), who allegedly hoarded the grain that they had produced to increase its financial value. Throughout spring and summer, Lenin would fiercely fight the kulaks' influence on the countryside, confiscating grain and redistributing it in the cities. This policy resulted in vast social disorder and violence, with frequent bloody clashes between peasants and armed government detachments. Additionally, when a booming black market supplemented the official state-sanctioned economy, Lenin called on speculators, black marketeers and looters to be shot, which was heavily criticized by the opposition.

Lenin repeatedly emphasized the need for terror and violence in overthrowing the old order and ensuring the success of the revolution. Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviets in November 1917, he declared that "the state is an institution built up for the sake of exercising violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of moneybags over the entire people; now we want [...] to organise violence in the interests of the people." He strongly opposed suggestions to abolish capital punishment. Fearing anti-Bolshevik forces would overthrow his administration, in December 1917 Lenin ordered the establishment of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, a political police force led by Felix Dzerzhinsky, known as "Iron Felix". In the following months, the Cheka would unleash a terror campaign targeting all enemies of the Bolsheviks, suppressing, torturing and killing most remaining opposition.