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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov [b] (22 April [ O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, [c] was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet ...
- Overview
- The making of a revolutionary
Vladimir Lenin was born in Simbirsk, Russia.
Where was Vladimir Lenin educated?
Lenin studied law at Kazan University but was expelled after just three months. In spite of this, he achieved top ranking in law examinations and was awarded a law degree in 1891.
When was Vladimir Lenin married?
Lenin married Nadezhda Krupskaya on July 22, 1898. Krupskaya served as Lenin’s personal secretary and played a key organizational role in the socialist revolutionary group that became the Russian Communist Party.
How did Vladimir Lenin change the world?
It is difficult to identify any particular events in his childhood that might prefigure his turn onto the path of a professional revolutionary. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk, which was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour. (He adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine party work after exile in Siberia.) He was the third of six children born into a close-knit, happy family of highly educated and cultured parents. His mother was the daughter of a physician, while his father, though the son of a serf, became a schoolteacher and rose to the position of inspector of schools. Lenin, intellectually gifted, physically strong, and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a voracious passion for learning. He graduated from high school ranking first in his class. He distinguished himself in Latin and Greek and seemed destined for the life of a classical scholar. When he was 16, nothing in Lenin indicated a future rebel, still less a professional revolutionary—except, perhaps, his turn to atheism. But, despite the comfortable circumstances of their upbringing, all five of the Ulyanov children who reached maturity joined the revolutionary movement. This was not an uncommon phenomenon in tsarist Russia, where even the highly educated and cultured intelligentsia were denied elementary civil and political rights.
As an adolescent Lenin suffered two blows that unquestionably influenced his subsequent decision to take the path of revolution. First, his father was threatened shortly before his untimely death with premature retirement by a reactionary government that had grown fearful of the spread of public education. Second, in 1887 his beloved eldest brother, Aleksandr, a student at the University of St. Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad State University), was hanged for conspiring with a revolutionary terrorist group that plotted to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. Suddenly, at age 17, Lenin became the male head of the family, which was now stigmatized as having reared a “state criminal.”
Fortunately the income from his mother’s pension and inheritance kept the family in comfortable circumstances, although it could not prevent the frequent imprisonment or exile of her children. Moreover, Lenin’s high school principal (the father of Aleksandr Kerensky, who was later to lead the Provisional government deposed by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in November [October, O.S.] 1917) did not turn his back on the “criminal’s” family. He courageously wrote a character reference that smoothed Lenin’s admission to a university.
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In autumn 1887 Lenin enrolled in the faculty of law of the imperial Kazan University (later renamed Kazan [V.I. Lenin] State University), but within three months he was expelled from the school, having been accused of participating in an illegal student assembly. He was arrested and banished from Kazan to his grandfather’s estate in the village of Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna had already been ordered by the police to reside. In the autumn of 1888, the authorities permitted him to return to Kazan but denied him readmission to the university. During this period of enforced idleness, he met exiled revolutionaries of the older generation and avidly read revolutionary political literature, especially Marx’s Das Kapital. He became a Marxist in January 1889.
- Albert Resis
Nov 9, 2009 · Learn about the life and achievements of Vladimir Lenin, the Russian communist revolutionary who led the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union. Explore his role in the Russian Revolution of 1917, his economic policies, his secret police and his death.
Apr 3, 2014 · Learn about the life and legacy of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Russian Communist Party, leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and architect of the Soviet state. Find out how he rose from a young revolutionary to a powerful leader, faced challenges and threats, and died in 1924.
Vladimir Lenin. Vladimir Lenin during the Russian Revolution, 1917. By 1917 it seemed to Lenin that the war would never end and that the prospect of revolution was rapidly receding. But in the week of March 8–15, the starving, freezing, war-weary workers and soldiers of Petrograd (until 1914, St. Petersburg) succeeded in deposing the Tsar.
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Vladimir Lenin, orig. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, (born April 22, 1870, Simbirsk, Russia—died Jan. 21, 1924, Gorki, near Moscow), Founder of the Russian Communist Party, leader of the Russian Revolution of 1917, and architect and builder of the Soviet state. Born to a middle-class family, he was strongly influenced by his eldest brother ...
Learn about the life and achievements of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik revolution in Russia in 1917 and the founder of the USSR. Explore his political views, his role in World War One, his health problems and his death.
