Encyclopedia
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known to the world as
Vladimir Lenin , was the founder of Russian
Communism and the first leader of the
Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.
Early life
Born in Simbirsk,
Russian Empire , Lenin was the son of
Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov , a Russian civil service official who worked for progressive democracy and free universal education in Russia, and his liberal wife Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova . The family was of mixed ethnic ancestry. "Lenin's antecedents were Russian,
Kalmyk,
German and
Swedish, and possibly others". Lenin was baptized into the
Russian Orthodox Church.
Two tragedies occurred early in his life. The first occurred when his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage in 1886. In May 1887, his eldest brother
Alexander Ulyanov was hanged for participation in a plot threatening the life of
Tsar Alexander III; his sister Anna, who was with Alexander at the time of his arrest, was banished to the small town of Kokuchkino near Karzan. This radicalized Lenin. His official Soviet biographies have this event as central to his revolutionary exploits. A famous painting by Belousov, , reprinted in millions of Soviet textbooks, depicted young Lenin and his mother grieving the loss of his elder brother. The phrase "We will follow a different path" meant that Lenin chose a
Marxist approach for a popular revolution, instead of anarchistic, individualistic methods. As Lenin became interested in
Marxism, he got involved in student protests and was subsequently arrested. He was then expelled from
Kazan University. He continued to study independently and by 1891 had earned a
license to practice
law. He also distinguished himself in
Latin and Greek, and also learned
German,
French and
English. Lenin is also accredited with translating the
Communist Manifesto into Russian in the period between being expelled from the University and obtaining his license to practice law.
Revolutionary
Lenin worked for some years in
Samara, Russia, then in 1893 moved to
St Petersburg. Rather than settling into a legal career, he became more involved in revolutionary propaganda efforts and the study of
Marxism. On December 7 1895, he was arrested and held by authorities for 14 months, then exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in
Siberia.
In July 1898, he married
Nadezhda Krupskaya, who was a
socialist activist. In April 1899, he published the book
The Development of Capitalism in Russia . In 1900 his exile ended and he travelled in Russia and elsewhere in
Europe. He lived in
Zurich,
Geneva,
Munich,
Prague,
Vienna,
Manchester and
London, and during his exile founded the newspaper
Iskra was a political newspaper [i] of Russian [i] socialist [i] emigrants. ...
. He also wrote several articles and books related to the revolutionary movement. At this period, he started using various aliases, finally settling upon Lenin.
He was active in the
Russian Social Democratic Labour Party , and in 1903 he led the
Bolshevik faction after a split with the
Mensheviks that was partly inspired by his pamphlet
What is to be Done? . In 1906 he was elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP. In 1907, he moved to
Finland for security reasons. He continued to travel in Europe and participated in many
socialist meetings and activities, including the Prague Party Conference of 1912 and the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915. When
Inessa Armand left Russia and settled in Paris, she met Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in exile, and it is believed that she became Lenin's partner during this time. Lenin later moved to
Switzerland.
When the
First World War began in 1914 and the large Social Democratic parties of Europe , including luminaries such as Karl Kautsky, supported their various countries' war efforts, Lenin was shocked, at first refusing to believe that the German Social Democrats had voted for war credits. This led him to a final split with the Second International, which was composed of these parties. Lenin adopted an "unpatriotic" position, stating the goal as the defeat of the Tsarist government in the war.
After the 1917 February Revolution in Russia and the overthrow of Tsar
Nicholas II, Lenin knew he needed to travel back to Russia as soon as possible. But he was isolated in neutral
Switzerland as the First World War was raging, and it would not have been easy to travel through Europe. The Swiss communist
Fritz Platten, however, managed to negotiate with the German government for Lenin and his company to travel through Germany in a sealed
train.
Kaiser Wilhelm II is thought to have expected Lenin to cause political unrest back in Russia and help end the war on the Eastern front. While on German territory, Lenin was not allowed outside the train. Once past Germany, Lenin continued by ferry to
Sweden, and the rest of the trip through
Scandinavia was arranged by the Swedish communists
Otto Grimlund and
Ture Nerman.
On April 16, 1917, he returned to
Petrograd and took a leading role within the Bolshevik movement, publishing the
April Theses , which called for an uncompromising opposition to the provisional government. Initially, Lenin isolated his party through this lurch to the left. However, this uncompromising stand meant that the Bolsheviks were to become the obvious home for the masses as they became disillusioned with the provisional government, and with the "luxury of opposition" the Bolsheviks did not have to assume responsibility for any policies implemented by the government .
Meanwhile,
Aleksandr Kerensky and other opponents of the Bolsheviks accused Lenin of being a paid German agent. On this allegation, co-leader
Leon Trotsky made a defensive speech on July 17, saying: "An intolerable atmosphere has been created, in which you as well as we are choking. They are throwing dirty accusations at Lenin and Zinoviev. Lenin has fought thirty years for the revolution. I have fought twenty years against the oppression of the people. And we cannot but cherish a hatred for German militarism. ... I have been sentenced by a German court to eight months’ imprisonment for my struggle against German militarism. This everybody knows. Let nobody in this hall say that we are hirelings of Germany."
After a failed workers' rising in July, Lenin fled to Finland for safety. He returned in October, inspiring an armed revolution with the slogan "All Power to the Soviets!" against the
Provisional Government. His ideas of government were expressed in his essay "State and Revolution" , which called for a new form of government based on workers' councils, or soviets. In this work, he also claimed that ordinary workers should, in principle, be capable of running a factory or government. He emphasized, though, that to be able to govern the state, a worker should "learn communism." He furthermore insisted that a member of the government should be paid no more than the salary of an average worker.
Head of the Soviet state
On November 8, Lenin was elected as the Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars by the Russian Soviet Congress.
"Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country," Lenin said, emphasizing the importance of bringing
electricity to all corners of Russia and modernizing industry and agriculture. "We must show the peasants that the organization of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism." He was very concerned about creating a free universal health care system for all, the emancipation of women, and teaching the
illiterate Russian people to read and write. But first and foremost, the new Bolshevik government needed to take Russia out of the
World War.
Faced with the threat of German invasion, Lenin argued that Russia should immediately sign a peace treaty. Other
Bolshevik leaders, such as
Bukharin, advocated continuing the war as a means of fomenting revolution in Germany. Trotsky, who led the negotiations, advocated an intermediate position, of "No War, No Peace", calling for a peace treaty only on the conditions that no territorial gains on either side be consolidated. After the negotiations collapsed, Germany launched an invasion that resulted in the loss of much of Russia's western territory. As a result of this turn of events, Lenin's position consequently gained the support of the majority in the Bolshevik leadership. On March 3 1918, Lenin removed Russia from World War I by agreeing to the
Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, under which Russia lost significant territories in Europe.
After the Bolsheviks lost the elections for the
Russian Constituent Assembly, they, with the backing of the overwhelming majority of the workers in both of Russia's major cities, Petrograd and Moscow , used the Red Guards to shut down the first session of the Assembly on January 19. Later, the Bolsheviks organized a counter-Assembly, the third Congress of Soviets, which gave them and their allies over 90% of the seats , arguing that "the dictatorship of the proletariat" was first and foremost an act of the proletariat itself: "Of course, those who thought that it was possible to leap straight from capitalism to socialism, or those who imagined that it was possible to convince the majority of the population that this could be achieved through the medium of the Constituent Assembly—those who believed in this bourgeois-democratic fable, can go on blithely believing it, but let them not complain if life destroys this fable," further arguing that "the chief reason why the 'socialists' of the Second International fail to understand the dictatorship of the proletariat is that they fail to understand that state power in the hands of one class, the proletariat, can and must become an instrument for winning to the side of the proletariat the non-proletarian working masses, an instrument for winning those masses from the bourgeoisie and from the petty-bourgeois parties."
The Bolsheviks formed a coalition government with the left wing of the
Socialist Revolutionaries. However, their coalition collapsed after the Social Revolutionaries opposed the Brest-Litovsk treaty, and they joined other parties in seeking to overthrow the Soviet government. The situation degenerated, with non-Bolshevik parties actively seeking the overthrow of the Bolshevik government. Lenin responded to these efforts by shutting down their activities and jailing some of the members of the opposing parties.
Though Lenin advocated and helped to form a "Soviet democracy," it is often argued by Lenin's opponents on the right, like Kautsky, and on his left, like
Kollontai, that he countermanded proletarian emancipation and democracy by force. [The Mensheviks' Political Comeback - The elections to the provincial soviets in spring 1918: Vladimir Brovkin. Russian Review 42 pp 1-50]
Anti-Communist historian and ultra-conservative politician
Richard Pipes has argued that policies such as handing sweeping power to the state, enforcing rigid party discipline, using terror as a means of political intimidation, and requisitioning grain paved the road to
Stalinism. Although many of these decried institutions and policies—such as secret police, labor camps, and executions of political opponents—were practiced under Lenin's regime, these techniques were all commonly used by the Tsars long before Lenin and were long since established as the standard means of dealing with political dissent in
Russia. However, the scale was different: three times more political prisoners were executed in the first few months of Bolshevik rule than in over 90 years under the Tsar. [Stephane Courtois, et. al, "The Black Book of Communism", Harvard University Press. 1999. ISBN 0-674-07608-7]. However, this is most likely due to the sudden and dramatic revolution and change of government, not to mention the approaching civil war and intervention by 21 foreign nations.
Defenders of Lenin assert that these criticisms ignore many central events during Tsarist rule, such as the
Russo-Japanese War, Bloody Sunday , and
World War I. They also mention that the scale of the circumstances which surrounded the Bolsheviks was different as well: a country ravaged by an unprecedently destructive world war, a mass of people kept historically illiterate by Tsarist autocracy, an oppositional force that fought to oust the Bolsheviks from power, etc. Moreover,
Leon Trotsky claimed that a "river of blood" separated Lenin from
Stalin's actions because Stalin executed many of Lenin's old comrades and their supporters, grouped in the Left Opposition. This was indeed to include Trotsky himself.
The
Leninist vision of revolution demanded a professional revolutionary cadre that would both lead the working masses in their conquest of power and centralize economic and administrative power in the hands of a workers' state. From early 1918, Lenin campaigned for a single, democratically accountable individual to be put in charge of each enterprise, contrary to most conceptions of workers' self-management, but absolutely essential for efficiency and expertise. As S.A. Smith wrote: "By the end of the civil war, not much was left of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers' state." During the civil war, democracy would become concentrated within the Bolshevik party and later the politburo of the CPSU.
To protect the newly-established Bolshevik government from counterrevolutionaries, the Bolsheviks created a secret police, the
Cheka. The Bolsheviks had planned to hold a trial for the former
Tsar for his crimes against the Russian people, but in August 1918, when the
White Army was advancing on
Yekaterinburg ,
Sverdlov made a quick decision to execute the Tsar and his family right away, rather than having them being taken by the Whites. Sverdlov later informed Lenin about this, who agreed it had been the right decision, since the Bolsheviks would rather not have let the royal family become a banner for the
White Movement.
On January 14, 1918, a terrorist attack was made against Lenin’s car in Petrograd by unknown gunmen. Lenin and
Fritz Platten were in the back of the car together, after having given a public speech. When the shooting started, "Platten grabbed Lenin by the head and pushed him down. ... Platten’s hand was covered in blood, having been grazed by a bullet as he was shielding Lenin."
On August 30 1918,
Fanya Kaplan, a member of the
Socialist Revolutionary Party, approached Lenin after he had spoken at a meeting and was on the way to his car. She called out to Lenin, who turned to answer. She immediately fired three shots, two of which struck him in the shoulder and lung. Lenin was taken to his apartment in
the Kremlin, refusing to venture to a hospital since he believed that other assassins would be waiting there. Doctors were summoned but decided that it was too dangerous to remove the bullets. Lenin eventually recovered, though his health declined from this point. It is believed that the incident contributed to his later strokes.
The Communist government responded to the assassination attempt, and to the increasingly mobilizing anti-communist offensive of which it was a component, with what they termed the Red Terror. Tens of thousands of real and
perceived enemies of the Revolution, many accused of actively conspiring against the Bolshevik government, were executed or put in labor camps. . The deliberate continuation of civil war, instigated by the White forces and supporting Western armies, such as
Japan and the
US, in the end caused widespread famine and the deaths of millions.
According to Orlando Figes, Lenin had always been an advocate of "mass terror against enemies of the revolution" and was open about his view that the proletarian state was a system of organized violence against the capitalist establishment. Figes also claims that the terror, while encouraged by the Bolsheviks, had its roots in a popular anger against the privileged. . When in late 1918 Kamenev and Bukharin tried to curb the "excesses" of the Cheka, it was Lenin who defended it. However, the nature of these so-called "excesses," as well as Lenin's reasons behind their defense, remain unnamed.
In March 1919, Lenin and other
Bolshevik leaders met with revolutionary socialists from around the world and formed the
Communist International. Members of the Communist International, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks themselves, broke off from the broader socialist movement. From that point onwards, they would become known as
communists. In Russia, the Bolshevik Party was renamed the "Russian Communist Party ," which eventually became the
CPSU.
Meanwhile, the
civil war raged across
Russia. A wide variety of political movements and their supporters took up arms to support or overthrow the Soviet government. Although many different factions were involved in the civil war, the two main forces were the
Red Army and the
White Army . Foreign powers such as France, Britain, the United States and Japan also intervened in this war . Eventually, the more organizationally proficient Red Army, led by
Leon Trotsky, won the civil war, defeating the White Russian forces and their allies in 1920. Smaller fights, however, continued for several more years.
Both White and Red Army forces, during this tumultuous time of war and revolution, "behaved with great brutality and cruelty in areas they controlled. Towns were burned, property destroyed or stolen, peasant farmers' crops and livestock taken by force — if people objected, they faced torture and execution." Far from being dictated by military necessity, Brovkin has argued that this level of terror was highly counterproductive. Alienation of the population behind the lines can explain, according to him, both red and white defeats during the civil war. .
In late 1919, successes against the White Russian forces convinced Lenin that it was time to spread the revolution to the West, by force if necessary. When the newly independent
Second Polish Republic began securing its eastern territories annexed by Russia in the
partitions of Poland in the late 18th century, it clashed with Bolshevik forces for dominance in these areas, which led to the outbreak of the
Polish-Soviet War in 1919. With the
revolution in Germany and the
Spartacist League on the rise, Lenin viewed this as the perfect time and place to "probe Europe with the
bayonets of the Red Army." Lenin saw Poland as the bridge that the Red Army would have to cross in order to link up the Russian Revolution with the communist supporters in the German Revolution, and to assist other communist movements in
Western Europe. However the defeat of Soviet Russia in the Polish-Soviet War invalidated these plans.
Lenin was a harsh critic of
imperialism. In 1917 he declared the unconditional right of self-determination and separation for national minorities and oppressed nations, usually defined as those nation-states that were previously subject to capitalist imperial control. However, when the Russian Civil War was won he used military force to assimilate the newly independent nations
Armenia,
Georgia, and
Azerbaijan, arguing that the inclusion of those countries into the newly emerging Soviet government would shelter them from capitalist imperial ambitions. This would allow these countries admittance into the Soviet Union rather than simply forcing them to become part of Russia as would be in imperialist practices.
The long years of war, the Bolshevik policy of War communism, the Russian famine of 1921, and the encirclement of hostile capitalist governments took their toll on Russia, however, and much of the country lay in ruins. There were many peasant uprisings, the largest being the Tambov rebellion. After an uprising by the sailors at
Kronstadt in March 1921, Lenin replaced the policy of War Communism with the
New Economic Policy , in a successful attempt to rebuild
industry and especially
agriculture.
Lenin's fight against anti-Semitism
After the revolution, Lenin worked hard to combat
Anti-Semitism in Russia. In a radio speech in 1919, Lenin said: "The Tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organized
pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. ... Only the most ignorant and downtrodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. ... It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. ... Shame on accursed Tsarism which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations."
Premature death
Lenin's health had already been severely damaged by the intolerable strains of revolution and war. The assassination attempt earlier in his life also added to his health problems. The bullet was still lodged in his neck, too close to his spine for medical techniques of the time to remove. In May 1922, Lenin had his first stroke. He was left partially paralyzed on his right side, and his role in government declined. After the second stroke in December of the same year, he resigned from active politics. In March 1923, he suffered his third stroke and was left bedridden for the remainder of his life, no longer able to speak.
After his first stroke, Lenin dictated several papers regarding the government to his wife. Most famous of these is Lenin's Testament, which among other things criticized top-ranking communists, especially
Joseph Stalin. Of Stalin, who had been the Communist Party's general secretary since April 1922, Lenin said that he had "unlimited authority concentrated in his hands" and suggested that "comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post." Upon Lenin's death, his wife mailed his Testament to the central committee, to be read at the 13th Party Congress in May 1924. However, because the will criticized all of the most prominent figures in the central committee:
Zinoviev,
Kamenev,
Bukharin and
Stalin, the committee had a vested interest in not releasing the will to the wider public. The central committee justified this by claiming that Lenin had been mentally ill in his final years and, as such, his final judgments were not to be trusted. Disregarding the words of Lenin is often perceived to have been a fatal error.
Lenin's Testament was first officially published in 1926 in the
United States by
Max Eastman.
Lenin died on January 21 1924, aged 53. Rumors of Lenin having
syphilis sprang up shortly after his death. The official cause given for Lenin's death was cerebral arteriosclerosis, or a fourth stroke. But out of the 27 physicians who treated him, only eight signed onto that conclusion in his autopsy report. Therefore, several other theories regarding his death have been put forward.
Documents released after the fall of the U.S.S.R., along with memoirs of Lenin's physicians, suggest that Lenin was treated for syphilis as early as 1895. Documents suggest that Alexei Abrikosov, the pathologist in charge of the autopsy, was ordered to prove that Lenin did not die of syphilis. Abrikosov did not mention syphilis in the autopsy; however, the blood-vessel damage, the paralysis and other incapacities he cited are typical of syphilis. Upon a second release of the autopsy report, none of the organs, major arteries, or brain areas usually affected by syphilis were cited.
In 1923, Lenin's doctors treated him with
Salvarsan, the only drug at the time specifically used to treat syphilis, and
potassium iodide, which was customary at the time in treating the disease.
Although he might have had syphilis, he had no visible lesions anywhere on his body that normally accompany the later stages of the disease. Most historians still agree that the most likely cause of his death was a stroke induced by the bullet still lodged in his neck from the assassination attempt.
The city of Petrograd was renamed
Leningrad in his honor three days after Lenin's death. This remained the name of the city until the collapse and liquidation of the Soviet Union in 1991, when it reverted to its original name, St Petersburg.
During the early 1920s the Russian movement of cosmism was quite popular and there was an intent to cryonically preserve Lenin's body in order to revive him in the future. Necessary equipment was purchased abroad, but for a variety of reasons the plan was not realized. Instead his body was embalmed and placed on permanent exhibition in the
Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow on January 27 1924.
After death
Lenin's preserved body is on permanent display at the
Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow.
Because of Lenin's unique role in the creation of the first Communist state, and despite his expressed wish shortly before his death that no memorials be created for him, his character was elevated over time to the point of near religious reverence. By the 1980s, every major city in the Soviet Union had a statue of Lenin in its central square, either a Lenin street or a Lenin Square near the center, and often 20 or more smaller statues and busts throughout its territory. Collective farms, medals, hybrids of wheat, and even an asteroid were named after him. Children were taught stories about "granddaddy Lenin" while they were still in kindergarten.
Since the fall of the Soviet Union, the level of reverence for Lenin in post-Soviet republics has gone down considerably, but he is still considered an important figure by the generations who grew up during the Soviet period. Most statues of Lenin have been torn down in
Eastern Europe, but many still remain in Russia. The city of Leningrad returned to its original name,
St Petersburg, but the surrounding
Leningrad Oblast still carries his name. The citizens of
Ulyanovsk, Lenin's birthplace, have so far resisted all attempts to revert its name to Simbirsk. The subject of interring Lenin's body has been a recurring topic for the past several years in Russia.
Lenin's brain study
Lenin's
brain was removed before his body was
embalmed. The
Soviet government commissioned the well-known German neuroscientist Oskar Vogt to study Lenin's brain and to locate the precise location of the brain cells that are responsible for "genius". The study was performed in Vladimir Bekhterev's Institute of the Brain. Vogt published a paper on the brain in 1929 where he reported that while the brain was discolored, shrunken, and showed "widespread areas of softening", some pyramidal neurons in the third layer of Lenin's
cerebral cortex were very large. However the conclusion of its relevance to genius was contested. Vogt's work was considered unsatisfactory by the Soviets. Further research was continued by the Soviet team, but the work on Lenin's brain was no longer advertised. Contemporary
anatomists are no longer convinced that morphology alone can determine the functioning of the brain.
The name "Lenin"
"Lenin" was one of his revolutionary pseudonyms. He later changed his name from Vladimir Ulyanov to Vladimir Lenin. He was sometimes referred to as "
Nikolai Lenin" in some Western sources: before the October Revolution he signed some of his books and articles as "N. Lenin".
There are various theories on his pseudonym's origin and he is not known to have ever stated exactly why he chose it. It is likely to relate to the River
Lena, in parallel to leading Russian Marxist
Georgi Plekhanov, who used the pseudonym Volgin after the
Volga River. It has been suggested that Lenin picked the
Lena as it is longer and flows in the opposite direction, but Lenin was not opposed to Plekhanov at that time in his life. However, it certainly does not relate to the
Lena execution, because the pseudonym predates this event.
Another possible origin of the name Lenin is from
Vaticinium Lehninense , a prophecy, purpotedly written in 13th or 14th century in the
Lehnin Abbey and first printed in 1722. Ulyanov adopted the pseudonym "Lenin" while staying in
Germany close to the location of
Lehnin Abbey.
See also Names in Russian Empire, Soviet Union and CIS countries#Early Soviet Union about the usage of the name "Lenin".
Censorship of Lenin in the Soviet Union
Lenin's writings were carefully censored under the Soviet regime after his death. In the early 1930s, it became accepted dogma under Stalin to assume that neither Lenin nor the Central Committee could ever be wrong. Therefore, it was necessary to remove evidence of situations where they had actually disagreed, since in those situations it was impossible for both to have been right at the same time. Trotsky was a particularly vocal critic of these practices, which he saw as a form of deification of a mere human being who could, and did, make mistakes. Later, even the fifth
complete Soviet edition of Lenin's works left out parts that either contradicted dogma or showed their author in too poor a light.
See also
References
Further reading
- C.L.R. James, Every Cook Can Govern
- Leon Trotsky, Lenin
- Robert Service, Lenin: A Biography
- Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 by V. I. Lenin, Slavoj Zizek , Verso Books, ISBN 1-85984-661-0
- Louis Fischer, The Life of Lenin, ISBN B00005W8VC
- Leszek Kolakowski, Main Currents of Marxism
- John Gooding, Socialism In Russia: Lenin and His Legacy, 1890–1991
- Anton Pannekoek, Lenin as
