Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulianov, better known by the pseudonym Lenin (April 22, 1870 – January 21, 1924), was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist who served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. Under his administration, Russia and then the Soviet Union became a one-party socialist state ruled by the Communist Party (CPSU). Ideologically Marxist, his political theories are known as Leninism.

Born into an upper-middle-class family in Simbirsk, he became interested in revolutionary socialist politics after the execution of his brother in 1887. Expelled from the Imperial University of Kazan for participating in protests against the tsarist regime of the Russian Empire, in the following years he graduated from if in right. In 1893, he moved to St. Petersburg and became an important figure in the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDRP). In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadežda Krupskaja. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist through his publications. In 1903, he took a pivotal role in an ideological division of the RSDLP, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. He encouraged insurrection during the failed Russian Revolution of 1905, later campaigning for the First World War to be transformed into a European-scale proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would culminate in the collapse of capitalism and its replacement by socialism. After the February Revolution of 1917 toppled the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.

His Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralized power in the new Communist Party. His administration redistributed land among peasants and nationalized banks and industry on a large scale. He pulled the country out of World War I by signing a treaty with the Central Powers and sought to promote world revolution through the Communist International. The government defeated the anti-Bolshevik armies of the right and left in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and participated in the Polish-Soviet War from 1919 to 1921. During the Civil War, opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, concurrent with the White Terror, in a violent campaign run by state security services, where tens of thousands were killed or sent to concentration camps. Responding to the ravages of war, famine and popular uprisings, in 1921 it encouraged economic growth through the market-oriented New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations achieved independence after the Revolution, but three joined Russia for the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922. In increasingly poor health, Lenin expressed opposition to the growing power of his successor, Josef Stalin, before die in Gorki's mansion.

Widely regarded as one of the most important and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin became the center of a posthumous personality cult widespread by the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became the ideological figure behind Marxism-Leninism, and thus , an important influence on the international communist movement. A controversial and highly polarizing individual, Lenin is seen by Marxist-Leninists as a hero of socialism and the working classes, while critics emphasize his role as founder and leader of an authoritarian regime responsible for human rights violations.

First years

Childhood: 1870–87

Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulianov, was from a family of serfs; his ethnic origins remain obscure, with suggestions being made that he was a Russian Chuvash, Mordovius or Kalmyk. Despite this lower-class background, he rose to middle-class status by studying physics and mathematics at Kazan Imperial University before teaching at the Nobility Institute in Penza. Ilya married Maria Alexandrovna Blank in mid-1863. Well-educated and from a relatively prosperous past, she was the daughter of a German-Swedish woman and a Russian Jewish doctor who converted to Christianity. It is likely that he was unaware of his mother's Jewish ancestry, which was only discovered by his sister Anna after her death.Shortly after his marriage, Ilya obtained a job in Nizhny Novgorod, rising to become Headmaster of Primary School in the Simbirsk district six years later. Five years later, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the creation of more than 450 schools as part of the government's plans for modernization. His dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir, which conferred upon him the status of a hereditary nobleman.

Lenin was born in Simbirsk on 10 April 1870 and baptized several days later; as a child, he earned the nickname "Volodya", a diminutive of Vladimir. He was one of eight children, having two older brothers, Anna (born 1864) and Alexander (born 1868). The Ulianovs had three more children, Olga (born 1871), Dmitry (born 1874) and Maria (born 1878). Two of her children later died in infancy. Ilya was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptized his children in it, although his wife – a Lutheran – was largely indifferent to Christianity, which eventually influenced his children.

His parents were liberal monarchists and conservatives, and they were committed to the 1861 emancipation reform introduced by the reformist Tsar Alexander II; they avoided radical politicians and there is no evidence that the police put them under surveillance for subversive thinking. Every summer they spent their holidays in a rural mansion in Kokushkino. Among his brothers, Lenin was closest to Olga, whom he often bossed around; he had an extremely competitive nature and could be destructive, but he usually admitted to his bad behavior. A keen sportsman, he spent much of his time outdoors or playing chess, and excelled in his studies at the disciplined and conservative Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium.

Ilya Ulianov died of a brain hemorrhage in January 1886, when Lenin was 16 years old. Subsequently, his behavior became erratic and conflicted, and he soon renounced his belief in God. At the time, his older brother Alexander — whom he called Sasha — was studying at the University of St. Petersburg. Involved in political agitation against the absolute monarchy of reactionary Tsar Alexander III of Russia, Sasha studied the writings of banned leftists and organized anti-government protests. He joined a revolutionary cell that planned to assassinate the Emperor and was selected to build a bomb. Before the attack could take place the conspirators were arrested and tried, and in May Sasha was executed by hanging.Despite the emotional trauma of the deaths of his father and brother, Lenin continued to study, graduated with a gold medal for outstanding performance, and decided to study law at Kazan University.

University and political radicalization: 1887–93

Upon entering the University of Kazan in August 1887, Lenin moved into a nearby apartment. There he joined a zemlyachestvo , a form of university society that represented people from a certain region. This group elected him as their representative to the university's student council, and in December, he participated in a demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested him and accused him of being a leader in the demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's estate in Kokushkino. There he read voraciously, falling in love with the pro-revolutionary novel Que Fazer? (1863) by Nikolay Chernyshevsky.

His mother was concerned about his radicalization and she played a key role in convincing the Ministry of the Interior to allow Lenin to return to the city of Kazan, though not to the university. On his return, he joined the revolutionary circle of Nikolai Fedoseev, through which he discovered Karl Marx 's book Capital (1867). This sparked his interest in Marxism, a sociopolitical theory that argues that society developed at different stages through class struggle and that capitalist society would eventually give way to socialist society and then communist society.Distrustful of his political views, Lenin's mother bought a country estate in the village of Alakaevka, Samara Oblast, in hopes that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. However, he had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the property as a summer home.

In September 1889, the Ulianov family moved to the city of Samara, where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko's socialist discussion circle. Sklyarenko and Lenin adopted Marxism, and the latter translated Marx and Friedrich Engels' political pamphlet Communist Manifesto (1848) into Russian. He began reading the works of Russian Marxist Georgy Plekhanov, agreeing with his argument that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat rather than the peasantry. This philosophical view contrasted with the ideas of the populist movement (or narodnik, as Russian populists were known) agrarian-socialist, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby deflecting capitalism. This view of the Narodniks developed in the 1860s with the People's Will Party and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Although Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument, he was influenced by adherents of this view such as Pyotr Tkachev and Sergey Nechayev, and befriended several Narodniks.

In May 1890, Maria—who maintained social influence as a nobleman's widow—persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his external examinations at St. Petersburg University, where he earned the equivalent of a first-class degree with honors. Graduation celebrations were marked when her sister Olga died of typhoid fever. Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer.He devoted a lot of time to radical politics, remaining active in Skylarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, he collected data on Russian society, using it to support a Marxist interpretation of social development and against the Narodniks' claims. At this time he wrote an article on peasant economics, which was rejected by the liberal magazine Russkaya Mysl ("Russian Thought").

Revolutionary activism

Early activism and imprisonment: 1893–1900

In the autumn of 1893, Lenin moved to St. Petersburg. There, he worked as a lawyer's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell that called itself "Social Democrats", influenced by the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany. Publicly promoting Marxism within the socialist movement, he encouraged the founding of revolutionary cells in the industrial centers of Russia. In the autumn of 1894, he led a Marxist working-class circle, and meticulously covered his tracks, knowing that police spies were trying to infiltrate the movement. He began a romantic relationship with Nadežda "Nadya" Krupskaja, a Marxist teacher. He also wrote a political treatise criticizing agrarian-socialist populists,Who are the "Friends of the People" and how do they fight the Social Democrats? , based largely on his experiences in Samara; about 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894.

Lenin hoped to cement connections between his Social Democrats and the Emancipation of Labour, a Swiss-based group of Russian Marxist émigrés; he visited the country to meet the group's members, Plekhanov and Pavel Akselrod. He proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and research the Paris Commune of 1871, which he considered an early prototype for a proletarian government. Funded by his mother, he stayed at a Swiss health spa before traveling to Berlin, where he studied for six weeks at the Staatsbibliothek and met Marxist activist Wilhelm Liebknecht. Returning to Russia with a stock of illegal revolutionary publications, he traveled to various cities distributing such literature to striking workers.Involved in the production of the periodical Rabochee delo ("Cause of Workers"), he was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition.

Refusing legal representation or bail, Lenin denied all charges against him, but remained in prison for a year before sentencing. He spent that time theorizing and writing. In this period, he went on to analyze that the rise of industrial capitalism in Russia had caused large numbers of peasants to move to the cities, where they formed a proletariat. From his Marxist perspective, he argued that this Russian proletariat would develop class consciousness, which in turn would lead them to violently overthrow tsarism, aristocracy, and the bourgeoisie, establishing a proletarian state that would move towards socialism.

In February 1897, he was sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia, although he was granted a few days in St. Petersburg to put his affairs in order. He used this time to meet with the Social Democrats, who renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. His journey to eastern Siberia took 11 weeks, many of which he was accompanied by his mother and sisters. Considered only a minor threat to the government, he was exiled to a peasants' hut in Shushenskoye, in the Minusinsky district, where he was kept under police surveillance; he was able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him, and was allowed to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and hunt ducks and snipes.

In May 1898, Nadya joined him in exile, being arrested in August 1896 for organizing a strike. Although initially detained in Ufa, she persuaded the authorities to move her to Shushenskoye, claiming that she and Lenin were engaged. Lenin and Nadya were married in a church on July 10, 1898. Establishing a family life with Nadya's mother, Elizaveta Vasilyevna, in Shushenskoye, the couple translated English socialist literature into Russian. Eager to follow the evolution of German Marxism – where there was an ideological divide, with revisionists like Eduard Bernstein advocating a peaceful and electoral path to socialism – Lenin remained devoted to violent revolution, attacking revisionist arguments in A Protest of the Russian Social Democrats .He also finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), his longest book to date, in which he criticized agrarian socialists and promoted a Marxist analysis of economic development in Russia. He published under the pseudonym "Vladimir Ilin", after the work received predominantly poor reviews.

Munich, London and Switzerland: 1900–05

After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in the early 1900s. There he began to raise funds for the newspaper Iskra ("Spark"), the new organ of the Russian Marxist Party, which now called itself the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party ( RSDLP). In July 1900 he left Russia for Western Europe; in Switzerland he met with other Russian Marxists and, at a conference in Corsier, agreed to launch the Munich paper, where he moved in September. Containing contributions from prominent European Marxists, Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country's most successful underground publication for 50 years. He adopted the pseudonym "Lenin" in December 1901, possibly inspired by the River Lena;he often used the pseudonym "N. Lenin", and although the "N" stood for nothing, a popular misconception later arose that it meant "Nikolai". Under this pseudonym, he published the political pamphlet Que Fazer? in 1902; his most influential publication to date dealt with his thoughts on the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution.

Nadya joined her husband in Munich, becoming his personal secretary. They continued their political militancy while Lenin wrote for Iskra and drafted the RSDLP program, attacking ideological dissidents and outside critics, particularly the Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR), a Narodnik agrarian-socialist group founded in 1901 . the opinion of populists on the revolutionary power of the Russian peasantry, in accordance with the pamphlet To the Poor in the Countryside , of 1903. To escape the Bavarian police, Lenin moved to London with Iskra in April 1902, there he befriended the Russian Marxist Leon Trotsky.In London, Lenin fell ill with erysipelas and was unable to take a leading role on the editorial board of Iskra ; in his absence, the council moved its base of operations to Geneva.

In July 1903, the II RSDLP Congress was held in London. At the conference, a schism arose between the supporters of Lenin and those of Julius Martov. Martov argued that party members should be able to express themselves independently of party leadership; Lenin disagreed, emphasizing the need for strong leadership with full control over the party. Lenin's supporters were the majority, calling themselves Bolsheviks ("majority", in Russian bol'sheviki ); as opposed to Martov's Mensheviks ("minority", in Russian men'sheviki ).Discussions between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks continued after the conference; the Bolsheviks accused their rivals of being undisciplined opportunists and reformers, while the Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and an autocrat. Infuriated by the Mensheviks, he resigned from the editorial board of Iskra and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik treatise One Step Forward, Two Steps Back . The stress made Lenin ill, and to recover he took to hiking during holidays in rural Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; in spring the entire RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded the newspaper Vperëd ("Progressive").

Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath: 1905–14

In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparked a wave of civil unrest that became known as the Revolution of 1905. Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to take a greater role in events, encouraging violent insurrection. In doing so, he adopted PSR slogans such as "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "expropriation of noble lands", resulting in Menshevik accusations that he had deviated from orthodox Marxism. In turn, he insisted that the Bolsheviks completely separate from the Mensheviks, although many members of the faction refused, and both groups attended the III RSDLP Congress, held in London in April 1905.Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution , published in August, predicting that Russia's liberal bourgeoisie would be sated by a transition to constitutional monarchy and thus betray the revolution; arguing that the proletariat would have to build an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the tsarist regime and establish the "provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry".

The insurrection has already begun. Strength against Strength. Street fighting is raging, barricades are being thrown, rifles are cracking, guns are seething. Rivers of blood are flowing, the civil war for freedom is burning. Moscow and the South, the Caucasus and Poland are ready to join the St. Petersburg proletariat. The workers' motto became: Freedom or Death!Lenin on the 1905 Revolution

In response to the 1905 Revolution, Tsar Nicholas II accepted a series of liberal reforms in his October Manifesto, after which Lenin felt safe to return to St. Petersburg. Joining the editorial board of Novaya Zhizn ("New Life"), a radical legal journal run by Maria Andreyeva, he used it to discuss issues facing the RSDLP. He encouraged the party to seek greater membership and advocated continued escalation of violent confrontation, believing that both were necessary measures for revolutionary success.Recognizing that membership fees and donations from some wealthy supporters were insufficient to finance the activities of the Bolsheviks, he endorsed the idea of ​​robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Under the leadership of Leonid Krasin, a group of Bolsheviks began carrying out such criminal actions, the best known taking place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks under the leadership of Josef Stalin carried out an armed robbery of the Tiflis bank. , Georgia.

Although he briefly advocated the idea of ​​reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin's advocacy of violence was condemned by the Mensheviks at the Fourth Party Congress held in Stockholm in April 1906. Lenin was involved in the creation of a Bolshevik Center in Kuokkala, Grand Duchy of Finland, at the time a semi-autonomous part of the Russian Empire, before the Bolsheviks regained dominance of the RSDLP at their Fifth Congress, held in London in May 1907. However, as the Tsarist government quelled opposition — both by dissolving Russia's Legislative Assembly, the Second Duma, and ordering its secret police, the Okhrana, to arrest revolutionaries—Lenin fled from Finland to Switzerland.There he tried to exchange stolen Tiflis banknotes that had identifiable serial numbers on them.

Alexander Bogdanov and other prominent Bolsheviks decided to move the faction's center to Paris; although Lenin disagreed, he moved to the city in December 1908. Lenin disliked the French capital, criticizing it as "a dirty hole", and while there he sued a driver who knocked him off his bicycle.He became a major critic of Bogdanov's view that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture in order to become a successful revolutionary vehicle. Instead, Lenin favored the idea of ​​a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia that would lead the working classes in revolution. Furthermore, Bogdanov – influenced by Ernst Mach – believed that all concepts in the world were relative, while Lenin was an adherent of the orthodox Marxist view that there was an objective reality independent of human observation. Although Bogdanov and Lenin lived together in Maxim Gorky's house in Capri in April 1908,in Paris, their discussions encouraged a split within the Bolshevik faction between his followers and those of Bogdanov, who accused him of deviating from Marxism.

Lenin lived briefly in London in May 1908, where he used the British Museum Reading Room to write Materialism and Empiriocriticism , an attack on what he described as the "bourgeois reactionary falsehood" of Bogdanov's relativism. His factionalism began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including Aleksei Rykov and Lev Kamenev. The Okhrana exploited its factional attitude by sending a spy, Roman Malinovsky, to act as a supporter of Lenin's party. Several Bolsheviks expressed their suspicions about Malinovsky to Lenin, and while it is unclear whether he was aware of the role assigned to the spy, it is possible that Lenin used Malinovsky to supply false information to the Okhrana.

In August 1910, Lenin attended the Eighth Congress of the Second International—an international gathering of socialists—in Copenhagen as the RSDLP representative, later spending a holiday in Stockholm with his mother. With his wife and sisters, he moved to France, settling first in Bombon and then in Paris. He then became a close friend of the French Bolshevik Inês Armand; some biographers suggest that they had an extramarital affair between 1910 and 1912. Meanwhile, at a meeting in Paris in June 1911, the RSDLP Central Committee decided to shift its focus of operations to Russia, ordering the closure of the Bolshevik Center and his newspaper, Proletari .Seeking to rebuild his importance in the party, Lenin arranged for a conference to be held in Prague in January 1912, and although 16 of the 18 attendants were Bolsheviks, he was heavily criticized for his factional tendencies and failed to broaden his influence within the party.

Moving to Krakow in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria, a culturally Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he used the Jagiellonian University library to conduct research. He remained in close contact with the RSDLP, which was operating in the Russian Empire, convincing Bolshevik Duma members to secede from the parliamentary alliance with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, Stalin – whom Lenin referred to as the "wonderful Georgian" – visited him, and they discussed the future of non-Russian ethnic groups in the Empire. Due to the ill health of Lenin and his wife, they moved to the rural town of Biały Dunajec, before going to Bern for Nadya to have surgery on her goiter.

World War I: 1914–17

The [First] [World] War is being fought for the division of colonies and the theft of foreign territory; thieves have fallen – and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of the thieves to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an inconceivable bourgeois lie.Lenin's Interpretation of World War I

I was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. The conflict pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, he was detained and briefly imprisoned until his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife returned to Bern before moving to Zurich in February 1916. He was angry that the German Social Democratic Party supported his country's war effort—a direct contravention of the Second International Stuttgart Resolution that the socialist parties would oppose the conflict—and thus saw the Second International as extinct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916,urging socialists across the continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continental "civil war" with the proletariat against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In July 1916, his mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. The death of his mother affected him deeply, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before he saw the proletarian revolution.

In September 1917, he published Imperialism: Higher Phase of Capitalism , in which he argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism, as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and the cheapest raw materials. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that the war between the imperialist powers would continue until the ruling classes were overthrown by the proletarian revolution and socialism was established. He spent much of this time reading the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach and Aristotle, all of whom had been key influences on Marx.This changed his interpretation of Marxism; while he believed that policies could be developed on the basis of predetermined scientific principles, he concluded that the only proof of whether the policy was correct was its practice. Although he still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, he began to deviate from some of Marx's predictions about social development; whereas the German philosopher believed that a "bourgeois democratic revolution" of the middle classes must take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia the proletariat could overthrow the tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution.

February Revolution and July Days: 1917

In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in St. Petersburg — renamed Petrograd at the start of World War I — as industrial workers went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions. The unrest spread to other parts of Russia, and fearing that he would be violently overthrown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The State Duma took control of the country, establishing a 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 over leadership of the Bolsheviks, but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict. He arranged a plan with other dissidents to negotiate passage for them through Germany, with whom Russia was at war. Recognizing that these dissidents could cause trouble for their Russian enemies, the German government agreed to allow 32 Russian citizens to travel in a rail car through its territory, among them Lenin and his wife. The group traveled by train from Zurich to Sassnitz, then took a ferry to Trelleborg, Sweden, and from there to Helsinki before taking the final train to Petrograd.

Arriving at Petrograd's Finland Station, he delivered a speech to Bolshevik partisans condemning the Provisional Government and calling again for a continental proletarian revolution in Europe. During the following days, he spoke at faction meetings, criticizing those who wanted reconciliation with the Mensheviks and revealing his April Theses , an outline of his plans for the Bolsheviks, which he had written on the trip from Switzerland.He publicly condemned the Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries — who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet — for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. Considering that the government was as imperialist as the tsarist regime, it advocated immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, nationalization of industry and banks, state expropriation of land, and government by the soviets, all with the intention of establish a proletarian government and the development of a socialist society. In contrast, the Mensheviks believed that Russia was not sufficiently developed for the socialist transition and accused Lenin of trying to plunge the new Republic into civil war.During the next few months, he campaigned on behalf of his militant views, attending meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee, prolifically writing for the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda , and giving public speeches in Petrograd with the aim of converting workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants to your cause.

Sensing growing frustration among Bolshevik supporters, he suggested an armed political demonstration in Petrograd to test the government's response. However, amid worsening health, he left the city to recuperate in the Finnish village of Neivola. The Bolsheviks' armed demonstration, in what became known as the July Days, took place while Lenin was absent, but upon learning that the protesters had clashed violently with government forces, he returned to Petrograd and called for calm. Responding to the violence, the government ordered the arrest of Lenin and other prominent party members, raiding their offices, and publicly claiming he was a German "agent provocateur".Escaping from prison, he hid in a series of security houses in Petrograd. Fearing his death, Lenin and Senior Bolshevik Grigori Zinoviev escaped the city in disguise, moving to Razliv. There he began work on The State and Revolution , an exposition of how he believed the socialist state would develop after the proletarian revolution and how, from then on, the state would gradually disappear, leaving a purely communist society. He began advocating an armed insurrection led by the Bolsheviks to overthrow the government, although at a clandestine meeting of the party's central committee such an idea was rejected.Lenin then traveled by train and on foot to Finland, arriving in Helsinki on 10 August, where he hid in the safe houses of Bolshevik sympathizers.

October Revolution: 1917

In August 1917, while in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the Russian army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be an attempted military coup against the Provisional Government. Prime Minister Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet — including its Bolshevik members — to help revolutionaries organize workers like Red Guards to defend the city. The coup was thwarted before reaching Petrograd, although events allowed the Bolsheviks to return to the open political scene. Fearing a reaction from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet were instrumental in pressuring the government to normalize relations with the Bolsheviks.Both the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their support for the Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalized on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet. In September, the faction gained a majority in the workers' sections of the Moscow and Petrograd soviets.

Recognizing that the situation was safer for him, Lenin returned to Petrograd. There, he attended a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 October, where he again argued that the party should lead an armed insurrection to overthrow the Provisional Government. This time the argument won with ten votes to two. Critics of the plan, Zinoviev and Kamenev, argued that Russian workers would not support a violent coup against the regime and that there was no clear evidence of Lenin's claim that all of Europe was on the brink of proletarian revolution. The party began organizing the offensive, holding a final meeting at the Smolny Institute on 24 October.This was the basis of the Military Revolutionary Committee (CMR), an armed militia largely loyal to the Bolsheviks that had been established by the Petrograd Soviet during the Kornilov coup.

In October, the CMR received orders to take control of Petrograd's main transport, communication, printing and utilities centers without bloodshed. The Bolsheviks besieged the government at the Winter Palace and overthrew it, arresting its ministers after the cruiser Aurora , controlled by Bolshevik sailors, fired on the building. During the insurrection, Lenin delivered 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 Commissariat or "Sovnarkom". Initially Lenin refused the President's leadership position, suggesting Trotsky for the job, but other Bolsheviks insisted and eventually he relented.Lenin and other Bolsheviks attended the Second Congress of Soviets on October 26 and 27 and announced the creation of the new government. Menshevik participants condemned the illegitimate seizure of power and the risk of civil war. In these early days of the new regime, Lenin avoided speaking in Marxist and socialist terms so as not to alienate the Russian population, and instead talked about having a country controlled by workers. He and many other Bolsheviks expected the proletarian revolution to sweep Europe in days or months.

Government

Organization of the Soviet government: 1917–18

The Provisional Government had planned a Constituent Assembly to be elected in November 1917; against Lenin's objections, Sovnarkom agreed that the vote should take place as planned. In the constitutional elections, the Bolsheviks won approximately a quarter of the votes, being defeated by the peasant-based Socialist Revolutionary Party. Lenin argued that the election was not a fair reflection of the will of the people, that the electorate did not have time to learn the political program from the Bolsheviks, and that the candidate lists had been drawn up before the Left Socialist Revolutionaries split from the Socialist Revolutionaries. However, the newly elected Russian Constituent Assembly met in Petrograd in January 1918.Sovnarkom argued that the Assembly was counter-revolutionary because it tried 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 proof of its counter-revolutionary nature and forcibly dismantled it.

Lenin rejected repeated calls — including from some Bolsheviks — to establish a coalition government with other socialist parties. However, Sovnarkom partially relented; despite refusing a coalition with the Mensheviks or Socialist Revolutionaries, in December 1917 the Left Socialist Revolutionaries were allowed five cabinet posts. This coalition only lasted four months, until March 1918, when the Left Socialist Revolutionaries withdrew from the government over a disagreement over the Bolsheviks' approach to ending World War I.At their Seventh Congress in March 1918, the Bolsheviks changed their official name from the "Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party" to the "Russian Communist Party". Lenin wanted to distance his group from the increasingly reformist Social Democratic Party of Germany and emphasize its ultimate goal: a communist society.

Although power officially rested with the government of the country in the form of the Sovnarkom and Executive Committee (VTsIK), elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (CSTR), the Communist Party was de facto in control of Russia, as recognized by its members at the moment. In 1918, Sovnarkom began to act unilaterally, citing a need for convenience, with the CSTR and VTsIK becoming increasingly marginalized, so the soviets no longer ruled Russia. During 1918 and 1919, the government expelled Mensheviks and Social Revolutionaries from the soviets. Russia became a one-party state.

Within the party a Political Agency (Politburo) and Organizational Office (Orgburo) were established to accompany the existing Central Committee; the decisions of these party bodies had to be adopted by Sovnarkom and the Council of Labor and Defense. Lenin was the central figure in this governance structure; in addition to being the President of Sovnarkom and being on the Council of Labor and Defense, he participated in the Central Committee and the Politburo of the Communist Party. The only individual who came close to this influence was his right-hand man, Yakov Sverdlov, who died in March 1919 during an influenza pandemic. In November 1917, Lenin and his wife lived in a two-room apartment inside the Smolny Institute, and the following month they left for a brief holiday in Halia, Finland.In January 1918, he survived an assassination attempt in Petrograd; Fritz Platten, who was with Lenin at the time, protected him and was wounded by a bullet.

Concerned that the German army posed a threat to Petrograd, in March 1918 Sovnarkom moved to Moscow, initially as a temporary measure. There, Lenin, Trotsky and other Bolshevik leaders moved to the Kremlin, where the party leader lived with his wife and sister Maria in a first-floor apartment adjacent to the room in which the Council of People's Commissariat meetings were held. Lenin disliked Moscow, although he rarely left the city center for the rest of his life. It was here, in August 1918, that he survived a second assassination attempt, shot after a public speech and seriously wounded. A Socialist Revolutionary, Fanni Kaplan, was arrested and executed.The attack was widely covered in the Russian press, generating much sympathy for him and increasing his popularity. As a break, in September 1918 he was taken to the Gorky estate outside Moscow, recently acquired by the government.

Social, legal and economic reforms: 1917–18

To all Workers, Soldiers and Peasants. The Soviet authority will immediately propose a democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will safeguard the uncompensated transfer of all land – crown and church property – to peasant committees; it will defend the rights of soldiers, introducing a complete democratization of the army; it will establish workers' control over the industry; will ensure the convening of the Constituent Assembly on the fixed date; he will supply the cities with bread and the villages with necessities of life; and it will guarantee to all nationalities that inhabit Russia the right to self-determination... Long live the revolution!Lenin's political program, October 1917

Upon taking power, Lenin's regime issued a series of decrees. The first was the Land Decree, which declared that the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church should be nationalized and redistributed to peasants by local governments. This contrasted with their desire for agricultural collectivization, but provided government recognition of the widespread assaults on peasant land that had already taken place. In November 1917, the government issued the Decree on the Press which closed many opposition media, considered counter-revolutionary. They claimed the measure would be temporary, although the decree was widely criticized, including by many Bolsheviks, for compromising press freedom.

In November 1917, the government published the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia, which declared that non-Russian ethnic groups living within the Republic had the right to cede Russian authority and establish their own independent nation-states. Citing this as legal justification, many nations declared independence: Finland and Lithuania in December 1917, Latvia and Ukraine in January 1918, Estonia in February 1918, Transcaucasia in April 1918, and Poland in November 1918. Soon, the Bolsheviks encouraged actively the communist parties in these now independent states,while in July 1918, at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets, a constitution was passed that reformed the Russian Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic. Seeking to modernize the country, the government officially converted Russia from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar used in Europe.

In November 1917, Sovnarkom issued a decree abolishing Russia's legal system, calling for the use of "revolutionary conscience" to replace the abolished laws. The courts were replaced by a two-tier system: Revolutionary Courts to deal with counter-revolutionary crimes and People's Courts to deal with civil torts and other crimes. They were instructed to ignore pre-existing laws, and base their decisions on Sovnarkom decrees and a "socialist sense of justice". In November there was also a reform of the armed forces; the Council of the People's Commissariat implemented egalitarian measures, abolished prior hierarchies, titles and medals, and called on soldiers to establish committees to elect their commanders.

In October 1917, a decree was issued limiting work to eight hours a day for all workers in Russia. Also issued was the Decree on Popular Education which stipulated that the government would guarantee free and secular education for all children in the country and a decree establishing a system of state orphanages. To combat mass illiteracy, a literacy campaign was started; about 5 million people enrolled in intensive courses in basic literacy from 1920 to 1926. Embracing gender equality, laws were introduced that helped to emancipate women, giving them economic autonomy from their husbands and eliminating restrictions on divorce. .A Bolshevik women's organization, Genotdel, was established to further these goals. Under his rule, Russia became the first country to legalize abortion at the request of a woman during the first trimester of pregnancy. Militant atheist Lenin and the Communist Party wanted to demolish organized religion, and in January 1918 the government decreed the separation of church and state and banned religious instruction in schools.

In the month following the revolution, the Decree on Workers' Control was issued, which called on the workers of each company to establish an elected committee to monitor the management of their companies. That month, the government also issued an order requisitioning the country's gold, and nationalized the banks, which Lenin saw as an important step towards the establishment of socialism. In December, Sovnarkom established a Supreme Council of the National Economy (Vesenkha or VSNKh), which had authority over industry, banking, agriculture and commerce. The factory committees were subordinate to the unions, which were subordinate to the VSNKh; thus, the economic plan centralized in the State was prioritized over the local economic interests of the workers.In early 1918, Sovnarkom canceled all external debts and refused to pay the interest owed on them. In April, foreign trade was nationalized, establishing a state monopoly over imports and exports. In June, the nationalization of public services, railways, engineering, textiles, metallurgy and mining was decreed, even though these were often state-owned only in name. Large-scale nationalization did not occur until November 1920, when small-scale industrial enterprises were placed under state control.

A faction of the Bolsheviks known as "Left Communists" criticized Sovnarkom's economic policy as too moderate; they wanted the nationalization of all industry, agriculture, commerce, finance, transport and communication. Lenin believed that this was impractical at that juncture and that the government should only nationalize Russia's large capitalist enterprises, such as banks, railways, larger estates, and larger factories and mines, allowing small businesses to operate privately until they grew large enough to be successfully nationalized.He also disagreed with the left communists about economic organization; in June 1918, he argued that centralized economic control of industry was necessary, while left communists wanted every factory to be controlled by its workers, a syndicalist approach that Lenin considered harmful to the cause of socialism.

Adopting a left-libertarian perspective, left communists and other factions in the Communist Party have criticized the decline of democratic institutions in Russia. Internationally, many socialists criticized Lenin's regime and denied that he was establishing socialism; in particular, they highlighted the lack of broad political participation, popular consultation and industrial democracy. In the autumn of 1918, the Czech-Austrian Marxist Karl Kautsky, author of an anti-Leninist pamphlet, condemned the undemocratic character of Soviet Russia, to which Lenin published a vociferous response. The German Marxist Rosa Luxemburg echoed Kautsky's views,while Russian anarchist Piotr Kropotkin described the Bolshevik seizure of power as "the burial of the Russian Revolution".

Treaty of Brest-Litovsk: 1917–18

By prolonging the war, we are unusually reinforcing German imperialism, and the peace will have to be concluded anyway, but then it will be worse, because it will be concluded by someone other than ourselves. No doubt the peace we are forcing to happen is indecent, but if war breaks out, our government will be swept away and peace will be completed by another.Lenin on Peace with the Central Powers

Upon assuming power, Lenin believed that a key policy of his government should be to withdraw the country from the First World War by establishing an armistice with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. He believed that the ongoing war would create resentment among war-weary Russian troops — to whom he had promised peace — and that these troops and the advancing German army threatened both his own government and international socialism. On the other hand, other Bolsheviks — in particular Bukharin and the Left Communists — believed that peace with the Central Powers would be a betrayal of international socialism and that Russia should "fight a war of revolutionary defense" that would provoke a revolt of the German proletariat. against their own government.

Lenin proposed a three-month armistice in his Peace Decree of November 1917, which was approved by the Second Congress of Soviets and presented to the German and Austro-Hungarian governments. The Germans responded positively, seeing this as an opportunity to focus on the Western Front and avoid the next defeat. In November, armistice negotiations began in Brest-Litovsk, the headquarters of the German command on the Eastern Front, with the Russian delegation being led by Trotsky and Adolph Joffe. Meanwhile, a ceasefire was agreed until January. During the negotiations, the Germans insisted on keeping their conquests — which included Poland, Lithuania and Courland — while the Russians argued that this would be a violation of these nations' rights to self-determination.Some Bolsheviks expressed the hope of dragging out the negotiations until the proletarian revolution broke out across Europe. On January 7, 1918, Trotsky returned from Brest-Litovsk to St. Petersburg with an ultimatum from the Central Powers: either Russia accepted Germany's territorial claims or the war would resume.

In January and again in February, Lenin urged the Bolsheviks to accept Germany's proposals. He argued that territorial losses were acceptable if they guaranteed the survival of the Bolshevik government. Most Bolsheviks rejected his position, hoping to prolong the armistice and win Germany's bluff. On 18 February, the German Army relaunched the offensive, advancing further into Russian-held territory and within a day conquering Dvinsk. At this point Lenin finally convinced a small majority of the Bolshevik Central Committee to accept the demands of the Central Forces.However, on February 23, the Central Powers issued a new ultimatum: Russia must recognize German control of not only Poland and the Baltic countries, but also Ukraine, or face a full-scale invasion.

On March 3, the Treaty of Brest-Litovski was signed. The treaty resulted in massive territorial losses for Russia, with 26% of the former Empire's population, 37% of its agricultural harvest area, 28% of its industry, 26% of its railways and three-quarters of its coal and iron deposits transferred. to German control. As a result, the Treaty was deeply unpopular across Russia's political spectrum, and several Bolsheviks and Left Socialist Revolutionaries renounced Sovnarkom in protest. After the Treaty, Sovnarkom focused on trying to foment the proletarian revolution in Germany, issuing a series of anti-war and anti-government publications in the country; the German government retaliated by expelling the Russian diplomats.In November 1918, German Emperor Wilhelm II resigned and the country's new administration signed an armistice with the Allies. As a result, Sovnarkom considered the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk to be void.

Anti-Kulak Campaigns, Cheka and Red Terror: 1918–22

The bourgeoisie exercised terror against workers, soldiers and peasants in the interests of a small group of landowners and bankers, while the Soviet regime applies decisive measures against landowners, looters and their accomplices in the interests of workers, soldiers and peasants. .Lenin on the Red Terror

In the spring of 1918, many cities in western Russia faced famine as a result of chronic food shortages. Lenin blamed the kulaks — wealthier peasants — who allegedly hoarded the grain they produced to increase their financial value. In May 1918, the government issued a requisition order that established armed detachments to confiscate grain from the kulaks for distribution in the cities, and in June called for the formation of Poor Peasants' Committees to assist in the requisition. This policy resulted in widespread social disorder and violence, as armed detachments often clashed with peasant groups, helping to set the stage for civil war.A prominent example of Lenin's views was his August telegram to the Penza Bolsheviks, in which he urged them to suppress a peasant insurrection by publicly hanging at least 100 "known kulaks, rich men and bloodsuckers".

The requirement discouraged peasants from producing more grain than they could personally consume, and so production fell. A booming black market complemented the official state-sanctioned economy, and Lenin called for speculators, clandestine traders, and looters to be killed. Both the Socialist Revolutionaries and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries condemned the armed appropriations of grain at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of Soviets in July 1918. Realizing that the Poor Peasants' Committees also persecuted those who were not kulaks, thus contributing to sentiment anti-Bolshevik among the peasants, in December 1918 the government abolished them.

Lenin repeatedly emphasized the need for terror and violence to overthrow the old order and ensure the success of the revolution. Speaking to the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in November 1917, he declared that "the state is an institution built by the exercise of violence. Previously, this violence was exercised by a handful of sacks of money against the whole people; now we want . .. organize violence in the interest of the people." He vehemently opposed suggestions to abolish the death penalty. Fearing an overthrow of the government by anti-Bolshevik forces, in December 1917 Lenin ordered the creation of the Emergency Commission to Combat Counterrevolution and Sabotage, or Cheka, a political police led by Félix Dzerzhinsky.

In September 1918, Sovnarkom passed a decree that inaugurated the Red Terror, a repressive system orchestrated by the Cheka. Although sometimes described as an attempt to eliminate the bourgeoisie, Lenin did not want to exterminate all members of this class, only those who sided with reaction. Most of the victims of the Terror were successful citizens or former members of the Tsarist administration, however others were non-bourgeois anti-Bolsheviks and people perceived as undesirable, such as prostitutes. The Cheka claimed the right to sentence and execute anyone deemed an enemy of the government, without resorting to the Revolutionary Courts.Consequently, throughout Soviet Russia, the organization carried out assassinations, often in large numbers. The Cheka in Petrograd, for example, executed 512 people in a few days. There are no surviving records to provide a precise number of how many perished in the Red Terror, although later historians' estimates ranged from 10,000 to 15,000 in one estimate and 50,000 to 140,000 in another.

Lenin never witnessed this violence or participated in it personally, publicly distancing himself from it. His published articles and speeches rarely required executions, though he regularly did so in his coded telegrams and confidential notes. Many Bolsheviks expressed disapproval of the Cheka's mass executions and feared the organization's apparent irresponsibility. The party brought attempts to restrict its activities in February 1919, stripping it of its court and enforcement powers in areas not subject to official martial law, although the Cheka continued to carry out massacres across the country. By 1920, the Cheka had become the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia, exerting influence over all other state apparatuses.

A decree in April 1919 resulted in the establishment of concentration camps, which were entrusted to the Cheka, which would later be managed by a new government agency, the Gulag. By the end of 1920, 84 camps had been established across Soviet Russia, holding about 50,000 prisoners; by October 1923, this number had grown to 315 camps and about 70,000 prisoners. Those interned in the camps were used as slave laborers. From July 1922 onwards, intellectuals opposed to the Bolshevik government were exiled to inhospitable regions or deported from Russia; Lenin personally examined the lists of people to be treated in this way.In May 1922, he issued a decree calling for the execution of anti-Bolshevik priests, causing between 14,000 and 20,000 deaths. While the Russian Orthodox Church was most affected, the government's anti-religious policies also impacted Roman Catholic and Protestant churches, Jewish synagogues and Islamic mosques.

Civil War and Polish-Soviet War: 1918–20

The existence of the Soviet Republic alongside the imperialist states in the long term is unthinkable. In the end, one or the other will triumph. And until that end has come, a series of the most terrible conflicts between the Soviet Republic and the bourgeois governments is inevitable. This means that the ruling class, the proletariat, if it only wants to govern and must govern, must also demonstrate this with its military organization.Lenin on the war

Although Lenin expected the opposition of the Russian aristocracy and bourgeoisie to his rule, he believed that the numerical superiority of the lower classes, coupled with the Bolsheviks' ability to organize them effectively, would guarantee a quick victory in any conflict. In this, he failed to anticipate the intensity of the violent opposition to Bolshevik power in the country. The Russian Civil War that followed pitted the pro-Bolshevik Reds against the anti-Bolshevik Whites, but also encompassed ethnic strife on Russia's borders and clashes between the Red and White armies and local peasant groups, the Green Armies, throughout the former Empire. .Thus, several historians have seen the civil war as representing two distinct conflicts: one between revolutionaries and counter-revolutionaries, and the other between different revolutionary factions.

The White Army was created by former tsarist military officers and included Anton Denikin's Volunteer Army in Southern Russia, Aleksandr Kolchak's forces in Siberia , and Nikolai Yudenich's troops in the newly independent Baltic States. The Whites were reinforced when 35,000 members of the Czech Legion — prisoners of war from the conflict with the Central Powers — turned against Sovnarkom and allied themselves with the Committee of Members of the Constituent Assembly (Komuch), an anti-Bolshevik government established in Samara. The Whites were also supported by Western governments who perceived the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk as a betrayal of the Allied war effort and feared the Bolsheviks' calls for world revolution.In 1918, the United Kingdom, France, United States, Canada, Italy and Serbia landed 10,000 soldiers in Murmansk, seized Kandalaksha, while later that year British, American and Japanese forces landed in Vladivostok. Western troops soon withdrew from the civil war, supporting the Whites only with officers, technicians, and armaments, but Japan remained because it saw the conflict as an opportunity for territorial expansion.

Lenin commissioned Trotsky to establish a Workers' and Peasants' Red Army, and with his support organized a Revolutionary Military Council in September 1918, of which he remained president until 1925. Recognizing his valuable military experience, Lenin agreed that officers of the former army Tsarists could serve in the Red Army, although Trotsky established military councils to monitor their activities. The Reds held control of Russia's two largest cities, Moscow and Petrograd, as well as most of Greater Russia, while the Whites were largely located on the former outskirts of the Empire. Whites, however, were disadvantaged by being fragmented and dispersed geographically,and because his ideas of Russian ethnic supremacy alienated national minorities from the regions where they were present. Anti-Bolshevik armies carried out the White Terror, a campaign of violence against Bolshevik partisans, although this was typically more spontaneous than the state-sanctioned Red Terror. Both the White and Red armies were responsible for attacks on Jewish communities, prompting Lenin to issue a condemnation of anti-Semitism, which he attributed to capitalist propaganda.

In July 1918, Sverdlov informed Sovnarkom that the Soviet Ural Regional had overseen the execution of the former Tsar and the imperial family in Yekaterinburg to prevent them from being rescued by White troops. Although evidence is lacking, biographers and historians such as Richard Pipes and Dmitri Volkogonov have expressed the opinion that the murder was likely sanctioned by Lenin; conversely, historian James Ryan warned that there was "no reason" to believe this. For the Communist leader, however, assassination was necessary; highlighting the precedent set by the execution of Louis XVI in the French Revolution.

After the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the Left Socialist Revolutionaries abandoned the coalition government and came to regard the Bolsheviks as traitors to the revolution. In July 1918, Left Socialist Revolutionary Yakov Grigoryevich Blumkin assassinated the German ambassador to Russia Wilhelm von Mirbach, hoping the diplomatic incident would lead to a relaunched revolutionary war against Germany. The Left Socialist Revolutionaries then launched a coup in Moscow, bombed the Kremlin and seized the city's central post before being stopped by Trotsky's forces. Party leaders and many members were arrested and imprisoned, but they were treated more leniently than other opponents of the Bolsheviks.

By 1919 the White army was in retreat, and by early 1920 it was defeated on all three fronts. Although Sovnarkom was victorious, the existing territory of the Russian state was reduced as many non-Russian ethnic groups used the disorder to promote national independence. In some cases—such as in northeastern European nations such as Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, and Finland—the Soviets recognized their independence and concluded peace treaties. In other cases, the Red Army suppressed separatist movements; in 1921 they defeated Ukrainian national movements and occupied the Caucasus, although fighting in Central Asia lasted until the late 1920s.

After the German garrisons at Ober Ost were withdrawn from the Eastern Front following the armistice, Soviet and Polish armies moved in to fill the void. Both the newly independent Polish state and the Soviet government pursued territorial expansion in the region. Polish and Russian troops first clashed in February 1919, with the clash escalating into the Polish-Soviet War. Unlike previous Soviet conflicts, it had major implications for the internationalization of the revolution and the future of Europe. In May 1920, the Poles capitulated Kiev.After forcing the Polish Army back, Lenin urged the Red Army to push them back to Poland, believing that the Polish proletariat would support Russian troops and thus spark the European revolution. Although Trotsky and other Bolsheviks were skeptical, they eventually agreed to the invasion. However, the Polish proletariat did not rebel, and the Red Army was defeated at the Battle of Warsaw. Polish armies began pushing the Red Army back into Russia, forcing the Council of the People's Commissariat to sue for peace; the war culminated in the Treaty of Riga, in which Russia ceded territory to Poland and paid it reparations.

Comintern and world revolution: 1919–20

After the Armistice on the Western Front, Lenin believed that the explosion of the European revolution was imminent. Seeking to promote it, Sovnarkom supported the establishment of the Hungarian communist government of Béla Kun in March 1919, followed by communist rule in Bavaria and several revolutionary socialist uprisings in other parts of Germany, including that of the Spartacist League. During the Russian Civil War, the Red Army was sent to the newly independent national republics on the Russian borders to assist Marxists there in establishing Soviet systems of government. In Europe, this resulted in the creation of new communist-led states in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus and Ukraine, all of them officially independent from Russia,while further east it led to the creation of communist governments in Georgia and then in Outer Mongolia. Several senior Bolsheviks wanted these countries to be absorbed into the Russian state; Lenin insisted that national sensitivities should be respected, but assured them that the new Communist Party administrations of these nations were in fact regional branches of the Moscow government.

In late 1918, the British Labor Party called for the establishment of an international conference of socialist parties, the Socialist Workers' International. Lenin saw this as a revival of the Second International, despising the initiative, and held his own international socialist conference to offset its impact. He organized this conference with the help of Zinoviev, Trotsky, Christian Rakovsky and Angelica Balabanoff. In March 1919, the First Congress of this Communist International ("Comintern") took place in Moscow. Global coverage was lacking; of the 34 delegates assembled, 30 resided in the countries of the former Russian Empire and most international delegates were not officially recognized by socialist parties within their own nations.Consequently, the Bolsheviks dominated the process, with Lenin later authorizing a series of regulations that meant that only socialist parties that supported the Bolsheviks' views were allowed to join the Comintern. During the first conference, he addressed delegates, criticizing the parliamentary path to socialism advocated by revisionist Marxists like Kautsky and reiterating his calls for a violent overthrow of the governments of the European bourgeoisie. While Zinoviev became the president of the International, Lenin continued to exercise great control over it.

The Second Congress of the Communist International took place at the Smolny Institute in Petrograd in July 1920, this being the last time Lenin visited a city other than Moscow. There he encouraged foreign delegates to adopt Bolshevik tactics, and abandoned his old view that capitalism was a necessary stage of social development, encouraging colonially occupied nations to move directly to the establishment of socialism. For this conference he wrote Leftism, Childhood Disease of Communism, a brief book articulating his criticism of the extreme left elements within the British and German communist parties who refused to enter the parliamentary systems and unions of those countries; instead, he urged them to do so to further the revolutionary cause. The conference had to be suspended for several days due to the ongoing war with Poland, before the Congress later moved to Moscow, where it continued to hold sessions until August. However, Lenin's proclaimed world revolution did not materialize, as the Hungarian communist government was overthrown and the German Marxist uprisings suppressed.

Hunger and the New Economic Policy: 1920–22

In the Communist Party, there was dissent from two factions, the Democratic Centralism Group and the Workers' Opposition, both accusing the Russian state of being too centralized and bureaucratic. The Workers' Opposition, which had connections with official state unions, also expressed concern that the government had lost the confidence of the Russian working class. They were furious at Trotsky's suggestion that the unions be eliminated. He considered unions superfluous in a "workers' state", but Lenin disagreed, believing that it was better to keep them; most Bolsheviks adopted Lenin's view in "trade union discussion."To deal with dissent, at the Tenth Party Congress in February 1921, factional activity within the party was banned, on pain of expulsion.

Caused in part by a drought, the Russian famine of 1921 was the most severe the country has experienced since that of 1891, resulting in an estimated five million deaths. The famine was exacerbated by government requisitions as well as exports of large amounts of Russian grain. To aid famine victims, the United States government established an American Relief Administration to distribute food, although Lenin was suspicious of this aid and followed it closely. During the famine, Patriarch Tikhon asked Orthodox churches to sell unnecessary items to help feed the hungry, an action endorsed by the government.In February 1922, the Council of the People's Commissariat went further, calling for all valuables belonging to religious institutions to be forcibly appropriated and sold. Tikhon opposed the sale of used items at the Eucharist and many clerics resisted the appropriations, resulting in violence.

In 1920 and 1921, local opposition to the requisitions resulted in anti-Bolshevik peasant uprisings breaking out across Russia, though they were soon suppressed. One of the most significant was the Tambov Revolt, put down by the Red Army. In February 1921, workers went on strike in Petrograd, resulting in the proclamation of martial law in the city and the deployment of the Red Army to quell the demonstrations.In March, the Kronstadt Uprising began when the Kronstadt sailors revolted against the Bolshevik government, demanding that all socialists be able to write freely, that independent trade unions have freedom of assembly and peasants freedom of the market and not be subject to requisitions. Lenin declared that the mutineers were deceived by the Socialist Revolutionaries and foreign imperialists, calling for violent reprisals. Under Trotsky's leadership, the Red Army put down the rebellion on 17 March, resulting in thousands of deaths and the internment of survivors in labor camps.

You should first try to build small bridges that will lead from a land of small peasant holdings through state capitalism to socialism. Otherwise, it will never lead tens of millions of people to communism. This is what the objective forces of the development of the Revolution have taught.Lenin on the NEP, 1921

In February 1921, Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy (NEP) to the Politburo, convincing older Bolsheviks of its necessity, and the government passed the law in April. Lenin explained the new policy in a pamphlet, On the Cash Tax , in which he claimed that the NEP represented a return to the original Bolshevik economic plans; he claimed that these had been derailed by the civil war, in which Sovnarkom had been forced to resort to the economic policy of "war communism". The NEP authorized the operation of some private companies in Russia, allowing the reintroduction of the wage system and approving the sale of peasants' products on the open market, as they were taxed on their earnings.The policy also allowed a return to small private industry, although basic industry, transport and foreign trade remained under state control. Lenin called this "state capitalism", and many Bolsheviks thought it was a betrayal of socialist principles. Lenin's biographers have often characterized the introduction of the NEP as one of his most significant achievements and some believe that if it had not been implemented, Sovnarkom would have been quickly overthrown by popular uprisings.

In January 1920, the government implemented mandatory work, ensuring that all citizens between the ages of 16 and 50 must work. Lenin also called for a mass electrification project, the GOELRO plan, which began in February 1920; his statement that "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country" would be widely quoted in later years. Seeking to advance the Russian economy through foreign trade, Sovnarkom sent delegates to the Genoa Conference; Lenin hoped to participate, but was prevented by ill health. The conference resulted in a Russian agreement with Germany, which was followed by an earlier trade agreement with the United Kingdom.Lenin hoped that by allowing foreign corporations to invest in Russia, Sovnarkom would exacerbate rivalries between capitalist nations and accelerate their downfall; he even tried to rent the Camchaca oil fields to an American corporation to increase tensions between the United States and Japan, who wanted the peninsula for their empire.

Health decline and quarrels with Stalin: 1920–23

To Lenin's embarrassment and horror, in April 1920 the Bolsheviks held a party to celebrate his fiftieth birthday, which was also marked by widespread celebrations across Russia and the publication of poems and biographies dedicated to him. Between 1920 and 1926, twenty volumes of his Complete Works were published; some of these works have been omitted. During 1920, a number of prominent Western figures visited him in Russia; among them the author HG Wells and the philosopher Bertrand Russell, as well as the anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman. He was also visited in the Kremlin by Armand, who was in increasingly poor health.He sent her to a sanatorium in Kislovodsk, North Caucasus to recover, but she died there in September 1920 during a cholera epidemic. Her body was transported to Moscow, where a visibly distressed Lenin oversaw her burial under the Kremlin Wall.

Lenin was seriously ill in the second half of 1921, suffering from hyperacusis, insomnia, and regular headaches. At the insistence of the Politburo, he left Moscow in July for a month's leave at his mansion in Gorky, where he was cared for by his wife and sister. He began to contemplate the possibility of suicide, asking Krupskaya and Stalin to purchase potassium cyanide for him. Twenty-six doctors would be hired to help Lenin during his final years; many were foreigners and were hired at great cost. Some have suggested that his illness could have been caused by the oxidation of metal from the bullets that were lodged in his body from the 1918 assassination attempt; in April 1922 he underwent a surgical operation to remove them.Symptoms continued after that, with doctors unsure of the cause; some suggested he was suffering from neurasthenia or cerebral arteriosclerosis, while others believed he had syphilis, an idea endorsed in a 2004 report by a team of neuroscientists who suggested it was later deliberately concealed by the government. In May 1922, Lenin suffered his first stroke, temporarily losing his ability to speak and leaving his right side paralyzed. He convalesced in Gorki, and recovered throughout July. In October he returned to Moscow, although in December he suffered a second stroke and returned to the mansion.

Despite his illness, he remained deeply interested in politics. When the leadership of the Socialist Revolutionary Party was found guilty of conspiring against the government in a trial held between June and August 1922, Lenin called for his execution; they were imprisoned indefinitely, being executed only during the Great Purge under Stalin's leadership. With his support, the government also managed to virtually eradicate Menshevism in Russia, expelling all members of the rival faction from state institutions and enterprises in March 1923, and then imprisoning the party's membership in concentration camps. Lenin was concerned about the survival of the tsarist bureaucratic system in Soviet Russia,and he became increasingly concerned about it in his later years. Condemning the bureaucratic stance, he suggested a complete overhaul of the bureaucracy to deal with such problems, in a letter complaining that "we are being sucked into a bureaucratic quagmire".

During December 1922 and January 1923 he dictated his "Testament", in which he discussed the personal qualities of his comrades, particularly Trotsky and Stalin. He recommended that the latter be removed from the post of General Secretary of the Communist Party, deeming him unfit for the post. Instead, he recommended Trotsky for the job, describing him as "the most capable man in the present Central Committee"; highlighting his superior intellect, but at the same time criticizing his self-confidence and penchant for administrative excess. During this period, he dictated a critique of the bureaucratic nature of the Workers' and Peasants' Inspection, calling for the recruitment of new working-class personnel as an antidote to this problem,while in another article it called for the state to combat illiteracy, promote punctuality and awareness among the population, and encourage peasants to join cooperatives.

Stalin is too brusque, and this defect, fully tolerable in our midst and among us communists, becomes intolerable in the post of Secretary General. That is why I propose to the comrades that they think about how to move Stalin to another post and appoint another man to this post who differs from Comrade Stalin in all other respects only for one advantage, namely, that he is more tolerant, more loyal, more correct. and more attentive to comrades, less capricious, etc.Lenin, January 4, 1923

In Lenin's absence, Stalin consolidated his power, appointing his supporters to prominent positions and cultivating an image of himself as Lenin's most intimate and worthy successor. In December 1922, he assumed responsibility for Lenin's regime, being tasked by the Politburo with controlling who had access to it. However, Lenin became increasingly critical of Stalin; while he was insisting that the state should maintain its monopoly on international trade during the summer of 1922, Stalin was leading several other Bolsheviks to unsuccessfully oppose this. There were also personal arguments between the two; he upset Krupskaya by yelling at her during a telephone conversation, which in turn greatly angered Lenin, who sent him a letter expressing his annoyance.

The most significant political divide between the two emerged during the Georgian affair. Stalin had suggested that both Georgia and neighboring countries such as Azerbaijan and Armenia should be merged into the Russian state, despite protests from their national governments. Lenin saw this as an expression of Greater Russian ethnic chauvinism on the part of Stalin and his supporters. Instead, he called for these nation-states to join Russia as semi-independent parts of a larger union, which he suggested would be called the Union of the Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia. Stalin initially resisted the proposal, but eventually accepted it, although he changed the name of the newly proposed state to the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR).Lenin sent Trotsky to speak on his behalf at the Central Committee plenary in December, where plans for the USSR were sanctioned; these plans were then ratified on December 30 by the Congress of Soviets, resulting in the formation of the Soviet Union. Despite his poor health, he was elected president of the country's new government.

Death and funeral: 1923–24

In March 1923, Lenin suffered a third stroke and lost the ability to speak; that month, he had partial paralysis on his right side and began to exhibit sensory aphasia. In May, he appeared to be making a slow recovery as he began to regain his mobility, speaking and writing skills. In October, he made a final visit to Moscow and the Kremlin. In his final weeks he was visited by Zinoviev, Kamenev and Bukharin, with the latter visiting him at his mansion in Gorky on the day of his death. Lenin died at his mansion on January 21, 1924, after falling into a coma earlier in the day. His official cause of death was recorded as an incurable blood vessel disease.

The government publicly announced his passing the next day. On 23 January, deputies from the Communist Party, trade unions and soviets visited Gorky to inspect the body, which was carried away in a red coffin by Bolshevik leaders. Transported on a train to Moscow, the coffin was taken to the House of Trade Unions, where the body was given a public wake. Over the next three days, about a million people came to see the body, creating many lines for hours in the freezing cold. On January 26, the Eleventh Congress of Soviets met to pay tribute to the late leader, with speeches by Kalinin, Zinoviev and Stalin, but notably not Trotsky, who had convalesced in the Caucasus.His funeral took place the next day, when his body was taken to Red Square, accompanied by martial music, where gathered crowds listened to a series of speeches before the corpse was placed in the vault of a specially erected mausoleum. Despite freezing temperatures, tens of thousands attended.

Against Krupskaya's protests, her husband's body was mummified to preserve it on long-term public display at the Red Square mausoleum. During this process, her brain was removed; in 1925 an institute was established to dissect it, revealing that Lenin suffered from severe sclerosis. In July 1929, the Politburo agreed to replace the temporary mausoleum with a permanent granite one, which was completed in 1933. The sarcophagus in which the corpse was contained was replaced in 1940 and again in 1970. From 1941 to 1945 the body was moved from Moscow and stored in Tyumen for security in the midst of World War II. The body still remains on public display in Lenin's Mausoleum on Red Square.

Political Views

We do not pretend that Marx or the Marxists know the path of socialism in all its concreteness. It makes no sense. We know the direction of the road, we know that class forces will guide it, but concretely, practically, this will be demonstrated by the experience of the millions when they undertake the act.Lenin, September 11, 1917

Lenin was a fervent Marxist and believed that his interpretation of Marx—called "Leninism" by Julius Martov in 1904 —was the only authentic and orthodox one. According to his Marxist perspective, humanity would eventually reach pure communism, becoming a classless and stateless society of workers free from exploitation and alienation, controlling their own destiny and respecting the rule "of each according to his ability". ; to each according to his needs". According to Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin believed "deeply and sincerely" that the path on which he led Russia would eventually lead to the establishment of this communist society.

However, Lenin's Marxist beliefs led him to the view that society could not directly transform from its current state to communism, but must first enter a period of socialist transition, and his main concern was to convert Russia into a socialist society. For this, Lenin believed that a dictatorship of the proletariat was necessary to repress the bourgeoisie and develop a socialist economy. Lenin defined socialism as "an order of civilized cooperators in which the means of production are socially owned", and believed that this economic system had to be expanded until it could create a society of plenty.To achieve this, Lenin considered centralizing the Russian economy under state control to be critical, with — in his words — "all citizens" becoming "contracted state employees". Lenin's interpretation of socialism was centralized, planned, and statist, with production and distribution strictly controlled. Lenin believed that all workers across the country would voluntarily unite to allow for the economic and political centralization of the state. Thus, his calls for "workers' control" of the means of production did not refer to the direct control of companies by their workers, but to the functioning of all companies under the control of a "workers' state".This resulted in two conflicting themes in Lenin's thought: the control of popular workers and a centralized, hierarchical and coercive state apparatus.

Before 1914 Lenin mainly agreed with the dominant theses of orthodox European Marxism. However, Leninism introduced revisions and innovations to orthodox Marxism and adopted a more absolutist and doctrinaire perspective. Likewise, Leninism distinguished itself from established variants of Marxism by the emotional intensity of its liberationist vision and its focus on the leadership role of a revolutionary vanguard party.

Lenin's ideas were heavily influenced both by pre-existing thinking within the Russian revolutionary movement and by theoretical variants of Russian Marxism, which focused narrowly on how the writings of Marx and Engels would apply to Russia. Consequently, Lenin was also influenced by earlier currents of Russian socialist thought, such as those of the agrarian Narodniks. On the other hand, he derided Marxists who adopted ideas from non-Marxist philosophers and sociologists. In his theoretical writings, particularly Imperialism , Lenin examined what he thought were the developments of the capitalist system since the death of Marx, arguing that capitalism had reached a new stage, state monopoly capitalism.Before taking power in 1917, Lenin believed that even though the Russian economy was dominated by the peasantry, the existence of monopoly capitalism in Russia meant that the country was sufficiently developed materially to move to socialism.

Lenin was an internationalist and an ardent supporter of world revolution, considering national borders an outdated concept and nationalism a distraction from the class struggle. He believed that under socialism there would be "the inevitable fusion of nations" and the establishment of "World Government". He opposed federalism, considering it bourgeois, and emphasized the need for a centralized unitary state. Lenin was anti-imperialist and believed that all nations deserved "the right to self-determination". He thus supported the war of national liberation, accepting that such conflicts might be necessary for a minority group to secede from a socialist state, because socialist states are not "

Lenin accepted the truth conveyed by Marx and selected data and arguments to reinforce that truth. He did not question the old Marxist writings, he simply commented, and the commentaries became new writing.Biographer Louis Fischer, 1964

Lenin believed that the representative democracy of capitalist countries had been used to give a democratic illusion while maintaining the dictatorship of the bourgeoisie. Describing the representative democratic system of the United States, he referred to the "spectacular and senseless duels between two bourgeois parties", both led by "cunning multi-millionaires" who exploited the American proletariat. He was also opposed to liberalism, displaying a general antipathy to freedom as a value, and believing that liberalism's liberties were fraudulent because they did not free workers from capitalist exploitation.

He expressed the opinion that "the Soviet government is millions of times more democratic than the bourgeois-democratic republic", a republic that was simply "a democracy for the rich". He considered his "dictatorship of the proletariat" democratic through the election of representatives to the soviets and by workers who elected their own officials, with regular rotation and involvement of all workers in the administration of the country. Thus, Lenin began to deviate from the Marxist mainstream on the question of how to establish a proletarian state. His belief in a strong state that excluded the bourgeoisie conflicted with the views of European Marxists like Karl Kautsky who envisioned a democratic parliamentary government in which the proletariat held a majority.Furthermore, according to historian James Ryan, Lenin was "the first and most significant Marxist theorist to dramatically elevate the role of violence as a revolutionary instrument". Lenin incorporated changes into his own beliefs, and the pragmatic realities of ruling Russia in the midst of war, famine and economic collapse resulted in him deviating from many of the Marxist ideas he articulated before the October Revolution.

Before taking power in 1917, he was concerned that ethnic and national minorities would make the Soviet state ungovernable with their calls for independence; according to historian Simon Sebag Montefiore, he encouraged Stalin to develop "a theory that offered the ideal of autonomy and the right of separation without necessarily having to grant them". Upon taking power, Lenin called for the dismantling of the ties that forced ethnic minority groups to remain in the Russian Empire and adopted the right to secede; however, he also hoped that they would immediately come together in the spirit of proletarian internationalism.He was willing to use military force to secure this unity, resulting in armed incursions into the independent states that formed in Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states. Only when conflicts with Finland, the Baltic States and Poland were unsuccessful did his government officially recognize its independence.

Personal life and characteristics

Lenin saw himself as a man of destiny and firmly believed in the justice of his cause and in his own ability as a revolutionary leader. Biographer Louis Fischer described him as "a lover of radical change and maximum agitation", a man for whom "there was never a middle ground. Either he was an exaggerator, or black or red". Highlighting his "extraordinary ability for disciplined work" and "devotion to the revolutionary cause", Pipes noted that he displayed a lot of charisma. Likewise, Volkogonov believed that "by his own strength of personality, Lenin had an influence over people".On the other hand, his friend Gorky commented that in his physical appearance as a "bald, stocky, robust person", the communist revolutionary was "very ordinary" and did not give "the impression of being a leader".

[Lenin's collected writings] reveal in detail a man with an iron will, self-enslavement to self-discipline, contempt for opponents and obstacles, the cold determination of a passionate partisan, the drive of a fanatic, and the ability to convince or intimidate the weakest people for their singularity of purpose, imposing intensity, impersonal approach, personal sacrifice, political astuteness, and complete conviction of the possession of absolute truth. His life became the history of the Bolshevik movement.—Louis Fischer in 

The Life of Lenin , 1964

Historian and biographer Robert Service has claimed that Lenin was an intensely emotional young man who displayed a strong hatred of Tsarist authorities. According to Service, he developed an "emotional attachment" to his ideological heroes such as Marx, Engels and Chernyshevsky; he owned portraits of them, and confidentially described himself as "in love" with Marx and Engels. According to biographer James D. White, he treated his writings as "holy scripture", a "religious dogma" that "was not to be questioned but believed". In Volkogonov's opinion, Lenin accepted Marxism as "absolute truth" and therefore acted like "a religious fanatic". Likewise, Bertrand Russell felt that he exhibited "Biographer Christopher Read suggested that he was "a secular equivalent of theocratic leaders who derive their legitimacy from the perceived truth of their doctrines, not popular mandates". Lenin was, however, an atheist and critic of religion, believing that socialism was inherently atheistic; he thus regarded Christian socialism as a contradiction in terms.

Service claimed that Lenin could be "temperamental and volatile", and Pipes considered him "a complete misanthrope", a view rejected by Read, who highlighted many instances where he showed kindness, particularly towards children. According to several biographers, he was intolerant of opposition and often disregarded clear opinions that differed from his own. He could be "poisonous in his criticism of others", displaying a penchant for ridiculous ad hominem attacks and mockery against those who disagreed with him. He ignored facts that didn't match his arguments, abhorred compromise , and rarely admitted his own mistakes.He refused to revise his views, until he completely rejected them, later treating the new view as if it were immutable. Despite showing no signs of sadism or personally wishing to commit violent acts, Lenin endorsed the violent actions of others and displayed no remorse for those killed for the revolutionary cause. Adopting an amoral stance, in his view the end always justified the means; according to Service, his "criterion of morality was simple: Does a given action advance or hinder the cause of the Revolution?"

The Lenin who appeared outwardly gentle and kind, who liked to laugh, loved animals, and was prone to sentimental reminiscences, transformed when class or political issues arose. He immediately became wild, uncompromising, remorseless and vindictive. Even in such a state, however, he was capable of dark humor.—Historian Dmitri Volkogonov, 1994

In addition to Russian, he spoke and read French, German and English. Concerned about physical fitness, he exercised regularly, enjoyed cycling, swimming and hunting, and also developed a passion for the mountains by walking through the Swiss Alps. He was also fond of pets, in particular cats. Tending to shun luxury, he lived a Spartan lifestyle, and Pipes noted that he was "extremely modest in his personal needs", leading "an austere, almost ascetic lifestyle". Lenin despised clutter, always keeping his desk tidy and his pencils sharp, and insisted on total silence while working. According to Fischer, his "vanity was minimal",and for this reason he did not like the cult of personality which the Soviet administration began to build around him; he, however, accepted that he might have some benefits from unifying the communist movement.

Despite his revolutionary politics, Lenin was not fond of revolutionary experimentation in literature and the arts, for example expressing his aversion to expressionism, futurism and cubism, and conversely favoring realism and classical Russian literature. He also had a conservative attitude towards sex and marriage. During his adult life, he maintained a relationship with Krupskaya, a fellow Marxist whom he married. Lenin and his wife were saddened that they had no children, although they enjoyed playing with their friends. Read noted that Lenin had "very close, warm and lasting relationships" with family members, although he had no lifelong friends, and Armand was cited as his only close confidant.

Ethnically, Lenin is identified as a Russian. Service described him as "a bit of a snob nationally, socially and culturally". The Bolshevik leader believed that other European countries, especially Germany, were culturally superior to Russia, "one of the most ignorant, medieval and shamefully backward of Asian countries". Lenin was irritated by what he perceived as a lack of conscience and discipline among the Russian people, and from his youth he wanted Russia to become more culturally westernized.

Legacy

Political and academic impressions

Volkogonov stated that "there could hardly be another man in history who could so profoundly change such a large society on such a scale". Lenin's administration set the framework for the system of government that led Russia for seven decades and provided the model for the later communist-led states that came to cover a third of the inhabited world in the mid-20th century. Thus, its influence was global. A controversial figure, Lenin remains vilified and revered; he was idolized by communists and demonized by critics across the political spectrum. Even during his lifetime Lenin "was loved and hated, admired and despised" by the Russian people.This extended to scholarly studies of Lenin and Leninism, which have often been polarized in political debates.

Historian Albert Resis has suggested that if the October Revolution is considered the most significant event of the 20th century, then Lenin "must, for better or worse, be considered the most significant political leader of the century". White described him as "one of the undeniably outstanding figures in modern history", while Service noted that the Russian leader was widely understood to be one of the "leading actors" of the last century. Read described him as "one of the most widespread and universally recognized icons of the 20th century", while Ryan called him "one of the most significant and influential figures in modern history". Time magazinenamed him one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century and one of its 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. Several later biographers, such as Read and Lars T. Lih, sought to avoid hostile or positive comments about him, thus preventing politicized stereotypes. Among supporters, he was portrayed as a genuine interpreter of Marxist theory and one who allowed it to adapt to Russia's particular socioeconomic conditions. The Soviet view characterized him as a man who recognized the historically inevitable and consequently helped to make the inevitable happen.On the other hand, most Western historians see Lenin as a person who manipulated events to achieve and then retain political power, viewing his ideas as attempts to ideologically justify his pragmatic policies. More recently, revisionists in Russia and the West have highlighted the impact of pre-existing ideas and the popular pressures exerted on him and his policies.

Several historians and biographers have characterized Lenin's administration as totalitarian and as a police state, and many have described it as a one-party dictatorship. Several of these scholars described Lenin as a dictator, although Ryan stated that he "was not a dictator in the sense that all of his recommendations were accepted and implemented", as many of his colleagues disagreed with him on several issues. Fischer noted that "Lenin was a dictator, but he was not the type that Stalin became", while Volkogonov believed that while Lenin established a "Party dictatorship", only under Stalin would the Soviet Union become a "one-man dictatorship".

On the other hand, a number of Marxist academics — including Western historians Hill and John Rees — have argued against the view that Lenin's government was a dictatorship, seeing it as an imperfect way of preserving elements of democracy without some of the processes found in states. liberal democrats. Ryan maintains that leftist historian Paul Le Blanc "makes a very valid observation that the personal qualities that led Lenin to brutal policies were not necessarily stronger than in some of the key Western leaders of the 20th century." He also posits that, for the Soviet leader, 'revolutionary' violence was only a means to an end: the establishment of a socialist, finally communist world—a world without violence.Historian J. Archibald Getty observed, "Lenin deserves much credit for the notion that the meek can inherit the land, that there can be a political movement based on social justice and equality." Some leftist intellectuals, among them Slavoj Žižek, Alain Badiou, Lars T. Lih and Fredric Jameson, advocate revitalizing Lenin's uncompromising revolutionary spirit to address contemporary global problems.

Inside the soviet union

In the Soviet Union, a personality cult devoted to Lenin began to develop during his lifetime, but it was not fully established until after his death. According to historian Nina Tumarkin, this has represented the "world's most elaborate cult of a revolutionary leader" since that of George Washington in the United States, and has been repeatedly described as "quasi-religious" in nature. Busts or statues of Lenin were erected in almost every village, and his face adorned postage stamps, crockery, posters, and the front pages of the Soviet newspapers Pravda and Izvestia . The places where he had lived or stayed were converted into museums dedicated to him.Libraries, streets, farms, museums, cities, and entire regions were named in his honor, the city of Petrograd was renamed "Leningrad" in 1924, and his birthplace of Simbirsk becoming "Ulianovsk" ". The Order of Lenin was established as one of the highest decorations in the country. All this was contrary to Lenin's own wishes, and was publicly criticized by his widow.

Several biographers claimed that Lenin's writings were treated similarly to holy scripture within the Soviet Union, while Pipes added that "all his opinions were cited to justify one policy or another and treated as gospel". Stalin codified Leninism through a series of lectures at the University of Sverdlov, which were later published as Questions of Leninism . Stalin also had many of the late leader's writings collected and stored in a secret archive at the Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute. This material, like his book collection in Krakow, was also collected from abroad for storage at the Institute, often at great cost.During the Soviet era, these writings were strictly controlled and access was restricted. All of Lenin's writings that proved useful to Stalin were published, but the others remained hidden, and knowledge of his non-Russian ancestry and noble status was suppressed. In particular, his Jewish ancestry was omitted until the 1980s, perhaps out of Soviet anti-Semitism, and so as not to undermine Russian efforts to succeed him, and perhaps not to fuel anti-Soviet sentiment among international anti-Semites.After the discovery of his Jewish ancestry, this aspect was repeatedly emphasized by the Russian far right, who claimed that his inherited Jewish genetics explained his desire to uproot traditional Russian society. Under Stalin, Lenin was actively portrayed as a close friend who had supported his candidacy to be the next Soviet leader. During the Soviet era, five separate editions of Lenin's published works were published in Russian, the first beginning in 1920 and the last from 1958 to 1965; although the fifth edition was described as "complete", in reality it had been largely omitted for political convenience.

After Stalin's death, Nikita Khrushchov became leader of the Soviet Union and began a process of de-Stalinization, citing Lenin's writings, including those of Stalin, to legitimize this process. When Mikhail Gorbachev took power in 1985 and introduced the policies of glasnost and perestroika , he also cited these actions as a return to Lenin's principles.In late 1991, amid the dissolution of the Soviet Union, Russian President Boris Yeltsin ordered that the Lenin archive be removed from Communist Party control and placed under the control of a state body, the Russian Center for the Preservation and Study of Recent History Documents, in which it was revealed that more than 6,000 of Lenin's writings were unpublished. These were declassified and made available for academic study. Yeltsin, however, did not dismantle Lenin's mausoleum recognizing that he was too popular and too respected among the Russian population for this to be feasible.

In Russia, in 2012, a proposal by the Liberal Democratic Party of Russia, with the support of some members of the United Russia party, proposed the removal of all Lenin monuments, a proposal strongly opposed by the Communist Party of the Russian Federation. In Ukraine, during the Euromaidan protests between 2013 and 2014, several statues of Lenin were damaged or destroyed by protesters who saw them as a symbol of Russian imperialism, and in April 2015 the Ukrainian government ordered all others to be dismantled to comply. the decommunization laws established by the country.

In the international communist movement

According to biographer David Shub, writing in 1965, it is Lenin's ideas and example that "form the basis of the communist movement today". Communist regimes that profess loyalty to these ideas appeared in various parts of the world during the 20th century. Writing in 1972, historian Marcel Liebman asserted that "there is almost no insurrectionary movement today, from Latin America to Angola, which does not claim the heritage of Leninism."

After his death, Stalin's government established an ideology known as Marxism-Leninism, a movement that came to be interpreted differently by various rival factions in the communist movement. After being forced into exile by Stalin's government, Trotsky argued that Stalinism was a degradation of Leninism, which was dominated by bureaucratism and the personal dictatorship of the new Soviet leader. Marxism-Leninism would be adapted to many of the most important revolutionary movements of the last century, forming variants such as Stalinism, Maoism, Juche ideology , Ho Chi Minh thought and Castroism.On the other hand, many later Western communists such as Manuel Azcárate and Jean Ellenstein, who were involved in the Eurocommunist movement, expressed the view that Lenin and his ideas were irrelevant to their own goals, thus embracing a Marxist but not a Marxist-Leninist perspective. .

Most Western historians have taken the position that Lenin was a crucial element in the development of Marxism without, however, considering that he was operating within a Marxist project. Former communist Max Eastman, for example, observed in 1926 that "a fundamental difference between Marx and Lenin is visible on almost every page they wrote."Stephen J. Lee and James Ryan cite that Lenin distorted the original conception of Marxism and applied a different approach in Russia, resulting in the imposition of a Marxist vision on a relatively primitive economy. A. James Gregor wrote that, "to cement the commitment of populations only partially industrialized", Marxism-Leninism invoked "collective sentiment and discipline" similar to those "enunciated by totalitarians everywhere" in the last century.