Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ле́нин 22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Влади́мир Ильи́ч Улья́нов), was the Communist Russian revolutionary who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolshevik Party, he was premier of the USSR during its initial years (1917–24), during which the Bolsheviks fought the Russian Civil War (1917–24) whilst establishing a socialist economic system in a semi– feudal country. As a politician, Vladimir Lenin was a persuasive orator, as a political scientist his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produced Marxism–Leninism, the pragmatic Russian application of the German (traditional) Marxism.Триумф и Трагедия - И. В. Сталин: политический портрет. (Triumph and Tragedy - I. V. Stalin : A Political Portrait) Дмитрий Волкогонов (Dmitriy Volkogonov). Book 1, Part 1, PP. 95 - 114. Новости Publications. Moscow. 1989. Nonetheless, traditional Marxists rejected Lenin’s intellectual œuvre, because of their novel (revolutionary) theories of the nature of imperialism, the vanguard party as required to effect a revolution, and that a developed industrial proletariat was inessential to achieving a Communist State; it is noteworthy that Lenin’s agrarian Russia had virtually no industrial proletariat.

Early life and background

 1887]] Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, on , to Maria Alexandrovna Blank, a schoolmistress, and Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov a physics instructor, at Simbirsk, a Volga River town in the Russian Empire of the nineteenth century; following family custom, he was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.Read, Christopher, Lenin (2005) Abingdon: Routledge p. 4.Hill, Christopher, Lenin and the Russian Revolution (1971) Penguin Books:London p. 35. Later, the USSR renamed Simbirsk as Ulyanovsk. In 1869, Ilya Ulyanov became the Inspector of Public Schools, and later the Director of Elementary Schools, for the Simbirsk Gubernia Oblast (province), a successful career in the Imperial Russian public education system. Yet, Tsarist cultural mores defined the Ulyanov family stock as "ethnically mixed" — " Mordovian, Kalmyk, Jewish (cf. Blank family), Volgan German, and Swedish, and possibly others"; none the less, being of the intelligentsia, the Ulyanovs educated their children against the ills of their time (violations of human rights, servile psychology, etc.), and instilled readiness to struggle for higher ideals, a free society, and equal rights. Subsequently, excepting Olga (dead at age 19), every Ulyanov child became a revolutionary. In the event, after the Provisional Government suppressed the Petrograd spontaneous July Days riots, by industrial workers and soldiers, it arrested the Bolsheviks as German agents provocateur; Lenin fled to Finland. Although the Bolsheviks did not provoke the July Days, Lenin acknowledged that the Bolsheviks required the support of the peasant and the urban populaces to effect the Marxist revolution. Meanwhile, he published State and Revolution (1917) proposing government by soviets (worker-elected councils). In late August 1917, after the failed coup d’ État of the General Kornilov affair, popular support for the Provisional Government collapsed, whilst support for the Bolshevik Peace, Land, Bread programme increased; jailed Bolsheviks were freed.Read, Christopher, Lenin (2005) p. 174. In October, Lenin returned from Finland, and inspired the October Revolution with the slogan All Power to the Soviets! From the Smolny Institute for girls, Lenin directed the Provisional Government’s deposition (6–8 November 1917), and the storming (7–8 November) of the Winter Palace to realise the Kerensky capitulation that established Bolshevik government in Russia.

Head of government

On 8 November 1917, the Russian Congress of Soviets elected the pragmatic Lenin as Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, as such, declaring that "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country" in modernising Russia into a twentieth-century country: Lenin "Collected Works", vol. 31, p. 516. Yet the Bolshevik Government had to first withdraw Russia from the First World War (1914–18). Facing continuing Imperial German eastward advance, Lenin proposed immediate Russian withdrawal from the West European war; yet, other, doctrinaire Bolshevik leaders (e.g. Nikolai Bukharin) advocated continuing in the war to foment revolution in Germany. Lead peace treaty negotiator Leon Trotsky proposed No War, No Peace, an intermediate-stance Russo–German treaty conditional upon neither belligerent annexing conquered lands; the negotiations collapsed, and the Germans renewed their attack, conquering much of the (agricultural) territory of west Russia. Resultantly, Lenin's withdrawal proposal then gained majority support, and, on 3 March 1918, Russia withdrew from the First World War via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, losing much of its European territory. Moreover, during the Russian Civil War (1917–24), after concording the Treaty, Lenin moved the Soviet Government from Petrograd to Moscow. LENINE’S MIGRATION A QUEER SCENE, The New York Times, 16 March 1918 On 19 January 1918, relying upon the soviets, the Bolsheviks, allied with anarchists and the Socialist Revolutionaries, dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly thereby consolidating the Bolshevik Government’s political power. Yet, that left-wing coalition collapsed consequent to the Social Revolutionaries opposing the territorially-expensive Brest-Litovsk treaty the Bolsheviks had concorded with Imperial Germany. The anarchists and the Socialist Revolutionaries then joined other political parties in attempting to depose the Bolshevik Government, who defended themselves with persecution and jail for the anti-Bolsheviks. , 31 March 1927.]] To initiate the Russian economic recovery, on 21 February 1920, he launched the GOELRO plan, the State Commission for Electrification of Russia (Государственная комиссия по электрификации России), and also established free universal health care and free education systems, and promulgated the politico-civil rights of women. Moreover, since 1918, in re-establishing the economy, for the productive business administration of each industrial enterprise in Russia, Lenin proposed a government-accountable leader for each enterprise. Workers could request measures resolving problems, but had to abide the leader's ultimate decision. Although contrary to workers' self-management, such pragmatic industrial administration was essential for efficient production and employment of worker expertise. Yet Lenin’s doctrinaire Bolshevik opponents argued that such industrial business management was meant to strengthen State control of labour, and that worker self-management failures were owed to lack of resources, not incompetence. Lenin resolved that problem by licencing (for a month) all workers of most factories; thus historian S.A. Smith's observation: "By the end of the civil war, not much was left of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers' state." Internationally, Lenin’s admiration of the Irish socialist revolutionary James Connolly, led to the USSR’s being the first country to grant diplomatic recognition to the Irish Free State that fought the Irish War of Independence from Britain. In the event, Lenin developed a friendship with Connolly's revolutionary son, Roddy Connolly.

Establishing the Cheka

On December 20, 1917, The Whole-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya), the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission) was created by a decree issued by Lenin to defend the Russian Revolution. The establishment of the Cheka, secret service, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, formally consolidated the censorship established earlier, when on "17 November, the Central Executive Committee passed a decree giving the Bolsheviks control over all newsprint and wide powers of closing down newspapers critical of the régime. . . .";Leonard Shapiro, The Communist Party of the Soviet Union non-Bolshevik soviets were disbanded; anti-soviet newspapers were closed until Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (The News) established their communications monopoly. The Bolshevik "refusal to come to terms with the Revolutionary socialists, and the dispersal of the Constituent assembly, led to the logical result that revolutionary terror would now be directed, not only against traditional enemies, such as the bourgeoisie or right-wing opponents, but against anyone, be he socialist, worker, or peasant, who opposed Bolshevik rule".

Combating anti-Semitism

Lenin recognised the value of mass communications technologies for educating Russia’s mostly illiterate, heterogeneous populaces; as Bolshevik leader, he recorded eight speeches to gramophone records in 1919, that went unpublished. During the Khrushchev era (1953–64), seven were published, but, significantly, the suppressed eighth speech delineated the Lenin’s opposition to anti-Semitism:Clark, Ronald Clark, Lenin: The Man Behind the Mask (1988) p. 456 }}

Failed assassinations

, 1919.]] First, on 14 January 1918, in Petrograd, after a speech, assassins ambushed Lenin in his automobile; he and Fritz Platten were in the back seat when assassins began shooting, and "Platten grabbed Lenin by the head and pushed him down . . . Platten's hand was covered in blood, having been grazed by a bullet as he was shielding Lenin". A New Biography |publisher= Free Press|date= |page=229 |isbn=0-02-933435-7 |location=New York}} Second, on 30 August 1918, the Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan approached Lenin after a speech; at his automobile, whilst he rested a foot upon the running board, in speaking with a woman, Kaplan called to Lenin, and, as he turned to face her in reply, she shot him three times. The first bullet struck an arm, the second bullet struck his jaw and neck, and the third bullet missed him — and wounded the woman with whom he was speaking; the wounds felled him, unconscious.Pipes, Richard, The Russian Revolution (Vintage Books, 1990) p.807 Fearing in-hospital assassins, Lenin was delivered to his Kremlin apartment; physicians decided against removing the bullets — lest the surgery endanger his recovery, which proved slow. To the public, Pravda ridiculed Fanya Kaplan as a failed, latter-day Charlotte Corday (a murderess of Jean-Paul Marat) who could not derail the Russian Revolution, reassuring readers that, immediately after surviving the assassination: "Lenin, shot through twice, with pierced lungs spilling blood, refuses help and goes on his own. The next morning, still threatened with death, he reads papers, listens, learns, and observes to see that the engine of the locomotive that carries us towards global revolution has not stopped working. . . ."; despite unharmed lungs, the neck wound did spill blood into a lung.ibid. p. 809Dr. V. Bonch-Bruevich, Lenin's attending physician, Tri Pokusheniia na V. Lenina, 1924. The Russian public remained ignorant of the true physical gravity of the wounded Soviet Head of State; other than panegyric of immortality (viz. the cult of personality), they knew nothing about either the (second) failed assassination, the assassin, Fanya Kaplan, or of Lenin's health. Historian Richard Pipes reports that "the impression one gains . . . is that the Bolsheviks deliberately underplayed the event to convince the public that, whatever happened to Lenin, they were firmly in control". Moreover, in a letter to his wife (7 September 1918), Leonid Borisovich Krasin, a Tsarist and Soviet régime diplomat, describes the public atmosphere and social response to the failed assassination on 30 August, and Lenin's survival: From having survived a second assassination originated the cult of personality, that Lenin, per his intellectual origins and pedigree, disliked and discouraged as superstition revived; nevertheless, his health, as a fifty-three-year-old man, declined from the effects of two bullet wounds, later aggravated by three strokes, culminating in his death.Clark, Ronald, Lenin: The Man Behind the Mask (1988) p. 373

Red Terror

In response to Fanya Kaplan's failed assassination of Lenin on 30 August 1918, and the successful assassination of the Petrograd Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky, Stalin to Lenin proposed "open and systematic mass terror . . . against . . . those responsible"; the Bolsheviks instructed Felix Dzerzhinsky to commence a Red Terror, announced in the 1 September 1918 issue of the Krasnaya Gazeta (Red Gazette). Red Terror To that effect, among other acts, at Moscow, execution lists signed by Lenin authorised the shooting of 25 Tsarist ministers, civil servants, and 765 White Guards in September 1918.