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.