Владимир Ильич Ленин Add a review

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist who was the founder and first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. The founder and leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin led the October Revolution which established the world's first socialist state. His government won the Russian Civil War and consolidated power in a one-party state under the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.

Born into a middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree before relocating to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and becoming a prominent Marxist activist. In 1897, Lenin was arrested for sedition and exiled to Siberia for three years. He then moved to Western Europe, where he became a key figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In the party's 1903 schism, he led his Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Lenin briefly returned to Russia during the failed Revolution of 1905, and during the First World War campaigned for its transformation into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the end of capitalism and the rise of socialism. After the February Revolution of 1917 ousted Tsar Nicholas II and established a Provisional Government, Lenin returned to Russia and played a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the regime.

Lenin's government redistributed land to the peasantry, issued a number of legislative decrees, nationalised banks and industry, withdrew from the war by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. It initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and allowed a multi-party Constituent Assembly, but by 1918 centralised power in the new Communist Party. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, and tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. Responding to devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, Lenin reversed his policy of war communism in 1921, and encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War, after which several non-Russian nations that had broken away from the empire after 1917 were re-united in the new Soviet Union in 1922; others, notably Poland, gained independence. Lenin suffered three debilitating strokes in 1922 and 1923 before his death in 1924, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.

Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. Under Stalin, he became an ideological figurehead of Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive figure, Lenin is praised by his supporters for establishing a revolutionary government which took steps towards socialism, while his critics accuse him of establishing a dictatorship which oversaw mass killings and political repression.