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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov [b] (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, [c] was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924.
Learn about the life and achievements of Vladimir Lenin, one of the most influential political figures of the 20th century. He led the October Revolution in 1917, established the USSR, and introduced the New Economic Policy.
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- The making of a revolutionary
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Vladimir Lenin was born in Simbirsk, Russia.
Where was Vladimir Lenin educated?
Lenin studied law at Kazan University but was expelled after just three months. In spite of this, he achieved top ranking in law examinations and was awarded a law degree in 1891.
When was Vladimir Lenin married?
Lenin married Nadezhda Krupskaya on July 22, 1898. Krupskaya served as Lenin’s personal secretary and played a key organizational role in the socialist revolutionary group that became the Russian Communist Party.
How did Vladimir Lenin change the world?
It is difficult to identify any particular events in his childhood that might prefigure his turn onto the path of a professional revolutionary. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk, which was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour. (He adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine party work after exile in Siberia.) He was the third of six children born into a close-knit, happy family of highly educated and cultured parents. His mother was the daughter of a physician, while his father, though the son of a serf, became a schoolteacher and rose to the position of inspector of schools. Lenin, intellectually gifted, physically strong, and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a voracious passion for learning. He graduated from high school ranking first in his class. He distinguished himself in Latin and Greek and seemed destined for the life of a classical scholar. When he was 16, nothing in Lenin indicated a future rebel, still less a professional revolutionary—except, perhaps, his turn to atheism. But, despite the comfortable circumstances of their upbringing, all five of the Ulyanov children who reached maturity joined the revolutionary movement. This was not an uncommon phenomenon in tsarist Russia, where even the highly educated and cultured intelligentsia were denied elementary civil and political rights.
As an adolescent Lenin suffered two blows that unquestionably influenced his subsequent decision to take the path of revolution. First, his father was threatened shortly before his untimely death with premature retirement by a reactionary government that had grown fearful of the spread of public education. Second, in 1887 his beloved eldest brother, Aleksandr, a student at the University of St. Petersburg (later renamed Leningrad State University), was hanged for conspiring with a revolutionary terrorist group that plotted to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. Suddenly, at age 17, Lenin became the male head of the family, which was now stigmatized as having reared a “state criminal.”
Fortunately the income from his mother’s pension and inheritance kept the family in comfortable circumstances, although it could not prevent the frequent imprisonment or exile of her children. Moreover, Lenin’s high school principal (the father of Aleksandr Kerensky, who was later to lead the Provisional government deposed by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in November [October, O.S.] 1917) did not turn his back on the “criminal’s” family. He courageously wrote a character reference that smoothed Lenin’s admission to a university.
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In autumn 1887 Lenin enrolled in the faculty of law of the imperial Kazan University (later renamed Kazan [V.I. Lenin] State University), but within three months he was expelled from the school, having been accused of participating in an illegal student assembly. He was arrested and banished from Kazan to his grandfather’s estate in the village of Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna had already been ordered by the police to reside. In the autumn of 1888, the authorities permitted him to return to Kazan but denied him readmission to the university. During this period of enforced idleness, he met exiled revolutionaries of the older generation and avidly read revolutionary political literature, especially Marx’s Das Kapital. He became a Marxist in January 1889.
Learn about the life and achievements of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Russian Communist Party and the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. Explore his early years, his political career, his role in the Soviet state, and his legacy.
- Albert Resis
Apr 3, 2014 · Who Was Vladimir Lenin? Vladimir Lenin founded the Russian Communist Party, led the Bolshevik Revolution and was the architect of the Soviet state.
Nov 9, 2009 · Learn about the life and legacy of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Bolshevik Party and the Soviet Union. Explore his role in the 1917 October Revolution, his economic policies, his secret police and his assassination attempt.
Vladimir Lenin was the leader of the Bolshevik movement, the first ruler of Soviet Russia and the dominant figure of the Russian Revolution. Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in the town of Simbirsk in 1870.
Learn about the life and political ideologies of Vladimir Lenin, the founder of the Russian Communist Party and the leader of the 1917 Russian Revolution. Explore his biography, his role in the Soviet state, and his legacy in Marxism-Leninism.
