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Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the October Revolution and the Soviet Union, died on 21 January 1924 in Gorki and was buried on 27 January in Red Square. Learn about the circumstances of his death, the funeral procession, the embalming, and the controversies surrounding his legacy.
His health failing, Lenin died in Gorki, 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.
Feb 9, 2010 · Learn about the life and legacy of Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution and the first ruler of the Soviet Union. He died of a brain hemorrhage on January 21, 1924, at the age of 54.
- Missy Sullivan
The web page tells the story of Lenin's last years, his strokes, his request for poison, and his death in Gorki in 1924. It also reveals some facts and mysteries about his condition and the autopsy.
- Overview
- The making of a revolutionary
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.
- Albert Resis
Learn about the life and achievements of the Bolshevik leader who masterminded the October Revolution and founded the USSR. Lenin died on 24 January 1924 after a long illness and was embalmed and honoured in a mausoleum.
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Nov 9, 2009 · Learn about the life and legacy of Vladimir Lenin, the Russian communist revolutionary who led the Bolshevik Revolution of 1917 and founded the Soviet Union. Find out when and how he died, and what he said in his famous quotes.
