Original name Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov; Lenin was his pen name. Founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks); founder of the Soviet state; leader of the international communist movement. He developed Marxism and founded Leninism.
Lenin was born on April 22, 1870, into a family of progressive intellectuals. In 1887, Lenin graduated from high school and entered the Faculty of Law of the University of Kazan, where he was arrested and exiled for his participation in the student movement. Returning to Kazan in 1888, he became an active member of a Marxist group in Kazan. In 1891, he passed the state examination of the Faculty of Law of the University of Petersburg as an extramural student and was awarded the Diploma of Honors, obtaining the qualification as a legal assistant. Lenin organized the first local Marxist group in Samara, where he studied and propagated revolutionary theory while conducting rural surveys.
In 1893, Lenin moved to Petersburg and soon became the recognized leader of local Marxists. In 1894, he completed the pamphlet What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, a comprehensive critique of the liberal Narodniks, which discussed the historical mission of the proletariat and put forward the thought of the worker-peasant alliance for the first time. In 1895, Lenin unified the Marxist groups in Petersburg and established the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, which marked the beginning of the combination of scientific socialism with the Russian workers’ movement and made preparations for the establishment of a revolutionary Marxist workers’ party. In the same year, Lenin went to Switzerland, Paris, Berlin and other places to learn about the French and German workers’ movement and also met with Plekhanov. In December, Lenin was arrested and jailed in Petersburg. In February 1897, he was exiled to Siberia. In June 1898, Lenin married Nadezhda Krupskaya. During his exile, he wrote more than 30 theoretical works. Among them, The Development of Capitalism in Russia analyzed the historical inevitability and internal contradictions of the emergence and development of capitalism in Russia and pointed out the inevitability of a bourgeois revolution in Russia and the leading role of the proletariat in the revolution, and thoroughly liquidated the erroneous theories of the Narodniks.
At the end of his exile in February 1900, Lenin established contacts with the most prominent Social Democratic Labor Party groups and party workers throughout Russia. In December of the same year, in Munich, Germany, he co-founded with Plekhanov the first Marxist political newspaper in Russia, Iskra (the Spark). During 1901-1902, Lenin wrote his famous work What Is to Be Done?, which opposed Bernstein’s revisionism, the Economists’ line, demanded that the party be built into a body with a core of professional revolutionaries as its vanguard and strict organizational discipline (i.e., democratic centralism), elucidated the important principle that socialist theories must be brought to the workers from without, and emphasized that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”, which laid the ideological foundation for the founding of the Party.
From July to August 1903, Lenin attended the Second Congress of Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. As a result of the disagreement over the principle of party organization, the Bolsheviks supporting Lenin and Mensheviks supporting Martov were formed within the party. In 1904, Lenin wrote the pamphlet One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, criticizing the Mensheviks’ erroneous views on the question of organization, and comprehensively expounded the theory of Marxist proletarian party. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1905, he chaired the Third Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, which was only attended by the Bolsheviks, in London in April and formulated the tactics of the Bolsheviks in the revolution. In July, Lenin published the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, criticizing the opportunistic line of the Mensheviks, pointing out that the proletariat must assume the leadership of this revolution and establish an alliance with the peasants, that armed uprising is the means for achieving revolutionary victory, and that victory must be followed by the establishment of a democratic dictatorship of the workers and peasants and an immediate transition to a socialist revolution. In December, due to the failure of an armed uprising against the Tsar, Lenin once again went into exile to Paris and elsewhere. In response to the debate on the future of the revolution, he wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in 1908, criticizing all kinds of subjective idealism and fighting against the Liquidators (Liquidationists) and the Otzovists (Recallists) in the party. In 1910, he attended the Copenhagen Congress of the Second International, and defended the proletarian revolutionary line on the question of the interrelationship between the cooperatives and the party. In January 1912, he led the Sixth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in Prague. The meeting decided to expel the Mensheviks from the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, and since then, the Bolsheviks officially formed into an independent Marxist party.
During the World War I, Lenin lived abroad in Switzerland, led the Bolshevik party to uphold the Marxist theories and tactics on the questions of war, peace and revolution, to uphold proletarian internationalism, to fight against social chauvinism, and put forward the slogan “Turn the imperialist war into a civil war”. At the same time, he united the leftists of the parties of various countries in order to prepare for the establishment of a new “International”. In 1915, he published the article On the Slogan for a United States of Europe, which analyzed the law of uneven economic and political development of capitalism and put forward the important point that “the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in one capitalist country alone.” In 1916, in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he comprehensively analyzed the essence, characteristics and the fundamental contradictions of imperialism and the objective law of its inevitable demise, and pointed out that imperialism is the eve of the proletarian social revolution, and thoroughly criticized Kautsky’s fallacies on these questions.
After the revolution in February 1917, a provisional bourgeois government was established in Russia. Lenin returned to Petrograd in April and published the April Theses, and put forward the guidelines for the transition from the bourgeois democratic revolution to socialist revolution and the new slogan “All power to the Soviets!”. After the July Days, Lenin went underground and led the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party. In September, he completed the book State and Revolution, which discussed the origin, the essence and the economic basis of the withering away of the State, revealed the basic characteristics of the two phases of the communist society, and emphasized that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be upheld during the whole transitional period from capitalism to socialism. In October 1920, he secretly returned to Petrograd. On November 7, 1917 (October 25, Russian calendar), he led the armed uprising of Petrograd to victory. On the following day, at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, he made a report on the Decree on Peace and the Decree on Land, and was elected chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union. In March 1918, after eliminating the destructive interference from inside and outside of the party, he signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with Germany, which gave the Soviet state a temporary opportunity for peace and respite. Immediately afterward, in The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government and other articles, he put forward a plan for proceeding with socialist construction.
From 1918 to 1920, Lenin led the whole people to repel the armed intervention of 14 capitalist countries and the rebellion of the reactionary classes in the country, and made the first socialist country stand tall in the world. In August 1918, Lenin was assassinated and seriously wounded. During his convalescence, he wrote the pamphlet, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, which exposed the smears and slanders of the opportunists of the Second International against the dictatorship of the proletariat and criticized Kautsky’s “pure democracy” and other fallacies. In March 1919, the Third International (Comintern) was founded. Lenin personally led the first four congresses of the Comintern. In May 1920, Lenin summed up the historical experience of the Bolshevik Party and the international significance of the Russian Revolution in his pamphlet the “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, criticized the “Left” tendencies within some newly established communist parties in Western Europe.
Following the end of the civil war, Lenin led the whole party to shift the focus of its work to the organization of socialist construction. In 1921, the policy of War Communism was replaced by the New Economic Policy (NEP). In The Tax in Kind and other reports, he put forward that the essence of the New Economic Policy was to allow, to a certain extent, the existence of private economy, and to exploit commodity relations in order to restore and develop economic links between industry and agriculture, with a view to gradually building up the economic basis of socialism. The foreign policy of peaceful coexistence was formulated to guard against the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet power by imperialism.
In May 1922, Lenin suffered a cerebral hemorrhage, and his condition began to get worse in December. During his illness, he dictated articles and letters such as Pages from a Diary, On Cooperation, Our Revolution and Better Fewer, But Better, in which he worked out plans for building socialism in the Soviet Union. He was convinced that a Russia with the New Economic Policy would become a socialist Russia and hoped that India, China and other countries would echo the victory of the socialist revolution in Russia.
Lenin passed away on January 21, 1924.
Lenin’s life was the life of a great proletarian revolutionary, who made great contributions to the world socialist movement.
