Vladimir Lenin

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Vladimir Lenin

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Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Влади́мир Ильи́ч Ле́нин
Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars
In office 8 November 1917 – 21 January 1924
Preceded by	Position created
Succeeded by	Alexei Rykov
Leader of the Bolshevik Party
In office 17 November 1903 – 21 January 1924
Preceded by	None
Succeeded by	Joseph Stalin (as General Secretary)
Born	22 April 1870(1870-04-22) Simbirsk, Russian Empire
Died	21 January 1924 (aged 53) Gorki, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Nationality	Soviet Russian
Political party	Bolshevik Party
Spouse(s)	Nadezhda Krupskaya (1898-1924)
Profession	Politician, Revolutionary, Lawyer
Religion	none (atheist)
Signature

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.^[1] 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

Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, on 22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870, 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.^[2][3] 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. ^[4]

In January 1886, his father died of a cerebral hemorrhage; in May 1887 (when 17 years old), his eldest brother Aleksandr Ulyanov was hanged for participating in a terrorist assassination attempt against the Tsar, Alexander III (1881–94).^[5] His sister, Anna Ulyanova, with Aleksandr when arrested, was banished to an Ulyanov family estate at Kokushkino, a village some 40 km (25 mi.) from Kazan — those events transformed Lenin into a political radical, which official Soviet biographies represent as central to his assuming the revolutionary track as political life.

Complementing these personal, emotional, and political upheavals was his matriculation, in August 1887, to the Kazan University, where he studied law and read the works of Karl Marx. That Marxism-derived political development involved Lenin in a student riot, and consequent arrest, in December 1887; Kazan University expelled him, the police authorities barred him from other universities, thence was under continuous police surveillance — as the brother of a known terrorist.^[6] Nevertheless, he studied independently and earned a law degree; in that time, he first read Das Kapital (1867–94). Three years later, in 1890, he was permitted studies at the University of Saint Petersburg.^[7] In January 1892, he was awarded a first class diploma in law;^[8] moreover, he was an intellectually distinguished student in the Classical languages of Latin and Greek, and the modern languages of German, French, and English, but had only limited command of the latter two. In the 1917 revolutionary period, he relied upon Inessa Armand to translate an article of his into French and English; and wrote to S. N. Ravich in Geneva, "I am unable to lecture in French".^[9]

Revolutionary

Lenin practised law in the Volga River port of Samara for a few years, mostly land-ownership cases, from which he derived political insight to the Russian peasants' socio-economic condition;^[10] in 1893, he moved to St Petersburg, and practised revolutionary propaganda. In 1895, he founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, the consolidation of the city's Marxist groups; as an embryonic revolutionary party, the League were active among the Russian labour organisations. On 7 December 1895, Lenin was arrested for plotting against Tsar Alexander III, and was then imprisoned for fourteen months in solitary confinement Cell 193 of the St Petersburg Remand Prison.^[11] In February 1897, he was exiled to eastern Siberia, to the village Shushenskoye in the Minusinsky District, Yenisei Gubernia. There, he met Georgy Plekhanov, the Marxist who introduced socialism to Russia. In July 1898, Lenin married the socialist activist Nadezhda Krupskaya, and, in April 1899, he pseudonymously published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), by Vladimir Ilyin, one of the thirty theoretical works he wrote in exile.^[11]

At exile's end in 1900, Lenin travelled Russia and Europe (Munich, Prague, Vienna, Manchester and London, with a memorial plaque at Percy Circus WC1, King's Cross), but resided in Zurich, where he worked as a Geneva University lecturer. He and Julius Martov (later a leading opponent) co-founded the newspaper Iskra (Spark), and published articles and books about revolutionary politics, whilst recruiting for the Social Democrats. In such clandestine political work, Vladimir Ulyanov assumed aliases, and, in 1902, adopted Lenin as his definitive nom de guerre, derived from the Siberian Lena River.^[3]

In 1903, the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (РСДРП) ideologically diverged as the Bolshevik and the Menshevik factions; the RSDLP party faction names Bolshevik (majority) and Menshevik (minority) derive from the narrow Bolshevik electoral defeat of the Mensheviks to the party's newspaper editorial board, and to central committee leadership. The break partly originated from Lenin's book What Is to Be Done? (1901–02), which proposed a smaller party organisation of professional revolutionaries, with Iskra in a primary ideologic role.

In November 1905, Lenin returned to Russia to support the 1905 Russian Revolution.^[12] In 1906, he was elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP; and shuttled between Finland and Russia, but resumed his exile in December 1907, after the Tsarist defeat of the November Revolution.^[12] Until the February and October revolutions of 1917, he lived in Western Europe, where, despite relative poverty, he developed Leninism — urban Marxism adapted to agrarian Russia reversing Karl Marx’s the economics–politics prescription, to allow for a dynamic revolution led by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries.^[13] .^[14]

In 1909, to disambiguate philosophic doubts about the proper practical course of a socialist revolution, Lenin published Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), which became a philosophic foundation of Marxism-Leninism. Throughout exile, Lenin travelled Europe, participated in socialist activities, (the 1912 Prague Party Conference). When Inessa Armand left Russia for Paris, she met Lenin and other exiled Bolsheviks. Rumour has it she was Lenin's lover; yet historian Neil Harding notes that there is a "slender stock of evidence . . . we still have no evidence that they were sexually intimate".^[15]

In 1914, when the First World War (1914–18) began, most of the mass Social Democratic parties of Europe supported their homelands' war effort. At first, Lenin disbelieved such political fickleness, especially that the Germans had voted for war credits; the Social Democrats' war-authorising votes broke Lenin's mainstream connection with the Second International (1889–1916). He opposed the Great War, because the peasants and workers would be fighting the bourgeoisie's "imperialist war" — one that ought be transformed to an international civil war, between the classes. At war's start, the Austrians briefly detained him in Poronin, his town of residence; on 5 September 1914, Lenin moved to neutral Switzerland, residing first at Berne, then at Zurich.^[16]

In 1915, in Switzerland, at anti-war Zimmerwald Conference, he led the Zimmerwald Left minority, who failed, against the majority pacifists, to achieve conference’s adopting Lenin's proposition of transforming imperialist war to class war. In the next conference (24–30 April 1916), at Kienthal, Lenin and the Zimmerwald Left presented a like resolution; but the conference concorded only a compromise manifesto.^[17]

In spring of 1916, at Zurich, with Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), Lenin popularized (his opponent) Karl Kautsky's politico-economic perspective of capitalism's development in the 1900s.^[18] From the merging of banks and industrial cartels arises finance capital — the basis of imperialism, the zenith of capitalism. To wit, in pursuing greater profits than the home market can offer, business exports capital, which, in turn, leads to the division of the world, among international, monopolist firms, and to European states colonizing large parts of the world, in support of their businesses. Imperialism, thus, is an advanced stage of capitalism based upon the establishment of monopolies, and upon the exportation of capital (rather than goods), managed with a global financial system, of which colonialism is one feature.^[19]

Russian return

After the 1917 February Revolution provoked the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II (1894–17), Lenin decided upon a Russian return; difficult, for he was isolated in neutral Switzerland, surrounded by belligerent countries fighting the Great War, nevertheless, the Swiss Communist Fritz Platten obtained Imperial German permission allowing Lenin (and cohort) to traverse Germany in a diplomatically-sealed train. Geopolitically, the Germans expected his return to politically disrupt Imperial Russia — in aid of ending the Eastern front war (17 August 1914 – 3 March 1918), so that Germany could concentrate upon defeating the Western allies. Having traversed Germany, Lenin continued through Sweden, aided by local Communists Otto Grimlund and Ture Nerman.

On 16 April 1917, Lenin arrived at the Finland Station, Petrograd, Russia, to assume command of the Bolsheviks, and published the April Theses (1917), calling for uncompromising opposition to the Provisional Government (March–November 1917).^{[20] [21]} Initially, that leftist position isolated the Bolsheviks, yet rendered the Bolshevik party as a pragmatic political refuge for people disillusioned with the vacillating Provisional Government; thei "luxury of opposition" dissociated them Kerensky’s policies.^[22] Meanwhile, Aleksandr Kerensky, Grigory Aleksinsky, and other opponents, accused the Bolsheviks — especially Lenin — of being Imperial German agents provocateur; on 17 July, Leon Trotsky defended them:^[23]

An intolerable atmosphere has been created, in which you, as well as we, are choking. They are throwing dirty accusations at Lenin and Zinoviev. Lenin has fought thirty years for the revolution. I have fought [for] twenty years against the oppression of the people. And we cannot but cherish a hatred for German militarism . . . I have been sentenced by a German court to eight months' imprisonment for my struggle against German militarism. This everybody knows. Let nobody in this hall say that we are hirelings of Germany.^[24]

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).^[25]

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.^[26] 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: ^[27]

We must show the peasants that the organisation of industry on the basis of modern, advanced technology, on electrification, which will provide a link between town and country, will put an end to the division between town and country, will make it possible to raise the level of culture in the countryside and to overcome, even in the most remote corners of land, backwardness, ignorance, poverty, disease, and barbarism.^[28]

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.^[29]

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.

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.^[30] 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.

National security: the Cheka

In December 1917, the Bolsheviks established the The Whole-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage (Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya), the Cheka (Extraordinary Commission) for defending the Russian Revolution.^[31] 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. . . .";^[32] 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".

Social reform

The Bolshevik assumption of Russian government included the liberation of women from patriarchy, by reforming the Code on Marriage, the Family, and Guardianship (ratified October 1918), allowing husband and wife to retain their individual property rights and income; outlawing bastardy, by granting equal family rights to children born out of wedlock (cf. legitimacy); and making divorce available upon request.^[33] In 1919, under the leadership of the feminist revolutionaries Alexandra Kollontai and Inessa Armand, and others, the Bolsheviks established the Zhenotdel (Женотдел), the women’s section of the Central Committee of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (1919–30). Under Kollontai’s leadership, the Zhenotdel disseminated news of the Marxist revolution, enforced its laws, established political education and literacy classes for peasant and working-class women, and fought sexual prostitution.^[34]

The freedom that the February Revolution established revitalized Russian feminism; feminists acted in expanding the role of women in society via women’s suffrage. When the Kerensky Russian Provisional Government’s initial declaration of “universal elections” to the Russian Constituent Assembly excluded women, The League for Women’s Equal Rights, on 19 March, organised a 40,000-woman right-to-vote protest march upon the Tauride Palace residence of the Kerensky Government. Moreover, the social democrats withheld suffrage from Russia’s women, especially from the peasant women, out of fear that they might vote to reinstate the monarchy of the deposed Romanov Russian Royal Family.^[35]

Despite the socialists and liberals long emphasising the importance of the rights of women, their responses to the social opportunities of the February Revolution were equivocal; they perceived social class as outweighing sex and gender, i.e. that educated women of the socialist party rejected feminism, because they had more in common with the men of their class than with the women of the other social classes. Generally, the Russian Revolution much changed the societal roles of urban women, but not of the peasant women; because they lived in poverty and continually faced political uncertainty, peasant women could not perceive the revolution as an opportunity to change either their sexual or gender roles.

In 1917, the Bolshevik Government was one of the first governments in the world to decriminalize homosexuality; like-wise, upon abolishing Tsarist laws impinging upon the woman citizen’s personal privacy, the Russian Communist Party legalized no-fault divorce and abortion. Moreover, the initial Soviet criminal code retained these liberal laws respecting private sexual practice, but, a decade later, the ex-seminarian Josef Stalin reversed such legal tolerance, and re-criminalized homosexuality, under Article 121; it remained so until the Boris Yeltsin era (1991–99).^[36]

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:^[37]

The Tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organized pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants, who were tortured by want, against the Jews. . . . Only the most ignorant and down-trodden people can believe the lies and slander that are spread about the Jews. . . . It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. Among the Jews there are kulaks, exploiters, and capitalists, just as there are among the Russians, and among people of all nations . . . Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob, and disunite the workers . . . Shame on accursed Tsarism, which tortured and persecuted the Jews. Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.^[38]

Failed assassinations

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".^[39]

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.^[40] 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.^[41][42]

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:

As it happens, the attempt to kill Lenin has made him much more popular than he was. One hears a great many people, who are far from having any sympathy with the Bolsheviks, saying that it would be an absolute disaster if Lenin had succumbed to his wounds, as it was first thought he would. And they are quite right, for, in the midst of all this chaos and confusion, he is the backbone of the new body politic, the main support on which everything rests.^[43]

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.^[44]

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).^[45] To that effect, among others, were issued Lenin's Hanging Order (11 August 1918) for the public executions of one hundred kulaks, to suppress interference with the 29 November 1916 prodrazvyorstka (food apportionment) required to feed civil war-isolated cities such as Moscow and Petrograd;^[46] and, at Moscow, the execution lists authorised the shooting of 25 Tsarist ministers, civil servants, and 765 White Guards in September 1918.^[47]

Earlier, in October, Lev Kamenev and cohort, had warned the Party that terrorist rule was inevitable, given Lenin’s assumption of sole command.^[48] In late 1918, when he and Nikolai Bukharin tried curbing Chekist excesses, Lenin over-ruled them; in 1921, via the Politburo, he expanded the Cheka's discretionary death-penalty powers.^[49][50]

The foreign-sponsored White Russian counter-revolution failed for want of popular Russian support, because the Bolshevik proletarian state, protected with "mass terror against enemies of the revolution", was socially organised against the previous capitalist establishment, thus class warfare terrorism in post–Tsarist Russia originated in working class (peasant and worker) anger against the privileged aristocrat classes of the deposed absolute monarchy.^[51] During the Russian Civil War, anti-Bolsheviks faced torture and summary execution, and by May 1919, there were some 16,000 enemies of the people imprisoned in the Tsarist katorga labour camps; by September 1921 the prisoner populace exceeded 70,000. ^{[52][53][54][55][56][57]} After a clerical insurrection in the town of Shuia, in a 19 March 1918 letter to Vyacheslav Molotov and the Politburo, Lenin delineated action against defiers of the decreed Bolshevik removal of Orthodox Church valuables: "We must . . . put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades. . . . The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing . . . the better."^[58][59]

In pursuing their revolution and counter-revolution the White and the Red Russians committed atrocities, against each other and their supporting populaces, yet contemporary historians disagree about equating the terrorisms — because the Red Terror was Bolshevik Government policy (e.g. Decossackization) against given social classes, whilst the class-based White Terror was racial and political, against Jews, anti-monarchists, and Communists, (cf. White Movement).^[60][61]

Civil War

Once the Bolshevik Revolution was a fait accompli, outside Russia, the vanquished anti-Communist factions loosely united as the counter-revolutionary White Movement to depose the Bolsheviks. To that effect, in 1918, the Allies of World War I, sponsored the Whites in the Russian Civil War (1917–23). Moreover, the Bolsheviks were going to try the deposed Tsar, Nicholas II, but the matter was mooted when, by July 1918, in the course of the Civil War, the counter-revolutionary Czechoslovak Legions, retreating from Russia, were near the central Russian city of Yekaterinburg, in the Sverdlovsk oblast, where the Romanov Russian Royal Family lived in house arrest. Rather than risk their rescue, Yakov Sverdlov agreed to the local soviet's request for permission to assassinate them on 16 July 1918; in his diaries, Leon Trotsky recorded that Lenin authorised the execution of the Russian Royal Family.^[62]

In March 1919, at Moscow, the Bolsheviks conferred with the world's socialists, and established the Communist International (Comintern, aka the Third International, 1919–43), where, in breaking with mainstream socialism, they renamed themselves as the revolutionary Communist Party that later became the Russian Communist Party, and then CPSU.

Meanwhile, the Red Army and the White Army continued fighting until the Red Army, commanded by Leon Trotsky, won the Russian Civil War in 1920; yet sporadic fighting continued until 1923. In the event, despite foreign sponsorship, and French, British, American, and Japanese military intervention, the Whites failed for want of popular support of their reinstatement to Russian power via foreign arms, (cf. Allied intervention in the Russian Civil War). In 1919, military success convinced Lenin to "probe Europe with the bayonets of the Red Army" and propagate proletarian revolution to Western Europe, especially by supporting the German Revolution (November 1918–August 1919), via the Spartacist League. Yet, when the Second Polish Republic (1918–39) secured its eastern lands (lost to 18th-century Tsarist partitions of Poland), it fought the Polish-Soviet War (1919–21) for them. Bolshevik Russia fought Poland, because it was the bridge to Germany, and to the other Communists in Western Europe, yet the Polish victory of the Battle of Warsaw (1920) mooted the matter.

In 1917, as an anti-imperialist, Lenin said that oppressed peoples had the unconditional right to secede from the Russian Empire; however, at Civil War's end, the USSR annexed Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, because the White Movement used them as attack bases.^[63] Lenin pragmatically defended the annexations as geopolitical protection against capitalist imperial depredations.^[64]

To maintain the war-isolated cities and the armies fed, and to avoid economic collapse, the Bolshevik government established war communism, via prodrazvyorstka, food requisitioning from the peasantry, for little payment, which peasants resisted with reduced harvests. The Bolsheviks blamed the kulaks' withholding grain to increase profits; but statistics indicate most such business occurred in the black market economy.^[65][66] Nonetheless, the prodrazvyorstka resulted in armed confrontations which the Cheka and Red Army suppressed with shootings, hostages, poison gas, and labour-camp deportation; yet Lenin increased the requisitioning, whilst the Cheka reported the Russian famine of 1921, which killed some 3–10 million people.^[67][68][69]

The six-year long White–Red civil war, the war communism, the famine of 1921, and foreign military intervention reduced much of Russia to ruin, and provoked rebellion against the Bolsheviks, the greatest being the Tambov rebellion (1919–21). After the March 1921 left-wing Kronstadt Rebellion mutiny, Lenin replaced war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), and successfully rebuilt industry and agriculture. The NEP was his pragmatic recognition of the political and economic realities, despite being a tactical, ideological retreat from the socialist ideal; later, the doctrinaire Josef Stalin reversed the NEP in consolidating his control of the Communist Party and the USSR.

Later life and death

The mental strains of leading a revolution, governing, and fighting a civil war aggravated the physical debilitation consequent to the wounds from the attempted assassinations; Lenin still retained a bullet in his neck, until a German surgeon removed it on 24 April 1922.^[70] Among his comrades, Lenin was notable for working almost ceaselessly, fourteen to sixteen hours daily, occupied with minor, major, and routine matters. About the man at his life’s end, Volkogonov said:

“Lenin was involved in the challenges of delivering fuel into Ivanovo-Vosnesensk . . . the provision of clothing for miners, he was solving the question of dynamo construction, drafted dozens of routine documents, orders, trade agreements, was engaged in the allocation of rations, edited books and pamphlets at the request of his comrades, held hearings on the applications of peat, assisted in improving the workings at the ‘Novii Lessner’ factory, clarified in correspondence with the engineer P. A. Kozmin the feasibility of using wind turbines for the electrification of villages . . . all the while serving as an adviser to party functionaries almost continuously.”

^[71]

When already sick, Lenin remembered that, since 1917, he had only rested twice: once, whilst hiding from the Kerensky Provisional Government (when he wrote The State and Revolution), and whilst recovering from Fanya Kaplan’s failed assassination.^[72] In March 1922, when physicians examined him, they found evidence of neither nervous nor organic pathology, but, given his fatigue and the headaches he suffered, they prescribed rest. Upon returning to St. Petersburg in May 1922, Lenin suffered the first of three strokes, which left him dumb for weeks, and severely hampered motion in his right side; by June, he had substantially recovered. By August he resumed limited duties, delivering three long speeches in November. In December 1922, he suffered the second stroke that partly paralyzed his right side, he then withdrew from active politics. In March 1923, he suffered the third stroke that rendered him mute and bed-ridden until his death.

After the first stroke, Lenin dictated government papers to Nadezhda; among them was Lenin's Testament (changing the structure of the soviets), partly inspired by the 1922 Georgian Affair (Russian cultural assimilation of constituent USSR republics), and it criticized high-rank Communists, including Josef Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Leon Trotsky. About the Communist Party's General Secretary (since 1922), Josef Stalin, Lenin reported that the "unlimited authority" concentrated in him was unacceptable, and suggested that "comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post." His phrasing, "Сталин слишком груб", implies “personal rudeness, unnecessary roughness, lack of finesse”, flaws "intolerable in a Secretary-General".

At Lenin's death, Nadezhda mailed his testament to the central committee, to be read aloud to the 13th Party Congress in May 1924, however, to remain in power, the ruling troika — Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev — suppressed Lenin's Testament; it was not published until 1925, in the United States, by the American intellectual Max Eastman. In that year, Trotsky published an article minimizing the importance of Lenin's Testament, saying that Lenin's notes should not be perceived as a will, that it had been neither concealed, nor violated;^[74] yet he did invoke it in later anti-Stalin polemics against.^[75][76]

Lenin died at 18.50 hrs, Moscow time, on 21 January 1924, aged 53, at his estate in Gorki Leninskiye. In the four days that the Bolshevik Leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lay in state, more than 900,000 mourners viewed his body in the Hall of Columns; among the statesmen who expressed condolences to Russia (the USSR) was Chinese premier Sun Yat-sen, who said:

"Through the ages of world history, thousands of leaders and scholars appeared who spoke eloquent words, but these remained words. You, Lenin, were an exception. You not only spoke and taught us, but translated your words into deeds. You created a new country. You showed us the road of joint struggle . . . You, great man that you are, will live on in the memories of the oppressed people through the centuries."^[77]

Winston Churchill, who encouraged British intervention against the Russian Revolution, in league with the White Movement, to destroy the Bolsheviks and Bolshevism, said:

"He alone could have found the way back to the causeway . . . The Russian people were left floundering in the bog. Their worst misfortune was his birth . . . their next worst his death."^[78]

Three days after his death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour, so remaining until 1991, when the USSR dissolved, yet the administrative area remains "Leningrad Oblast". In the early 1920s, the Russian cosmism movement proved so popular that Leonid Krasin and Alexander Bogdanov proposed to cryonically preserve Lenin for future resurrection, yet, despite buying the requisite equipment, that was not done.^[79] Instead, the body of V. I. Lenin was embalmed and permanently exhibited in the Lenin Mausoleum, in Moscow, on 27 January 1924. Despite the official diagnosis of death from stroke consequences, the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov reported that Lenin died of neurosyphilis. ^[80]

Writings

Lenin was a prolific political theoretician and philosopher who wrote about the practical aspects of leading a proletarian revolution; he wrote pamphlets, articles, and books, without a stenographer or secretary, until prevented by illness.^[81] He simultaneously corresponded with comrades, allies, and friends, in Russia and world-wide. His known writings compose 54, 650-page volumes; the most influential are:

• What is to be Done? (1903) establishes that a revolution requires a professional vanguard party.
• Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) explains why capitalism had not collapsed, as Marx had posited, presenting the First World War as a capitalist war for land, resources, and cheap labour.
• The State and the Revolution (1917) interprets the ideas of Marx and Engels, the October Revolution's theoretic basis, and opposes the social-democratic tendency as indecisive in effecting revolution.
• April Theses (1917) propose the socio-economic need for a socialist revolution.
• "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920) A sharp critique of the 'ultra-left'

Soviet censorship of Lenin

After his death, the USSR selectively censored Lenin's writings, to establish the dogma of the infallibility of Lenin, Stalin (his successor), and the Central Committee;^[82] thus, the Soviet fifth edition (55 vols., 1958–65) of Lenin's œuvre deleted the Lenin–Stalin contradictions, and all that is unfavourable to the founder of the USSR.^[83] Moreover, the historians Richard Pipes and David Brandenberger published a documentary collection of letters and telegrams excluded from the Soviet fifth edition, that is not notably different from the Collected Works, which does not suggest censorship.^[84] They proposed them as proof that the Soviet fifth edition is incomplete, an interpretation dependant upon the notion of “Lenin’s Works”, because the Khrushchev-era edition contains documents considered "not for publication".

Post-mortem

Since the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991, reverence for Lenin declined among the post-Soviet generations, yet he remains an important historical figure for the Soviet-era generations.^[85] Eastern European countries removed most statues of Lenin, yet Russia retains some; however, his historical importance merited the installation of one such statue, from Poprad, Slovakia, in Seattle, Washington, USA, as a kitsch reminder of the Cold War (1945–91). In 1991, a Lenin statue was placed atop the "Red Square" apartment building, at Essex and Houston streets, in New York City. Furthermore, also in 1991, after a contested vote, between Communists and liberals, the Leningrad government reverted the city's name to St. Petersburg, whilst the surrounding Leningrad Oblast remained so named;^[86] like-wise the city of Ulyanovsk (V. I. Lenin's birthplace) remains so named. Gyumri in Armenia was named Leninakan from 1924 to 1990, Khujand in Tajikistan Leninabad from 1936 to 1991.

See also

• Anti-Leninism
• Decossackization
• Enemy of the people
• Lenin's stance on anti-Semitism
• Human rights in the Soviet Union
• Lenin's Hanging Order
• Lenin's national policy
• Leninade
• Leninism
• List of statues of Lenin
• Persecution of Christians in the Soviet Union
• Russian Civil War
• Russian Revolution of 1917
• Leningrad
• Ulyanovsk
• USSR Anti-Religious Campaign (1917-1921)
• USSR Anti-Religious Campaign (1921-1928)

References

Notes

Further reading

• Blackledge, Paul (2006) What was Done, International Socialism 2/111
• Cliff, Tony (1986). Building the Party: Lenin, 1893–1914. Haymarket Books. ISBN 1-931859-01-9.
• Felshtinsky, Yuri (2010). Lenin and His Comrades: The Bolsheviks Take Over Russia 1917-1924. Enigma Books. ISBN 1929631952.
• Fischer, Louis (2001). The Life of Lenin. Orion Publishing Co.. ISBN 1-84212-230-4.
• Gellately, Robert (2007). Lenin, Stalin, and Hitler: The Age of Social Catastrophe. Knopf. ISBN 1400040051.
• Gooding, John (2002). Socialism In Russia: Lenin and His Legacy, 1890–1991. Palgrave Macmillan. ISBN 0-333-97235-X.
• Hill, Christopher (1971). Lenin and the Russia Revolution. Pelican Books Ltd.. ISBN 978-0140212976.
• Kolakowski, Leszek and Falla, P. S. (2005). Main Currents of Marxism. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-06054-3.
• Leggett, George (1987). The Cheka: Lenin's Political Police. Oxford University Press. ISBN 0198228627.
• Lars T. Lih, (2006) Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? in Context Brill: Lieden
• Lenin, Vladimir (2002). Revolution at the Gates: A Selection of Writings from February to October 1917 by V. I. Lenin. Verso Books. ISBN 1-85984-661-0.
• Pannekoek, Anton, and Richey, Lance Byron (2003). Lenin as Philosopher. Marquette University Press. ISBN 0-87462-654-4.
• Payne, Robert (1967). The Life And Death Of Lenin. Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-41640-5.
• Pipes, Richard (1999). The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive. Yale University Press. ISBN 0-300-07662-2.
• Read, Christopher (2005). Lenin: A Revolutionary Life. Routledge. ISBN 0-415-20649-9.
• Service, Robert (2002). Lenin: A Biography. Belknap Press. ISBN 0-674-00828-6.
• Shub, David (1965). Lenin: A Biography. Penguin Books. ISBN 0-14-020809-7.
• Toynbee, Arnold (July 1970). [Expression error: Missing operand for > "A Centenary View of Lenin"]. International Affairs 46 (3): 490–500. doi:10.2307/2613225.
• Trotsky, Leon (1971). On Lenin: Notes Towards a Biography. Harrap Publishing. ISBN 0-245-50302-1.
• Tucker, Robert C. (1975). The Lenin Anthology. W. W. Norton & Company. ISBN 0-393-09236-4.
• Volkogonov, Dmitri (2006). Lenin: A New Biography. Free Press. ISBN 0-02-933435-7.

External links

• Marxists.org Lenin Internet Archive – Extensive compendium of writings, a biography, and many photographs
• Marx2Mao.org – Lenin Internet Library
• Lenin's speech (video) – Lenin's speech with subtitles
• Article on Lenin written by Trotsky for the Encyclopedia Britannica
• Reminiscences of Lenin by N. K. Krupskaya
• Impressions of Soviet Russia by John Dewey
• Information on Lenin's Grave
• The Lenin Museum in Tampere, Finland
• Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions
• Lenin Internet Archive Biography includes interviews with Lenin and essays on the leader
• Mirrors of Moscow: Nikolai Lenin by Louise Bryant
• Nicolai Lenin His Life and Work by G. Zinovieff, Indiana State University
• The Personality and Power of Nikolai Lenin From Raymond Robins' Own Story by William Hard (1920)
• TIME 100: V.I. Lenin by David Remnick, 13 April 1998
• Statues and portraits of Lenin
• Re: Lenin in color - high quality edition at YouTube
• The Ghosts of Lenin Abound by The Moscow News Weekly, January 15, 2009

Selected works

• The Development of Capitalism in Russia
• What is to be Done? [1]
• One Step Forward, Two Steps Back
• Reply by N. Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg
• Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution
• Materialism and Empirio-Criticism
• The Right of Nations to Self-Determination
• Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
• The State and Revolution [2]
• How to Organise Competition?
• The April Theses[3]
• The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky
• Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder [4]
• Lenin's Testament
• Lenin's last letter to Stalin

Political offices
Preceded by None	Chairman of the RSFSR Council of People's Commissars 1917–1924	Succeeded by Alexey Rykov
Preceded by None	Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR 1922–1924
Military offices
Preceded by None	Chairman of the Council of Labour and Defence 1918 – 1920	Succeeded by Himself as Chair of the Sovnarkom

v • [[|d]] • e Prime Ministers of Russia Russian Empire Witte · Goremykin · Stolypin · Kokovtsov · Goremykin · Stürmer · Trepov · Golitsyn Provisional Government Lvov · Kerensky Russian SFSR/ Soviet Union Lenin · Rykov · Molotov · Stalin · Malenkov · Bulganin · Khrushchev · Kosygin · Tikhonov · Ryzhkov · Pavlov · Silayev Russia as a part of the Soviet Union Syrtsov · Sulimov · Bulganin · Vakhrushev · Khokhlov · Pamfilov* · Kosygin · Rodionov · Chernousov · Puzanov · Yasnov · Kozlov · Polyansky · Voronov · Solomentsev · Vorotnikov · Vlasov · Silayev · Lobov* · Yeltsin Russian Federation Yeltsin · Gaidar* · Chernomyrdin · Kiriyenko · Chernomyrdin* · Primakov · Stepashin · Putin · Kasyanov · Khristenko* · Fradkov · Zubkov · Putin * denotes acting.

v • [[|d]] • e Leaders of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union Lenin · Stalin · Malenkov · Khrushchev · Brezhnev · Andropov · Chernenko · Gorbachev

v • [[|d]] • e Significant works by Vladimir Lenin The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899) · What Is to Be Done? (1902) · One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904) · Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Social Revolution (1905) · Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909) · The Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914) · Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) · State and Revolution (1917) · The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky · "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

v • [[|d]] • e Russian Revolution of 1917 February Revolution · July Days · Kornilov affair · October Revolution · Russian Civil War Major groups Provisional Committee of the State Duma · Russian Provisional Government · Petrograd Soviet · Council of the People's Commissars · Military Revolutionary Committee · Russian Constituent Assembly (elections) · Red Guards · Tsentralna Rada and Ukrainian People's Republic Political parties Kadets · Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (Bolsheviks and Mensheviks) · Socialist-Revolutionary Party (Left SR) Major figures Nicholas II of Russia · Georgy Lvov · Vladimir Lenin · Alexander Kerensky · Lev Kamenev · Grigory Zinoviev · Leon Trotsky

v • [[|d]] • e People from Russia Leaders (before 1168 · 1168–1917 · 1917–1991 · 1991–present) Prime Ministers · Foreign Ministers · Field Marshals · Metropolitans and Patriarchs Architects · Artists · Ballet dancers · Composers · Cosmonauts · Explorers Inventors · Novelists · Opera singers · Philosophers · Playwrights · Poets

Persondata
NAME	Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich
ALTERNATIVE NAMES	Vladimir Illyich Ulyanov, Владимир Ильич Ульянов (Ленин) (Russian)
SHORT DESCRIPTION	Russian politician, led October Revolution
DATE OF BIRTH	22 April 1870(1870-04-22)
PLACE OF BIRTH	Simbirsk, Russia
DATE OF DEATH	21 January 1924
PLACE OF DEATH	Moscow, Russia

mhr:Ленин, Владимир Ильич pnb:لینن

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