Vladimir Lenin

Born in Simbirsk – later renamed Ulyanovsk after its most famous son – beside the Volga River in the Russian Empire, Lenin was the son of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova.

His father was a successful Russian official in public education who wanted democracy. The family was of mixed ethnicity, his ancestry being “Russian, Mordovian, Kalmyk, Jewish (see Blank family), Volgan German, and Swedish, and possibly others” according to biographer Dmitri Volkogonov. Lenin was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church. In January 1886, Lenin’s father, a schoolmaster, died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and, in May 1887, when Lenin was 17 years old, his eldest brother Alexander was arrested and hanged for participating in a terrorist bomb plot threatening the life of Tsar Alexander III.

His sister Anna, who was with Alexander at the time of his arrest, was banished to his family estate in the village of Kokushkino, about 40 km (25 mi.) from Kazan.

These events radicalized Lenin, and his official Soviet biographies describe them as being central to the revolutionary track of his life. It is also significant, perhaps, that this emotional upheaval transpired in the same year he enrolled at the Kazan State University.

As Lenin became interested in Marxism, he was involved in student protests and was subsequently arrested. He was then expelled from Kazan University for his political ideals. He continued to study independently, however, and it was during this period of exile that he first familiarized himself with Karl Marx’s Das Kapital.

Lenin was later permitted to continue his studies, this time at the University of Saint Petersburg, and, by 1891, had been admitted to the Bar.

In January 1892, Lenin was awarded a first class degree in law by the University. He also distinguished himself in Latin and Greek, and learned German, French and English, although his knowledge of the latter two languages was limited: he relied on Inessa Armand to translate an article into French and into English in 1917. In the same year he also wrote to S. N. Ravich in Geneva, “I am unable to lecture in French.”

Lenin practiced as a lawyer for some years in Samara, a port on the Volga river, before moving to St Petersburg in 1893. Rather than pursuing a legal career, he became increasingly involved in revolutionary propaganda efforts, joining the local Marxist group. On 7 December 1895, Lenin was arrested, detained by authorities for fourteen months, in cell 193 of the St Petersburg Remand Prison, and then released and exiled to the village of Shushenskoye in Siberia, where he mingled with such notable Marxists as Georgy Plekhanov, who had introduced socialism to Russia.

In July 1898, Lenin married socialist activist Nadezhda Krupskaya and he published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia in April 1899. In 1900, his exile came to an end, and he began his travels throughout Russia and the rest of Europe. Lenin lived in Zurich, Geneva (where he lectured and studied at Geneva University), Munich, Prague, Vienna, Manchester and London, and, during this time, he co-founded the newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”) with Julius Martov, who later became a leading opponent. He also wrote several articles and books related to the revolutionary movement, striving to recruit future Social Democrats. He began using various aliases, finally settling upon "Lenin"—"N. Lenin" in full. (The Western press often called him "Nikolai Lenin" - perhaps on the mistaken assumption that N. stood for Nikolai - however, he was virtually never referred to by this name in Russia or the Soviet Union, and Lenin himself never used it as a pseudonym.)

Lenin was active in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP; РСДРП in Russian) and, in 1903, led the Bolshevik faction after a split with the Mensheviks. The names ‘Bolshevik’, or ‘Majority’, and ‘Menshevik’, or ‘Minority’, referred to the narrow outvoting of the Mensheviks in the decision to limit party membership to revolutionary professionals, rather than including sympathizers. The division was inspired partly by Lenin’s pamphlet What Is to Be Done? (1901–02), which focused on his revolutionary strategy. It is said to have been one of the most influential pamphlets in pre-revolutionary Russia, with Lenin himself claiming that three out of five workers had either read it or had had it read to them.

In November 1905, Lenin returned from exile to Russia to support the 1905 Russian Revolution. In 1906, Lenin was elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP. At this time he shuttled between Finland and Russia but, in December 1907, with the revolution crushed by the Tsarist authorities, he returned back to European exile. Until the revolutions of 1917, he spent the majority of his time exiled in Europe, where, despite relative poverty, he managed to continue his political writings.
In response to philosophical debates on the proper course of a socialist revolution, Lenin completed Materialism and Empirio-criticism in 1909—a work which became fundamental in the Marxist-Leninist philosophy. Lenin continued to travel in Europe and participated in many socialist meetings and activities, including the Prague Party Conference of 1912. When Inessa Armand left Russia and settled in Paris, she met Lenin and other Bolsheviks living in exile, and it is believed that she was Lenin’s lover during this time. As writer Neil Harding points out however, although much has been made of this relationship, despite the “slender stock of evidence … we still have no evidence that they were sexually intimate”.
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Memorial plate

When the First World War began in 1914, and the large Social Democratic parties of Europe (at that time self-described as Marxist, and including luminaries such as Karl Kautsky) supported their various countries’ war efforts, Lenin was absolutely stunned, refusing to believe at first that the German Social Democrats had voted for war credits. This led him to a final split with the Second International, which was composed of these parties. Lenin (against the war in his belief that the peasants and workers were fighting the battle of the bourgeoisie for them) adopted the stance that what he described as an “imperialist war” ought to be turned into a civil war between the classes. As war broke out, Lenin was briefly detained by the Austrian authorities in the town of Poronin, where he was residing at the time. On 5 September 1914 Lenin moved to neutral Switzerland, residing first at Berne and then Zurich. In 1915 he attended the anti-war Zimmerwald Conference, convened in the Swiss town of that name. Lenin was the main leader of the minority Zimmerwald Left, who unsuccessfully urged against the majority pacifists that the conference should adopt Lenin's stance of converting the imperialist war into a class war. Lenin and the Zimmerwald Left urged a similar resolution at the next anti-war conference, also held in Switzerland at Kienthal (24-30 April 1916), but in the end settled for a compromise manifesto.

It was in Zurich in the spring of 1916 that Lenin wrote the notable theoretical work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which ironically popularized Kautsky's take in the 1900s. In this work Lenin argues that the merging of banks and industrial cartels give rise to finance capital. According to Lenin, in the last stage of capitalism, in pursuit of greater profits than the home market can offer, capital is exported. This leads to the division of the world between international monopolist firms and to European states colonizing large parts of the world in support of their businesses. Imperialism is thus an advanced stage of capitalism, one relying on the rise of monopolies and on the export of capital (rather than goods), and of which colonialism is one feature.