The State and Revolution

Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov, later known as Lenin, was a Russian political theorist and revolutionary who became the leader of the world’s first communist state in 1917. He was born in Simbirsk, along the Volga River, on April 22, 1870. His hometown would later be renamed Ulyanovsk in his honor.

Lenin was born into a tumultuous period in Russian politics. When Lenin was 11 years old, Tsar Alexander II was assassinated by a group of revolutionaries known as narodniks (roughly translated as “populists”). His successor, Alexander III, undertook a brutal crackdown against all dissent. In 1886, Alexander III’s government arrested, tried, and hanged Lenin’s older brother Alexander for anti-government activity.

Lenin moved to St. Petersburg 1893, where he joined a Marxist group known as the Social Democrats. He was arrested for sedition and spent several years in exile in Siberia. In 1900 Lenin went into exile in Europe, where he could disseminate his ideas and organize groups with relatively greater freedom. Taking the name “Lenin”—likely a reference to the Lena River—Lenin became the champion of a small vanguard of highly-motivated Marxist revolutionaries. He spent these years writing works of revolutionary theory and engaging in political activism. When World War I broke out in 1914, Lenin strongly criticized socialists who backed the war effort instead of adhering to internationalist principles.  

Lenin was in Zurich when, in 1917, Tsar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. Russia had suffered a string of military defeats on the war front and there was widespread discontent over food shortages, fueling anti-government sentiment among the Russian population. After the Tsar’s abdication, power passed into the hands of a provisional government headed by Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky’s government instituted a sweeping set of liberal reforms, including the abolition of the death penalty and freedom of the press. However, the provisional government’s decision to continue the war effort exacerbated the country’s economic instability. The German government, eager to capitalize on their enemy’s weakness, dispatched Lenin to the then-capital of Petrograd (St. Petersburg) in a secret train compartment.

In November 1917, Lenin’s Bolsheviks seized the Winter Palace in Petrograd and declared that all power would now be in the hands of “Soviets” (local workers’ councils). After a long and grueling civil war (1917-1923) against a patchwork opposition and foreign interests, the Bolsheviks declared victory and established the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.

Lenin was named head of government, but by then his health was already failing. He died of a stroke in 1924, with Joseph Stalin taking over the leadership of the Bolshevik party. Although the Soviet Union collapsed in 1991, Lenin’s body is still on public display, entombed in a glass case inside the Kremlin in Moscow.