Vladimir Lenin

• 1. Introduction

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  Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the man the world would come to know as Vladimir Lenin, took the name from no person at all. He first used it in December 1901, and one theory ties it to the Siberian Lena River. He often wrote it as N. Lenin, though the N stood for nothing. A popular misconception later decided it meant Nikolai. This was a man comfortable with masks. To get a reader's ticket at the British Museum Reading Room, he signed himself Jacob Richter. To slip out of Petrograd when the government wanted him dead, he traveled in disguise. How does a provincial lawyer's son become the first head of a communist state? What turned a competitive boy who played chess in Simbirsk into the founder of the Bolsheviks? And once power was won in the October Revolution, what did he do with a country that nobody had governed his way before? The answers run through executed brothers, sealed trains, famine, and a final scramble that ended with Joseph Stalin.

• 2. Two Deaths In Simbirsk

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  In January 1886, when Lenin was 15, his father Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov died of a brain haemorrhage. Lenin's behaviour turned erratic and confrontational, and he renounced his belief in God. His father had been a man of remarkable rise. Born into a family of former serfs, Ilya studied physics and mathematics at Kazan University, then climbed to Director of Public Schools for the province and the rank of State Councillor, which made him a hereditary nobleman. He oversaw the foundation of over 450 schools and earned the Order of Saint Vladimir in 1882. The second death came soon after. Lenin's elder brother Aleksandr, whom he knew affectionately as Sasha, was studying at Saint Petersburg University and had joined a revolutionary cell bent on assassinating Tsar Alexander III. Selected to construct a bomb, Aleksandr was arrested before the attack and executed in May 1887. Despite this trauma, Lenin graduated at the top of his class with a gold medal and chose to study law at Kazan University. His mother, Maria Alexandrovna, carried a secret of her own. According to historian Petrovsky-Shtern, Lenin was likely unaware of his mother's Jewish ancestry, which his sister Anna discovered only after his death.

• 3. The Making Of A Marxist

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  In August 1887, within months of arriving at Kazan University, Lenin was arrested. He had joined a revolutionary cell and taken part in a December demonstration against bans on student societies. The police named him a ringleader, expelled him, and exiled him to the family's Kokushkino estate. There he read voraciously, falling for Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done? His mother, Maria, kept intervening on his behalf. She persuaded the Interior Ministry to let him return to Kazan, bought a country estate at Alakaevka hoping he would take up farming, and in May 1890 arranged for him to sit his law exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he earned the equivalent of a first-class degree with honours. The graduation was marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid. In Samara, Lenin produced a Russian translation of Marx and Engels' 1848 pamphlet The Communist Manifesto and absorbed the work of Georgi Plekhanov. Plekhanov argued that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism, so socialism would come from the urban proletariat, not the peasantry. This put Lenin against the agrarian-socialist Narodniks, who believed peasant communes could reach socialism while skipping capitalism entirely.

• 4. Exile And The Underground

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  In late 1893 Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg and rose within a Marxist cell calling itself the Social-Democrats. He met Nadezhda Krupskaya, a Marxist schoolteacher who became his romantic partner, and he covered his tracks against police spies. In 1894 around 200 copies of his anti-Narodnik tract were illegally printed. He traveled to Switzerland to meet Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod, to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue, and to Berlin's Staatsbibliothek for six weeks of study. Then the net closed. He was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition, held a year before sentencing. In February 1897 he was sent without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia. The journey to Shushenskoye took 11 weeks. Deemed only a minor threat, he could correspond with revolutionaries, swim in the Yenisei River, and hunt duck and snipe. Nadya, herself arrested for organising a strike, joined him, and the couple married on the 10th of July 1898. After his release he raised funds for a newspaper, Iskra, launched from Munich in 1900 and smuggled into Russia. It became the country's most successful underground publication since the 1850s, the platform from which a Siberian river's name would soon belong to him.

• 5. Bolsheviks And Mensheviks

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  In July 1903, at the second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party in London, a single disagreement split the movement. Julius Martov argued that party members should express themselves independently of the leadership. Lenin demanded a strong leadership with complete control. Lenin's side held the majority, so he called them bol'sheviki, the majoritarians, while Martov's became the men'sheviki, the minoritarians. The names stuck. The quarrel curdled fast. Bolsheviks called their rivals undisciplined opportunists, and Mensheviks called Lenin a despot and an autocrat. Enraged, Lenin resigned from the Iskra editorial board and in May 1904 published One Step Forward, Two Steps Back. His central idea had already appeared in his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?, which argued for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution. The factional fights followed him across Europe. He clashed with Alexander Bogdanov over whether reality existed independently of human observation, and in 1908 attacked Bogdanov's relativism in Materialism and Empirio-criticism. The Okhrana secret police exploited his combativeness, planting the spy Roman Malinovsky as a vocal Lenin supporter inside the party itself.

• 6. The Sealed Train

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  In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in Petrograd as industrial workers struck over food shortages. Tsar Nicholas II abdicated, the State Duma formed a Provisional Government, and the empire became a republic. Lenin learned all of this from Switzerland and celebrated, but the war blocked his routes home. The solution was audacious. The German government, hoping to weaken its Russian enemy, agreed to let 32 Russian citizens cross its territory by train. For political cover, Lenin and the Germans agreed to call it a sealed train carriage, though it was not truly sealed. Passengers even disembarked to spend a night in Frankfurt. The route ran from Zurich to Sassnitz, by ferry to Trelleborg, then through the Haparanda-Tornio crossing to Helsinki and on to Petrograd. He arrived at the Finland Station in April. There he condemned the Provisional Government and laid out his April Theses, written on the journey: immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, rule by soviets, nationalisation of industry and banks, and the expropriation of land. After the July Days demonstrations turned violent, the government ordered his arrest and called him a German agent provocateur. He fled again, this time to Helsinki, hiding in sympathisers' safe houses while writing The State and Revolution.

• 7. Seizing And Holding Power

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  On the 10th of October 1917, at a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee, Lenin won the argument for armed insurrection by ten votes to two. Zinoviev and Kamenev objected, doubting that Russian workers would back a violent coup. The plan went ahead from the Smolny Institute. The Military Revolutionary Committee took Petrograd's transport, communication, printing and utility hubs without bloodshed. The cruiser Aurora fired a blank shot to signal the assault, the Winter Palace fell, and its ministers were arrested. The Bolsheviks formed a new government, the Council of People's Commissars, or Sovnarkom. Lenin first turned down the chairmanship and suggested Trotsky, then relented. Governing proved harsher than seizing. When the Constituent Assembly convened in January 1918, the Bolsheviks had won about a quarter of the vote, losing to the Socialist-Revolutionaries, so Sovnarkom forcibly disbanded it. The decrees came fast: the Decree on Land nationalising aristocratic and church estates, an eight-hour workday, free secular education, the emancipation of women through the Zhenotdel, and first-trimester abortion on demand, a first for any country. Power survived two assassination attempts. On the 30th of August 1918, the former SR Fanny Kaplan shot Lenin twice outside an arms factory; he recovered, but his health never did. Kaplan was executed on the 3rd of September.

• 8. War, Terror, And Retreat

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  On the 3rd of March 1918, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk handed Germany an enormous prize: 26% of the former empire's population, 37% of its agricultural harvest area, 28% of its industry, 26% of its railway tracks, and three-quarters of its coal and iron deposits. Lenin had argued for the territorial losses to ensure the government's survival, against Bolsheviks who wanted to call Germany's bluff. The peace did not buy calm. The Russian Civil War set the Red Army against the Whites under former Tsarist officers like Anton Denikin, Alexander Kolchak, and Nikolai Yudenich, with 35,000 Czech Legion members and Western troops backing the anti-Bolshevik side. Lenin tasked Trotsky with building the Red Army. Inside the country, the machinery of repression hardened. In December 1917 Lenin established the Cheka under Felix Dzerzhinsky, and in September 1918 Sovnarkom inaugurated the Red Terror. Estimates of the dead range from 10,000 to 15,000 at the low end and 50,000 to 140,000 at the high. His August 1918 telegram to the Bolsheviks of Penza demanded the public hanging of at least 100 known kulaks. The Russian famine of 1921, worsened by grain requisitioning and exports, killed around five million people. Uprisings followed, including the Tambov Rebellion and the Kronstadt revolt, which Trotsky's Red Army crushed on the 17th of March 1921. That same month Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, allowing private enterprise and open markets, a course his biographers often call one of his greatest achievements. His most quoted line came from the electrification drive: communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the whole country.