Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 1924 Lenin

LENIN, VLADIMIR ILYICH ULYANOV 1924), founder and guiding spirit of the Soviet Republics and the Communist International, the disciple of Marx, the leader of the Bolshevik party and the organizer of the Oct. revolution in Russia, was born on April 9 (22), 1870, in the town of Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk. His father, Ilya Nicolaevitch, was a schoolmaster. His mother, Maria Alexandrovna, was the daughter of a doctor named Berg. His eldest brother (b. 1866) joined the "Narod ovoltze" (a revolutionary terrorist society), and taking part in the unsuccessful attempt on the life of Alexander III., was exe cuted (1891); this was a determining factor in Lenin's life.

Early Life.

The third of a family of six, Lenin completed his course at the Simbirsk gymnasium in 1887, winning the gold medal. He entered the Kazan University to study law, but was sent down in Dec. of the same year for taking part in a gathering of students and was banished to the country. It was not till the autumn of 1889 that he was allowed to return to Kazan, where he began the systematic study of Marx and met the members of the local Marxist circle. In 1891 Lenin passed the law examinations of the St. Petersburg University, and in 1892 he began to practise as a barrister at Samara, appearing for the defence in several trials. His life, however, was chiefly filled by the study of Marx ism and its application to the economic and political development of Russia and subsequently of the whole world.

In 1894 he moved to St. Petersburg, and began his propaganda work. To this period belong Lenin's first polemical writings directed against the popular party and passed from hand to hand in manuscript form. Soon after, Lenin started in the Press a theoretical struggle against the falsifiers of Marx. In April 1895 he first went abroad to meet Plekhanov, Zasulich, Axelrod and the Marxist group known as the "Osvobozhdenie Truda" (Deliverance of Labour). On his return to St. Petersburg, he organized the illegal "Union for the liberation of the Working Class," which rapidly became an important organization, carrying on propaganda among the workers. In Dec. 1895 Lenin and his closest col laborators were arrested. He spent the year 1896 in prison, and in Feb. 1897 he was exiled for three years to the Yenisei province in eastern Siberia. In 1898 he married N. K. Krupskaya, a com rade in the St. Petersburg Union and his faithful companion for

the remaining 26 years of his life. During his exile he finished his most important economic work, The Development of Capital ism in Russia, based on an enormous mass of statistical material (1899). In 1900 Lenin went to Switzerland to arrange, with the "Deliverance of Labour" group, the publication of a revolutionary paper intended for Russia. At the end of the year the first number of the paper Iskra (The Spark) appeared in Munich, with the motto "From Spark to Flame." Its aim was to give a Marxian interpretation of the problems of the revolution, with the political watchwords of the struggle, and to form a centralized "underground" revolutionary party of Social Democrats, which, standing at the head of the proletariat, should open the struggle against Tsarism. The idea of an organized party leadership of the struggle of the proletariat in all its forms and manifestations, which is one of the central ideas of Leninism, is closely connected with the idea of the hegemony of the working class within the democratic movement of the country. This idea found direct expression in the programme of the dictatorship of the proletariat when the development of the revolutionary movement had pre pared the conditions for the Oct. revolution.

Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.—The second Congress of the R.S.D.R.P. (Brussels, London) in July and Aug. 1903 accepted the programme worked out by Plekhanov and Lenin, but ended with the historic split of the party into Bolsheviks and Menshe viks. Thereupon Lenin entered on his separate path as leader of the Bolshevik section, later the Bolshevik party. The differences concerned tactics and finally the party programme. The Menshe viks tried to bring the policy of the Russian proletariat into line with that of the liberal bourgeoisie. Lenin saw in the peasantry the closest ally of the proletariat. Occasional agreements and closer relations with the Mensheviks failed to arrest the constant widening of the two lines—the revolutionary and the opportunist —the proletarian and the bourgeois. The struggle with the Mensheviks forged the policy which led to the break with the Second International (1914), to the Oct. revolution (1917) and to the change of the party's name from Social Democrat to Com munist (1918).