Vladimir Ilyich Lenin Essay, Research Paper

LENIN (Ulyanov) Vladimir Ilyich (also used other pseudonyms such as V. Ilyin, K. Tulin, Karpov and others).

Born: 10th (22nd) April 1870 in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk).

Organizer of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union and founder of the Soviet state, he continued the revolutionary teaching of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Born in the family of a public-school inspector. His elder brother Alexander, a member of the “People’s Freedom” movement, was sentenced to death in 1887 for participation in preparations for an assassination attempt on the Tsar. In 1887 Lenin finished gymnasium [eg. highschool] and entered the law faculty of Kazan University. He was arrested in December 1887 for participation in a student revolutionary movement, was expelled from the university and exiled to the village of Kokushkino in Kazan Province. In October 1888 he returned to Kazan, where he became a member of a Marxist society. In 1889 he moved to the city of Samara. In 1891 he took and passed extramural exams at the law faculty of St Petersburg University and got work as assistant to a justice of the law in Samara. In August 1893 he moved to St Petersburg. In Autumn 1895 he set up the St Petersburg “Union for the liberation of the working class”. At the beginning of December 1895 he was arrested and in February 1897 exiled to Siberia for three years. In 1900 he went abroad, where together with G.V. Plekhanov he began to publish the newspaper “Iskra” (”Spark”).

At the 2nd conference of the Russian Social Democratic Working Party (1903) Lenin was instrumental in setting up a new type of Bolshevik Marxist Party. During the revolution of 1905 -1907 Lenin developed the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the bourgeois democratic revolution, and worked out the theory of the expansion of the bourgeois democratic revolution into socialist revolution. At the beginning of November 1905 Lenin came to St Petersburg to take control of the revolutionary struggle. In December 1905 he directed the 1st conference of the Bolsheviks at Tammerfors. From December 1907 onwards, as an emigrant, he continued the fight for the survival and consolidation of the illegal party. In June 1912 he moved from Paris to Krakow, where he supervised publication of the Bolshevik newspaper “Pravda”. During this time he developed a Marxist programme on the nationalities question. At the end of July 1914 he was arrested by the Austrian police, but was soon released and left for Switzerland. During the 1st World War he promoted the slogan of converting imperialist into civil [revolutionary] war. Following the bourgeois-democratic revolution of April 1917, he moved to Petrograd and pointed the socialist revolution towards victory, whilst hiding from the persecution of the bourgeois provisional government. During this time he developed a plan for the proletariat to seize power by means of an armed uprising.

On 10th (23rd) October at a session of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party a resolution put forward by Lenin regarding armed uprising was passed. On 24th October (6th November) Lenin arrived at Smolny and took charge of the October Uprising. He was elected head of the Soviet Government. On 11th March 1918, together with the Party Central Committee and the Soviet Government, Lenin moved to Moscow, which then became the capital of the Soviet state. During this time Lenin worked out a plan for the construction of socialism and put forward principles for a new economic policy. In 1922 he fell seriously ill. In December 1922 – March 1923 he dictated a series of articles which formed his legacy to the Party and the Soviet people in their struggle for socialism and communism. V.I. Lenin died on 21st January 1924.