Who was Lenin?

Submitted by Anon on 5 March, 2006 - 12:21

Vladimir Lenin (1869-1924) was one of many thousands of young students in Russia who joined revolutionary movements there in the later years of the 19th century.

Russia was a stifling dictatorship ruled by the Tsar (emperor). Aristocratic landlords had virtual power of life or death over the peasants on their land, even after the legal abolition of serfdom in 1861.

Almost all educated young people resented the system, and many became activists. At first they tried to mobilise the peasants, the big majority of the population. They had little success. Some concluded that the only answer was for a small band of dedicated revolutionaries to overthrow the Tsar by military force. Lenin's older brother Alexander was put to death in 1887 after being arrested for conspiring to kill the Tsar.

From the early 1880s some activists started to argue that the minority, but fast-growing and concentrated, class of industrial workers was the key to revolution. Lenin became one of those worker-oriented revolutionaries. He was active organising workers in St Petersburg from 1893.

Like almost all Russian revolutionaries of his time, he was eventually arrested (in 1895) and exiled to Siberia. After five years in jail and in Siberia, spent studying and writing, he went abroad. He was abroad - scraping a precarious livelihood, and producing illegal papers and pamphlets to smuggle into Russia - most of the time after 1900, being able to return only when there were revolutionary upheavals, in 1905-6 and 1917.

In 1903 the Russian Social-Democratic (i.e., in the terminology of the time, Marxist) movement split between the more revolutionary Bolsheviks (Russian for "majority") and the softer Mensheviks ("minority"). Lenin led the Bolshevik faction.

After a spontaneous uprising in St Petersburg overthrew the Tsar in February 1917, the Mensheviks and, at first, the Bolsheviks too, supported the bourgeois Provisional Government set up in his place. Lenin returned to Russia in April 1917, and very quickly won a majority in the Bolshevik party for "all power to the Soviets" (workers' councils). That policy enabled the Bolsheviks to lead the Russian workers to power in October 1917, while the Mensheviks were still supporting the bourgeois Provisional Government. Lenin and the Bolsheviks were regarded by most other socialists of their day as ultra-argumentative and quarrelsome. But in their arguments they worked out how to build a party capable of leading workers' struggles on the ideological, political and economic fronts, and how Russian workers should relate to wider questions such as national oppression and the needs of the peasants.

Lenin suffered a stroke in May 1922, and was out of action most of the time from then until his death in January 1924. But, as best he could, he conducted a struggle against the rise of Stalin from his death-bed.

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