Workers' Liberty

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.