Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was the third of the six children born to Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Blank, both of whom were from affluent backgrounds.

His father was a prominent Russian schoolmaster, who received numerous honors for his work in the field of education. His mother, the daughter of a Jewish doctor, was well-versed in Russian literature and insisted that her children receive quality education.

Lenin’s elder brother, Alexsandr Sacha was a gold-medalist from St. Petersburg University and later became involved in political agitations against Tsar Alexander III. He organized several protests and was soon arrested and executed on April 25, 1887, on charges of conspiracy against the Tsar.

Though distraught after the deaths of his father and his elder brother, he continued his studies and received a gold medal for his exceptional performance in school. He started pursuing law at the Kazan University in 1887.

At the university, he became interested in his late brother’s ideologies and soon started taking part in student protests and was consequently expelled. Around this time, he became influenced with Karl Marx and joined St. Petersburg University, where he finally completed his law studies and later passed the bar exams.

In 1892, he was appointed as a barrister but continued to devote his time to radical political activities, formulating ideas for the application of the Marxist ideology to reform Russia. He soon became a member of the ‘Social Democrats’ group, which was run by cell member, S.I. Radchenko.

In a few years, revolutionary cells in Russia grew manifold and by 1894, Lenin, himself was the leader of a cell, and wrote his first political treatise, ‘What the Friends of the People Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats’. Despite being banned, it sold over 200 copies illegally.

He was soon arrested, along with his coworkers, for his revolutionary activities and was exiled to Siberia for 3 years, where he met his future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

In 1904, Russia was at war with Japan and it had an intense impact on the Russian society, causing people to object and call for a political reform.

Lenin seized the opportunity and returned to St. Petersburg in 1905 to support the Russian Revolution and was soon elected as President of the streamlined Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP).

In order to end the Russian Revolution and to pacify the agitated Russian citizens, Tsar Nicholas II formed a legislative assembly known as the ‘Duma’. However, Lenin was far from satisfied with the formation of the new assembly and moved to Geneva, Switzerland, in 1905.

During his voluntary exile in Switzerland, he travelled throughout Europe and partook in numerous socialist-Marxist activities. He even authored ‘Materialism and Empirio-criticism’, published in 1909.

At the outbreak of World War I, most Social Democratic parties supported the war efforts in their respective homelands but Lenin’s views of the war were far from supportive. In order to get away from the war chaos, he moved back to neutral Switzerland where he joined the Zimmerwald Conference, an anti-war socialist conference group.