Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov 22 April 1870 21 January 1924 better known by his alias Lenin was a Russian revolutionary politician and political theorist He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1922 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924 Under his administration Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a oneparty communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party A Marxist he developed a variant of this communist ideology known as Leninism Born to a moderately prosperous middleclass family in Simbirsk Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brothers 1887 execution Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empires Tsarist government he devoted the following years to a law degree He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist In 1897 he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya After his exile he moved to Western Europe where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party RSDLP In 1903 he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martovs Mensheviks Following Russias failed Revolution of 1905 he campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europewide proletarian revolution which as a Marxist he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime Lenins Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries elected soviets and a multiparty Constituent Assembly although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party Lenins administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and largescale industry It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty conceding territory to the Central Powers and promoted world revolution through the Communist International Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror a violent campaign administered by the state security services tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps His administration defeated right and leftwing antiBolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the PolishSoviet War of 19191921 Responding to wartime devastation famine and popular uprisings in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the marketoriented New Economic Policy Several nonRussian nations had secured independence from the Russian Empire after 1917 but three were reunited into the new Soviet Union in 1922 His health failing Lenin died in Gorki with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the preeminent figure in the Soviet government Description above from the Wikipedia article Vladimir Lenin licensed under CCBYSA full list of contributors on Wikipedia