Russian revolutionary leader of the communist movement and the founder of the Soviet Union, a Marxist revolutionary shaped into his radical political views by living under the Tsarist government in Russia. A fanatical believer in the doctrine of Karl Marx, he spread it throughout Russia and tried to put it into practice as an international revolutionary leader. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a communist, he developed a variant of Marxism known as Leninism.
In 1903 at the Russian Social Democratic Labor party in London, he was able to split the professional revolutionaries into Bolshevism lead by him and Menshevism. Exploiting Russian vulnerabilities during WW I, Lenin came back to Moscow and took control of the country. During the twentieth century, Lenin was considered the father of modern Soviet Russia. With the collapse of the Soviet government, Lenin’s stature has fallen throughout the world.
Lenin’s parents were teachers instilling leftist views on their middle-class Russian family. His older brother Alexander was hanged in 1887 for his participation in plotting against Tsar Alexander III. Lenin’s movements were under surveillance by the Tsar’s police while he attended his law studies at the University of Kazan. He was arrested in December 1895 for revolutionary activities. In 1891, he completed his law studies and worked for the poor in Samara, Russia until 1893, when he moved to St. Petersburg and participated in revolutionary protests. He was arrested in December 1895, and sent to Siberia for three years. On his release, he went abroad for the next 17 years visiting radicals in Switzerland, Paris, London and Germany. In 1902, he published his book, “What is to be Done.”
Knowing the Russians were ripe for domestic agitation, the German government sent the revolutionary in a private train from Switzerland to Sweden in which he entered Russia in 1917. In November 1917, he seized power of the state and sued for peace with Germany and began the new Communist government. Lenin became the Chairman of the Communist Party and quickly established the secret police to suppress all opposition. The treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the WWI German government was accepted in March 1918. After the ensuing Russian Civil War ended in 1921, he established his New Economic Policy. A fanatical believer in the doctrine of Karl Marx, he tried to spread Marxist theory and put it into practice throughout Russia.
He was married to Marxist revolutionary, Nadezhda Krupskaya whom he met in St. Petersburg in 1893.
Lenin was struck by two bullets by a would-be female assassin on 30 August 1918. He survived the assassination but was injured with his wounds. On 26 May 1922, he suffered his first stroke. On 15 December 1922 he had his second stroke and his third stroke on 9 March 1923 left him completely incapacitated. He died at 6:50 PM on 21 January 1924 with his wife, Krupskaya holding his hand in Gorki. He was 53. His body was embalmed and placed on display in a mausoleum in Red Square, Moscow.
Link to Wikipedia biography