Vladimir Ilich Lenin (1870-1924)

His original name is Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov, and “Lenin” was his pseudonym name he initially used in the Party. Founder of the Russian Communist Party (B); founder of the Soviet state; prominent leader of the international communist movement. He inherited and developed Marxism and founded Leninism.

Born on 22 April 1870 into a progressive intellectual family, Lenin graduated from middle school in 1887 and enrolled in the law faculty of Kazan University, where he was arrested and exiled for participating in the student movement. In 1888 he returned to Kazan and became an active member of the Kazan Marxist Group. In 1891 he passed the state examinations of the law faculty of Petersburg University as an external student and received a diploma with honors, qualifying as a law clerk. Lenin organized the first local Marxist group in Samara, where he studied and propagated revolutionary theory while conducting rural investigations.

In 1893, Lenin moved to Petersburg and soon became the recognized leader of Marxists in this city. In 1894, he finished the pamphlet What the “Friends of the People” Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats. In this first book, he criticized the liberal Narodniks in a comprehensive way, discussed the historical mission of the proletariat, and put forward the thought of the alliance of workers and peasants for the first time. In 1895, Lenin united all the Marxist groups in Petersburg and established the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, which marked the beginning of the combination of scientific socialism with the Russian workers’ movement and made preparations for the establishment of the revolutionary Marxist workers’ party. In the same year, Lenin went to Switzerland, Paris, Berlin and other places to learn about the French and German workers’ movement and also met with Plekhanov. In December, Lenin was arrested and jailed in Petersburg. Exiled to Siberia in February 1897. In June 1898, Lenin married Nadhezda Krupskaya. During his exile, he wrote more than 30 theoretical works, among which in The Development of Capitalism in Russia, he analyzed the historical inevitability and internal contradictions of the emergence and development of Russian capitalism and pointed out the inevitability of the bourgeois democratic revolution in Russia and emphasized the leading role of the proletariat in this revolution, thoroughly clearing up the erred theories of the Narodniks.

At the end of his exile in February 1900, Lenin established contact with Social-Democratic groups and individual Social-Democrats in various Russian towns. In December of the same year, he and Plekhanov jointly founded the first Marxist political newspaper Iskra of Russia in Munich, Germany. During 1901-1902, Lenin wrote his famous work What Is to Be Done?

In this first book, he opposed Bernstein’s revisionism, criticized the “economism” trend, and demanded that the party should be built into an organization with professional revolutionists as the vanguard core and strict organization and discipline (organizational principle of democratic-centralism). He expounded the important principle that socialist theory must be instilled into workers thinking from outside and stressed that “without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement”, which laid the solid theoretical foundation for the proletarian party building.

From July to August 1903, Lenin attended the Second Congress of Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party. Due to differences in the party’s organizational principles, two fractions, i.e., Bolsheviks supporting Lenin and Mensheviks supporting Martov formed in the party. In 1904, Lenin wrote One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, criticizing Mensheviks’ erred views on the organizational issues, and comprehensively expounded the theory of Marxist proletarian parties. After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1905, the Third Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, which only Bolsheviks participated in, was held in London in April wherein the strategy of Bolsheviks in the revolution was formulated. In July, Lenin published the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, criticizing the opportunistic line of the Mensheviks, pointing out that the proletariat must hold the leadership of this revolution and establish an alliance with the peasants, and advocated armed uprising as the means to win victory in the 1905 revolution.

He said: “after the victory, we must establish a democratic dictatorship of workers and peasants and start an immediate transition to socialist revolution.” And in December, due to the failure of the armed uprising against the Tsar, Lenin once again went into exile to Paris and other places in Europe. In response to the debate on the future of the revolution, he wrote Materialism and Empirio-Criticism in 1908, to criticize all kinds of subjective idealism and fighting against the liquidators and the Otzovist (Recallist) groups in the party. In 1910, he attended the Copenhagen Meeting of the Second International Congress and defended the proletarian revolutionary line on the issue of the relationship between consumer cooperatives of the working class and the party. In January 1912, he led the Sixth Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party in Prague. The meeting decided to expel the Mensheviks from the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, and since then, the Bolsheviks have officially become an independent Marxist party.

During the World War I, Lenin lived in Switzerland, led the Bolshevik party, upheld Marxist theories and tactics on war, peace and revolution issues, upheld the proletarian internationalism, fought against social chauvinism, and put forward the slogan of “Turn the Imperialist War into a Civil War.” At the same time, Lenin actively fought to unite the left-wing forces of the parties from all countries in order to prepare for the establishment of a new “international”. In 1915, his article “On the Slogan for a United States of Europe” was published, which analyzed the uneven economic and political development law of capitalism and put forward his thesis that “the victory of socialism is possible first in several or even in a single capitalist country.” In 1916, in his book Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, Lenin comprehensively analyzed the essence, characteristics and the basic contradictions of imperialism and objective laws of its inevitable demise, and pointed out that imperialism is the eve of the proletarian social revolution, and thoroughly criticized Kautsky’s erred views on these issues.

After the revolution in February 1917, Russia established a provisional bourgeois government. Lenin returned to Petrograd in April and published his work “April Theses”, and put forward the policy of transition from the bourgeois democratic revolution to socialist revolution and proposed the new slogan of “all power to the Soviets!” After the July counterrevolutionary incident, Lenin turned to underground work and led the Sixth Congress of the Bolshevik Party.

In September, he finished his work State and Revolution, which discusses the origin, essence and economic basis of the withering away of the State, revealed the basic characteristics of the two stages of communist society, and emphasized that the dictatorship of the proletariat must be upheld during the whole transitional period from capitalism to socialism. In October 1920, he secretly returned to Petrograd.

On November 7, 1917 (October 25, Russian calendar), he led the armed uprising of Petrograd to victory. The next day, his “Peace Decree” and “Decree on Land” was passed by the Second Congress of Soviets of Workers’, Soldiers’, and Peasants’ Deputies, and Lenin was elected chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars. In March 1918, after achieving consolidation inside and outside of the party, Bolsheviks signed “Treaty of Brest-Litovsk” with Germany, which gave the Soviet state a temporary opportunity for peace and breathing. Finally, as envisioned in the “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government” and other articles, the plan of starting socialist construction was put forward.

From 1918 to 1920, Lenin led the whole nation in their successful retaliation, repelling the armed intervention of 14 capitalist countries along with the insurgence of the reactionary class thus achieving the survival of the first socialist country in the world. In August 1918, Lenin was assassinated and seriously injured. During his convalescent period, he wrote a book, The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky, which exposed the slandering and reactionary attacks against proletarian dictatorship by the opportunists of the Second International and criticized Kautsky’s “pure democracy” and other fallacies. In March, the Third International (Comintern) was established. Lenin personally led the first four congresses of the Communist International. In May 1920, Lenin summed up the historical experience of the Bolshevik party and the international significance of the Russian Revolution in his pamphlet the “Left-Wing” Communism: An Infantile Disorder, criticized the “left-leaning” trend of thought within some newly established communist parties of Western Europe.

Following the end of the civil war, Lenin led the whole party to shift the focus of party work to lead the construction of socialism. In 1921, the War Communism economic policy was replaced by the New Economic Policy (NEP). The essence of the New Economic Policy was to allow the existence of the private economy to a certain extent, which aimed to restore and develop the economic relations between industry and agriculture by using the commodity relations, in order to gradually establish the socialist economic foundation, formulate a foreign policy of peaceful coexistence and guard against the peaceful disintegration of the Soviet regime by imperialism.

Lenin suffered from cerebral hemorrhage in May 1922, and his condition began to get worse in December. During his illness, he dictated articles and letters such as “Pages From a Diary”, “On Cooperation”, “On Our Revolution” and “Better Fewer, But Better”, in which he worked out plans for building socialism in the Soviet Union. He firmly argued that by the implementation of New Economic Policy, Russia, would become a socialist Russia, and hoped that India, China and other developing countries would respond positively to the victory of Russian socialist revolution. Lenin died on January 21, 1924.

Lenin’s life is the life of a great proletarian revolutionary, who has made great contributions to the world socialist movement.