The man known to history as Vladimir Lenin
was born as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on the 22nd, April 1870, or the 10th of April, using
the old style Julian calendar, in the city of Simbirsk over 700 kilometres to the east
of the Russian capital, Moscow. His father was Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov who
had been born into a serf family in Russia in 1831, but had earned his freedom in his
youth and then studied physics and mathematics at Kazan University. He subsequently enjoyed a successful career
as an educator and public school overseer in Russia and rose to become a state councillor,
a position which meant that in the early 1880s the Ulyanovs became part of the minor Russian
nobility based on Ilya’s contributions to public education within the Russian Empire. Vladimir’s mother was Maria Alexandrovna
Blank, who was of mixed German, Swedish, Russian and Jewish ancestry. It seems likely that Vladimir never knew of
his mother’s Jewish heritage. She and Ilya had eight children in total,
two of whom died in infancy. Vladimir was the third eldest, arriving after
Anna in 1864 and Alexander in 1866. Vladimir’s childhood was comfortable, in
line with his father’s increasingly successful career. For instance, as well as living in a well-appointed
home in Simbirsk, the Ulyanovs also holidayed at a manor in Kokushkino in the countryside. Vladimir also emerged as his father’s son,
displaying a considerable intellect by his teenage years, excelling at school and becoming
an accomplished chess player. But the upper middle class idyll of his childhood
years was soon shattered. When he was fifteen years of age his father
died prematurely of a brain haemorrhage in January 1886, an event which had a profound
impact on Vladimir who after this, began to become an increasingly reactionary and rebellious
character. The situation was massively compounded the
following year when his older brother, Alexander, who had left to attend Saint Petersburg State
University some time earlier, was implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate the ruler of
the Russian Empire, Alexander III. Vladimir’s brother, along with several others,
were executed shortly afterwards for their role in the conspiracy. Vladimir would never be the same again and
his descent into extremist politics in Russia can be traced to this event. Vladimir’s subsequent actions and those
of his brother Alexander in 1887 must be viewed in relation to the political landscape of
Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. For centuries Russia had largely lain outside
of the mainstream of European politics and culture but beginning with the reign of Peter
I in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries, efforts had been made
to modernise and reform the country to make it more like other European states such as
France and the Austrian Empire. This work was continued by his near successor,
Catherine the Great, who was German herself and wanted to make Russia a modern nation. This all occurred as the Russian Empire was
expanding dramatically and by the end of the eighteenth century Russian explorers and colonists
had reached as far as the Bering Straits and Manchuria, extending the Russian state as
far as the Pacific Ocean, while in the west Catherine began a series of conquests which
brought parts of the Caucasus, Poland and Ukraine under Russian rule. Yet despite all of this, the country remained
backward in many respects. Serfdom, under which Russian commoners were
tied to the land and their manorial lord as a quasi-slave, still predominated across the
country; the economy remained resoundingly rural; the Orthodox Church had a huge influence
over society; and the country was incredibly authoritarian, being ruled by the Tsars and
the nobility in their own interest. In a world where nations like the United States,
Britain and France were emerging in their modern form in the nineteenth century, the
Russian Empire looked politically and socially backwards by comparison. These issues were compounded by events in
the years before Vladimir’s birth and while he was growing up. In 1855 Alexander II ascended to the throne
as Tsar of Russia. He was a liberal reformer who wished to drag
Russia into the modern world. Thus, in 1861 he brought serfdom to an end
and emancipated the serfs of Russia in one of the most striking social reforms of the
nineteenth century. He also sought to reform the courts, policing
and education system. However, in 1866 he only just survived an
assassination attempt and thereafter his liberal inclinations were toned down. But the reforms he had initiated had let the
genie out of the bottle so to speak in Russia. New ideas were being discussed in a more tolerant
environment, driven by writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bulgokov,
who questioned Russian society and discussed ideas and political theories like anarchism,
nihilism and communism. Many Russians wanted further reforms of society
as a result, notably the creation of a parliament and an end to the autocratic state ruled by
the Tsars. Groups such as the Narodniks and the People’s
Will emerged as politico-terrorist organisations agitating for these changes and it was the
latter group which in 1881 succeeded in assassinating Alexander II. This ushered in a period of even greater discontent
as he was succeeded by his son, Alexander III, who was opposed to the reforms his father
had implemented and wanted to crack down on liberal dissent in Russia. Thus, the country Vladimir was growing up
in during the 1880s was a powder-keg of political discontent and instability. It was in this political environment that
Vladimir arrived in 1887 to Kazan University to commence his studies. He was almost immediately involved in a protest
against the government’s crackdown on student societies which were perceived as hotbeds
of political dissent. His role in this, resulted in a brief arrest
and his expulsion from the university, but his brief spell there had ignited the fire
of political radicalisation. In the months that followed, Vladimir began
reading voraciously of various Russian and European political writers. Amongst others he was soon attracted to the
writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two German political philosophers and social
critics who had been deeply critical of the manner in which industrial society was developing
and who had postulated in their 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, that bourgeois capitalist
society should be replaced by one in which the industrial proletariat took everything
in society into communal ownership. This appealed to Vladimir at a time when industrialisation
was beginning to rapidly advance in Russian cities like Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan
and Samara. However, it was not the only intellectual
influence on him at this time and his political views were still under formation, although
there is no doubt they were radical even before he reached his twentieth year. In 1890, Vladimir’s mother was able to use
her family’s connections within the Russian education system to ensure that he was able
to sit exams at the University of St Petersburg in lieu of completing his studies at Kazan
University. He passed with first class honours and thereafter
took up a position as a legal assistant in Samara during the 1890s. Throughout these years he continued to foster
his political radicalism and was involved in numerous political organisations. Russia’s radical politics was buoyant at
this time owing to events in 1891. A dry autumn was followed by a bitterly cold
winter where temperatures dropped to below -30 degrees Celsius in some parts of the country
along the course of the River Volga. This was followed by a particularly dry spring
and summer in 1892, all of which combined to cause harvest failures across much of Russia. Famine struck thereafter and this was compounded
by the incompetent response of the government of Tsar Alexander III and other pillars of
Russian society such as the Orthodox Church. By the time the famine abated in late 1892
over 350,000 people had died of starvation and millions more were malnourished or badly
impacted in some other way. As criticism of the government escalated radical
groups such as the communists and nihilists gained ever greater numbers of supporters
in Russia. As the political radicalism of Russian society
increased, Lenin found himself feeling marginalised in provincial Samara and so it was, that in
1893 he set off for the capital, Saint Petersburg. There he continued to work as a legal assistant,
but his energies were primarily poured into working to foster the Marxist and communist
movement in the city. Socially revolutionary groups such as these
were effectively outlawed by the government of Alexander III, however his premature death
from kidney failure in 1894 brought his son Nicholas II to the throne, but while he was
more liberal than his father the political environment would remain repressive. No sooner had he arrived in the capital than
Vladimir became involved with a revolutionary communist cell in the city whose members primarily
came from the Technological Institute of Saint Petersburg. They termed themselves Social Democrats in
emulation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany which was Marxist and communist in
its ideology. Already by the spring of 1894 Vladimir was
under observation by the secret police in Saint Petersburg as he had come to their attention
as a rising Marxist figure. Nevertheless, his politics only became more
radical in the months that followed, particularly so after he met and entered into a relationship
with Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom he referred to as Nadya, a schoolteacher who espoused
radical Marxist political views. By that time he had also become involved in
the underground publishing of Marxist pamphlets in the city. It was this activity which eventually saw
him and several dozen of his associates arrested by the authorities in 1895, just as they had
been preparing to publish a communist newspaper called The Worker’s Cause. Lenin was refused legal representation following
his arrest and was detained for over a year before he was sentenced. This was a formative period in his life, as
he began working on a book entitled The Development of Capitalism in Russia while in jail. Eventually late in 1896 he was sentenced to
three years in exile in Siberia, the cold, vast and inhospitable region of Russia beyond
the Ural Mountains. This was not a prison sentence, but the Russian
state viewed exile to Siberia as effectively removing a political threat from civilization,
so remote and under-populated was Siberia. He was joined there by Nadya in 1898 and they
were wed within weeks. Owing to medical complications which Nadya
suffered from, though, they would never have children. Vladimir continued to write throughout this
time, eventually publishing The Development of Capitalism in Russia under the pseudonym
‘Vladimir Ilin’ in 1899. His exile ended in the early spring of 1900,
but the authorities forbade him from returning to Saint Petersburg and so it was, that he
briefly settled in Pskov, a city south of the capital. Here Vladimir became involved in publishing
a new revolutionary newspaper entitled Iskra meaning The Spark, however he quickly realised
that he would be re-arrested and suffer an even greater sentence if he continued to operate
on Russian soil. Consequently, in the summer of 1900 he left
for Switzerland, connecting with some revolutionary groups there before relocating to Munich in
the German Empire where he was joined by Nadya in 1901. It was at this time that he began writing
under the name which he would become synonymous with: Lenin. By 1902 he and Nadya had moved again, this
time to London, where Lenin ran Iskra from afar, with the paper being smuggled into Russia. It was during this time in exile in London
that Lenin composed his most famous written work, ‘What is to be Done?’ in 1902. In this, he rejected the view held by many
communists that it was inevitable that the proletariat would move society towards a socialist
state in advance of a communist one. Adherents of this view claimed that the role
of communist parties was simply to shepherd that process along. Instead Lenin believed a more interventionist
line was needed in order to ensure the victory of communism over capitalism, if needs be
by overt armed struggle. His belief was that the working conditions
of the proletariat and other factors did create a greater desire for a socialist state amongst
the workers of countries like Russia, Germany and Britain, but they would not move towards
socialism and then communism without a revolutionary movement to guide them there. Once this was achieved in one nation, Lenin
believed that the state would serve to drive the international communist movement. As such Lenin now conceived of the Russian
communist movement as what he termed the “vanguard of the proletariat,” a movement which would
lead the proletariat of Russia and then Europe towards communism. But inherent in this view was a danger. If the communist parties in Russia were responsible
for the communist movement both at home and internationally, then surely all manner of
conduct by the Russian communist movement could be justified as necessary for the greater
good of international communism?
In London Lenin also became involved in one of the critical episodes in the early history
of the Russian communist movement. While Lenin was in exile in Siberia in 1898,
the disparate revolutionary cells and groups that constituted Russian communism had united
into the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or RSDLP, formed at an underground conference
held in the city of Minsk in March 1898. The party was soon being targeted by the Russian
secret police, the Okhrana, and several of its leaders were arrested and imprisoned within
months of its establishment. Accordingly, a decision was taken to hold
the RSDLP’s 2nd Party Congress abroad when it was held in 1903. However, when the delegates met in London
in a chapel on Tottenham Court Road in August, divisions soon began to appear. One faction, led by Julius Martov, argued
that party membership should be kept broad in order to appeal to as many people as possible
back in Russia, as industrial workers there still only constituted 3% of the population. However, the other faction, which Lenin quickly
emerged as the leader of, argued that membership should be restricted to more committed revolutionaries. When a vote was held on the matter in November,
the party split in two. Lenin’s group became known as the Bolsheviks
and the other faction were known thereafter as the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks were the smaller grouping,
though confusingly Bolshevik actually means ‘majority’ and Menshevik means ‘minority’,
a contradiction owing to the fact that the majority of the editorial board of Iskra voted
in favour of Lenin’s faction. The split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks
did not result in the creation of two autonomous political parties immediately. Rather these now became two factions operating
within the RSDLP. Nevertheless the division between them was
extremely acrimonious, fuelled by Lenin himself who in the summer of 1904 published a treatise
entitled One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, which bitterly attacked the Mensheviks. These actions were successful and by early
1905, the Bolsheviks were acquiring control over the central committee of the RSDLP. The timing was propitious, as important events
were occurring in Russia in the first months of 1905. On the 22nd of January that year, a procession
of several thousand unarmed workers marched on the Tsar’s Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg
to peacefully present a petition for an improvement of workers’ rights in Russian factories. In a striking overreaction, government forces
opened fire on the protestors, killing over 150 people and injuring hundreds more in what
became known as Bloody Sunday. This, combined with Russia’s defeat in the
Russo-Japanese War, incited a revolution across Russia in 1905, with workers striking in many
cities, portions of the army mutinying and agrarian unrest across the countryside. The Revolution of 1905 was the spark which
led Lenin to return to Russia for the first time in five years. He was soon in Saint Petersburg where he was
central to establishing a new communist newspaper entitled Novaya Zhizn, meaning New Life. Through this and his other writings, he advocated
in favour of trying to expand the RSDLP membership at this time of intense revolutionary fervour
in Russia, but the moment was already passing the party by. In October 1905 the Tsar, Nicholas II, issued
what is known as the October Manifesto. In this he made wide-ranging concessions to
the myriad protestors throughout Russia. These included a declaration that many civil
rights which had been established elsewhere in Europe as far back as the eighteenth century
would now be granted to Russian citizens, while the Manifesto also promised that a new
Russian parliament to be known as the Duma would be created and political parties could
be established to elect members to this legislative assembly. This had the effect of ending the political
crisis and concluding the Revolution of 1905, however, thereafter, Nicholas reneged on most
of his promises. While a State Duma was established, Nicholas
disbanded the first one which was elected in 1906 when the membership of the parliament
was deemed to be too radical. Further Dumas were conservative and ineffective
organs of government. Meanwhile martial law was quickly imposed
in 1906 and political dissent was crushed across Russia in the years that followed. As the political crackdown gathered pace in
1906 and 1907 Lenin and the Bolsheviks considered their options. The Revolution of 1905 had clearly been a
false dawn. What then was the path forward? One faction, led by a rising figure within
the Georgian branch of the communist movement, Joseph Stalin, advocated engaging in a terror
campaign whereby state institutions would be attacked, a programme which would have
the added benefit of helping finance the RSDLP. There were few supporters of this, though
Lenin was not entirely opposed to it. By early 1906 in the face of the crackdown,
he had slipped over the border into the Grand Duchy of Finland, which was a constituent
part of the Russian Empire, though ruled somewhat autonomously. Here the Bolsheviks were able to operate with
some freedom for a time in 1906 and could easily get their printed material into Saint
Petersburg and Moscow from just across the Finnish border. Yet it was soon realised that there would
need to be a return to the tactics employed between 1900 and 1905. Once again the RSDLP leaders would head into
exile further to the west in countries like Britain where their activities were more tolerated
than in the autocratic east. By 1907 Lenin was back in London where the
Bolsheviks successfully resumed control over the RSDLP against the Menshevik faction at
the party’s Fifth Congress which took place that summer. A decision was then taken to move the party’s
headquarters to Paris, where Lenin and Nadya had relocated by the end of 1908, as part
of their never-ending lives as nomadic revolutionaries, but not before Lenin had spent several months
undertaking research in the British Museum in London in the summer of 1908, work which
became the basis of his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The subsequent move to Paris also proved transient
and over the next several years Lenin spent stints, usually consisting of a few months
at a time, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Prague and Krakow. These were years of decline for him as his
influence with the RSDLP seemed to ebb as some elements within the party favoured entering
into parliamentary politics back in Russia, despite the fact that the State Duma Tsar
Nicholas II had established in 1905 was little more than a smokescreen to pretend that parliamentary
representation had been granted in Russia. Moreover, both his and Nadya’s health were
declining. Lenin was probably suffering from the early
stages of acute atherosclerosis, a disease which leads to an abnormal build-up of fat
and cholesterol on the artery walls, though some have hypothesised that his health problems
may have stemmed from neuro-syphilis. Whatever the exact cause of his ailment, it
began to cause considerable problems during these years in exile, as his star waned within
the Russian communist movement. Meanwhile, in 1912 the split between the Bolsheviks
and the Mensheviks was formalised as they divided into two separate political parties. The opportunity for Lenin to re-establish
himself as a central figure within the Bolshevik Party and for the Russian communist movement
to reignite itself emerged in the strangest of fashions, specifically the outbreak of
a European war. For years tensions between the major European
powers had been building over a myriad of issues, most notably the rise of the German
Empire as a challenge to British supremacy, colonial rivalry amongst all the major powers
in the Scramble for Africa and a similar Scramble for Asia, and regional tensions over the changing
political situation in the Balkans where the Ottoman Empire was collapsing after centuries
of dominating the region. Russia was particularly concerned with the
latter issue where it was in competition with the Empire of Austria-Hungary to succeed the
Turks as the dominant regional power. Thus, when a regional crisis arose there in
the summer of 1914 it soon escalated into a war between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Within days Germany had joined Austria-Hungary
and the British and the French had in turn declared war on the governments in Berlin
and Vienna in support of their Russian ally. The First World War had commenced. By the end of it, Russia would be transformed. When the war broke out in the finals days
of July 1914, Lenin was in Galicia, a region which straddles the borders of Poland and
Ukraine today but which formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early twentieth
century. He was briefly imprisoned by the Austro-Hungarian
authorities owing to his Russian citizenship, but he was soon able to prove that he was
anything but a supporter of the Tsarist regime of Nicholas II. Thus he was released and he and Nadya headed
to neutral Switzerland where they spent the next two years as the war raged around them
in Europe. There he continued to write and theorise,
publishing Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1917. By now Lenin’s political thought was beginning
to mature and he was willing to diverge from orthodox Marxism in a way which few communist
ideologues were by the 1910s. In particular he rejected Marx’s idea that
every society had to gradually transition from autocracy in the shape of kings and emperors
to a bourgeois democracy governed by the middle and upper classes before it could transition
to a socialist revolution and then communism. Lenin, always with an eye to the situation
in Russia where no bourgeois democracy could be said to have yet emerged, theorised in
Switzerland in the mid-1910s that it was possible for a state to move straight from autocracy
to a socialist revolution, effectively skipping the development of a bourgeois democracy. Such an experiment would soon be attempted
in Russia. As Lenin’s political thought was evolving
in the peaceful Alpine region, Russia’s war effort was proceeding dismally. The Russian army was poorly commanded and
badly trained and in the German imperial army on the Eastern Front it faced the most effective
military in the world. Matters were compounded when Tsar Nicholas
II decided to take command of the army himself. 1916 actually saw Russian gains, most notably
through the Brusilov Offensive which resulted in the capture of extensive territory in Poland,
while Romania’s entry into the war on the side of Britain, France and Russia also aided
the Russian war effort in the Balkans. However, by the end of the year food shortages
and social unrest were escalating within Russia itself as the war crippled supply lines and
caused scarcity everywhere. Disaffection at the Tsarist government was
also running at an all-time high owing to concerns about the influence over the imperial
family of Grigory Rasputin, a mystic and self-proclaimed holy man. Eventually this spilled over on the 23rd of
February 1917 into mass protests in Saint Petersburg, which had been renamed Petrograd
in 1914, and then other Russian cities. Over the next week the Tsarist government
gradually lost control of the country and by early March it was clear that the military
was no longer willing to intervene in a decisive way to save Nicholas II. With his family surrounded in Petrograd and
himself surrounded by hostile troops as he attempted to make his way back to the capital
from the Eastern Front, the Tsar eventually took the advice of the army chiefs and several
senior members of the Duma and abdicated the throne on the 3rd of March 1917. The brief February Revolution had brought
the Romanov dynasty to an end after 300 years of ruling Russia.
In Switzerland Lenin was soon abreast of what was occurring back home. Within days he was preparing to return to
Russia again after many more years in exile. His power within the Bolshevik movement had
revived during the war owing to his stance that the communist movement should refuse
to play any role in the conflict, instead lambasting it as a clash of capitalists and
imperialist regimes. He was facilitated in his efforts to head
back to Russia by the German government who provided a sealed train to him and a few dozen
other Russian dissidents to travel from the Swiss-German border to the North Sea, the
belief being that Lenin would serve to destabilise Russia’s politics and potentially aid the
German war effort on the Eastern Front. By March the company had reached the Baltic
Sea, where they headed by ferry to neutral Sweden and then onwards by land north through
Sweden and into Finland. Along the way they received updates of developments
in Petrograd where the State Duma had formed a provisional government, one which looked
set to be dominated by a mix of centrist revolutionaries and the liberal aristocracy. But this new regime had immediately run into
trouble as the Russian lines on the Eastern Front literally collapsed in the face of mounting
desertions and a lack of leadership. Thus, when Lenin’s train pulled into Petrograd
on the 16th of April 1917 the new regime was already experiencing difficulties. He immediately set to work bolstering the
Bolshevik cause, addressing large rallies of proletarian workers in the city in the
late spring and early summer, as well as distributing the ‘April Theses’ which he had written
on his journey back to Russia and which called for a new government based around workers’
councils called ‘soviets’. Tensions built in the weeks that followed,
culminating in mid-July, a period which has become known as the July Days and during which
workers and soldiers engaged in violent demonstrations against the government, fuelled by Bolshevik
agitation. In the aftermath of the July Days the provisional
government moved to suppress the Bolsheviks and Lenin and many of his followers fled over
the border to the semi-autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. Other senior members of the party such as
Leon Trotsky, an emerging theorist and organiser, were arrested in Petrograd. From Helsinki in the early autumn of 1917
Lenin and his followers began plotting a new counter-revolution in Russia to overthrow
the provisional government. They were not alone and elements within the
Russian army and navy were plotting similar initiatives against the provisional government,
which was effectively living on borrowed time owing to poor handling of the war and failure
to stabilise the domestic situation. Throughout the autumn the political situation
remained tense in Russia, with the commander-in-chief of the Russian military, General Lavr Kornilov,
attempting a military takeover. In order to suppress this, the provisional
government was forced to turn to the communists and their workers’ soviets in Petrograd
for help, a development which strengthened the cause of the Bolsheviks. Lenin was consequently able to slip back across
the border into the capital in early October, where Leon Trotsky had been elected as head
of the Petrograd soviet. The Bolsheviks had also managed to outflank
their rivals within the Russian communist movement, the Mensheviks, by this time. The latter had played a greater role in the
State Duma over the years and had co-operated more with the provisional government since
March, whereas the Bolsheviks were increasingly able to capitalise on their persistently uncompromising
attitude since the 1900s. Thus, by the time Lenin returned to Petrograd
in October the time was wholly propitious for the Bolsheviks to try to seize power in
Russia once and for all. The coup which occurred in Petrograd on the
7th of November 1917 or the 25th of October in the Julian calendar which Russia used at
the time, was one of the seminal moments in modern world history, lauded thereafter by
the communist movement as the October Revolution. It followed from several weeks of planning
by Lenin, Trotsky and others in Petrograd in early and mid-October. Armed militias were prepared in Petrograd,
Moscow and other cities to move against the government. It is a sign of how powerful the movement
had become that the provisional government was aware of what was being planned, but could
not stop it, despite efforts to effectively shut down the city of Petrograd on the 24th
of October to forestall a further revolution. Lenin and Trotsky responded by calling on
the Military-Revolutionary Committee and the soviets to occupy government buildings on
the 25th of October. By the end of the day most of Petrograd and
Moscow were under Bolshevik control. The following day Bolshevik Red Guards, as
their revolutionary soldiers were termed, entered the Winter Palace in Petrograd and
effectively removed the provisional government from power. That evening a congress of Russia’s workers’
councils, the soviets, was convened in Petrograd, which culminated the following day, the 27th
of October, in the declaration of a new socialist government. In order not to alienate the bulk of the Russian
population, most of whom were still agrarian agricultural workers, talk of a communist
state was initially limited, but that is what was effectively established in late October
1917. Within days the revolutionaries made some
of their views and intentions known to the wider political community across Russia. This was a polyglot empire which stretched
from the Baltic Sea in Europe to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic Circle south into
the deserts of Central Asia. It incorporated a vast array of different
people including Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Georgians, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians,
Moldovans, Kazakhs, Turkmen, Armenians and the various ethnic peoples of the thinly populated
Siberian region beyond the Ural Mountains. It was with the goal of assuring this vast
array of people that the new government would rule Russia for all its people that the Declaration
of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia was issued on the 2nd of November 1917, just days
after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. This affirmed that all ethnic people living
under Russian rule were equal and sovereign and had a right to self-determination. It also abolished religious and national privileges
in line with Marxist ideology. The document, which was signed by Lenin and
Joseph Stalin, who had risen to become a senior figure within the Bolshevik movement since
his first emergence during the Revolution of 1905, is a striking testament to the idealism
of the Bolshevik revolution at its outset. The Declaration was effectively saying that
the imperialism which had characterised the Russian Empire would not be maintained. The subject people of the Tsars could decide
their own political future. Within months the communist regime would begin
to completely renege on this promise. The October Revolution did not result automatically
in the creation of a one-party state. The provisional government had been preparing
to hold elections for the formation of a new constituent assembly prior to the Revolution
and the Bolsheviks followed through with this plan early in 1918. There were, after all, other elements within
the revolutionary movement in Russia which had a claim to power, notably the Mensheviks
and other leftist and revolutionary groups. Accordingly a Russian Constituent Assembly
met in January 1918, but events were overtaking it as the Bolsheviks, who in March 1918 were
to formally rechristen themselves as the Russian Communist Party, aspired to absolute power. In the months that followed real power was
increasingly vested in the hands of the workers’ councils or soviets in cities like Petrograd
and Moscow, while centralised power was monopolised by the Political Bureau or Politburo of the
Russian Communist Party. In tandem the party began a concentrated campaign
of expelling Mensheviks and members of other socialist and revolutionary groups from the
soviets and other political bodies. Thus, by the end of 1918 the Russian Communist
Party had effectively turned Russia into a one-party state which they controlled. Lenin emerged in the course of this formative
year as the head of the new communist state. Perhaps most importantly he was the chair
of Sovnarkom, the name of the Council of People’s Commissars which effectively oversaw the governance
of the soviets or workers’ councils throughout Russia on behalf of the Russian Communist
Party. It would subsequently become one of the main
executive branches of the government of what was evolving into the Soviet Union. The chairs of Sovnarkom would later serve
as the official head of state, but these titles and roles were still evolving in 1918. As well as chairing Sovnarkom Lenin also sat
on the Politburo and the Council of Labour and Defence. Thus, when Lenin relocated to the Kremlin
in Moscow, the ancient centre of government prior to the moving of the capital to Saint
Petersburg by Tsar Peter I in the early eighteenth century, he did so as the most powerful figure
within the new communist regime. This came at a cost though. With the political environment still highly
unstable there were three serious attempts on his life alone in 1918. The third assassination attempt on the morning
of the 30th of August 1918 resulted in Lenin being shot twice and badly wounded, with blood
entering his lungs. His health, which had been precarious for
years, rapidly declined in the period thereafter. In tandem with this reorganisation of the
government in 1918 to establish a country ruled by the Politburo, Sovnarkom and the
soviets, 1918 saw the Communist Party begin to introduce a number of major economic reforms
in line with Marxist ideology. As early as the 8th of November 1917, less
than two weeks after the October Revolution, a Decree on Land was issued by the new government. This declared that all the land across Russia
which was owned by the old Russian nobility and the Orthodox Church was now confiscated
by the state and was to be presently redistributed amongst the peasantry in line with communist
ideology. A debate would follow involving Lenin and
others over what kind of agricultural policy should be followed thereafter. Lenin favoured the establishment of large
collective farms run by the state, but this would not be resolved for some time. In the cities major industries and factories
were also brought under state ownership and the new ownership structure effectively handed
control of them over to the soviets. New rules were introduced to reform the labour
laws as well. For instance, the working day was limited
to eight hours a day, a highly liberal decision given that workers across Europe in many countries
like Britain and Germany had been agitating for decades to have the working day gradually
reduced from as much as fourteen or twelve hours a day. In tandem with these economic and property
reforms a wide array of legislation was passed by Lenin’s government in late 1917 and 1918
to transform the social and legal landscape of Russia. For instance, communist ideology rejected
religion. Accordingly in January 1918 the new government
decreed the immediate separation of church and state at a time when organised Christian
churches across Europe still had a major influence over education and other social matters. In tandem the new communist state stepped
into the breach and began providing free education to all. In a country like Russia where only a very
small proportion of the population were in receipt of a comprehensive education in the
early twentieth century this was a major development and a campaign to begin tackling widespread
illiteracy was also initiated. Other aspects of Russian life such as banking,
transport, trade and communications were also soon being brought under state ownership,
while the old Tsarist legal system was quickly replaced by one presided over by People’s
Courts. This differed from most judicial systems across
Europe and the common law courts of Britain in particular as they were presided over by
a mix of a judge and two people’s assessors. The latter were like jurors in the common
law system, but with greater powers which included the right of decision in cases in
co-operation with the judge. Of course beyond these economic and social
reforms, there was still a war to be dealt with. 1917 had been a terrible year for the Russian
war effort on the Eastern Front. In the course of it mass desertion and the
unwillingness of many Russian military commanders to fight first for the Tsarist regime and
then for the provisional government following the February Revolution had seen the German
Empire advance along a wide front stretching from the Baltic Sea south-east through Poland
and Ukraine. Lenin’s government quickly accepted that
it could not hope to extricate Russia from the conflict without the loss of territory
and so it entered into negotiations almost immediately with Berlin with a view to terminating
Russian involvement in what Lenin had always lambasted as a capitalist, imperialist conflict. Accordingly, on the 3rd of March 1918, just
four months after the October Revolution, Russia and the Central Powers led by Germany
signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Under the terms of the agreement Russia effectively
renounced control over all its territories in the Baltic States region, Poland and Ukraine. Germany annexed much of the Russian territory
in Poland, while the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were made into independent
German vassal states. A new Ukrainian state acquired its independence,
as did Finland. Further to the south-east Russia also ceded
some territory to Germany’s ally, the Ottoman Empire. This was an incredibly punitive peace agreement,
one which stripped Russia of a vast amount of its prime agricultural land and industrial
cities, as well as some of the most densely populated areas of the Russian Empire. But in agreeing to it, the nascent communist
state extricated itself from the war with Germany in order to concentrate on consolidating
its control over Russia. Lenin’s government desperately needed peace
with Germany and the other Central Powers in the spring of 1918, for the revolution
which they had initiated in October 1917 had not been accepted by a great many elements
within Russia and civil war was developing across the nation. The primary enemy of the new regime were known
as the White Army in contrast to the Red Army of the soviet regime, but in reality the ‘Whites’
were a very broad array of counter-revolutionaries who were unwilling to accept the new regime. They included large segments of the old Russian
aristocracy and the Orthodox Church, both of which overnight had found themselves stripped
of the great wealth and power which they had enjoyed in Russia for centuries. Other elements amongst the Whites included
fractious elements within the Russian army and navy who were unwilling to accept the
communist takeover, as well as other centrists and leftists who gravitated towards the counter-revolution
once it became clear that the Bolsheviks were going to monopolise power and that there would
be no form of democratic communism in Lenin’s Russia. By the spring and summer of 1918 significant
parts of Russia had fallen into the hands of this unorthodox alliance of anti-Bolsheviks. The early stages of the Russian Civil War
were difficult for Lenin’s government. This was owing to events elsewhere. By the late autumn of 1918 the First World
War was winding down as Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to collapse internally. The war eventually came to an end on the 11th
of November 1918 when Germany surrendered, the Kaiser Wilhelm II already having abdicated
his throne by that time. With the wider global conflict over, the victorious
powers, particularly Britain, but also France, the United States and Japan, determined to
ensure the overthrow of the new communist state in Russia. The great powers in London and Paris were
determined that a radical socialist government would not come to control one of the most
powerful states in Europe and so from late 1918 Britain and others began supplying enormous
resources to the White Army. Expeditionary forces were also dispatched
to Russia by Britain and others, while the newly created state of Poland which was formed
following Germany’s defeat went to war with Russia with western aid. As this occurred, the early stages of the
civil war in 1918 and 1919 were very difficult for Lenin’s government and it seemed for
some time that the new regime might not survive long. The immense emergency which confronted the
fledgling Soviet state in 1918 and 1919 must be borne in mind when assessing the early
development of that same state. Faced with multiple threats to its very existence
Lenin and his closest associates such as Trotsky and Stalin began unleashing state terror to
retain control of the territory which remained in Soviet hands. This was occurring as early as December 1917
when Lenin ordered the creation of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution
and Sabotage. It is better known as the Cheka and the first
of the extremely powerful secret police services established by the Soviet state over its 74
year history. The Cheka was tasked with rooting out anyone
deemed to be a counter-revolutionary or enemy of the state. Its leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was given wide-ranging
powers to undertake this mission. Within weeks hundreds and then thousands of
perceived enemies of the state were being arrested and executed without trial. A great many others were detained and sent
to labour camps which were being established in the remote inhospitable climes of Siberia. Lenin tried to distance himself from what
became known as the Red Terror, but there is no denying that he was the head of the
Soviet state during a time when the worst elements of the Tsarist regime were revived
in order to create the architecture of a security state which would broadly define Soviet Russia
for the next seven decades. The Red Terror was but one element in the
brutal policies adopted by the nascent Soviet state in order to fight the civil war and
secure the regime. Another was the use of blocking units in the
war effort. The idea for these had come from Leon Trotsky
and essentially involved using units of Red Army soldiers who stood behind the Soviet
front lines and gunned down any Soviet soldiers who attempted to retreat. Brutal as these methods were, they soon proved
effective. The war effort reached a low ebb in the summer
and autumn of 1918, as a British and French expeditionary force landed at Arkhangelsk
on the White Sea before the war against Germany had even been concluded, a legion of Czech
and Slovak soldiers which had penetrated deep into Russia seized the city of Kazan and Vladivostok,
the main port in the east, was attacked by the Japanese. Thereafter Trotsky mobilized the Red Army
in an effective manner. Kazan was retaken in September 1918 and Samara
followed in October. However, these efforts were offset when newly
independent Poland declared war in November. Yet the initial onslaught of 1918 by the western
powers and their proxies had failed to crush the communist state and the end of the First
World War brought distractions for the Entente powers as wars broke out in Ireland, Turkey
and other regions. In 1919 the Red Army went on the offensive. In early February Kiev fell as the communists
began reasserting the control over Ukraine which they had lost with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By April the British, French and American
troops in Ukraine were forced to pull out of the region as the port of Odessa fell to
the Russians and communist control of Ukraine was established. In August the British and French expeditionary
forces around Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the north by the White Sea were evacuated. Thereafter the western powers were largely
reduced to fighting the Soviets indirectly through their proxies in the White Army, Poland
and some of Russia’s other neighbours, though a token American and Japanese presence was
maintained in the far east of the country. Meanwhile the war in the west now concentrated
largely on Russia’s clash with Poland. At first the Poles made major advances, seizing
Kiev early in 1920, but after a Soviet counter-offensive threatened Warsaw an armistice was agreed
in the autumn. Thus, by the end of 1920 the Russian Civil
War had largely been won by Lenin’s regime, though mopping up operations continued in
many locations until the recapture of the port of Vladivostok in October 1922 brought
the war to an end. Lenin had left the leadership of the Red Army
during the civil war to others, most notably Trotsky. Instead he had spent the late 1910s formulating
a new approach to international socialism and communism. This was in response to calls by the British
Labour Party in 1918 for a new international conference of socialist parties to be called
the Labour and Socialist International. But the Russian leader had become disillusioned
with the more moderate socialist movements which prevailed in Western Europe during his
years in exile and was committed to establishing a new international socialist movement which
would be led by Soviet Russia. Accordingly in March 1919 the First Congress
of the Communist International was held in Moscow, better known as the Comintern. There was much optimism at this about the
possibility of a world revolution of socialism, given that communist revolutions had occurred
in Germany and Hungary in the weeks preceding the First Comintern. But these were soon suppressed and in his
later years Lenin must have been aware that no immediate overthrow of the international
capitalist system would occur. Nevertheless the establishment of the Comintern
was extremely significant as in years to come it would serve as a major instrument of international
communism led by the Soviet Union. One final policy of the Soviet regime under
Lenin warrants attention. In the spring of 1921 as the civil war was
winding down the Soviet leader promulgated the New Economic Policy. This represented something of a change of
course for Lenin, who was always a staunch ideological Marxist. It may have surprised many then when he outlined
plans for a new economic system which would allow the capitalist free market to continue
operating on a limited basis in Russia for the foreseeable future. It was declared that Russians could also own
small amounts of land and businesses, though major industry and large agricultural estates
remained under state ownership. The purpose of the New Economic Policy was
to stabilise the Russian economy in the aftermath of the war and introduce some growth into
the system at a time when the worst famine since that of 1891 and 1892 had spread across
the country. Ultimately the New Economic Policy resulted
in a major boost to the Russian economy as it exited the war and pointed towards the
benefits of at least allowing a limited amount of private ownership and free trade to continue. Yet the New Economic Policy would be gradually
abandoned in the course of the 1920s as the process of state management of industry and
farm collectivization intensified. The about-face in the early 1920s to adopt
the New Economic Policy of course raises questions as to how we should perceive Lenin’s political
thought overall. After all this was something of a new departure
from classical Marxism. But then Lenin had been willing to depart
from the nineteenth-century German political theorist’s writings for some time, to the
extent that Leninism became its own brand of communist thought by the 1920s, one which
continued to influence communist regimes globally throughout the remainder of the twentieth
century. Essentially Leninism’s core idea was that
a socialist revolution need not be preceded by the development of a bourgeois democracy
and capitalist system, one which created a large urban proletariat which would implement
the socialist revolution and then create a communist state in due course. Instead Lenin espoused the idea of a dictatorship
of the proletariat, no matter how small it might be in a given state and that this vanguard
party of the proletariat would then lead the rest of society towards socialism and communism. This was an important development. Marx would have scoffed at the idea of communism
developing in countries like China, Mongolia or Angola where there was little industrialisation
let alone a large urban proletariat, but Leninism, with its message of a small vanguard of the
proletariat leading any nation to communism would have a profound impact on the twentieth
century. Lenin, though, would not live to see any of
this. His health had been steadily declining throughout
the 1910s, though the exact cause of his ailment has never been definitively established. It deteriorated sharply following the multiple
assassination attempts in 1918, in particular when he was shot twice and badly wounded that
autumn. Thereafter his physicians, of which there
were dozens called in during the late 1910s and early 1920s to try to resolve his problems,
concluded that he might be suffering from blood poisoning brought on by the fact that
the bullets from this most serious assassination attempt had never been removed from his body. Eventually in April 1922 he underwent an operation
to have them surgically removed, but it did not bring about any improvement. Instead throughout the early 1920s he was
increasingly restricted to Moscow as he suffered from an unusual combination of symptoms including
insomnia, a sensitivity to sound and other stimuli, headaches, nausea and general fatigue. All of this eventually culminated in the summer
of 1922 in the first of several strokes which he suffered in the space of just a few months. These left him partially paralyzed and increasingly
restricted to a wheelchair. As Lenin’s health declined precipitously
in the early 1920s thoughts inevitably turned to the succession and what arrangement might
be put in place if he died or was rendered completely unable to lead the new Union of
Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR as it had been newly christened in 1922. Lenin had never established himself as a dictator
in an absolute sense, but he had become the pre-eminent figure within the Soviet state
based on his many years at its forefront in exile and his intellectual leadership. Therefore it was conceivable that nobody would
succeed him, but rather the Politburo would rule the Soviet Union collectively as a body. Yet even Lenin doubted that such an arrangement
could work and believed that a pre-eminent figure would succeed him. To that end in the midst of his illness in
the winter of 1922 he dictated his last testament. Here he discussed the respective qualities
of the viable candidates. Foremost amongst them was Joseph Stalin, who
had risen by then to become the General Secretary of the Communist Party. But Lenin had become wary of the Georgian
he had first met 17 years earlier at the time of the Revolution of 1905, claiming he was
overly ambitious and poorly equipped from an intellectual standpoint. Instead Lenin gave his approval for Leon Trotsky
to succeed him. The dictation of the testament was one of
his last lucid major acts. In March 1923 Lenin suffered another stroke,
as a result of which he lost the ability to speak. Thereafter he continued to decline before
falling into a coma in the first weeks of 1924. He died on the 21st of January. The political machinations to succeed Lenin
began immediately. Trotsky was convalescing from an illness in
the warmer weather of the Caucasus region when Lenin died and Stalin sent him incorrect
details of the funeral arrangements so that he missed the state funeral which was held
in Moscow on the 27th of January. Lenin’s body was subsequently embalmed and
placed on public display in a Mausoleum in Red Square in central Moscow, where it is
still viewable a century later. Despite Lenin’s warnings, many of the other
senior members of the Soviet regime and the Politburo favoured Stalin in the aftermath
of Lenin’s death. Stalin entered a political alliance with two
of the senior members of the Politburo, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, one which he used
to undermine Trotsky in the years that followed. He eventually drove him into exile and then
turned on his former allies. By 1929 Stalin had monopolised power completely
in his own hands and established himself as a dictator in a manner which Lenin never had. For the next quarter of a century he ruled
the Soviet Union in a totalitarian fashion, murdering millions in his quest to retain
absolute power. The man who was born as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
and became known to the world as Lenin, the pen-name he adopted in the early 1900s, was
one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. He hailed from an upper middle class bourgeois
background and then reacted violently against that same background from a very young age,
a development brought about in part by the execution of his brother by the authoritarian
Tsarist regime in the late 1880s. Over the next quarter of a century he emerged
as the leading intellectual figure within the Bolshevik movement, theorising about how
communism could function in Russia and moving beyond Marx’s thought in the process. As a result, when the First World War created
a propitious environment for a communist state to emerge in Russia in 1917 he became the
leader of it, with his message that the Russian proletariat and the communists, as small in
number as they might be compared to the population of the Russian Empire as a whole, would act
as a vanguard for the development of communism in Russia and then the world. The Russian Revolution was born of idealism
and the =goal of overthrowing the autocratic imperial regime which had ruled Russia for
centuries. But nation states can rarely escape their
past entirely and that proved to be all too true of Soviet Russia. Within weeks of the Bolsheviks seizing power
they had begun to create a communist state which in many ways mirrored the Tsarist regime
which preceded it. The Cheka was created as a secret police which
effectively succeeded the Okhrana, the secret police under the Tsars. Political dissidents were soon being sent
off to labour camps and exile in Siberia, much as they had been in imperial times. And the possibility of a democratic legislative
assembly being established within a new communist state was quickly dashed as a dictatorship
of the soviets and the Politburo was created, with Lenin at its summit. This soon drew withering criticism from other
communist leaders elsewhere in Europe and Russia, notably Rosa Luxembourg, the leader
of the German Revolution, and Peter Kropotkin, the intellectual forefather of Bolshevism. In saying this it should be noted that Lenin
was not Joseph Stalin. But the state which he more than anybody else
brought into being in the late 1910s and early 1920s was a highly totalitarian one which
allowed for Stalin’s rise. What do you think of Lenin? If he had lived long enough would a more benign
Soviet Union have emerged or might he ultimately have become as oppressive and totalitarian
as Stalin subsequently became? Please let us know in the comment section,
and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.
