Thinkers Timeline

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was a Russian revolutionary and political theorist. He led the October Revolution of 1917 and founded the Soviet Union, the world's first communist state. His real name was Vladimir Ulyanov. He took the name Lenin around 1901. He was born on 22 April 1870 in Simbirsk, a town on the Volga river. His family was educated and middle class. His father was a school inspector who had risen into the Russian nobility. Two family events shaped him. In 1886 his father died. The next year, his older brother Alexander was hanged for taking part in a plot to kill Tsar Alexander III. Lenin was seventeen. He kept his brother's revolutionary commitment but rejected terrorism as a method. He turned to Marxism, a theory developed by Karl Marx, who argued that workers would eventually overthrow capitalism. Lenin trained as a lawyer but spent most of his life as a full-time revolutionary. He was arrested in 1895 and exiled to Siberia. In 1900 he moved to Western Europe, where he lived for most of the next seventeen years. He edited newspapers and wrote major books. In 1902 he published What Is to Be Done?, arguing for a small, disciplined revolutionary party. In April 1917, after the Tsar fell, he returned to Russia. His Bolshevik party seized power in the October Revolution. He led the new Soviet state through civil war, famine, and foreign intervention. A series of strokes from 1922 left him unable to work. He died on 21 January 1924, aged 53. His body is still on display in Red Square in Moscow.