Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov .}} ( 187021 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin,; .}} was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist who was the founder and first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. As the founder and leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin led the October Revolution which established the world's first socialist state. His government won the Russian Civil War and created a one-party state under the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.

Born into a middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's execution in 1887. He was expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Tsarist government, and devoted the following years to a law degree before relocating to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and becoming a leading Marxist activist. In 1897, Lenin was arrested for sedition and exiled to Siberia for three years, after which he moved to Western Europe and became a key figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In the party's 1903 schism, he led his Bolshevik faction against the Mensheviks. Lenin briefly returned to Russia during the failed Revolution of 1905, and during the First World War campaigned for its transformation into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the collapse of capitalism and the rise of socialism. After the February Revolution of 1917 ousted Tsar Nicholas II and established a Provisional Government, Lenin returned to Russia and played a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the regime.

Lenin's government abolished private ownership of land, nationalised major industry and banks, withdrew from the war by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. The Bolsheviks initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and allowed a multi-party Constituent Assembly, but during the Russian Civil War centralised power in their Communist Party and suppressed opposition in the Red Terror, in which tens of thousands were killed or imprisoned. Responding to devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, Lenin reversed his policy of war communism in 1921 and stabilised the economy by introducing the New Economic Policy. The Soviet Red Army defeated several right- and left-wing anti-Bolshevik and separatist armies in the civil war, after which some of the non-Russian nations which had broken away from the empire were re-united in the Soviet Union in 1922; others, notably Poland, gained independence. Lenin suffered three debilitating strokes in 1922 and 1923 before his death in 1924, beginning a power struggle which ended in the rise to power of Joseph Stalin.

Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. Under Stalin, he became an ideological figurehead of Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive figure, Lenin is praised by his supporters for establishing a revolutionary government which took steps towards socialism, while his critics accuse him of establishing a dictatorship which oversaw mass killings and political repression. Today, he is widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century. Provided by Wikipedia