Short biographical profile of Lenin / by Lelio La Porta

Lenin, pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, was born in 1870.

In his family, the anti-Tzarist tradition was very strong as his brother was shot for making an attempt on the life of Alexander III.

Expelled from the University of Kazan for illegal activities, he graduated in law in Petersburg in 1891. Having become involved in Marxist student worker circles, together with Plechanoy and Martov, he founded the ’Union for the Liberation of the Working Class’ in 1895.

Arrested and exiled to Siberia, he married Krupskaya there.

The three years of exile were dedicated to studying the Russian peasant question. Returning to freedom, he travelled abroad. In Geneva he founded ’Iskra’ and the group of the same name, during the 2nd Congress of the Russian Bolshevik Social Democratic Workers’ Party (London-1903), he split into the two Bolshevik and Menshevik factions on the basis of the theory of the political party set out by Lenin in What to do? in 1902. Away from Russia at the outbreak of the 1905 revolution, he lived mainly in Switzerland where, reflecting on the First World War and its causes, he wrote Imperialism, the Supreme Phase of Capitalism (1916).

He did not return to his homeland until April 1917 and, in the April Theses, he manifested the need to replace Kerensky’s provisional government with a soviet government. The proposed tactic was rooted in the theories set forth in State and Revolution. Accused by the Provisional Government of being a German agent, he had to take refuge in Finland from where he proposed armed insurrection, not without finding resistance among his own comrades. Having accepted the proposal by the majority of the Central Committee, once the uprising was over and power had been won, he was elected president of the new Soviet government. In this capacity, he promulgated the decrees on peace and land, accepted the extremely harsh Brest-Litovsk peace with the Germans, was unyielding in the civil war against the counter-revolutionary forces, implemented war communism, which, once victory had been won, was replaced economically by Nep.

From 1922 onwards, the inexorable deterioration of his health began, forcing him to relinquish leadership of the state and leading to his death on 21 January 1924.