Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), commonly known as Vladimir Lenin, was a prominent Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He held the position of the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. During his administration, Russia and subsequently the Soviet Union transformed into a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party. Lenin, an adherent of Marxism, introduced significant developments to the ideology, which became known as Leninism.
Raised in an upper-middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin adopted revolutionary socialist beliefs following the execution of his brother in 1887.
Upon being expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participation in protests against the Tsarist government, he pursued a law degree in the ensuing years.
In 1893, he relocated to Saint Petersburg and emerged as a senior Marxist activist. Subsequently, he faced arrest for sedition in 1897 and was exiled to Shushenskoye in Siberia for three years, where he entered into marriage with Nadezhda Krupskaya.
Following his exile, he moved to Western Europe and gained recognition as a prominent theorist within the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
In 1903, he assumed a pivotal role in the RSDLP ideological schism, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov’s Mensheviks.
Following the failed Revolution of 1905 in Russia, he advocated for the transformation of the First World War into a pan-European proletarian revolution, anticipating the overthrow of capitalism and the rise of socialism. Subsequent to the 1917 February Revolution, which resulted in the ousting of the Tsar and the establishment of a Provisional Government, Lenin returned to Russia and played a leading role in the subsequent October Revolution, through which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.
Initially, Lenin’s Bolshevik government shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, but by 1918 it had centralized power within the new Communist Party.
His administration initiated the redistribution of land among the peasantry and the nationalization of banks and large-scale industry.
It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty that conceded territory to the Central Powers and advocated for worldwide revolution through the Communist International.
Opponents were suppressed during the Red Terror, a forceful campaign administered by the state security services, leading to the deaths or internment of tens of thousands in concentration camps.
Lenin’s administration successfully quelled both right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies during the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and managed the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921.
In response to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, Lenin advocated for economic growth through the implementation of the New Economic Policy in 1921. Although several non-Russian nations had attained independence from the Russian Republic after 1917, five were forcibly reunited into the new Soviet Union in 1922, whereas others repelled Soviet invasions. With his health in decline, Lenin passed away in Gorki, and Joseph Stalin succeeded him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.
Regarded as one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin became the subject of an enduring personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He evolved into an ideological figurehead for Marxism–Leninism and exerted a pronounced influence over the international communist movement.
A controversial and deeply divisive historical figure, Lenin is celebrated by his supporters as a proponent of socialism, communism, anti-imperialism, and the working class, while his detractors accuse him of establishing a totalitarian dictatorship that oversaw mass killings and political repression of dissidents.
Historian Robert Conquest made the following statement. “The huge catastrophes of our era have been inflicted by human beings, driven by certain thoughts.” And he went on to say that some of those thoughts have become so deadly that they have killed millions.
Lets look at Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolshevik Revolution. The revolution that led of course, to the development of the USSR, the Soviet Union, and led eventually to tens and well over a hundred million deaths. All of it traceable to the Bolshevik Revolution.
Vladimire died 100 years. He died on January the 21st, 1924, and that brought an end to his life, but it did not bring an end to Soviet tyranny. It did not bring an end to the murderous, indeed genocidal reality of the Soviet Union. He may have died in 1924, but he was born on April the twenty-second of 1870.
The revolutionary fervor and even the revolutionary movement that led to the Bolshevik Revolution and to the formation of the Soviet Union in the 20th century wasn’t the first uprising in Russia. The 19th century in Russia was a century of ongoing attempts at revolution. Sergey Nechayev in his work entitled The Revolutionary Catechism of 1869, wrote, “The revolutionary is a dedicated man. He has no personal interest, no private affairs, no emotions, no attachments, no property and no name. Everything in him is subordinated towards a single thought, a single passion, the revolution.”
Now, among those revolutionaries, most people forget in terms of Russia, is a young man who was actually the older brother of Vladimir Lenin. He was involved with a group of other college students or university students in an attempted assassination of the Tsar, and he was executed for that. So as a teenager, Vladimir Lenin was forged in this revolutionary environment, which was fueling much of the unrest there in Russia. And of course, there’s an historical consequence there, and the context of the fact that Russia was an autocracy in terms of the Romanov dynasty, that frankly went beyond any of the major monarchial powers in Europe. That’s why, at least for one reason, along with other economic stresses, that there was this revolutionary fervor in Russia. Vladimir Lenin was a product of, and later a driver of that fervor.
Marx came along in the 19th century, and of course, Marx and Engels wrote the Communist Revolution. Lenin became an advocate for a Marxist revolution in Russia, and what would become, of course, by its product, the Soviet Union. But the uniqueness of Vladimir Lenin was the fact that he warped Marxist ideology in a way that made it even more dangerous and even more murderous. He developed the idea of what he called a vanguard party. That’s the idea that a party would seize control, and basically in the name of the people, would maintain that control, and it would largely maintain the power of its control by killing many of its own citizens. It was an intentional attempt to create a new communist reality with this vanguard party at the very head. And thus, there was no excuse for the power of this party because in Lenin’s theory, in his ideology, the party became everything.
The worth of human beings was denied if that worth was not to the party. Anyone opposed to the party became, well, as the Nazis would refer to them, life unworthy of life. Paul Johnson, one of the major historians of the 20th century, wrote this, “Once Lenin had abolished the idea of personal guilt, and had started to exterminate, a word he frequently employed, whole classes merely on account of occupation and parentage, there was no limit to which this deadly principle might be carried. There is no essential moral difference,” said Paul Johnson about Lenin, “Between destroying a class and destroying a race. Thus, the practice of genocide was born.”
And of course, the Soviet Union was also born, and it became one of the most malignant forces in the history of the entire human story. But it’s also clear that when Vladimir Lenin died, it was not a better that replaced him, but if anything, a worse, and that was Joseph Stalin. As Winston Churchill said, and he had long history observing the Soviet Union and both dictators, he said this, and I quote, “For Russians, their worst misfortune was Lenin’s birth. Their next worst, his death.”
And thus, it set the stage for the Soviet Union in terms of famine and war, and the internal genocide of its own people, the subjugation of many others. So a very long reminder, a very tragic reminder of the fact that ideas do have consequences. The consequences of the ideology of Vladimir Lenin turned out to be some of the most deadly and toxic of the entire human story.
Erick Chepkwony, TH.D 