Background
Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on 22 April 1870 in the Volga town of Sibirsk, Lenin was the grandson of a liberated
serf. His father was a staunch supporter of the Tsarist rule, and a successful
government official. In 1887, Lenin's elder brother was arrested and hanged by the okhrana (secret police) for plotting to
assassinate the
Tsar Alexander III. Lenin enrolled in the Kazan' University the same year but was soon expelled as an excessive troublemaker and exiled to the
village of Kokushkino where his grandfather's
estate was located.
Whilst in kokushkino, Lenin became interested the classics of Euorpean revolutionary thought, particularly
Karl Marx's
Das Kapital. After a year of
exile Lenin considered himself a Marxist, and in 1891 passed his
law examinations and was admitted to the
bar. Before moving to
Saint Petersburg in 1893, Lenin worked as a
lawyer for the poor in the town of Samara, on the
Volga.
History as a Bolshevik
In 1900 Lenin, along with Plekhanov and Martov, founded an illegal
newspaper,
Iskra ("
The Spark"), which they smuggled into
Russia. The core of the Russian Social Democratic party, formed in 1903, was made up of the network of agents this publication employed. Almost immediately there was disagreement over the degree of
discipline and
professionalism to be demanded by party members, and so the group split into two factions, the Mensheviks and the
Bolsheviks. Lenin led the Bolsheviks, who stressed that the only way to have any chance of surviving against the Tsarist
police agents was to build the party around a disciplined core of professionals.
The
Populist group that assassinated Alexander II,
Narodnaya Volga was Lenin's basis for the the organisation of the party, though he did not agree with their
ideals or tactics of
terror. He also argued that relations within the party should be governed by the principle of "democratic centralism", a view with which the Mensheviks agreed. Eventually, however, both Plekhanov and Martov found Lenin too dictorial and sided with the Mensheviks, and what was originally considered a temporary
rift within the Russian Social Democratic Party became permanent. Over the years Lenin built the Bolshevik Party into a large and
complex organisation, which believed in the
proletariats (working classes) opposing both the
bourgeoisie (middle classes) and chinovniks (landowners).
Opposition to the Tsar
For most of his life under Tsarist rule, Lenin was in exile. From a young age he promoted opposition towards the Tsar, evident from his
illegal anti-Tsar newspaper. He also wrote the
masterpiece organisational theory,
What Is To Be Done? Through his very disciplined approach to party operation Lenin succeeded in making the Bolshevik Party very popular and successful. A natural leader, Lenin united the proletariats against the other classes and eventually founded the first Russian
socialist government.