Lenin complete biography. War communism and new politics

Real last name, first name and patronymic - Ulyanov Vladimir Ilyich. Literary pseudonyms: Vladimir, Vl., V. Ilyin, N. Lenin, Petersburger, Petrov, William Frey, K. Tulin. Party nicknames: Karpov, Meyer, Nikolai Petrovich, Old Man, etc.

Social and political figure, revolutionary, one of the leaders of the RSDLP, RSDLP(b), RCP(b), publicist. The founder of one of the directions of Marxism, who carried out a synthesis of the ideas of the founders of Marxism (K. Marx, F. Engels, G. Plekhanov, K. Kautsky) and Russian Blanquism (P.N. Tkachev). Founder of the Soviet state.

Member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RSDLP(b) (10(23).10 - 4(17).11.1917). Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR (10/27/11/9/1917 - 01/21/1924). Member of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) (03/25/1919 - 01/21/1924). Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR (07/06/1923 - 01/21/1924). Chairman of the Council of Labor and Defense of the USSR (07/17/1923 - 01/21/1925).

Biography and career

From the family of an inspector, then director of public schools in the Simbirsk province, actual state councilor Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, who received hereditary nobility. Mother - Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (née Blank). Paternal grandfather - Nikolai Vasilyevich Ulyanov, from the serf peasants of the Sergach district of the Nizhny Novgorod province, a tailor-artisan in Astrakhan. Maternal grandfather - Alexander Dmitrievich Blank, physiotherapist, retired state councilor, nobleman, landowner of the Nizhny Novgorod province. The Ulyanov family had eight children (Anna, Alexander, Olga, Vladimir, Olga, Nikolai, Dmitry, Maria), two of whom (Olga and Nikolai) died in infancy. Since July 20 (22), 1898, he has been married to Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya. Had no children.

In 1879-1887 he studied at the Simbirsk gymnasium. In 1887, V. Ulyanov graduated with a gold medal and entered the Faculty of Law of Kazan University. In December of the same year, he was expelled from the university for participating in a student gathering and sent under secret police supervision to the Kokushkino estate, which belonged to his mother, in the Kazan province. In September 1891, he passed the exams at St. Petersburg University for a law faculty course as an external student.

The young Vladimir Ulyanov was greatly impressed by the execution of his older brother Alexander, one of the organizers of the Terrorist Faction of the People's Will party group, who was hanged in 1887 for preparing an assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander III.

Living under police supervision in Kokushkino, Vladimir Ulyanov devoted time to self-education, became familiar with the works of N.G. Chernyshevsky. Subsequently, he repeatedly recalled the novel “What is to be done?”, which influenced the formation of his own worldview. In October 1888 he returned to Kazan, where he joined one of the Marxist circles. Here Ulyanov studied Volume I of “Capital” by K. Marx and the work of G.V. Plekhanov "Our differences". Since 1889, in Samara he has become close to the Narodnaya Volya and Marxists. In 1892-1893 he worked as an assistant to a sworn attorney in Samara. In 1893, Ulyanov submitted his first article for publication in the journal “Russian Thought” - “New economic movements in peasant life.” However, his first work was rejected by the editors.

In August 1893, Vladimir Ulyanov moved to St. Petersburg. Here he was able to quickly gain authority among local Marxists. He was especially famous for his essay “On the so-called question of markets” and the illegally published work “What are “friends of the people” and how do they fight against the Social Democrats?”, in which he sharply criticized populist ideas. In particular, Lenin tried to refute the populist thesis, according to which the ruin of the peasantry meant a narrowing of the market for the development of capitalism. Also, from the position of historical materialism, he criticized the sociological concept of N.K. Mikhailovsky. In his first works, Lenin saw the only path to socialism in Russia through the development of the labor movement, considering the proletariat as the vanguard force in the revolutionary struggle against the autocracy.

In the article “The Economic Content of Populism and Its Criticism in Mr. Struve’s Book” (1895), Lenin entered into polemics with the so-called “legal Marxists,” in other words, with those authors (P.B. Struve, M.N. Tugan- Baranovsky and others), who, based on the works of K. Marx and F. Engels, stated the fact of the progressiveness of capitalism in Russia. Accusing his opponents of “bourgeois objectivism,” Lenin contrasted them with the concept of “partisanship” in the social sciences. In 1894-1895 he conducted propaganda in workers' circles, while simultaneously studying the situation of the working class in Russia.

In May 1896, in Switzerland, V. Lenin met with members of the Liberation of Labor group. Returning from a trip abroad, he supported the idea of ​​​​the transition of Marxists from propaganda to mass agitation. In November 1895, the group of “old men” led by him merged with the group of Yu.O. Martov to the citywide social democratic organization of St. Petersburg, called the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.” On the night of December 8-9 he was arrested. On March 1, 1897, after imprisonment, he was exiled to Siberia for three years. He served exile in the village of Shushenskoye, Minusinsk district, Yenisei province.

While in exile, he completed work on the book “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” published in 1899. In this work, relying on a large amount of factual material, V.I. Lenin argued that Russia had already become a capitalist country. At the same time, he noted the preservation in Russia of many remnants of pre-capitalist relations. Lenin concluded that the political strength of the Russian proletariat is greater than its share in the mass of the population. In 1899, he organized a protest by a group of exiles against the spread of the ideas of “economism” in the Social Democratic movement. At this time, as a result of correspondence, Lenin, Martov and Potresov agreed to publish an all-Russian Social Democratic newspaper. At the end of their exile, in February 1900, they held a meeting in Pskov. In July they went abroad, where, together with members of the Liberation of Labor group, they formed the editorial board of the newspaper Iskra and the magazine Zarya. At this time, Lenin lived in Munich, London, Geneva, continuing his discussion with the “economists”. In 1902, his book “What to Do” was published, which outlined the concept of a centralized proletarian party, the purpose of which is to carry out a political revolution in Russia through an armed uprising of the masses. For the first time in this work the principles of “democratic centralism” were set out. Lenin took an active part in the discussion of what G.V. wrote. Plekhanov of the draft program of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.

At the Second Congress of the RSDLP in July 1903, V. Lenin headed the faction of “hard” Iskrists (Bolsheviks). In an effort to secure a leading role in the Social Democratic movement in Russia, he proposed reducing the number of members of the Iskra editorial board to three and establishing a Party Council. After Plekhanov went over to the Menshevik side, Lenin retained his position in the Central Committee, where he was co-opted in November 1903. In the book “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” (1904), in which he criticized his opponents at the Second Party Congress and questioned the value of democratic norms in the party. Soon he put forward the idea of ​​convening a new congress of the RSDLP, which, however, did not receive the support of the Central Committee. In response to the discrepancy with the decision of the majority, he formed from his supporters the Bureau of Majority Committees (BCB), which prepared the convening of the Third Congress, consisting exclusively of Bolshevik delegates.

This congress, which approved Lenin's proposals on tactics, was held in London in April 1905. In the book “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” he commented on the results of this congress, arguing for the need to establish the hegemony of the proletariat in the struggle to overthrow the autocracy and an armed uprising, which would result in the establishment of a “dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry” in Russia. Having solved this problem, the Social Democratic Party will be able to move directly to the implementation of the socialist revolution. At the Third Congress of the RSDLP he emphasized that the main task of the unfolding revolution was the elimination of autocracy and the remnants of the serfdom system in Russia. In his letters to Russia, he demanded that the Bolsheviks organize combat detachments preparing for an armed uprising, carrying out military actions in the form of attacks on police and military personnel. At the beginning of November 1905, Lenin returned to St. Petersburg, where he headed the editorial office of the newspaper “New Life”.

A large number of works of fiction about V.I. have been published in many languages ​​of the world. Lenin. Among the earliest works is, for example, the poem by V.V. Mayakovsky "Vladimir Ilyich Lenin". Many feature films have also been made about him. One of the first images of Lenin was captured in S. Eisenstein’s film “October” (1927). For example, most of the works of fiction and films about it come from the USSR and the countries of the “socialist” bloc. Also an integral part of Soviet monumental art were monuments to Lenin. He was also depicted in numerous paintings. One of the first artists to reflect the image of Lenin in their works was I.I. Brodsky (1919 - “Lenin and Manifestation”). The set of works of fiction dedicated to him was called “Leninana”. His portraits and busts were required to decorate Soviet institutions. National folklore works include numerous anecdotes about Lenin, many of which are passed on from mouth to mouth in our time. Also in the USSR, settlements (for example: Leningrad), as well as enterprises, military and civilian ships were named after Lenin.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (real name Ulyanov) is a great Russian political and public figure, revolutionary, founder of the RSDLP party (Bolsheviks), creator of the first socialist state in history.

Years of Lenin’s life: 1870 – 1924.

Lenin is known primarily as one of the leaders of the great October Revolution of 1917, when the monarchy was overthrown and Russia turned into a socialist country. Lenin was the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (government) of the new Russia - RSFSR, and is considered the creator of the USSR.

Vladimir Ilyich was not only one of the most prominent political leaders in the entire history of Russia, he was also known as the author of many theoretical works on politics and social sciences, the founder of the theory of Marxism-Leninism and the creator and main ideologist of the Third International (an alliance of communist parties of different countries) .

Brief biography of Lenin

Lenin was born on April 22 in the city of Simbirsk, where he lived until he graduated from the Simbirsk gymnasium in 1887. After graduating from high school, Lenin left for Kazan and entered the university there to study law. In the same year, Alexander, Lenin’s brother, was executed for participation in the assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander 3 - for the whole family this becomes a tragedy, since it is about Alexander’s revolutionary activities.

While studying at the university, Vladimir Ilyich is an active participant in the banned Narodnaya Volya circle, and also takes part in all student riots, for which three months later he is expelled from the university. A police investigation carried out after the student riot revealed Lenin's connections with banned societies, as well as his brother's participation in the assassination attempt on the Emperor - this entailed a ban on Vladimir Ilyich's reinstatement at the university and the establishment of close supervision over him. Lenin was included in the list of “unreliable” persons.

In 1888, Lenin again came to Kazan and joined one of the local Marxist circles, where he began to actively study the works of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov, which in the future would have a huge impact on his political identity. Around this time, Lenin's revolutionary activity began.

In 1889, Lenin moved to Samara and there continued to look for supporters of the future coup d'etat. In 1891, he took exams as an external student for a course at the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University. At the same time, his views, under the influence of Plekhanov, evolved from populist to social democratic, and Lenin developed his first doctrine, which laid the foundation for Leninism.

In 1893, Lenin came to St. Petersburg and got a job as an assistant lawyer, while continuing to be active in journalism - he published many works in which he studied the process of capitalization of Russia.

In 1895, after a trip abroad, where Lenin met with Plekhanov and many other public figures, he organized the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class” in St. Petersburg and began an active struggle against the autocracy. For his activities, Lenin was arrested, spent a year in prison, and then sent into exile in 1897, where, however, he continued his activities, despite the prohibitions. During his exile, Lenin was officially married to his common-law wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

In 1898, the first secret congress of the Social Democratic Party (RSDLP), led by Lenin, took place. Soon after the Congress, all its members (9 people) were arrested, but the beginning of the revolution was laid.

The next time Lenin returned to Russia only in February 1917 and immediately became the head of the next uprising. Despite the fact that quite soon he is ordered to be arrested, Lenin continues his activities illegally. In October 1917, after the coup d'etat and the overthrow of the autocracy, power in the country completely passed to Lenin and his party.

Lenin's reforms

From 1917 until his death, Lenin was engaged in reforming the country in accordance with social democratic ideals:

• Makes peace with Germany, creates the Red Army, which takes an active part in the civil war of 1917-1921;
• Creates NEP - new economic policy;
• Gives civil rights to peasants and workers (the working class becomes the main one in the new political system of Russia);
• Reforms the church, seeking to replace Christianity with a new “religion” - communism.

He dies in 1924 after a sharp deterioration in his health. By order of Stalin, the leader's body was placed in a mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow.

The role of Lenin in the history of Russia

Lenin's role in the history of Russia is enormous. He was the main ideologist of the revolution and the overthrow of the autocracy in Russia, organized the Bolshevik Party, which was able to come to power in a fairly short time and completely change Russia politically and economically. Thanks to Lenin, Russia transformed from an Empire into a socialist state, which was based on the ideas of communism and the supremacy of the working class.

The state created by Lenin lasted almost throughout the entire 20th century and became one of the strongest in the world. Lenin's personality is still controversial among historians, but everyone agrees that he is one of the greatest world leaders who has ever existed in world history.

Biography

First emigration 1900-1905

Return to Russia

Press reaction

July - October 1917

Role in the Red Terror

Foreign policy

Last years (1921-1924)

Lenin's main ideas

About class morality

After death

The fate of Lenin's body

Lenin Awards

Titles and awards

Posthumous "awards"

Lenin's personality

Lenin's pseudonyms

Works of Lenin

Works of Lenin

Interesting Facts

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin(real name Ulyanov; April 10 (22), 1870, Simbirsk - January 21, 1924, Gorki estate, Moscow province) - Russian and Soviet political and statesman, revolutionary, founder of the Bolshevik Party, one of the organizers and leaders of the October Revolution of 1917, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (government ) RSFSR and USSR. Philosopher, Marxist, publicist, founder of Marxism-Leninism, ideologist and creator of the Third (Communist) International, founder of the Soviet state. The scope of his main scientific work is philosophy and economics.

Biography

Childhood, education and upbringing

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), in the family of an inspector and director of public schools of the Simbirsk province Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831-1886), the son of a former serf peasant of the Nizhny Novgorod province Nikolai Ulyanov (surname spelling option: Ulyanina), married to Anna Smirnova - the daughter of an Astrakhan tradesman (according to the Soviet writer M. E. Shaginyan, who came from a family of baptized Chuvash). Mother - Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (née Blank, 1835-1916), of Swedish-German origin on her mother’s side, and Jewish origin on her father’s side. I. N. Ulyanov rose to the rank of full state councilor.

In 1879-1887, Vladimir Ulyanov studied at the Simbirsk gymnasium, headed by F. M. Kerensky, the father of A. F. Kerensky, the future head of the Provisional Government (1917). In 1887 he graduated from high school with a gold medal and entered the law faculty of Kazan University. F. M. Kerensky was very disappointed with the choice of Volodya Ulyanov, as he advised him to enter the history and literature department of the university due to the younger Ulyanov’s great success in Latin and literature.

In the same year, 1887, on May 8 (20), Vladimir Ilyich’s elder brother, Alexander, was executed as a participant in a Narodnaya Volya conspiracy to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. Three months after admission, Vladimir Ilyich was expelled for participating in student unrest caused by the new university charter, the introduction of police surveillance of students and a campaign to combat “unreliable” students. According to the student inspector, who suffered from student unrest, Vladimir Ilyich was in the forefront of the raging students, almost with clenched fists. As a result of the unrest, Vladimir Ilyich, along with 40 other students, was arrested the next night and sent to the police station. All those arrested were expelled from the university and sent to their “homeland.” Later, another group of students left Kazan University in protest against the repression. Among those who voluntarily left the university was Lenin’s cousin, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Ardashev. After petitions from Lyubov Alexandrovna Ardasheva, Vladimir Ilyich’s aunt, he was exiled to the village of Kokushkino, Kazan province, where he lived in the Ardashevs’ house until the winter of 1888-1889.

The beginning of revolutionary activity

In the fall of 1888, Ulyanov was allowed to return to Kazan. Here he joined one of the Marxist circles organized by N. E. Fedoseev, where the works of K. Marx, F. Engels and G. V. Plekhanov were studied and discussed. In 1924, N.K. Krupskaya wrote in Pravda: “Vladimir Ilyich loved Plekhanov passionately. Plekhanov played a major role in the development of Vladimir Ilyich, helped him find the right revolutionary path, and therefore Plekhanov was surrounded by a halo for a long time: he experienced every slightest disagreement with Plekhanov extremely painfully.”

For some time, Lenin tried to engage in agriculture on the estate bought by his mother in Alakaevka (83.5 dessiatinas) in the Samara province. During Soviet times, a house-museum of Lenin was created in this village.

In the fall of 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to Samara, where Lenin also maintained contact with local revolutionaries.

In 1891, Vladimir Ulyanov passed the exams as an external student for a course at the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University.

In 1892-1893, Vladimir Ulyanov worked as an assistant to the Samara attorney (lawyer) N.A. Hardin, conducting most criminal cases and conducting “state defenses.”

In 1893, Lenin came to St. Petersburg, where he got a job as an assistant to the sworn attorney (lawyer) M. F. Volkenshtein. In St. Petersburg, he wrote works on the problems of Marxist political economy, the history of the Russian liberation movement, and the history of the capitalist evolution of the post-reform Russian village and industry. Some of them were published legally. At this time he also developed the program of the Social Democratic Party. The activities of V.I. Lenin as a publicist and researcher of the development of capitalism in Russia, based on extensive statistical materials, make him famous among Social Democrats and opposition-minded liberal figures, as well as in many other circles of Russian society.

In May 1895, Ulyanov went abroad. Meets in Switzerland with Plekhanov, in Germany - with W. Liebknecht, in France - with P. Lafargue and other figures of the international labor movement, and upon returning to the capital in 1895, together with Yu. O. Martov and other young revolutionaries, unites disparate Marxist circles in the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.”

The “Union of Struggle” carried out active propaganda activities among workers; they issued more than 70 leaflets. In December 1895, like many other members of the “Union,” Ulyanov was arrested and, after a long period in prison, in 1897 he was exiled for 3 years to the village of Shushenskoye, Yenisei province, where in July 1898 he married N.K. Krupskaya. In exile, he wrote a book, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” based on the collected material, directed against “legal Marxism” and populist theories. During his exile, over 30 works were written, contacts were established with Social Democrats in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and other cities. By the end of the 90s, under the pseudonym “K. Tulin” V.I. Ulyanov gains fame in Marxist circles. While in exile, Ulyanov advised local peasants on legal issues and drafted legal documents for them.

First emigration 1900-1905

In 1898, in Minsk, in the absence of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle, the First Congress of the RSDLP was held, which “founded” the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party by adopting the Manifesto; all members of the Central Committee elected by the congress and most of the delegates were immediately arrested; Many organizations represented at the congress were destroyed by the police. The leaders of the Union of Struggle, who were in exile in Siberia, decided to unite the numerous Social Democratic organizations and Marxist circles scattered throughout the country with the help of the newspaper.

After the end of their exile in February 1900, Lenin, Martov and A.N. Potresov traveled around Russian cities, establishing connections with local organizations; On July 29, 1900, Lenin left for Switzerland, where he negotiated with Plekhanov on the publication of a newspaper and theoretical journal. The editorial board of the newspaper, which received the name “Iskra” (later the magazine “Zarya” appeared), included three representatives of the emigrant group “Emancipation of Labor” - Plekhanov, P. B. Axelrod and V. I. Zasulich and three representatives of the “Union of Struggle” - Lenin, Martov and Potresov. The average circulation of the newspaper was 8,000 copies, and some issues were up to 10,000 copies. The spread of the newspaper contributed to the creation of a network of underground organizations on the territory of the Russian Empire.

In December 1901, Lenin first signed one of his articles published in Iskra with the pseudonym “Lenin”. In 1902, in the work “What to do? "Very pressing issues of our movement" Lenin came up with his own concept of the party, which he saw as a centralized militant organization. In this article he writes: “Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will turn Russia over!”

Participation in the work of the Second Congress of the RSDLP (1903)

From July 17 to August 10, 1903, the Second Congress of the RSDLP was held in London. Lenin took an active part in the preparations for the congress not only with his articles in Iskra and Zarya; Since the summer of 1901, together with Plekhanov, he worked on a draft party program and prepared a draft charter. The program consisted of two parts - a minimum program and a maximum program; the first involved the overthrow of tsarism and the establishment of a democratic republic, the destruction of the remnants of serfdom in the countryside, in particular the return to the peasants of lands cut off from them by landowners during the abolition of serfdom (the so-called “cuts”), the introduction of an eight-hour working day, recognition of the right of nations to self-determination and the establishment of equal rights nations; the maximum program determined the ultimate goal of the party - the construction of a socialist society and the conditions for achieving this goal - the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

At the congress itself, Lenin was elected to the bureau, worked on the program, organizational and credentials commissions, chaired a number of meetings and spoke on almost all issues on the agenda.

Both organizations that were in solidarity with Iskra (and were called “Iskra”) and those that did not share its position were invited to participate in the congress. During the discussion of the program, a polemic arose between supporters of Iskra, on the one hand, and the “economists” (for whom the position of the dictatorship of the proletariat turned out to be unacceptable) and the Bund (on the national question) on the other; as a result, 2 “economists”, and later 5 Bundists left the congress.

But the discussion of the party charter, point 1, which defined the concept of a party member, revealed disagreements among the Iskraists themselves, who were divided into “hard” supporters of Lenin and “soft” supporters of Martov. “In my project,” Lenin wrote after the congress, “this definition was as follows: “Anyone who recognizes its program and supports the party both materially and personally is considered a member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.” participation in one of the party organizations“. Martov, instead of underlined words, suggested saying: work under the control and leadership of one of the party organizations... We argued that it is necessary to narrow the concept of a party member in order to separate those who work from those who talk, to eliminate organizational chaos, to eliminate such ugliness and such absurdity so that there can be organizations , consisting of party members, but not party organizations, etc. Martov stood for the expansion of the party and spoke of a broad class movement requiring a broad - vague organization, etc. ... “Under control and leadership,” I said, - in fact mean no more and no less than: without any control and without any guidance.” Lenin's opponents saw in his formulation an attempt to create not a party of the working class, but a sect of conspirators; the wording of paragraph 1 proposed by Martov was supported by 28 votes against 22 with 1 abstention; but after the departure of the Bundists and economists, Lenin’s group received a majority in the elections to the Party Central Committee; This accidental circumstance, as subsequent events showed, forever divided the party into “Bolsheviks” and “Mensheviks.”

Member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP Rafail Abramovich (in the party since 1899) recalled in January 1958: “Of course, I was still a very young man then, but four years later I was already a member of the Central Committee, and then in this Central Committee, not only with Lenin and with other old Bolsheviks, but also with Trotsky, with all of them we were in the same Central Committee. Plekhanov, Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, Lev Deitch and a number of other old revolutionaries were still alive then. So we all worked together until 1903. In 1903, at the Second Congress, our lines diverged. Lenin and some of his friends insisted that it was necessary to act using dictatorial methods within the party and outside the party. Lenin always supported the fiction of collective leadership, but even then he was the master in the party. He was its actual owner, that’s what they called him - “master.”

Split

But it was not disputes about the charter that split the Iskraists, but the elections of the Iskra editorial board. From the very beginning, there was no mutual understanding on the editorial board between the representatives of the “Emancipation of Labor” group, who had long been cut off from Russia and the labor movement, and the young St. Petersburg residents; controversial issues were not resolved because the editorial board was split into two equal parts. Long before the congress, Lenin tried to solve the problem by proposing to introduce L. D. Trotsky to the editorial board as the seventh member; but the proposal, supported even by Axelrod and Zasulich, was decisively rejected by Plekhanov. Plekhanov's intransigence prompted Lenin to choose a different path: to reduce the editorial board to three people. The congress - at a time when Lenin's supporters already constituted the majority - was offered an editorial board consisting of Plekhanov, Martov and Lenin. “The political leader of Iskra,” Trotsky testifies, “was Lenin. The main journalistic force of the newspaper was Martov.” And yet, the removal from the editorial board of albeit few working, but respected and honored “old men” seemed to both Martov and Trotsky himself to be unjustified cruelty. The congress supported Lenin's proposal by a small majority, but Martov refused to serve on the editorial board; his supporters, among whom Trotsky now found himself, declared a boycott of the “Leninist” Central Committee and refused to cooperate in Iskra. Lenin had no choice but to leave the editorial office; Plekhanov, left alone, restored the previous editorial board, but without Lenin - Iskra became the printed organ of the Menshevik faction.

After the congress, both factions had to create their own structures; at the same time, it turned out that the congress minority had the support of the majority of party members. The Bolsheviks were left without a printed organ, which prevented them not only from promoting their views, but also from responding to harsh criticism from their opponents. Only in December 1904 was the newspaper “Forward” created, which briefly became the printed organ of the Leninists.

The abnormal situation that had developed in the party prompted Lenin, in letters to the Central Committee (in November 1903) and the Party Council (in January 1904), to insist on convening a party congress; Finding no support from the opposition, the Bolshevik faction eventually took the initiative. All organizations were invited to the Third Congress of the RSDLP, which opened in London on April 12 (25), 1905, but the Mensheviks refused to participate in it, declared the congress illegal and convened their own conference in Geneva - the split of the party was thus formalized.

First Russian Revolution (1905-1907)

Already at the end of 1904, against the backdrop of a growing strike movement, differences on political issues emerged between the “majority” and “minority” factions, in addition to organizational ones.

The revolution of 1905-1907 found Lenin abroad, in Switzerland.

At the Third Congress of the RSDLP, held in London in April 1905, Lenin emphasized that the main task of the ongoing revolution was to put an end to autocracy and the remnants of serfdom in Russia. Despite the bourgeois nature of the revolution, according to Lenin, its main driving force was to be the working class, as the most interested in its victory, and its natural ally was the peasantry. Having approved Lenin's point of view, the congress determined the party's tactics: organizing strikes, demonstrations, preparing an armed uprising.

At the first opportunity, in early November 1905, Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg illegally, under a false name, and headed the work of the Central and St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committees elected by the congress; paid great attention to the management of the newspaper “New Life”. Under the leadership of Lenin, the party was preparing an armed uprising. At the same time, Lenin wrote the book “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in which he points out the need for the hegemony of the proletariat and an armed uprising. In the struggle to win over the peasantry (which was actively waged with the Socialist Revolutionaries), Lenin wrote the pamphlet “To the Village Poor.”

In 1906, Lenin moved to Finland, and in the fall of 1907 he emigrated again.

According to Lenin, despite the defeat of the December armed uprising, the Bolsheviks used all revolutionary opportunities, they were the first to take the path of uprising and the last to leave it when this path became impossible.

Role in the Revolutionary Terror of the early 20th century

During the revolution of 1905-1907, Russia experienced the peak of revolutionary terrorism; the country was overwhelmed by a wave of violence: political and criminal murders, robberies, expropriations and extortion. Like the Socialist Revolutionaries, who widely practiced terror, the Bolsheviks had their own military organization (known as the “Combat Technical Group”, “Technical Group under the Central Committee”, “Military Technical Group”). In conditions of competition in extremist revolutionary activities with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, “famous” for the activities of their Combat Organization, after some hesitation (his vision of the issue changed many times depending on the current situation), the Bolshevik leader Lenin developed his position on terror. As historian Professor Anna Geifman, a researcher on the problem of revolutionary terrorism, notes, Lenin’s protests against terrorism, formulated before 1905 and directed against the Socialist Revolutionaries, are in sharp contradiction with Lenin’s practical policy, developed by him after the outbreak of the Russian revolution “in the light of the new tasks of the day” in the interests of of his party. Lenin called for “the most radical means and measures as the most expedient,” for which, Anna Geifman quotes documents, the Bolshevik leader proposed creating “detachments of a revolutionary army ... of all sizes, starting with two or three people, [who] should arm themselves, who than he can (a gun, a revolver, a bomb, a knife, brass knuckles, a stick, a rag with kerosene for arson...),” and concludes that these Bolshevik detachments were essentially no different from the terrorist “combat brigades” of the militant Socialist Revolutionaries.

Lenin, in the changed conditions, was already ready to go even further than the Socialist Revolutionaries and, as Anna Geifman notes, even went into obvious contradiction with the scientific teachings of Marx in order to promote the terrorist activities of his supporters, arguing that combat units should use every opportunity for active work, not postponing their actions until the outbreak of a general uprising.

Lenin essentially gave orders for the preparation of terrorist acts, which he himself had previously condemned, calling on his supporters to carry out attacks on city officials and other government officials; in the fall of 1905 he openly called for the murder of policemen and gendarmes, Black Hundreds and Cossacks, to blow up police stations, to pour soldiers with boiling water, and police with sulfuric acid.

Later, dissatisfied with the insufficient level of terrorist activity of his party, in his opinion, Lenin complained to the St. Petersburg Committee:

Seeking immediate terrorist action, Lenin even had to defend the methods of terror in the face of his fellow Social Democrats:

The followers of the Bolshevik leader were not forced to wait long; in Yekaterinburg, according to some evidence, members of the Bolshevik combat detachment under the leadership of Ya. Sverdlov “constantly terrorized the supporters of the Black Hundred, killing them at every opportunity.”

As one of Lenin's closest colleagues, Elena Stasova, testifies, the Bolshevik leader, having formulated his new tactics, began to insist on its immediate implementation and turned into an “ardent supporter of terror.” The greatest concern with terror during this period was shown by the Bolsheviks, whose leader Lenin wrote on October 25, 1916 that the Bolsheviks were not at all opposed to political assassinations, only individual terror should be combined with mass movements.

Analyzing the terrorist activities of the Bolsheviks during the years of the first Russian revolution, historian and researcher Anna Geifman comes to the conclusion that for the Bolsheviks, terror turned out to be an effective and often used tool at different levels of the revolutionary hierarchy.

In addition to people specializing in political murders in the name of revolution, in each of the social democratic organizations there were people involved in armed robbery, extortion and confiscation of private and state property. Officially, such actions were never encouraged by the leaders of social democratic organizations, with the exception of the Bolsheviks, whose leader Lenin publicly declared robbery an acceptable means of revolutionary struggle. The Bolsheviks were the only social democratic organization in Russia that resorted to expropriations (the so-called “exs”) in an organized and systematic manner.

The actions of the Bolshevik militants did not go unnoticed by the leadership of the RSDLP. Martov proposed expelling the Bolsheviks from the party for the illegal expropriations they committed. Plekhanov called for a fight against “Bolshevik Bakuninism,” many party members considered Lenin and Co. to be ordinary swindlers, and Fyodor Dan called the Bolshevik members of the Central Committee of the RSDLP a company of criminals. Lenin’s main goal was to strengthen the position of his supporters within the RSDLP with the help of money, and to bring certain people and even entire organizations to financial dependence on the “Bolshevik Center”. The leaders of the Menshevik faction understood that Lenin was operating with huge expropriated sums, subsidizing the Bolshevik-controlled St. Petersburg and Moscow committees, giving the first a thousand rubles a month and the second five hundred. At the same time, relatively little of the proceeds from Bolshevik plunder went into the general party treasury, and the Mensheviks were outraged that they could not force the Bolshevik Center to share with the Central Committee of the RSDLP.

The V Congress of the RSDLP provided the Mensheviks with the opportunity to fiercely criticize the Bolsheviks for their “gangster practices.” At the congress it was decided to put an end to any participation of Social Democrats in terrorist activities and expropriations. Martov’s calls for the revival of the purity of revolutionary consciousness did not make any impression on Lenin; the Bolshevik leader listened to them with open irony, and, while reading a financial report, when the speaker mentioned a large donation from an anonymous benefactor, X, Lenin sarcastically remarked: “Not from X, and from ex"

Continuing the practice of expropriation, Lenin and his associates in the Bolshevik Center also received money from such dubious sources as fictitious marriages and forced indemnities. Finally, Lenin's habit of not honoring his faction's financial obligations angered even his supporters.

At the end of 1916, even when the wave of revolutionary extremism had almost died out, the Bolshevik leader Lenin asserted in his letter dated October 25, 1916 that the Bolsheviks were by no means against political assassinations. Lenin, historian Anna Geifman points out, was ready to once again change his theoretical principles, which he did in December 1916: in response to a request from the Bolsheviks from Petrograd about the official position of the party on the issue of terror, Lenin expressed his own: “at this historical moment, terrorist actions are permitted.” Lenin's only condition was that in the eyes of the public the initiative for terrorist attacks should not come from the party, but from individual members or small Bolshevik groups in Russia. Lenin also added that he hoped to convince the entire Central Committee of the advisability of his position

A large number of terrorists remained in Russia after the Bolsheviks came to power and participated in Lenin's "Red Terror" policy. A number of founders and major figures of the Soviet state, who had previously participated in extremist actions, continued their activities in a modified form after 1917.

Second emigration (1908 - April 1917)

In early January 1908, Lenin returned to Geneva. The defeat of the revolution of 1905-1907 did not force him to fold his arms; he considered a repetition of the revolutionary upsurge inevitable. “Defeated armies learn well,” Lenin later wrote about this period.

At the end of 1908, Lenin, together with Zinoviev and Kamenev, moved to Paris. Here his first meeting and close acquaintance with Inessa Armand took place, who became his mistress until her death in 1920.

In 1909 he published his main philosophical work, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism.” The work was written after Lenin realized how widely popular Machism and empirio-criticism had become among Social Democrats.

In 1912, he decisively broke with the Mensheviks, who insisted on the legalization of the RSDLP.

On May 5, 1912, the first issue of the legal Bolshevik newspaper Pravda was published in St. Petersburg. Extremely dissatisfied with the editing of the newspaper (Stalin was the editor-in-chief), Lenin sent L. B. Kamenev to St. Petersburg. He wrote articles to Pravda almost every day, sent letters in which he gave instructions, advice, and corrected the editors’ mistakes. Over the course of 2 years, Pravda published about 270 Leninist articles and notes. Also in exile, Lenin led the activities of the Bolsheviks in the IV State Duma, was a representative of the RSDLP in the II International, wrote articles on party and national issues, and studied philosophy.

When World War I began, Lenin lived on the territory of Austria-Hungary in the Galician town of Poronin, where he arrived at the end of 1912. Due to suspicion of spying for the Russian government, Lenin was arrested by Austrian gendarmes. For his release, the help of socialist deputy of the Austrian parliament V. Adler was required. On August 6, 1914, Lenin was released from prison.

17 days later in Switzerland, Lenin took part in a meeting of a group of Bolshevik emigrants, where he announced his theses on the war. In his opinion, the war that began was imperialist, unfair on both sides, and alien to the interests of the working people.

At international conferences in Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916), Lenin, in accordance with the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress and the Basel Manifesto of the Second International, defended his thesis on the need to transform the imperialist war into a civil war and came out with the slogan of “revolutionary defeatism.”

In February 1916, Lenin moved from Bern to Zurich. Here he finishes his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Popular Essay)”, actively collaborates with Swiss Social Democrats (among them the radical left Fritz Platten), and attends all their party meetings. Here he learns from newspapers about the February Revolution in Russia.

Lenin did not expect a revolution in 1917. Lenin’s public statement in January 1917 in Switzerland is known that he did not expect to live to see the coming revolution, but that young people would see it. Lenin, who knew the weakness of the underground revolutionary forces in the capital, regarded the revolution that soon took place as the result of a “conspiracy of Anglo-French imperialists.”

Return to Russia

In April 1917, the German authorities, with the assistance of Fritz Platten, allowed Lenin, along with 35 party comrades, to leave Switzerland by train through Germany. Among them were Krupskaya N.K., Zinoviev G.E., Lilina Z.I., Armand I.F., Sokolnikov G.Ya., Radek K.B. and others.

April - July 1917. “April Theses”

On April 3, 1917, Lenin arrived in Russia. The Petrograd Soviet, the majority of which were Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, organized a solemn meeting for him as a prominent fighter against autocracy. The next day, April 4, Lenin made a report to the Bolsheviks, the theses of which were published in Pravda only on April 7, when Lenin and Zinoviev joined the editorial board of Pravda, since, according to V. M. Molotov, the new The leader’s ideas seemed too radical even to his close associates. These were the famous “April Theses”. In this report, Lenin sharply opposed the sentiments that prevailed in Russia among Social Democrats in general and the Bolsheviks in particular, which boiled down to the idea of ​​​​expanding the bourgeois-democratic revolution, supporting the Provisional Government and defending the revolutionary fatherland in a war that changed its character with the fall of the autocracy. Lenin announced the slogans: “No support for the Provisional Government” and “all power to the Soviets”; he proclaimed a course for the development of the bourgeois revolution into a proletarian revolution, putting forward the goal of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and the transfer of power to the Soviets and the proletariat with the subsequent liquidation of the army, police and bureaucracy. Finally, he demanded widespread anti-war propaganda, since, according to his opinion, the war on the part of the Provisional Government continued to be imperialistic and “predatory” in nature. Having taken control of the RSDLP(b), Lenin implements this plan. From April to July 1917, he wrote more than 170 articles, brochures, draft resolutions of Bolshevik conferences and the Party Central Committee, and appeals.

Press reaction

Despite the fact that the Menshevik newspaper Rabochaya Gazeta, when writing about the arrival of the Bolshevik leader in Russia, assessed this visit as the emergence of “danger from the left flank”, the newspaper Rech - the official publication of the Minister of Foreign Affairs P. N. Milyukov - according to historian of the Russian revolution S.P. Melgunov, spoke positively about the arrival of Lenin, and that now not only Plekhanov will fight for the ideas of socialist parties.

July - October 1917

On July 5, during the uprising, the Provisional Government made public the information it had about the connections of the Bolsheviks with the Germans. July 20 (7) The Provisional Government ordered the arrest of Lenin and a number of prominent Bolsheviks on charges of treason and organizing an armed uprising. Lenin goes underground again. In Petrograd, he had to change 17 safe houses, after which, until August 21 (8), 1917, he and Zinoviev hid not far from Petrograd - in a hut on Lake Razliv. In August, on the steam locomotive N-293, he moved to the Grand Duchy of Finland, where he lived until the beginning of October in Yalkala, Helsingfors and Vyborg.

October Revolution of 1917

Lenin arrived in Smolny and began to lead the uprising, the direct organizer of which was the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet L. D. Trotsky. It took 2 days to overthrow the government of A.F. Kerensky. On November 7 (October 25) Lenin wrote an appeal for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. On the same day, at the opening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin's decrees on peace and land were adopted and a government was formed - the Council of People's Commissars, headed by Lenin. On January 5, 1918, the Constituent Assembly opened, the majority of which was won by the Socialist Revolutionaries, representing the interests of the peasants, who at that time made up 90% of the country's population. Lenin, with the support of the Left Social Revolutionaries, presented the Constituent Assembly with a choice: ratify the power of the Soviets and the decrees of the Bolshevik government or disperse. The Constituent Assembly, which did not agree with this formulation of the issue, was forcibly dissolved.

During the 124 days of the “Smolny period,” Lenin wrote over 110 articles, draft decrees and resolutions, delivered over 70 reports and speeches, wrote about 120 letters, telegrams and notes, and participated in the editing of more than 40 state and party documents. The working day of the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars lasted 15-18 hours. During this period, Lenin chaired 77 meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, led 26 meetings and meetings of the Central Committee, participated in 17 meetings of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and its Presidium, and in the preparation and conduct of 6 different All-Russian Congresses of Working People. After the Central Committee of the Party and the Soviet government moved from Petrograd to Moscow, from March 11, 1918, Lenin lived and worked in Moscow. Lenin's personal apartment and office were located in the Kremlin, on the third floor of the former Senate building.

After the revolution and during the Civil War (1917-1921)

January 15 (28), 1918 Lenin signs the decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the creation of the Red Army. In accordance with the Peace Decree, it was necessary to withdraw from the world war. Despite the opposition of the left communists and L.D. Trotsky, Lenin achieved the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany on March 3, 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, in protest against the signing and ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, withdrew from the Soviet government. On March 10-11, fearing the capture of Petrograd by German troops, at the suggestion of Lenin, the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the RCP (b) moved to Moscow, which became the new capital of Soviet Russia. On July 6, two left Socialist Revolutionaries, employees of the Cheka Yakov Blyumkin and Nikolai Andreev, presenting the mandates of the Cheka, went to the German embassy in Moscow and killed the ambassador Count Wilhelm von Mirbach. This is a provocation to cause an aggravation of relations with Germany, even to the point of war. And there was already a threat that German military units would be sent to Moscow. Immediately - the Left Socialist Revolutionary rebellion. In short, everything is balancing on the edge. Lenin is making great efforts to somehow smooth out the imposed Soviet-German conflict and avoid a clash. On July 16, the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his entire family, along with their servants, were shot in Yekaterinburg.

In his memoirs, Trotsky accuses Lenin of organizing the execution of the royal family:

My next visit to Moscow came after the fall of Yekaterinburg. In a conversation with Sverdlov, I asked in passing:

The senior investigator for especially important cases of the General Prosecutor's Office of Russia, Vladimir Solovyov, who led the investigation of the criminal case into the death of the royal family, discovered that in the minutes of the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars, at which Sverdlov announced the decision of the Urals Council regarding the execution of the royal family, Trotsky's name appears among those present. Therefore, he later composed that conversation “after arriving from the front” with Sverdlov about Lenin. Solovyov came to the conclusion that Lenin was against the execution of the royal family, and the execution itself was organized by the same left Socialist Revolutionaries, who had enormous influence in the Urals Soviet, with the aim of disrupting the Brest-Litovsk Treaty between Soviet Russia and Kaiser Germany. After the February Revolution, the Germans, despite the war with Russia, were worried about the fate of the Russian imperial family, because the wife of Nicholas II, Alexandra Feodorovna, was German, and their daughters were both Russian princesses and German princesses. The spirit of the Great French Revolution with the then execution of the king and queen hovered over the heads of the Ural Socialist Revolutionaries and the local Bolsheviks who joined them, the leaders of the Urals Council (Alexander Beloborodov, Yakov Yurovsky, Philip Goloshchekin). Lenin became, in a sense, a hostage to the radicalism and obsession of the leaders of the Urals Council. Make public the “feat” of the Urals - the murder of German princesses and find yourself between a rock and a hard place - between the White Guards and the Germans? Information about the death of the entire royal family and servants was hidden for years. Referring to Trotsky’s fake, the famous Russian director Gleb Panfilov made the film “The Romanovs. The Crowned Family,” where Lenin is presented as the organizer of the execution of the royal family, played by People’s Artist of Russia Alexander Filippenko.

On August 30, 1918, an attempt was made on Lenin, according to the official version, by the Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan, which led to severe injury.

As Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, from November 1917 to December 1920, Lenin chaired 375 meetings of the Soviet government out of 406. From December 1918 to February 1920, out of 101 meetings of the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense, only two he did not preside over. In 1919, V.I. Lenin led the work of 14 plenums of the Central Committee and 40 meetings of the Politburo, at which military issues were discussed. From November 1917 to November 1920, V.I. Lenin wrote over 600 letters and telegrams on various issues of defense of the Soviet state, and spoke at rallies over 200 times.

Lenin paid significant attention to the development of the country's economy. Lenin believed that in order to restore the economy destroyed by the war, it was necessary to organize the state into a “national, state “syndicate”. Soon after the revolution, Lenin set the task for scientists to develop a plan for the reorganization of industry and the economic revival of Russia, and also contributed to the development of the country's science.

In 1919, on the initiative of Lenin, the Communist International was created.

Role in the Red Terror

During the Russian Civil War, Lenin was one of the main organizers of the Bolshevik policy of red terror, carried out directly on his instructions. These Leninist instructions prescribed the start of mass terror, organizing executions, isolating unreliable people in concentration camps and carrying out other emergency measures. On August 9, 1918, Lenin sent instructions to the Penza Provincial Executive Committee, where he wrote: “It is necessary to carry out merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; those who are dubious will be locked up in a concentration camp outside the city.” On August 10, 1918, Lenin sent a telegram about the suppression of the kulak uprising in the Penza province, in which he called for hanging 100 kulaks, taking away all their bread and assigning hostages.

A description of the ways to implement the instructions of the Bolshevik leader on the mass Red Terror is presented in acts, investigations, certificates, reports and other materials of the Special Commission for the Investigation of Bolshevik Atrocities.

The KGB history textbook states that Lenin spoke to employees of the Cheka, received security officers, was interested in the progress of operational developments and investigations, and gave instructions on specific cases. When the Chekists fabricated the Whirlwind case in 1921, Lenin personally participated in the operation, certifying with his signature the forged mandate of the Cheka agent provocateur.

In mid-August 1920, in connection with receiving information that in Estonia and Latvia, with which Soviet Russia had concluded peace treaties, volunteers were being enrolled in anti-Bolshevik detachments, Lenin in a letter to E.M. Sklyansky called for “hanging kulaks, priests, landowners " In another letter he wrote about the admissibility of “putting in prison several dozen or hundreds of instigators, guilty or innocent” in order to save the lives of “thousands of Red Army soldiers and workers.”

Even after the end of the Civil War, in 1922, V.I. Lenin declared the impossibility of ending terror and the need for its legislative regulation.

This problem was not raised in Soviet historiography, but at present it is being studied not only by foreign, but also by domestic historians.

Doctors of historical sciences Yu. G. Felshtinsky and G. I. Chernyavsky explain in their work why it is only today that the discrepancy between the reality of the image of the Bolshevik leader traditional for Soviet historiography is becoming obvious:

A 2007 textbook on Russian history says:

Foreign policy

Immediately after the October Revolution, Lenin recognized the independence of Finland.

During the Civil War, Lenin tried to reach an agreement with the Entente powers. In March 1919, Lenin negotiated with William Bullitt, who had arrived in Moscow. Lenin agreed to pay off pre-revolutionary Russian debts in exchange for an end to the intervention and the Entente's support for the Whites. A draft agreement was developed with the Entente powers.

After the end of the civil war, Lenin's foreign policy was unsuccessful. Of the great powers, only Germany established diplomatic relations with the USSR before Lenin’s death, having signed the Rappal Treaty (1922) with the RSFSR. Peace treaties were concluded and diplomatic relations were established with a number of border states: Finland (1920), Estonia (1920), Poland (1921), Turkey (1921), Iran (1921), Mongolia (1921).

In October 1920, Lenin met with a Mongolian delegation that had arrived in Moscow, hoping for support from the “Reds” who were victorious in the Civil War on the issue of Mongolian independence. As a condition for supporting Mongolian independence, Lenin pointed to the need to create a “united organization of forces, political and state,” preferably under the red banner.

Last years (1921-1924)

The economic and political situation required the Bolsheviks to change their previous policies. In this regard, at the insistence of Lenin, in 1921, at the 10th Congress of the RCP (b), “war communism” was abolished, food allocation was replaced by a food tax. The so-called New Economic Policy (NEP) was introduced, which allowed private free trade and gave the opportunity to large sections of the population to independently seek the means of subsistence that the state could not give them. At the same time, Lenin insisted on the development of state-owned enterprises, on electrification (with the participation of Lenin, a special commission was created to develop a project for the electrification of Russia - GOELRO), on the development of cooperation. Lenin believed that in anticipation of the world proletarian revolution, keeping all large industry in the hands of the state, it was necessary to gradually build socialism in one country. All this could, in his opinion, help put the backward Soviet country on the same level as the most developed European countries.

Lenin was one of the initiators of the campaign to confiscate church valuables, which caused resistance from representatives of the clergy and some parishioners. The shooting of parishioners in Shuya caused great resonance. In connection with these events, on March 19, 1922, Lenin drafted a secret letter that qualified the events in Shuya as just one manifestation of a general plan of resistance to the decree of Soviet power on the part of “the most influential group of the Black Hundred clergy.” On March 30, at a meeting of the Politburo, on the recommendations of Lenin, a plan was adopted to destroy the church organization.

Lenin contributed to the establishment of a one-party system in the country and the spread of atheistic views. In 1922, on his recommendations, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was created.

In 1923, shortly before his death, Lenin wrote his last works: “On cooperation”, “How can we reorganize the workers’ krin”, “Less is better”, in which he offers his vision of the economic policy of the Soviet state and measures to improve the work of the state apparatus and parties. On January 4, 1923, V.I. Lenin dictates the so-called “Addition to the letter of December 24, 1922,” in which, in particular, the characteristics of individual Bolsheviks claiming to be the leader of the party (Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Pyatakov) were given. Stalin was given an unflattering description in this letter.

Illness and death. Question about cause of death

The consequences of the injury and overload, according to the surgeon Yu. M. Lopukhin, led Lenin to a serious illness. In March 1922, Lenin led the work of the 11th Congress of the RCP (b) - the last party congress at which he spoke. In May 1922 he became seriously ill, but returned to work in early October. Leading German specialists in nervous diseases were called in for treatment. Lenin's chief physician from December 1922 until his death in 1924 was Otfried Förster. Lenin's last public speech took place on November 20, 1922 at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet. On December 16, 1922, his health condition again deteriorated sharply, and in May 1923, due to illness, he moved to the Gorki estate near Moscow. The last time Lenin was in Moscow was on October 18-19, 1923. During this period, he, however, dictated several notes: “Letter to the Congress”, “On giving legislative functions to the State Planning Committee”, “On the issue of nationalities or “autonomization””, “Pages from the diary”, “On cooperation”, “About our revolution (regarding N. Sukhanov’s notes)”, “How can we reorganize the Rabkrin (Proposal to the XII Party Congress)”, “Better less, but better.”

Lenin's "Letter to the Congress" (1922) is often viewed as Lenin's testament. Some believe that this letter contained Lenin's real will, which Stalin later deviated from. Supporters of this point of view believe that if the country had developed along a truly Leninist path, many problems would not have arisen.

In January 1924, Lenin's health suddenly deteriorated; On January 21, 1924 at 18:50 he died.

The widespread belief that Lenin had syphilis, which he allegedly contracted in Europe, has never been officially confirmed by Soviet or Russian authorities.

The official conclusion on the cause of death in the autopsy report read: “The basis of the deceased’s disease is widespread atherosclerosis of blood vessels due to their premature wear (Abnutzungssclerose). Due to the narrowing of the lumen of the arteries of the brain and disruption of its nutrition from insufficient blood flow, focal softening of the brain tissue occurred, explaining all the previous symptoms of the disease (paralysis, speech disorders). The immediate cause of death was: 1) increased circulatory disorders in the brain; 2) hemorrhage into the pia mater in the quadrigeminal region.”

According to Alexander Grudinkin, rumors about syphilis arose due to the fact that advanced syphilis was one of the preliminary diagnoses put forward by doctors at the onset of the disease; Lenin himself also did not exclude this possibility and took salvarsan, and in 1923, drugs based on mercury and bismuth.

Lenin's main ideas

Historiosophical analysis of contemporary capitalism

Communism, socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat

Before building communism, an intermediate stage is necessary - the dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism is divided into two periods: socialism and communism proper. Under socialism there is no exploitation, but there is still no abundance of material goods to satisfy any needs of all members of society.

In 1920, in his speech “Tasks of Youth Unions,” Lenin argued that communism would be built in 1930-1950.

Attitude to the imperialist war and revolutionary defeatism

According to Lenin, the First World War was of an imperialist nature, was unfair for all parties involved, and alien to the interests of the working people. Lenin put forward the thesis about the need to transform the imperialist war into a civil war (in each country against its own government) and the need for workers to use war to overthrow “their” governments. At the same time, pointing out the need for Social Democrats to participate in the anti-war movement, which came up with pacifist slogans for peace, Lenin considered such slogans to be “a deception of the people” and emphasized the need for a civil war.

Lenin put forward the slogan of revolutionary defeatism, the essence of which was voting in parliament against war loans to the government, creating and strengthening revolutionary organizations among workers and soldiers, fighting government patriotic propaganda, and supporting the fraternization of soldiers at the front. At the same time, Lenin considered his position to be patriotic - national pride, in his opinion, was the basis of hatred towards the “slave past” and the “slave present.”

The possibility of an initial victory of the revolution in one country

In the article “On the Slogan of the United States of Europe” in 1915, Lenin wrote that the revolution would not necessarily occur simultaneously throughout the world, as Marx believed. It may first occur in one single country. This country will then help the revolution in other countries.

About class morality

There is no universal morality, but only class morality. Each class implements its own morality, its own moral values. The morality of the proletariat is moral that which meets the interests of the proletariat (“Our morality is completely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. Our morality is derived from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat”).

As political scientist Alexander Tarasov notes, Lenin brought ethics from the realm of religious dogma to the realm of verifiability: ethics must be verified and proven whether a particular action serves the cause of the revolution, whether it is useful to the cause of the working class.

After death

The fate of Lenin's body

On January 23, the coffin with Lenin’s body was transported to Moscow and installed in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. The official farewell took place over five days and nights. On January 27, the coffin with Lenin’s embalmed body was placed in a specially built Mausoleum on Red Square (architect A.V. Shchusev).

In 1923, the Central Committee of the RCP(b) created the V.I. Lenin Institute, and in 1932, as a result of its merger with the Institute of K. Marx and F. Engels, a single Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute was formed under the Central Committee of the CPSU(b) (later the Institute Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU). The Central Party Archive of this institute contains more than 30 thousand documents, the author of which is V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin).

During the Great Patriotic War, Lenin's body was evacuated from the Moscow Mausoleum to Tyumen, where it was kept in the building of the current Tyumen State Agricultural Academy. The Mausoleum itself was disguised as a mansion.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, some political parties expressed the opinion that it was necessary to remove Lenin’s body and brain from the Mausoleum and bury it (the brain is stored separately, at the Brain Institute, including in the form of tens of thousands of histological preparations). Statements about the removal of Lenin's body from the Mausoleum, as well as about the liquidation of memorial burials near the Kremlin wall, are periodically heard to this day from various Russian government officials, political parties and forces, and representatives of religious organizations.

Attitude towards Lenin after death. Grade

The name and ideas of V. I. Lenin were glorified in the USSR along with the October Revolution and I. V. Stalin (before the 20th Congress of the CPSU). On January 26, 1924, after the death of Lenin, the 2nd All-Union Congress of Soviets granted the request of the Petrograd Soviet to rename Petrograd to Leningrad. A city delegation (about 1 thousand people) participated in Lenin’s funeral in Moscow. Cities, towns and collective farms were named after Lenin. In every city there was a monument to Lenin. Numerous stories about “Grandfather Lenin” were written for children, including Mikhail Zoshchenko’s Stories about Lenin, partly based on the memoirs of his sister Anna Ulyanova. Even his driver Gil wrote memoirs about Lenin.

The cult of Lenin began to take shape during his lifetime through party propaganda and the media. In 1918, the city of Taldom was renamed Leninsk, and in 1923, higher educational institutions in the USSR received the name of Lenin.

In the 1930s, villages, streets and squares of cities, premises of educational institutions, assembly halls of factories began to be filled with tens of thousands of busts and monuments to Lenin, among which, along with works of Soviet art, there were also typical “objects of worship” devoid of artistic value. There were massive campaigns of renaming various objects and giving them, contrary to the wishes of N. Krupskaya, the name of Lenin. The highest state award was the Order of Lenin. Sometimes the opinion is expressed that such actions were coordinated by the Stalinist leadership in the context of the formation of Stalin’s personality cult with the aim of usurping power and declaring Stalin as Lenin’s successor and worthy disciple.

After the collapse of the USSR, the attitude towards Lenin among the population of the Russian Federation became differentiated; According to a FOM survey, in 1999, 65% of the Russian population considered Lenin’s role in Russian history to be positive, 23% - negative, 13% found it difficult to answer. Four years later, in April 2003, FOM conducted a similar survey - this time 58% assessed Lenin’s role positively, 17% negatively, and the number of those who found it difficult to answer grew to 24%, and therefore FOM noted a trend.

Lenin in culture, art and language

In the USSR, a lot of memoirs, poems, poems, short stories, stories and novels about Lenin were published. Many films about Lenin were also made. In Soviet times, the opportunity to play Lenin in a movie was considered a sign of high trust for the actor by the leadership of the CPSU.

Monuments to Lenin have become an integral part of the Soviet tradition of monumental art. After the collapse of the USSR, many monuments to Lenin were dismantled by the authorities or destroyed by various individuals.

Soon after the emergence of the USSR, a series of jokes about Lenin arose. These jokes are still in circulation to this day.

Lenin made many statements that have become catchphrases. Moreover, a number of statements attributed to Lenin do not belong to him, but first appeared in literary works and cinema. These statements became widespread in the political and everyday languages ​​of the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. Such phrases include, for example, the words “We will go a different way,” allegedly uttered by him in connection with the execution of his older brother, the phrase “There is such a party!”, uttered by him at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, or the characterization “Political prostitute.”

Lenin Awards

Official lifetime award

The only official state award that V.I. Lenin was awarded was the Order of Labor of the Khorezm People's Socialist Republic (1922).

Lenin had no other state awards, either from the RSFSR and the USSR, or from foreign countries.

Titles and awards

In 1917, Norway took the initiative to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Vladimir Lenin, with the wording “For the triumph of the ideas of peace,” as a response to the “Decree on Peace” issued in Soviet Russia, which separately led Russia out of the First World War. The Nobel Committee rejected this proposal due to the lateness of the application by the deadline - February 1, 1918, but made a decision that the committee would not object to awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to V. I. Lenin if the existing Russian government establishes peace and tranquility in the country (as you know, the path to establishing peace in Russia was blocked by the Civil War, which began in 1918). Lenin’s idea about transforming the imperialist war into a civil war was formulated in his work “Socialism and War,” written back in July-August 1915.

In 1919, by order of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, V.I. Lenin was accepted as an honorary Red Army soldier of the 1st squad of the 1st platoon of the 1st company of the 195th Yeisk Infantry Regiment.

Posthumous "awards"

On January 22, 1924, N.P. Gorbunov, Lenin’s secretary, took the Order of the Red Banner (No. 4274) from his jacket and pinned it to the jacket of the already deceased Lenin. This award was on Lenin’s body until 1943, and Gorbunov himself received a duplicate of the order in 1930. According to some reports, N.I. Podvoisky did the same, standing in the guard of honor at Lenin’s tomb. Another Order of the Red Banner was laid at Lenin’s coffin along with a wreath from the Military Academy of the Red Army. Currently, the orders of N.P. Gorbunov and the Military Academy are kept in the Lenin Museum in Moscow.

The fact of the presence of the order on the chest of the deceased Lenin during the funeral ceremony in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions was captured in the poem by V. Inber “Five nights and days (On the death of Lenin).”

Lenin's personality

British historian Helen Rappaport, who wrote a book about Lenin, described him as “demanding”, “punctual”, “neat”, “brilliant” and “very clean” in everyday life. At the same time, Lenin is described as “very authoritarian”, “very inflexible”, he “did not tolerate disagreement with his opinion”, “ruthless”, “cruel”. It is indicated that friendship for Lenin was secondary to politics. Rappaport points out that Lenin "changed his party tactics depending on circumstances and political advantage."

Lenin's pseudonyms

At the end of 1901, Vladimir Ulyanov acquired the pseudonym “N. Lenin,” with which, in particular, he signed his printed works during this period. Abroad, the initial “N” is usually deciphered as “Nikolai,” although in reality this initial was not deciphered in any of Lenin’s lifetime publications. There were many versions about the origin of this pseudonym. For example, toponymic - along the Siberian Lena River.

According to historian Vladlen Loginov, the most plausible version seems to be related to the use of the passport of the real Nikolai Lenin.

The Lenin family can be traced back to the Cossack Posnik, who in the 17th century was granted nobility and the surname Lenin for his services associated with the conquest of Siberia and the creation of winter huts along the Lena River. His numerous descendants distinguished themselves more than once in both military and official service. One of them, Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin, having risen to the rank of state councilor, retired and in the 80s of the 19th century settled in the Yaroslavl province, where he died in 1902. His children, who sympathized with the emerging Social Democratic movement in Russia, were well acquainted with Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and after their father’s death they gave Vladimir Ulyanov his passport, albeit with the date of birth changed. There is a version that Vladimir Ilyich received the passport in the spring of 1900, when Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin himself was still alive.

According to the Ulyanov family version, Vladimir Ilyich’s pseudonym comes from the name of the Lena River. Thus, Olga Dmitrievna Ulyanova, the niece of V.I. Lenin and the daughter of his brother D.I. Ulyanova, who acts as an author studying the life of the Ulyanov family, writes in defense of this version based on the stories of her father:

After V.I. Lenin came to power, he signed official party and state documents “ V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin)».

He also had other pseudonyms: V. Ilyin, V. Frey, Iv. Petrov, K. Tulin, Karpov, Starik, etc.

Works of Lenin

Works of Lenin

• What are “friends of the people” and how do they fight against the Social Democrats? (1894);
• "On the Characteristics of Economic Romanticism", (1897)
• Development of capitalism in Russia (1899);
• What to do? (1902)
• One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904);
• Party organization and party literature (1905);
• Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909);
• Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism (1913);
• On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914);
• Karl Marx (a short biographical sketch outlining Marxism) (1914);
• Socialism and War (1915);
• Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism (popular essay) (1916);
• State and Revolution (1917);
• On dual power (1917);
• How to Organize a Competition (1918);
• The Great Initiative (1919);
• The childhood disease of “leftism” in communism (1920);
• Tasks of youth unions (1920);
• About the food tax (1921);
• Pages from the diary, About cooperation (1923);
• About the pogrom persecution of Jews (1924);
• What is Soviet power?;
• On leftist childishness and petty-bourgeoisism (1918);
• About our revolution

Speeches recorded on gramophone records

In 1919-1921 V.I. Lenin recorded 16 speeches on gramophone records. Over three sessions in March 1919 (19, 23 and 31), 8 recordings were made, which became the most famous and were published in copies of ten thousand, including “The Third Communist International”, “Appeal to the Red Army” (2 parts recorded separately) and the especially popular “What is Soviet power?”, which was considered the most successful in technical terms.

During the next recording session on April 5, 1920, 3 speeches were recorded - “On work for transport,” part 1 and part 2, “On labor discipline” and “How to forever save workers from the oppression of landowners and capitalists.” Another record, most likely dedicated to the outbreak of the Polish war, was damaged and lost in the same 1920.

Five speeches recorded during the last session on April 25, 1921 turned out to be technically unsuitable for mass production - due to the departure of a foreign specialist, engineer A. Kibart, to Germany. These gramophone recordings remained unknown for a long time, four of them were found in 1970. Of these, only three were restored and released for the first time on long-playing discs - one of the two speeches “On the tax in kind”, “On consumer and trade cooperation” and “Non-party and Soviet power" (Company "Melodiya", M00 46623-24, 1986).

In addition to the second speech “On the Tax in Kind” that has not been found, the 1921 entry “On Concessions and the Development of Capitalism” has not yet been published. The first part of the speech, “On Work for Transport,” has not been reprinted since 1929, and the speech, “On the pogrom persecution of the Jews,” has not appeared on disk since the late 1930s.

Descendants

Lenin's niece (daughter of his younger brother Olga Dmitrievna Ulyanova), the last direct descendant of the Ulyanov family, died in Moscow at the age of 90.

• During his famous speech at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin did not have a beard (conspiracy), although Vladimir Serov’s now textbook painting depicts him with a traditional beard.
• Nizhny Novgorod residents joke (and not without reason) that Lenin was conceived in Nizhny Novgorod, since Ilya Ulyanov was there as a teacher at the provincial boys' gymnasium until the end of 1869, and his son Vladimir was born in Simbirsk in the spring of 1870.
• On June 16, 1921, Bernard Shaw sent Lenin the book “Back to Methuselah.” On the title page he wrote: "To Nikolai Lenin, the only statesman in Europe who possesses the talent, character and knowledge corresponding to his responsible position". Lenin subsequently left numerous notes in the margins of the manuscript, indicating his keen interest in the work of Bernard Shaw.
• Albert Einstein wrote about Lenin: “I respect in Lenin a man who, with complete selflessness, devoted all his strength to the implementation of social justice. His method seems inappropriate to me. But one thing is certain: people like him preserve and renew the conscience of humanity.”.
• On January 19, 1919, the car in which Lenin and his sister were was attacked by a group of bandits led by the famous Moscow raider Yakov Koshelkov. The bandits got everyone out of the car and stole it. Subsequently, having learned who was in their hands, they tried to return and take Lenin hostage, but by that time the latter had already disappeared.

In the biography of Lenin by Vladimir Ilyich this time occupied a special place: at first the boy received a home education - the family spoke several languages ​​and attached great importance to discipline, which was monitored mother . The Ulyanovs lived in Simbirsk at that time, so he subsequently studied at the local gymnasium, where he entered in 1879 and whose director was the father of the future head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, F.M. Kerensky. In 1887, Lenin graduated from the educational institution with honors and continued his studies at the University of Kazan. It was there that his passion for Marxism began, which led to joining a circle where the works of not only K. Marx and F. Engels, but also G. Plekhanov, who had a great influence on the young man, were discussed. A little later, this became the reason for his expulsion from the university. Subsequently, Lenin passed the law exams as an external student.

The beginning of the revolutionary path

Having left his native Simbirsk, where he lived parents , he studied political economy and was interested in social democracy. This period was also distinguished by the future leader’s trips to Europe, upon his return from which he founded the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.”

For this, the revolutionary was arrested and exiled to the Yenisei province, where he not only wrote most of his works, but also established a personal life with N. Krupskaya.

In 1900, his period of exile ended, and Lenin settled in Pskov, where Vladimir Ilyich published the Zarya magazine and the Iskra newspaper. In addition to him, S. I. Radchenko, as well as P. B. Struve and M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky were involved in the publication.

Years of the first emigration

There are many things connected with Lenin’s life during this period. interesting facts . In July of the same year, Vladimir Ulyanov left for Munich, where Iskra settled for two years, then moved first to London, where the first congress of the RSDLP was held, and then to Geneva.

Between 1905 and 1907 Lenin lived in Switzerland. After the failure of the first Russian revolution and the arrest of its instigators, he became the leader of the party.

Active political activity

Despite the constant moving, the decade from the first to the second revolution was very fruitful for V.I. Lenin: he published the newspaper “Pravda”, worked on his journalism and preparation for the February uprising, and after the October revolution, which ended in victory. Full the biography says that during these years his comrades-in-arms were Zinoviev and Kamenev, and then he first met I. Stalin.

The last years of life and the cult of personality

At the Congress of Soviets he headed a new government, called the Council of People's Commissars (SNK).

Brief biography of Lenin says that it was he who negotiated peace with Germany and softened domestic policy, creating conditions for private trade - since the state was not able to provide for citizens, it gave them the opportunity to feed themselves. Under his leadership, the Red Army was founded, and in 1922, a whole new state on the world map, called the USSR. It was also Lenin who introduced the initiative for widespread electrification and insisted on a legislative settlement of terror.

In the same year, the health of the leader of the proletariat deteriorated sharply. After a two-year illness, he died on January 21, 1924.

Lenin's death gave rise to a phenomenon that later became known as the cult of personality. The leader's body was embalmed and placed in the Mausoleum, monuments were erected throughout the country and numerous infrastructure facilities were renamed. Subsequently, many books and films were dedicated to the life of Vladimir Lenin for children and adults who painted him exclusively in a positive way. After the collapse of the USSR, controversial issues began to arise in the biography of the great politician, in particular, about his nationality.

Other biography options

The figure of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin has attracted the close attention of historians and politicians around the world for almost centuries. One of the most taboo topics in “Leninianism” in the USSR is the origin of Lenin, his genealogy. This same topic was subject to the greatest speculation on the part of geopolitical opponents of the state, whose founder and “banner” was V.I. Lenin.

Secrets of Lenin's biography

How did the children of serfs become hereditary nobles, why did the Soviet government classify information about the leader's maternal ancestors, and how did Vladimir Ulyanov turn into Nikolai Lenin in the early 1900s?
Ulyanov family. From left to right: standing – Olga, Alexander, Anna; sitting - Maria Alexandrovna with her youngest daughter Maria, Dmitry, Ilya Nikolaevich, Vladimir. Simbirsk 1879 Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

Biographical chronicle of V.I. Lenin" begins with the entry: "April, 10 (22). Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was born. Vladimir Ilyich’s father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, was at that time an inspector and then the director of public schools in the Simbirsk province. He came from poor townspeople of the city of Astrakhan. His father was previously a serf. Lenin's mother Maria Alexandrovna was the daughter of the doctor A.D. Blanca."

It is curious that Lenin himself did not know many details of his ancestry. In their family, as in the families of other commoners, it was somehow not customary to delve into their “genealogical roots.” It was only later, after the death of Vladimir Ilyich, when interest in this kind of problems began to grow, that his sisters took up this research. Therefore, when Lenin received a detailed party census questionnaire in 1922, when asked about the occupation of his paternal grandfather, he sincerely answered: “I don’t know.”

GRANDSON OF A SERF

Meanwhile, Lenin’s paternal grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were indeed serfs. Great-great-grandfather - Nikita Grigorievich Ulyanin - was born in 1711. According to the revision tale of 1782, he and the family of his youngest son Feofan were recorded as a servant of the landowner of the village of Androsova, Sergach district, Nizhny Novgorod governorship, Marfa Semyonovna Myakinina.

According to the same revision, his eldest son Vasily Nikitich Ulyanin, born in 1733, with his wife Anna Semionovna and children Samoila, Porfiry and Nikolai lived in the same place, but were considered servants of the cornet Stepan Mikhailovich Brekhov. According to the revision of 1795, Lenin’s grandfather Nikolai Vasilyevich, 25 years old, single, lived with his mother and brothers in the same village, but they were already listed as servants of ensign Mikhail Stepanovich Brekhov.

Of course, he was listed, but he was no longer in the village then...

The Astrakhan archive contains the document “Lists of registered landowner peasants expected to be counted as refugees from different provinces,” where under number 223 it is written: “Nikolai Vasilyev, son of Ulyanin... Nizhny Novgorod province, Sergach district, village of Androsov, landowner Stepan Mikhailovich Brekhov, peasant. He left in 1791." It is not known for sure whether he was a runaway or released on quitrent and bought out, but in 1799 in Astrakhan Nikolai Vasilyevich was transferred to the category of state peasants, and in 1808 he was accepted into the petty bourgeois class, into the workshop of artisan tailors.

Having gotten rid of serfdom and becoming a free man, Nikolai Vasilyevich changed his surname Ulyanin to Ulyaninov, and then Ulyanov. Soon he married the daughter of the Astrakhan tradesman Alexei Lukyanovich Smirnov - Anna, who was born in 1788 and was 18 years younger than her husband.

Based on some archival documents, the writer Marietta Shaginyan put forward a version according to which Anna Alekseevna is not Smirnov’s own daughter, but a baptized Kalmyk woman, rescued by him from slavery and allegedly adopted only in March 1825.

There is no indisputable evidence for this version, especially since already in 1812 she and Nikolai Ulyanov had a son, Alexander, who died four months old; in 1819, a son, Vasily, was born; in 1821, a daughter, Maria; in 1823 - Feodosiya and, finally, in July 1831, when the head of the family was already over 60, son Ilya - the father of the future leader of the world proletariat.

FATHER'S TEACHING CAREER

After the death of Nikolai Vasilyevich, concerns about the family and raising children fell on the shoulders of his eldest son, Vasily Nikolaevich. Working at that time as a clerk at the famous Astrakhan company “Brothers Sapozhnikov” and not having his own family, he managed to ensure prosperity in the house and even gave his younger brother Ilya an education.

ILYA NIKOLAEVICH ULYANOV GRADUATED PHYSICS AND MATHEMATICS FACULTY OF KAZAN UNIVERSITY.
HE WAS SUGGESTED TO STAY AT THE DEPARTMENT TO “IMPROVE IN SCIENTIFIC WORK” – THIS WAS INSISTED BY THE FAMOUS MATHEMATICIST NIKOLAY IVANOVICH LOBACHEVSKY

In 1850, Ilya Nikolaevich graduated from the Astrakhan gymnasium with a silver medal and entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Kazan University, where he completed his studies in 1854, receiving the title of Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the right to teach in secondary educational institutions. And although he was invited to remain at the department for “improvement in scientific work” (the famous mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky insisted on this, by the way), Ilya Nikolaevich chose a career as a teacher.

Monument to Lobachevsky in Kazan. Beginning of the 20th century. Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

His first place of work - from May 7, 1855 - was the Noble Institute in Penza. In July 1860, Ivan Dmitrievich Veretennikov came here to the position of inspector of the institute. Ilya Nikolaevich became friends with him and his wife, and in the same year Anna Aleksandrovna Veretennikova (née Blank) introduced him to her sister Maria Alexandrovna Blank, who came to visit her for the winter. Ilya Nikolaevich began to help Maria prepare for the exam for the title of teacher, and she helped him with conversational English. The young people fell in love with each other, and in the spring of 1863 an engagement took place.

On July 15 of the same year, after successfully passing external exams at the Samara Men's Gymnasium, “the daughter of the court councilor, Maiden Maria Blank,” received the title of primary school teacher “with the right to teach the Law of God, the Russian language, arithmetic, German and French.” And in August they already had a wedding, and the “maiden Maria Blank” became the wife of the court councilor Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov - this rank was also granted to him in July 1863.

Panorama of Simbirsk from the Moscow highway. 1866–1867. Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

The genealogy of the Blank family began to be studied by Lenin’s sisters, Anna and Maria. Anna Ilyinichna said: “The elders could not find out this for us. The surname seemed to us to be of French origin, but there was no information about such an origin. I personally began to think about the possibility of Jewish origin quite a long time ago, which was prompted mainly by my mother’s message that my grandfather was born in Zhitomir, a famous Jewish center. Grandmother - mother's mother - was born in St. Petersburg and was of German origin from Riga. But while my mother and her sisters maintained contact with their maternal relatives for quite a long time, about her father’s relatives, A.D. Blank, no one heard. He looked like a cut piece, which also made me think about his Jewish origin. His daughters did not remember any of the grandfather’s stories about his childhood or youth.”

Anna Ilyinichna Ulyanova reported the results of the search, which confirmed her assumption, to Joseph Stalin in 1932 and 1934. “The fact of our origin, which I had assumed before,” she wrote, “was not known during his [Lenin’s] lifetime... I don’t know what motives we communists might have for silencing this fact.”

“To remain absolutely silent about him” was Stalin’s categorical answer. And Lenin’s second sister, Maria Ilyinichna, also believed that this fact “let it be known someday in a hundred years.”

Lenin's great-grandfather, Moshe Itskovich Blank, was apparently born in 1763. The first mention of him is contained in the revision of 1795, where among the townspeople of the city of Starokonstantinov, Volyn province, Moishka Blank is recorded under number 394. Where he came from in these places is unclear. However…
Some time ago, the famous bibliographer Maya Dvorkina introduced an interesting fact into scientific circulation. Somewhere in the mid-1920s, archivist Yulian Grigoryevich Oksman, who was studying the genealogy of the leader of the world proletariat on the instructions of the director of the Lenin Library Vladimir Ivanovich Nevsky, discovered a petition from one of the Jewish communities of the Minsk province, supposedly dating back to the beginning of the 19th century, for the exemption from taxes of a certain boy , because he is “the illegitimate son of a major Minsk official,” and therefore, they say, the community should not pay for him. The boy's last name was Blank.

According to Oksman, Nevsky took him to Lev Kamenev, and then the three of them went to Nikolai Bukharin. Showing the document, Kamenev muttered: “I always thought so.” To which Bukharin replied: “What do you think – it doesn’t matter, but what are we going to do?” Oksman was made to promise that he would not tell anyone about the find. And since then no one has seen this document.

One way or another, Moshe Blank appeared in Starokonstantinov, already an adult, and in 1793 he married a local 29-year-old girl, Maryam (Marem) Froimovich. From subsequent audits it follows that he read both Hebrew and Russian, had his own house, was engaged in trade, and in addition, near the town of Rogachevo, he rented 5 morgues (about 3 hectares) of land, which were sown with chicory.

In 1794, his son Aba (Abel) was born, and in 1799, his son Srul (Israel). Moshe Itzkovich probably did not have a good relationship with the local Jewish community from the very beginning. He was “a man who did not want, or perhaps did not know how, to find a common language with his fellow tribesmen.” In other words, the community simply hated him. And after Blank’s house burned down in 1808 due to fire, and possibly arson, the family moved to Zhitomir.

LETTER TO THE EMPEROR

Many years later, in September 1846, Moshe Blank wrote a letter to Emperor Nicholas I, from which it is clear that already “40 years ago” he “renounced the Jews,” but because of his “overly pious wife,” who died in 1834 , converted to Christianity and received the name Dmitry only on January 1, 1835.

But the reason for the letter was something else: while maintaining hostility towards his fellow tribesmen, Dmitry (Moshe) Blank proposed - in order to assimilate the Jews - to prohibit them from wearing national clothes, and most importantly, to oblige them to pray in synagogues for the Russian emperor and the imperial family.

It is curious that in October of that year the letter was reported to Nicholas I and he fully agreed with the proposals of the “baptized Jew Blanc”, as a result of which in 1850 Jews were banned from wearing national clothing, and in 1854 the corresponding text of the prayer was introduced. Researcher Mikhail Stein, who collected and carefully analyzed the most complete data on Blank’s genealogy, rightly noted that in terms of hostility towards his people, Moshe Itskovich “can be compared, perhaps, only with another baptized Jew - one of the founders and leaders of the Moscow Union of Russian People V.A. . Greenmouth"...

Alexander Dmitrievich Blank (1799–1870). Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

The fact that Blank decided to break with the Jewish community long before his baptism was also evidenced by other things. Both of his sons, Abel and Israel, like their father, also knew how to read Russian, and when a district (povet) school opened in Zhitomir in 1816, they were enrolled there and successfully graduated. From the point of view of Jewish believers, this was blasphemy. And yet, belonging to the Jewish religion doomed them to vegetate within the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement. And only an event that happened in the spring of 1820 radically changed the fate of young people...

In April, a “high rank” – the head of affairs of the so-called Jewish Committee, senator and poet Dmitry Osipovich Baranov – arrived in Zhitomir on a business trip. Somehow, Blank managed to meet him, and he asked the senator to assist his sons in entering the Medical-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg. Baranov did not at all sympathize with Jews, but the rather rare conversion of two “lost souls” to Christianity at that time, in his opinion, was a good thing, and he agreed.

The brothers immediately went to the capital and submitted a petition addressed to Metropolitan Michael of Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Estonia and Finland. “Having now settled in St. Petersburg,” they wrote, “and having always been treated with Christians professing the Greek-Russian religion, we now wish to accept it.”

The petition was granted, and already on May 25, 1820, the priest of the Church of St. Sampson the Stranger in St. Petersburg, Fyodor Barsov, “enlightened both brothers with baptism.” Abel became Dmitry Dmitrievich, and Israel became Alexander Dmitrievich. The youngest son of Moshe Blank received a new name in honor of his successor (godfather), Count Alexander Ivanovich Apraksin, and a patronymic in honor of Abel’s successor, Senator Dmitry Osipovich Baranov. And on July 31 of the same year, at the direction of the Minister of Education, Prince Alexander Nikolaevich Golitsyn, the brothers were identified as “pupils of the Medical-Surgical Academy,” which they graduated in 1824, receiving the academic title of doctors of the 2nd department and a gift in the form of a pocket set of surgical tools.

MARRIAGE OF THE STAFF DOCTOR

Dmitry Blank remained in the capital as a police doctor, and Alexander in August 1824 began serving in the city of Porechye, Smolensk province, as a district doctor. True, already in October 1825 he returned to St. Petersburg and, like his brother, was enrolled as a doctor in the city police staff. In 1828 he was promoted to staff physician. It was time to think about marriage...

His godfather, Count Alexander Apraksin, was at that time an official of special assignments at the Ministry of Finance. So Alexander Dmitrievich, despite his origin, could well count on a decent match. Apparently, at another of his benefactors, Senator Dmitry Baranov, who was fond of poetry and chess, with whom Alexander Pushkin visited and almost the entire “enlightened Petersburg” gathered, the younger Blank met the Groschopf brothers and was received in their house.

Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831–1886) and Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (1835–1916)

The head of this very respectable family, Ivan Fedorovich (Johann Gottlieb) Groshopf, was from the Baltic Germans, was a consul of the State College of Justice for Livonian, Estonian and Finnish affairs and rose to the rank of provincial secretary. His wife Anna Karlovna, née Östedt, was Swedish and Lutheran. There were eight children in the family: three sons - Johann, who served in the Russian army, Karl, vice-director in the foreign trade department of the Ministry of Finance, and Gustav, who was in charge of the Riga customs, and five daughters - Alexandra, Anna, Ekaterina (married von Essen) , Caroline (married Bouberg) and the younger Amalia. Having met this family, the staff doctor proposed to Anna Ivanovna.

MASHENKA FORM

Things went well for Alexander Dmitrievich at first. As a police doctor, he received 1 thousand rubles a year. He has received thanks more than once for his “quickness and diligence.”

But in June 1831, during the cholera riots in the capital, his brother Dmitry, who was on duty at the central cholera hospital, was brutally killed by a rioting crowd. This death shocked Alexander Blank so much that he resigned from the police and did not work for more than a year. Only in April 1833 did he re-enter service - as a resident at the City Hospital of St. Mary Magdalene for the poor from the districts beyond the river in St. Petersburg. By the way, it was here that Taras Shevchenko was treated by him in 1838. At the same time (from May 1833 to April 1837) Blank worked in the Maritime Department. In 1837, after passing the exams, he was recognized as an inspector of the medical board, and in 1838 - a medical surgeon.

IN 1874, ILYA NIKOLAEVICH ULYANOV RECEIVED THE POST OF DIRECTOR OF PEOPLE'S SCHOOL OF THE SIMBIRSK PROVINCE.
AND IN 1877, HE WAS AWARDED THE RANK OF ACTIVE STATE COUNSELOR, EQUAL IN THE TABLE OF RANKS TO THE RANK OF GENERAL AND GIVING THE RIGHT TO HEREDITARY NOBILITY

Alexander Dmitrievich’s private practice also expanded. Among his patients were representatives of the highest nobility. This allowed him to move to a decent apartment in a wing of one of the luxurious mansions on the Promenade des Anglais, which belonged to the emperor’s physician and the president of the Medical-Surgical Academy, baronet Yakov Vasilyevich Willie. Here in 1835 Maria Blank was born. Mashenka’s godfather was their neighbor, formerly the adjutant of Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, and since 1833, the horsemaster of the Imperial Court, Ivan Dmitrievich Chertkov.

In 1840, Anna Ivanovna became seriously ill, died and was buried in St. Petersburg at the Smolensk Evangelical Cemetery. Then her sister Catherine von Essen, who was widowed that same year, took full care of the children. Alexander Dmitrievich, apparently, had sympathized with her before. It is no coincidence that he named his daughter, born in 1833, Ekaterina. After the death of Anna Ivanovna, they become even closer, and in April 1841, Blank decides to enter into a legal marriage with Ekaterina Ivanovna. However, the law did not allow such marriages - with the daughters' godmother and the deceased wife's own sister. And Catherine von Essen becomes his common-law wife.

In the same April, they all left the capital and moved to Perm, where Alexander Dmitrievich received the position of inspector of the Perm Medical Council and doctor of the Perm Gymnasium. Thanks to the latter circumstance, Blank met the Latin teacher Ivan Dmitrievich Veretennikov, who became the husband of his eldest daughter Anna in 1850, and the mathematics teacher Andrei Aleksandrovich Zalezhsky, who married another daughter, Ekaterina.

Alexander Blank entered the history of Russian medicine as one of the pioneers of balneology - treatment with mineral waters. Having retired at the end of 1847 from the post of doctor at the Zlatoust arms factory, he left for the Kazan province, where in 1848 the Kokushkino estate with 462 acres (503.6 hectares) of land, a water mill and 39 serfs was purchased in Laishevsky district. On August 4, 1859, the Senate confirmed Alexander Dmitrievich Blank and his children in the hereditary nobility, and they were included in the book of the Kazan Noble Deputy Assembly.

THE ULYANOV FAMILY

This is how Maria Alexandrovna Blank ended up in Kazan, and then in Penza, where she met Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov...

Their wedding on August 25, 1863, like the weddings of the other Blank sisters before that, took place in Kokushkino. On September 22, the newlyweds left for Nizhny Novgorod, where Ilya Nikolaevich was appointed to the position of senior teacher of mathematics and physics at a men's gymnasium. On August 14, 1864, daughter Anna was born. A year and a half later - on March 31, 1866 - son Alexander... But soon there was a sad loss: daughter Olga, who was born in 1868, did not live even a year, fell ill and died on July 18 in the same Kokushkino...

On September 6, 1869, Ilya Nikolaevich was appointed inspector of public schools in the Simbirsk province. The family moved to Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), which at that time was a quiet provincial town with just over 40 thousand inhabitants, of whom 57.5% were listed as bourgeois, 17% as military, 11% as peasants, 8.8% as nobles, 3.2% - merchants and honorary citizens, and 1.8% - people of clergy, persons of other classes and foreigners. Accordingly, the city was divided into three parts: noble, commercial and bourgeois. In the nobility's house there were kerosene lanterns and plank sidewalks, and in the bourgeois' house all sorts of livestock were kept in the courtyards, and these animals, contrary to prohibitions, walked the streets.
Here the Ulyanovs had a son, Vladimir, born on April 10 (22), 1870. On April 16, priest Vasily Umov and sexton Vladimir Znamensky baptized the newborn. The godfather was the manager of the specific office in Simbirsk, the actual state councilor Arseny Fedorovich Belokrysenko, and the godfather was the mother of Ilya Nikolaevich’s colleague, collegiate assessor Natalia Ivanovna Aunovskaya.

Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (sitting third from the right) among the teachers of the Simbirsk men's classical gymnasium. 1874 Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

The family continued to grow. On November 4, 1871, the fourth child was born - daughter Olga. Son Nikolai died without living even a month, and on August 4, 1874, son Dmitry was born, and daughter Maria was born on February 6, 1878. Six children.
On July 11, 1874, Ilya Nikolaevich received the position of director of public schools in the Simbirsk province. And in December 1877, he was awarded the rank of actual state councilor, equal in the table of ranks to the rank of general and giving the right to hereditary nobility.

The salary increase made it possible to realize a long-time dream. Having changed six rented apartments since 1870 and having saved the necessary funds, on August 2, 1878, the Ulyanovs finally bought their own house on Moskovskaya Street for 4 thousand silver - from the widow of the titular councilor Ekaterina Petrovna Molchanova. It was made of wood, one storey on the façade and with mezzanines under the roof on the courtyard side. And behind the yard, overgrown with grass and chamomile, lies a beautiful garden with silver poplars, thick elms, yellow acacia and lilacs along the fence...
Ilya Nikolaevich died in Simbirsk in January 1886, Maria Alexandrovna died in Petrograd in July 1916, outliving her husband by 30 years.

WHERE DID “LENIN” COME FROM?

The question of how and where Vladimir Ulyanov got the pseudonym Nikolai Lenin in the spring of 1901 has always aroused the interest of researchers; there have been many versions. Among them are toponymic: both the Lena River (analogy: Plekhanov - Volgin) and the village of Lenin near Berlin appear. During the formation of “Leninoism” as a profession, they were looking for “amorous” sources. Thus was born the assertion that the Kazan beauty Elena Lenina was allegedly to blame for everything, in another version - the chorus girl of the Mariinsky Theater Elena Zaretskaya, etc. But none of these versions withstood the most serious scrutiny.

However, back in the 1950s and 1960s, the Central Party Archive received letters from relatives of a certain Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin, which outlined a fairly convincing everyday story. Deputy head of the archive Rostislav Aleksandrovich Lavrov forwarded these letters to the CPSU Central Committee, and, naturally, they did not become available to a wide range of researchers.

Meanwhile, the Lenin family dates back to the Cossack Posnik, who in the 17th century, for his services associated with the conquest of Siberia and the creation of winter quarters on the Lena River, was granted nobility, the surname Lenin and an estate in the Vologda province. His numerous descendants distinguished themselves more than once in both military and official service. One of them, Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin, fell ill and retired, having risen to the rank of state councilor, in the 80s of the 19th century and settled in the Yaroslavl province.

Volodya Ulyanov with his sister Olga. Simbirsk 1874 Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

His daughter Olga Nikolaevna, having graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of the Bestuzhev Courses in 1883, went to work at the Smolensk Evening Workers' School in St. Petersburg, where she met Nadezhda Krupskaya. And when there was a fear that the authorities might refuse to issue Vladimir Ulyanov a foreign passport, and friends began to look for smuggling options for crossing the border, Krupskaya turned to Lenina for help. Olga Nikolaevna then conveyed this request to her brother, a prominent official of the Ministry of Agriculture, agronomist Sergei Nikolaevich Lenin. In addition, a similar request apparently came to him from his friend, statistician Alexander Dmitrievich Tsyurupa, who in 1900 met the future leader of the proletariat.

Sergei Nikolaevich himself knew Vladimir Ilyich - from meetings in the Free Economic Society in 1895, as well as from his works. In turn, Ulyanov knew Lenin: for example, he refers three times to his articles in the monograph “The Development of Capitalism in Russia.” After consulting, the brother and sister decided to give Ulyanov the passport of their father, Nikolai Yegorovich, who by that time was already very ill (he died on April 6, 1902).

According to family legend, in 1900 Sergei Nikolaevich went to Pskov on official business. There, on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture, he received Sack plows and other agricultural machines arriving in Russia from Germany. In one of the Pskov hotels, Lenin handed over his father’s passport with the altered date of birth to Vladimir Ilyich, who was then living in Pskov. This is probably how the origin of Ulyanov’s main pseudonym, N. Lenin, is explained.