How old was Lenin when the revolution took place? Who is Lenin? Further development of revolutionary political activity

"Who is Lenin?" - the younger generation is asking this offensive question more and more often. Returning social injustice seems to be the norm. But those who lived by the tenets of Lenin’s teachings know that this is not the norm at all. In any case, his works are still accessible and even very topical. In addition, it is simply necessary to know the history of your country. And about who Lenin is, too. The country lived for seventy years according to his teachings - this is quite a large part of the life of the state. With great victories. With faith in tomorrow. Let's hope that Vladimir Lenin is alive.

Childhood

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was the fourth child in the family of the director of public schools in the city of Simbirsk, Ilya Nikolaevich, who was extremely friendly, because the mother devoted herself entirely to the children. An extremely gifted pianist, excellently read, she had a lot to pass on to her children. And she herself is the best example before their eyes: she never raises her voice, is strict, but at the same time has the kindest soul, a woman who is fair, but knows how to understand her child and really delve deeply into the situation. All five of Lenin's brothers and sisters became revolutionaries. The eldest, Alexander, was executed for the assassination attempt on the Tsar. Vladimir Ilyich always studied excellently. He graduated from Simbirsk gymnasium with a gold medal and entered Kazan University. For active participation in student unrest, he was expelled and exiled to the village of Kokushkino.

Revolutionary

In 1888, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin became a professional revolutionary. The study of Marx's "Capital" and the works of Engels, Plekhanov, Kautsky helped him in four years to comprehend all the heights and depths of political economy and philosophy. He carefully studied the economic conditions in Russia and the position of the proletariat and peasantry. At the same time, Vladimir Ilyich was preparing to take external exams at St. Petersburg University and passed them brilliantly, receiving a diploma as an assistant sworn attorney. True, he was almost not involved in legal practice, since other goals and objectives determined all his aspirations. Even then, being very young, he surprised his comrades with the versatility and quality of his knowledge and the intransigence of his convictions.

Who is Lenin

Even his first philosophical works were brilliant. In 1894, a work was published entitled “What are Friends of the People...”, where the entire path of the working class through the revolution to freedom and prosperity against tsarism and capitalism and for socialism was already clearly traced. Lenin continued the work of Marx and Engels, independently developing and developing their teaching. In 1897 he was sent into exile in Shushenskoye ( Krasnoyarsk region). Here he worked hard on his books (including “The Development of Capitalism in Russia”). Changes also came in his personal life: he married whom all his life she had been his first and most reliable assistant in all revolutionary affairs. At the same time, in Shushenskoye, Lenin came up with a means to unite all the progressive forces of the country. This medium later turned out to be the newspaper Iskra.

Party leader

In 1903, Lenin promoted the speedy convening of the second congress of the Social Democratic Labor Party. By this time, the Social Democrats no longer had any questions about who Lenin was. His works were not only studied everywhere, but also found their supporters and opponents. There, in London, the split in the party into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, which he had discovered back in Shushenskoye, was revealed. This is how Bolshevism took shape as an independent political movement. In all subsequent years, Lenin worked tirelessly, living semi-legally, either at home or abroad. He devoted most of his time to studying labor reform, published the newspaper “New Time,” and conducted revolutionary educational work. was brutally suppressed. Vladimir Ilyich revealed all the objective and subjective reasons failures. The following years, especially from 1908 to 1911, were very difficult.

Scientist-innovator

In 1911, a party school for workers began its work, where Lenin gave lectures on the theory and practice of party politics. After the conference, the newspaper Pravda appeared in St. Petersburg. That’s when the broadest sections of the Russian population learned about who Lenin was, what he was calling for, and how he would lead the working class to the victory of the revolution. Lenin directed the publication from abroad, wrote materials for it every day, which helped attract most conscious workers. The First World War was not greeted with enthusiasm by the people. And Lenin called on the warring parties to turn their weapons against bloody tsarism and capitalism. In 1915, he substantiated the possibility of the victory of socialism in a single country. The February bourgeois year called Lenin from abroad to Petrograd. He edited Pravda, explaining Bolshevik slogans and calls for a revolution that would be many times stronger than the February one. In addition, he conducted classes and gave speeches in soldiers' barracks and in work shops. The number of supporters of the revolution grew rapidly. An order was issued for Lenin's arrest. Work continued underground.

Organization of the revolution

October 25, 1917 it happened! Lenin's contribution to the revolution is truly enormous. The doctrine he created about the party as the leader of the proletariat in the struggle for its dictatorship appeared for the bourgeoisie and all its manifestations. In addition, Lenin became the founder and leader of a new philosophical movement of the Marxist persuasion. The volume of works he wrote is enormous: fifty-five volumes of scholarly texts. And the value of what is contained in them is immeasurable.

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, founder of the theory of Marxism-Leninism and the creator and main ideologist of the Third International (a union of communist parties from 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 others public figures, he organizes the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class” in St. Petersburg and begins 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 peasants and workers (the working class becomes the main one in the new political system 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 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. Simbirsk province Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831-1886), - son of a former serf peasant Nizhny Novgorod province Nikolai Ulyanov (variant spelling of the surname: 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, since he advised him to enter the history and literature department of the university due to great success junior Ulyanov 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 cousin Lenin, 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 dessiatines) in the Samara province. IN Soviet time In this village, a house-museum of Lenin was created.

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 democratic republic, the destruction of the remnants of serfdom in the countryside, in particular the return to the peasants of the lands cut off from them by the landowners during the abolition of serfdom (the so-called “cuts”), the introduction of an eight-hour working day, the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination and the establishment of equality of nations; the maximum program determined final goal 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, paragraph 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 they did not dare because they split the editorial board 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 combat 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, he even went to obvious contradiction with the scientific teachings of Marx for the sake of promoting the terrorist activities of their supporters, arguing that militant groups should use every opportunity for active work, without delaying 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 effective and often used in different levels revolutionary hierarchy tool.

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 “exams”) 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 time historical moment terrorist acts 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

Big number terrorists remained in Russia after the Bolsheviks came to power and participated in Lenin's policy"Red Terror". 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. The revolution that soon took place, Lenin, who knew the weakness of the underground revolutionary forces in the capital, regarded 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. Opened on January 5, 1918 constituent Assembly, 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 former building Senate.

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. 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 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 Council, in order to disrupt Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Soviet Russia and the Kaiser's 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 official version- Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan, which led to serious 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 Civil War in Russia, 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 are being registered for 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 foreign policy Lenin 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)

Economic and political situation demanded that the Bolsheviks change their previous policy. 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 a world war proletarian revolution While keeping all large-scale industry in the hands of the state, it is necessary to gradually carry out the construction of 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 composed a secret letter that qualified the events in Shuya as just one of the manifestations general plan 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. Leaders were called in for treatment. German specialists By nervous diseases. Lenin's chief physician from December 1922 until his death in 1924 was Otfried Förster. Last thing public speaking Lenin 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 material goods, allowing 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 to vote in parliament against war loans to the government, to create and strengthen revolutionary organizations among workers and soldiers, the fight against government patriotic propaganda, support for 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 what is moral that meets the interests of the proletariat (“Our morality is completely subordinated to the interests class struggle 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 breakup Soviet Union in 1991, some political parties expressed the opinion about the need 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 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 means mass 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 educational institutions, assembly halls 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).

Others state awards Lenin did not have both the RSFSR and the USSR, and foreign states.

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. Nobel Committee rejected this proposal due to the lateness of the petition 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 country (as is known, 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 Egorovich Lenin, having risen to the rank of state councilor, retired in the 80s years XIX century he 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.

By family version The Ulyanov pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyich 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 (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 (his daughter) younger brother Olga Dmitrievna Ulyanova), the last direct descendant of the Ulyanov family, died in Moscow at the age of 90.

• During famous speech At the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin did not have a beard (conspiracy), although Vladimir Serov’s 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.

Lenin Vladimir Ilyich (1870-1924), revolutionary, political figure Soviet Russia, leader of the Bolshevik revolution, head of the Soviet government (1917-1924). Real name- Ulyanov. Born April 10 (22), 1870 in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). Father, Ilya Nikolaevich, worked his way up from a high school teacher to the director of public schools in the Samara province, and received the title of nobility (died in 1886). Mother, Maria Alexandrovna Blank, the daughter of a doctor, received only home education, but could speak several foreign languages, played the piano, and read a lot. Vladimir was the third of six children. There was a friendly atmosphere in the family; parents encouraged their children's curiosity and treated them with respect.

Probably already in school years Vladimir Ulyanov began to form his first, still vague ideas about the injustice of the social system. In any case, already in one of his school essays he mentioned the “oppressed classes.” His older brother, Alexander, participated in the populist movement; in May 1887 he was executed for preparing an assassination attempt on the Tsar. The death of his brother shocked Vladimir, and from then on he became an enemy of the regime. At Kazan University, where he entered the Faculty of Law in 1887, he joined a student revolutionary circle, took part in student meetings and was detained by the police. In December of the same year, the authorities expelled him from the university and exiled him under police supervision to his mother's estate, where he continued his self-education. In the fall of 1888, he had the opportunity to return to Kazan, became acquainted with the works of K. Marx and joined the Marxist circle. The passion for populism and admiration for the “Narodnaya Volya” was over, and from now on Ulyanov became a staunch supporter of Marxism.

The capitalists are ready to sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

Lenin Vladimir Ilyich

In subsequent years, he lived in Samara under police supervision, earned money by giving private lessons, and in 1891 managed to pass the exam as an external student. state exams for a full course at the Faculty of Law of St. Petersburg University. In 1892-1893 he worked as an assistant to a sworn attorney in Samara, where he simultaneously created a Marxist circle and translated the Manifesto Communist Party Karl Marx and began to write himself, polemicizing with the populists.

Having moved to St. Petersburg in August 1893, he worked as a lawyer and gradually became one of the leaders of St. Petersburg Marxists. Sent abroad, he met the recognized leader of Russian Marxists, Georgy Plekhanov. After returning to Russia, Ulyanov in 1895 united the St. Petersburg Marxist circles into a single “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.” In December of the same year, he was arrested by the police. Spent more than a year in prison and was exiled for three years Eastern Siberia under public police supervision. There, in the village of Shushenskoye, in July 1898, he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom he knew from the St. Petersburg revolutionary underground.

While in exile, he continued his theoretical and organizational work. revolutionary activity. In 1897 he published the work The Development of Capitalism in Russia, where he tried to challenge the views of the populists on socio-economic relations in the country and thereby prove that a bourgeois revolution was brewing in Russia. He became acquainted with the works of the leading theorist of German Social Democracy, Karl Kautsky, and they made a great impression on him. From Kautsky he borrowed the idea of ​​organizing the Russian Marxist movement in the form of a centralized party of a “new type”, introducing consciousness into the “dark” and “immature” working masses. Polemics with those Social Democrats who, from his point of view, underestimated the role of the party, became a constant theme in Ulyanov's articles. He also waged a harsh polemic with the “economists,” a movement that argued that the Social Democrats should place the main emphasis on economic rather than political struggle.

After the end of his exile, he went abroad in January 1900 (for the next five years he lived in Munich, London and Geneva). There, together with Plekhanov, his associates Vera Zasulich and Pavel Axelrod, as well as his friend Yuliy Martov, Ulyanov began publishing social media. democratic newspaper Iskra. From 1901 he began to use the pseudonym "Lenin" and from then on was known in the party under this name. In 1902 he outlined his organizational views in the pamphlet What to Do? He proposed to rebuild the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), formed in 1898, according to the type of a besieged fortress, turning it into a rigid and centralized organization led by professional revolutionaries - leaders, whose decisions would be binding on ordinary members. This approach was opposed by a significant number of party activists, including Yuli Martov. At the second congress of the RSDLP in Brussels and London in 1903, the party split into two movements: the “Bolsheviks” (supporters of Lenin’s organizational principles) and the “Mensheviks” (their opponents). Lenin became the recognized leader of the Bolshevik faction of the party.

During the Russian Revolution of 1905-1907, Lenin managed to return to Russia for some time. He oriented his supporters toward active participation in the bourgeois-democratic revolution in order to try to win hegemony in it and achieve the establishment of a “revolutionary-democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and peasantry.” On this issue, covered in detail in Lenin's work Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, he sharply disagreed with for the most part the Mensheviks, who oriented toward an alliance under the leadership of bourgeois-liberal circles.

The defeat of the revolution forced Lenin to emigrate again. From abroad, he continued to lead the activities of the Bolshevik movement, insisting on combining illegal activities with legal ones, participating in elections to the State Duma and in the work of this body. On this basis, Lenin broke with the group of Bolsheviks led by Alexander Bogdanov, which called for a boycott of the Duma. Against his new opponents, Lenin released the polemical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909), accusing them of revising Marxist philosophy. In the early 1910s, disagreements within the RSDLP became extremely acute. In contrast to the “otzovists” (supporters of the boycott of the Duma), the Mensheviks - “liquidators” (adherents of legal work) and Leon Trotsky’s group, which advocated maintaining the unity of party ranks, Lenin forced the transformation of his movement in 1912 into an independent political party, the RSDLP (b), with its own printed organ - the newspaper Pravda.

Ideas become power when they take hold of the masses.

Lenin Vladimir Ilyich

(1870 - 1924)

Lenin's biography is very long, some things in it are subject to doubt, some events are probably still hidden.

The great leader and teacher of the working people of the whole world, the successor of the revolutionary teachings of K. Marx and F. Engels, the organizer of the CPSU and the founder of the Soviet state, was born on April 22 (according to the old style - April 10), 1870, in the city of Simbirsk, in the family of an inspector of public schools. The elder brother Alexander, a Narodnaya Volya member, was executed in 1887 after participating in the preparation of an assassination attempt on the Tsar. In the year of his brother’s death, Lenin graduated from high school and entered the law faculty of Kazan University. However, in December of the same year he was arrested for participating in the revolutionary movement of students, which was the reason for his expulsion and deportation to the village of Kokushkino, Kazan province.

In 1888 he returned to Kazan, where he joined a Marxist circle, and the following year he moved to Samara. In 1891, he passed the exams as an external student for the Faculty of Law at St. Petersburg University and began working as an assistant to a sworn attorney in Samara. In the book “What are “friends of the people” and how do they fight against the Social Democrats?” (1984), “The Development of Capitalism in Russia” (1899) Lenin completed the ideological defeat of populism.

The next part is better represented as short biography Lenin (Ulyanov) - at this time Vladimir Ilyich did a lot useful acquaintances and travel.
In April 1895, L. went abroad to establish contact with the Liberation of Labor group. In Switzerland he met Plekhanov, in Germany - with W. Liebknecht, in France - with P. Lafargue and other figures of the international labor movement. In September 1895, having returned from abroad, Lenin visited Vilnius, Moscow and Orekhovo-Zuevo, where he established connections with local Social Democrats. And already in the fall of 1895, on the initiative and under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich, the Marxist circles of St. Petersburg united into a single organization - the St. Petersburg “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class,” which was the beginning of a revolutionary proletarian party, for the first time in Russia began to combine scientific socialism with the mass labor movement.

On the night of December 8 (20) to December 9 (21) of the same year, Lenin, along with his comrades in the Union of Struggle, was arrested and imprisoned, from where he continued to lead the Union. However, Ulyanov’s activities did not subside even in prison - there he wrote “The Project and Explanation of the Program of the Social Democratic Party,” a number of articles and leaflets, and prepared materials for his book “The Development of Capitalism in Russia.” After 2 years, in February, Lenin was exiled for 3 years to the village. Shushenskoye, Minusinsk district, Yenisei province. For active revolutionary work, his future wife, N.K. Krupskaya, was also sentenced to exile. As L.'s bride, she was also sent to Shushenskoye, where she became his wife. While in exile, Vladimir Ilyich established and maintained contacts with the Social Democrats of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and other cities, with the Emancipation of Labor group, corresponded with the Social Democrats who were in exile in the North and Siberia, rallied surrounded by exiled Social Democrats of the Minusinsk district. In addition, he wrote over 30 works while in exile.

Lenin left Shushenskoye immediately after the end of his exile (January 29 (February 10), 1900) left Shushenskoye. He established connections with Social Democrats everywhere - in Ufa, Moscow, St. Petersburg (he visited it illegally), and in other cities. In 1900 he settled in Pskov, where he spent great job to organize the newspaper, he created strongholds for it in a number of cities. In July of the same year, Lenin went abroad, where he established the publication of the newspaper Iskra - he was its immediate leader. Iskra played an exceptional role in the ideological and organizational preparation of the revolutionary proletarian party. Subsequently, Lenin noted that “the entire flower of the conscious proletariat took the side of Iskra.” It was one of his articles published in Iskra that Ulyanov wrote under the “fatal” pseudonym - Lenin. This happened in December 1901.

For the next five years (1900 - 1905) Vladimir Ilyich lived in Munich, London, and Geneva.
In the struggle for the creation of a new type of party, Lenin’s work “What is to be done?” was of outstanding importance. Urgent issues of our movement" (1902), in which Lenin criticized "economism" and highlighted the main problems of building the party, its ideology and politics.

In 1903, the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP took place. At this congress, the process of unification of revolutionary Marxist organizations was completed and the party of the working class of Russia was formed on the ideological, political and organizational principles developed by Lenin. A new type of proletarian party, the Bolshevik Party, was created. After the congress, Ulyanov launched a struggle against Menshevism.

During the Revolution of 1905-1907, Lenin directed the work of the Bolshevik Party to lead the masses. Already on November 8 (21), 1905, he arrived in St. Petersburg, where he led the activities of the Central Committee and the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks, the preparation of an armed uprising, and also headed the work of the Bolshevik newspapers “Forward”, “Proletary”, “New Life”. In the summer of 1906, due to police persecution, Lenin moved to Kuokkala (Finland), and in December 1907 he was again forced to emigrate to Switzerland, and at the end of 1908 to Paris.

During the years of reaction 1908-1810, Lenin fought for the preservation of the illegal Bolshevik Party against the Menshevik liquidators, otzovists, and against the schismatic actions of the Trotskyists , against conciliation to opportunism ( detailed description these trends will not be given in the short biography of Lenin). He deeply analyzed the experience of the Revolution of 1905–07. At the same time, L. repulsed the onslaught of reaction against the ideological foundations of the party.
From the end of 1910 a new rise began in Russia revolutionary movement. In December 1910, on Lenin's initiative, new newspapers began to be published in St. Petersburg (Zvezda, Pravda). To train party workers, Lenin in 1911 organized a party school in Longjumeau (near Paris), in which he gave 29 lectures. In January 1912, the 6th (Prague) took place in Prague under the leadership of L. All-Russian Conference The RSDLP, which expelled the Menshevik liquidators from the RSDLP and determined the tasks of the party in an environment of revolutionary upsurge. To be closer to Russia, Lenin moved to Krakow in June 1912. From there he directs the work of the bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in Russia, the editorial office of the newspaper Pravda, and manages the activities of the Bolshevik faction of the 4th State Duma.
During the First World War (1914-1918), the Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin, raised high the banner of proletarian internationalism, exposed the social chauvinism of the leaders of the 2nd International, and put forward the slogan of transforming the imperialist war into a civil war.

On July 26 (August 8), 1914, Lenin, following a false denunciation, was arrested by the Austrian authorities and imprisoned in the city of New Targ. Thanks to the assistance of Polish and Austrian Social Democrats, he was soon released, after which he continued to remain abroad. Having received in Zurich on March 2 (15), 1917, the first reliable news about the February bourgeois-democratic revolution that had begun in Russia, Lenin defined new tasks for the proletariat and the Bolshevik Party. April 3(16), 1917 L. returned from emigration to Petrograd. Solemnly greeted by thousands of workers and soldiers, he made a short speech, ending with the words: “Long live the socialist revolution!” Under L.'s leadership, the party launched political and organizational work among the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers.

In July 1917, after the elimination of dual power and the concentration of power in the hands of the counter-revolution, the peaceful period of development of the revolution ended. On July 7 (20), the Provisional Government ordered the arrest of Lenin, and he was forced to go underground. Until August 8 (21), 1917, L. was hiding in a hut beyond the lake. Razliv, near Petrograd, then until the beginning of October - in Finland (Yalkala, Helsingfors, Vyborg). However, even underground, he continued to lead the activities of the party, publishing various brochures.
On the evening of October 24 (November 6), Lenin illegally arrived in Smolny to directly lead the armed uprising. At the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which opened on October 25 (November 7), which proclaimed the transfer of all power in the center and locally into the hands of the Soviets, he made reports on peace and land. The congress adopted Lenin's decrees on peace and land and formed a workers' and peasants' government - the Council of People's Commissars, headed by Lenin.

Victory of the Great October Revolution socialist revolution, won under the leadership of the Communist Party, opened a new era in the history of mankind - the era of transition from capitalism to socialism.

Lenin led the struggle of the Communist Party and the people of Russia to solve the problems of the dictatorship of the proletariat, to build socialism, under his leadership the party and government created a new, Soviet state machine. The confiscation of landowners' lands and the nationalization of all land, banks, transport, and large-scale industry were carried out, and a foreign trade monopoly was introduced. The Red Army was created. National oppression has been destroyed. The party attracted the broad masses of the people to the grandiose work of building the Soviet state and implementing fundamental socio-economic transformations. In December 1917 Lenin, in his article “How to organize a competition?” put forward the idea of ​​socialist competition of the masses as an effective method of building socialism.
From March 11, 1918, L. lived and worked in Moscow, after the Central Committee of the Party and the Soviet government moved here from Petrograd.

In May 1918, on the initiative and with the participation of Lenin, decrees on the food issue were developed and adopted. At L.'s suggestion, food detachments were created from workers, sent to the villages to rouse the poor to fight the kulaks, to fight for bread. The socialist measures of the Soviet government met fierce resistance from the overthrown exploiting classes. They launched an armed struggle against Soviet power and resorted to terror. On August 30, 1918, Lenin was seriously wounded by the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist F.E. Kaplan.

During the Civil War and military intervention 1918-20 Lenin was chairman of the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense, created on November 30, 1918 to mobilize all forces and resources to defeat the enemy. He put forward the slogan “Everything for the front!” At his suggestion, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee declared the Soviet Republic a military camp. Under the leadership of Lenin, the party and the Soviet government in a short time managed to rebuild the country's economy on a war footing, developed and implemented a system of emergency measures, called “war communism.”
After the victorious end of the Civil War, Lenin led the struggle of the party and all workers of the Soviet Republic for the restoration and further development of the economy, and led cultural construction.

At the end of 1920 - beginning of 1921, a discussion unfolded in the party about the role and tasks of trade unions, in which questions were actually resolved about methods of approaching the masses, about the role of the party, about the fate of the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism in Russia. Lenin spoke out against the erroneous platforms and factional activities of Trotsky, N.I. Bukharin, the “workers’ opposition”, and the group of “democratic centralism”. He pointed out that, being a school of communism in general, trade unions should be for workers, in particular, a school of economic management.

At the 10th Congress of the RCP (b) (1921), L. summed up the results of the trade union discussion in the party and put forward the task of transition from the policy of “war communism” to a new one economic policy(NEP). The congress approved the transition to the NEP, which ensured the strengthening of the alliance of the working class and the peasantry and the creation of the production base of a socialist society. Many economic issues were resolved, including the development of
principles of unification Soviet republics into one multinational state on the basis of voluntariness and equality - Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was created in December 1922.

In March 1922, L. led the work of the 11th Congress of the RCP (b) - the last party congress at which he spoke. Hard work and the consequences of being wounded in 1918 undermined Lenin’s health, and after 2 months he became seriously ill and returned to work only in early October. His last public appearance was on November 20, 1922 at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet. On December 16, 1922, Lenin’s health condition deteriorated sharply again. At the end of December 1922 - beginning of 1923, L. dictated letters on internal party and state issues: “Letter to the Congress”, “On giving legislative functions to the State Planning Committee”, “On the issue of nationalities or “autonomization”” and a number of articles - “Pages from the diary”, “On cooperation”, “On our revolution”, “ How can we reorganize the Rabkrin (Proposal to the XII Party Congress)”, “Less is better.” These letters and articles are rightly called political testament L. They were the final stage in Lenin’s development of a plan for building socialism in the USSR. In them, L. outlined in general form the program for the socialist transformation of the country and the prospects for the world revolutionary process, the foundations of the party’s policy, strategy and tactics.
In May 1923, Lenin moved to Gorki due to illness, and in January 1924 his condition worsened sharply, and on January 21, 1924 at 6 o’clock. 50 min. Lenin died in the evening. January 23 coffin with body former leader was transported to Moscow and installed in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions, where everyone who wanted to say goodbye to it could say goodbye. On January 27, a funeral took place on Red Square; the coffin with L.'s embalmed body was placed in a specially built Mausoleum.

This is where Lenin's biography ends. Of course, in our time the attitude towards Vladimir Ilyich is not clear, but there is no doubt that he was an unsurpassed philosopher. He developed all the components of Marxism - philosophy, political economy, scientific communism. Having summarized the achievements of science, especially physics, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the perspective of Marxist philosophy, Lenin further developed the doctrine of dialectical materialism. He deepened the concept of matter, defining it as an objective reality that exists outside of human consciousness, and developed the fundamental problems of the theory of man’s reflection of objective reality and the theory of knowledge. Lenin's great merit is the comprehensive development of materialist dialectics, especially the law of unity and struggle of opposites. L. made his greatest contribution to Marxist sociology. He specified, substantiated and developed the most important problems, categories and provisions of historical materialism about socio-economic formations, about the laws of development of societies.