Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia became a one-party socialist state; all land, natural resources, and industry were socialized into public property. Ideologically a Marxist, his political theories are known as Leninism.

Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin gained an interest in revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's execution in 1887. Expelled from Kazan State University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist regime, he devoted the following years to a law degree. In 1893 he moved to Saint Petersburg and became a senior figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, there he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent party theorist through his publications. In 1903, he took a key role in a RSDLP schism over ideological differences, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Encouraging insurrection during Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he later campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which as a Marxist he believed would result in the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to campaign for the new regime's removal by a Bolshevik-led government of the soviets.

Lenin played a leading role in the October Revolution of 1917, which overthrew the Provisional Government and established a Bolshevik administration, the Council of People's Commissars. Abolishing Russia's electedConstituent Assembly and suppressing both left and right-wing rivals, they established a one-party state under the new Russian Communist Party. This administration withdrew Russia from the First World War by signing apunitive treaty with the Central Powers and granted temporary independence to non-Russian nations under Russian control. Domestically, it oversaw radical land redistribution among the peasantry, established the Chekaand Gulag labor camp system, and initiated the Red Terror, a violent campaign against the bourgeois, kulaks, and clergy. Opposition to Bolshevik rule resulted in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922, in which Lenin's government proved victorious. Responding to famine and peasant rebellions, in 1921 Lenin introduced the New Economic Policy, a mixed economic system of state capitalism. Creating the Communist International to promote world revolution, Lenin's government also united Russia with other former territories of the Empire to form the Soviet Union in 1922. In increasingly poor health, Lenin expressed concern regarding the bureaucratisation of the regime and the growing power of his successor, Joseph Stalin, before dying at his dacha in Gorki.

Recognised as one of the most significant and influential historical figures of the 20th century, Lenin remains a controversial and highly divisive world figure. Admirers view him as a champion of working people's rights andwelfare whilst critics see him as the founder of a totalitarian dictatorship responsible for civil war and mass human rights abuses. The subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991, he remains an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement.