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143-478: Vladimir Lenin was in internal exile here from 1897 to 1900. In 1970, a museum dedicated to his time in Siberia was opened which became a prominent and popular local site. Russian and international visitors go there to see the history of Lenin's stay as well as to see the peasant way of life during the 19th century. The area is also known for its nature reserves. During 2003 and 2004, an ethnic music festival called

286-622: A Corsier conference they agreed to launch the paper from Munich , where Lenin relocated in September. Containing contributions from prominent European Marxists, Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country's most successful underground publication since 1850s. He first adopted the pseudonym Lenin in December 1901, possibly based on the Siberian River Lena ; he often used the fuller pseudonym of N. Lenin, and while

429-436: A Lutheran by upbringing, was largely indifferent to Christianity , a view that influenced her children. Ilya Ulyanov was from a family of former serfs ; Ilya's father's ethnicity remains unclear, with suggestions that he was of Russian , Chuvash , Mordvin , or Kalmyk ancestry. Despite a lower-class background, he had risen to middle-class status, studying physics and mathematics at Kazan University before teaching at

572-585: A one-party state under the Communist Party . Ideologically a Marxist , his developments to the ideology are called Leninism . Born into a middle-class family in Simbirsk , Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother 's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Tsarist government , he devoted the following years to

715-528: A one-party state . Within the party, a Political Bureau (Politburo) and Organisation Bureau (Orgburo) were established to accompany the existing Central Committee ; decisions of these bodies had to be adopted by Sovnarkom and the Council of Labour and Defence . Lenin was the most significant figure in this governance structure, being Chairman of Sovnarkom and sitting on the Council of Labour and Defence,

858-949: A "bourgeoisie-democratic revolution" of the middle classes had to take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution. In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in Saint Petersburg, renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the First World War, as industrial workers went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions. The unrest spread to other parts of Russia, and fearing that he would be violently overthrown, Tsar Nicholas II abdicated. The State Duma took over control of

1001-608: A "day of Red Terror" to execute 300 people in one day, and took quotas from each part of town. According to the Chekist Karl Lander  [ ru ] , the Cheka in Kislovodsk , "for lack of a better idea", killed all the patients in the hospital. In October 1920 alone more than 6,000 people were executed. Gellately adds that Communist leaders "sought to justify their ethnic-based massacres by incorporating them into

1144-488: A "socialist sense of justice". November also saw the military restructured with egalitarian measures, abolition of previous ranks, titles, and medals, and the establishment of soldiers' committees to elect commanders. Red Terror The Red Terror ( Russian : красный террор , romanized :  krasnyy terror ) was a campaign of political repression and executions in Soviet Russia carried out by

1287-683: A Marxist interpretation of societal development and counter the claims of the Narodniks. He wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought . In late 1893, Lenin moved to Saint Petersburg . There, he worked as a barrister's assistant and rose to a senior position in a Marxist revolutionary cell that called itself the Social-Democrats after the Marxist Social Democratic Party of Germany . Championing Marxism within

1430-518: A Russian language translation of Marx and Friedrich Engels 's 1848 political pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto . He began to read the works of the Russian Marxist Georgi Plekhanov , agreeing with Plekhanov's argument that Russia was moving from feudalism to capitalism and so socialism would be implemented by the proletariat , or urban working class, rather than the peasantry. This Marxist perspective contrasted with

1573-540: A bomb. Before the attack could take place, the conspirators were arrested and tried, and Alexander was executed by hanging in May 1887. Despite the emotional trauma of his father's and brother's deaths, Lenin continued studying, graduated from school at the top of his class with a gold medal for exceptional performance, and decided to study law at Kazan University. Upon entering Kazan University in August 1887, Lenin moved into

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1716-500: A bullet to the back of the head. Her corpse was bundled into a barrel and set alight so that her "remains [might] be destroyed without a trace", as Sverdlov had instructed. These events persuaded the government to heed Dzerzhinsky's lobbying for greater terror against opposition. The campaign of mass repressions would officially begin thereafter. The Red Terror is considered to have officially begun between 17 and 30 August 1918. While recovering from his wounds, Lenin instructed: "It

1859-531: A class." On October 15, the leading Chekist Gleb Bokii , summing up the officially-ended Red Terror, reported that, in Petrograd, 800 alleged enemies had been shot and another 6,229 imprisoned. Casualties in the first two months were between 10,000 and 15,000 based on lists of summarily executed people published in newspaper Cheka Weekly and other official press. A declaration About the Red Terror by

2002-704: A coalition government with other socialist parties. Though Sovnarkom refused a coalition with the Mensheviks or Socialist-Revolutionaries, it allowed the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries five cabinet posts in December 1917. This coalition lasted only until March 1918, when the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries left the government over disagreements about the Bolsheviks' approach to ending the First World War. At their 7th Congress in March 1918,

2145-510: A country controlled by the workers and power to the Soviets. Lenin and many other Bolsheviks expected proletariat revolution to sweep across Europe in days or months. The Provisional Government had planned for a Constituent Assembly to be elected in November 1917; despite Lenin's objections, Sovnarkom allowed the vote as scheduled. In the election , the Bolsheviks gained about a quarter of

2288-539: A country estate in Alakaevka village, Samara Oblast , in the hope that her son would turn his attention to agriculture. He had little interest in farm management, and his mother soon sold the land, keeping the house as a summer home. In September 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to the city of Samara , where Lenin joined Alexei Sklyarenko 's socialist discussion circle. There, Lenin fully embraced Marxism and produced

2431-666: A culturally Polish part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire , he used Jagiellonian University 's library to conduct research. He stayed in close contact with the RSDLP, which was operating in the Russian Empire, convincing the Duma's Bolshevik members to split from their parliamentary alliance with the Mensheviks. In January 1913, Stalin, whom Lenin referred to as the "wonderful Georgian", visited him, and they discussed

2574-492: A family life with Nadya's mother Elizaveta Vasilyevna, in Shushenskoye the couple translated English socialist literature into Russian. There, Lenin wrote A Protest by Russian Social-Democrats to criticise German Marxist revisionists like Eduard Bernstein who advocated a peaceful, electoral path to socialism. He also finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), his longest book to date, which criticised

2717-528: A job in Nizhny Novgorod , rising to become Director of Primary Schools in the Simbirsk district six years later. Five years after that, he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. In January 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir , which bestowed on him

2860-548: A law degree before relocating to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and becoming a prominent Marxist activist. In 1897, Lenin was arrested for sedition and exiled to Siberia for three years. He then moved to Western Europe, where he became a key figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party . In the party's 1903 schism, he led his Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov 's Mensheviks . Lenin briefly returned to Russia during

3003-581: A meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on 10 October, where he again argued that the party should lead an armed insurrection to topple the Provisional Government. This time the argument won with ten votes against two. Critics of the plan, Zinoviev and Kamenev, argued that Russian workers would not support a violent coup against the regime and that there was no clear evidence for Lenin's assertion that all of Europe

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3146-594: A multi-party Constituent Assembly , but by 1918 centralised power in the new Communist Party. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror , and tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. Responding to devastation, famine , and popular uprisings, Lenin reversed his policy of war communism in 1921, and encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy . His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in

3289-400: A nearby flat. There, he joined a zemlyachestvo , a form of university society that represented the men of a particular region. This group elected him as its representative to the university's zemlyachestvo council, and he took part in a December demonstration against government restrictions that banned student societies. The police arrested Lenin and accused him of being a ringleader in

3432-474: A news sheet, Rabochee delo ( Workers' Cause ), he was among 40 activists arrested in St. Petersburg and charged with sedition. Refused legal representation or bail, Lenin denied all charges against him but remained imprisoned for a year before sentencing. He spent this time theorising and writing. In this work he noted that the rise of industrial capitalism in Russia had caused large numbers of peasants to move to

3575-556: A passage for them through Germany, with which Russia was then at war. Recognising that these dissidents could cause problems for their Russian enemies, the German government agreed to permit 32 Russian citizens to travel by train through their territory, among them Lenin and his wife. For political reasons, Lenin and the Germans agreed to a cover story that Lenin had travelled by sealed train carriage through German territory, but in fact

3718-480: A pure communist society . He began arguing for a Bolshevik-led armed insurrection to topple the government, but at a clandestine meeting of the party's central committee this idea was rejected. Lenin then headed by train and by foot to Finland, arriving at Helsinki on 10 August, where he hid away in safe houses belonging to Bolshevik sympathisers. In August 1917, while Lenin was in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov ,

3861-474: A revolutionary government which took steps towards socialism, while his critics accuse him of establishing a dictatorship which oversaw mass killings and political repression . Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in Streletskaya Ulitsa, Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk , on 22 April 1870, and baptised six days later; as a child, he was known as Volodya the common nickname variant of Vladimir. He

4004-424: A series of Petrograd safe houses. Fearing that he would be killed, Lenin and fellow senior Bolshevik Grigory Zinoviev escaped Petrograd in disguise, relocating to Razliv . There, Lenin began work on the book that became The State and Revolution , an exposition on how he believed the socialist state would develop after the proletariat revolution, and how from then on the state would gradually wither away, leaving

4147-577: A single death sentence was issued in the first three months of Lenin's government, which consisted in fact of a coalition with the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries , who, albeit terrorists in the tsarist era , were staunch opponents of the death penalty. However, as pressure mounted from the White Armies and from international intervention, the Bolsheviks moved closer to Lenin 's harsher perspective. The decision to enact

4290-425: A speech to Bolshevik supporters condemning the Provisional Government and again calling for a continent-wide European proletarian revolution. Over the following days, he spoke at Bolshevik meetings, lambasting those who wanted reconciliation with the Mensheviks and revealing his " April Theses ", an outline of his plans for the Bolsheviks, which he had written on the journey from Switzerland. He publicly condemned both

4433-630: A spy, Roman Malinovsky , to act as a vocal Lenin supporter within the party. Various Bolsheviks expressed their suspicions about Malinovsky to Lenin, although it is unclear if the latter was aware of the spy's duplicity; it is possible that he used Malinovsky to feed false information to the Okhrana. In August 1910, Lenin attended the 8th Congress of the Second International , an international meeting of socialists, in Copenhagen as

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4576-483: A suspected civilian uprising there, and to "crush" landowners in Penza who resisted, sometimes violently, the requisitioning of their grain by military detachments: Comrades! The kulak uprising in your five districts must be crushed without pity ... You must make example of these people. Do all this so that for miles (versts) around people see it all, understand it, tremble, and tell themselves that we are killing

4719-601: Is necessary – secretly and urgently to prepare the terror." In immediate response to the two attacks, Chekists killed approximately 1,300 "bourgeois hostages" held in Petrograd and Kronstadt prisons. Bolshevik newspapers were especially integral to instigating an escalation in state violence: on August 31, the state-controlled media launched the repressive campaign through incitement of violence. One article appearing in Pravda exclaimed: "the time has come for us to crush

4862-574: The Bolsheviks , chiefly through the Cheka , the Bolshevik secret police. It officially started in early September 1918 and lasted until 1922. Arising after assassination attempts on Vladimir Lenin along with the successful assassinations of Petrograd Cheka leader Moisei Uritsky and party editor V. Volodarsky in alleged retaliation for Bolshevik mass repressions, the Red Terror was modeled on

5005-535: The Cheka , she made the following statement: "My name is Fanya Kaplan. Today I shot Lenin. I did it on my own. I will not say from whom I obtained my revolver. I will give no details. I had resolved to kill Lenin long ago. I consider him a traitor to the Revolution. I was exiled to Akatui for participating in an assassination attempt against a Tsarist official in Kiev [now Kyiv]. I spent 11 years at hard labour. After

5148-534: The Council of People's Commissars issued a decree "On Red Terror", prescribing "mass shooting" to be "inflicted without hesitation;" the decree ordered the Cheka "to secure the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by isolating them in concentration camps", as well as stating that counter-revolutionaries "must be executed by shooting [and] that the names of the executed and the reasons of the execution must be made public." According to official numbers,

5291-455: The July Days , took place while Lenin was away, but upon learning that demonstrators had violently clashed with government forces, he returned to Petrograd and called for calm. Responding to the violence, the government ordered the arrest of Lenin and other prominent Bolsheviks, raiding their offices, and publicly alleging that he was a German agent provocateur . Evading arrest, Lenin hid in

5434-551: The Kholmogory camp adopted the practice of drowning bound prisoners in the nearby Dvina river. Occasionally, entire prisons were "emptied" of inmates via mass shootings prior to abandoning a town to White forces. On 16 March 1919, Cheka stormed the Putilov factory . Hundreds of workers who went to a strike were arrested, of whom around 200 were executed without trial during the next few days. Numerous strikes took place in

5577-511: The Kremlin . "Most sources indicate that Kaplan was executed on 3 September, the day after her transfer to the Kremlin". In 1958 the commander of the Kremlin, the former Baltic sailor Pavel Dmitriyevich Malkov (1887–1965) revealed he had personally executed Kaplan on that date upon the specific orders of Yakov Sverdlov , chief secretary of the Bolshevik Central Committee . She was killed with

5720-521: The N did not stand for anything, a popular misconception later arose that it represented Nikolai . Under this pseudonym, in 1902 he published his most influential publication to date, the pamphlet What Is to Be Done? , which outlined his thoughts on the need for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat to revolution. Nadya joined Lenin in Munich and became his secretary. They continued their political agitation, as Lenin wrote for Iskra and drafted

5863-659: The National Academy of Sciences of Belarus the large, “fantastic” estimates derived from eyewitness accounts and White army emigre press. A Crimean Cheka report in 1921 showed that 441 people were shot with a modern estimation that 5,000–12,000 people in total were executed in Crimea. On 16 March 1919, all military detachments of the Cheka were combined in a single body, the Troops for the Internal Defense of

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6006-787: The October Revolution , in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the regime. Lenin's government redistributed land to the peasantry, issued a number of legislative decrees , nationalised banks and industry, withdrew from the war by signing the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk with the Central Powers , and promoted world revolution through the Communist International . It initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries and allowed

6149-670: The Paris Commune of 1871 , which he considered an early prototype for a proletarian government. Financed by his mother, he stayed in a Swiss health spa before travelling to Berlin , where he studied for six weeks at the Staatsbibliothek and met the Marxist Wilhelm Liebknecht . Returning to Russia with a stash of illegal revolutionary publications, he travelled to various cities distributing literature to striking workers. While involved in producing

6292-565: The Penza Institute for the Nobility . In mid-1863, Ilya married Maria, the well-educated daughter of a wealthy Swedish Lutheran mother and a Russian Jewish father who had converted to Christianity and worked as a physician. According to historian Petrovsky-Shtern , it is likely that Lenin was unaware of his mother's half-Jewish ancestry, which was only discovered by Anna after his death. Soon after their wedding, Ilya obtained

6435-654: The Reign of Terror of the French Revolution , and sought to eliminate political dissent , opposition, and any other threat to Bolshevik power. More broadly, the term can be applied to Bolshevik political repression throughout the Russian Civil War (1917–1922). Bolshevik leaders attempted to excuse the severe repression as a necessary response to the White Terror initiated in 1917. When

6578-644: The Sovnarkom on 5 September 1918 stated: ...that for empowering the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission in the fight with the counter-revolution, profiteering and corruption and making it more methodical, it is necessary to direct there possibly bigger number of the responsible party comrades, that it is necessary to secure the Soviet Republic from the class enemies by way of isolating them in concentration camps, that all people are to be executed by fire squad who are connected with

6721-700: The White Guard organizations, conspiracies and mutinies, that it is necessary to publicize the names of the executed as well as the reasons of applying to them that measure. As the Russian Civil War progressed, significant numbers of prisoners, suspects and hostages were executed because they belonged to the "possessing classes". Numbers are recorded for cities occupied by the Bolsheviks: In Kharkov there were between 2,000 and 3,000 executions in February–June 1919, and another 1,000–2,000 when

6864-688: The " greens " ( we will blame them later ), we will advance by 10–20 miles (versts) and hang kulaks, priests, landowners. Prize: 100.000 rubles for each hanged man. Leonid Kannegisser , a young military cadet of the Imperial Russian Army , assassinated Moisey Uritsky on August 17, 1918, outside the Petrograd Cheka headquarters in retaliation for the execution of his friend and other officers. On August 30, Socialist Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan unsuccessfully attempted to assassinate Vladimir Lenin . During interrogation by

7007-538: The "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats ; around 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894. Hoping to cement connections between his Social-Democrats and Emancipation of Labour , a group of Russian Marxists based in Switzerland , Lenin visited the country to meet group members Plekhanov and Pavel Axelrod . He proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and to research

7150-514: The Bolshevik Centre to Paris; although Lenin disagreed, he moved to the city in December 1908. Lenin disliked Paris, lambasting it as "a foul hole", and while there he sued a motorist who knocked him off his bike. Lenin became very critical of Bogdanov's view that Russia's proletariat had to develop a socialist culture to become a successful revolutionary vehicle. Instead, Lenin favoured a vanguard of socialist intelligentsia who would lead

7293-686: The Bolshevik faction between his and Bogdanov's followers, accusing the latter of deviating from Marxism. In May 1908, Lenin lived briefly in London, where he used the British Museum Reading Room to write Materialism and Empirio-criticism , an attack on what he described as the "bourgeois-reactionary falsehood" of Bogdanov's relativism. Lenin's factionalism began to alienate increasing numbers of Bolsheviks, including his former close supporters Alexei Rykov and Lev Kamenev . The Okhrana exploited his factionalist attitude by sending

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7436-438: The Bolshevik newspaper Pravda , and giving public speeches in Petrograd aimed at converting workers, soldiers, sailors, and peasants to his cause. Sensing growing frustration among Bolshevik supporters, Lenin suggested an armed political demonstration in Petrograd to test the government's response. Amid deteriorating health, he left the city to recuperate in the Finnish village of Neivola. The Bolsheviks' armed demonstration,

7579-416: The Bolsheviks changed their name from the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party to the Russian Communist Party, as Lenin wanted to distance his group from the increasingly reformist German Social Democratic Party and emphasize its goal of a communist society. Although ultimate power officially rested with Sovnarkom and the Executive Committee (VTSIK) elected by the All-Russian Congress of Soviets (ARCS),

7722-403: The Bolsheviks executed 500 "representatives of overthrown classes" ( kulaks ) immediately after the assassination of Uritsky. Soviet commissar Grigory Petrovsky called for an expansion of the Terror and an "immediate end of looseness and tenderness." In October 1918, Cheka commander Martin Latsis likened the Red Terror to a class war , explaining that "we are destroying the bourgeoisie as

7865-519: The Bolsheviks regained dominance of the RSDLP at its Fifth Congress , held in London in May 1907. As the Tsarist government cracked down on opposition, both by disbanding Russia's legislative assembly, the Second Duma , and by ordering its secret police, the Okhrana , to arrest revolutionaries, Lenin fled Finland for Switzerland. There, he tried to exchange those banknotes stolen in Tiflis that had identifiable serial numbers on them. Alexander Bogdanov and other prominent Bolsheviks decided to relocate

8008-432: The Bolsheviks split completely with the Mensheviks; many Bolsheviks refused, and both groups attended the Third RSDLP Congress , held in London in April 1905. Lenin presented many of his ideas in the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution , published in August 1905. Here, he predicted that Russia's liberal bourgeoisie would be sated by a transition to constitutional monarchy and thus betray

8151-418: The Bolsheviks to return to the open political arena. Fearing a counter-revolution from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet had been instrumental in pressuring the government to normalise relations with the Bolsheviks. Both the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their affiliation with

8294-430: The Bolsheviks' activities, Lenin endorsed the idea of robbing post offices, railway stations, trains, and banks. Under the lead of Leonid Krasin , a group of Bolsheviks began carrying out such criminal actions, the best-known taking place in June 1907, when a group of Bolsheviks acting under the leadership of Joseph Stalin committed an armed robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis , Georgia. Although he briefly supported

8437-543: The Borovskaya and Petropavlovskaya volosts has been eliminated. During the liquidation, 23 armed deserters who offered resistance to our troops have been shot. In the southeastern part of the province, there is an unprecedented influx of deserters to the commissariats, which come with a request to enroll them in the ranks of the Red Army. Estimates suggest that during the suppression of the Tambov Rebellion of 1920–1921, around 100,000 peasant rebels and their families were imprisoned or deported and perhaps 15,000 executed. During

8580-448: The Central Committee, and the Politburo. The only individual with comparable influence was Lenin's right-hand man, Yakov Sverdlov , who died in March 1919 as a result of the Spanish flu pandemic. In November 1917, Lenin and his wife took a two-room flat within the Smolny Institute; the following month, they went on a brief holiday in Halila, Finland. In January 1918, he survived an assassination attempt in Petrograd; Fritz Platten , who

8723-419: The Cheka tied White officers to planks and slowly fed them into furnaces or tanks of boiling water; in Kharkiv , scalpings and hand-flayings were commonplace: the skin was peeled off victims' hands to produce "gloves"; the Voronezh Cheka rolled naked people around in barrels studded internally with nails; victims were crucified or stoned to death at Yekaterinoslav ; the Cheka at Kremenchuk impaled members of

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8866-418: The Communist Party was de facto in control of Russia, as acknowledged by its members at the time. By 1918, Sovnarkom began acting unilaterally, citing a need for expediency, with the ARCS and VTSIK becoming increasingly marginalized, so the soviets no longer had a role in governing Russia. During 1918 and 1919, the government expelled Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries from the soviets. Russia had become

9009-470: The Highest Stage of Capitalism , which argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism , as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that war between the imperialist powers would continue until they were overthrown by proletariat revolution and socialism established. He spent much of this time reading

9152-436: The Mensheviks accused Lenin of being a despot and autocrat. Enraged at the Mensheviks, Lenin resigned from the Iskra editorial board and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back . The stress made Lenin ill, and to recuperate he holidayed in Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by spring 1905, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded

9295-428: The Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet , for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism. Considering the government to be just as imperialist as the Tsarist regime, he advocated immediate peace with Germany and Austria-Hungary, rule by soviets , the nationalisation of industry and banks, and the state expropriation of land, all with

9438-408: The Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet. In September, the Bolsheviks gained a majority in the workers' sections of both the Moscow and Petrograd Soviets. Recognising that the situation was safer for him, Lenin returned to Petrograd. There he attended

9581-546: The RSDLP programme, attacking ideological dissenters and external critics, particularly the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SR), a Narodnik agrarian-socialist group founded in 1901. Despite remaining a Marxist, he accepted the Narodnik view on the revolutionary power of the Russian peasantry, accordingly, penning the 1903 pamphlet To the Village Poor . To evade Bavarian police, Lenin moved to London with Iskra in April 1902, where he befriended fellow Russian-Ukrainian Marxist Leon Trotsky . Lenin fell ill with erysipelas and

9724-478: The RSDLP's representative, following this with a holiday in Stockholm with his mother. With his wife and sisters, he then moved to France, settling first in Bombon and then Paris. Here, he became a close friend to the French Bolshevik Inessa Armand ; some biographers suggest that they had an extra-marital affair from 1910 to 1912. Meanwhile, at a Paris meeting in June 1911, the RSDLP Central Committee decided to move their focus of operations back to Russia, ordering

9867-433: The Red Army in 1921. Around 500,000 deserters were arrested in 1919 and close to 800,000 in 1920 by Cheka troops and special divisions created to combat desertions. Thousands of deserters were killed, and their families were often taken hostage. According to Lenin's instructions, After the expiration of the seven-day deadline for deserters to turn themselves in, punishment must be increased for these incorrigible traitors to

10010-408: The Red Terror was also driven by the initial "massacre of their 'Red' prisoners by the office-cadres during the Moscow insurrection of October 1917", allied intervention in the Russian Civil War , and the large-scale massacres of Reds during the Finnish Civil War in which 10,000 to 20,000 revolutionaries had been killed by the Finnish Whites . In December 1917, Felix Dzerzhinsky was appointed to

10153-485: The Red sailors' uprising at Kronstadt in March 1921. He particularly distinguished himself in the course of the pursuit, capture, and killing of captured sailors. Among the victims of the Red Terror were tsarists , liberals , non-Bolshevik socialists, anarchists , members of the clergy, ordinary criminals, counter-revolutionaries, and other political dissidents . Later, industrial workers who failed to meet production quotas were also targeted. The first victims of

10296-693: The Republic (a branch of the Cheka), which numbered at least 200,000 in 1921. These troops policed labor camps , ran the Gulag system, conducted prodrazverstka (requisitions of food from peasants), and put down peasant rebellions, riots by workers, and mutinies in the Red Army (which was plagued by desertions). One of the main organizers of the Red Terror for the Bolshevik government was 2nd-Grade Army Commissar Yan Karlovich Berzin (1889–1938), whose real name

10439-549: The Revolution took power in November 1917, many top Bolsheviks hoped to avoid much of the violence which would come to define this period. Through one of its first decrees on 8 November 1917, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies abolished the death penalty . It had first been canceled by the February Revolution and then restored by the Kerensky's government . Not

10582-666: The Revolution, I was freed. I favoured the Constituent Assembly and am still for it". Kaplan referenced the Bolsheviks' growing authoritarianism, citing their forcible shutdown of the Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the elections to which they had lost. When it became clear that Kaplan would not implicate any accomplices, she was executed in Alexander Garden , near the western walls of

10725-526: The Russian Civil War, after which several non-Russian nations that had broken away from the empire after 1917 were re-united in the new Soviet Union in 1922; others, notably Poland, gained independence. Lenin suffered three debilitating strokes in 1922 and 1923 before his death in 1924, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government. Widely considered one of

10868-761: The Russian Republic into the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic . The government also switched from the Julian calendar to the Gregorian calendar , aligning Russia with Europe. In November 1917, Sovnarkom abolished Russia's legal system, replacing it with "revolutionary conscience". Courts were replaced by Revolutionary Tribunals for counter-revolutionary crimes, and People's Courts for civil and criminal cases, instructed to follow Sovnarkom decrees and

11011-653: The Sayan Ring ( Саянское кольцо ) was started in Shushenskoye, which draws visitors from Russia and other countries. Different ethno-music styles are played during its 3–4 day duration. The climate is very warm in summer: local people cultivate melons and watermelons . Winters are very cold with temperatures as low as −40 °C (−40 °F). Vladimir Lenin Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [ O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin ,

11154-704: The Terror were the Socialist Revolutionaries (SR). Over the months of the campaign, over 800 SR members were executed, while thousands more were driven into exile or detained in labor camps. In a matter of weeks, executions carried out by the Cheka doubled or tripled the number of death sentences pronounced by the Russian Empire over the 92-year period from 1825 to 1917. While the Socialist Revolutionaries were initially

11297-628: The Whites managed to smuggle more than 3000 rifles and machine guns into the city. The leaders of the plot decided to act on the night 9–10 March 1919. The rebels were joined by wealthy peasants from the villages, which suppressed the Committees of the Poor, and committed massacres against rural activists. Eyewitnesses reported atrocities in villages such as Ivanchug, Chagan, Karalat. In response, Soviet forces led by Kirov undertook to suppress this revolt in

11440-814: The agrarian-socialists and promoted a Marxist analysis of Russian economic development. Published under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilin, upon publication it received predominantly poor reviews. After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900. There, he began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra ( Spark ), a new organ of the Russian Marxist party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In July 1900, Lenin left Russia for Western Europe; in Switzerland he met other Russian Marxists, and at

11583-402: The bloodthirsty kulaks and that we will continue to do so ... Yours, Lenin. P.S. Find tougher people. Lenin had justified the state response to the kulak revolts due to the preceding 258 uprisings that had occurred in 1918 and the threat of the White Terror . He summarised his view that either the "kulaks massacre vast numbers of workers, or the workers ruthlessly suppress the revolt of

11726-575: The bourgeoisie or be crushed by it.... The anthem of the working class will be a song of hatred and revenge!" The next day, the newspaper Krasnaia Gazeta stated that "only rivers of blood can atone for the blood of Lenin and Uritsky." The first official announcement of a Red Terror was published in Izvestia on September 3, titled "Appeal to the Working Class": it had been drafted by Dzerzhinsky and his assistant Jēkabs Peterss and called for

11869-484: The cause of the people. Families and anyone found to be assisting them in any way whatsoever are to be considered as hostages and treated accordingly. In September 1918, in just twelve provinces of Russia, 48,735 deserters and 7,325 brigands were arrested: 1,826 were executed and 2,230 were deported. A typical report from a Cheka department stated: 23 June 1919. 19h 30min. Telegram from Yaroslavl by battalion commander Frenkel, № 279, 22 June. The uprising of deserters in

12012-446: The cities, where they formed a proletariat. From his Marxist perspective, Lenin argued that this Russian proletariat would develop class consciousness , which would in turn lead them to violently overthrow Tsarism , the aristocracy , and the bourgeoisie and to establish a dictatorship of the proletariat that would move toward socialism. In February 1897, Lenin was sentenced without trial to three years' exile in eastern Siberia. He

12155-558: The city of Kazan , but not the university. On his return, he joined Nikolai Fedoseev 's revolutionary circle, through which he discovered Karl Marx 's 1867 book Capital . This sparked his interest in Marxism , a socio-political theory that argued that society developed in stages, that this development resulted from class struggle , and that capitalist society would ultimately give way to socialist society and then communist society . Wary of his political views, Lenin's mother bought

12298-597: The civil war for freedom is blazing up. Moscow and the South, the Caucasus and Poland are ready to join the proletariat of St. Petersburg. The slogan of the workers has become: Death or Freedom! — Lenin on the Revolution of 1905 In response to the revolution of 1905, which had failed to overthrow the government, Tsar Nicholas II accepted a series of liberal reforms in his October Manifesto . In this climate, Lenin felt it safe to return to Saint Petersburg. Joining

12441-593: The clergy and buried alive rebelling peasants; in Oryol , water was poured on naked prisoners bound in the winter streets until they became living ice statues; in Kiev , Chinese Cheka detachments placed rats in iron tubes sealed at one end with wire netting and the other placed against the body of a prisoner, with the tubes being heated until the rats gnawed through the victim's body in an effort to escape. Executions took place in prison cellars or courtyards, or occasionally on

12584-527: The closure of the Bolshevik Centre and its newspaper, Proletari . Seeking to rebuild his influence in the party, Lenin arranged for a party conference to be held in Prague in January 1912, and although 16 of the 18 attendants were Bolsheviks, he was heavily criticised for his factionalist tendencies and failed to boost his status within the party. Moving to Kraków in the Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria ,

12727-545: The commander-in-chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Premier Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members, for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend the city. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd, but the events had allowed

12870-408: The continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy. In July 1916, Lenin's mother died, but he was unable to attend her funeral. Her death deeply affected him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution. In September 1917, Lenin published Imperialism,

13013-559: The country, establishing the Russian Provisional Government and converting the Empire into a new Russian Republic . When Lenin learned of this from his base in Switzerland, he celebrated with other dissidents. He decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict. He organised a plan with other dissidents to negotiate

13156-574: The defeat of general Pyotr Wrangel at the end of 1920. They had been promised amnesty if they would surrender. This is one of the largest massacres in the Civil War. The figures related to the massacre in Crimea remain contested. Anarchist and Bolshevik Victor Serge gave a lower figure for White officers around 13,000 which he claims were exaggerated. Yet, he condemned Kun for his treacherous actions towards allied anarchists and surrendering whites. According to social scientist, Nikolay Zayats, from

13299-539: The demonstration; he was expelled from the university, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs exiled him to his family's Kokushkino estate. There, he read voraciously, becoming enamoured with Nikolay Chernyshevsky 's 1863 pro-revolutionary novel What Is to Be Done? Lenin's mother was concerned by her son's radicalisation, and was instrumental in convincing the Interior Ministry to allow him to return to

13442-503: The duty of rooting out counterrevolutionary threats to the Soviet government . He was the director of the All-Russian Extraordinary Commission (aka Cheka ), a predecessor of the KGB that served as the secret police for the Soviets. From spring 1918, the Bolsheviks started physical elimination of opposition and other socialist and revolutionary factions, anarchists among the first: Of all

13585-446: The editorial board of Novaya Zhizn ( New Life ), a radical legal newspaper run by Maria Andreyeva , he used it to discuss issues facing the RSDLP. He encouraged the party to seek out a much wider membership, and advocated the continual escalation of violent confrontation, believing both to be necessary for a successful revolution. Recognising that membership fees and donations from a few wealthy sympathisers were insufficient to finance

13728-470: The failed Revolution of 1905 , and during the First World War campaigned for its transformation into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution , which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the end of capitalism and the rise of socialism . After the February Revolution of 1917 ousted Tsar Nicholas II and established a Provisional Government , Lenin returned to Russia and played a leading role in

13871-413: The future of non-Russian ethnic groups in the Empire. Due to the ailing health of both Lenin and his wife, they moved to the rural town of Biały Dunajec , before heading to Bern for Nadya to have surgery on her goitre . The [First World] war is being waged for the division of colonies and the robbery of foreign territory; thieves have fallen out–and to refer to the defeats at a given moment of one of

14014-536: The government in the Winter Palace and overcame it and arrested its ministers after the cruiser Aurora , controlled by Bolshevik seamen, fired a blank shot to signal the start of the revolution. During the insurrection, Lenin gave a speech to the Petrograd Soviet announcing that the Provisional Government had been overthrown. The Bolsheviks declared the formation of a new government, the Council of People's Commissars , or Sovnarkom. Lenin initially turned down

14157-655: The idea of reconciliation between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, Lenin's advocacy of violence and robbery was condemned by the Mensheviks at the Fourth RSDLP Congress , held in Stockholm in April 1906. After Lenin escaped to Finland from Russia, he was involved in setting up a Bolshevik Centre in Kuokkala , Grand Duchy of Finland , which was at the time an autonomous state controlled by the Russian Empire, before

14300-413: The intention of establishing a proletariat government and pushing toward a socialist society. By contrast, the Mensheviks believed that Russia was insufficiently developed to transition to socialism and accused Lenin of trying to plunge the new Republic into civil war. Over the coming months Lenin campaigned for his policies, attending the meetings of the Bolshevik Central Committee, prolifically writing for

14443-557: The leading position of Chairman , suggesting Trotsky for the job, but other Bolsheviks insisted and ultimately Lenin relented. Lenin and other Bolsheviks then attended the Second Congress of Soviets on 26 and 27 October and announced the creation of the new government. Menshevik attendees condemned the illegitimate seizure of power and the risk of civil war. In the early days of the regime, Lenin adjusted his rhetoric so as not to alienate Russia's population, and spoke about having

14586-489: The most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. Under Stalin, he became an ideological figurehead of Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement . A controversial and highly divisive figure, Lenin is praised by his supporters for establishing

14729-525: The need for a strong leadership with complete control over the party. Lenin's supporters were in the majority, and he termed them the "majoritarians" ( bol'sheviki in Russian; Bolsheviks ); in response, Martov termed his followers the "minoritarians" ( men'sheviki ; Mensheviks ). Arguments between Bolsheviks and Mensheviks continued after the conference; the Bolsheviks accused their rivals of being opportunists and reformists who lacked discipline, while

14872-712: The newspaper Vperyod ( Forward ). In January 1905, the Bloody Sunday massacre of protesters in St. Petersburg sparked a spate of civil unrest in the Russian Empire known as the Revolution of 1905 . Lenin urged Bolsheviks to take a greater role in the events, encouraging violent insurrection. In doing so, he adopted SR slogans regarding "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "the expropriation of gentry land", resulting in Menshevik accusations that he had deviated from orthodox Marxism. In turn, he insisted that

15015-462: The outskirts of town, during the Red Terror and Russian Civil War . After the condemned were stripped of their clothing and other belongings, which were shared among the Cheka executioners, they were either machine-gunned in batches or dispatched individually with a revolver. Those killed in prison were usually shot in the back of the neck as they entered the execution cellar, which became littered with corpses and soaked with blood. Victims killed outside

15158-645: The predatory kulak minority... There can be no middle course". In a mid-August 1920 letter, having received information that in Estonia and Latvia, with which Soviet Russia had concluded peace treaties, volunteers were being enrolled in anti-Bolshevik detachments, Lenin wrote to E. M. Sklyansky , deputy chairman of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic: Great plan! Finish it with Dzerzhinsky. While pretending to be

15301-557: The primary targets of the terror, most of its direct victims were associated with the preceding regimes. The Internal Troops of the Cheka and the Red Army practiced the terror tactics of taking and executing numerous hostages, often in connection with desertions of forcefully mobilized peasants. According to Orlando Figes , more than 1 million people deserted from the Red Army in 1918, around 2 million people deserted in 1919, and almost 4 million deserters escaped from

15444-637: The rebellion, Mikhail Tukhachevsky (chief Red Army commander in the area) authorized Bolshevik military forces to use chemical weapons against villages with civilian population and rebels. Publications in local Communist newspapers openly glorified liquidations of "bandits" with the poison gas. This campaign marked the beginning of the Gulag , and some scholars have estimated that 70,000 were imprisoned by September 1921 (this number excludes those in several camps in regions that were in revolt, such as Tambov). Conditions in these camps led to high mortality rates, and "repeated massacres" took place. The Cheka at

15587-421: The revolution; instead, he argued that the proletariat would have to build an alliance with the peasantry to overthrow the Tsarist regime and establish the "provisional revolutionary democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the peasantry". The uprising has begun. Force against Force. Street fighting is raging, barricades are being thrown up, rifles are cracking, guns are booming. Rivers of blood are flowing,

15730-656: The revolutionary elements in Russia it is the Anarchists who now suffer the most ruthless and systematic persecution. Their suppression by the Bolsheviki began already in 1918, when – in the month of April of that year – the Communist Government attacked, without provocation or warning, the Anarchist Club of Moscow and by the use of machine guns and artillery "liquidated" the whole organisation. It

15873-560: The right of self-determination ... Long live the revolution! — Lenin's political programme, October 1917 Upon taking power, Lenin's regime issued several decrees. The first was the Decree on Land , nationalizing the landed estates of the aristocracy and the Orthodox Church for redistribution to peasants by local governments. This contrasted with Lenin's preference for agricultural collectivisation but acknowledged

16016-602: The right to secede and form independent nation-states. Many declared independence ( Finland , Lithuania in December 1917, Latvia and Ukraine in January 1918, Estonia in February 1918, Transcaucasia in April 1918, and Poland in November 1918). The Bolsheviks then promoted communist parties in these new states, while at the Fifth All-Russian Congress of the Soviets in July 1918, a constitution reformed

16159-460: The socialist movement, he encouraged the founding of revolutionary cells in Russia's industrial centres. By late 1894, he was leading a Marxist workers' circle, and meticulously covered his tracks to evade police spies. He began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya , a Marxist school teacher. He also authored a political tract criticising the Narodnik agrarian-socialists, What

16302-572: The spot". On 16 June, more than two months prior to the events that would officially catalyze the Terror, a new decree re-established the death penalty as an ordinary jurisdictional measure by instructing the Revolutionary People's Courts to use it "as the only punishment for counter-revolutionary offences". On 11 August 1918, still prior to the events that would officially catalyze the Terror, Vladimir Lenin sent telegrams "to introduce mass terror" in Nizhny Novgorod in response to

16445-516: The spring of 1919 in cities of Tula , Oryol , Tver , Ivanovo , and Astrakhan . Starving workers sought to obtain food rations matching those of Red Army soldiers. They also demanded the elimination of privileges for Bolsheviks, freedom of the press, and free elections. The Cheka mercilessly suppressed all strikes, using arrests and executions. In the city of Astrakhan, a revolt led by the White Guard forces broke out. In preparing this revolt,

16588-489: The status of hereditary nobleman . Both of Lenin's parents were monarchists and liberal conservatives , being committed to the emancipation reform of 1861 introduced by the reformist Tsar Alexander II ; they avoided political radicals and there is no evidence that the police ever put them under surveillance for subversive thought. Every summer they holidayed at a rural manor in Kokushkino . Among his siblings, Lenin

16731-494: The tense situation regarding workers in the Ural region . On 29 January 1920, he sent a telegram to Vladimir Smirnov stating "I am surprised that you are putting up with this and do not punish sabotage with shooting; also the delay over the transfer here of locomotives is likewise manifest sabotage; please take the most resolute measures." At these times, there were numerous reports that Cheka interrogators used torture. At Odessa ,

16874-775: The thieves in order to identify the interests of all thieves with the interests of the nation or the fatherland is an unconscionable bourgeois lie. — Lenin on his interpretation of the First World War Lenin was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. The war pitted the Russian Empire against the Austro-Hungarian Empire, and due to his Russian citizenship, Lenin was arrested and briefly imprisoned until his anti-Tsarist credentials were explained. Lenin and his wife returned to Bern, before relocating to Zürich in February 1916. Lenin

17017-465: The time, Lenin's elder brother Alexander, whom he affectionately knew as Sasha, was studying at Saint Petersburg University . Involved in political agitation against the absolute monarchy of the reactionary Tsar Alexander III , Alexander studied the writings of banned leftists and organised anti-government protests. He joined a revolutionary cell bent on assassinating the Tsar and was selected to construct

17160-1022: The town was taken again in December of that year; in Rostov-on-Don , approximately 1,000 in January 1920; in Odessa , 2,200 in May–August 1919, then 1,500–3,000 between February 1920 and February 1921; in Kiev , at least 3,000 in February–August 1919; in Ekaterinodar , at least 3,000 between August 1920 and February 1921; In Armavir , a small town in Kuban , between 2,000 and 3,000 in August–October 1920. The list could go on and on. In Crimea , Béla Kun and Rosalia Zemlyachka , with Vladimir Lenin 's approval, had 50,000 White prisoners of war and civilians summarily executed by shooting or hanging after

17303-443: The town were moved by truck, bound and gagged, to their place of execution, where they sometimes were made to dig their own graves. According to Edvard Radzinsky , "it became a common practice to take a husband hostage and wait for his wife to come and purchase his life with her body". During decossackization , there were massacres, according to historian Robert Gellately , "on an unheard of scale". The Pyatigorsk Cheka organized

17446-530: The train was not truly sealed, and the passengers were allowed to disembark to, for example, spend the night in Frankfurt. The group travelled by train from Zürich to Sassnitz , proceeding by ferry to Trelleborg , Sweden, and from there to the Haparanda – Tornio border crossing and then to Helsinki before taking the final train to Petrograd. Arriving at Petrograd's Finland Station in April, Lenin gave

17589-469: The transfer without compensation of all land—landlord, imperial, and monastery—to the peasants' committees; it will defend the soldiers' rights, introducing a complete democratisation of the army; it will establish workers' control over industry; it will ensure the convocation of the Constituent Assembly on the date set; it will supply the cities with bread and the villages with articles of first necessity; and it will secure to all nationalities inhabiting Russia

17732-614: The view of the agrarian-socialist Narodnik movement, which held that the peasantry could establish socialism in Russia by forming peasant communes, thereby bypassing capitalism. This Narodnik view developed in the 1860s with the People's Freedom Party and was then dominant within the Russian revolutionary movement. Lenin rejected the premise of the agrarian-socialist argument but was influenced by agrarian-socialists like Pyotr Tkachev and Sergei Nechaev and befriended several Narodniks. In May 1890, Maria, who retained societal influence as

17875-758: The villages, and together with the Committees of the Poor restored Soviet power. The revolt in Astrakhan was brought under control by 10 March, and completely defeated by the 12th. More than 184 were sentenced to death, including monarchists, and representatives of the Kadets, Left-Socialist Revolutionaries, repeat offenders, and persons shown to have links with British and American intelligence services. The opposition media with political opponents like Chernov, and Melgunov, and others would later say that between 2,000 and 4,000 were shot or drowned from 12 to 14 of March 1919. However, strikes continued. Lenin had concerns about

18018-549: The vote, losing to the agrarian-focused Socialist-Revolutionaries. Lenin argued that the election did not reflect the people's will, claiming the electorate was unaware of the Bolsheviks' programme, and that candidacy lists were outdated, having been drawn up before the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries split from the Socialist-Revolutionaries. Nevertheless, the newly elected Russian Constituent Assembly convened in Petrograd in January 1918. Sovnarkom claimed it

18161-723: The widespread peasant land seizures that had already taken place. In November 1917, the government issued the Decree on the Press, closing opposition media outlets deemed counter-revolutionary. Although claimed to be temporary, the decree faced criticism, including from Bolsheviks, for undermining freedom of the press . In November 1917, Lenin issued the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia , granting non-Russian ethnic groups

18304-816: The widow of a nobleman, persuaded the authorities to allow Lenin to take his exams externally at the University of St Petersburg, where he obtained the equivalent of a first-class degree with honours. The graduation celebrations were marred when his sister Olga died of typhoid . Lenin remained in Samara for several years, working first as a legal assistant for a regional court and then for a local lawyer. He devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia. Inspired by Plekhanov's work, Lenin collected data on Russian society, using it to support

18447-417: The workers to "crush the hydra of counter-revolution with massive terror!"; it would also make clear that "anyone who dares to spread the slightest rumor against the Soviet regime will be arrested immediately and sent to a concentration camp ". Izvestia also reported that, in the 4 days since the attempt on Lenin, over 500 hostages had been executed in Petrograd alone. Subsequently, on September 5,

18590-405: The working-classes in revolution. Furthermore, Bogdanov, influenced by Ernst Mach , believed that all concepts of the world were relative, whereas Lenin stuck to the orthodox Marxist view that there was an objective reality independent of human observation. Bogdanov and Lenin holidayed together at Maxim Gorky 's villa in Capri in April 1908; on returning to Paris, Lenin encouraged a split within

18733-529: The works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel , Ludwig Feuerbach , and Aristotle , all of whom had been key influences on Marx. This changed Lenin's interpretation of Marxism; whereas he once believed that policies could be developed based on predetermined scientific principles, he concluded that the only test of whether a policy was correct was its practice. He still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, but he began to diverge from some of Marx's predictions about societal development; whereas Marx had believed that

18876-410: Was Pēteris Ķuzis. He took part in the October Revolution of 1917 and afterwards worked in the central apparatus of the Cheka. During the Red Terror, Berzin initiated the system of taking and shooting hostages to stop desertions and other "acts of disloyalty and sabotage". As chief of a special department of the Latvian Red Army (later the Russian 15th Army ), Berzin played a part in the suppression of

19019-425: Was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist who was the founder and first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924, and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. The founder and leader of the Bolsheviks , Lenin led the October Revolution which established the world's first socialist state . His government won the Russian Civil War and consolidated power in

19162-399: Was angry that the German Social Democratic Party was supporting the German war effort, which was a direct contravention of the Second International's Stuttgart resolution that socialist parties would oppose the conflict and saw the Second International as defunct. He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across

19305-517: Was closest to his sister Olga , whom he often bossed around; he had an extremely competitive nature and could be destructive, but usually admitted his misbehaviour. A keen sportsman, he spent much of his free time outdoors or playing chess, and excelled at school, the disciplinarian and conservative Simbirsk Classical Gymnasium. In January 1886, when Lenin was 15, his father died of a brain haemorrhage. Subsequently, his behaviour became erratic and confrontational, and he renounced his belief in God. At

19448-408: Was counter-revolutionary because it sought to remove power from the soviets, but the Socialist-Revolutionaries and Mensheviks denied this. The Bolsheviks presented a motion to strip the Assembly of most of its legal powers; when the Assembly rejected this, Sovnarkom declared it counter-revolutionary and forcibly disbanded it. Lenin rejected repeated calls, including from some Bolsheviks, to establish

19591-441: Was granted a few days in Saint Petersburg to put his affairs in order and used this time to meet with the Social-Democrats, who had renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class . His journey to eastern Siberia took 11 weeks, for much of which he was accompanied by his mother and sisters. Deemed only a minor threat to the government, he was exiled to Shushenskoye , Minusinsky District , where he

19734-476: Was kept under police surveillance; he was nevertheless able to correspond with other revolutionaries, many of whom visited him, and permitted to go on trips to swim in the Yenisei River and to hunt duck and snipe . In May 1898, Nadya joined him in exile, having been arrested in August 1896 for organising a strike. She was initially posted to Ufa , but persuaded the authorities to move her to Shushenskoye, where she and Lenin married on 10 July 1898. Settling into

19877-533: Was on the verge of proletarian revolution. The party began plans to organise the offensive, holding a final meeting at the Smolny Institute on 24 October. This was the base of the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), an armed militia largely loyal to the Bolsheviks that had been established by the Petrograd Soviet during Kornilov's alleged coup. In October, the MRC was ordered to take control of Petrograd's key transport, communication, printing and utilities hubs, and did so without bloodshed. Bolsheviks besieged

20020-482: Was the beginning of Anarchist hounding, but it was sporadic in character, breaking out now and then, quite planless, and frequently self-contradictory. On 21 February 1918, the death penalty was also formally re-established, as an exceptional revolutionary instrument, with the famous decree Socialist Homeland is in Danger! . In article 8, it read as follows: "Enemy agents, profiteers, marauders, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators and German spies are to be shot on

20163-447: Was the third of eight children, having two older siblings, Anna (born 1864) and Alexander (born 1866). They were followed by three more children, Olga (born 1871), Dmitry (born 1874), and Maria (born 1878). Two later siblings died in infancy. His father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov , was a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church and baptised his children into it, although his mother, Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (née Blank),

20306-434: Was unable to take such a leading role on the Iskra editorial board; in his absence, the board moved its base of operations to Geneva . The second RSDLP Congress was held in London in July 1903. At the conference, a schism emerged between Lenin's supporters and those of Julius Martov . Martov argued that party members should be able to express themselves independently of the party leadership; Lenin disagreed, emphasising

20449-489: Was with Lenin at the time, shielded him and was injured by a bullet. Concerned by Petrograd's vulnerability to German attack, Sovnarkom began relocating to Moscow in March 1918. Lenin, Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders moved into the Kremlin . He survived another assassination attempt in August 1918. To All Workers, Soldiers and Peasants. The Soviet authority will at once propose a democratic peace to all nations and an immediate armistice on all fronts. It will safeguard

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