Vladimir Lenin
Lenin built a party designed to seize power rather than to win elections, and it worked once. Born Vladimir Ulyanov in 1870 at Simbirsk on the Volga, he was the son of a school inspector who had earned hereditary nobility, and the family was comfortable and educated. His elder brother Alexander was hanged in 1887 at twenty-one for conspiring to assassinate Alexander III, which ended the comfortable part. Vladimir was expelled from Kazan university within months for attending a protest, took a law degree externally, and read Marx. He was arrested in 1895, exiled to Siberia for three years in conditions that allowed him to write and shoot game, and then spent most of the next seventeen years abroad — Munich, London, Geneva, Kraków — editing newspapers and quarrelling. The quarrel that mattered was in 1903, when the Russian Social Democratic party split over the definition of a member. Lenin wanted a small, disciplined, professional organisation; Martov wanted anyone who supported it. Lenin's faction took the name Bolsheviks, meaning the majority, on the strength of one vote in one committee, and kept the name for fourteen years. He was in Zurich in February 1917 and had told an audience of young socialists weeks earlier that his generation might not live to see the revolution. The Germans gave him a sealed train home in April because they wanted Russia out of the war, and he arrived demanding no support for the Provisional Government, all power to the soviets, and an immediate peace. He forced the October insurrection through his own central committee, dissolved the elected constituent assembly, made a punitive peace at Brest-Litovsk, created the Cheka, and won the civil war. He had a series of strokes from 1922 and died in 1924, having spent his last months warning about Stalin.
- Lived: 1870 CE – 1924 CE
- Nationality: Russian
- Roles: revolutionary_leader, head_of_state, ideologue
