BIOGRAPHY OF LENIN AND RUSSIAN REVOLUTION PART - 1

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1 BIOGRAPHY OF LENIN AND RUSSIAN REVOLUTION PART - 1 By SIDDHANT AGNIHOTRI B.Sc (Silver Medalist) M.Sc (Applied Physics) Facebook: sid_educationconnect

2 WHAT WE WILL STUDY? CHILDHOOD OF LENIN THE RISING RUSSIAN REVOLUTION LENINISM

3 CHILDHOOD Lenin was not born, Lenin was constructed. The child who was to become Lenin, Vladimir Il ich Ulyanov, was born on 22 April 1870 in the town of Simbirsk on the Volga. He was the fourth child of a moderately prosperous, teacher and public official, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov ( ) and his wife Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova ( ). Volodya was a brilliant child and became a passable piano player but gave up when he was ten years old. The children themselves were successful learners and the Ulyanov sisters, Maria, Anna and Olga, were also intelligent and accomplished. Like Alexander, Volodya shone at school. At the end of his secondary school he was given a glowing report by his headmaster and achieved top marks in almost all his subjects.

4 CONSTRUCTION(Young Revolutionary) The question was: could Russia bypass capitalism and go straight to the construction of a socialist society?marxism was very much established untill then. It was not Marx who made the greatest impact on Volodya.The novel What is to be Done? Tales of the New People (1864), written by the academic economist Nikolai Chernyshevsky ( ), had a greater effect. The first key problem was his educational career. As a top student Volodya would have been entitled to walk into the best of universities. However, it took a long struggle for his headmaster, Fyodor Kerensky, to get him admitted to the local university in Kazan.

5 CONSTRUCTION(Young Revolutionary) The young Volodya had received a number of severe jolts. In January 1886 his father had died unexpectedly of a brain haemorrhage. Following that there was Alexander s arrest in March 1887, followed by his execution two months later In 1890 and 1891 the pace of his qualification as a lawyer speeded up. He was granted permission to visit St. Petersburg to take his exams as an external student.in his finals he obtained first place with excellent marks and was awarded a first-class degree in law in January 1892.

6 RISE OF LENIN In December 1895 Lenin and several other Marxist leaders were arrested. Lenin was exiled to Siberia for three years. His fiancée and future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, joined him and supported him tremendously. The wedding duly took place on 22 July For Lenin, peasants were the victims of unremitting repression by landowners and state. They were poor, ignorant and often lived short, brutish lives curtailed by alcohol and domestic violence. In January 1901, for the first time, he used the name Lenin in place of Tulin and Ilyin which he had used most frequently while escaping from the authority.

7 RISE OF LENIN It seems curious that, at this time and Building a unified party was an obvious task. The problem for social democrats in exile was that they had an excess of architects and no bricklayers. Russia, was to produce a Party newspaper. A major split was trheir in the party on the ideology and hence two newspapers came out. Iskra (The Spark) was dominated by Lenin and Martov. The elders produced a less frequently appearing journal Zarya (The Dawn). The compromise did not run smoothly. Party unity and harmony seemed far away. Frequent quarrels and disputes broke out. Such arguments crop up with increasing frequency in he next phase of Lenin s life but none is more crucial than the upcoming debates which led to the fateful split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

8 POLITICAL PROBLEMS 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). Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country's most successful underground publication for 50 years. he published the political pamphlet What Is To Be Done?in 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 went on a hiking holiday in rural Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by the spring, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded the newspaper Vpered(Forward).

9 BLOODY SUNDAY A leading role in this events was played by a priest Father Georgy Gapon.On Sunday, 22 January 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia, when unarmed demonstrators led by Father Georgy Gapon were fired upon by soldiers of the Imperial Guard as they marched towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia. In 1904 Russia went to war with Japan. The conflict had a profound impact on Russian society. After a number of defeats put a strain on the country s domestic budget, citizens from all walks of life began to vocalize their discontent over the country s political structure and called for reform. The situation was heightened on January 9, 1905, when a group of unarmed workers in St. Petersburg took their concerns directly to the city s palace to submit a petition to Emperor Nicholas II. They were met by security forces, who fired on the group, killing and wounding hundreds. The crisis set the stage for what would be called the Russian Revolution of 1905.

10 I was not going to follow the beaten track, come what may; I was going to lead a life conducive to my spiritual welfare and the uplift of humanity; I was going to make a profound study of philosophy so that I could solve the fundamental problems of life ; in practical life I was going to emulate Ramakrishna and Vivekananda as far as possible and, in any case, I was not going in for a worldly career. This was the outlook with which I faced a new chapter in my life. TO BE CONTD

11 BIOGRAPHY OF LENIN AND RUSSIAN REVOLUTION PART - 2 By SIDDHANT AGNIHOTRI B.Sc (Silver Medalist) M.Sc (Applied Physics) Facebook: sid_educationconnect

12 ROLE IN THE WORLD WAR 1 Lenin was in Galicia when the First World War broke out. During World War I Lenin went into exile again, this time taking up residence in Switzerland. As always, his mind stayed focus on revolutionary politics. During this period he wrote and published Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). He attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across 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.

13 RUSSIAN REVOLUTION BEGINS In February 1917, the February Revolution broke out in St. Petersburg renamed Petrograd at the beginning of the First World War as industrial workers went on strike over food shortages and deteriorating factory conditions. A tired, hungry and war-weary Russia deposed the tsars. Lenin quickly returned home and, perhaps sensing his own path to power, quickly denounced the country s newly formed Provisional Government. In late 1917 Lenin led what was soon to be known as the October Revolution.Three years of civil war followed. The Lenin-led Soviet government faced incredible odds. The anti-soviet forces, or Whites fought desperately to overthrow Lenin s Red regime.

14 LEADER In November 1917, Lenin issued the Decree on Workers' Control, which called on the workers of each enterprise to establish an elected committee to monitor their enterprise's management.that month they also issued an order requisitioning the country's gold, and nationalised the banks, which Lenin saw as a major step toward socialism. In 1921, Lenin now faced the same kind of peasant uprising he d ridden to power. Widespread strikes in cities and in rural sections of the country broke out, threatening the stability of Lenin s government.

15 ECONOMIC POLICY In October 1917, Lenin issued a decree limiting work for everyone in Russia to eight hours per day. He also issued the Decree on Popular Education that stipulated that the government would guarantee free, secular education for all children in Russia. In April 1918, it nationalised foreign trade, establishing a state monopoly on imports and exports. In June 1918, it decreed nationalisation of public utilities, railways, engineering, textiles, metallurgy, and mining, although often these were state-owned in name only.full-scale nationalisation did not take place until November 1920, when small-scale industrial enterprises were brought under state control December, Sovnarkom established a Supreme Council of the National Economy (VSNKh), which had authority over industry, banking, agriculture, and trade A faction of the Bolsheviks known as the "Left Communists" criticised Sovnarkom's economic policy

16 LATER YEARS Lenin expected Russia's aristocracy and bourgeoisie to oppose his government, but he believed that the numerical superiority of the lower classes, coupled with the Bolsheviks' ability to effectively organise them, guaranteed a swift victory in any conflict. During Russia's Civil War, the Red Army was sent into the newly independent national republics on Russia's borders to aid Marxists there in establishing soviet systems of government. In Europe, this resulted in the creation of new communistled states in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, all of which were officially independent of Russia. The Treaty along with the Declaration of the Creation of the USSR was approved on December 29, 1922

17 LENINISM According to his Marxist perspective, humanity would eventually reach pure communism, becoming a stateless, classless, egalitarian society of workers who were free from exploitation and alienation, controlled their own destiny, and abided by the rule "from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs". Lenin's Marxist beliefs led him to the view that society could not transform directly from its present state to communism, but must first enter a period of socialism, and so his main concern was how to convert Russia into a socialist society. To do so, he believed that a "dictatorship of the proletariat" was necessary to suppress the bourgeoisie and develop a socialist economy. He defined socialism as "an order of civilized co-operators in which the means of production are socially owned.

18 DEATH Lenin suffered a stroke in May 1922, and then a second one in December of that year. With his health in obvious decline, Lenin turned his thoughts to how the newly formed USSR would be governed after he was gone. In early 1923 he issued what came to be called as his Testament, in which a regretful Lenin expressed remorse over the dictatorial power that dominated Soviet government. He was particularly disappointed with Joseph Stalin, the general secretary of the Communist Party, who had begun to amass great power. On March 10, 1923, Lenin s health was dealt another severe blow when he suffered an additional stroke, this one taking away his ability to speak and concluding his political work. Nearly 10 months later, on January 21, 1924 he passed away in the village now known as Gorki Leninskiye. In a testament to his standing in Russian society, his corpse was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum on Moscow s Red Square.

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