Give me four years to teach the children and
the seed I have sown will never be uprooted. – Lenin
[PHOTO SOURCE: https://twitter.com/al_gorelioni/status/664945115442507776] |
Give me just one generation of youth, and I'll
transform the whole world. – Lenin
[PHOTO SOURCE: http://www.azquotes.com/quote/370514]
|
AUTHOR: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin
(22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21
January 1924), was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician, and political
theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian
Republic from 1917 to 1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative
Socialist Republic from 1918 to 1924, and of the Soviet
Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the
wider Soviet Union became a one-party
communist
state governed by the Russian Communist Party.
Ideologically a Marxist,
he developed political theories known as Leninism.
Born
to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk,
Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his
brother's execution in 1887. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University
for participating in protests against the Russian
Empire's Tsarist regime, he devoted the following years to
a law degree. He moved to Saint
Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour
Party (RSDLP). In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and
exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where 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 ideological split, 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 cause the overthrow of capitalism and its
replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and
established a Provisional Government, he returned
to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks
overthrew the new regime.
Lenin's government was led by the
Bolsheviks—now renamed the Communist Party—with some powers initially also held
by elected soviets. The new government called
elections for the Constituent Assembly and then
abolished it, withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty with the Central
Powers, and granted independence to non-Russian nations under Russian
control. It redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and
large-scale industry. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror,
a violent campaign orchestrated by the state security services;
tens of thousands were killed and others interned in concentration camps.
Anti-Bolshevik armies, established by both right and left-wing groups, were defeated in the Russian
Civil War from 1917 to 1922. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin
promoted economic growth through a mixed economic system. Seeking to promote world
revolution, Lenin's government created the Communist International, waged the Polish–Soviet War, and united Russia with neighbouring
nations to form the Soviet Union in 1922. In increasingly poor health, Lenin
expressed opposition to the growing power of his successor, Joseph
Stalin, before dying at his
Gorki mansion.
Widely
considered one of 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. He became
an ideological figurehead behind Marxism-Leninism
and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A
controversial and highly divisive individual, Lenin is viewed by
Marxist-Leninists as a champion of socialism and the working class, while
critics on both the left and right see him as the founder of a totalitarian
dictatorship responsible for mass human rights abuses.
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