Leninism is a political theory and practice of the dictatorship of the proletariat, led by a revolutionary vanguard party. Developed by and named after Russian revolutionary and politician Vladimir Lenin, Leninism comprises political and socialist economic theories, developed from Marxism, and Lenin's interpretations of Marxist theory within the agrarian Russian Empire of the early 20th century. Leninism reversed Marx’s order of economics over politics, allowing for a political revolution led by a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries rather than a spontaneous uprising of the working class as predicted by Karl Marx. After the October Revolution of 1917, Leninism was the ideological basis of Soviet socialism, specifically its Russian realisation in the Soviet Union.

As a political-science term Leninism entered common usage in 1922, only after infirmity ended Lenin’s participation in governing the USSR. Two years later, in July 1924, at the fifth congress of the Communist International (Comintern), Grigory Zinoviev popularized Leninism as a Marxist ideological term denoting “revolutionary”.

After the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics was established in 1922, its governing philosophy, Leninism, became the predominant branch of Marxism. In Russia, the theoretical descendants of Leninism are Stalinism and Trotskyism; at his death in 1924, Lenin’s revolutionary comrades, Joseph Stalin and Leon Trotsky, were the leaders of the strongest ideological factions that emerged to assume command of the Communist Party in the USSR.

Ideologically, the Stalinists and the Trotskyists (like their namesakes), deny the philosophic and political legitimacy of the other, because each claims to be the true Leninist theory.

Overview

, 1920.]] The Communist Manifesto (1848) established that a communist revolution would occur only under specific conditions — including the pre-condition of an economically-exhausted industrialized nation. Because Imperial Russia did not possess most of the requisite pre-revolutionary conditions (i.e. nationalism, irredentism, class warfare), Lenin adapted Marx’s urban revolution to Russia’s agricultural conditions, sparking the “revolutionary nationalism of the poor”.

The pamphlet What is to be Done? (1902), proposed that the (urban) proletariat can successfully achieve revolutionary consciousness only under the leadership of a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries — who can achieve aims only with internal democratic centralism in the party; tactical and ideological policy decisions are agreed via democracy, and every member must support and promote the agreed party policy.

To wit, capitalism can be overthrown only with revolution — because attempts to reform capitalism from within (Fabianism) and from without (democratic socialism) will fail because of its inherent contradictions. The purpose of a Leninist revolutionary vanguard party is the forceful deposition of the incumbent government; assume power (as agent of the proletariat) and establish a dictatorship of the proletariat government. Moreover, as the government, the vanguard party must educate the proletariat — to dispel the societal false consciousness of religion and nationalism that are culturally instilled by the bourgeoisie in facilitating exploitation. The dictatorship of the proletariat is governed with a de-centralized direct democracy practised via soviets (councils) where the workers exercise political power (cf. soviet democracy); the fifth chapter of State & Revolution, describes it:

“. . . the dictatorship of the proletariat — i.e. the organisation of the vanguard of the oppressed as the ruling class for the purpose of crushing the oppressors. . . . An immense expansion of democracy, which for the first time becomes democracy for the poor, democracy for the people, and not democracy for the rich: . . . and suppression by force, i.e. exclusion from democracy, for the exploiters and oppressors of the people — this is the change which democracy undergoes during the transition from capitalism to communism.”

The Bolshevik government was hostile to nationalism, especially to Russian nationalism, the “Great Russian chauvinism”, as an obstacle to establishing the proletarian dictatorship. The revolutionary elements of Leninism — the disciplined vanguard party, a dictatorial state, and class war — are the influences of the anarchist Sergey Nechayev and the nineteenth century Narodnik (“People”) movement (of whom Alexandr Ulyanov, Lenin’s elder brother, was a member), thus “the morals of the Bolshevik party owed as much to Nechayev as they did to Marx”; hence his social class qualifications of the kulaks and the bourgeoisie as “parasites”, “insects”, “leeches”, “bloodsuckers”, — ideologic considerations present in Leninism, but not in Marxism.

Composed for revolutionary praxis, Leninism is neither rigorously proper philosophy nor discrete political theory; it required the Hungarian intellectual György Lukács (1885–1971) to logically develop Lenin’s ideas, notably in the anthology History and Class Consciousness (1923) which established a more philosophically rigorous basis for Leninism, than did Lenin, himself — thus illustrating Lenin’s prescient 1915 revolutionary dictum: “One cannot be a revolutionary Social–Democrat without participating, according to one’s powers, in developing this theory [Marxism], and adapting it to changed conditions.”

In 1924 , Lukács published the monograph (1924), and in 1925, a critical review of The ABC of Communism (1920), Nikolai Bukharin’s popular communist catechism explaining historical materialism to the semi-literate peoples of the (old) Tsarist Empire. The critique discusses reification (Ger. Verdinglichung, Versachlichung “objectification”), the philosophic concept wherein the commodified nature of a capitalist society, renders social relations into things; action and condition which then preclude the proletariat’s developing the social and intellectual perceptions required for the spontaneous emergence of class consciousness. In the event, in such a political context arises the need for the revolutionary leadership of the Leninist vanguard party — the subjective aspect of the re-invigorated Marxist dialectics.

Imperialism

In Lenin’s developing Marxism for Russian application, Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) explains a development which Marx predicted: capitalism’s becoming a global system wherein advanced capitalist industrial nations export financial capital to colonial countries to exploit their resources and labour. This superexploitation of poorer countries allows the capitalist countries to maintain some homeland workers politically content with a slightly-higher standard of living, and so ensure peaceful labour-capital relations, (cf. labor aristocracy, globalization). Hence, a proletarian revolution could not occur in the developed capitalist countries while the imperialist global system was intact; thus an under-developed country would feature the first proletarian revolution, and Imperial Russia was the weakest country in the capitalist global system. In the early twentieth century, Russia’s economy was primarily agrarian, effected with peasant and animal labour; under-developed when compared to industrialized Western Europe and North America.

Workers of the world, unite!: in 1915, he wrote, “Uneven economic and political development is an absolute law of capitalism. Hence the victory of socialism is possible, first in several, or even in one capitalist country taken separately. The victorious proletariat of that country, having expropriated the capitalists and organised its own socialist production, would stand up against the rest of the world, the capitalist world.”

On 14 May 1918, after the Bolshevik Revolution, in a speech to a joint meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Moscow Soviet, Lenin declared: ”I know that there are, of course, sages who think they are very clever, and even call themselves ‘Socialists’, who assert that power should not have been seized until the revolution had broken out in all countries. They do not suspect, that by speaking in this way, they are deserting the revolution, and going over to the side of the bourgeoisie. To wait until the toiling classes bring about a revolution on an international scale means that everybody should stand stock-still in expectation. That is nonsense.”

Successors

At Lenin’s death, Josef Stalin and Leon Trotsky fought for the leadership of the Communist Party, the USSR, and Communist world politics. In 1924, Stalin proposed the thesis of Socialism in One Country — that the USSR should domestically build socialism, while supporting revolutionary governments worldwide. Trotsky countered that socialism in one country was impossible, and that the USSR should have supported revolution in developed countries. Stalin and cohort labelled that counter-argument as Trotskyism, to connote that Socialism in One Country was the theoretic continuation of Leninism. Later, Stalinist proponents called it Marxism-Leninism, and opponents called it Stalinism; in the event, Stalin’s theory was adopted and became state policy, and Leon Trotsky was expelled from the USSR.

In the Republic of China, the Kuomintang party was organized as a Leninist party, although its ideology was extremely anti-communist and right-wing.

In the People's Republic of China, the Communist Party of China is organised as a Leninist revolutionary vanguard party, based upon Maoism (Mao Zedong Thought), the Chinese Communist development of Marxism-Leninism, and the theoretical basis of many third world revolutionary movements.

Contemporary Leninists see globalization as the continuation of imperialism, wherein developed-country capitalists exploit the working class of under-developed and developed countries with low wages, long workdays, and intensive working conditions.

See also

Marxism-Leninism

He who does not work neither shall he eat

An equal amount of products for an equal amount of labor

Lenin's national policy

New Economic Policy

Democratic centralism

Anti-Leninism

Marxism

The Communist Manifesto

Notes

Further reading

Paul Blackledge.What was Done an extended review of Lars Lih's Lenin Rediscovered from International Socialism

Marcel Liebman. Leninism Under Lenin. The Merlin Press. 1980. ISBN 0-85036-261-X

Roy Medvedev. Leninism and Western Socialism. Verso Books. 1981. ISBN 0-86091-739-8

Neil Harding. Leninism. Duke University Press. 1996. ISBN 0-8223-1867-9

Joseph Stalin. Foundations of Leninism. University Press of the Pacific. 2001. ISBN 0-89875-212-4

CLR James. Notes on Dialectics: Hegel, Marx, Lenin. Pluto Press. 2005. ISBN 0-7453-2491-6

Edmund Wilson. To the Finland Station: A Study in the Writing and Acting of History. Phoenix Press. 2004. ISBN 0-7538-1800-0

Non-Leninist Marxism: Writings on the Workers Councils (texts by Gorter, Pannekoek, Pankhurst and Rühle), Red and Black Publishers, St Petersburg, Florida, 2007. ISBN 978-0-9791813-6-8

Paul Le Blanc. Lenin and the Revolutionary Party. Humanities Press International, Inc. 1990. ISBN 0-391-03604-1.

A. James Gregor. The Faces of Janus. Yale University Press. 2000. ISBN 0-300-10602-5.

External links

Works by Vladimir Lenin:

What is to be Done?

Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism

The State and Revolution

The Lenin Archive at Marxists.org

First Conference of the Communist International

Other links:

Marcel Liebman on Lenin and democracy

An excerpt on Leninism and State Capitalism from the work of Noam Chomsky

Organizational Questions of the Russian Social Democracy by Rosa Luxemburg

LENIN'S PHILOSOPHY by Karl Korsch

Cyber Leninism

Leninist Ebooks

Lenin as a Philosopher by Anton Pannekoek

The Lenin Legend by Paul Mattick

Dead Labor: Marx and Lenin Reconsidered by Paul Craig Roberts

Category:Marxism Category:Modernism Category:Theories of history Category:Vladimir Lenin Category:Political philosophy by politician

Region	Western Philosophy
Era	20th / 21st-century philosophy
Color	#B0C4DE
Name	Avram Noam Chomsky
Image name	Chomsky.jpg
Caption	Noam Chomsky visiting Vancouver, Canada in 2004
Birth date	December 07, 1928
Birth place	Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania (BA 1949, MA 1951, Ph.D 1955)
School tradition	Generative linguistics, Analytic philosophy
Main interests	Linguistics PsychologyPhilosophy of languagePhilosophy of mind Politics Ethics
Alma mater	University of Pennsylvania
Religion	Atheist
Notable ideas	Generative grammar, universal grammar, transformational grammar, government and binding, X-bar theory, Chomsky hierarchy, context-free grammar, principles and parameters, Minimalist program, language acquisition device, poverty of the stimulus, Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem, Chomsky Normal Form, propaganda model
Influences	Pāṇini, Bertrand Russell, Ludwig Wittgenstein, John Dewey, Mikhail Bakunin, Karl Marx, Wilhelm von Humboldt, Adam Smith, Zellig Harris, Rudolf Rocker, Immanuel Kant, René Descartes, George Orwell, C. West Churchman, Alan Turing, W.V.O. Quine
Influenced	Niall McLaren, Colin McGinn, Edward Said, Christopher Hitchens, Steven Pinker, Peter Ludlow, Tanya Reinhart, Morris Halle, Gilbert Harman, Jerry Fodor, Howard Lasnik, Robert Fisk, Neil Smith, Ray Jackendoff, Norbert Hornstein, Jean Bricmont, Marc Hauser, Norman Finkelstein, Robert Lees, Hugo Chavez, Bill Hicks, Mark Baker, Julian Boyd, Ray C. Dougherty, Derek Bickerton, Amy Goodman, Michael Albert.

Avram Noam Chomsky (; born December 7, 1928), known as Noam Chomsky, is an American linguist, philosopher, cognitive scientist, and political activist. He is an Institute Professor and professor emeritus of linguistics at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Chomsky is well known in the academic and scientific community as one of the fathers of modern linguistics, and a major figure of analytic philosophy. referring to himself as a libertarian socialist. Chomsky is the author of more than 150 books and has received worldwide attention for his views, despite being typically absent from the mainstream media.

In the 1950s, Chomsky began developing his theory of generative grammar, which has undergone numerous revisions and has had a profound influence on linguistics. His approach to the study of language emphasizes "an innate set of linguistic principles shared by all humans" known as universal grammar, "the initial state of the language learner," and discovering an "account for linguistic variation via the most general possible mechanisms." He elaborated on these ideas in 1957's Syntactic Structures, which then laid the groundwork for the concept of transformational grammar. He also established the Chomsky hierarchy, a classification of formal languages in terms of their generative power. In 1959, Chomsky published a widely influential review of B. F. Skinner's theoretical book Verbal Behavior. In this review and other writings, Chomsky broadly and aggressively challenged the behaviorist approaches to studies of behavior and language dominant at the time, and contributed to the cognitive revolution in psychology. His naturalistic approach to the study of language has influenced the philosophy of language and mind. and a libertarian socialist, principles he regards as grounded in the Age of Enlightenment and as "the proper and natural extension of classical liberalism into the era of advanced industrial society."

Chomsky's social criticism has also included (1988), co-written with Edward S. Herman, an analysis articulating the propaganda model theory for examining the media.

According to the Arts and Humanities Citation Index in 1992, Chomsky was cited as a source more often than any other living scholar from 1980 to 1992. He is also the eighth most cited source of all time, and is considered the "most cited living author". He is also considered a prominent cultural figure, while his status as a leading critic of U.S. foreign policy has made him controversial.

Life and career

at MIT, in which Chomsky holds his office in the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy.]] Chomsky was born on the morning of December 7, 1928 to Jewish parents in the affluent East Oak Lane neighborhood of Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, the son of noted professor of Hebrew at Gratz College and IWW (Industrial Workers of the World) member William Chomsky (1896–1977), a native of Ukraine. His mother, Elsie Chomsky (née Simonofsky), a native of what is present-day Belarus, grew up in the United States and, unlike her husband, spoke "ordinary New York English." Chomsky's parents' first language was Yiddish, but Chomsky said it was "taboo" in his family to speak it. Chomsky was also influenced by being a part of a Hebrew-based, Zionist organization as well as hanging around anarchist bookstores. Chomsky also describes tensions he personally experienced with Irish Catholics and German Catholics and anti-semitism in the mid-1930s. He recalls "beer parties" celebrating the fall of Paris to the Nazis.

Chomsky remembers the first article he wrote was at age 10 while a student at Oak Lane Country Day School about the threat of the spread of fascism, following the fall of Barcelona in the Spanish Civil War. From the age of 12 or 13, he identified more fully with anarchist politics.

A graduate of Central High School of Philadelphia, Chomsky began studying philosophy and linguistics at the University of Pennsylvania in 1945, taking classes with philosophers such as C. West Churchman and Nelson Goodman and linguist Zellig Harris. Harris's teaching included his discovery of transformations as a mathematical analysis of language structure (mappings from one subset to another in the set of sentences). Chomsky referred to the morphophonemic rules in his 1951 Master's Thesis, The Morphophonemics of Modern Hebrew, as transformations in the sense of Carnap's 1938 notion of rules of transformation (vs. rules of formation), and subsequently reinterpreted the notion of grammatical transformations in a very different way from Harris, as operations on the productions of a context-free grammar (derived from Post production systems). Harris's political views were instrumental in shaping those of Chomsky. Chomsky earned a BA in 1949 and an MA in 1951.

In 1949, he married linguist Carol Schatz. They remained married for 59 years until her death from cancer in December 2008. The couple had two daughters, Aviva (b. 1957) and Diane (b. 1960), and a son, Harry (b. 1967). With his wife Carol, Chomsky spent time in 1953 living in HaZore'a, a kibbutz in Israel. Asked in an interview whether the stay was "a disappointment" Chomsky replied, "No, I loved it," however he "couldn't stand the ideological atmosphere" and "fervent nationalism" in the early 1950s at the kibbutz, with Stalin being defended by many of the left-leaning kibbutz members who chose to paint a rosy image of future possibilities and contemporary realities in the USSR. Chomsky notes seeing many positive elements in the commune-like living of the kibbutz, in which parents and children lived in rooms of separate houses together, and when asked whether there were "lessons that we have learned from the history of the kibbutz," responded, that in "some respects, the Kibbutzim came closer to the anarchist ideal than any other attempt that lasted for more than a very brief moment before destruction, or that was on anything like a similar scale. In these respects, I think they were extremely attractive and successful; apart from personal accident, I probably would have lived there myself – for how long, it's hard to guess."

Chomsky received his PhD in linguistics from the University of Pennsylvania in 1955. He conducted part of his doctoral research during four years at Harvard University as a Harvard Junior Fellow. In his doctoral thesis, he began to develop some of his linguistic ideas, elaborating on them in his 1957 book Syntactic Structures, one of his best-known works in linguistics.

Chomsky joined the staff of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in 1955 and in 1961 was appointed full professor in the Department of Modern Languages and Linguistics (now the Department of Linguistics and Philosophy). From 1966 to 1976 he held the Ferrari P. Ward Professorship of Modern Languages and Linguistics, and in 1976 he was appointed Institute Professor. As of 2010, Chomsky has taught at MIT continuously for 55 years.

In February 1967, Chomsky became one of the leading opponents of the Vietnam War with the publication of his essay, "The Responsibility of Intellectuals", in The New York Review of Books. This was followed by his 1969 book, American Power and the New Mandarins, a collection of essays that established him at the forefront of American dissent. His far-reaching criticisms of U.S. foreign policy and the legitimacy of U.S. power have made him a controversial figure: largely shunned by the mainstream media in the United States, he is frequently sought out for his views by publications and news outlets internationally. In 1977 he delivered the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden, The Netherlands, under the title: Intellectuals and the State.

Chomsky has received death threats because of his criticisms of U.S. foreign policy. He was also on a list of planned targets created by Theodore Kaczynski, better known as the Unabomber; during the period that Kaczynski was at large, Chomsky had all of his mail checked for explosives.

The Principles and Parameters approach (P&P;)—developed in his Pisa 1979 Lectures, later published as (LGB)—makes strong claims regarding universal grammar: that the grammatical principles underlying languages are innate and fixed, and the differences among the world's languages can be characterized in terms of parameter settings in the brain (such as the pro-drop parameter, which indicates whether an explicit subject is always required, as in English, or can be optionally dropped, as in Spanish), which are often likened to switches. (Hence the term principles and parameters, often given to this approach.) In this view, a child learning a language need only acquire the necessary lexical items (words, grammatical morphemes, and idioms), and determine the appropriate parameter settings, which can be done based on a few key examples.

Proponents of this view argue that the pace at which children learn languages is inexplicably rapid, unless children have an innate ability to learn languages. The similar steps followed by children all across the world when learning languages, and the fact that children make certain characteristic errors as they learn their first language, whereas other seemingly logical kinds of errors never occur (and, according to Chomsky, should be attested if a purely general, rather than language-specific, learning mechanism were being employed), are also pointed to as motivation for innateness.

More recently, in his Minimalist Program (1995), while retaining the core concept of "principles and parameters," Chomsky attempts a major overhaul of the linguistic machinery involved in the LGB model, stripping from it all but the barest necessary elements, while advocating a general approach to the architecture of the human language faculty that emphasizes principles of economy and optimal design, reverting to a derivational approach to generation, in contrast with the largely representational approach of classic P&P.;

Chomsky's ideas have had a strong influence on researchers of the language acquisition in children, though many researchers in this area such as Elizabeth Bates and Michael Tomasello argue very strongly against Chomsky's theories, and instead advocate emergentist or connectionist theories, explaining language with a number of general processing mechanisms in the brain that interact with the extensive and complex social environment in which language is used and learned.

His best-known work in phonology is The Sound Pattern of English (1968), written with Morris Halle (and often known as simply SPE). This work has had a great significance for the development in the field. While phonological theory has since moved beyond "SPE phonology" in many important respects, the SPE system is considered the precursor of some of the most influential phonological theories today, including autosegmental phonology, lexical phonology and optimality theory. Chomsky no longer publishes on phonology.

Generative grammar

The Chomskyan approach towards syntax, often termed generative grammar, studies grammar as a body of knowledge possessed by language users. Since the 1960s, Chomsky has maintained that much of this knowledge is innate, implying that children need only learn certain parochial features of their native languages. The innate body of linguistic knowledge is often termed Universal Grammar. From Chomsky's perspective, the strongest evidence for the existence of Universal Grammar is simply the fact that children successfully acquire their native languages in so little time. Furthermore, he argues that there is an enormous gap between the linguistic stimuli to which children are exposed and the rich linguistic knowledge they attain (the "poverty of the stimulus" argument). The knowledge of Universal Grammar would serve to bridge that gap.

Chomsky's theories have been immensely influential within linguistics, but they have also received criticism. One recurring criticism of the Chomskyan variety of generative grammar is that it is Anglocentric and Eurocentric, and that often linguists working in this tradition have a tendency to base claims about Universal Grammar on a very small sample of languages, sometimes just one. Initially, the Eurocentrism was exhibited in an overemphasis on the study of English. However, hundreds of different languages have now received at least some attention within Chomskyan linguistic analyses. In spite of the diversity of languages that have been characterized by UG derivations, critics continue to argue that the formalisms within Chomskyan linguistics are Anglocentric and misrepresent the properties of languages that are different from English. Thus, Chomsky's approach has been criticized as a form of linguistic imperialism. In addition, Chomskyan linguists rely heavily on the intuitions of native speakers regarding which sentences of their languages are well-formed. This practice has been criticized on general methodological grounds. Some psychologists and psycholinguists, though sympathetic to Chomsky's overall program, have argued that Chomskyan linguists pay insufficient attention to experimental data from language processing, with the consequence that their theories are not psychologically plausible. Other critics (see language learning) have questioned whether it is necessary to posit Universal Grammar to explain child language acquisition, arguing that domain-general learning mechanisms are sufficient.

Today there are many different branches of generative grammar; one can view grammatical frameworks such as head-driven phrase structure grammar, lexical functional grammar and combinatory categorial grammar as broadly Chomskyan and generative in orientation, but with significant differences in execution.

Chomsky hierarchy

Chomsky is famous for investigating various kinds of formal languages and whether or not they might be capable of capturing key properties of human language. His Chomsky hierarchy partitions formal grammars into classes, or groups, with increasing expressive power, i.e., each successive class can generate a broader set of formal languages than the one before. Interestingly, Chomsky argues that modeling some aspects of human language requires a more complex formal grammar (as measured by the Chomsky hierarchy) than modeling others. For example, while a regular language is powerful enough to model English morphology, it is not powerful enough to model English syntax. In addition to being relevant in linguistics, the Chomsky hierarchy has also become important in computer science (especially in compiler construction and automata theory).

Contributions to psychology

Chomsky's work in linguistics has had profound implications for modern psychology. For Chomsky, linguistics is a branch of cognitive psychology; genuine insights in linguistics imply concomitant understandings of aspects of mental processing and human nature. His theory of a universal grammar was seen by many as a direct challenge to the established behaviorist theories of the time and had major consequences for understanding how children learn language and what, exactly, the ability to use language is.

In 1959, Chomsky published an influential critique of B.F. Skinner's Verbal Behavior, a book in which Skinner offered a theoretical account of language in functional, behavioral terms. He defined "Verbal Behavior" as learned behavior that has characteristic consequences delivered through the learned behavior of others. This makes for a view of communicative behaviors much larger than that usually addressed by linguists. Skinner's approach focused on the circumstances in which language was used; for example, asking for water was functionally a different response than labeling something as water, responding to someone asking for water, etc. These functionally different kinds of responses, which required in turn separate explanations, sharply contrasted both with traditional notions of language and Chomsky's psycholinguistic approach. Chomsky thought that a functionalist explanation restricting itself to questions of communicative performance ignored important questions. (Chomsky—Language and Mind, 1968). He focused on questions concerning the operation and development of innate structures for syntax capable of creatively organizing, cohering, adapting and combining words and phrases into intelligible utterances.

In the review Chomsky emphasized that the scientific application of behavioral principles from animal research is severely lacking in explanatory adequacy and is furthermore particularly superficial as an account of human verbal behavior because a theory restricting itself to external conditions, to "what is learned," cannot adequately account for generative grammar. Chomsky raised the examples of rapid language acquisition of children, including their quickly developing ability to form grammatical sentences, and the universally creative language use of competent native speakers to highlight the ways in which Skinner's view exemplified under-determination of theory by evidence. He argued that to understand human verbal behavior such as the creative aspects of language use and language development, one must first postulate a genetic linguistic endowment. The assumption that important aspects of language are the product of universal innate ability runs counter to Skinner's radical behaviorism.

Chomsky's 1959 review has drawn fire from a number of critics, the most famous criticism being that of Kenneth MacCorquodale's 1970 paper On Chomsky’s Review of Skinner’s Verbal Behavior (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 13, pages 83–99). MacCorquodale's argument was updated and expanded in important respects by Nathan Stemmer in a 1990 paper, Skinner's Verbal Behavior, Chomsky's review, and mentalism (Journal of the Experimental Analysis of Behavior, volume 54, pages 307–319). These and similar critiques have raised certain points not generally acknowledged outside of behavioral psychology, such as the claim that Chomsky did not possess an adequate understanding of either behavioral psychology in general, or the differences between Skinner's behaviorism and other varieties. Consequently, it is argued that he made several serious errors. On account of these perceived problems, the critics maintain that the review failed to demonstrate what it has often been cited as doing. As such, it is averred that those most influenced by Chomsky's paper probably either already substantially agreed with Chomsky or never actually read it. The review has been further critiqued for misrepresenting the work of Skinner and others, including by quoting out of context. Chomsky has maintained that the review was directed at the way Skinner's variant of behavioral psychology "was being used in Quinean empiricism and naturalization of philosophy."

It has been claimed that Chomsky's critique of Skinner's methodology and basic assumptions paved the way for the "cognitive revolution", the shift in American psychology between the 1950s through the 1970s from being primarily behavioral to being primarily cognitive. In his 1966 Cartesian Linguistics and subsequent works, Chomsky laid out an explanation of human language faculties that has become the model for investigation in some areas of psychology. Much of the present conception of how the mind works draws directly from ideas that found their first persuasive author of modern times in Chomsky.

There are three key ideas. First is that the mind is "cognitive," or that the mind actually contains mental states, beliefs, doubts, and so on. Second, he argued that most of the important properties of language and mind are innate. The acquisition and development of a language is a result of the unfolding of innate propensities triggered by the experiential input of the external environment. The link between human innate aptitude to language and heredity has been at the core of the debate opposing Noam Chomsky to Jean Piaget at the Abbaye de Royaumont in 1975 (Language and Learning. The Debate between Jean Piaget and Noam Chomsky, Harvard University Press, 1980). Although links between the genetic setup of humans and aptitude to language have been suggested at that time and in later discussions, we are still far from understanding the genetic bases of human language. Work derived from the model of selective stabilization of synapses set up by Jean-Pierre Changeux, Philippe Courrège and Antoine Danchin, and more recently developed experimentally and theoretically by Jacques Mehler and Stanislas Dehaene in particular in the domain of numerical cognition lend support to the Chomskyan "nativism". It does not, however, provide clues about the type of rules that would organize neuronal connections to permit language competence. Subsequent psychologists have extended this general "nativist" thesis beyond language. Lastly, Chomsky made the concept of "modularity" a critical feature of the mind's cognitive architecture. The mind is composed of an array of interacting, specialized subsystems with limited flows of inter-communication. This model contrasts sharply with the old idea that any piece of information in the mind could be accessed by any other cognitive process (optical illusions, for example, cannot be "turned off" even when they are known to be illusions).

Approach to science

Chomsky sees science as a straightforward search for explanation, and rejects the views of it as a catalog of facts or mechanical explanations. In this light, the majority of his contributions to science have been frameworks and hypotheses, rather than "discoveries."

As such, he considers certain so-called post-structuralist or postmodern critiques of logic and reason to be nonsensical:

I have spent a lot of my life working on questions such as these, using the only methods I know of; those condemned here as "science", "rationality," "logic," and so on. I therefore read the papers with some hope that they would help me "transcend" these limitations, or perhaps suggest an entirely different course. I'm afraid I was disappointed. Admittedly, that may be my own limitation. Quite regularly, "my eyes glaze over" when I read polysyllabic discourse on the themes of poststructuralism and postmodernism; what I understand is largely truism or error, but that is only a fraction of the total word count. True, there are lots of other things I don't understand: the articles in the current issues of math and physics journals, for example. But there is a difference. In the latter case, I know how to get to understand them, and have done so, in cases of particular interest to me; and I also know that people in these fields can explain the contents to me at my level, so that I can gain what (partial) understanding I may want. In contrast, no one seems to be able to explain to me why the latest post-this-and-that is (for the most part) other than truism, error, or gibberish, and I do not know how to proceed.

Although Chomsky believes that a scientific background is important to teach proper reasoning, he holds that science in general is "inadequate" to understand complicated problems like human affairs:

Science talks about very simple things, and asks hard questions about them. As soon as things become too complex, science can’t deal with them... But it’s a complicated matter: Science studies what’s at the edge of understanding, and what’s at the edge of understanding is usually fairly simple. And it rarely reaches human affairs. Human affairs are way too complicated.

Debates

Chomsky has been known to vigorously defend and debate his views and opinions, in philosophy, linguistics, and politics. Michel Foucault, William F. Buckley, Jr., Christopher Hitchens, Richard Perle, Hilary Putnam, Willard Quine, and Alan Dershowitz, to name a few. In response to his speaking style being criticized as boring, Chomsky said that "I'm a boring speaker and I like it that way…. I doubt that people are attracted to whatever the persona is…. People are interested in the issues, and they're interested in the issues because they are important." "We don't want to be swayed by superficial eloquence, by emotion and so on."

Political views

(Porto Alegre) in 2003.]] Chomsky has stated that his "personal visions are fairly traditional anarchist ones, with origins in The Enlightenment and classical liberalism" He calls himself an anarcho-syndicalist He published a book on anarchism titled Chomsky on Anarchism, published by the anarchist book collective AK Press in 2006.

Chomsky has engaged in political activism all of his adult life and expressed opinions on politics and world events, which are widely cited, publicized and discussed. Chomsky has in turn argued that his views are those the powerful do not want to hear and for this reason he is considered an American political dissident.

Chomsky asserts that power, unless justified is inherently illegitimate and that the burden of proof is on those in authority. If this burden can't be met, the authority in question should be dismantled and authority for its own sake is inherently unjustified. An example given by Chomsky of a legitimate authority is that exerted by an adult to prevent a young child from wandering into traffic. He contends that there is no difference between slavery and renting one's self to an owner or "wage slavery". He feels that it is an attack on personal integrity that undermines individual freedom. He holds that workers should own and control their workplace, a view held (as he notes) by the Lowell Mill Girls.

Chomsky has strongly criticized the foreign policy of the United States. He claims double standards in a foreign policy preaching democracy and freedom for all while allying itself with non-democratic and repressive organizations and states such as Chile under Augusto Pinochet and argues that this results in massive human rights violations. He often argues that America's intervention in foreign nations, including the secret aid given to the Contras in Nicaragua, an event of which he has been very critical, fits any standard description of terrorism, including "official definitions in the US Code and Army Manuals in the early 1980s." Before its collapse, Chomsky also condemned Soviet imperialism; for example in 1986 during a question/answer following a lecture he gave at Universidad Centroamericana in Nicaragua, when challenged about how he could "talk about North American imperialism and Russian imperialism in the same breath," Chomsky responded: "One of the truths about the world is that there are two superpowers, one a huge power which happens to have its boot on your neck; another, a smaller power which happens to have its boot on other people's necks. I think that anyone in the Third World would be making a grave error if they succumbed to illusions about these matters."

He has argued that the mass media in the United States largely serve as a propaganda arm and "bought priesthood" of the U.S. government and U.S. corporations, with the three parties intertwined through common interests. In a famous reference to Walter Lippmann, Chomsky along with his coauthor Edward S. Herman has written that the American media manufactures consent among the public. Chomsky has condemned the 2010 supreme court ruling revoking the limits on campaign finance, calling it "corporate takeover of democracy."

Chomsky opposes the U.S. global "war on drugs", claiming its language is misleading, and refers to it as "the war on certain drugs." He favors drug policy reform, in education and prevention rather than military or police action as a means of reducing drug use. In an interview in 1999, Chomsky argued that, whereas crops such as tobacco receive no mention in governmental exposition, other non-profitable crops, such as marijuana are attacked because of the effect achieved by persecuting the poor: He has stated:

U.S. domestic drug policy does not carry out its stated goals, and policymakers are well aware of that. If it isn't about reducing substance abuse, what is it about? It is reasonably clear, both from current actions and the historical record, that substances tend to be criminalized when they are associated with the so-called dangerous classes, that the criminalization of certain substances is a technique of social control.

Chomsky is critical of the American "state capitalist" system and big business, he describes himself as a socialist, specifically an anarcho-syndicalist and is therefore strongly critical of "authoritarian" Marxist and/or Leninist and/or Maoist branches of socialism. He also believes that socialist values exemplify the rational and morally consistent extension of original unreconstructed classical liberal and radical humanist ideas to an industrial context. He believes that society should be highly organized and based on democratic control of communities and work places. He believes that the radical humanist ideas of his two major influences, Bertrand Russell and John Dewey, were "rooted in the Enlightenment and classical liberalism, and retain their revolutionary character."

Chomsky has stated that he believes the United States remains the "greatest country in the world", a comment that he later clarified by saying, "Evaluating countries is senseless and I would never put things in those terms, but that some of America's advances, particularly in the area of free speech, that have been achieved by centuries of popular struggle, are to be admired." He has also said "In many respects, the United States is the freest country in the world. I don't just mean in terms of limits on state coercion, though that's true too, but also in terms of individual relations. The United States comes closer to classlessness in terms of interpersonal relations than virtually any society."

Chomsky objects to the criticism that anarchism is inconsistent with support for government welfare, stating in part:

One can, of course, take the position that we don't care about the problems people face today, and want to think about a possible tomorrow. OK, but then don't pretend to have any interest in human beings and their fate, and stay in the seminar room and intellectual coffee house with other privileged people. Or one can take a much more humane position: I want to work, today, to build a better society for tomorrow – the classical anarchist position, quite different from the slogans in the question. That's exactly right, and it leads directly to support for the people facing problems today: for enforcement of health and safety regulation, provision of national health insurance, support systems for people who need them, etc. That is not a sufficient condition for organizing for a different and better future, but it is a necessary condition. Anything else will receive the well-merited contempt of people who do not have the luxury to disregard the circumstances in which they live, and try to survive.

Chomsky holds views that can be summarized as anti-war but not strictly pacifist. He prominently opposed the Vietnam War and most other wars in his lifetime. He expressed these views with tax resistance and peace walks. He published a number of articles about the war in Vietnam, including "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". He maintains that U.S. involvement in World War II to defeat the Axis powers was probably justified, with the caveat that a preferable outcome would have been to end or prevent the war through earlier diplomacy. He believes that the dropping of nuclear bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki were "among the most unspeakable crimes in history".

Chomsky has made many criticisms of the Israeli government, its supporters, the United States' support of the government and its treatment of the Palestinian people, arguing that " 'supporters of Israel' are in reality supporters of its moral degeneration and probable ultimate destruction" and that "Israel's very clear choice of expansion over security may well lead to that consequence." Chomsky disagreed with the founding of Israel as a Jewish state, saying, "I don't think a Jewish or Christian or Islamic state is a proper concept. I would object to the United States as a Christian state." Chomsky hesitated before publishing work critical of Israeli policies while his parents were alive, because he "knew it would hurt them" he says, "mostly because of their friends, who reacted hysterically to views like those expressed in my work." On May 16, 2010, Israeli authorities detained Chomsky and ultimately refused his entry to the West Bank via Jordan. A spokesman for the Israeli Prime Minister indicated that the refusal of entry was simply due to a border guard who "overstepped his authority" and a second attempt to enter would likely be allowed. Chomsky disagreed, saying that the Interior Ministry official who interviewed him was taking instructions from his superiors. With reference to the United States diplomatic cables leak, Chomsky suggested that "perhaps the most dramatic revelation ... is the bitter hatred of democracy that is revealed both by the U.S. Government -- Hillary Clinton, others -- and also by the diplomatic service." Chomsky refuses to take legal action against those who may have libeled him and prefers to counter libels through open letters in newspapers. One notable example of this approach is his response to an article by Emma Brockes in The Guardian which alleged he denied the existence of the Srebrenica massacre.

Chomsky has frequently stated that there is no connection between his work in linguistics and his political views and is generally critical of the idea that competent discussion of political topics requires expert knowledge in academic fields. In a 1969 interview, he said regarding the connection between his politics and his work in linguistics:

I still feel myself that there is a kind of tenuous connection. I would not want to overstate it but I think it means something to me at least. I think that anyone's political ideas or their ideas of social organization must be rooted ultimately in some concept of human nature and human needs.

Some critics have accused Chomsky of hypocrisy when, in spite of his political criticism of American and European military imperialism, parts of his linguistic research have been substantially funded by the American military. Chomsky makes the argument that because he has received funding from the U.S. Military, he has an even greater responsibility to criticize and resist its actions.

Influence in other fields

Chomskyan models have been used as a theoretical basis in several other fields. The Chomsky hierarchy is often taught in fundamental computer science courses as it confers insight into the various types of formal languages. This hierarchy can also be discussed in mathematical terms and has generated interest among mathematicians, particularly combinatorialists. Some arguments in evolutionary psychology are derived from his research results.

The 1984 Nobel Prize laureate in Medicine and Physiology, Niels K. Jerne, used Chomsky's generative model to explain the human immune system, equating "components of a generative grammar … with various features of protein structures". The title of Jerne's Stockholm Nobel lecture was "The Generative Grammar of the Immune System".

Nim Chimpsky, a chimpanzee who was the subject of a study in animal language acquisition at Columbia University, was named after Chomsky in reference to his view of language acquisition as a uniquely human ability.

Famous computer scientist Donald Knuth admits to reading Syntactic Structures during his honeymoon and being greatly influenced by it. "…I must admit to taking a copy of Noam Chomsky's Syntactic Structures along with me on my honeymoon in 1961 … Here was a marvelous thing: a mathematical theory of language in which I could use a computer programmer's intuition!".

Another focus of Chomsky's political work has been an analysis of mainstream mass media (especially in the United States), its structures and constraints, and its perceived role in supporting big business and government interests.

Edward S. Herman and Chomsky's book (1988) explores this topic in depth, presenting their "propaganda model" of the news media with numerous detailed case studies demonstrating it. According to this propaganda model, more democratic societies like the U.S. use subtle, non-violent means of control, unlike totalitarian systems, where physical force can readily be used to coerce the general population. In an often-quoted remark, Chomsky states that "propaganda is to a democracy what the bludgeon is to a totalitarian state." (Media Control)

The model attempts to explain this perceived systemic bias of the mass media in terms of structural economic causes rather than a conspiracy of people. It argues the bias derives from five "filters" that all published news must "pass through," which combine to systematically distort news coverage.

In explaining the first filter, ownership, he notes that most major media outlets are owned by large corporations. The second, funding, notes that the outlets derive the majority of their funding from advertising, not readers. Thus, since they are profit-oriented businesses selling a product—readers and audiences—to other businesses (advertisers), the model expects them to publish news that reflects the desires and values of those businesses. In addition, the news media are dependent on government institutions and major businesses with strong biases as sources (the third filter) for much of their information. Flak, the fourth filter, refers to the various pressure groups that attack the media for supposed bias. Norms, the fifth filter, refer to the common conceptions shared by those in the profession of journalism. (Note: in the original text, published in 1988, the fifth filter was "anticommunism". However, with the fall of the Soviet Union, it has been broadened to allow for shifts in public opinion.) The model describes how the media form a decentralized and non-conspiratorial but nonetheless very powerful propaganda system, that is able to mobilize an élite consensus, frame public debate within élite perspectives and at the same time give the appearance of democratic consent.

Chomsky and Herman test their model empirically by picking "paired examples"—pairs of events that were objectively similar except for the alignment of domestic élite interests. They use a number of such examples to attempt to show that in cases where an "official enemy" does something (like murder of a religious official), the press investigates thoroughly and devotes a great amount of coverage to the matter, thus victims of "enemy" states are considered "worthy". But when the domestic government or an ally does the same thing (or worse), the press downplays the story, thus victims of US or US client states are considered "unworthy."

They also test their model against the case that is often held up as the best example of a free and aggressively independent press, the media coverage of the Tet Offensive during the Vietnam War. Even in this case, they argue that the press was behaving subserviently to élite interests.

Academic achievements, awards and honors

In the spring of 1969, he delivered the John Locke Lectures at Oxford University; in January 1970, the Bertrand Russell Memorial Lecture at University of Cambridge; in 1972, the Nehru Memorial Lecture in New Delhi; in 1977, the Huizinga Lecture in Leiden; in 1988 the Massey Lectures at the University of Toronto, titled "Necessary Illusions: Thought Control in Democratic Societies"; in 1997, The Davie Memorial Lecture on Academic Freedom in Cape Town, and many others.

Chomsky has received many honorary degrees from universities around the world, including from the following: {| | valign="top" | |} He is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the National Academy of Sciences, and the American Philosophical Society. In addition, he is a member of other professional and learned societies in the United States and abroad, and is a recipient of the Distinguished Scientific Contribution Award of the American Psychological Association, the Kyoto Prize in Basic Sciences, the Helmholtz Medal, the Dorothy Eldridge Peacemaker Award, the 1999 Benjamin Franklin Medal in Computer and Cognitive Science, and others. He is twice winner of The Orwell Award, granted by The National Council of Teachers of English for "Distinguished Contributions to Honesty and Clarity in Public Language" (in 1987 and 1989).

He is a member of the Serbian Academy of Sciences and Arts in Department of Social Sciences.

Chomsky is a member of the Faculty Advisory Board of MIT Harvard Research Journal.

In 2005, Chomsky received an honorary fellowship from the Literary and Historical Society.

In 2007, Chomsky received The Uppsala University (Sweden) Honorary Doctor's degree in commemoration of Carolus Linnaeus.

In February 2008, he received the President's Medal from the Literary and Debating Society of the National University of Ireland, Galway.

Since 2009 he is honorary member of IAPTI.

In 2010, Chomsky received the Erich Fromm Prize in Stuttgart, Germany.

Chomsky has an Erdős number of four.

Chomsky was voted the leading living public intellectual in The 2005 Global Intellectuals Poll conducted by the British magazine Prospect. He reacted, saying "I don't pay a lot of attention to polls". In a list compiled by the magazine New Statesman in 2006, he was voted seventh in the list of "Heroes of our time".

Actor Viggo Mortensen with avant-garde guitarist Buckethead dedicated their 2006 album, called Pandemoniumfromamerica to Chomsky.

On January 22, 2010, a special honorary concert for Chomsky was given at Kresge Auditorium at MIT. The concert, attended by Chomsky and dozens of his family and friends, featured music composed by Edward Manukyan and speeches by Chomsky's colleagues, including David Pesetsky of MIT and Gennaro Chierchia, head of the linguistics department at Harvard University.

Bibliography

Filmography

, Director: Mark Achbar and Peter Wintonick (1992)

Last Party 2000, Director: Rebecca Chaiklin and Donovan Leitch (2001)

Power and Terror: Noam Chomsky in Our Times, Director: John Junkerman (2002)

Distorted Morality—America's War On Terror?, Director: John Junkerman (2003)

Noam Chomsky: Rebel Without a Pause (TV), Director: Will Pascoe (2003)

The Corporation, Directors: Mark Achbar and Jennifer Abbott; Writer: Joel Bakan (2003)

Peace, Propaganda & the Promised Land, Directors: Sut Jhally and Bathsheba Ratzkoff (2004)

On Power, Dissent and Racism: A discussion with Noam Chomsky, Journalist: Nicolas Rossier; Producers: Eli Choukri, Baraka Productions (2004)

Lake of Fire, Director: Tony Kaye (2006)

, Director: Richard Hall (2008)

In the Time We've Got, Director: Christopher Ives (2008)

Chomsky & Cie Director: Olivier Azam (out in 2008)

An Inconvenient Tax, Director: Christopher P. Marshall (out in 2009)

The Money Fix, Director: Alan Rosenblith (2009)

Pax Americana and the Weaponization of Space, Director: Denis Delestrac (2010)

, Director: Juan Manuel Biaiñ (2010)

See also

American philosophy

Axiom of categoricity

Chomsky normal form

Chomskybot

Chomsky–Schützenberger theorem

Colorless green ideas sleep furiously

Criticisms of Noam Chomsky

English studies

Important publications in computability

Intellectual worker

Language acquisition

Nim Chimpsky

Noam Chomsky's political views

Propaganda model

List of American philosophers

References

External links

chomsky.info : The Noam Chomsky Website

Noam Chomsky at MIT

Noam Chomsky's page on Academia.edu

Noam Chomsky at Zmag

Talks by Noam Chomsky at A-Infos Radio Project

Interview about Human Rights by scholars (English with French subtitles) – 2009

Chomsky media files at the Internet Archive

Articles and videos featuring Noam Chomsky at AnarchismToday.org

The Political Economy of the Mass Media Part 1

Noam Chomsky: "The Center Cannot Hold: Rekindling the Radical Imagination" - 1 hour interview by Democracy Now!

Noam Chomsky interviewed by Alyssa McDonald on New Statesman September 2010.

The Real News (TRNN) ">Noam Chomsky Interviews on The Real News (TRNN)

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Name	Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Nationality	SovietRussian
Religion	None (atheist)
Office	Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Soviet Union
Term start	30 December 1922
Term end	21 January 1924
Predecessor	Position created
Successor	Alexey Rykov
Office2	Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the Russian SFSR
Term start2	8 November 1917
Term end2	21 January 1924
Predecessor2	Position created
Successor2	Alexey Rykov
Office3	Leader of the Bolshevik Party
Term start3	17 November 1903
Term end3	21 January 1924
Predecessor3	None
Successor3	Joseph Stalin(as General Secretary)
Birth date	April 22, 1870
Birthname	Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov
Birth place	Simbirsk, Russian Empire
Death date	January 21, 1924
Death place	Gorki, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Profession	Politician, Revolutionary, Lawyer
Spouse	Nadezhda Krupskaya (1898–1924)
Party	Russian Communist Party (bolsheviks)
A.k.a.	Nikolai Lenin, N. Lenin, V. I. Lenin
Signature	Unterschrift_Lenins.svg

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years (1917–1924), as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a socialist economic system.

As a politician, Vladimir Lenin was a persuasive orator, as a political scientist his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produced Leninism, the Russian application of Marxism. He was also named by Time Magazine as one of the people of the 20th century.

Early life and background

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (; ) was born on in the town of Simbirsk in the Russian Empire. Simbirsk, a rural town on the River Volga nearly 1,500 miles from the capital Saint Petersburg, would be renamed upon Ulyanov's death fifty-four years later as "Ulyanovsk" in his honour. That same year, Saint Petersburg itself would be renamed after Ulyanov's better-known cadre name: Lenin. Lenin's parents were Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova, a schoolteacher, and Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, a government education official. Lenin was baptised on at the local church of St. Nicholas into the Russian Orthodox Church. Lenin came from a diverse ancestry. Besides Russian, Lenin had German, Swedish and more controversially Jewish ancestors on his mother's side and Mongolic Kalmyk ancestry on his father's.

Lenin was born into a comfortable middle-class family. Lenin's father Ilya was elevated into the Russian nobility for his work in the government bureaucracy, and, after being appointed director of Simbirsk's primary schools in 1874, was entitled to wear a blue gold-embroidered uniform and be addressed as "Your Excellency". Although later Soviet biographies tried to disguise his background, Lenin himself never made any effort to hide the fact that he was a nobleman by birth.

Being of the intelligentsia, the Ulyanovs educated their children against the ills of their time (violations of human rights, servile psychology, etc.), and instilled readiness to struggle for higher ideals, a free society, and equal rights. Subsequently, excepting Olga (dead at age 19), every Ulyanov child became a revolutionary.

Lenin attended the Simbirsk Men's Gymnasium which was headed by the father of Alexander Kerensky and graduated in 1887 with a gold medal.

In January 1886, his father died of a brain hemorrhage; in May 1887 (when Lenin was 17 years old), his eldest brother Aleksandr Ulyanov was hanged for participating in a terrorist assassination attempt against the Tsar, Alexander III (1881–94). His sister, Anna Ulyanova, with Aleksandr when arrested, was banished to an Ulyanov family estate at Kokushkino, a village some 40 km (25 mi.) from Kazan—those events transformed Lenin into a political radical, which official Soviet biographies represent as central to his assuming the revolutionary track as political life.

Complementing these personal, emotional, and political upheavals was his matriculation, in August 1887, to the Kazan University, where he studied law and read the works of Karl Marx. That Marxism-derived political development involved Lenin in a student riot, and consequent arrest, in December 1887; Kazan University expelled him and the police authorities barred him from other universities. After this, he was under continuous police surveillance as the brother of a known terrorist. Nevertheless, he studied independently and earned a law degree; at that time, he first read Das Kapital (1867–94). Three years later, in 1890, he was permitted to study at the University of Saint Petersburg. In January 1892, he was awarded a first class diploma in law; moreover, he was an intellectually distinguished student in the Classical languages of Latin and Greek, and the modern languages of German, French, and English, but had only limited command of the latter two. In the 1917 revolutionary period, he relied upon Inessa Armand to translate an article of his into French and English; and wrote to S. N. Ravich in Geneva, "I am unable to lecture in French".

Revolutionary

of V. I. Lenin, December 1895]]

Lenin practised law in the Volga River port of Samara for a few years, mostly land-ownership cases, from which he derived political insight to the Russian peasants' socio-economic condition; in 1893, he moved to St Petersburg, and practised revolutionary propaganda. In 1895, he founded the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, the consolidation of the city's Marxist groups; as an embryonic revolutionary party, the League were active among the Russian labour organisations. On 7 December 1895, Lenin was arrested for plotting against Tsar Alexander III, and was then imprisoned for fourteen months in solitary confinement Cell 193 of the St. Petersburg Remand Prison. In February 1897, he was exiled to eastern Siberia, to the village Shushenskoye in the Minusinsky District, Yenisei Gubernia. There, he met Georgy Plekhanov, the Marxist who introduced socialism to Russia. In July 1898, Lenin married the socialist activist Nadezhda Krupskaya, and, in April 1899, he published the book The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899), under the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyin; one of the thirty theoretical works he wrote in exile. In 1900 he and Julius Martov (later a leading opponent) co-founded the newspaper Iskra (Spark), and published articles and books about revolutionary politics, whilst recruiting for the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party which had held its first congress in 1898 whilst Lenin was still in exile in Siberia. In such clandestine political work, Vladimir Ulyanov assumed aliases, and, in 1902, adopted Lenin as his definitive nom de guerre, derived from the Siberian Lena River. The break partly originated from Lenin's book What Is to Be Done? (1902), which proposed a smaller party organisation of professional revolutionaries, with Iskra in a primary ideologic role. Another issue which divided the two factions was Lenin's support of a worker-peasant alliance to overthrow the Tsarist regime as opposed to the Menshevik's support on an alliance between the working classes and the liberal bourgeoise to achieve the same aim (whilst a small third faction led by Trotsky espoused the view that the working class alone was the instrument of revolutionary change—needing no help from either the peasants or the middle classes).

, 2008)]]

in 2008]]

In November 1905, Lenin returned to Russia to support the 1905 Russian Revolution. In 1906, he was elected to the Presidium of the RSDLP; and shuttled between Finland and Russia, but resumed his exile in December 1907, after the Tsarist defeat of the revolution and after the scandal of the 1907 Tiflis bank robbery.

, 1919. (detail)]] In 1909, to disambiguate philosophic doubts about the proper practical course of a socialist revolution, Lenin published Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909), which became a philosophic foundation of Marxism-Leninism. Throughout exile, Lenin travelled Europe, participated in socialist activities, (the 1912 Prague Party Conference). When Inessa Armand left Russia for Paris, she met Lenin and other exiled Bolsheviks. Rumour has it she was Lenin's lover; yet historian Neil Harding notes that there is a "slender stock of evidence . . . we still have no evidence that they were sexually intimate".

In 1914, when the First World War (1914–18) began, most of the mass Social Democratic parties of Europe supported their homelands' war effort. At first, Lenin disbelieved such political fickleness, especially that the Germans had voted for war credits; the Social Democrats' war-authorising votes broke Lenin's mainstream connection with the Second International (1889–1916). He opposed the Great War, because the peasants and workers would be fighting the bourgeoisie's "imperialist war"—one that ought be transformed to an international civil war, between the classes. At war's start, the Austrians briefly detained him in Poronin, his town of residence; on 5 September 1914, Lenin moved to neutral Switzerland, residing first at Bern, then at Zürich.

In 1915, in Switzerland, at anti-war Zimmerwald Conference, he led the Zimmerwald Left minority, who failed, against the majority pacifists, to achieve conference's adopting Lenin's proposition of transforming imperialist war to class war. In the next conference (24–30 April 1916), at Kienthal, Lenin and the Zimmerwald Left presented a like resolution; but the conference concorded only a compromise manifesto.

In spring of 1916, in Zürich, Lenin wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916). In this work Lenin synthesised previous works on the subject by Karl Kautsky, John A. Hobson (Imperialism: A Study, 1902), and Rudolf Hilferding (Das Finanzkapital, 1910), and applied them to the new circumstances of the First World War (1914–18) fought between the German and the British empires—which exemplified the imperial capitalist competition, which was the thesis of his book. This thesis posited that the merging of banks and industrial cartels gave rise to finance capital—the basis of imperialism, the zenith of capitalism. To wit, in pursuing greater profits than the home market can offer, business exports capital, which, in turn, leads to the division of the world, among international, monopolist firms, and to European states colonising large parts of the world, in support of their businesses. Imperialism, thus, is an advanced stage of capitalism based upon the establishment of monopolies, and upon the exportation of capital (rather than goods), managed with a global financial system, of which colonialism is one feature.

In accordance with this thesis, Lenin believed that Russia was being used as a tool of French and British capitalist imperialism in World War One and that its participation in the conflict was at the behest of those interests.

, 11 August 1917]]

The February Revolution

In February 1917 popular demonstrations in Russia provoked by the hardship of war forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate. The monarchy was replaced by an uneasy political relationship between, on the one hand, a Provisional Government of parliamentary figures and, on the other, an array of "Soviets" (most prominently the Petrograd Soviet): revolutionary councils directly elected by workers, soldiers and peasants. Lenin was still in exile in Zurich.

Lenin was preparing to go to the library after lunch when a fellow exile burst in to exclaim: "Haven't you heard the news? There's a revolution in Russia!" The very next day Lenin wrote to Alexandra Kollontai in Stockholm, insisting on "revolutionary propaganda, agitation and struggle with the aim of an international proletarian revolution and for the conquest of power by the Soviets of Workers' Deputies". The next day: "Spread out! Rouse new sections! Awaken fresh initiative, form new organisations in every stratum and prove to them that peace can come only with the armed Soviet of Workers' Deputies in power."

Lenin was determined to return to Russia at once. But that was not an easy task in the middle of the First World War. Switzerland was surrounded by the warring countries of France, Germany, Austria-Hungary and Italy, and the seas were dominated by Russia's ally Britain. Lenin considered crossing Germany with a Swedish passport, but Krupskaya joked that he would give himself away by swearing at Mensheviks in Russian in his sleep. Lenin was formally welcomed by Chkheidze, the Menshevik Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet. But Lenin pointedly turned to the crowd instead to address it on the international importance of the Russian Revolution:

The piratical imperialist war is the beginning of civil war throughout Europe ... The world-wide Socialist revolution has already dawned ... Germany is seething ... Any day now the whole of European capitalism may crash ... Sailors, comrades, we have to fight for a socialist revolution, to fight until the proletariat wins full victory! Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!

The April Theses

On the train from Switzerland, Lenin had composed his famous April Theses: his programme for the Bolshevik Party. In the Theses, Lenin argued that the Bolsheviks should not rest content, like almost all other Russian socialists, with the "bourgeois" February Revolution. Instead the Bolsheviks should press ahead to a socialist revolution of the workers and poorest peasants:

Lenin argued that this socialist revolution would be achieved by the Soviets taking power from the parliamentary Provisional Government: "No support for the Provisional Government ... Not a parliamentary republic — to return to a parliamentary republic from the Soviets of Workers' Deputies would be a retrograde step — but a republic of Soviets of Workers', Agricultural Labourers' and Peasants' Deputies throughout the country, from top to bottom."

Lenin arrived at the revolutionary April Theses thanks to his work in exile on the theory of imperialism. Through his study of worldwide politics and economics, Lenin came to view Russian politics in international perspective. In the conditions of the First World War, Lenin believed that, although Russian capitalism was underdeveloped, a socialist revolution in Russia could spark revolution in the more advanced nations of Europe, which could then help Russia achieve economic and social development. A. J. P. Taylor argued: "Lenin made his revolution for the sake of Europe, not for the sake of Russia, and he expected Russia's preliminary revolution to be eclipsed when the international revolution took place. Lenin did not invent the iron curtain. On the contrary it was invented against him by the anti-revolutionary Powers of Europe. Then it was called the cordon sanitaire."

In this way, Lenin moved away from the previous Bolshevik policy of pursuing only bourgeois revolution in Russia, and towards the position of his fellow Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky and his theory of permanent revolution, which may have influenced Lenin at this time.

Controversial as it was in April 1917, the programme of the April Theses made the Bolshevik party a political refuge for Russians disillusioned with the Provisional Government and the war.

The October Revolution

In Petrograd dissatisfaction with the regime culminated in the spontaneous July Days riots, by industrial workers and soldiers. After being suppressed, these riots were blamed by the government on Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Aleksandr Kerensky, Grigory Aleksinsky, and other opponents, also accused the Bolsheviks, especially Lenin—of being Imperial German agents provocateur; on 17 July, Leon Trotsky defended them:

}}

In the event, the Provisional Government arrested the Bolsheviks and outlawed their Party, prompting Lenin to flee to Finland. In exile again, reflecting on the July Days and its aftermath, Lenin determined that, to prevent the triumph of counter-revolutionary forces, the Provisional Government must be overthrown by an armed uprising. Meanwhile, he published State and Revolution (1917) proposing government by the soviets (worker-, soldier- and peasant-elected councils) rather than by a parliamentary body.

In late August 1917, while Lenin was in hiding in Finland, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army General Lavr Kornilov sent troops from the front to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Kerensky panicked and turned to the Petrograd Soviet for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend Petrograd. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd thanks to the industrial action of the Petrograd workers and the soldiers' increasing unwillingness to obey their officers.

However, faith in the Provisional Government had been severely shaken. Lenin's slogan since the April Theses – "All power to the soviets!" – became more plausible the more the Provisional Government was discredited in public eyes. The Bolsheviks won a majority in the Petrograd Soviet on 31 August and in the Moscow Soviet on 5 September.

In October Lenin returned from Finland. From the Smolny Institute for girls, Lenin directed the Provisional Government's deposition (6–8 November 1917), and the storming (7–8 November) of the Winter Palace to realise the Kerensky capitulation that established Bolshevik government in Russia.

Forming a government

Lenin had argued in a newspaper article in September 1917:

The peaceful development of any revolution is, generally speaking, extremely rare and difficult ... but ... a peaceful development of the revolution is possible and probable if all power is transferred to the Soviets. The struggle of parties for power within the Soviets may proceed peacefully, if the Soviets are made fully democratic

The October Revolution had been relatively peaceful. The revolutionary forces already had de facto control of the capital thanks to the defection of the city garrison. Few troops had stayed to defend the Provisional Government in the Winter Palace. Most citizens had simply continued about their daily business while the Provisional Government was actually overthrown.

However, not all Russian socialists supported transferring all power to the Soviets. The Right SRs and Mensheviks walked out of this very first session of the Congress of Soviets in protest at the overthrow of the Provisional Government, of which their parties had been members.

The next day, on the evening of 26 October O.S., Lenin attended the Congress of Soviets: undisguised in public for the first time since the July Days, although not yet having regrown his trademark beard. The American journalist John Reed described the man who appeared at about 8:40 pm to "a thundering wave of cheers":

A short, stocky figure, with a big head set down in his shoulders, bald and bulging. Little eyes, a snubbish nose, wide, generous mouth, and heavy chin; clean-shaven now, but already beginning to bristle with the well-known beard of his past and future. Dressed in shabby clothes, his trousers much too long for him. Unimpressive, to be the idol of a mob, loved and revered as perhaps few leaders in history have been. A strange popular leader—a leader purely by virtue of intellect; colourless, humourless, uncompromising and detached, without picturesque idiosyncrasies—but with the power of explaining profound ideas in simple terms, of analysing a concrete situation. And combined with shrewdness, the greatest intellectual audacity.

According to Reed, Lenin waited for the applause to subside before declaring simply: "We shall now proceed to construct the Socialist order!" Lenin proceeded to propose to the Congress a Decree on Peace, calling on "all the belligerent peoples and to their Governments to begin immediately negotiations for a just and democratic peace", and a Decree on Land, transferring ownership of all "land-owners' estates, and all lands belonging to the Crown, [and] to monasteries" to the Peasants' Soviets. The Congress passed the Decree on Peace unanimously, and the Decree on Land faced only one vote in opposition.

Having approved these key Bolshevik policies, the Congress of Soviets proceeded to elect the Bolsheviks into power as the Council of People's Commissars by "an enormous majority". The Bolsheviks offered posts in the Council to the Left SRs: an offer which the Left SRs at first refused, but later accepted, joining the Bolsheviks in coalition on 12 December O.S. Lenin had suggested that Trotsky take the position of Chairman of the Council—the head of the Soviet government—but Trotsky refused on the grounds that his Jewishness would be controversial, and he took the post of Commissar for Foreign Affairs instead.

Yet the Bolshevik Government had to first withdraw Russia from the First World War (1914–18). Facing continuing Imperial German eastward advance, Lenin proposed immediate Russian withdrawal from the West European war; yet, other, doctrinaire Bolshevik leaders (e.g. Nikolai Bukharin) advocated continuing in the war to foment revolution in Germany. Lead peace treaty negotiator Leon Trotsky proposed No War, No Peace, an intermediate-stance Russo–German treaty conditional upon neither belligerent annexing conquered lands; the negotiations collapsed, and the Germans renewed their attack, conquering much of the (agricultural) territory of west Russia. Resultantly, Lenin's withdrawal proposal then gained majority support, and, on 3 March 1918, Russia withdrew from the First World War via the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, losing much of its European territory. Because of the German threat Lenin moved the Soviet Government from Petrograd to Moscow on 10–11 March 1918.

On 19 January 1918, relying upon the soviets, the Bolsheviks, allied with anarchists and the Socialist Revolutionaries, dissolved the Russian Constituent Assembly thereby consolidating the Bolshevik Government's political power. Yet, that left-wing coalition collapsed consequent to the Social Revolutionaries opposing the territorially expensive Brest-Litovsk treaty the Bolsheviks had concorded with Imperial Germany. The anarchists and the Socialist Revolutionaries then joined other political parties in attempting to depose the Bolshevik Government, who defended themselves with persecution and jail for the anti-Bolsheviks.

, 31 March 1927]]

To initiate the Russian economic recovery, on 21 February 1920, he launched the GOELRO plan, the State Commission for Electrification of Russia (Государственная комиссия по электрификации России), and also established free universal health care and free education systems, and promulgated the politico-civil rights of women. Moreover, since 1918, in re-establishing the economy, for the productive business administration of each industrial enterprise in Russia, Lenin proposed a government-accountable leader for each enterprise. Workers could request measures resolving problems, but had to abide the leader's ultimate decision. Although contrary to workers' self-management, such pragmatic industrial administration was essential for efficient production and employment of worker expertise. Yet Lenin's doctrinaire Bolshevik opponents argued that such industrial business management was meant to strengthen State control of labour, and that worker self-management failures were owed to lack of resources, not incompetence. Lenin resolved that problem by licencing (for a month) all workers of most factories; thus historian S.A. Smith's observation: "By the end of the civil war, not much was left of the democratic forms of industrial administration promoted by the factory committees in 1917, but the government argued that this did not matter since industry had passed into the ownership of a workers' state."

Internationally, Lenin's admiration of the Irish socialist revolutionary James Connolly, led to the USSR's being the first country to grant diplomatic recognition to the Irish Republic that fought the Irish War of Independence from Britain. In the event, Lenin developed a friendship with Connolly's revolutionary son, Roddy Connolly.

Establishing the Cheka

On December 20, 1917, "The Whole-Russian Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage", the Cheka (Chrezvychaynaya Komissiya – Extraordinary Commission) was created by a decree issued by Lenin to defend the Russian Revolution. The establishment of the Cheka, secret service, headed by Felix Dzerzhinsky, formally consolidated the censorship established earlier, when on "17 November, the Central Executive Committee passed a decree giving the Bolsheviks control over all newsprint and wide powers of closing down newspapers critical of the régime. . . ."; non-Bolshevik soviets were disbanded; anti-soviet newspapers were closed until Pravda (Truth) and Izvestia (The News) established their communications monopoly. According to Leonard Schapiro the Bolshevik "refusal to come to terms with the [Revolutionary] socialists, and the dispersal of the Constituent assembly, led to the logical result that revolutionary terror would now be directed, not only against traditional enemies, such as the bourgeoisie or right-wing opponents, but against anyone, be he socialist, worker, or peasant, who opposed Bolshevik rule". On December 19, 1918, a year after its creation, a resolution was adopted at Lenin's behest that forbade the Bolshevik's own press from publishing "defamatory articles" about the Cheka. As Lenin put it: "A Good Communist is also a good Chekist."

The tsarist police, in alliance with the landowners and the capitalists, organised pogroms against the Jews. The landowners and capitalists tried to divert the hatred of the workers and peasants who were tortured by want against the Jews. ... It is not the Jews who are the enemies of the working people. The enemies of the workers are the capitalists of all countries. Among the Jews there are working people, and they form the majority. They are our brothers, who, like us, are oppressed by capital; they are our comrades in the struggle for socialism. ... The capitalists strive to sow and foment hatred between workers of different faiths, different nations and different races. ... Rich Jews, like rich Russians, and the rich in all countries, are in alliance to oppress, crush, rob, and disunite the workers. ... Shame on those who foment hatred towards the Jews, who foment hatred towards other nations.

Failed assassinations

, 1919]]

First, on 14 January 1918, in Petrograd, after a speech, assassins ambushed Lenin in his automobile; he and Fritz Platten were in the back seat when assassins began shooting, and "Platten grabbed Lenin by the head and pushed him down... Platten's hand was covered in blood, having been grazed by a bullet as he was shielding Lenin".

Second, on 30 August 1918, the Socialist Revolutionary Fanya Kaplan approached Lenin after a speech; at his automobile, whilst he rested a foot upon the running board, in speaking with a woman, Kaplan called to Lenin, and, as he turned to face her in reply, she shot at him three times. The first bullet struck an arm, the second bullet struck his jaw and neck, and the third bullet missed him—and wounded the woman with whom he was speaking; the wounds felled him, unconscious. Fearing in-hospital assassins, Lenin was delivered to his Kremlin apartment; physicians decided against removing the bullets—lest the surgery endanger his recovery, which proved slow.

To the public, Pravda ridiculed Fanya Kaplan as a failed assassin, latter-day Charlotte Corday (a murderess of Jean-Paul Marat) who could not derail the Russian Revolution, reassuring readers that, immediately after surviving the assassination: "Lenin, shot through twice, with pierced lungs spilling blood, refuses help and goes on his own. The next morning, still threatened with death, he reads papers, listens, learns, and observes to see that the engine of the locomotive that carries us towards global revolution has not stopped working..."; despite unharmed lungs, the neck wound did spill blood into a lung.

The Russian public remained ignorant of the true physical gravity of the wounded Soviet Head of State; other than panegyric of immortality (viz. the cult of personality), they knew nothing about either the (second) failed assassination, the assassin, Fanya Kaplan, or of Lenin's health. Historian Richard Pipes reports that "the impression one gains . . . is that the Bolsheviks deliberately underplayed the event to convince the public that, whatever happened to Lenin, they were firmly in control". Moreover, in a letter to his wife (7 September 1918), Leonid Borisovich Krasin, a Tsarist and Soviet régime diplomat, describes the public atmosphere and social response to the failed assassination on 30 August, and Lenin's survival:

From having survived a second assassination originated the cult of personality, that Lenin, per his intellectual origins and pedigree, disliked and discouraged as superstition revived; nevertheless, his health, as a fifty-three-year-old man, declined from the effects of two bullet wounds, later aggravated by three strokes, culminating in his death.

Red Terror

In response to Fanya Kaplan's failed assassination of Lenin on 30 August 1918, and the successful assassination of the Petrograd Cheka chief Moisei Uritsky, Stalin proposed to Lenin "open and systematic mass terror . . . [against] . . . those responsible"; the Bolsheviks instructed Felix Dzerzhinsky to commence a Red Terror, announced in the 1 September 1918 issue of the Krasnaya Gazeta (Red Gazette). To that effect, among other acts, at Moscow, execution lists signed by Lenin authorised the shooting of 25 Tsarist ministers, civil servants, and 765 White Guards in September 1918. In his Diaries in Exile, 1935, Leon Trotsky recollected that Lenin authorised the execution of the Russian Royal Family. However, according to Greg King and Penny Wilson's investigation into the fate of the Romanovs, Trotsky's recollections on this matter, seventeen years after the events described, are unsubstantiated, inaccurate and contradicted by what Trotsky himself said on other occasions. Most historians say there is enough evidence to prove Lenin ordered the killings. According to the late Soviet historian Dmitri Volkogonov:

Indirect evidence shows that the order to execute the royal family was given verbally by Lenin and Sverdlov. The object of 'exterminating the entire Romanov kin' is confirmed by the almost simultaneous murders of Grand Duchess Yelizaveta Feodorovna, Grand Duke Sergei Mikhailovich, Prince Ivan Konstantinovich, Prince Konstantin Konstantinovich, Prince Igor Konstantinovich and Count Vladimir Paley (son of Grand Duke Paul Alexandrovich), all of them in Alapaevsk, a hundred miles from Yekaterinburg.

Earlier, in October, Lev Kamenev and cohort, had warned the Party that terrorist rule was inevitable, given Lenin's assumption of sole command. In late 1918, when he and Nikolai Bukharin tried curbing Chekist excesses, Lenin over-ruled them; in 1921, via the Politburo, he expanded the Cheka's discretionary death-penalty powers.

The foreign-aided White Russian counter-revolution failed for want of popular Russian support, because the Bolshevik proletarian state, protected with "mass terror against enemies of the revolution", was socially organised against the previous capitalist establishment, thus class warfare terrorism in post–Tsarist Russia originated in working class (peasant and worker) anger against the privileged aristocrat classes of the deposed absolute monarchy. During the Russian Civil War, anti-Bolsheviks faced torture and summary execution, and by May 1919, there were some 16,000 enemies of the people imprisoned in the Tsarist katorga labour camps; by September 1921 the prisoner populace exceeded 70,000.

In pursuing their revolution and counter-revolution the White and the Red Russians committed atrocities, against each other and their supporting populaces, yet contemporary historians disagree about equating the terrorisms—because the Red Terror was Bolshevik Government policy (e.g. Decossackization) against given social classes, whilst the class-based White Terror was racial and political, against Jews, anti-monarchists, and Communists, (cf. White Movement).

Professor Christopher Read states that though terror was employed at the height of the Civil War fighting, "from 1920 onwards the resort to terror was much reduced and disappeared from Lenin's mainstream discourses and practices". However, after a clerical insurrection in the town of Shuia, in a 19 March 1922 letter to Vyacheslav Molotov and the Politburo, Lenin delineated action against defiers of the decreed Bolshevik removal of Orthodox Church valuables: "We must... put down all resistance with such brutality that they will not forget it for several decades... The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing... the better." As a result of this letter, historian Orlando Figes estimates that perhaps 8,000 priests and laymen were executed. And the crushing of the revolts in Kronstadt and Tambov in 1921 resulted in tens of thousands of executions.

, Lenin and Kamenev at the II Party Congress in 1919]]

Civil War

In 1917, as an anti-imperialist, Lenin said that oppressed peoples had the unconditional right to secede from the Russian Empire; however, at end of the Civil War, the USSR annexed Armenia, Georgia, and Azerbaijan, because the White Movement used them as attack bases. Lenin pragmatically defended the annexations as geopolitical protection against capitalist imperial depredations.

To maintain the war-isolated cities, keep the armies fed, and to avoid economic collapse, the Bolshevik government established war communism, via prodrazvyorstka, food requisitioning from the peasantry, for little payment, which peasants resisted with reduced harvests. The Bolsheviks blamed the kulaks' withholding grain to increase profits; but statistics indicate most such business occurred in the black market economy. Nonetheless, the prodrazvyorstka resulted in armed confrontations which the Cheka and Red Army suppressed with shooting hostages, poison gas, and labour-camp deportation; yet Lenin increased the requisitioning.

The six-year long White–Red civil war, the war communism, the famine of 1921, which killed an estimated 5 million, and foreign military intervention reduced much of Russia to ruin, and provoked rebellion against the Bolsheviks, the greatest being the Tambov rebellion (1919–21). After the March 1921 left-wing Kronstadt Rebellion mutiny, Lenin replaced war communism with the New Economic Policy (NEP), and successfully rebuilt industry and agriculture. The NEP was his pragmatic recognition of the political and economic realities, despite being a tactical, ideological retreat from the socialist ideal; later, the doctrinaire Josef Stalin reversed the NEP in consolidating his control of the Communist Party and the USSR.

Lenin and World Revolution

As stated in his Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism Lenin's revolutionary project embraced not just Russia but the world. To implement world revolution the Third or Communist International was convened in Russia in 1919, to replace the discredited Second International. Lenin dominated the first, second (1920) and third (1921) Congresses of the International and hoped to use the organisation as an agency of international socialist revolution. After the failure of revolutionary ambitions in Poland, in the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–21, and after various revolutions in Germany and Eastern Europe in 1919 had been crushed, Lenin, increasingly, saw that that anti-colonial struggles in the Third World would be the foci of the revolutionary struggle. In 1923 Lenin said: :the outcome of the struggle will be determined by the fact that Russia, India, China, etc,. account for the overwhelming majority of the population of the globe. And during the last few years it is this majority that has been drawn into the struggle for emancipation with extraordinary rapidity, so that in this respect there cannot be the slightest doubt what the final outcome of the world struggle will be. In this sense the complete victory of socialism is fully and absolutely assured.

Lenin praised Chinese socialist revolutionary leader Dr. Sun Yatsen and his Kuomintang party for their ideology and principles. Lenin praised Dr. Sun, his attempts on social reformation and congratulated him for fighting foreign Imperialism. Dr. Sun also returned the praise, calling him a "great man", and sent his congratulations on the revolution in Russia. The Kuomintang was a nationalist revolutionary party, which had been supported by the Soviet Union. It was organised on Leninism.

Later life and death

and Lenin, at Gorki, south of Moscow, 1922]]

The mental strains of leading a revolution, governing, and fighting a civil war aggravated the physical debilitation consequent to the wounds from the attempted assassinations; Lenin still retained a bullet in his neck, until a German surgeon removed it on 24 April 1922. Among his comrades, Lenin was notable for working almost ceaselessly, fourteen to sixteen hours daily, occupied with minor, major, and routine matters. About the man at his life's end, Volkogonov said:

When already sick, Lenin remembered that, since 1917, he had only rested twice: once, whilst hiding from the Kerensky Provisional Government (when he wrote The State and Revolution), and whilst recovering from Fanya Kaplan's failed assassination. In March 1922, when physicians examined him, they found evidence of neither nervous nor organic pathology, but, given his fatigue and the headaches he suffered, they prescribed rest. Upon returning to St. Petersburg in May 1922, Lenin suffered the first of three strokes, which left him dumb for weeks, and severely hampered motion in his right side; by June, he had substantially recovered. By August he resumed limited duties, delivering three long speeches in November. In December 1922, he suffered the second stroke that partly paralyzed his right side, he then withdrew from active politics. In March 1923, he suffered the third stroke that rendered him mute and bed-ridden until his death.

After the first stroke, Lenin dictated government papers to Nadezhda; among them was Lenin's Testament (changing the structure of the soviets), partly inspired by the 1922 Georgian Affair (Russian cultural assimilation of constituent USSR republics), and it criticised high-rank Communists, including Josef Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Leon Trotsky. About the Communist Party's General Secretary (since 1922), Josef Stalin, Lenin reported that the "unlimited authority" concentrated in him was unacceptable, and suggested that "comrades think about a way of removing Stalin from that post." His phrasing, "Сталин слишком груб", implies "personal rudeness, unnecessary roughness, lack of finesse", flaws "intolerable in a Secretary-General".

At Lenin's death, Nadezhda mailed his testament to the central committee, to be read aloud to the 13th Party Congress in May 1924. However, to remain in power, the ruling troika—Stalin, Kamenev, Zinoviev—suppressed Lenin's Testament; it was not published until 1925, in the United States, by the American intellectual Max Eastman. In that year, Trotsky published an article minimising the importance of Lenin's Testament, saying that Lenin's notes should not be perceived as a will, that it had been neither concealed, nor violated; yet he did invoke it in later anti-Stalin polemics.

Lenin died at 18.50 hrs, Moscow time, on 21 January 1924, aged 53, at his estate in Gorki Leninskiye. In the four days that the Bolshevik Leader Vladimir Ilyich Lenin lay in state, more than 900,000 mourners viewed his body in the Hall of Columns; among the statesmen who expressed condolences to Russia (the USSR) was Chinese premier Sun Yat-sen, who said:

Winston Churchill, who encouraged British intervention against the Russian Revolution, in league with the White Movement, to destroy the Bolsheviks and Bolshevism, said:

Three days after his death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour, so remaining until 1991, when the USSR dissolved, yet the administrative area remains "Leningrad Oblast". In the early 1920s, the Russian cosmism movement proved so popular that Leonid Krasin and Alexander Bogdanov proposed to cryonically preserve Lenin for future resurrection, yet, despite buying the requisite equipment, that was not done. Instead, the body of V. I. Lenin was embalmed and permanently exhibited in the Lenin Mausoleum, in Moscow, on 27 January 1924. Despite the official diagnosis of death from stroke consequences, the Russian scientist Ivan Pavlov reported that Lenin died of neurosyphilis, according to a publication by V.Lerner and colleagues in the European Journal of Neurology in 2004. The authors also note that 'It is possible that future DNA technology applied to preserved Lenin's brain material ultimately could establish or disprove neurosyphilis as the primary cause of Lenin's death'.

Personal life and characteristics

According to Leon Trotsky, who knew him well: :Lenin's outward appearance was distinguished by simplicity and strength. He was below the middle height, with the plebeian features of the Slavonic type of face, brightened by piercing eyes; and his powerful forehead and still more powerful head gave him a marked distinction. According to most reports, in his personal life Lenin was a modest and unassuming man. He liked children and cats and his enthusiasms included bicycling, amateur photography, chess, skating, swimming, hunting, music and hiking. When in exile in Switzerland, Lenin, accompanied by his wife Krupskaya, developed a considerable passion for mountain walking in the Swiss peaks. Lenin's personal life is documented in detail in his wife's book Memories of Lenin.

Writings

newspaper featuring Lenin's writing]]

Lenin was a prolific political theoretician and philosopher who wrote about the practical aspects of carrying out a proletarian revolution; he wrote pamphlets, articles, and books, without a stenographer or secretary, until prevented by illness. He simultaneously corresponded with comrades, allies, and friends, in Russia and world-wide. His Collected Works comprise 54 volumes, each of about 650 pages, translated into English in 45 volumes by Progress Publishers, Moscow 1960–70. The most influential include:

What is to be Done? (1902) – states that a revolution requires a professional vanguard party.

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916) explains why capitalism had not collapsed, as Marx had posited, presenting the First World War as a capitalist war for land, resources, and cheap labour.

The State and the Revolution (1917) interprets the ideas of Marx and Engels, the October Revolution's theoretic basis, and opposes the social-democratic tendency as indecisive in effecting revolution.

April Theses (1917) propose the socio-economic need for a socialist revolution.

(1920) – sharp critique of the "ultra-left"

Soviet censorship of Lenin

After Lenin's death, the USSR selectively censored his writings, to establish the dogma of the infallibility of Lenin, Stalin (his successor), and the Central Committee; thus, the Soviet fifth edition (55 vols., 1958–65) of Lenin's œuvre deleted the Lenin–Stalin contradictions, and all that is unfavourable to the founder of the USSR. The historians Richard Pipes and David Brandenberger published a documentary collection of letters and telegrams excluded from the Soviet fifth edition They proposed them as proof that the Soviet fifth edition is incomplete. This collection has been criticized as politically biased: for example Paul Flewers wrote in a review: "I can’t help thinking that Pipes has picked these documents in order to bolster his own bitterly hostile attitude towards Lenin. . . . Pipes seeks to promote a one-dimensional Lenin, a malignant incarnation of evil, and tries to put the clock back a few decades to the times when Cold War demonology was the norm. A less prejudiced investigator could have used the wealth of documentation in the archives in order to produce a worthwhile analysis of the mechanics of the Soviet government . . . a more objective understanding of Lenin and the Soviet regime than old-fashioned conservatives like Richard Pipes."

Post-mortem

Since the dissolution of the USSR in late 1991, reverence for Lenin declined among the post-Soviet generations, yet he remains an important historical figure for the Soviet-era generations. Eastern European countries removed most statues of Lenin, yet Russia retains some; however, his historical importance merited the installation of one such statue, from Poprad, Slovakia, in Seattle, Washington, U.S., as a kitsch reminder of the Cold War (1945–91). In 1991, a Lenin statue was placed atop the "Red Square" apartment building, at Essex and Houston streets, in New York City. Furthermore, also in 1991, after a contested vote, between Communists and liberals, the Leningrad government reverted the city's name to St. Petersburg, whilst the surrounding Leningrad Oblast remained so named; like-wise the city of Ulyanovsk (V. I. Lenin's birthplace) remains so named. Gyumri in Armenia was named Leninakan from 1924 to 1990, Khujand in Tajikistan Leninabad from 1936 to 1991.

In popular culture

Lenin appeared as a character in the Soviet films Lenin in October (1937) and Lenin in 1918 (1939), both directed by Mikhail Romm. Sergei Yutkevich also directed a series of films about Lenin, with all except the last featuring Maxim Straukh as Lenin. These are The Man With the Gun (1938), Yakov Sverdlov (1940), Stories of Lenin (1957), Lenin in Poland (1966) and Lenin in Paris (1981). Lenin was portrayed by Michael Bryant in the 1971 film Nicholas and Alexandra.

See also

Anti-Leninism

Index of Soviet Union-related articles

Leninism

Lenin's national policy

Lenin's stance on anti-Semitism

List of statues of Lenin

List of places named after Lenin

References

Notes

Further reading

A review of Lars T Lih, Lenin Rediscovered: What is to be Done? in Context

External links

Marxists.org Lenin Internet Archive Extensive compendium of writings, a biography, and many photographs Marx2Mao.org Lenin Internet Library Lenin's speech (video) Lenin's speech with subtitles

Article on Lenin written by Trotsky for the Encyclopedia Britannica

Reminiscences of Lenin by N. K. Krupskaya

Impressions of Soviet Russia  by John Dewey

Information on Lenin's Grave

The Lenin Museum in Tampere, Finland

Lenin and the First Communist Revolutions

Lenin Internet Archive Biography includes interviews with Lenin and essays on the leader

Mirrors of Moscow: Nikolai Lenin by Louise Bryant

Nicolai Lenin His Life and Work by G. Zinovieff, Indiana State University

The Personality and Power of Nikolai Lenin From Raymond Robins' Own Story by William Hard (1920)

TIME 100: V.I. Lenin by David Remnick, 13 April 1998

The Ghosts of Lenin Abound by The Moscow News Weekly, January 15, 2009

Lenin's Fight to Defend Working-class Power and Revolutionary Internationalism by The Militant

Lenin's Funeral Train in its own museum next to Paveletsky Rail Terminal

Selected works

The Development of Capitalism in Russia

What is to be Done?

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back

Reply by N. Lenin to Rosa Luxemburg

Two Tactics of Social-Democracy in the Democratic Revolution

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism

The Right of Nations to Self-Determination

Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism

The State and Revolution

How to Organise Competition?

The April Theses

The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky

Lenin's Testament

Lenin's last letter to Stalin

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Name	Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr.
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Spouse	Deirdre Campbell Jones (1926)
Relatives	Pete (uncle)Grace Jones (aunt)Frank (cousin)Caroline (granddaughter)Lucy (granddaughter)/Theist}}

Henry Walton "Indiana" Jones, Jr. Ph.D. is a fictional American adventurer, OSS operative, professor of archaeology, and the central protagonist of the Indiana Jones franchise. George Lucas created the character in homage to the action heroes of 1930s film serials. The character first appeared in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, to be followed by Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom in 1984, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade in 1989, The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles from 1992 to 1996, and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull in 2008. Alongside the more widely known films and television programs, the character is also featured in novels, comics, video games, and other media. Jones is also featured in the theme park attraction Indiana Jones Adventure, which exists in similar forms at Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea.

Jones is most famously played by Harrison Ford and has also been portrayed by River Phoenix (as the young Jones in The Last Crusade), and in the television series The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles by Corey Carrier, Sean Patrick Flanery, and George Hall. Doug Lee has supplied Jones's voice to two LucasArts video games, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis and Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, while David Esch supplied his voice to Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb.

Particularly notable facets of the character include his iconic look (bullwhip, fedora, and leather jacket), sense of humor, deep knowledge of many ancient civilizations and languages, and fear of snakes.

Indiana Jones remains one of cinema's most revered movie characters. In 2003, he was ranked as the second greatest movie hero of all time by the American Film Institute. He was also named the sixth greatest movie character by Empire magazine. Entertainment Weekly ranked Indy 2nd on their list of The All-Time Coolest Heroes in Pop Culture. Premiere magazine also placed Indy at number 7 on their list of The 100 Greatest Movie Characters of All Time. Since his first appearance in Raiders of the Lost Ark, he has become a worldwide star. On their list of the 100 Greatest Fictional Characters, Fandomania.com ranked Indy at number 10. In 2010, he ranked #2 on Time Magazine's list of the greatest fictional characters of all time, surpassed only by Sherlock Holmes.

Appearances

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Indiana Jones, played by Harrison Ford, was first introduced in the 1981 film Raiders of the Lost Ark, set in 1936. He is portrayed as an adventurous throwback to the 1930s film serial treasure hunters and pulp action heroes, with an alter ego of Doctor Jones, a respected archaeology professor at Marshall College (named after producer Frank Marshall) a fictional college in Connecticut. In this first adventure, he is pitted against the Nazis, traveling the world to prevent them from recovering the Ark of the Covenant (see also Biblical archaeology). He is aided by Marion Ravenwood and Sallah. The Nazis are led by Jones's archrival, a Nazi-sympathizing French archaeologist named René Belloq, and Arnold Toht, a sinister Gestapo agent.

The 1984 prequel, Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, set in 1935, took the character into a more horror-oriented story, skipping his legitimate teaching job and globe trotting, and taking place almost entirely in India. This time, Jones attempts to recover children and the Sankara stones from the bloodthirsty Thuggee cult. He is aided by Short Round and accompanied by Willie Scott (Kate Capshaw).

The third film, 1989's Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, set in 1938, returned to the formula of the original, reintroducing characters such as Sallah and Marcus Brody, a scene from Professor Jones's classroom (he now teaches at Barnett College), the globe trotting element of multiple locations, and the return of the infamous Nazi mystics, this time trying to find the Holy Grail. The film's introduction, set in 1912, provided some back story to the character, specifically the origin of his fear of snakes, his use of a bullwhip, the scar on his chin, and his hat; the film's epilogue also reveals that "Indiana" is not Jones's first name, but a nickname he took from the family dog. The film was a buddy movie of sorts, teaming Jones with his father, often to comical effect. Although Lucas intended at the time to do five films, this ended up being the last for over eighteen years, as Lucas could not think of a good plot element to drive the next installment.

The 2008 film, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, became the latest film in the series. Set in 1957, 19 years after the third film, it pits an older, wiser Indiana Jones against Soviet agents bent on harnessing the power of a crystal skull discovered in South America by his former colleague Harold Oxley (John Hurt). He is aided in his adventure by an old lover, Marion Ravenwood (Karen Allen), and her son—a young greaser named Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf), later revealed to be his biological child Henry Jones III. There are rumors that LaBeouf will take over the Indy franchise. This film also reveals that Jones was recruited by the Office of Strategic Services (a predecessor department to the CIA) during World War II, attaining the rank of Colonel and running covert operations with MI6 agent George McHale on the Soviet Union.

Television

From 1992 to 1996, George Lucas executive-produced a television series named The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles, which was designed as an educational program for children, spotlighting historical figures and important events, using the concept of a prequel to the films as a draw. The show featured a standard formula of a 93-year-old Jones (George Hall), wearing an eye patch, introducing a story, and then an adventure with either a 17-year-old Jones (Sean Patrick Flanery) or a 10-year-old Jones (Corey Carrier), and even a baby Indy (Neil Boulane). Historical figures featured on the show include Mustafa Kemal Atatürk, Leo Tolstoy, Pancho Villa, Charles de Gaulle, Elliot Ness, Ernest Hemingway, Patrick Pearse, Vladimir Lenin, T. E. Lawrence, Winston Churchill, Herman Göring, Theodore Roosevelt, Manfred von Richthofen, and John Ford, in such diverse locations as Egypt, Austria-Hungary, India, China, and the whole of Europe.

One episode, "Young Indiana Jones and the Mystery of the Blues", is bookended by Harrison Ford, reprising his role as the character. Indiana loses one of his eyes sometime between 1957 and when the "Old Indy" segments take place.

The show provided some backstory for the films, as well as new information regarding the character. He was born July 1, 1899, and his middle name is Walton (Lucas's middle name). It is also mentioned that he had a sister called Suzie who died as an infant of fever, and that he eventually has a daughter and grandchildren who appear in some episode introductions and epilogues. His relationship with his father, first introduced in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, was further fleshed out with stories about his travels with his father as a young boy. A large portion of the series centered around his activities during World War I.

In 1999, Lucas removed the episode introductions and epilogues by George Hall for the VHS and DVD releases, as he re-edited the episodes into chronologically ordered feature-length stories. The series title was also changed to The Adventures of Young Indiana Jones.

In 2008's Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull film, Jones makes passing mention to the events of the episode in which he met Pancho Villa; this was included to reinforce that the TV series is indeed part of the same official continuity as the movies.

Video games

The character has appeared in several officially licensed video games, beginning with adaptations of Raiders of the Lost Ark, Temple of Doom, two adaptations of The Last Crusade (one with purely action mechanics, one with an adventure and puzzle based structure) and Indiana Jones' Greatest Adventures which included the storylines from all three of the original films.

Following this, the games branched off into original storylines with Indiana Jones in the Lost Kingdom, Indiana Jones and the Fate of Atlantis, Indiana Jones and the Infernal Machine, Indiana Jones and the Emperor's Tomb and Indiana Jones and the Staff of Kings. Emperor's Tomb sets up Jones's companion Wu Han and the search for Nurhaci's ashes seen at the beginning of Temple of Doom. The first two games were developed by Hal Barwood and starred Doug Lee as the voice of Indiana Jones; Emperor's Tomb had David Esch fill the role and Staff of Kings starred John Armstrong.

There is also a small game from Lucas Arts Indiana Jones and His Desktop Adventures. A video game was made for young Indy called Young Indiana Jones and the Instruments of Chaos, as well as a video game version of The Young Indiana Jones Chronicles.

Two Lego Indiana Jones games have also been released. was released in 2008 and follows the plots of the first three films. It was followed by in late 2009. The sequel includes an abbreviated reprise of the first three films, but focuses on the plot of Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

Indiana Jones has also made cameo appearances as an unlockable character in the games and .

Theme parks

The Indiana Jones Adventure attractions at Disneyland and Tokyo DisneySea ("Temple of the Forbidden Eye" and "Temple of the Crystal Skull," respectively) place Indy at the forefront of two similar archaeological discoveries. These two temples each contain a wrathful deity who threatens the guests who ride through in World War II troop transports. The attractions, some of the most expensive of their kind at the time, opened in 1995 and 2001, respectively, with sole design credit attributed to Walt Disney Imagineering. Disney did not license Harrison Ford's likeness for the North American version; nevertheless, a differentiated Indiana Jones audio-animatronic character appears at three points in both attractions. However, the Indiana Jones featured in the DisneySea version does use Harrison Ford's likeness but uses Japanese audio for all of his speaking parts.

Disneyland Resort Paris also features an Indiana Jones-titled ride where people speed off through ancient ruins in a runaway mine wagon similar to that found in Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom. Indiana Jones and the Temple of Peril is a looping roller coaster engineered by Intamin AG and opened in 1993.

The Indiana Jones Epic Stunt Spectacular! is a live show that has been presented in the Disney's Hollywood Studios theme park of the Walt Disney World Resort with few changes since the park's 1989 opening under a different name. The 25-minute show presents various stunts framed in the context of a feature film production, and recruits members of the audience to participate in the show. Stunt artists in the show re-create and ultimately reveal some of the secrets of the stunts of the Raiders of the Lost Ark films, including the well-known "running-from-the-boulder" scene. Stunt performer Anislav Varbanov was fatally injured in August, 2009 while rehearsing the popular show.

Characterization

In his role as a college professor of archaeology, Henry Jones Jr. is scholarly and learned in a tweed suit, lecturing on ancient civilizations. But at the opportunity to recover important artifacts, he transforms into "Indiana," a near superhero image he has concocted for himself. Producer Frank Marshall said, "Indy [is] a fallible character. He makes mistakes and gets hurt. [...] That's the other thing people like: He's a real character, not a character with superpowers." Spielberg said there "was the willingness to allow our leading man to get hurt and to express his pain and to get his mad out and to take pratfalls and sometimes be the butt of his own jokes. I mean, Indiana Jones is not a perfect hero, and his imperfections, I think, make the audience feel that, with a little more exercise and a little more courage, they could be just like him." According to Spielberg biographer Douglas Brode, Indiana created his heroic figure so as to escape the dullness of teaching at a school. Both of Indiana's personas reject one another in philosophy, creating a duality. while scholars have analyzed Indiana as having traits of a lone wolf; a man on a quest; a noble treasure hunter; a hardboiled detective; a human superhero; and an American patriot.

Like many characters in his films, Jones has some autobiographical elements of Spielberg. Indiana lacks a proper father figure because of his strained relationship with his father, Henry Senior. His own contained anger is misdirected at the likes of Professor Abner Ravenwood, his mentor at the University of Chicago, leading to a strained relationship with Marion Ravenwood. Marcus Brody acts as Indiana's positive role model at the college.

Because of Indiana's strained relationship with his father, who was absent much of Indiana's youth searching for the Holy Grail, the character does not pursue the more spiritual aspects of the cultures he studies. Indiana uses his knowledge of Shiva to ultimately defeat Mola Ram. In Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Jones is older and wiser, whereas his sidekicks Mutt and Mac are youthfully arrogant and greedy, respectively.

Concept and creation

Indiana Jones is modeled after the strong-jawed heroes of the serials and pulp magazines that George Lucas and Steven Spielberg enjoyed in their childhoods (such as the Republic Pictures serials, and the Doc Savage series). H. Rider Haggard's adventure hero Alan Quatermain of King Solomon's Mines was a notable template for Jones. The two friends first discussed the project in Hawaii around the time of the release of the first film. Spielberg told Lucas how he wanted his next project to be something fun, like perhaps a James Bond film. According to sources, Lucas responded to the effect that he had something "even better,"

The character was originally named "Indiana Smith" (perhaps in a nod to the 1966 Western film Nevada Smith), after an Alaskan Malamute Lucas owned in the 1970s ("Indiana"); however, Spielberg disliked the name "Smith," and Lucas casually suggested "Jones" as an alternative. Costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis said the inspiration for Indiana's outfit was Charlton Heston's Harry Steele in Secret of the Incas: "We did watch this film together as a crew several times, and I always thought it strange that the filmmakers did not credit it later as the inspiration for the series."

Upon requests by Spielberg and Lucas, the costume designer gave the character a distinctive silhouette through the styling of the hat; after examining many hats, the designers chose a tall-crowned, wide-brimmed fedora. As a documentary of Raiders pointed out, the hat served a practical purpose. Following the lead of the old "B"-movies that inspired the Indiana Jones series, the fedora hid the actor's face sufficiently to allow doubles to perform the more dangerous stunts seamlessly. Examples in Raiders include the wider-angle shot of Indy and Marion crashing a statue through a wall, and Indy sliding under a fast-moving vehicle from front to back. Thus it was necessary for the hat to stay in place much of the time.

The hat became so iconic that the filmmakers could only come up with very good reasons or jokes to remove it. If it ever fell off during a take, filming would have to stop to put it back on. In jest, Ford put a stapler against his head when a documentary crew visited during shooting of The Last Crusade. This created the urban legend that Ford stapled the hat to his head. Although other hats were also used throughout the movies, the general style and profile remained the same. Elements of the outfit include:

The fedora was supplied by Herbert Johnson Hatters in England for the first three films. It was referred to as "The Australian Model" by costume designer Deborah Nadoolman Landis and was fitted with a Petersham bow. Indy's fedora for Crystal Skull was made by Steve Delk and Marc Kitter of the Adventurebilt Hat Company.

The leather jacket, a hybrid of the "Type 440" and the A-2 jacket, were made by Leather Concessionaires (now known as Wested Leather Co). Raiders of the Lost Ark and The Last Crusade. For Temple of Doom, jackets were made in house at Bermans & Nathans in London based on a stunt jacket they provided for Raiders of The Lost Ark, while Tony Nowak made the jacket in Kingdom of the Crystal Skull.

The bag was a modified Mark VII British gas mask bag.

The whip was a bullwhip crafted by David Morgan for the first three films. The whips for Crystal Skull were crafted by a variety of people, including Terry Jacka, Joe Strain and Morgan (different lengths and styles were likely used in specific stunts). The pistol was usually a World War I-era revolver, including the Webley Green (Last Crusade and Crystal Skull), or a .45 ACP Smith & Wesson Hand Ejector 2nd model revolver (Raiders). He has also used an M1917 revolver (Temple of Doom), a Nagant M1895 (Young Indiana Jones), and a 9 mm Browning Hi-Power (Raiders). The weapon is carried in a military pattern Sam Browne belt. The shoes were "Indy Boots" made by Alden Shoes, still sold today (though in a redder (brick) shade of brown than seen in the movies).

Jones's fedora and leather jacket (as used in The Last Crusade) are on display at the Smithsonian's American History Museum in Washington, D.C. The collection of props and clothing from the films has become a thriving hobby for some aficionados of the franchise. Jones' whip was the third most popular film weapon, as shown by a 2008 poll held by 20th Century Fox, which surveyed approximately two thousand film fans.

Casting

Originally, Spielberg suggested Harrison Ford; Lucas resisted the idea, since he had already cast the actor in three of his movies (American Graffiti, , and ), and did not want Ford to become known as his "Bobby De Niro" (in reference to the fact that fellow director Martin Scorsese regularly cast Robert De Niro in his films). Italian archaeologist and circus strongman Giovanni Battista Belzoni (1778–1823). Yale University professor, historian, and explorer Hiram Bingham III, who rediscovered and excavated the lost city of Machu Picchu, and chronicled his find in the bestselling book The Lost City of the Incas in 1948. The University of Chicago archaeologist Robert Braidwood. Fellow University of Chicago archaeologist James Henry Breasted. The British archaeologist Percy Fawcett, who spent much of his life exploring the jungles of northern Brazil, and who was last seen in 1925 returning to the Amazon Basin to look for the Lost City Of Z. A fictionalized version of Fawcett appears to Jones in the book Indiana Jones And The Seven Veils. British archaeologist and soldier T. E. Lawrence. The Northwestern University anthropologist, professor and adventurer William Montgomery McGovern. Frederick Albert Mitchell-Hedges. German archaeologist Otto Rahn.

George Lucas has said on various occasions that Sean Connery's portrayal of British secret agent James Bond was one of the primary inspirations for Jones, a reason Connery was chosen for the role of Indiana's father in the third film, Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade.

Influence

Though some archaeologists criticize Indy's methods as befitting a "looter" rather more than a careful worker of precious sites, many have adopted the popular figure as something of a standard-bearer for their profession. The industry magazine Archaeology, believing that Jones, as one editor said, was "a horrible archaeologist but a great diplomat for archeology," That same year Ford himself was elected to the Board of Directors of the Archaeological Institute of America. Commenting that "understanding the past can only help us in dealing with the present and the future," Ford was praised by the association's president for his character's "significant role in stimulating the public's interest in archaeological exploration."

While himself a homage to various prior adventurers, aspects of Indiana Jones also directly influenced some subsequent characterizations: Lara Croft, the female archaeologist of the Tomb Raider franchise, was originally designed as a man, but was changed to a woman, partly because the developers felt that the original design was too similar to Indiana Jones. Paramount Pictures, which distributed the Indiana Jones film series, would later make two films based on the Tomb Raider games. Prince of Persia producer Ben Mattes explained that their "inspiration was anything Harrison Ford has ever done: Indiana Jones, Han Solo." The video game series Uncharted is also very heavily influenced by Indiana Jones, as well as some of the influences that led to Indiana Jones himself, such as pulp magazines and movie serials. The design team felt the sources shared themes of mystery and "what-if scenarios" that romanticized adventure and aimed to include those in Uncharted.

Jack West Jr, a character featured in 3 Matthew Reilly books, (Seven Ancient Wonders, The Six Sacred Stones and The Five Greatest Warriors) is heavily influenced by Indiana Jones. Reilly himself is a big fan of George Lucas.

Ben Franklin Gates of the National Treasure (film) series.

In the game "World of Warcraft" there is an NPC named "Harrison Jones", a reference to Indiana Jones and the actor Harrison Ford. This NPC teaches Archaeology to the character, making them able to find ancient treasures around the world. Furthermore, the game area Uldum has numerous playable quests with Harrison Jones as the main character, which contain a number of lines and references from Raiders of the Lost Ark.

The Tia Carrere television show Relic Hunter

References

External links

IndianaJones.com — the official Indiana Jones site

Category:Fictional characters introduced in 1981 Category:Fictional archaeologists Category:Fictional characters from New Jersey Category:Fictional professors Category:Fictional American people Category:Fictional American people of Scottish descent Category:Fictional secret agents and spies Category:Fictional colonels Category:Child characters in television Category:Fictional World War I veterans Category:Fictional World War II veterans Category:Indiana Jones characters

Professor Elaine L Graham (born 1959) is the Grosvenor Research Professor at the University of Chester. She was until October 2009 the Samuel Ferguson Professor of Social and Pastoral Theology at the University of Manchester.

Education

Graham holds a BSc (Social Science) (Hons) in Sociology and Economic History (1980), from the University of Bristol, an MA in Social and Pastoral Theology from the University of Manchester (1988) and a PhD entitled "The Implications of Theories of Gender for Christian Pastoral Practice and Theological Formulation" (1993), also from Manchester.

Career

After working as the Northern Regional Secretary of the Student Christian Movement (1981-84) and four years as ecumenical lay chaplain at Sheffield City Polytechnic (now Sheffield Hallam University), Professor Graham joined the University of Manchester in 1988 as a Lecturer in Social and Pastoral Theology. She was appointed to the position of Samuel Ferguson Professor of Social and Pastoral Theology, succeeding Ronald Preston (1970-81) and Tony Dyson (1981-98) in June 1998. She later held the position of Head of the School of Religions and Theology & Middle Eastern Studies from 2000-04.

During her time at Manchester Graham has organized or hosted a number of conferences which reflect her research interests in public theology, urban issues, gender and human sexuality and the ethics of new technologies. She has also lectured and given papers at many international conferences and seminars.

She was the President of the International Academy of Practical Theology between 2005 & 2007, and was a member of the Archbishops' Commission on Urban Life and Faith, which published the report Faithful Cities: A call for celebration, vision and justice (Methodist Publishing House, 2006). She is also a member of the BBC Standing Conference on Religion and Belief and occasional broadcaster and contributor to the Church Times newspaper.

Published work

This is a list of books that Graham has published or edited. In addition, she has also written a number of other articles in edited volumes and academic journals.

Co edited Life-Cycles: Women and Pastoral Care (SPCK, 1993) with Margaret Halsey; ISBN 0-281-04688-3

Author of Making the Difference: Gender, Personhood and Theology (Mowbray, 1995) ISBN 0-264-67346-8

Author of Transforming Practice: Pastoral Theology in an Age of Uncertainty (1996: 2nd edition, Wipf and Stock, 2002) ISBN 1-57910-922-5

Author of Representations of the Post/Human: Monsters, Aliens and Others in Popular Culture (Manchester University Press, 2002) ISBN 0-7190-5442-7

Co-Author of Theological Reflection: Methods (SCM, 2005) with Heather Walton and Frances Ward; ISBN 0-334-02976-7.

Co-editor of Theological Reflection: Sources (SCM, 2007) with Heather Walton and Frances Ward; ISBN 0-334-02977-9.

Co-Author of What Makes a Good City? Public Theology and the Urban Church (DLT 2009) with Stephen Lowe; ISBN 0-232-52748-3.

Author of Words Made Flesh: Writings in Pastoral and Practical Theology (SCM, 2009); ISBN 0-334-04194-8.

Editor of Grace Jantzen: Redeeming the Present (Ashgate, 2009).

Other information

In April 2007 Professor Graham became an honorary lay canon of Manchester Cathedral.

External links

University of Chester

Commission on Urban Life and Faith

Category:1959 births Category:Living people Category:British academics