pseudonym	Maxim Gorky
birth name	Alexei Maximovich Peshkov
birth date
birth place	Nizhny Novgorod, Russian Empire
death date	June 18, 1936 (aged 68)
death place	Gorki Leninskiye, Moscow Oblast, Russian SFSR, USSR
occupation	Writer, Dramatist, Political Activist
nationality	Russian, Soviet
period	Modernism
genre	Novel, Drama
movement	Socialist Realism
signature	MaximGorkySignature.svg }}

Alexei Maximovich Peshkov (;  – 18 June 1936), also known as Maxim Gorky (, ), was a Russian, Soviet author, a founder of the Socialist Realism literary method and a political activist.

Life

Gorky was born in Nizhny Novgorod and became an orphan at the age of nine. In 1880, at the age of twelve, he ran away from home in an effort to find his grandmother. Gorky was brought up by his grandmother. Her death deeply affected him, and after an attempt at suicide in December 1887, he travelled on foot across the Russian Empire for five years, changing jobs and accumulating impressions used later in his writing.

As a journalist working for provincial newspapers, he wrote under the pseudonym (Jehudiel Khlamida). The name is suggestive of "cloak-and-dagger" by the similarity to the Greek ''chlamys'', "cloak"). He began using the pseudonym Gorky (literally "bitter") in 1892, while working in Tiflis for the newspaper ''Кавказ'' (''The Caucasus''). The name reflected his simmering anger about life in Russia and a determination to speak the bitter truth. Gorky's first book ''Очерки и рассказы'' (''Essays and Stories'') in 1898 enjoyed a sensational success and his career as a writer began. Gorky wrote incessantly, viewing literature less as an aesthetic practice (though he worked hard on style and form) than as a moral and political act that could change the world. He described the lives of people in the lowest strata and on the margins of society, revealing their hardships, humiliations, and brutalization, but also their inward spark of humanity.

Gorky’s reputation as a unique literary voice from the bottom strata of society and as a fervent advocate of Russia's social, political, and cultural transformation grew. By 1899, he was openly associating with the emerging Marxist social-democratic movement which helped make him a celebrity among both the intelligentsia and the growing numbers of "conscious" workers. At the heart of all his work was a belief in the inherent worth and potential of the human person (, 'lichnost'). In his writing, he counterposed individuals, aware of their natural dignity, and inspired by energy and will, with people who succumb to the degrading conditions of life around them. Both his writings and his letters reveal a "restless man" (a frequent self-description) struggling to resolve contradictory feelings of faith and skepticism, love of life and disgust at the vulgarity and pettiness of the human world.

He publicly opposed the Tsarist regime and was arrested many times. Gorky befriended many revolutionaries and became Lenin's personal friend after they met in 1902. He exposed governmental control of the press (see Matvei Golovinski affair). In 1902, Gorky was elected an honorary Academician of Literature, but Nicholas II ordered this annulled. In protest, Anton Chekhov and Vladimir Korolenko left the Academy. The years 1900 to 1905 saw a growing optimism in Gorky’s writings. He became more involved in the opposition movement, for which he was again briefly imprisoned in 1901. In 1904, having severed his relationship with the Moscow Art Theatre in the wake of conflict with Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, Gorky returned to Nizhny Novgorod to establish a theatre of his own. Both Constantin Stanislavski and Savva Morozov provided financial support for the venture. Stanislavski saw in Gorky's theatre an opportunity to develop the network of provincial theatres that he hoped would reform the art of the stage in Russia, of which he had dreamed since the 1890s. He sent some pupils from the Art Theatre School—as well as Ioasaf Tikhomirov, who ran the school—to work there. By the autumn, however, after the censor had banned every play that the theatre proposed to stage, Gorky abandoned the project. Now a financially-successful author, editor, and playwright, Gorky gave financial support to the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP), as well as supporting liberal appeals to the government for civil rights and social reform. The brutal shooting of workers marching to the Tsar with a petition for reform on January 9, 1905 (known as the "Bloody Sunday"), which set in motion the Revolution of 1905, seems to have pushed Gorky more decisively toward radical solutions. He now became closely associated with Vladimir Lenin's Bolshevik wing of the party—though it is not clear whether he ever formally joined and his relations with Lenin and the Bolsheviks would always be rocky. His most influential writings in these years were a series of political plays, most famously ''The Lower Depths'' (1902). In 1906, the Bolsheviks sent him on a fund-raising trip to the United States, where in the Adirondack Mountains Gorky wrote his famous novel of revolutionary conversion and struggle, (''Mat’'', ''The Mother''). His experiences there—which included a scandal over his traveling with his lover rather than his wife—deepened his contempt for the "bourgeois soul" but also his admiration for the boldness of the American spirit. While briefly imprisoned in Peter and Paul Fortress during the abortive 1905 Russian Revolution, Gorky wrote the play ''Children of the Sun'', nominally set during an 1862 cholera epidemic, but universally understood to relate to present-day events. From 1906 to 1913, Gorky lived on the island of Capri, partly for health reasons and partly to escape the increasingly repressive atmosphere in Russia. He continued to support the work of Russian social-democracy, especially the Bolsheviks, and to write fiction and cultural essays. Most controversially, he articulated, along with a few other maverick Bolsheviks, a philosophy he called "God-Building", which sought to recapture the power of myth for the revolution and to create a religious atheism that placed collective humanity where God had been and was imbued with passion, wonderment, moral certainty, and the promise of deliverance from evil, suffering, and even death. Though 'God-Building' was suppressed by Lenin, Gorky retained his belief that "culture"—the moral and spiritual awareness of the value and potential of the human self—would be more critical to the revolution’s success than political or economic arrangements.

An amnesty granted for the 300th anniversary of the Romanov Dynasty allowed Gorky to return to Russia in 1913, where he continued his social criticism, mentored other writers from the common people, and wrote a series of important cultural memoirs, including the first part of his autobiography. On returning to Russia, he wrote that his main impression was that "everyone is so crushed and devoid of God's image." The only solution, he repeatedly declared, was "culture".

During World War I, his apartment in Petrograd was turned into a Bolshevik staff room, and his politics remained close to the Bolsheviks throughout the revolutionary period of 1917. These relations became strained, however, after his newspaper ''Novaya Zhizn'' (''Новая Жизнь'', "New Life") fell prey to Bolshevik censorship during the ensuing civil war, around which time Gorky published a collection of essays critical of the Bolsheviks called ''Untimely Thoughts'' in 1918. (It would not be re-published in Russia until after the collapse of the Soviet Union.) The essays call Lenin a tyrant for his senseless arrests and repression of free discourse, and an anarchist for his conspiratorial tactics; Gorky compares Lenin to both the Tsar and Nechayev.

In August 1921, Nikolai Gumilyov, his friend and fellow writer was arrested by the Petrograd Cheka for his monarchist views. Gorky hurried to Moscow, obtained an order to release Gumilyov from Lenin personally, but upon his return to Petrograd he found out that Gumilyov had already been shot. In October, Gorky returned to Italy on health grounds: he had tuberculosis.

According to Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Gorky's return to the Soviet Union was motivated by material needs. In Sorrento, Gorky found himself without money and without fame. He visited the USSR several times after 1929, and in 1932 Josef Stalin personally invited him to return for good, an offer he accepted. In June 1929, Gorky visited Solovki (cleaned up for this occasion) and wrote a positive article about that Gulag, which had already gained ill fame in the West. Later he stated that everything he had written was under the control of censors. What he actually saw and thought when visiting the camp has been a highly discussed topic.

Gorky's return from Fascist Italy was a major propaganda victory for the Soviets. He was decorated with the Order of Lenin and given a mansion (formerly belonging to the millionaire Ryabushinsky, now the Gorky Museum) in Moscow and a dacha in the suburbs. One of the central Moscow streets, Tverskaya, was renamed in his honor, as was the city of his birth. The largest fixed-wing aircraft in the world in the mid-1930s, the Tupolev ANT-20 (photo) was named ''Maxim Gorky'' in his honor.

On October 11, 1931 Gorky read his fairy tale "A Girl and Death" to his visitors Josef Stalin, Kliment Voroshilov and Vyacheslav Molotov, an event that was later depicted by Viktor Govorov in his painting. On that same day Stalin left his autograph on the last page of this work by Gorky: "Эта штука сильнее чем "Фауст" Гёте (любовь побеждает смерть)"( "This piece is stronger than Goethe's ''Faust'' (love defeats death)". In 1933 Gorky edited an infamous book about the White Sea-Baltic Canal, presented as an example of "successful rehabilitation of the former enemies of proletariat". With the increase of Stalinist repression and especially after the assassination of Sergei Kirov in December 1934, Gorky was placed under unannounced house arrest in his house near Moscow.

The sudden death of Gorky's son Maxim Peshkov in May 1934 was followed by the death of Maxim Gorky himself in June 1936. Speculation has long surrounded the circumstances of his death. Stalin and Molotov were among those who carried Gorky's coffin during the funeral. During the Bukharin trials in 1938, one of the charges was that Gorky was killed by Yagoda's NKVD agents.

In Soviet times, before and after his death, the complexities in Gorky's life and outlook were reduced to an iconic image (echoed in heroic pictures and statues dotting the countryside): Gorky as a great Soviet writer who emerged from the common people, a loyal friend of the Bolsheviks, and the founder of the increasingly canonical "socialist realism".

Depictions of Gorky

''The Gorky Trilogy'' is a series of three feature films: ''The Childhood of Maxim Gorky'', ''My Apprenticeship'', and ''My Universities'', directed by Mark Donskoi, filmed in the Soviet Union, released 1938-1940. The trilogy was adapted from Gorky's autobiography.

Adaptations

The German modernist Bertolt Brecht based his epic play ''The Mother'' (1932) on Gorky's novel of the same name. Gorky's novel was also adapted for an opera by Valery Zhelobinsky in 1938. In 1912, the Italian composer Giacomo Orefice based his opera ''Radda'' on the character of Radda from ''Makar Chudra''.

Gallery

Selected works

''Makar Chudra'' (Макар Чудра), short story, 1892

''Goremyka Pavel'', novel, 1894 (published in English as ''Orphan Paul'' )

''Chelkash'' (Челкаш), novelette, 1895

''Malva'', short story, 1897

''Sketches and Stories'', stories, (three volumes) 1898-1899

''Creatures That Once Were Men'', stories in English translation (1905)

This contained an introduction by G. K. Chesterton

''Twenty-six Men and a Girl'', short story, 1899

''Foma Gordeyev''/''The Man Who Was Afraid'' (Фома Гордеев), novel, 1899

''Three of Them'' (Трое), novel, 1900

''The Song of the Stormy Petrel'' (Песня о Буревестнике), poem, 1901

''Song of a Falcon'' (Песня о Соколе),short story, 1902

''The Mother'' (Мать), novel, 1907

''The Life of a Useless Man'', novel, 1907

''A Confession'' (Исповедь), novel, 1908

''Okurov City'' (Городок Окуров), novel, 1908

''The Life of Matvei Kozhemyakin'' (Жизнь Матвея Кожемякина), novel, 1910

''Tales of Italy'', stories, 1911–1913

''My Childhood'' (Детство), Autobiography Part I, 1913–1914

''In the World'' (В людях), Autobiography Part II, 1916

''Chaliapin'', articles in ''Letopis'', 1917

''Untimely Thoughts'', articles, 1918

''My Recollections of Tolstoy'', 1919

''My Universities'' (Мои университеты), Autobiography Part III, 1923

''Through Russia'', stories, 1923

''The Artamonov Business'' (Дело Артамоновых), novel, 1927

''Life of Klim Samgin'' (Жизнь Клима Самгина), unfinished novel series:

* ''The Bystander'', novel, 1927

* ''The Magnet'', novel, 1928

* ''Other Fires'', novel, 1930

* ''The Specter'', novel, 1936

''Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov, and Andreyev'', 1920–1928

''V.I. Lenin'' (В.И. Ленин), reminiscence, 1924–1931

''The I.V. Stalin White Sea - Baltic Sea Canal'', 1934 (editor-in-chief)

Drama

''The Philistines''/''The Smug Citizens''/''The Petty Bourgeois'' (Мещане), 1901

''The Lower Depths'' (На дне), 1902

''Summerfolk'' (Дачники), 1904

''Children of the Sun'' (Дети солнца), 1905

''Barbarians'', 1905

''Enemies'', 1906

''The Last Ones'', 1908

''The Reception'''/''Vstrecha'', 1910

''Queer People''/''Eccentrics'', 1910

''Vassa Zheleznova'', 1910

''The Zykovs'', 1913

''Counterfeit Money'', 1913

''The Old Man''/''The Judge''/''Starik'', 1915, revised 1922, 1924

''Workaholic Slovotekov'', 1920

''Somov and Others'', 1930

''Yegor Bulychov and Others''/''Egor Bulychev'', 1932

''Dostigayev and Others'', 1933

Sources

Banham, Martin, ed. 1998. ''The Cambridge Guide to Theatre.'' Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. ISBN 0521434378.

Benedetti, Jean. 1999. ''Stanislavski: His Life and Art''. Revised edition. Original edition published in 1988. London: Methuen. ISBN 0413525201.

Worrall, Nick. 1996. ''The Moscow Art Theatre.'' Theatre Production Studies ser. London and NY: Routledge. ISBN 0415055989.

Figes, Orlando. 1998. "A People's Tragedy: The Russian Revolution: 1891-1924" Penguin, NY and London. ISBN 9780140243642

Giuseppe Mario Tufarulo- La luna é morta e lo specchio infranto- Miti letterari del Novecento, vol.1- G.Laterza, Bari, 2009( Critica letteraria).ISBN978-88-8231-491-0.

Further reading

''The Murder of Maxim Gorky. A Secret Execution'' by Arkady Vaksberg. Enigma Books: New York, 2007. ISBN 978-1-929631-62-9

See also

Gorky Park in Moscow

Znanie Publishers

Maxim Gorky Literature Institute

Notes

External links

"Anton Chekhov: Fragments of Recollections" by Maxim Gorky

Some works of Maxim Gorky in the original Russian

Works by Maxim Gorky (public domain in Canada)

"Prince of Russian Literature" (Sri Lanka)

*

Category:1868 births Category:1936 deaths Category:People from Nizhny Novgorod Category:Soviet novelists Category:Soviet non-fiction writers Category:Soviet dramatists and playwrights Category:Socialist realism writers Category:Russian novelists Category:Russian dramatists and playwrights Category:Russian short story writers Category:Soviet short story writers Category:Russian memoirists Category:Pseudonymous writers Category:Bolshevik finance Category:Capri Category:People buried in the Kremlin Wall Necropolis Category:Recipients of the Order of Lenin

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Name	Vladimir Ilyich Lenin
Nationality	SovietRussian
Religion	None
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	Informal leader of the Russian Communist Party
Term start3	17 November 1903
Term end3	21 January 1924
Predecessor3	Position created
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 (stroke)
Death place	Gorki, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
Profession	Lawyer, revolutionary, politician
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) was a Russian revolutionary, author, lawyer, economic theorist, political philosopher, creator of the Soviet Communist Party, leader of the 1917 October Revolution, and founder of the USSR. As head of the Bolsheviks (1917–1924) he led the Red Army to victory in the Russian Civil War, before establishing the world's first officially socialist state. As a theorist, his extensive theoretical and philosophical contributions to Marxism produced Leninism.

Early life and background

Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov () 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 Leningrad after Ulyanov's better-known cadre name. 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. He was of Russian, German, and Swedish descent, and his maternal grandfather descended from the Jewish Blank family. Lenin is also believed to have had Kalmyk ancestry on his father's side.

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. Lenin argued explicitly in one of his most famous works ''What Is To Be Done?'' that intellectuals from "bourgeois" backgrounds have a vital revolutionary role to play bringing political ideas to the working-class movement: "By their social status the founders of modern scientific socialism, Marx and Engels, themselves belonged to the bourgeois intelligentsia."

Athletically, Lenin was a good swimmer and ice skater, and later attended the Simbirsk Men's Gymnasium which was headed by the father of Alexander Kerensky and graduated in 1887 with a gold medal.

Being of the intelligentsia, the Ulyanovs educated their children (all of which except one become revolutionaries) against the ills of their time (violations of human rights, servile psychology, etc.), and instilled a readiness in them to struggle for higher ideals, a free society, and equal rights. Lenin in particular was impressed by his father’s descriptions of the "darkness" of life in the villages and of the arbitrary treatment of peasants by officials. Lenin, an intelligent and conscientious student who loved playing chess, also became a voracious reader, enjoying the writings of Alexander Pushkin, Ivan Turgenev, Leo Tolstoy, and Nikolay Nekrasov. Additionally, he read the works of protorevolutionary writers such as Vissarion Belinsky, Alexander Herzen, Dmitry Pisarev, and Nikolay Dobrolyubov.

Brother's execution and radicalization

Following his father's death from a brain hemorrhage in January 1886, a number of events contributed to Lenin's radicalization. In May 1887 (when Lenin was 17 years old), his eldest brother Aleksandr Ulyanov was hanged for participating in an assassination attempt against the Tsar, Alexander III (1881–94). His sister, Anna Ulyanova, who was arrested with his brother Aleksandr, was then banished to an Ulyanov family estate at Kokushkino, a village some 40 km (25 mi.) from Kazan. These events helped transform Lenin into a political radical. During this time, Lenin was also influenced by the writings of Georgi Plekhanov, and most importantly, Nikolay Chernyshevsky's 1863 novel ''What is to be Done?''.

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 and Friedrich Engels. That Marxism-derived political development involved Lenin in a student riot, and subsequent 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

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 was 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 (RSDLP) 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 of an alliance between the working classes and the liberal bourgeoisie 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).

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.

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 the beginning of the war, 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 the anti-war Zimmerwald Conference, he led the Zimmerwald Left minority, who failed, against the majority pacifists, to achieve the conference's adopting Lenin's proposition of transforming the imperialist war into a 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 the 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 I and that its participation in the conflict was at the behest of those interests.

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 Altstadt library after lunch on March 15 when a fellow exile, the Pole Mieczyslav Broski, burst in to exclaim: "Haven't you heard the news? There's a revolution in Russia!" The 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.

Negotiations with the Provisional Government to obtain passage through Germany for the Russian exiles in return for German and Austro-Hungarian prisoners of war dragged on. Eventually, bypassing the Provisional Government, on March 31 the Swiss Communist Fritz Platten obtained permission from the German Foreign Minister through his ambassador in Switzerland, Baron Gisbert von Romberg, for Lenin and other Russian exiles to travel through Germany to Russia in a sealed one-carriage train. At Lenin's request the carriage would be protected from interference by a special grant of extraterritorial status.

On April 9 Lenin and Krupskaya met their fellow exiles in Bern, a group eventually numbering thirty boarded a train which took them to Zurich. From there they travelled to the specially arranged train which was waiting at Gottmadingen, just short of the official German crossing station at Singen. Accompanied by two German Army officers, who sat at the rear of the single carriage behind a chalked line, the exiles travelled through Frankfurt and Berlin to Sassnitz (arriving April 12), where a ferry took them to Trelleborg. Krupskaya noted how, looking out of the carriage window as they passed through wartime Germany, the exiles were "struck by the total absence of grown-up men. Only women, teenagers and children could be seen at the wayside stations, on the fields, and in the streets of the towns." Once in Sweden the group travelled by train to Stockholm and thence back to Russia.

Just before midnight on , Lenin's train arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd. He was greeted, to the sound of the Marseillaise, by a crowd of workers, sailors and soldiers bearing red flags: by now a ritual in revolutionary Russia for welcoming home political exiles. 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."

To achieve this, Lenin argued, the Bolsheviks' immediate task was to campaign diligently among the Russian people to persuade them of the need for Soviet power:

The April Theses were more radical than virtually anything Lenin's fellow revolutionaries had heard. Previous Bolshevik policy had been like that of the Mensheviks in this respect: that Russia was ready only for bourgeois, not socialist, revolution. Stalin and Kamenev, who had returned from exile in Siberia in mid-March and taken control of the Bolshevik newspaper ''Pravda'', had been campaigning for support for the Provisional Government. When Lenin presented his Theses to a joint RSDLP meeting, he was booed by the Mensheviks. Boris Bogdanov called them "the ravings of a madman". Of the Bolsheviks, only Kollontai at first supported the Theses.

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 provocateurs''; on 17 July, Leon Trotsky defended them:

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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. It thus appeared that all power had been transferred to the Soviets relatively peacefully. On the evening of the October Revolution, the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets met, with a Bolshevik-Left SR majority, in the Smolny Institute in Petrograd. When the left-wing Menshevik Martov proposed an all-party Soviet government, the Bolshevik Lunacharsky stated that his party did not oppose the idea. The Bolshevik delegates voted unanimously in favour of the proposal.

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. Thus Lenin became the head of government in Russia.

Trotsky announced the composition of the new Soviet Central Executive Committee: with a Bolshevik majority, but with places reserved for the representatives of the other parties, including the seceded Right SRs and Mensheviks. Trotsky concluded the Congress: "We welcome into the Government all parties and groups which will adopt our programme."

Lenin declared in 1920 that "Communism is Soviet power plus the electrification of the entire country" in modernising Russia into a twentieth-century country:

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.

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."

Lenin on anti-Semitism

Lenin was enthusiastic about new mass communication technology like the radio and the gramophone and its capacity for educating Russia's mostly illiterate peasant population. In 1919 Lenin recorded eight speeches on to gramophone records. During the Nikita Khrushchev era (1953–64), seven were published. The eighth speech, which was not published, outlined Lenin's thoughts on anti-Semitism:

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

The first occasion was on 14 January 1918 in Petrograd, when assassins ambushed Lenin in his automobile after a speech. 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".

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

''Pravda'' publicly ridiculed Fanya Kaplan as a failed assassin, a latter-day Charlotte Corday (the 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 gravity of the physical wounds of the Soviet Head of State. Other than from panegyrics of immortality (''viz.'' the cult of personality), they knew nothing about the (second) failed assassination attempt, the assassin, Fanya Kaplan, or about 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 attempt on 30 August and to Lenin's survival:

A cult of personality originated from his having survived the second assassination attempt. This Lenin, per his intellectual origins and pedigree, disliked and discouraged as the revival of superstition; nevertheless, his health, as a fifty-three-year-old man, declined from the effects of the 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).

"Hang (and make sure that the hanging takes place in full view of the people) no fewer than one hundred known landlords, rich men, bloodsuckers. … Do it in such a fashion that for hundreds of kilometres around the people might see, tremble, know, shout: "they are strangling, and will strangle to death, the bloodsucking kulaks".—Vladimir Lenin

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.

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 ''kulak''s' 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 Joseph 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 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.

After Lenin's death in 1924, world revolution was soon rejected by his successor Joseph Stalin in favour of Socialism in One Country which contributed to the split with Leon Trotsky.

Later life and death

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 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 unable to speak 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 Joseph Stalin, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Nikolai Bukharin, and Leon Trotsky. About the Communist Party's General Secretary (since 1922), Joseph 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 at Gorki settlement (later renamed 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 Lenin's preserved brain material could ultimately establish or disprove neurosyphilis as the primary cause of Lenin's death."

In January 2011, United Russia party created a website «goodbyelenin.ru» with voting on a question whether Lenin's body should be buried.

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

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.

''"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder'' (1920) sharply criticizes 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.

Legacy

When Lenin died on January 21, 1924, near Moscow, he was acclaimed as "the greatest genius of mankind" and "the leader and teacher of the peoples of the whole world". Historian J. Arch Getty has remarked that "Lenin deserves a lot of credit for the notion that the meek can inherit the earth, that there can be a political movement based on social justice and equality". ''Time Magazine'' also named Lenin one of the 100 most important people of the 20th century, and one of their top 25 political icons of all time; remarking that "for decades, Marxist-Leninist rebellions shook the world while Lenin's embalmed corpse lay in repose in the Red Square". Following the dissolution of the USSR in 1991, reverence for Lenin declined among the post-Soviet generations, yet he remains an important historical figure for the Soviet-era generations.

According to the article in Encyclopaedia Britannica written by Professor of Northern Illinois University Albert Resis:

In space, Lenin is commemorated by asteroid 852 Wladilena

Statues and city names

Although many Eastern European countries have removed most statues of Lenin, Russia still retains some. 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

Film

Sergei Eisenstein's ''October: Ten Days That Shook the World'' (1927) became an influential celebratory dramatization of the 1917 October Revolution.

''Three Songs About Lenin'' (1934) is a documentary silent film by Russian filmmaker Dziga Vertov.

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 directed a series of films about Lenin, featuring Maxim Straukh. These include ''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''.

''All My Lenins'' (1997) is a historical comedy by Hardi Volmer.

Television

Lenin was portrayed by Patrick Stewart in the 1974 BBC miniseries ''Fall of Eagles''.

See also

Leninism

Lenin's national policy

Lenin's stance on anti-Semitism

Marxist–Leninist atheism

Lenin's Testament

Anti-Leninism

Lenin Prize

Lenin Peace Prize

Order of Lenin

Lenin's Mausoleum

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

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

''Left-Wing Communism: An Infantile Disorder''

Lenin's ''Testament''

Lenin's last letter to Stalin

Lenin's ''Complete Collected Works,'' in 55 volumes. (Russian)

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Name	Genrikh Yagoda
Order	People's Commissar for Internal Affairs (NKVD)
term start	10 July 1934
term end	26 September 1936
predecessor	none
successor	Nikolai Yezhov
birth date	1891
birth place	Rybinsk, Russian Empire
death date	March 15, 1938
death place	Moscow, Russian SFSR, Soviet Union
nationality	Soviet
party	Communist Party of the Soviet Union
children	}}

Genrikh Grigoryevich Yagoda (;7 November 1891–15 March 1938), born Enokh Gershevich Ieguda (), was a Soviet state security official who served as director of the NKVD, the Soviet Union's Stalin-era security and intelligence agency, from 1934 to 1936. Appointed by Joseph Stalin, Yagoda supervised the arrest, show trial, and execution of the Old Bolsheviks Lev Kamenev and Grigory Zinoviev, events which comprised the beginnings of the Great Purge.

Like many Soviet secret policemen of the 1930s, Yagoda was ultimately a victim of the Purge himself. He was demoted from the directorship of the NKVD in favor of Nikolai Yezhov during 1936, and arrested during 1937. Charged with the standard crimes of wrecking, espionage, Trotskyism, and conspiracy, Yagoda was a defendant at the Trial of the Twenty-One, the last of the major Soviet show trials of the 1930s. Soon after his confession at the trial, Yagoda was found guilty and shot.

Early life and career

Yagoda was born in Rybinsk into a Jewish family. He joined the Bolsheviks during 1907. Contrary to the rumors invented by himself, Yagoda was never a pharmacist but in fact an apprentice engraver in Yakov Sverdlov's father's workshop. Yagoda subsequently married Sverdlov's niece Ida Averbach which permitted him, after the October Revolution of 1917, to be promoted through the ranks of the ''Cheka'' (the NKVD's predecessor), becoming Felix Dzerzhinsky's second deputy in September 1923. After Dzerzhinsky's appointment as chairman of the Supreme Council of National Economy during January 1924, Yagoda became the real manager of the Gosudarstvennoye Politicheskoye Upravlenie, as the deputy chairman Vyacheslav Menzhinsky had little authority because of his serious illness. The troika Grigory Zinoviev-Lev Kamenev-Joseph Stalin wanted a symbolic direction represented by Felix Dzerzhinsky and Vyacheslav Menzhinsky and an effective direction represented by Yagoda who was neither a people's commissar or a central committee member to ensure that the GPU remained loyal to the party. During 1931, Yagoda was demoted to second deputy chairman.

As deputy head of the GPU, Yagoda organized the building of the White Sea – Baltic Canal using forced labor from the Gulag system at breakneck speed between 1931 and 1933 at the cost of huge casualties. For his contribution to the canal’s construction he was later awarded the Order of Lenin. The construction of the Moscow-Volga Canal was also started under his watch but only completed after his fall by his successor Nikolai Yezhov.

NKVD Chief

On July 10, 1934, two months after Menzhinsky's death, Joseph Stalin appointed Yagoda People's Commissar for Internal Affairs, a position that included oversight of regular as well as the secret police, the NKVD.

Yagoda may have been involved with the murder of his superior Menzhinsky, whom he was later accused of poisoning, and the popular Leningrad party director and Stalin opponent Sergei Kirov, who was assassinated during December 1934 by Leonid Nikolaev.

Yagoda worked closely in conjunction with Andrei Vyshinsky in organizing the first Moscow Show Trial, resulting in the successful prosecution and subsequent execution of former Soviet politicians Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev during August 1936, part of Stalin's Great Purge. The Red Army high command was not spared and it's ranks were decimated by Yagoda as a precursor to the later more extensive purge. More than a quarter of a million people were arrested during the 1934-1935 period and the Gulag system was vastly expanded under his stewardship, forced labor becoming a major factor in the Soviet economy.

Nevertheless, Stalin became increasingly disillusioned with Yagoda's performance. In the middle of 1936, Stalin received a report from Yagoda detailing the unfavorable public reaction abroad to the show trials and the growing sympathy amongst the Soviet population for the executed defendants. The report enraged Stalin, interpreting it as Yagoda's advice to stop the show trials and in particular to abandon the secret planned prosecution of Mikhail Tukhachevsky, the then commander in chief of the Red Army. Stalin was already unhappy with Yagoda's services, mostly due to the bad management of Kirov's assassination and his failure to fabricate "proofs" of Kamenev's and Zinoniev's ties with the Okhrana.

On September 25, 1936, Stalin sent a telegram (co-signed by Andrei Zhdanov) to the members of the Politburo. The telegram read:

"We consider it absolutely necessary and urgent that Comrade Yezhov be appointed to head the People's Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Yagoda has obviously proved unequal to the task of exposing the Trotskyite-Zinonievite bloc. ''The GPU was four years late in this matter.'' All party heads and the most of the NKVD agents in the region are talking about this."

A day later, he was replaced by Yezhov, who managed the main purges during 1937-1938.

Disgrace

Initially Yagoda became People's Commissar for Post and Telecommunications. However during March 1937, he was arrested on Stalin's orders; the Politburo never had a chance to order it. Yezhov announced Yagoda's arrest for diamond smuggling, corruption and spying for Germany since joining the party in 1907. Yezhov even sprinkled mercury around his office, then blamed it on Yagoda trying to assassinate him. Yagoda's two Moscow apartments and his dacha contained 3,904 pornographic photos, 11 pornographic films, 165 pornographic pipes, one dildo and the two bullets that killed Zinoviev and Kamenev. Yezhov took over the apartments. The charge of corruption at least was accurate. He had spent four million roubles decorating his three homes, boasting that his garden had '2,000 orchids and roses'. He also had an expensive taste in fine wines.

During the trial of Radek and Piatakov (Trial of the Seventeen), Yagoda extracted confessions from the defendants, thus revealing inadvertently that the men did not have any political differences with Stalin, a fact the Soviet state prosecutor was unable to challenge. This infuriated Stalin, as it implied that he had eliminated the defendants solely to maintain his own political power. Yagoda had already earned Stalin's enmity eight years earlier, when he had expressed sympathy for Nikolai Bukharin, whom Stalin had forced from power.

As one Soviet official put it, "The Boss forgets nothing." Yagoda was found guilty of treason and conspiracy against the Soviet government at the Trial of the Twenty One during March 1938. Solzhenitsyn describes Yagoda as trusting in deliverance from Stalin even during the show trial itself:

Just as though Stalin had been sitting right there in the hall, Yagoda confidently and insistently begged him directly for mercy: "I appeal to you! ''For you'' I built two great canals!" And a witness reports that at just that moment a match flared in the shadows behind a window on the second floor of the hall, apparently behind a muslin curtain, and, while it lasted, the outline of a pipe could be seen.

Yagoda was shot soon after the trial as were 3,000 of his NKVD supporters. His successor and former deputy Yezhov ordered the guards to strip Yagoda naked and beat him for added humiliation just before his execution. Yezhov himself would suffer exactly the same treatment at the order of ''his'' successor and former deputy, Lavrenti Beria, before dying by the same executioner (NKVD Chief Executioner Vasili Blokhin) just two years later.

Notes

Category:1891 births Category:1938 deaths Category:Bolsheviks Category:Executed Soviet people Category:People executed by the Soviet Union Category:Great Purge victims Category:Great Purge perpetrators Category:Jewish people executed by the Soviet Union Category:NKVD officers Category:People executed by firing squad Category:People from Rybinsk Category:People executed for treason against the Soviet Union Category:Russian Jews Category:Trial of the Twenty-One Category:People's Commissars and Ministers of the Soviet Union

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