V.I. LENIN
1870-1924
Russian revolutionary, founder of Bolshevism, and major force behind the founding of the USSR. Born in the Volga region, the son of a school inspector named Ulyanov, he was deeply influenced by his brother Aleksandr, who was executed in 1887 for plotting to kill the czar. Lenin abandoned the law to devote himself to Marxist study and agitation among workers, and was arrested and exiled to Siberia in 1895. There he married Nadezhda K. Krupskaya. In 1900 they left Russia for W Europe; about this time he took the name Lenin. Lenin's insistence that only a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries could bring socialism to Russia (expressed in his 1902 pamphlet What Is to Be Done?) led the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' party, meeting in London in 1903, to split into two factions: the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, and the Mensheviks (see BOLSHEVISM AND MENSHEVISM). Lenin returned to Russia on the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution but left in 1907. He continued to write and to engage in Social-Democratic party politics in W Europe. When WORLD WAR I began he saw it as an opportunity for worldwide socialist revolution. In March 1917 the RUSSIAN REVOLUTION broke out and he returned to Petrograd, where in November (October according to the Old Style) he led the Bolsheviks in overthrowing KERENSKY's provisional government. As chairman of the Council of People's Commissars he became virtual dictator; his associates included STALIN and TROTSKY. Among the Soviet government's first acts were the signing of the Treaty of BREST-LITOVSK with Germany and the distribution of land to the peasants. The Bolsheviks (who became the Communist party) asserted that the October Revolution had created a proletarian dictatorship; in fact, it was the party that ruled. Political opposition was suppressed, but civil war, complicated by foreign invasion and war with Poland, continued until late 1920. In 1919 Lenin established the Third International, or COMINTERN, to further world revolution. His policy of war Communism, prevailing until 1921, brought extensive nationalization, food rationing, and control over industry. In an attempt to boost the economy, he launched the NEW ECONOMIC POLICY (NEP), which allowed some private enterprise. Lenin's death in 1924 precipitated a power struggle in which Stalin was victorious. Lenin's main contributions to Marxism were his analysis of IMPERIALISM and his concept of a revolutionary party as a highly disciplined unit. He was one of the greatest and most practical revolutionists of all time.
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The full development of the productive forces in modern bourgeoisie society, a broad, free, and open class struggle, and the political education, training, and rallying of the masses of the proletariat are inconceivable without political freedom . Therefore it has always been the aim of the class conscious proletariat to wage a determined struggle for complete political freedom and the democratic revolution. (1905).
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Democracy is the rule of the majority. As long as the will of the majority was not clear, as long as it was possible to make it out to be unclear, at least with a grain of plausibility, the people were offered a counter-revolutionary bourgeois government disguised as "democratic." (1917).
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First of all we examine the theory of Marx and Engels of the state, and dwell in particular detail on those aspects of this theory which are ignored or have been distorted by the opportunists. Then we deal specially with the one who is chiefly responsible for these distortions, Karl Kautsky, the best-known leader of the Second International (1889-1914), which has met with such miserable bankruptcy in the present war. (1917).
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Let everyone know what their governments have in mind. We do not want any secrets. We want a government to be always under the supervision of the public opinion of its country.... Our idea of strength is different. Our idea is that a state is strong when the people are politically conscious. It is strong when the people know everything, can form an opinion of everything and do everything consciously. (1917).
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Marx and Engels in their last joint preface to the Communist Manifesto (in 1872) considered it necessary to specifically warn the workers that the proletariat cannot simply lay hold of the ready-made (that is, the bourgeois) state machine and wield it for their own purpose, but that they must smash it, break it up. (1918).
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History teaches us that no oppressed class ever did, or could, achieve power without going through a period of dictatorship, i.e., the conquest of political power and forceable suppression of the resistance always offered by the exploiters — the resistance that is most desperate, most furious, and that stops at nothing. (1919).
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