Vladimir Lenin

Russian revolutionary, Marxist theorist and statesman (Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known as Lenin, 1870–1924), born in Simbirsk into a family of minor nobility with liberal leanings, decisively radicalised after the execution of his elder brother, Alexander, implicated in a failed plot to assassinate the tsar, and trained in law before devoting himself fully to Marxist revolutionary activism, which led to several arrests and a prolonged exile, first in Siberia and later in Western Europe, where he produced most of his theoretical work. Leader of the Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party from the 1903 split onward, Lenin firmly advocated a disciplined, centralised vanguard-party model made up of professional revolutionaries capable of leading the working class toward revolution, in contrast to the Mensheviks, who favoured a broader, less hierarchical mass party. His theoretical work Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917) adapted Marxist analysis to the new economic conditions of early-twentieth-century monopoly and finance capitalism, interpreting the First World War as the inevitable consequence of inter-imperialist struggle over the colonial division of the world. Taking advantage of the collapse of tsarist authority after the February Revolution of 1917, Lenin led the October Revolution that established the first self-proclaimed Marxist workers' state in history, and in the immediately following years directed the new Soviet government through the Russian Civil War, the implementation of 'war communism' and, ultimately, the more pragmatic introduction of the New Economic Policy to revive a devastated economy. In The State and Revolution (1917), written shortly before the seizure of power, he developed his theory of the need for a transitional 'dictatorship of the proletariat' to dismantle the bourgeois state apparatus before it could finally 'wither away' in a classless society. Weakened by a series of strokes from 1922 onward that progressively removed him from effective power, he died in 1924, leaving behind an intensely disputed political legacy that remains among the most controversial of twentieth-century history.

10 works

• A letter to American workingmen (Lenin)
• A Letter to American Workingmen, from the Socialist Soviet Republic of Russia
• Declaration of the Rights for the Peoples of Russia
• How the Working People Can Be Saved from the Oppression of the Landowners and Ca
• Lenin 1908mec 1. The Criticism of Kantianism from the Left and From the Right
• Lenin 1908mec 1. The Excursions of the German Empirio-Criticists Into The Field
• The Middle Peasants
• The proletarian revolution and the renegade Kautsky
• The State and Revolution
• The Three Sources and Three Component Parts of Marxism