The man known to history as Vladimir Lenin was born as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov on the 22nd, April 1870, or the 10th of April, using the old style Julian calendar, in the city of Simbirsk over 700 kilometres to the east of the Russian capital, Moscow. His father was Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov who had been born into a serf family in Russia in 1831, but had earned his freedom in his youth and then studied physics and mathematics at Kazan University. He subsequently enjoyed a successful career as an educator and public school overseer in Russia and rose to become a state councillor, a position which meant that in the early 1880s the Ulyanovs became part of the minor Russian nobility based on Ilya’s contributions to public education within the Russian Empire. Vladimir’s mother was Maria Alexandrovna Blank, who was of mixed German, Swedish, Russian and Jewish ancestry. It seems likely that Vladimir never knew of his mother’s Jewish heritage. She and Ilya had eight children in total, two of whom died in infancy. Vladimir was the third eldest, arriving after Anna in 1864 and Alexander in 1866. Vladimir’s childhood was comfortable, in line with his father’s increasingly successful career. For instance, as well as living in a well-appointed home in Simbirsk, the Ulyanovs also holidayed at a manor in Kokushkino in the countryside. Vladimir also emerged as his father’s son, displaying a considerable intellect by his teenage years, excelling at school and becoming an accomplished chess player. But the upper middle class idyll of his childhood years was soon shattered. When he was fifteen years of age his father died prematurely of a brain haemorrhage in January 1886, an event which had a profound impact on Vladimir who after this, began to become an increasingly reactionary and rebellious character. The situation was massively compounded the following year when his older brother, Alexander, who had left to attend Saint Petersburg State University some time earlier, was implicated in a conspiracy to assassinate the ruler of the Russian Empire, Alexander III. Vladimir’s brother, along with several others, were executed shortly afterwards for their role in the conspiracy. Vladimir would never be the same again and his descent into extremist politics in Russia can be traced to this event. Vladimir’s subsequent actions and those of his brother Alexander in 1887 must be viewed in relation to the political landscape of Russia in the second half of the nineteenth century. For centuries Russia had largely lain outside of the mainstream of European politics and culture but beginning with the reign of Peter I in the late seventeenth century and early eighteenth centuries, efforts had been made to modernise and reform the country to make it more like other European states such as France and the Austrian Empire. This work was continued by his near successor, Catherine the Great, who was German herself and wanted to make Russia a modern nation. This all occurred as the Russian Empire was expanding dramatically and by the end of the eighteenth century Russian explorers and colonists had reached as far as the Bering Straits and Manchuria, extending the Russian state as far as the Pacific Ocean, while in the west Catherine began a series of conquests which brought parts of the Caucasus, Poland and Ukraine under Russian rule. Yet despite all of this, the country remained backward in many respects. Serfdom, under which Russian commoners were tied to the land and their manorial lord as a quasi-slave, still predominated across the country; the economy remained resoundingly rural; the Orthodox Church had a huge influence over society; and the country was incredibly authoritarian, being ruled by the Tsars and the nobility in their own interest. In a world where nations like the United States, Britain and France were emerging in their modern form in the nineteenth century, the Russian Empire looked politically and socially backwards by comparison. These issues were compounded by events in the years before Vladimir’s birth and while he was growing up. In 1855 Alexander II ascended to the throne as Tsar of Russia. He was a liberal reformer who wished to drag Russia into the modern world. Thus, in 1861 he brought serfdom to an end and emancipated the serfs of Russia in one of the most striking social reforms of the nineteenth century. He also sought to reform the courts, policing and education system. However, in 1866 he only just survived an assassination attempt and thereafter his liberal inclinations were toned down. But the reforms he had initiated had let the genie out of the bottle so to speak in Russia. New ideas were being discussed in a more tolerant environment, driven by writers like Fyodor Dostoyevsky, Pyotr Kropotkin and Mikhail Bulgokov, who questioned Russian society and discussed ideas and political theories like anarchism, nihilism and communism. Many Russians wanted further reforms of society as a result, notably the creation of a parliament and an end to the autocratic state ruled by the Tsars. Groups such as the Narodniks and the People’s Will emerged as politico-terrorist organisations agitating for these changes and it was the latter group which in 1881 succeeded in assassinating Alexander II. This ushered in a period of even greater discontent as he was succeeded by his son, Alexander III, who was opposed to the reforms his father had implemented and wanted to crack down on liberal dissent in Russia. Thus, the country Vladimir was growing up in during the 1880s was a powder-keg of political discontent and instability. It was in this political environment that Vladimir arrived in 1887 to Kazan University to commence his studies. He was almost immediately involved in a protest against the government’s crackdown on student societies which were perceived as hotbeds of political dissent. His role in this, resulted in a brief arrest and his expulsion from the university, but his brief spell there had ignited the fire of political radicalisation. In the months that followed, Vladimir began reading voraciously of various Russian and European political writers. Amongst others he was soon attracted to the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, two German political philosophers and social critics who had been deeply critical of the manner in which industrial society was developing and who had postulated in their 1848 pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, that bourgeois capitalist society should be replaced by one in which the industrial proletariat took everything in society into communal ownership. This appealed to Vladimir at a time when industrialisation was beginning to rapidly advance in Russian cities like Moscow, Saint Petersburg, Kazan and Samara. However, it was not the only intellectual influence on him at this time and his political views were still under formation, although there is no doubt they were radical even before he reached his twentieth year. In 1890, Vladimir’s mother was able to use her family’s connections within the Russian education system to ensure that he was able to sit exams at the University of St Petersburg in lieu of completing his studies at Kazan University. He passed with first class honours and thereafter took up a position as a legal assistant in Samara during the 1890s. Throughout these years he continued to foster his political radicalism and was involved in numerous political organisations. Russia’s radical politics was buoyant at this time owing to events in 1891. A dry autumn was followed by a bitterly cold winter where temperatures dropped to below -30 degrees Celsius in some parts of the country along the course of the River Volga. This was followed by a particularly dry spring and summer in 1892, all of which combined to cause harvest failures across much of Russia. Famine struck thereafter and this was compounded by the incompetent response of the government of Tsar Alexander III and other pillars of Russian society such as the Orthodox Church. By the time the famine abated in late 1892 over 350,000 people had died of starvation and millions more were malnourished or badly impacted in some other way. As criticism of the government escalated radical groups such as the communists and nihilists gained ever greater numbers of supporters in Russia. As the political radicalism of Russian society increased, Lenin found himself feeling marginalised in provincial Samara and so it was, that in 1893 he set off for the capital, Saint Petersburg. There he continued to work as a legal assistant, but his energies were primarily poured into working to foster the Marxist and communist movement in the city. Socially revolutionary groups such as these were effectively outlawed by the government of Alexander III, however his premature death from kidney failure in 1894 brought his son Nicholas II to the throne, but while he was more liberal than his father the political environment would remain repressive. No sooner had he arrived in the capital than Vladimir became involved with a revolutionary communist cell in the city whose members primarily came from the Technological Institute of Saint Petersburg. They termed themselves Social Democrats in emulation of the Social Democratic Party of Germany which was Marxist and communist in its ideology. Already by the spring of 1894 Vladimir was under observation by the secret police in Saint Petersburg as he had come to their attention as a rising Marxist figure. Nevertheless, his politics only became more radical in the months that followed, particularly so after he met and entered into a relationship with Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom he referred to as Nadya, a schoolteacher who espoused radical Marxist political views. By that time he had also become involved in the underground publishing of Marxist pamphlets in the city. It was this activity which eventually saw him and several dozen of his associates arrested by the authorities in 1895, just as they had been preparing to publish a communist newspaper called The Worker’s Cause. Lenin was refused legal representation following his arrest and was detained for over a year before he was sentenced. This was a formative period in his life, as he began working on a book entitled The Development of Capitalism in Russia while in jail. Eventually late in 1896 he was sentenced to three years in exile in Siberia, the cold, vast and inhospitable region of Russia beyond the Ural Mountains. This was not a prison sentence, but the Russian state viewed exile to Siberia as effectively removing a political threat from civilization, so remote and under-populated was Siberia. He was joined there by Nadya in 1898 and they were wed within weeks. Owing to medical complications which Nadya suffered from, though, they would never have children. Vladimir continued to write throughout this time, eventually publishing The Development of Capitalism in Russia under the pseudonym ‘Vladimir Ilin’ in 1899. His exile ended in the early spring of 1900, but the authorities forbade him from returning to Saint Petersburg and so it was, that he briefly settled in Pskov, a city south of the capital. Here Vladimir became involved in publishing a new revolutionary newspaper entitled Iskra meaning The Spark, however he quickly realised that he would be re-arrested and suffer an even greater sentence if he continued to operate on Russian soil. Consequently, in the summer of 1900 he left for Switzerland, connecting with some revolutionary groups there before relocating to Munich in the German Empire where he was joined by Nadya in 1901. It was at this time that he began writing under the name which he would become synonymous with: Lenin. By 1902 he and Nadya had moved again, this time to London, where Lenin ran Iskra from afar, with the paper being smuggled into Russia. It was during this time in exile in London that Lenin composed his most famous written work, ‘What is to be Done?’ in 1902. In this, he rejected the view held by many communists that it was inevitable that the proletariat would move society towards a socialist state in advance of a communist one. Adherents of this view claimed that the role of communist parties was simply to shepherd that process along. Instead Lenin believed a more interventionist line was needed in order to ensure the victory of communism over capitalism, if needs be by overt armed struggle. His belief was that the working conditions of the proletariat and other factors did create a greater desire for a socialist state amongst the workers of countries like Russia, Germany and Britain, but they would not move towards socialism and then communism without a revolutionary movement to guide them there. Once this was achieved in one nation, Lenin believed that the state would serve to drive the international communist movement. As such Lenin now conceived of the Russian communist movement as what he termed the “vanguard of the proletariat,” a movement which would lead the proletariat of Russia and then Europe towards communism. But inherent in this view was a danger. If the communist parties in Russia were responsible for the communist movement both at home and internationally, then surely all manner of conduct by the Russian communist movement could be justified as necessary for the greater good of international communism? In London Lenin also became involved in one of the critical episodes in the early history of the Russian communist movement. While Lenin was in exile in Siberia in 1898, the disparate revolutionary cells and groups that constituted Russian communism had united into the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party or RSDLP, formed at an underground conference held in the city of Minsk in March 1898. The party was soon being targeted by the Russian secret police, the Okhrana, and several of its leaders were arrested and imprisoned within months of its establishment. Accordingly, a decision was taken to hold the RSDLP’s 2nd Party Congress abroad when it was held in 1903. However, when the delegates met in London in a chapel on Tottenham Court Road in August, divisions soon began to appear. One faction, led by Julius Martov, argued that party membership should be kept broad in order to appeal to as many people as possible back in Russia, as industrial workers there still only constituted 3% of the population. However, the other faction, which Lenin quickly emerged as the leader of, argued that membership should be restricted to more committed revolutionaries. When a vote was held on the matter in November, the party split in two. Lenin’s group became known as the Bolsheviks and the other faction were known thereafter as the Mensheviks. The Bolsheviks were the smaller grouping, though confusingly Bolshevik actually means ‘majority’ and Menshevik means ‘minority’, a contradiction owing to the fact that the majority of the editorial board of Iskra voted in favour of Lenin’s faction. The split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks did not result in the creation of two autonomous political parties immediately. Rather these now became two factions operating within the RSDLP. Nevertheless the division between them was extremely acrimonious, fuelled by Lenin himself who in the summer of 1904 published a treatise entitled One Step Forward, Two Steps Back, which bitterly attacked the Mensheviks. These actions were successful and by early 1905, the Bolsheviks were acquiring control over the central committee of the RSDLP. The timing was propitious, as important events were occurring in Russia in the first months of 1905. On the 22nd of January that year, a procession of several thousand unarmed workers marched on the Tsar’s Winter Palace in Saint Petersburg to peacefully present a petition for an improvement of workers’ rights in Russian factories. In a striking overreaction, government forces opened fire on the protestors, killing over 150 people and injuring hundreds more in what became known as Bloody Sunday. This, combined with Russia’s defeat in the Russo-Japanese War, incited a revolution across Russia in 1905, with workers striking in many cities, portions of the army mutinying and agrarian unrest across the countryside. The Revolution of 1905 was the spark which led Lenin to return to Russia for the first time in five years. He was soon in Saint Petersburg where he was central to establishing a new communist newspaper entitled Novaya Zhizn, meaning New Life. Through this and his other writings, he advocated in favour of trying to expand the RSDLP membership at this time of intense revolutionary fervour in Russia, but the moment was already passing the party by. In October 1905 the Tsar, Nicholas II, issued what is known as the October Manifesto. In this he made wide-ranging concessions to the myriad protestors throughout Russia. These included a declaration that many civil rights which had been established elsewhere in Europe as far back as the eighteenth century would now be granted to Russian citizens, while the Manifesto also promised that a new Russian parliament to be known as the Duma would be created and political parties could be established to elect members to this legislative assembly. This had the effect of ending the political crisis and concluding the Revolution of 1905, however, thereafter, Nicholas reneged on most of his promises. While a State Duma was established, Nicholas disbanded the first one which was elected in 1906 when the membership of the parliament was deemed to be too radical. Further Dumas were conservative and ineffective organs of government. Meanwhile martial law was quickly imposed in 1906 and political dissent was crushed across Russia in the years that followed. As the political crackdown gathered pace in 1906 and 1907 Lenin and the Bolsheviks considered their options. The Revolution of 1905 had clearly been a false dawn. What then was the path forward? One faction, led by a rising figure within the Georgian branch of the communist movement, Joseph Stalin, advocated engaging in a terror campaign whereby state institutions would be attacked, a programme which would have the added benefit of helping finance the RSDLP. There were few supporters of this, though Lenin was not entirely opposed to it. By early 1906 in the face of the crackdown, he had slipped over the border into the Grand Duchy of Finland, which was a constituent part of the Russian Empire, though ruled somewhat autonomously. Here the Bolsheviks were able to operate with some freedom for a time in 1906 and could easily get their printed material into Saint Petersburg and Moscow from just across the Finnish border. Yet it was soon realised that there would need to be a return to the tactics employed between 1900 and 1905. Once again the RSDLP leaders would head into exile further to the west in countries like Britain where their activities were more tolerated than in the autocratic east. By 1907 Lenin was back in London where the Bolsheviks successfully resumed control over the RSDLP against the Menshevik faction at the party’s Fifth Congress which took place that summer. A decision was then taken to move the party’s headquarters to Paris, where Lenin and Nadya had relocated by the end of 1908, as part of their never-ending lives as nomadic revolutionaries, but not before Lenin had spent several months undertaking research in the British Museum in London in the summer of 1908, work which became the basis of his book Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The subsequent move to Paris also proved transient and over the next several years Lenin spent stints, usually consisting of a few months at a time, in Stockholm, Copenhagen, Prague and Krakow. These were years of decline for him as his influence with the RSDLP seemed to ebb as some elements within the party favoured entering into parliamentary politics back in Russia, despite the fact that the State Duma Tsar Nicholas II had established in 1905 was little more than a smokescreen to pretend that parliamentary representation had been granted in Russia. Moreover, both his and Nadya’s health were declining. Lenin was probably suffering from the early stages of acute atherosclerosis, a disease which leads to an abnormal build-up of fat and cholesterol on the artery walls, though some have hypothesised that his health problems may have stemmed from neuro-syphilis. Whatever the exact cause of his ailment, it began to cause considerable problems during these years in exile, as his star waned within the Russian communist movement. Meanwhile, in 1912 the split between the Bolsheviks and the Mensheviks was formalised as they divided into two separate political parties. The opportunity for Lenin to re-establish himself as a central figure within the Bolshevik Party and for the Russian communist movement to reignite itself emerged in the strangest of fashions, specifically the outbreak of a European war. For years tensions between the major European powers had been building over a myriad of issues, most notably the rise of the German Empire as a challenge to British supremacy, colonial rivalry amongst all the major powers in the Scramble for Africa and a similar Scramble for Asia, and regional tensions over the changing political situation in the Balkans where the Ottoman Empire was collapsing after centuries of dominating the region. Russia was particularly concerned with the latter issue where it was in competition with the Empire of Austria-Hungary to succeed the Turks as the dominant regional power. Thus, when a regional crisis arose there in the summer of 1914 it soon escalated into a war between Russia and Austria-Hungary. Within days Germany had joined Austria-Hungary and the British and the French had in turn declared war on the governments in Berlin and Vienna in support of their Russian ally. The First World War had commenced. By the end of it, Russia would be transformed. When the war broke out in the finals days of July 1914, Lenin was in Galicia, a region which straddles the borders of Poland and Ukraine today but which formed part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the early twentieth century. He was briefly imprisoned by the Austro-Hungarian authorities owing to his Russian citizenship, but he was soon able to prove that he was anything but a supporter of the Tsarist regime of Nicholas II. Thus he was released and he and Nadya headed to neutral Switzerland where they spent the next two years as the war raged around them in Europe. There he continued to write and theorise, publishing Imperialism: The Highest Stage of Capitalism in 1917. By now Lenin’s political thought was beginning to mature and he was willing to diverge from orthodox Marxism in a way which few communist ideologues were by the 1910s. In particular he rejected Marx’s idea that every society had to gradually transition from autocracy in the shape of kings and emperors to a bourgeois democracy governed by the middle and upper classes before it could transition to a socialist revolution and then communism. Lenin, always with an eye to the situation in Russia where no bourgeois democracy could be said to have yet emerged, theorised in Switzerland in the mid-1910s that it was possible for a state to move straight from autocracy to a socialist revolution, effectively skipping the development of a bourgeois democracy. Such an experiment would soon be attempted in Russia. As Lenin’s political thought was evolving in the peaceful Alpine region, Russia’s war effort was proceeding dismally. The Russian army was poorly commanded and badly trained and in the German imperial army on the Eastern Front it faced the most effective military in the world. Matters were compounded when Tsar Nicholas II decided to take command of the army himself. 1916 actually saw Russian gains, most notably through the Brusilov Offensive which resulted in the capture of extensive territory in Poland, while Romania’s entry into the war on the side of Britain, France and Russia also aided the Russian war effort in the Balkans. However, by the end of the year food shortages and social unrest were escalating within Russia itself as the war crippled supply lines and caused scarcity everywhere. Disaffection at the Tsarist government was also running at an all-time high owing to concerns about the influence over the imperial family of Grigory Rasputin, a mystic and self-proclaimed holy man. Eventually this spilled over on the 23rd of February 1917 into mass protests in Saint Petersburg, which had been renamed Petrograd in 1914, and then other Russian cities. Over the next week the Tsarist government gradually lost control of the country and by early March it was clear that the military was no longer willing to intervene in a decisive way to save Nicholas II. With his family surrounded in Petrograd and himself surrounded by hostile troops as he attempted to make his way back to the capital from the Eastern Front, the Tsar eventually took the advice of the army chiefs and several senior members of the Duma and abdicated the throne on the 3rd of March 1917. The brief February Revolution had brought the Romanov dynasty to an end after 300 years of ruling Russia. In Switzerland Lenin was soon abreast of what was occurring back home. Within days he was preparing to return to Russia again after many more years in exile. His power within the Bolshevik movement had revived during the war owing to his stance that the communist movement should refuse to play any role in the conflict, instead lambasting it as a clash of capitalists and imperialist regimes. He was facilitated in his efforts to head back to Russia by the German government who provided a sealed train to him and a few dozen other Russian dissidents to travel from the Swiss-German border to the North Sea, the belief being that Lenin would serve to destabilise Russia’s politics and potentially aid the German war effort on the Eastern Front. By March the company had reached the Baltic Sea, where they headed by ferry to neutral Sweden and then onwards by land north through Sweden and into Finland. Along the way they received updates of developments in Petrograd where the State Duma had formed a provisional government, one which looked set to be dominated by a mix of centrist revolutionaries and the liberal aristocracy. But this new regime had immediately run into trouble as the Russian lines on the Eastern Front literally collapsed in the face of mounting desertions and a lack of leadership. Thus, when Lenin’s train pulled into Petrograd on the 16th of April 1917 the new regime was already experiencing difficulties. He immediately set to work bolstering the Bolshevik cause, addressing large rallies of proletarian workers in the city in the late spring and early summer, as well as distributing the ‘April Theses’ which he had written on his journey back to Russia and which called for a new government based around workers’ councils called ‘soviets’. Tensions built in the weeks that followed, culminating in mid-July, a period which has become known as the July Days and during which workers and soldiers engaged in violent demonstrations against the government, fuelled by Bolshevik agitation. In the aftermath of the July Days the provisional government moved to suppress the Bolsheviks and Lenin and many of his followers fled over the border to the semi-autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland. Other senior members of the party such as Leon Trotsky, an emerging theorist and organiser, were arrested in Petrograd. From Helsinki in the early autumn of 1917 Lenin and his followers began plotting a new counter-revolution in Russia to overthrow the provisional government. They were not alone and elements within the Russian army and navy were plotting similar initiatives against the provisional government, which was effectively living on borrowed time owing to poor handling of the war and failure to stabilise the domestic situation. Throughout the autumn the political situation remained tense in Russia, with the commander-in-chief of the Russian military, General Lavr Kornilov, attempting a military takeover. In order to suppress this, the provisional government was forced to turn to the communists and their workers’ soviets in Petrograd for help, a development which strengthened the cause of the Bolsheviks. Lenin was consequently able to slip back across the border into the capital in early October, where Leon Trotsky had been elected as head of the Petrograd soviet. The Bolsheviks had also managed to outflank their rivals within the Russian communist movement, the Mensheviks, by this time. The latter had played a greater role in the State Duma over the years and had co-operated more with the provisional government since March, whereas the Bolsheviks were increasingly able to capitalise on their persistently uncompromising attitude since the 1900s. Thus, by the time Lenin returned to Petrograd in October the time was wholly propitious for the Bolsheviks to try to seize power in Russia once and for all. The coup which occurred in Petrograd on the 7th of November 1917 or the 25th of October in the Julian calendar which Russia used at the time, was one of the seminal moments in modern world history, lauded thereafter by the communist movement as the October Revolution. It followed from several weeks of planning by Lenin, Trotsky and others in Petrograd in early and mid-October. Armed militias were prepared in Petrograd, Moscow and other cities to move against the government. It is a sign of how powerful the movement had become that the provisional government was aware of what was being planned, but could not stop it, despite efforts to effectively shut down the city of Petrograd on the 24th of October to forestall a further revolution. Lenin and Trotsky responded by calling on the Military-Revolutionary Committee and the soviets to occupy government buildings on the 25th of October. By the end of the day most of Petrograd and Moscow were under Bolshevik control. The following day Bolshevik Red Guards, as their revolutionary soldiers were termed, entered the Winter Palace in Petrograd and effectively removed the provisional government from power. That evening a congress of Russia’s workers’ councils, the soviets, was convened in Petrograd, which culminated the following day, the 27th of October, in the declaration of a new socialist government. In order not to alienate the bulk of the Russian population, most of whom were still agrarian agricultural workers, talk of a communist state was initially limited, but that is what was effectively established in late October 1917. Within days the revolutionaries made some of their views and intentions known to the wider political community across Russia. This was a polyglot empire which stretched from the Baltic Sea in Europe to the Pacific Ocean and from the Arctic Circle south into the deserts of Central Asia. It incorporated a vast array of different people including Russians, Ukrainians, Poles, Georgians, Finns, Latvians, Estonians, Lithuanians, Moldovans, Kazakhs, Turkmen, Armenians and the various ethnic peoples of the thinly populated Siberian region beyond the Ural Mountains. It was with the goal of assuring this vast array of people that the new government would rule Russia for all its people that the Declaration of the Rights of the Peoples of Russia was issued on the 2nd of November 1917, just days after the Bolsheviks had seized power in Petrograd. This affirmed that all ethnic people living under Russian rule were equal and sovereign and had a right to self-determination. It also abolished religious and national privileges in line with Marxist ideology. The document, which was signed by Lenin and Joseph Stalin, who had risen to become a senior figure within the Bolshevik movement since his first emergence during the Revolution of 1905, is a striking testament to the idealism of the Bolshevik revolution at its outset. The Declaration was effectively saying that the imperialism which had characterised the Russian Empire would not be maintained. The subject people of the Tsars could decide their own political future. Within months the communist regime would begin to completely renege on this promise. The October Revolution did not result automatically in the creation of a one-party state. The provisional government had been preparing to hold elections for the formation of a new constituent assembly prior to the Revolution and the Bolsheviks followed through with this plan early in 1918. There were, after all, other elements within the revolutionary movement in Russia which had a claim to power, notably the Mensheviks and other leftist and revolutionary groups. Accordingly a Russian Constituent Assembly met in January 1918, but events were overtaking it as the Bolsheviks, who in March 1918 were to formally rechristen themselves as the Russian Communist Party, aspired to absolute power. In the months that followed real power was increasingly vested in the hands of the workers’ councils or soviets in cities like Petrograd and Moscow, while centralised power was monopolised by the Political Bureau or Politburo of the Russian Communist Party. In tandem the party began a concentrated campaign of expelling Mensheviks and members of other socialist and revolutionary groups from the soviets and other political bodies. Thus, by the end of 1918 the Russian Communist Party had effectively turned Russia into a one-party state which they controlled. Lenin emerged in the course of this formative year as the head of the new communist state. Perhaps most importantly he was the chair of Sovnarkom, the name of the Council of People’s Commissars which effectively oversaw the governance of the soviets or workers’ councils throughout Russia on behalf of the Russian Communist Party. It would subsequently become one of the main executive branches of the government of what was evolving into the Soviet Union. The chairs of Sovnarkom would later serve as the official head of state, but these titles and roles were still evolving in 1918. As well as chairing Sovnarkom Lenin also sat on the Politburo and the Council of Labour and Defence. Thus, when Lenin relocated to the Kremlin in Moscow, the ancient centre of government prior to the moving of the capital to Saint Petersburg by Tsar Peter I in the early eighteenth century, he did so as the most powerful figure within the new communist regime. This came at a cost though. With the political environment still highly unstable there were three serious attempts on his life alone in 1918. The third assassination attempt on the morning of the 30th of August 1918 resulted in Lenin being shot twice and badly wounded, with blood entering his lungs. His health, which had been precarious for years, rapidly declined in the period thereafter. In tandem with this reorganisation of the government in 1918 to establish a country ruled by the Politburo, Sovnarkom and the soviets, 1918 saw the Communist Party begin to introduce a number of major economic reforms in line with Marxist ideology. As early as the 8th of November 1917, less than two weeks after the October Revolution, a Decree on Land was issued by the new government. This declared that all the land across Russia which was owned by the old Russian nobility and the Orthodox Church was now confiscated by the state and was to be presently redistributed amongst the peasantry in line with communist ideology. A debate would follow involving Lenin and others over what kind of agricultural policy should be followed thereafter. Lenin favoured the establishment of large collective farms run by the state, but this would not be resolved for some time. In the cities major industries and factories were also brought under state ownership and the new ownership structure effectively handed control of them over to the soviets. New rules were introduced to reform the labour laws as well. For instance, the working day was limited to eight hours a day, a highly liberal decision given that workers across Europe in many countries like Britain and Germany had been agitating for decades to have the working day gradually reduced from as much as fourteen or twelve hours a day. In tandem with these economic and property reforms a wide array of legislation was passed by Lenin’s government in late 1917 and 1918 to transform the social and legal landscape of Russia. For instance, communist ideology rejected religion. Accordingly in January 1918 the new government decreed the immediate separation of church and state at a time when organised Christian churches across Europe still had a major influence over education and other social matters. In tandem the new communist state stepped into the breach and began providing free education to all. In a country like Russia where only a very small proportion of the population were in receipt of a comprehensive education in the early twentieth century this was a major development and a campaign to begin tackling widespread illiteracy was also initiated. Other aspects of Russian life such as banking, transport, trade and communications were also soon being brought under state ownership, while the old Tsarist legal system was quickly replaced by one presided over by People’s Courts. This differed from most judicial systems across Europe and the common law courts of Britain in particular as they were presided over by a mix of a judge and two people’s assessors. The latter were like jurors in the common law system, but with greater powers which included the right of decision in cases in co-operation with the judge. Of course beyond these economic and social reforms, there was still a war to be dealt with. 1917 had been a terrible year for the Russian war effort on the Eastern Front. In the course of it mass desertion and the unwillingness of many Russian military commanders to fight first for the Tsarist regime and then for the provisional government following the February Revolution had seen the German Empire advance along a wide front stretching from the Baltic Sea south-east through Poland and Ukraine. Lenin’s government quickly accepted that it could not hope to extricate Russia from the conflict without the loss of territory and so it entered into negotiations almost immediately with Berlin with a view to terminating Russian involvement in what Lenin had always lambasted as a capitalist, imperialist conflict. Accordingly, on the 3rd of March 1918, just four months after the October Revolution, Russia and the Central Powers led by Germany signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. Under the terms of the agreement Russia effectively renounced control over all its territories in the Baltic States region, Poland and Ukraine. Germany annexed much of the Russian territory in Poland, while the Baltic States of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia were made into independent German vassal states. A new Ukrainian state acquired its independence, as did Finland. Further to the south-east Russia also ceded some territory to Germany’s ally, the Ottoman Empire. This was an incredibly punitive peace agreement, one which stripped Russia of a vast amount of its prime agricultural land and industrial cities, as well as some of the most densely populated areas of the Russian Empire. But in agreeing to it, the nascent communist state extricated itself from the war with Germany in order to concentrate on consolidating its control over Russia. Lenin’s government desperately needed peace with Germany and the other Central Powers in the spring of 1918, for the revolution which they had initiated in October 1917 had not been accepted by a great many elements within Russia and civil war was developing across the nation. The primary enemy of the new regime were known as the White Army in contrast to the Red Army of the soviet regime, but in reality the ‘Whites’ were a very broad array of counter-revolutionaries who were unwilling to accept the new regime. They included large segments of the old Russian aristocracy and the Orthodox Church, both of which overnight had found themselves stripped of the great wealth and power which they had enjoyed in Russia for centuries. Other elements amongst the Whites included fractious elements within the Russian army and navy who were unwilling to accept the communist takeover, as well as other centrists and leftists who gravitated towards the counter-revolution once it became clear that the Bolsheviks were going to monopolise power and that there would be no form of democratic communism in Lenin’s Russia. By the spring and summer of 1918 significant parts of Russia had fallen into the hands of this unorthodox alliance of anti-Bolsheviks. The early stages of the Russian Civil War were difficult for Lenin’s government. This was owing to events elsewhere. By the late autumn of 1918 the First World War was winding down as Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire began to collapse internally. The war eventually came to an end on the 11th of November 1918 when Germany surrendered, the Kaiser Wilhelm II already having abdicated his throne by that time. With the wider global conflict over, the victorious powers, particularly Britain, but also France, the United States and Japan, determined to ensure the overthrow of the new communist state in Russia. The great powers in London and Paris were determined that a radical socialist government would not come to control one of the most powerful states in Europe and so from late 1918 Britain and others began supplying enormous resources to the White Army. Expeditionary forces were also dispatched to Russia by Britain and others, while the newly created state of Poland which was formed following Germany’s defeat went to war with Russia with western aid. As this occurred, the early stages of the civil war in 1918 and 1919 were very difficult for Lenin’s government and it seemed for some time that the new regime might not survive long. The immense emergency which confronted the fledgling Soviet state in 1918 and 1919 must be borne in mind when assessing the early development of that same state. Faced with multiple threats to its very existence Lenin and his closest associates such as Trotsky and Stalin began unleashing state terror to retain control of the territory which remained in Soviet hands. This was occurring as early as December 1917 when Lenin ordered the creation of the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage. It is better known as the Cheka and the first of the extremely powerful secret police services established by the Soviet state over its 74 year history. The Cheka was tasked with rooting out anyone deemed to be a counter-revolutionary or enemy of the state. Its leader, Felix Dzerzhinsky, was given wide-ranging powers to undertake this mission. Within weeks hundreds and then thousands of perceived enemies of the state were being arrested and executed without trial. A great many others were detained and sent to labour camps which were being established in the remote inhospitable climes of Siberia. Lenin tried to distance himself from what became known as the Red Terror, but there is no denying that he was the head of the Soviet state during a time when the worst elements of the Tsarist regime were revived in order to create the architecture of a security state which would broadly define Soviet Russia for the next seven decades. The Red Terror was but one element in the brutal policies adopted by the nascent Soviet state in order to fight the civil war and secure the regime. Another was the use of blocking units in the war effort. The idea for these had come from Leon Trotsky and essentially involved using units of Red Army soldiers who stood behind the Soviet front lines and gunned down any Soviet soldiers who attempted to retreat. Brutal as these methods were, they soon proved effective. The war effort reached a low ebb in the summer and autumn of 1918, as a British and French expeditionary force landed at Arkhangelsk on the White Sea before the war against Germany had even been concluded, a legion of Czech and Slovak soldiers which had penetrated deep into Russia seized the city of Kazan and Vladivostok, the main port in the east, was attacked by the Japanese. Thereafter Trotsky mobilized the Red Army in an effective manner. Kazan was retaken in September 1918 and Samara followed in October. However, these efforts were offset when newly independent Poland declared war in November. Yet the initial onslaught of 1918 by the western powers and their proxies had failed to crush the communist state and the end of the First World War brought distractions for the Entente powers as wars broke out in Ireland, Turkey and other regions. In 1919 the Red Army went on the offensive. In early February Kiev fell as the communists began reasserting the control over Ukraine which they had lost with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By April the British, French and American troops in Ukraine were forced to pull out of the region as the port of Odessa fell to the Russians and communist control of Ukraine was established. In August the British and French expeditionary forces around Arkhangelsk and Murmansk in the north by the White Sea were evacuated. Thereafter the western powers were largely reduced to fighting the Soviets indirectly through their proxies in the White Army, Poland and some of Russia’s other neighbours, though a token American and Japanese presence was maintained in the far east of the country. Meanwhile the war in the west now concentrated largely on Russia’s clash with Poland. At first the Poles made major advances, seizing Kiev early in 1920, but after a Soviet counter-offensive threatened Warsaw an armistice was agreed in the autumn. Thus, by the end of 1920 the Russian Civil War had largely been won by Lenin’s regime, though mopping up operations continued in many locations until the recapture of the port of Vladivostok in October 1922 brought the war to an end. Lenin had left the leadership of the Red Army during the civil war to others, most notably Trotsky. Instead he had spent the late 1910s formulating a new approach to international socialism and communism. This was in response to calls by the British Labour Party in 1918 for a new international conference of socialist parties to be called the Labour and Socialist International. But the Russian leader had become disillusioned with the more moderate socialist movements which prevailed in Western Europe during his years in exile and was committed to establishing a new international socialist movement which would be led by Soviet Russia. Accordingly in March 1919 the First Congress of the Communist International was held in Moscow, better known as the Comintern. There was much optimism at this about the possibility of a world revolution of socialism, given that communist revolutions had occurred in Germany and Hungary in the weeks preceding the First Comintern. But these were soon suppressed and in his later years Lenin must have been aware that no immediate overthrow of the international capitalist system would occur. Nevertheless the establishment of the Comintern was extremely significant as in years to come it would serve as a major instrument of international communism led by the Soviet Union. One final policy of the Soviet regime under Lenin warrants attention. In the spring of 1921 as the civil war was winding down the Soviet leader promulgated the New Economic Policy. This represented something of a change of course for Lenin, who was always a staunch ideological Marxist. It may have surprised many then when he outlined plans for a new economic system which would allow the capitalist free market to continue operating on a limited basis in Russia for the foreseeable future. It was declared that Russians could also own small amounts of land and businesses, though major industry and large agricultural estates remained under state ownership. The purpose of the New Economic Policy was to stabilise the Russian economy in the aftermath of the war and introduce some growth into the system at a time when the worst famine since that of 1891 and 1892 had spread across the country. Ultimately the New Economic Policy resulted in a major boost to the Russian economy as it exited the war and pointed towards the benefits of at least allowing a limited amount of private ownership and free trade to continue. Yet the New Economic Policy would be gradually abandoned in the course of the 1920s as the process of state management of industry and farm collectivization intensified. The about-face in the early 1920s to adopt the New Economic Policy of course raises questions as to how we should perceive Lenin’s political thought overall. After all this was something of a new departure from classical Marxism. But then Lenin had been willing to depart from the nineteenth-century German political theorist’s writings for some time, to the extent that Leninism became its own brand of communist thought by the 1920s, one which continued to influence communist regimes globally throughout the remainder of the twentieth century. Essentially Leninism’s core idea was that a socialist revolution need not be preceded by the development of a bourgeois democracy and capitalist system, one which created a large urban proletariat which would implement the socialist revolution and then create a communist state in due course. Instead Lenin espoused the idea of a dictatorship of the proletariat, no matter how small it might be in a given state and that this vanguard party of the proletariat would then lead the rest of society towards socialism and communism. This was an important development. Marx would have scoffed at the idea of communism developing in countries like China, Mongolia or Angola where there was little industrialisation let alone a large urban proletariat, but Leninism, with its message of a small vanguard of the proletariat leading any nation to communism would have a profound impact on the twentieth century. Lenin, though, would not live to see any of this. His health had been steadily declining throughout the 1910s, though the exact cause of his ailment has never been definitively established. It deteriorated sharply following the multiple assassination attempts in 1918, in particular when he was shot twice and badly wounded that autumn. Thereafter his physicians, of which there were dozens called in during the late 1910s and early 1920s to try to resolve his problems, concluded that he might be suffering from blood poisoning brought on by the fact that the bullets from this most serious assassination attempt had never been removed from his body. Eventually in April 1922 he underwent an operation to have them surgically removed, but it did not bring about any improvement. Instead throughout the early 1920s he was increasingly restricted to Moscow as he suffered from an unusual combination of symptoms including insomnia, a sensitivity to sound and other stimuli, headaches, nausea and general fatigue. All of this eventually culminated in the summer of 1922 in the first of several strokes which he suffered in the space of just a few months. These left him partially paralyzed and increasingly restricted to a wheelchair. As Lenin’s health declined precipitously in the early 1920s thoughts inevitably turned to the succession and what arrangement might be put in place if he died or was rendered completely unable to lead the new Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, or USSR as it had been newly christened in 1922. Lenin had never established himself as a dictator in an absolute sense, but he had become the pre-eminent figure within the Soviet state based on his many years at its forefront in exile and his intellectual leadership. Therefore it was conceivable that nobody would succeed him, but rather the Politburo would rule the Soviet Union collectively as a body. Yet even Lenin doubted that such an arrangement could work and believed that a pre-eminent figure would succeed him. To that end in the midst of his illness in the winter of 1922 he dictated his last testament. Here he discussed the respective qualities of the viable candidates. Foremost amongst them was Joseph Stalin, who had risen by then to become the General Secretary of the Communist Party. But Lenin had become wary of the Georgian he had first met 17 years earlier at the time of the Revolution of 1905, claiming he was overly ambitious and poorly equipped from an intellectual standpoint. Instead Lenin gave his approval for Leon Trotsky to succeed him. The dictation of the testament was one of his last lucid major acts. In March 1923 Lenin suffered another stroke, as a result of which he lost the ability to speak. Thereafter he continued to decline before falling into a coma in the first weeks of 1924. He died on the 21st of January. The political machinations to succeed Lenin began immediately. Trotsky was convalescing from an illness in the warmer weather of the Caucasus region when Lenin died and Stalin sent him incorrect details of the funeral arrangements so that he missed the state funeral which was held in Moscow on the 27th of January. Lenin’s body was subsequently embalmed and placed on public display in a Mausoleum in Red Square in central Moscow, where it is still viewable a century later. Despite Lenin’s warnings, many of the other senior members of the Soviet regime and the Politburo favoured Stalin in the aftermath of Lenin’s death. Stalin entered a political alliance with two of the senior members of the Politburo, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev, one which he used to undermine Trotsky in the years that followed. He eventually drove him into exile and then turned on his former allies. By 1929 Stalin had monopolised power completely in his own hands and established himself as a dictator in a manner which Lenin never had. For the next quarter of a century he ruled the Soviet Union in a totalitarian fashion, murdering millions in his quest to retain absolute power. The man who was born as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and became known to the world as Lenin, the pen-name he adopted in the early 1900s, was one of the most influential figures of the twentieth century. He hailed from an upper middle class bourgeois background and then reacted violently against that same background from a very young age, a development brought about in part by the execution of his brother by the authoritarian Tsarist regime in the late 1880s. Over the next quarter of a century he emerged as the leading intellectual figure within the Bolshevik movement, theorising about how communism could function in Russia and moving beyond Marx’s thought in the process. As a result, when the First World War created a propitious environment for a communist state to emerge in Russia in 1917 he became the leader of it, with his message that the Russian proletariat and the communists, as small in number as they might be compared to the population of the Russian Empire as a whole, would act as a vanguard for the development of communism in Russia and then the world. The Russian Revolution was born of idealism and the =goal of overthrowing the autocratic imperial regime which had ruled Russia for centuries. But nation states can rarely escape their past entirely and that proved to be all too true of Soviet Russia. Within weeks of the Bolsheviks seizing power they had begun to create a communist state which in many ways mirrored the Tsarist regime which preceded it. The Cheka was created as a secret police which effectively succeeded the Okhrana, the secret police under the Tsars. Political dissidents were soon being sent off to labour camps and exile in Siberia, much as they had been in imperial times. And the possibility of a democratic legislative assembly being established within a new communist state was quickly dashed as a dictatorship of the soviets and the Politburo was created, with Lenin at its summit. This soon drew withering criticism from other communist leaders elsewhere in Europe and Russia, notably Rosa Luxembourg, the leader of the German Revolution, and Peter Kropotkin, the intellectual forefather of Bolshevism. In saying this it should be noted that Lenin was not Joseph Stalin. But the state which he more than anybody else brought into being in the late 1910s and early 1920s was a highly totalitarian one which allowed for Stalin’s rise. What do you think of Lenin? If he had lived long enough would a more benign Soviet Union have emerged or might he ultimately have become as oppressive and totalitarian as Stalin subsequently became? Please let us know in the comment section, and in the meantime, thank you very much for watching.