home Boiler room What year was Lenin born? Who is Lenin? Not knowing is a shame! Ulyanov Library

What year was Lenin born? Who is Lenin? Not knowing is a shame! Ulyanov Library

Lenin (Ulyanov) Vladimir Ilyich, the greatest proletarian revolutionary and thinker, successor to the work of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, organizer of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, founder of the Soviet socialist state, teacher and leader of the working people of the whole world.

Lenin's grandfather - Nikolai Vasilyevich Ulyanov, a serf from the Nizhny Novgorod province, later lived in Astrakhan, was a tailor-craftsman. Father - Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, after graduating from Kazan University, he taught in secondary educational institutions Penza and Nizhny Novgorod, and then was an inspector and director of public schools in the Simbirsk province. Lenin's mother, Maria Aleksandrovna Ulyanova (née Blank), the daughter of a doctor, having received a home education, passed the exams for the title of teacher as an external student; She devoted herself entirely to raising her children. The elder brother, Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov, was executed in 1887 for participating in the preparation of the assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander III. Sisters - Anna Ilyinichna Ulyanova-Elizarova, Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova and younger brother - Dmitry Ilyich Ulyanov became prominent figures in the Communist Party.

From 1879 to 1887, L. (Lenin) studied at the Simbirsk gymnasium. The spirit of protest against the tsarist system, social and national oppression awakened in him early. Advanced Russian literature, the works of V. G. Belinsky, A. I. Herzen, N. A. Dobrolyubov, D. I. Pisarev and especially N. G. Chernyshevsky contributed to the formation of his revolutionary views. From his older brother L. learned about Marxist literature. After graduating from high school with a gold medal, L. entered Kazan University, but in December 1887, for active participation in a revolutionary gathering of students, he was arrested, expelled from the university and exiled to the village of Kokushkino, Kazan province. From that time on, L. devoted his entire life to the struggle against autocracy and capitalism, to the cause of liberating the working people from oppression and exploitation. In October 1888 L. returned to Kazan. Here he joined one of the Marxist circles organized by N. E. Fedoseev, in which the works of K. Marx, F. Engels, and G. V. Plekhanov were studied and discussed. The works of Marx and Engels played a decisive role in the formation of L.'s worldview—he became a convinced Marxist.

In 1891, L. passed the exams as an external student for the Faculty of Law at St. Petersburg University and began working as an assistant to a sworn attorney in Samara, where the Ulyanov family moved in 1889. Here he organized a circle of Marxists, established connections with the revolutionary youth of other cities of the Volga region, and gave lectures against populism. The first of L.’s surviving works, the article “New Economic Movements in Peasant Life,” dates back to the Samara period.

At the end of August 1893, L. moved to St. Petersburg, where he joined a Marxist circle, whose members were S. I. Radchenko, P. K. Zaporozhets, G. M. Krzhizhanovsky and others. The legal cover of L.’s revolutionary activities was his work as an assistant to a sworn attorney . Unshakable faith in the victory of the working class, extensive knowledge, deep understanding of Marxism and the ability to apply it to the resolution of vital issues that worried the masses earned L. the respect of St. Petersburg Marxists and made L. their recognized leader. He establishes connections with advanced workers (I.V. Babushkin, V.A. Shelgunov, etc.), leads workers’ circles, and explains the need for a transition from circle propaganda of Marxism to revolutionary agitation among the broad proletarian masses.

L. was the first Russian Marxist to set the task of creating a working class party in Russia as urgent practical problem and led the struggle of the revolutionary Social Democrats for its implementation. L. believed that this should be a proletarian party of a new type, which, in its principles, forms and methods of activity, meets the requirements new era- the era of imperialism and socialist revolution.

Having accepted the central idea of Marxism about the historical mission of the working class - the gravedigger of capitalism and the creator of communist society, L. devotes all the strength of his creative genius, comprehensive erudition, colossal energy, and rare capacity for work to selfless service to the cause of the proletariat, becomes a professional revolutionary, and is formed as a leader of the working class.

In 1894, L. wrote the work “What are “friends of the people” and how do they fight against the Social Democrats? )". Already these first major works by L. were distinguished by a creative approach to the theory and practice of the labor movement. In them, L. subjected the subjectivism of the populists and the objectivism of the “legal Marxists” to devastating criticism, and showed a consistently Marxist approach to the analysis of Russian. in reality, he described the tasks of the Russian proletariat, developed the idea of an alliance of the working class with the peasantry, and substantiated the need to create a truly revolutionary party in Russia. In April 1895, L. went abroad to establish contact with the Liberation of Labor group. In Switzerland he met Plekhanov, in Germany - with W. Liebknecht, in France - with P. Lafargue and other figures of the international labor movement. In September 1895, having returned from abroad, L. visited Vilnius, Moscow and Orekhovo-Zuevo, where he established connections with local Social Democrats. In the fall of 1895, on the initiative and under the leadership of L., the Marxist circles of St. Petersburg united into a single organization - the St. Petersburg “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class,” which was the beginning of a revolutionary proletarian party and, for the first time in Russia, began to combine scientific socialism with the mass workers’ movement.

On the night of December 8 (20) to December 9 (21), 1895, L., together with his comrades in the “Union of Struggle,” was arrested and imprisoned, from where he continued to lead the “Union.” In prison, L. wrote “Project and Explanation of the Program of the Social Democratic Party,” a number of articles and leaflets, and prepared materials for his book “The Development of Capitalism in Russia.” In February 1897, L. was exiled to the village for 3 years. Shushenskoye, Minusinsk district, Yenisei province. N.K. Krupskaya was also sentenced to exile for active revolutionary work. As L.'s bride, she was also sent to Shushenskoye, where she became his wife. Here L. established and maintained contacts with the Social Democrats of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and other cities, with the Emancipation of Labor group, corresponded with the Social Democrats who were in exile in the North and Siberia, and rallied around him exiled Social Democrats of the Minusinsk district. In exile, L. wrote over 30 works, including the book “The Development of Capitalism in Russia” and the brochure “Tasks of Russian Social Democrats,” which were of great importance for the development of the party’s program, strategy and tactics. In 1898, the 1st Congress of the RSDLP was held in Minsk, which proclaimed the formation of a Social Democratic Party in Russia and published the “Manifesto of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party.” L. agreed with the main provisions of the “Manifesto”. However, the party had not actually been created yet. The congress, which took place without the participation of L. and other prominent Marxists, was unable to develop a program and charter for the party and overcome the disunity of the Social Democratic movement. L. developed a practical plan for the creation of a Marxist party in Russia; the most important means of achieving this goal was, as L. believed, to be an all-Russian illegal political newspaper. Fighting for the creation of a new type of proletarian party, irreconcilable to opportunism, L. opposed the revisionists in international social democracy (E. Bernstein and others) and their supporters in Russia (“economists”). In 1899 he compiled the “Protest of Russian Social Democrats,” directed against “economism.” The “protest” was discussed and signed by 17 exiled Marxists.

After the end of his exile, L. left Shushenskoye on January 29 (February 10), 1900. Proceeding to his new place of residence, L. stopped in Ufa, Moscow, etc., illegally visited St. Petersburg, establishing connections with Social Democrats everywhere. Having settled in Pskov in February 1900, L. did a lot of work organizing the newspaper and created strongholds for it in a number of cities. In July 1900, L. went abroad, where he established the publication of the newspaper Iskra. L. was the immediate manager of the newspaper. Iskra played an exceptional role in the ideological and organizational preparation of the revolutionary proletarian party, in distinguishing itself from the opportunists. It became the center for uniting desks. strength, education of desks. frames. Subsequently, L. noted that “the entire flower of the conscious proletariat took the side of Iskra” (Poln. sobr. soch., 5th ed., vol. 26, p. 344).

From 1900 to 05, L. lived in Munich, London, and Geneva. In December 1901, L. for the first time signed one of his articles published in Iskra with the pseudonym Lenin (he also had pseudonyms: V. Ilyin, V. Frey, Iv. Petrov, K. Tulin, Karpov, etc.).

In the struggle for the creation of a new type of party, Lenin’s work “What is to be done?” was of outstanding importance. Urgent issues of our movement" (1902). In it, L. criticized “economism” and highlighted the main problems of building the party, its ideology and politics. L. outlined the most important theoretical issues in the articles “The Agrarian Program of Russian Social Democracy” (1902) and “The National Question in Our Program” (1903). With the leading participation of L., the editorial board of Iskra developed a draft Party Program, which formulated the demand for the establishment of the dictatorship of the proletariat for the socialist transformation of society, which was absent in the programs of Western European social democratic parties. L. wrote the draft Charter of the RSDLP, drew up a work plan and drafts of almost all the resolutions of the upcoming party congress. In 1903, the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP took place. At this congress, the process of unification of revolutionary Marxist organizations was completed and the party of the working class of Russia was formed on the ideological, political and organizational principles developed by L. A proletarian party of a new type, the Bolshevik Party, was created. “Bolshevism has existed as a current of political thought and as a political party since 1903,” wrote L. in 1920 (ibid., vol. 41, p. 6). After the congress, L. launched a struggle against Menshevism. In his work “One Step Forward, Two Steps Back” (1904), he exposed the anti-party activities of the Mensheviks and substantiated the organizational principles of a new type of proletarian party.

During the Revolution of 1905–07, L. directed the work of the Bolshevik Party in leading the masses. At the 3rd (1905), 4th (1906), 5th (1907) congresses of the RSDLP, in the book “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution” (1905) and numerous articles, L. developed and substantiated strategic plan and the tactics of the Bolshevik Party in the revolution, criticized the opportunist line of the Mensheviks; on November 8 (21), 1905, L. arrived in St. Petersburg, where he led the activities of the Central Committee and the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks, the preparation of an armed uprising. L. headed the work of the Bolshevik newspapers “Forward”, “Proletary”, “ New life" In the summer of 1906, due to police persecution, L. moved to Kuokkala (Finland), in December 1907 he was again forced to emigrate to Switzerland, and at the end of 1908 to France (Paris).

During the years of reaction 1908–10, Lenin led the struggle for the preservation of the illegal Bolshevik Party against the Menshevik liquidators and otzovists, against the splitting actions of the Trotskyists (see Trotskyism), and against conciliation towards opportunism. He deeply analyzed the experience of the Revolution of 1905–07. At the same time, L. resisted the onslaught of reaction against the ideological foundations of the party. In his work “Materialism and Empirio-Criticism” (published in 1909), L. exposed the sophisticated methods of defending idealism by bourgeois philosophers, the attempts of revisionists to distort the philosophy of Marxism, and developed dialectical materialism.

At the end of 1910, a new upsurge of the revolutionary movement began in Russia. In December 1910, on L.’s initiative, the newspaper “Zvezda” began to be published in St. Petersburg; on April 22 (May 5), 1912, the first issue of the daily legal Bolshevik workers’ newspaper “Pravda” was published. To train party workers, L. in 1911 organized a party school in Longjumeau (near Paris), in which he gave 29 lectures. In January 1912, the 6th (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP was held in Prague under the leadership of L., which expelled the Menshevik liquidators from the RSDLP and defined the tasks of the party in an environment of revolutionary upsurge. To be closer to Russia, L. moved to Krakow in June 1912. From there he directs the work of the bureau of the Central Committee of the RSDLP in Russia, the editorial office of the newspaper Pravda, and manages the activities of the Bolshevik faction of the 4th State Duma. In December 1912 in Krakow and in September 1913 in Poronin, under the leadership of L., meetings of the Central Committee of the RSDLP with party workers were held on the most important issues of the revolutionary movement. L. paid great attention to the development of the theory of the national question, the education of party members and the broad masses of workers in the spirit of proletarian internationalism. He wrote program work: “Critical notes on the national question” (1913), “On the right of nations to self-determination” (1914).

From October 1905 to 1912, L. was a representative of the RSDLP in the International Socialist Bureau of the 2nd International. Heading the Bolshevik delegation, he took an active part in the work of the Stuttgart (1907) and Copenhagen (1910) international socialist congresses. L. led a decisive struggle against opportunism in the international labor movement, rallying left-wing revolutionary elements, and paid much attention to exposing militarism and developing the tactics of the Bolshevik Party in relation to imperialist wars.

During World War I (1914–18), the Bolshevik Party, led by L., raised high the banner of proletarian internationalism, exposed the social chauvinism of the leaders of the Second International, and put forward the slogan of transforming the imperialist war into a civil war. The war found L. in Poronin. On July 26 (August 8), 1914, L., following a false denunciation, was arrested by the Austrian authorities and imprisoned in the city of New Targ. Thanks to the assistance of Polish and Austrian Social Democrats, L. was released from prison on August 6 (19). On August 23 (September 5) he left for Switzerland (Bern); in February 1916 he moved to Zurich, where he lived until March (April) 1917. In the manifesto of the Central Committee of the RSDLP “War and Russian Social Democracy”, in the works “On the National Pride of the Great Russians”, “The Collapse of the Second International”, “Socialism and War”, “On the slogan of the United States of Europe”, “Military program of the proletarian revolution”, “Results of the discussion on self-determination”, “On the caricature of Marxism and “imperialist economism””, etc. L. further developed the most important provisions of Marxist theory, developed a strategy and the tactics of the Bolsheviks in war conditions. A profound substantiation of the theory and policy of the party on issues of war, peace and revolution was L.’s work “Imperialism, as the highest stage of capitalism” (1916). During the war years, L. worked a lot on issues of philosophy (see “Philosophical Notebooks”). Despite the difficulties of wartime, L. established the regular publication of the Central Organ of the Party of the newspaper “Social-Democrat”, established connections with party organizations in Russia, and directed their work. At the international socialist conferences in Zimmerwald [August (September) 1915] and Quinthal (April 1916), L. defended revolutionary Marxist principles and led the struggle against opportunism and centrism (Kautskyism). By rallying the revolutionary forces in the international labor movement, L. laid the foundations for the formation of the 3rd Communist International.

Having received in Zurich on March 2 (15), 1917, the first reliable news about the February bourgeois-democratic revolution that had begun in Russia, L. defined new tasks for the proletariat and the Bolshevik Party. In “Letters from Afar,” he formulated the party’s political course for the transition from the first, democratic stage to the second, socialist stage of the revolution, warned about the inadmissibility of supporting the bourgeois Provisional Government, and put forward the position on the need to transfer all power into the hands of the Soviets. April 3(16), 1917 L. returned from emigration to Petrograd. Solemnly greeted by thousands of workers and soldiers, he made a short speech, ending with the words: “Long live the socialist revolution!” On April 4 (17), at a meeting of the Bolsheviks, L. spoke with a document that went down in history under the name V. I. Lenin’s April Theses (“On the tasks of the proletariat in this revolution”). In these theses, in “Letters on Tactics”, in reports and speeches at the 7th (April) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP (b), L. developed a plan for the party’s struggle for the transition from a bourgeois-democratic revolution to a socialist revolution, the party’s tactics in conditions of dual power - an orientation toward the peaceful development of the revolution, put forward and substantiated the slogan “All power to the Soviets!” Under L.'s leadership, the party launched political and organizational work among the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers. L. directed the activities of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) and the central printed organ of the party, the newspaper Pravda, and spoke at meetings and rallies. From April to July 1917, L. wrote over 170 articles, brochures, draft resolutions of Bolshevik conferences and the Party Central Committee, and appeals. At the 1st All-Russian Congress of Soviets (June 1917), L. made speeches on the issue of war, on the attitude towards the bourgeois Provisional Government, exposing its imperialist, anti-people policy and the conciliation of the Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries. In July 1917, after the elimination of dual power and the concentration of power in the hands of the counter-revolution, the peaceful period of development of the revolution ended. On July 7 (20), the Provisional Government ordered the arrest of L. He was forced to go underground. Until August 8 (21), 1917, L. was hiding in a hut beyond the lake. Razliv, near Petrograd, then until the beginning of October - in Finland (Yalkala, Helsingfors, Vyborg). And underground he continued to lead the activities of the party. In the theses “The Political Situation” and in the brochure “Towards Slogans,” L. defined and substantiated the party’s tactics in the new conditions. Based on Lenin’s principles, the 6th Congress of the RSDLP (b) (1917) decided on the need to take power by the working class in alliance with the poor peasantry through an armed uprising. While underground, L. wrote the book “State and Revolution,” brochures “The Impending Catastrophe and How to Fight It,” “Will the Bolsheviks Maintain State Power?” and other works. On September 12-14 (25-27), 1917, L. wrote a letter to the Central, Petrograd and Moscow committees of the RSDLP (b) “The Bolsheviks must take power” and a letter to the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b) “Marxism and uprising”, and then on September 29 (12 October) article “The crisis is ripe.” Based on them deep analysis Based on the alignment and correlation of class forces in the country and in the international arena, L. concluded that the moment was ripe for a victorious socialist revolution, and developed a plan for an armed uprising. At the beginning of October, L. returned illegally from Vyborg to Petrograd. In the article “Advice from an Outsider” on October 8 (21), he outlined the tactics of carrying out an armed uprising. On October 10 (23), at a meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), L. made a report on the current situation; At his suggestion, the Central Committee adopted a resolution on an armed uprising. On October 16 (29), at an extended meeting of the Central Committee of the RSDLP (b), L. in his report defended the course of uprising and sharply criticized the position of opponents of the uprising L. B. Kamenev and G. E. Zinoviev. L. considered the position of postponing the uprising until the convening of the 2nd Congress of Soviets to be extremely dangerous for the fate of the revolution, which L. D. Trotsky especially insisted on. The meeting of the Central Committee confirmed Lenin's resolution on an armed uprising. During the preparation of the uprising, L. directed the activities of the Military Revolutionary Center, created by the Central Committee of the party, and the Military Revolutionary Committee (MRC), formed at the proposal of the Central Committee under the Petrograd Soviet. On October 24 (November 6), in a letter to the Central Committee, L. demanded to immediately go on the offensive, arrest the Provisional Government and take power, emphasizing that “delay in taking action is like death” (ibid., vol. 34 p. 436).

On the evening of October 24 (November 6), L. illegally arrived in Smolny to directly lead the armed uprising. At the 2nd All-Russian Congress of Soviets, which opened on October 25 (November 7), which proclaimed the transfer of all power in the center and locally into the hands of the Soviets, L. made reports on peace and land. The congress adopted Lenin's decrees on peace and land and formed a workers' and peasants' government - the Council of People's Commissars, headed by L. The victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution, won under the leadership of the Communist Party, opened a new era in the history of mankind - the era of transition from capitalism to socialism.

L. led the struggle of the Communist Party and the people of Russia to solve the problems of the dictatorship of the proletariat and to build socialism. Under L.'s leadership, the party and government created a new, Soviet state apparatus. The confiscation of landowners' lands and the nationalization of all land, banks, transport, and large-scale industry were carried out, and a foreign trade monopoly was introduced. The Red Army was created. National oppression has been destroyed. The party attracted the broad masses of the people to the grandiose work of building the Soviet state and implementing fundamental socio-economic transformations. In December 1917, L. in the article “How to organize a competition?” put forward the idea of socialist competition of the masses as an effective method of building socialism. At the beginning of January 1918, L. prepared the “Declaration of the Rights of the Working and Exploited People,” which was the basis of the first Soviet Constitution of 1918. Thanks to L.’s integrity and perseverance, as a result of his struggle against the “left communists” and Trotskyists, the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty of 1918 was concluded with Germany, which gave The Soviet government needed a peaceful respite.

From March 11, 1918, L. lived and worked in Moscow, after the Central Committee of the Party and the Soviet government moved here from Petrograd.

In the work “The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power”, in the work “On “Left” Childhood and Petty-Bourgeoisism” (1918), etc., L. outlined a plan for creating the foundations of a socialist economy. In May 1918, on the initiative and with the participation of L., decrees on the food issue were developed and adopted. At L.'s suggestion, food detachments were created from workers, sent to the villages to rouse the poor peasants (see Committees of the Poor Peasants) to fight the kulaks, to fight for bread. The socialist measures of the Soviet government met fierce resistance from the overthrown exploiting classes. They launched an armed struggle against Soviet power and resorted to terror. On August 30, 1918, L. was seriously wounded by the Socialist Revolutionary terrorist F. E. Kaplan.

During the Civil War and military intervention of 1918–20, L. was chairman of the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense, created on November 30, 1918 to mobilize all forces and resources to defeat the enemy. L. put forward the slogan “Everything for the front!” At his suggestion, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee declared the Soviet Republic a military camp. Under L.'s leadership, the party and the Soviet government in a short time managed to rebuild the country's economy on a war footing, developed and implemented a system of emergency measures, called “war communism.” Lenin wrote the most important party documents, which were a combat program for mobilizing the forces of the party and the people to defeat the enemy: “Theses of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) in connection with the situation of the Eastern Front” (April 1919), a letter of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) to all party organizations “ Everyone to fight Denikin!” (July 1919) and others. L. directly supervised the development of plans for the most important strategic operations of the Red Army to defeat the White Guard armies and troops of foreign interventionists.

At the same time, L. continued to conduct theoretical work. In the fall of 1918, he wrote the book “The Proletarian Revolution and the Renegade Kautsky,” in which he exposed Kautsky’s opportunism and showed the fundamental opposition between bourgeois and proletarian, Soviet democracy. L. pointed out the international significance of the strategy and tactics of Russian communists. “...Bolshevism,” wrote L., “is suitable as a model of tactics for everyone” (ibid., vol. 37, p. 305). L. mainly drafted the second Party Program, which defined the tasks of building socialism, adopted by the 8th Congress of the RCP (b) (March 1919). The focus of L.'s attention at that time was the question of the transition period from capitalism to socialism. In June 1919, he wrote the article “The Great Initiative,” dedicated to communist subbotniks; in the fall, he wrote the article “Economics and Politics in the Era of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat,” and in the spring of 1920, the article “From the Destruction of the Age-Old Way of Life to the Creation of the New.” In these and many other works, L., summarizing the experience of the dictatorship of the proletariat, deepened the Marxist doctrine of the transition period, illuminated critical issues communist construction in the context of the struggle between two systems: socialism and capitalism. After the victorious end of the Civil War, L. led the struggle of the party and all workers of the Soviet Republic for the restoration and further development of the economy, and led cultural construction. In the Report of the Central Committee to the 9th Party Congress, Latvia defined the tasks of economic construction and emphasized the extremely important importance of a unified economic plan, the basis of which should be the electrification of the country. Under L.’s leadership, the GOELRO plan was developed - a plan for the electrification of Russia (for 10-15 years), the first long-term development plan National economy Soviet country, which L. called “the second program of the party” (see ibid., vol. 42, p. 157).

At the end of 1920 - beginning of 1921, a discussion unfolded in the party about the role and tasks of trade unions, in which questions were actually resolved about methods of approaching the masses, about the role of the party, about the fate of the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism in Russia. L. spoke out against the erroneous platforms and factional activities of Trotsky, N.I. Bukharin, the “workers’ opposition,” and the group of “democratic centralism.” He pointed out that, being a school of communism in general, trade unions should be for workers, in particular, a school of economic management.

At the 10th Congress of the RCP (b) (1921), L. summed up the results of the trade union discussion in the party and put forward the task of transition from the policy of “war communism” to the new economic policy (NEP). The congress approved the transition to the NEP, which ensured the strengthening of the alliance of the working class and the peasantry, the creation of the production base of a socialist society; adopted the resolution “On Party Unity” written by L. In the brochure “On the Food Tax (The Significance of the New Policy and Its Conditions)” (1921) and the article “On the Four-Year Anniversary of the October Revolution” (1921), L. revealed the essence of the new economic policy as the economic policy of the proletariat in the transition period and described the ways of its implementation.

In the speech “Tasks of Youth Unions” at the 3rd Congress of the RKSM (1920), in the outline and draft resolution “On Proletarian Culture” (1920), in the article “On the Significance of Militant Materialism” (1922) and other works, L. highlighted the problems creating a socialist culture, the tasks of the ideological work of the party; L. showed great concern for the development of science.

L. determined ways to solve the national question. The problems of nation-state building and socialist transformations in national regions are covered by L. in the report on the party program at the 8th Congress of the RCP (b), in the “Initial Draft of Theses on National and Colonial Issues” (1920) for the 2nd Congress of the Comintern, in the letter “On the Formation of the USSR” (1922) and others, L. developed the principles of uniting the Soviet republics into a single multinational state on the basis of voluntariness and equality - the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, which was created in December 1922.

The Soviet government, led by L., consistently fought to preserve peace, to prevent a new world war, and sought to establish the economy and diplomatic relations with other countries. At the same time, the Soviet people supported the revolutionary and national liberation movements.

In March 1922, L. led the work of the 11th Congress of the RCP (b) - the last party congress at which he spoke. Hard work and the consequences of being wounded in 1918 undermined L.'s health. In May 1922 he became seriously ill. At the beginning of October 1922, L. returned to work. His last public appearance was on November 20, 1922 at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet. On December 16, 1922, L.’s health condition deteriorated sharply again. At the end of December 1922 - beginning of 1923, L. dictated letters on internal party and state issues: “Letter to the Congress”, “On giving legislative functions to the State Planning Committee”, “On the issue of nationalities or “autonomization”” and a number of articles - “Pages from the diary”, “About cooperation”, “About our revolution”, “How can we reorganize the Rabkrin (Proposal to the XII Party Congress)”, “Less is better”. These letters and articles are rightly called L.'s political testament. They were the final stage in L.'s development of a plan for building socialism in the USSR. In them, L. outlined in general form the program for the socialist transformation of the country and the prospects for the world revolutionary process, the foundations of the party’s policy, strategy and tactics. He substantiated the possibility of building a socialist society in the USSR, developed provisions on the industrialization of the country, on the transition of peasants to large-scale social production through cooperation (see V.I. Lenin’s Cooperative Plan), on the cultural revolution, emphasized the need to strengthen the alliance of the working class and the peasantry, strengthen the friendship of the peoples of the USSR, improve the state apparatus, ensure the leading role of the Communist Party, the unity of its ranks.

L. consistently pursued the principle of collective leadership. He put all the most important issues for discussion at regularly meeting party congresses and conferences, plenums of the Central Committee and the Politburo of the Party Central Committee, All-Russian Congresses of Soviets, sessions of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and meetings of the Council of People's Commissars. Under the leadership of L. worked such prominent figures of the party and the Soviet state as V.V. Borovsky, F.E. Dzerzhinsky, M.I. Kalinin, L.B. Krasin, G.M. Krzhizhanovsky, V.V. Kuibyshev, A. V. Lunacharsky, G. K. Ordzhonikidze, G. I. Petrovsky, Y. M. Sverdlov, I. V. Stalin, P. I. Stuchka, M. V. Frunze, G. V. Chicherin, S. G. Shaumyan et al.

L. was the leader of not only the Russian, but also the international labor and communist movement. In letters to the working people of Western Europe, America and Asia, L. explained the essence and international significance of the October Socialist Revolution, the most important tasks of the world revolutionary movement. On L.'s initiative, the 3rd Communist International was created in 1919. Under the leadership of L. the 1st, 2nd, 3rd and 4th congresses of the Comintern were held. He wrote drafts of many resolutions and documents of congresses. In L.’s works, primarily in the work “The Infantile Disease of “Leftism” in Communism” (1920), the programmatic foundations, strategy and principles of tactics of the international communist movement were developed.

In May 1923, L. moved to Gorki due to illness. In January 1924, his health suddenly deteriorated sharply. January 21, 1924 at 6 o'clock. 50 min. L. died in the evening. On January 23, the coffin with L.’s body was transported to Moscow and installed in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions. For five days and nights, the people said goodbye to their leader. On January 27, a funeral took place on Red Square; the coffin with L.'s embalmed body was placed in a specially built Mausoleum (see Mausoleum of V.I. Lenin).

Never since Marx has the history of the liberation movement of the proletariat given the world a thinker and leader of the working class, all working people, of such gigantic stature as Lenin. The genius of a scientist, political wisdom and foresight were combined in him with the talent of the greatest organizer, with an iron will, courage and courage. L. believed boundlessly in creative forces the masses of the people, was closely connected with them, enjoyed their boundless trust, love and support. All of L.'s activities are the embodiment of the organic unity of revolutionary theory and revolutionary practice. Selfless devotion to communist ideals, the cause of the party, the working class, the greatest conviction in the rightness and justice of this cause, subordination of one’s entire life to the struggle for the liberation of workers from social and national oppression, love for the Motherland and consistent internationalism, intransigence towards class enemies and touching attention to comrades , exactingness towards oneself and towards others, moral purity, simplicity and modesty are the characteristic features of Lenin - a leader and a person.

L. built the leadership of the party and the Soviet state on the basis of creative Marxism. He tirelessly fought against attempts to turn the teachings of Marx and Engels into a dead dogma.

“We do not at all look at Marx’s theory as something complete and inviolable,” wrote L., “we are convinced, on the contrary, that it laid only the cornerstones of the science that socialists must move further in all directions if they do not want to lag behind life" (ibid., vol. 4, p. 184).

L. raised revolutionary theory to a new, higher level, enriching Marxism with scientific discoveries of world-historical significance.

“Leninism is the Marxism of the era of imperialism and proletarian revolutions, the era of the collapse of colonialism and the victory of national liberation movements, the era of humanity’s transition from capitalism to socialism and the construction of a communist society” (“On the 100th anniversary of the birth of V. I. Lenin,” Theses Central Committee of the CPSU, 1970, p. 5).

L. developed all the components of Marxism - philosophy, political economy, scientific communism (see Marxism-Leninism).

Having summarized the achievements of science, especially physics, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries from the perspective of Marxist philosophy, L. further developed the doctrine of dialectical materialism. He deepened the concept of matter, defining it as an objective reality that exists outside of human consciousness, and developed the fundamental problems of the theory of man’s reflection of objective reality and the theory of knowledge. L.'s great merit is the comprehensive development of materialist dialectics, especially the law of unity and struggle of opposites.

“Lenin is the first thinker of the century who, in the achievements of contemporary natural science, saw the beginning of a grandiose scientific revolution, was able to reveal and philosophically generalize the revolutionary meaning of the fundamental discoveries of the great researchers of nature... The idea he expressed about the inexhaustibility of matter became the principle of natural scientific knowledge” (ibid., p. . 14).

L. made his greatest contribution to Marxist sociology. He concretized, substantiated and developed the most important problems, categories and provisions of historical materialism about socio-economic formations, about the laws of development of society, about the development of productive forces and production relations, about the relationship between the base and the superstructure, about classes and class struggle, about the state, about social revolution, about the nation and national liberation movements, about the relationship between objective and subjective factors in social life, about social consciousness and the role of ideas in the development of society, about the role of the masses and individuals in history.

L. significantly supplemented the Marxist analysis of capitalism with the formulation of such problems as the formation and development of the capitalist mode of production, in particular in relatively backward countries in the presence of strong feudal remnants, agrarian relations under capitalism, as well as an analysis of bourgeois and bourgeois-democratic revolutions, the social structure of capitalist society, the essence and form of the bourgeois state, the historical mission and forms of the class struggle of the proletariat. Of great importance is L.'s conclusion that the strength of the proletariat in historical development is immeasurably greater than its share in the total population.

L. created the doctrine of imperialism as the highest and final stage in the development of capitalism. Having revealed the essence of imperialism as monopoly and state-monopoly capitalism, characterizing its main features, showing the extreme aggravation of all its contradictions, the objective acceleration of the creation of material and socio-political prerequisites for socialism, L. concluded that imperialism is the eve of the socialist revolution.

L. comprehensively developed the Marxist theory of socialist revolution in relation to the new historical era. He deeply developed the idea of the hegemony of the proletariat in the revolution, the need for an alliance of the working class with the working peasantry, determined the attitude of the proletariat towards various layers of the peasantry at different stages of the revolution; created a theory of the development of a bourgeois-democratic revolution into a socialist revolution, and illuminated the question of the relationship between the struggle for democracy and for socialism. Having revealed the mechanism of action of the law of uneven development of capitalism in the era of imperialism, L. made the most important conclusion, which has enormous theoretical and political significance, about the possibility and inevitability of the victory of socialism initially in a few or even in one individual capitalist country; this conclusion of L., confirmed by the course historical development, formed the basis for the development important issues the world revolutionary process, the construction of socialism in countries where the proletarian revolution was victorious. L. developed provisions on the revolutionary situation, on an armed uprising, on the possibility, under certain conditions, of the peaceful development of the revolution; substantiated the idea of the world revolution as a single process, as an era connecting the struggle of the proletariat and its allies for socialism with democratic, including national liberation, movements.

L. deeply developed the national question, pointing out the need to consider it from the standpoint of the class struggle of the proletariat, revealed the thesis about the two tendencies of capitalism in the national question, substantiated the position of complete equality of nations, the right of oppressed, colonial and dependent peoples to self-determination, and at the same time the principle internationalism of the labor movement and proletarian organizations, the idea of the joint struggle of workers of all nationalities in the name of social and national liberation, the creation of a voluntary union of peoples.

L. revealed the essence and characterized the driving forces of national liberation movements. He came up with the idea of organizing a united front of the revolutionary movement of the international proletariat and national liberation movements against the common enemy - imperialism. He formulated a position on the possibility and conditions for the transition of backward countries to socialism, bypassing the capitalist stage of development. L. developed the principles of the national policy of the dictatorship of the proletariat, which ensures the flourishing of nations and nationalities, their close unity and rapprochement.

L. defined the main content of the modern era as the transition of mankind from capitalism to socialism, and characterized the driving forces and prospects of the world revolutionary process after the split of the world into two systems. The main contradiction of this era is the contradiction between socialism and capitalism. L. considered the socialist system and the international working class to be the leading force in the struggle against imperialism. L. foresaw the formation of a world system of socialist states, which would have a decisive influence on all world politics.

L. developed a complete theory about the transition period from capitalism to socialism, revealed its content and patterns. Having summarized the experience of the Paris Commune and three Russian revolutions, L. developed and concretized the teachings of Marx and Engels on the dictatorship of the proletariat, and comprehensively revealed historical meaning Republics of Soviets are states of a new type, immeasurably more democratic than any bourgeois parliamentary republic. The transition from capitalism to socialism, L. taught, cannot but give a variety of political forms, but the essence of all these forms will be the same - the dictatorship of the proletariat. He comprehensively developed the question of the functions and tasks of the dictatorship of the proletariat, pointed out that the main thing in it is not violence, but the rallying of non-proletarian layers of workers around the working class, the building of socialism. The main condition for the implementation of the dictatorship of the proletariat, L. taught, is the leadership of the Communist Party. L.'s works deeply illuminate the theoretical and practical problems of building socialism. The most important task after the victory of the revolution is the socialist transformation and planned development of the national economy, achieving higher labor productivity than under capitalism. The creation of an appropriate material and technical base and the industrialization of the country are of decisive importance in the construction of socialism. L. deeply developed the issue of socialist reconstruction Agriculture through the formation of state farms and the development of cooperation, the transition of peasants to large-scale social production. L. put forward and substantiated the principle of democratic centralism as the main principle of economic management in the conditions of building a socialist and communist society. He showed the need to preserve and use commodity-money relations, and to implement the principle of material interest.

L. considered one of the main conditions for building socialism to be the implementation of a cultural revolution: the rise of public education, the introduction of knowledge and cultural values to the broadest masses, the development of science, literature and art, ensuring a profound revolution in the consciousness, ideology and spiritual life of the working people, and re-educating them in the spirit of socialism . L. emphasized the need to use the culture of the past and its progressive, democratic elements in the interests of building a socialist society. He considered it necessary to attract old, bourgeois specialists to participate in socialist construction. At the same time, L. put forward the task of training numerous cadres of the new, popular intelligentsia. In articles about L. Tolstoy, in the article “Party organization and party literature” (1905), as well as in letters to M. Gorky, I. Armand and others, L. substantiated the principle of partisanship in literature and art, examined their role in the class struggle of the proletariat , formulated the principle of party leadership of literature and art.

In L.'s works the principles of socialism were developed foreign policy as an important factor in building a new society and developing the world revolutionary process. This is a policy of a close state, economic and military union of socialist republics, solidarity with peoples fighting for social and national liberation, peaceful coexistence of states with different social order, international cooperation, decisive opposition to imperialist aggression.

L. developed the Marxist doctrine of the two phases of communist society, the transition from the first to the higher phase, the essence and ways of creating the material and technical base of communism, the development of statehood, the formation of communist social relations, and the communist education of the working people.

L. created the doctrine of a new type of proletarian party as the highest form of revolutionary organization of the proletariat, as the vanguard and leader of the working class in the struggle for the dictatorship of the proletariat, for the construction of socialism and communism. He developed the organizational foundations of the party, the international principle of its construction, the norms of party life, pointed out the need for democratic centralism in the party, unity and conscious iron discipline, the development of internal party democracy, the activity of party members and collective leadership, intransigence to opportunism, and close ties between the party and the masses.

L. was firmly convinced of the inevitability of the victory of socialism throughout the world. He considered the essential conditions for this victory to be: the unity of the revolutionary forces of our time - the world system of socialism, the international working class, the national liberation movement; correct strategy and tactics of communist parties; a decisive struggle against reformism, revisionism, right and left opportunism, nationalism; cohesion and unity of the international communist movement based on Marxism and the principles of proletarian internationalism.

L.'s theoretical and political activity marked the beginning of a new, Leninist stage in the development of Marxism and in the international labor movement. The name of Lenin and Leninism are associated with the largest revolutionary achievements of the 20th century, which radically changed the social appearance of the world and marked the turn of humanity towards socialism and communism. The revolutionary transformation of society in the Soviet Union on the basis of Lenin’s brilliant plans and plans, the victory of socialism and the construction of a developed socialist society in the USSR is the triumph of Leninism. Marxism-Leninism, as the great and united international teaching of the proletariat, is the heritage of all communist parties, all revolutionary workers of the world, all working people. All indigenous social problems modernity can be correctly assessed and decided based on the ideological heritage of Lenin, guided by a reliable compass - the ever-living and creative Marxist-Leninist teaching. The Address of the International Conference of Communist and Workers' Parties (Moscow, 1969) “On the 100th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin” states:

“The entire experience of world socialism, the workers’ and national liberation movements has confirmed the international significance of Marxist-Leninist teaching. The victory of the socialist revolution in a group of countries, the emergence of the world system of socialism, the gains of the labor movement in capitalist countries, the entry into the arena of independent socio-political activity of the peoples of former colonies and semi-colonies, the unprecedented rise of the anti-imperialist struggle - all this proves the historical correctness of Leninism, which expresses the fundamental needs of the modern era "("International Meeting of Communist and Workers' Parties." Documents and materials, M., 1969, p. 332).

The CPSU attaches great importance to the study, storage and publication of L.'s literary heritage, as well as documents related to his life and work. In 1923, the Central Committee of the RCP (b) created the V.I. Lenin Institute, which was entrusted with these functions. In 1932, as a result of the merger of the Institute of K. Marx and F. Engels with the Institute of V. I. Lenin, a single Marx-Engels-Lenin Institute under the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks (now the Institute of Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU) was formed. The Central Party Archive of this institute stores more than 30 thousand Lenin documents. Five editions of Lenin’s works have been published in the USSR (see Works of V.I. Lenin), and “Lenin’s collections” are being published. Thematic collections of L.'s works and his individual works are printed in millions of copies. Much attention is paid to the publication of memoirs and biographical works about Lenin, as well as literature on various problems of Leninism.

The Soviet people sacredly honor the memory of Lenin. The All-Union Communist Youth League and the Pioneer Organization in the USSR, many cities, including Leningrad, the city where Lenin proclaimed the power of the Soviets, bear the name of Lenin; Ulyanovsk, where L spent his childhood and youth. In all cities, the central or most beautiful streets are named after L. Factories and collective farms, ships and mountain peaks bear his name. In honor of L., the highest award in the USSR was established in 1930 - the Order of Lenin; Lenin Prizes were established for outstanding achievements in the field of science and technology (1925), in the field of literature and art (1956); International Lenin Prize “For Strengthening Peace Between Nations” (1949). A unique memorial and historical monument is the Central Archive of V.I. Lenin and its branches in many cities of the USSR. There are also museums of V.I. Lenin in other socialist countries, in Finland and France.

In April 1970 the Communist Party Soviet Union, the entire Soviet people, the international communist movement, the working masses, the progressive forces of all countries solemnly celebrated the 100th anniversary of the birth of V. I. Lenin. The celebration of this significant date resulted in the greatest demonstration of the vitality of Leninism. Lenin's ideas arm and inspire communists and all working people in the struggle for the complete triumph of communism.

Essays:

Collected Works, vol. 1-20, M. - L., 1920-1926;
Soch., 2nd ed., vol. 1-30, M. - Leningrad, 1925-1932;
Soch., 3rd ed., vol. 1-30, M. - Leningrad, 1925-1932;
Soch., 4th ed., vol. 1-45, M., 1941-67;
Complete works, 5th ed., vol. 1-55, M., 1958-65;
Lenin collections, book. 1-37, M. - L., 1924-70.

Literature:

To the 100th anniversary of the birth of V.I. Lenin. Theses of the CPSU Central Committee, M., 1970;
To the 100th anniversary of the birth of V.I. Lenin, Collection of documents and materials, M., 1970.
V. I. Lenin. Biography, 5th ed., M., 1972;
V. I. Lenin. Biographical chronicle, 1870 - 1924, vol. 1-3, M., 1970-72;
Memoirs of V.I. Lenin, vol. 1-5, M., 1968-1969;
Krupskaya N.K., About Lenin. Sat. Art. and performances. 2nd ed., M., 1965;
Leninian, Library of works by V.I. Lenin and literature about him 1956-1967, in 3 volumes, vol. 1-2, M., 1971-72;
Lenin is still more alive than anyone else alive. Recommendatory index of memoirs and biographical literature about V. I. Lenin, M., 1968;
Memories of V.I. Lenin. Annotated index of books and journal articles 1954-1961, M., 1963;
Lenin. Historical and biographical atlas, M., 1970;
Lenin. Collection of photographs and film footage, vol. 1-2, M., 1970-72.

In the biography of Lenin by Vladimir Ilyich this time occupied a special place: at first the boy received a home education - the family spoke several languages and gave great importance discipline, which I followed mother . The Ulyanovs lived in Simbirsk at that time, so he subsequently studied at the local gymnasium, where he entered in 1879 and whose director was the father of the future head of the Provisional Government, Alexander Kerensky, F.M. Kerensky. In 1887, Lenin graduated from the educational institution with honors and continued his studies at the University of Kazan. It was there that his passion for Marxism began, which led to joining a circle where the works of not only K. Marx and F. Engels, but also G. Plekhanov, who had a great influence on the young man, were discussed. A little later, this became the reason for his expulsion from the university. Subsequently, Lenin passed the law exams as an external student.

The beginning of the revolutionary path

Having left his native Simbirsk, where he lived parents , he studied political economy and was interested in social democracy. This period was also distinguished by the future leader’s trips to Europe, upon his return from which he founded the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.”

For this, the revolutionary was arrested and exiled to the Yenisei province, where he not only wrote most of his works, but also established a personal life with N. Krupskaya.

In 1900, his period of exile ended, and Lenin settled in Pskov, where Vladimir Ilyich published the Zarya magazine and the Iskra newspaper. In addition to him, S. I. Radchenko, as well as P. B. Struve and M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky were involved in the publication.

Years of the first emigration

There are many things connected with Lenin’s life during this period. interesting facts . In July of the same year, Vladimir Ulyanov left for Munich, where Iskra settled for two years, then moved first to London, where the first congress of the RSDLP was held, and then to Geneva.

Between 1905 and 1907 Lenin lived in Switzerland. After the failure of the first Russian revolution and the arrest of its instigators, he became the leader of the party.

Active political activity

Despite the constant moving, the decade from the first to the second revolution was very fruitful for V.I. Lenin: he published the newspaper “Pravda”, worked on his journalism and preparation for the February uprising, and after the October revolution, which ended in victory. Full the biography says that during these years his comrades-in-arms were Zinoviev and Kamenev, and then he first met I. Stalin.

The last years of life and the cult of personality

At the Congress of Soviets he headed a new government, called the Council of People's Commissars (SNK).

Brief biography of Lenin says that it was he who agreed with Germany on peace and softened domestic policy, creating conditions for private trade - since the state was not able to provide for citizens, it gave them the opportunity to feed themselves. Under his leadership, the Red Army was founded, and in 1922, a whole new state on the world map, called the USSR. It was also Lenin who introduced the initiative for widespread electrification and insisted on a legislative settlement of terror.

In the same year, the health of the leader of the proletariat deteriorated sharply. After a two-year illness, he died on January 21, 1924.

Lenin's death gave rise to a phenomenon that later became known as the cult of personality. The leader's body was embalmed and placed in the Mausoleum, monuments were erected throughout the country and numerous infrastructure facilities were renamed. Subsequently, many books and films were dedicated to the life of Vladimir Lenin for children and adults who painted him exclusively in a positive way. After the collapse of the USSR, controversial issues began to arise in the biography of the great politician, in particular, about his nationality.

Other biography options

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Vladimir Ulyanov was born on April 22, 1870 in the city of Ulyanovsk. He was born into the family of the inspector of public schools of the Simbirsk province, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, the son of a former serf. Mother - Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova.

In 1879-1887, Vladimir Ulyanov studied at the Simbirsk gymnasium and graduated with a gold medal. Entered the Faculty of Law of Kazan University.

Until 1887, nothing is known about any revolutionary activities of Vladimir Ulyanov. He accepted Orthodox baptism and until the age of 16 he belonged to the Simbirsk religious Society of St. Sergius of Radonezh. His grades according to the law of God in the gymnasium were excellent, as in almost all other subjects. There is only one B in his matriculation certificate - logically. The first award was presented to him already in 1880, after graduating from the first grade - a book with gold embossing on the binding: “For good behavior and success” and a certificate of merit.

In 1887, his elder brother, Alexander, was executed as a participant in a Narodnaya Volya conspiracy to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. What happened became a deep tragedy for the Ulyanov family.

At the university, Vladimir was involved in the illegal student circle of Narodnaya Volya, led by Lazar Bogoraz. Three months after admission, he was expelled for participating in student riots. According to a student inspector who suffered from student unrest, Ulyanov was in the forefront of the raging students. The next night, Vladimir, along with forty other students, was arrested and sent to the police station. All those arrested, in accordance with the methods of combating “disobedience” characteristic of the reign of Alexander III, were expelled from the university and sent to their “homeland.”

Since during the police investigation, young Ulyanov’s connections with the illegal circle of Bogoraz were revealed, and also because of the execution of his brother, he was included in the list of “unreliable” persons subject to police supervision. For the same reason, he was prohibited from reinstatement at the university.

At the same time, Lenin read a lot. He studied “progressive” magazines and books of the 1860-1870s, especially the works of N. G. Chernyshevsky, which, in his own words, had a decisive influence on him. It was a difficult time for all the Ulyanovs: Simbirsk society boycotted them, since connections with the family of an executed terrorist could attract unwanted attention from the police.

In 1893, he developed a doctrine that was new at that time, declaring contemporary Russia to be a “capitalist” country. The credo of Leninism was finally formulated in 1894: “the Russian worker, rising at the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the Russian proletariat along the straight road of open political struggle to a victorious communist revolution.”

In May 1895, Ulyanov went abroad, where he met with leaders of the international labor movement, and upon returning to St. Petersburg, in 1895, together with Yu. O. Martov and other young revolutionaries, he united scattered Marxist circles into the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class " In December 1895, like many other members of the “Union,” Ulyanov was arrested, kept in prison for more than a year, and in 1897 exiled for 3 years to the village of Shushenskoye, Minusinsk district, Yenisei province.

So that Lenin’s “common-law” wife, N.K. Krupskaya, could follow him into exile, he had to register his marriage with her in July 1898.

After the end of their exile in February 1900, Lenin, Martov and A.N. Potresov is being circled Russian cities by establishing connections with local organizations. On February 26, 1900, Ulyanov arrived in Pskov, where he was allowed to reside after exile. In April 1900, an organizational meeting was held in Pskov to create an all-Russian workers' newspaper, Iskra. In April 1900, Lenin illegally made a one-day trip to Riga from Pskov. At the negotiations with the Latvian Social Democrats, issues of transporting the Iskra newspaper from abroad to Russia through the ports of Latvia were considered. The average circulation of the newspaper was 8,000 copies, with some issues up to 10,000 copies. The spread of the newspaper was facilitated by the creation of a network of underground organizations in the territory Russian Empire.

From July 17 to August 10, 1903, the Second Congress of the RSDLP was held in London. Lenin, together with Plekhanov, worked on a draft party program, which consisted of two parts - a minimum program and a maximum program; the first assumed the overthrow of tsarism and the establishment of a democratic republic, the destruction of the remnants of serfdom in the countryside, in particular the return to the peasants of the lands cut off from them by the landowners during the abolition of serfdom, the introduction of an eight-hour working day, the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination and the establishment of equality of nations; the maximum program determined the ultimate goal of the party - the construction of a socialist society and the conditions for achieving this goal - the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The proposed wording was supported by 28 votes to 22, with 1 abstention. During the elections to the Central Committee of the RSDLP, Lenin's group received a majority. This accidental circumstance forever divided the party into “Bolsheviks” and “Mensheviks.”

The revolution of 1905-1907 found Lenin abroad, in Switzerland. At the Third Congress of the RSDLP, held in London in April 1905, Lenin emphasized that the main task of the ongoing revolution was to put an end to autocracy and the remnants of serfdom in Russia.

At the beginning of November 1905, Lenin illegally, under a false name, arrived in St. Petersburg and headed the work of the Central and St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committees elected by the congress; great attention devoted to the management of the newspaper “New Life”. Under the leadership of Lenin, the party was preparing an armed uprising. At the same time, Lenin wrote the book “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in which he points out the need for the hegemony of the proletariat and an armed uprising. In the struggle to win over the peasantry to his side, Lenin wrote the pamphlet “To the Rural Poor.” In December 1905, the First Conference of the RSDLP was held in Tammerfors, where V. I. Lenin and I. V. Stalin met for the first time.

In 1912, he decisively broke with the Mensheviks, who insisted on the legalization of the RSDLP.

When did the first one begin? World War Lenin lived on the territory of Austria-Hungary. Due to suspicions of spying for the Russian government, Lenin was arrested by Austrian gendarmes. On August 6, 1914, Lenin was released from prison. 17 days later in Switzerland, Lenin took part in a meeting of a group of Bolshevik emigrants, where he announced his theses on the war. In his opinion, the war that began was imperialist, unfair on both sides, and alien to the interests of the working people.

In February 1916, Lenin moved from Bern to Zurich. Here he completed his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism”, actively collaborated with the Swiss Social Democrats, and attended all their party meetings. Here he learned from newspapers about the February Revolution in Russia.

On April 3, 1917, Lenin arrived in Russia. The Petrograd Soviet organized a ceremonial meeting for him. However, Lenin’s first speech at the Finlyandsky Station immediately after his arrival ended with a call for a “social revolution” and caused confusion even among Lenin’s supporters.

The next day, April 4, Lenin made a report to the Bolsheviks. In this report, Lenin sharply opposed the sentiments that prevailed in Russia among Social Democrats in general and the Bolsheviks in particular, which boiled down to the idea of expanding the bourgeois-democratic revolution, supporting the Provisional Government and defending the revolutionary fatherland in a war that changed its character with the fall of the autocracy. He demanded widespread anti-war propaganda, since, according to his opinion, the war on the part of the Provisional Government continued to be imperialistic and “predatory” in nature.

In July, the provisional government ordered the arrest of Lenin and a number of prominent Bolsheviks on charges of treason and organizing an armed uprising. Lenin went underground again. During this period, Lenin wrote one of his fundamental works - the book “State and Revolution”.

In 1917, on October 20, Lenin illegally arrived from Vyborg to Petrograd. Arriving in Smolny, he began to lead the uprising, the direct organizer of which was the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet L. D. Trotsky. On the night of October 25-26, the Provisional Government was arrested. On November 7, Lenin wrote an appeal for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. On the same day, at the opening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin's decrees on peace and land were adopted and a government was formed - the Council of People's Commissars, headed by Lenin. On January 5, 1918, the Constituent Assembly opened, the majority of which was won by the Socialist Revolutionaries, representing the interests of the peasants, who at that time made up 80% of the country's population. Lenin, with the support of the Left Social Revolutionaries, presented the Constituent Assembly with a choice: ratify the power of the Soviets and the decrees of the Bolshevik government or disperse. The Constituent Assembly, which did not agree with this formulation of the issue, lost its quorum and was forcibly dissolved.

In 1918, on January 15, Lenin signed the decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the creation of the Red Army. In accordance with the Peace Decree, it was necessary to withdraw from the world war. Despite the opposition of the left communists and L.D. Trotsky, Lenin achieved the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany. On March 3, 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, in protest against the signing and ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, withdrew from the Soviet government. On March 10-11, fearing the capture of Petrograd by German troops, at the suggestion of Lenin, the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the RCP (b) moved to Moscow, which became the new capital of Soviet Russia.

In 1918, on August 30, an attempt was made on Lenin, according to the official version, by the Socialist-Revolutionary Fanny Kaplan, which led to severe injury. After the assassination attempt, Lenin was successfully operated on.

The refusal of the international treaty by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty in November 1918 significantly strengthened Lenin’s authority in the party.

By decree of the Council of People's Commissars of July 30, 1918, the “Monuments of the Republic” program was approved. In Moscow and Petrograd alone, it was planned to erect 167 monuments to revolutionaries, figures of world and Russian culture, including Andrei Rublev, Fyodor Tyutchev, Mikhail Vrubel.

Lenin paid significant attention to the development of the country's economy. He believed that in order to restore the economy destroyed by the war, it was necessary to organize the state into a “national, state “syndicate”. Soon after the revolution, Lenin set the task for scientists to develop a plan for the reorganization of industry and the economic revival of Russia, and also contributed to the development of the country's science.

In 1919, on the initiative of Lenin, the Communist International was created.

On the night of July 16-17, 1918, the former Russian Emperor Nicholas II was shot along with his family and servants by order of the Ural Regional Council in Yekaterinburg, headed by the Bolsheviks.

In February 1920, the Irkutsk Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee secretly shot Admiral A.V. Kolchak, who was under arrest in the Irkutsk prison, without trial.

After the end of the Civil War, Soviet Russia managed to break through the economic blockade thanks to the establishment of diplomatic relations with Germany and the signing of the Treaty of Rapallo. Peace treaties were concluded and diplomatic relations were established with a number of border states: Finland, Estonia, Poland, Turkey, Iran, Mongolia. The most active support came from Turkey, Afghanistan and Iran, which resisted European colonialism.

The economic and political situation required the Bolsheviks to change their previous policies. In this regard, at the insistence of Lenin, in 1921, at the 10th Congress of the RCP (b), “war communism” was abolished and food allocation was replaced by a food tax. The so-called New Economic Policy was introduced, which allowed private free trade and enabled large sections of the population to independently seek the means of subsistence that the state could not give them.

At the same time, Lenin insisted on the development of state-type enterprises, electrification, and the development of cooperation. Lenin believed that in anticipation of the world proletarian revolution, keeping all large industry in the hands of the state, it was necessary to gradually build socialism in one country. All this could, in his opinion, help put the backward Soviet country on the same level as the most developed European countries.

In 1923, shortly before his death, Lenin wrote his last works: “On cooperation”, “How can we reorganize the workers’ krin”, “Better less, but better”, in which he offers his vision of the economic policy of the Soviet state and measures to improve the work of the state apparatus and the party. On January 4, 1923, V.I. Lenin dictates the so-called “Addition to the letter of December 24, 1922,” which, in particular, gave the characteristics of individual Bolsheviks claiming to be the leader of the party. Stalin was given an unflattering description in this letter.

In March 1922, Lenin led the work of the 11th Congress of the RCP (b) - the last party congress at which he spoke.

In January 1924, Lenin's health suddenly deteriorated sharply.

The official conclusion on the cause of death in the autopsy report stated: 1) increased circulatory impairment in the brain; 2) hemorrhage into the pia mater in the quadrigeminal region.” After his death, the body of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was embalmed and placed in the Mausoleum of V.I. Lenin on Red Square near the Kremlin wall.

Titles, awards, works, performance results

Results of activities and transformations carried out under the leadership of V.I. Lenin:

The Soviet state developed its own methods of moral and material stimulation of labor: various social payments, construction of free housing, organization of free healthcare, including the development of a wide network of free sanatoriums for workers, free education, transport, industrial clothing, payments in kind, creation of normal conditions, organization rest, after Lenin’s decree of June 14, 1918 “On Vacations,” all workers for the first time in the history of Russia received a state-guaranteed right to vacation, etc. - all this contributed to increasing labor productivity and convincing the majority of the population that the new government has its main The goal is to care about improving the living conditions of workers. For the first time in Russian history, workers received the right to old-age pensions.

Despite the largely fair accusations of political opponents of the socialist system of excessive equalization of the socialist wage system, this system contributed to the formation of social homogeneity and the constitution of the Soviet people, having a common civic identity, although the socialist wage system, in the context of its equalization, was also criticized by senior Soviet officials, it constantly developed and differentiated on the basis of many criteria, where one of the main ones was the assessment of the citizen’s real contribution to labor and social life countries.

The most important element in overcoming social inequality and building a new society for V. Lenin was the development of education, ensuring equal access to education for all workers, regardless of their national origin and gender differences. In October 1918, at the suggestion of V.I. Lenin, the “Regulations on the Unified Labor School of the RSFSR” were introduced, which introduced free and cooperative education for children school age. Modern researchers note that the communist attack on the system of distribution of scientific statuses began in 1918 and the matter ended not so much in the “re-education of the bourgeois professors”, but in the establishment of equal access to education and the destruction of class privileges, which included the privilege of being educated.

Lenin's policy in the field of education, ensuring its accessibility for all groups of workers served as the basis for the fact that in 1959, political opponents of the USSR believed that the Soviet education system, especially in engineering and technical specialties, occupied a leading position in the world.

Lenin's policy in the field of healthcare, based on the principles of free and equal access to medical care for all social groups of the population, contributed to the fact that medicine in the USSR was recognized as one of the best in the world.

In the USSR, a lot of memoirs, poems, poems, short stories, stories and novels about Lenin were published. Many films about Lenin were also made. In Soviet times, the opportunity to play Lenin in films or on stage was considered for an actor a sign of high trust shown by the leadership of the CPSU.

Monuments to Lenin have become an integral part of the Soviet tradition of monumental art.

In the USSR, five collected works of Lenin and forty “Lenin collections” were published, compiled by the Lenin Institute, specially created by decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for the study of Lenin’s creative heritage. However, even the last, 5th, collected works in 55 volumes, called “complete,” could not claim either objectivity and academic quality, or completeness. Many of the works included in it were edited and corrected before publication, and many of Lenin's works were not included in it at all.

In Soviet times, a collection of selected works was periodically published in two to four volumes. In addition, “Selected Works” were published in 10 volumes (11 books) in 1984-1987.

Lenin's main works:

What are “friends of the people” and how do they fight against the Social Democrats? (1894)

"On the Characteristics of Economic Romanticism", (1897)

What inheritance are we giving up? (1897)

The Development of Capitalism in Russia (1899)

What to do? (1902)

One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904)

Party organization and party literature (1905)

Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905)

Marxism and Revisionism (1908)

Materialism and Empirio-criticism (1909)

Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism (1913)

On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914)

On the breakdown of unity covered by cries for unity (1914)

Karl Marx (a short biographical sketch outlining Marxism) (1914)

Socialism and War (1915)

Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism (popular essay) (1916)

State and Revolution (1917)

Tasks of the proletariat in our revolution (1917)

The Impending Catastrophe and How to Deal with It (1917)

On dual power (1917)

How to Organize a Competition (1918)

The Great Initiative (1919)

The childhood disease of “leftism” in communism (1920)

Tasks of youth unions (1920)

About the food tax (1921)

Pages from a diary, About cooperation (1923)

About the pogrom persecution of Jews (1924)

What's happened Soviet authority? (1919, publ.: 1928)

On leftist childishness and petty-bourgeoisism (1918)

About our revolution (1923)

Letter to the Congress (1922, read out: 1924, published: 1956)

Speeches recorded on gramophone records:

In 1919-1921 V.I. Lenin recorded 16 speeches on gramophone records - among them “The Third Communist International”, “Appeal to the Red Army” and the especially popular “What is Soviet power?”, which was considered the most successful in technical terms.

During the next recording session on April 5, 1920, 3 speeches were recorded - “On work for transport,” part 1 and part 2, “On labor discipline” and “How to forever save workers from the oppression of landowners and capitalists.” Another recording, most likely dedicated to the outbreak of the Polish war, was damaged and lost in the same 1920.

Five speeches recorded during the last session on April 25, 1921, were technically unsuitable for mass production. Of these, only three were restored and released for the first time on long-playing discs - one of the two speeches “On the tax in kind”, “On consumer and trade cooperation” and “Non-party people and Soviet power”.

In addition to the second speech “On the Tax in Kind” that has not been found, the 1921 entry “On Concessions and the Development of Capitalism” has not yet been published. The first part of the speech, “On Work for Transport,” has not been reissued since 1929, and the speech, “On the pogrom persecution of the Jews,” has not appeared on disk since the early 1940s.

The figure of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin has attracted the close attention of historians and politicians around the world for almost centuries. One of the most taboo topics in “Leninianism” in the USSR is the origin of Lenin, his genealogy. This same topic was subject to the greatest speculation on the part of geopolitical opponents of the state, whose founder and “banner” was V.I. Lenin.

Secrets of Lenin's biography

How did the children of serfs become hereditary nobles, why did the Soviet government classify information about the leader's maternal ancestors, and how did Vladimir Ulyanov turn into Nikolai Lenin in the early 1900s?
Ulyanov family. From left to right: standing - Olga, Alexander, Anna; sitting - Maria Alexandrovna with her youngest daughter Maria, Dmitry, Ilya Nikolaevich, Vladimir. Simbirsk 1879 Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

Biographical chronicle of V.I. Lenin" begins with the entry: "April, 10 (22). Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was born. Vladimir Ilyich’s father, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov, was at that time an inspector and then the director of public schools in the Simbirsk province. He came from poor townspeople of the city of Astrakhan. His father was previously a serf. Lenin's mother Maria Alexandrovna was the daughter of the doctor A.D. Blanca."

It is curious that Lenin himself did not know many details of his ancestry. In their family, as in the families of other commoners, it was somehow not customary to delve into their “genealogical roots.” It was only later, after the death of Vladimir Ilyich, when interest in this kind of problems began to grow, that his sisters took up this research. Therefore, when Lenin received a detailed party census questionnaire in 1922, when asked about the occupation of his paternal grandfather, he sincerely answered: “I don’t know.”

GRANDSON OF A SERF

Meanwhile, Lenin’s paternal grandfather, great-grandfather and great-great-grandfather were indeed serfs. Great-great-grandfather - Nikita Grigorievich Ulyanin - was born in 1711. According to the revision tale of 1782, he and the family of his youngest son Feofan were recorded as a servant of the landowner of the village of Androsova, Sergach district, Nizhny Novgorod governorship, Marfa Semyonovna Myakinina.

According to the same revision, his eldest son Vasily Nikitich Ulyanin, born in 1733, with his wife Anna Semionovna and children Samoila, Porfiry and Nikolai lived in the same place, but were considered servants of the cornet Stepan Mikhailovich Brekhov. According to the revision of 1795, Lenin’s grandfather Nikolai Vasilyevich, 25 years old, single, lived with his mother and brothers in the same village, but they were already listed as servants of ensign Mikhail Stepanovich Brekhov.

Of course, he was listed, but he was no longer in the village then...

The Astrakhan archive contains the document “Lists of registered landowner peasants expected to be counted as fugitives from different provinces,” where under number 223 it is written: “Nikolai Vasilyev, son of Ulyanin... Nizhny Novgorod province, Sergach district, village of Androsov, landowner Stepan Mikhailovich Brekhov, peasant. He left in 1791." It is not known for sure whether he was a runaway or released on quitrent and redeemed, but in 1799 in Astrakhan Nikolai Vasilyevich was transferred to the category of state peasants, and in 1808 he was accepted into the petty bourgeois class, into the workshop of artisan tailors.

Having gotten rid of serfdom and becoming a free man, Nikolai Vasilyevich changed his surname Ulyanin to Ulyaninov, and then Ulyanov. Soon he married the daughter of the Astrakhan tradesman Alexei Lukyanovich Smirnov - Anna, who was born in 1788 and was 18 years younger than her husband.

Based on some archival documents, the writer Marietta Shaginyan put forward a version according to which Anna Alekseevna is not Smirnov’s own daughter, but a baptized Kalmyk woman, rescued by him from slavery and allegedly adopted only in March 1825.

There is no indisputable evidence for this version, especially since already in 1812 she and Nikolai Ulyanov had a son, Alexander, who died four months old, in 1819 a son, Vasily, was born, in 1821, a daughter, Maria, in 1823 - Feodosiya and, finally, in July 1831, when the head of the family was already over 60, son Ilya - the father of the future leader of the world proletariat.

FATHER'S TEACHING CAREER

After the death of Nikolai Vasilyevich, concerns about the family and raising children fell on the shoulders of his eldest son, Vasily Nikolaevich. Working at that time as a clerk at the famous Astrakhan company “Brothers Sapozhnikov” and not having his own family, he managed to ensure prosperity in the house and even gave his younger brother Ilya an education.

ILYA NIKOLAEVICH ULYANOV GRADUATED PHYSICS AND MATHEMATICS FACULTY OF KAZAN UNIVERSITY.
HE WAS SUGGESTED TO STAY AT THE DEPARTMENT TO “IMPROVE IN SCIENTIFIC WORK” – THIS WAS INSISTED BY THE FAMOUS MATHEMATICIST NIKOLAY IVANOVICH LOBACHEVSKY

In 1850, Ilya Nikolaevich graduated from the Astrakhan gymnasium with a silver medal and entered the Faculty of Physics and Mathematics of Kazan University, where he completed his studies in 1854, receiving the title of Candidate of Physical and Mathematical Sciences and the right to teach in secondary educational institutions. And although he was invited to remain at the department for “improvement in scientific work“(This, by the way, was insisted on by the famous mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky), Ilya Nikolaevich chose a career as a teacher.

Monument to Lobachevsky in Kazan. Beginning of the 20th century. Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

His first place of work - from May 7, 1855 - was the Noble Institute in Penza. In July 1860, Ivan Dmitrievich Veretennikov came here to the position of inspector of the institute. Ilya Nikolaevich became friends with him and his wife, and in the same year Anna Aleksandrovna Veretennikova (née Blank) introduced him to her sister Maria Alexandrovna Blank, who came to visit her for the winter. Ilya Nikolaevich began to help Maria prepare for the exam for the title of teacher, and she helped him with conversational English. The young people fell in love with each other, and in the spring of 1863 an engagement took place.

On July 15 of the same year, after successfully passing external exams at the Samara Men's Gymnasium, “the daughter of the court councilor, maiden Maria Blank” received the title of primary school teacher “with the right to teach the Law of God, the Russian language, arithmetic, German and French" And in August they already had a wedding, and the “maiden Maria Blank” became the wife of the court councilor Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov - this rank was also granted to him in July 1863.

Panorama of Simbirsk from the Moscow highway. 1866–1867. Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

The genealogy of the Blank family began to be studied by Lenin’s sisters, Anna and Maria. Anna Ilyinichna said: “The elders could not find out this for us. The surname seemed to us to be of French origin, but there was no information about such an origin. I personally began to think about the possibility of Jewish origin quite a long time ago, which was prompted mainly by my mother’s message that my grandfather was born in Zhitomir, a famous Jewish center. Grandmother - mother's mother - was born in St. Petersburg and was of German origin from Riga. But while my mother and her sisters maintained contact with their maternal relatives for quite a long time, about her father’s relatives, A.D. Blank, no one heard. He looked like a cut piece, which also made me think about his Jewish origin. His daughters did not remember any of the grandfather’s stories about his childhood or youth.”

Anna Ilyinichna Ulyanova reported the results of the search, which confirmed her assumption, to Joseph Stalin in 1932 and 1934. “The fact of our origin, which I had assumed before,” she wrote, “was not known during his [Lenin’s] lifetime... I don’t know what motives we communists might have for hushing up this fact.”

“To remain absolutely silent about him” was Stalin’s categorical answer. And Lenin’s second sister, Maria Ilyinichna, also believed that this fact “let it be known someday in a hundred years.”

Lenin's great-grandfather, Moshe Itskovich Blank, was apparently born in 1763. The first mention of him is contained in the revision of 1795, where among the townspeople of the city of Starokonstantinov, Volyn province, Moishka Blank is recorded under number 394. Where he came from in these places is unclear. However…
Some time ago, the famous bibliographer Maya Dvorkina introduced an interesting fact into scientific circulation. Somewhere in the mid-1920s, archivist Yulian Grigoryevich Oksman, who was studying the genealogy of the leader of the world proletariat on the instructions of the director of the Lenin Library Vladimir Ivanovich Nevsky, discovered a petition from one of the Jewish communities of the Minsk province, allegedly relating to early XIX century, about the exemption from taxes of a certain boy, because he is “the illegitimate son of a major Minsk official,” and therefore, they say, the community should not pay for him. The boy's last name was Blank.

According to Oksman, Nevsky took him to Lev Kamenev, and then the three of them went to Nikolai Bukharin. Showing the document, Kamenev muttered: “I always thought so.” To which Bukharin replied: “What do you think – it doesn’t matter, but what are we going to do?” Oksman was made to promise that he would not tell anyone about the find. And since then no one has seen this document.

One way or another, Moshe Blank appeared in Starokonstantinov, already an adult, and in 1793 he married a local 29-year-old girl, Maryam (Marem) Froimovich. From subsequent revisions it follows that he read both Hebrew and Russian, had own house, was engaged in trade and, in addition, near the town of Rogachevo, he rented 5 morgues (about 3 hectares) of land, which were sown with chicory.

In 1794, his son Aba (Abel) was born, and in 1799, his son Srul (Israel). Moshe Itzkovich probably did not have a good relationship with the local Jewish community from the very beginning. He was "a man who did not want, or perhaps did not know how, to find mutual language with his fellow tribesmen." In other words, the community simply hated him. And after Blank’s house burned down in 1808 due to fire, and possibly arson, the family moved to Zhitomir.

LETTER TO THE EMPEROR

Many years later, in September 1846, Moshe Blank wrote a letter to Emperor Nicholas I, from which it is clear that already “40 years ago” he “renounced the Jews,” but because of his “overly pious wife,” who died in 1834 , converted to Christianity and received the name Dmitry only on January 1, 1835.

But the reason for the letter was something else: while maintaining hostility towards his fellow tribesmen, Dmitry (Moshe) Blank proposed - in order to assimilate the Jews - to prohibit them from wearing national clothes, and most importantly, oblige them to pray in synagogues for the Russian emperor and the imperial family.

It is curious that in October of that year the letter was reported to Nicholas I and he fully agreed with the proposals of the “baptized Jew Blanc”, as a result of which in 1850 Jews were banned from wearing national clothing, and in 1854 the corresponding text of the prayer was introduced. Researcher Mikhail Stein, who collected and carefully analyzed the most complete data on Blank’s genealogy, rightly noted that in terms of hostility towards his people, Moshe Itskovich “can be compared, perhaps, only with another baptized Jew - one of the founders and leaders of the Moscow Union of Russian People V.A. . Greenmouth"...

Alexander Dmitrievich Blank (1799–1870). Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

The fact that Blank decided to break with the Jewish community long before his baptism was also evidenced by other things. Both of his sons, Abel and Israel, like their father, also knew how to read Russian, and when a district (povet) school opened in Zhitomir in 1816, they were enrolled there and successfully graduated. From the point of view of Jewish believers, this was blasphemy. And yet, belonging to the Jewish religion doomed them to vegetate within the boundaries of the Pale of Settlement. And only an event that happened in the spring of 1820 radically changed the fate of young people...

In April, a “high rank” – the head of affairs of the so-called Jewish Committee, senator and poet Dmitry Osipovich Baranov – arrived in Zhitomir on a business trip. Somehow, Blank managed to meet him, and he asked the senator to assist his sons in entering the Medical-Surgical Academy in St. Petersburg. Baranov did not at all sympathize with Jews, but the rather rare conversion of two “lost souls” to Christianity at that time, in his opinion, was a good thing, and he agreed.

The brothers immediately went to the capital and submitted a petition addressed to Metropolitan Michael of Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Estonia and Finland. “Having now settled in St. Petersburg,” they wrote, “and having always been treated with Christians professing the Greek-Russian religion, we now wish to accept it.”

The petition was granted, and already on May 25, 1820, the priest of the Church of St. Sampson the Stranger in St. Petersburg, Fyodor Barsov, “enlightened both brothers with baptism.” Abel became Dmitry Dmitrievich, and Israel became Alexander Dmitrievich. The youngest son of Moshe Blank received a new name in honor of his successor (godfather), Count Alexander Ivanovich Apraksin, and a patronymic in honor of Abel’s successor, Senator Dmitry Osipovich Baranov. And on July 31 of the same year, at the direction of the Minister of Education, Prince Alexander Nikolaevich Golitsyn, the brothers were identified as “pupils of the Medical-Surgical Academy,” which they graduated in 1824, receiving the academic title of doctors of the 2nd department and a gift in the form of a pocket set of surgical tools.

MARRIAGE OF THE STAFF DOCTOR

Dmitry Blank remained in the capital as a police doctor, and Alexander in August 1824 began serving in the city of Porechye, Smolensk province, as a district doctor. True, already in October 1825 he returned to St. Petersburg and, like his brother, was enrolled as a doctor in the city police staff. In 1828 he was promoted to staff physician. It was time to think about marriage...

His godfather, Count Alexander Apraksin, was at that time an official of special assignments at the Ministry of Finance. So Alexander Dmitrievich, despite his origin, could well count on a decent match. Apparently, at another of his benefactors, Senator Dmitry Baranov, who was fond of poetry and chess, with whom Alexander Pushkin visited and almost the entire “enlightened Petersburg” gathered, the younger Blank met the Groschopf brothers and was received in their house.

Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831–1886) and Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (1835–1916)

The head of this very respectable family, Ivan Fedorovich (Johann Gottlieb) Groshopf, was from the Baltic Germans, was a consul of the State College of Justice for Livonian, Estonian and Finnish affairs and rose to the rank of provincial secretary. His wife Anna Karlovna, née Östedt, was Swedish and Lutheran. There were eight children in the family: three sons - Johann, who served in the Russian army, Karl, vice-director in the foreign trade department of the Ministry of Finance, and Gustav, who was in charge of the Riga customs, and five daughters - Alexandra, Anna, Ekaterina (married von Essen) , Caroline (married Bouberg) and the younger Amalia. Having met this family, the staff doctor proposed to Anna Ivanovna.

MASHENKA FORM

Things went well for Alexander Dmitrievich at first. As a police doctor, he received 1 thousand rubles a year. He has received thanks more than once for his “quickness and diligence.”

But in June 1831, during the cholera riots in the capital, his brother Dmitry, who was on duty at the central cholera hospital, was brutally killed by a rioting crowd. This death shocked Alexander Blank so much that he resigned from the police and did not work for more than a year. Only in April 1833 did he re-enter service - as a resident at the City Hospital of St. Mary Magdalene for the poor from the districts beyond the river in St. Petersburg. By the way, it was here that Taras Shevchenko was treated by him in 1838. At the same time (from May 1833 to April 1837) Blank worked in the Maritime Department. In 1837, after passing the exams, he was recognized as an inspector of the medical board, and in 1838 - a medical surgeon.

IN 1874, ILYA NIKOLAEVICH ULYANOV RECEIVED THE POST OF DIRECTOR OF PEOPLE'S SCHOOL OF THE SIMBIRSK PROVINCE.
AND IN 1877, HE WAS AWARDED THE RANK OF ACTIVE STATE COUNSELOR, EQUALIZED IN THE TABLE OF RANKS TO THE RANK OF GENERAL AND GIVING THE RIGHT TO A HEREDITARY NOBILITY

Alexander Dmitrievich’s private practice also expanded. Among his patients were representatives of the highest nobility. This allowed him to move to a decent apartment in a wing of one of the luxurious mansions on the Promenade des Anglais, which belonged to the emperor’s physician and the president of the Medical-Surgical Academy, baronet Yakov Vasilyevich Willie. Here in 1835 Maria Blank was born. Mashenka’s godfather was their neighbor, formerly the adjutant of Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, and since 1833, the horsemaster of the Imperial Court, Ivan Dmitrievich Chertkov.

In 1840, Anna Ivanovna became seriously ill, died and was buried in St. Petersburg at the Smolensk Evangelical Cemetery. Then her sister Catherine von Essen, who was widowed that same year, took full care of the children. Alexander Dmitrievich, apparently, had sympathized with her before. It is no coincidence that he named his daughter, born in 1833, Ekaterina. After the death of Anna Ivanovna, they become even closer, and in April 1841, Blank decides to enter into a legal marriage with Ekaterina Ivanovna. However, the law did not allow such marriages - with the daughters' godmother and the deceased wife's own sister. And Catherine von Essen becomes his common-law wife.

In the same April, they all left the capital and moved to Perm, where Alexander Dmitrievich received the position of inspector of the Perm Medical Council and doctor of the Perm Gymnasium. Thanks to the latter circumstance, Blank met the Latin teacher Ivan Dmitrievich Veretennikov, who became the husband of his eldest daughter Anna in 1850, and the mathematics teacher Andrei Aleksandrovich Zalezhsky, who married another daughter, Ekaterina.

Alexander Blank entered the history of Russian medicine as one of the pioneers of balneology - treatment mineral waters. Having retired at the end of 1847 from the post of doctor at the Zlatoust arms factory, he left for the Kazan province, where in 1848 the Kokushkino estate with 462 acres (503.6 hectares) of land, a water mill and 39 serfs was purchased in Laishevsky district. On August 4, 1859, the Senate confirmed Alexander Dmitrievich Blank and his children in the hereditary nobility, and they were entered in the book of the Kazan Noble Deputy Assembly.

THE ULYANOV FAMILY

This is how Maria Alexandrovna Blank ended up in Kazan, and then in Penza, where she met Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov...

Their wedding on August 25, 1863, like the weddings of the other Blank sisters before that, took place in Kokushkino. On September 22, the newlyweds left for Nizhny Novgorod, where Ilya Nikolaevich was appointed to the position of senior teacher of mathematics and physics at a men's gymnasium. On August 14, 1864, daughter Anna was born. A year and a half later - on March 31, 1866 - son Alexander... But soon there was a sad loss: daughter Olga, who was born in 1868, did not live even a year, fell ill and died on July 18 in the same Kokushkino...

On September 6, 1869, Ilya Nikolaevich was appointed inspector of public schools in the Simbirsk province. The family moved to Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), which at that time was a quiet provincial town with just over 40 thousand inhabitants, of whom 57.5% were listed as bourgeois, 17% as military, 11% as peasants, 8.8% as nobles, 3.2% - merchants and honorary citizens, and 1.8% - people of clergy, persons of other classes and foreigners. Accordingly, the city was divided into three parts: noble, commercial and bourgeois. In the nobility's house there were kerosene lanterns and plank sidewalks, and in the bourgeois' house all sorts of livestock were kept in the courtyards, and these animals, contrary to prohibitions, walked the streets.
Here the Ulyanovs had a son, Vladimir, born on April 10 (22), 1870. On April 16, priest Vasily Umov and sexton Vladimir Znamensky baptized the newborn. The godfather was the manager of the specific office in Simbirsk, the actual state councilor Arseny Fedorovich Belokrysenko, and the godfather was the mother of Ilya Nikolaevich’s colleague, collegiate assessor Natalia Ivanovna Aunovskaya.

Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (sitting third from the right) among the teachers of the Simbirsk men's classical gymnasium. 1874 Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

The family continued to grow. On November 4, 1871, the fourth child was born - daughter Olga. Son Nikolai died without living even a month, and on August 4, 1874, son Dmitry was born, and daughter Maria was born on February 6, 1878. Six children.
On July 11, 1874, Ilya Nikolaevich received the position of director of public schools in the Simbirsk province. And in December 1877, he was awarded the rank of actual state councilor, equal in the table of ranks to the rank of general and giving the right to hereditary nobility.

The salary increase made it possible to realize a long-time dream. Having changed six rented apartments since 1870 and having saved the necessary funds, on August 2, 1878, the Ulyanovs finally bought their own house on Moskovskaya Street for 4 thousand silver - from the widow of the titular councilor Ekaterina Petrovna Molchanova. It was made of wood, one storey on the façade and with mezzanines under the roof on the courtyard side. And behind the yard, overgrown with grass and chamomile, lies a beautiful garden with silver poplars, thick elms, yellow acacia and lilacs along the fence...
Ilya Nikolaevich died in Simbirsk in January 1886, Maria Alexandrovna died in Petrograd in July 1916, outliving her husband by 30 years.

WHERE DID “LENIN” COME FROM?

The question of how and where Vladimir Ulyanov got the pseudonym Nikolai Lenin in the spring of 1901 has always aroused the interest of researchers; there have been many versions. Among them are toponymic: both the Lena River (analogy: Plekhanov - Volgin) and the village of Lenin near Berlin appear. During the formation of “Leninoism” as a profession, they were looking for “amorous” sources. Thus was born the assertion that the Kazan beauty Elena Lenina was allegedly to blame for everything, in another version - the chorus girl of the Mariinsky Theater Elena Zaretskaya, etc. But none of these versions withstood the most serious scrutiny.

However, back in the 1950s and 1960s, the Central Party Archive received letters from relatives of a certain Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin, which outlined a fairly convincing everyday story. Deputy head of the archive Rostislav Aleksandrovich Lavrov forwarded these letters to the CPSU Central Committee, and, naturally, they did not become available to a wide range of researchers.

Meanwhile, the Lenin family dates back to the Cossack Posnik, who in the 17th century, for his services associated with the conquest of Siberia and the creation of winter quarters on the Lena River, was granted nobility, the surname Lenin and an estate in the Vologda province. His numerous descendants distinguished themselves more than once in both military and official service. One of them, Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin, fell ill and retired, having risen to the rank of state councilor, in the 80s of the 19th century and settled in the Yaroslavl province.

Volodya Ulyanov with his sister Olga. Simbirsk 1874 Courtesy of M. Zolotarev

His daughter Olga Nikolaevna, having graduated from the Faculty of History and Philology of the Bestuzhev Courses in 1883, went to work at the Smolensk Evening Workers' School in St. Petersburg, where she met Nadezhda Krupskaya. And when there was a fear that the authorities might refuse to issue Vladimir Ulyanov a foreign passport, and friends began to look for smuggling options for crossing the border, Krupskaya turned to Lenina for help. Olga Nikolaevna then conveyed this request to her brother, a prominent official of the Ministry of Agriculture, agronomist Sergei Nikolaevich Lenin. In addition, a similar request apparently came to him from his friend, statistician Alexander Dmitrievich Tsyurupa, who in 1900 met the future leader of the proletariat.

Sergei Nikolaevich himself knew Vladimir Ilyich - from meetings in the Free Economic Society in 1895, as well as from his works. In turn, Ulyanov knew Lenin: for example, he refers three times to his articles in the monograph “The Development of Capitalism in Russia.” After consulting, the brother and sister decided to give Ulyanov the passport of their father, Nikolai Yegorovich, who by that time was already very ill (he died on April 6, 1902).

According to family legend, in 1900 Sergei Nikolaevich went to Pskov on official business. There, on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture, he received Sack plows and other agricultural machines arriving in Russia from Germany. In one of the Pskov hotels, Lenin handed over his father’s passport with the altered date of birth to Vladimir Ilyich, who was then living in Pskov. This is probably how the origin of Ulyanov’s main pseudonym, N. Lenin, is explained.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin). Born on April 22, 1870 in Simbirsk - died on January 21, 1924 in the Gorki estate, Moscow province. Russian revolutionary, Soviet political and statesman, creator of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), one of the main organizers and leaders of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (government) of the RSFSR, creator of the first socialist state in world history.

Marxist, publicist, founder of Marxism-Leninism, ideologist and creator of the Third (Communist) International, founder of the USSR, first chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the USSR.

The scope of the main political and journalistic works is materialist philosophy, the theory of Marxism, criticism of capitalism and its highest phase: imperialism, the theory and practice of the implementation of the socialist revolution, the construction of socialism and communism, the political economy of socialism.

Regardless of the positive or negative assessment of Lenin's activities, even many non-communist researchers consider him the most significant revolutionary statesman in world history. Time magazine included Lenin among the 100 outstanding people of the 20th century in the category “Leaders and Revolutionaries.” The works of V.I. Lenin occupy first place in the world among translated literature.

Vladimir Ulyanov was born in 1870 in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), in the family of the inspector of public schools of the Simbirsk province, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831-1886), - the son of a former serf in the village of Androsovo, Sergach district, Nizhny Novgorod province, Nikolai Ulyanov (variant spelling of the surname: Ulyanina), married to Anna Smirnova, the daughter of an Astrakhan tradesman (according to the Soviet writer M. S. Shaginyan, who came from a family of baptized Kalmyks).

Mother - Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (née Blank, 1835-1916), of Swedish-German origin on the mother's side and, according to various versions, Ukrainian, German or Jewish origin on the father's side.

According to one version, Vladimir’s maternal grandfather was a Jew who converted to Orthodoxy, Alexander Dmitrievich Blank. According to another version, he came from a family of German colonists invited to Russia). The famous researcher of the Lenin family M. Shaginyan argued that Alexander Blank was Ukrainian.

I. N. Ulyanov rose to the rank of actual state councilor, which in the Table of Ranks corresponded to the military rank of major general and gave the right to hereditary nobility.

In 1879-1887, Vladimir Ulyanov studied at the Simbirsk gymnasium, which was headed by F. M. Kerensky, the father of A. F. Kerensky, the future head of the Provisional Government (1917). In 1887 he graduated from high school with a gold medal and entered the law faculty of Kazan University. F. M. Kerensky was very disappointed with the choice of Volodya Ulyanov, as he advised him to enter the history and literature department of the university due to the younger Ulyanov’s great success in Latin and literature.

Until 1887, nothing is known about any revolutionary activities of Vladimir Ulyanov. He accepted Orthodox baptism and until the age of 16 belonged to the Simbirsk religious Society of St. Sergius of Radonezh, leaving religion probably in 1886. His grades according to the law of God in the gymnasium were excellent, as in almost all other subjects. There is only one B in his matriculation certificate - logically. In 1885, the list of students at the gymnasium indicated that Vladimir was “a very gifted, diligent and careful student. He does very well in all subjects. He behaves exemplary." The first award was presented to him already in 1880, after graduating from the first grade - a book with gold embossing on the binding: “For good behavior and success” and a certificate of merit.

In 1887, on May 8 (20), his older brother, Alexander, was executed as a participant in the Narodnaya Volya conspiracy to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. What happened became a deep tragedy for the Ulyanov family, who were unaware of Alexander’s revolutionary activities.

At the university, Vladimir was involved in the illegal student circle of Narodnaya Volya, led by Lazar Bogoraz. Three months after his admission, he was expelled for his participation in student unrest caused by the new university charter, the introduction of police surveillance of students and a campaign to combat “unreliable” students. According to a student inspector who suffered from student unrest, Ulyanov was in the forefront of the raging students.

The next night, Vladimir, along with forty other students, was arrested and sent to the police station. All those arrested, in accordance with the methods of combating “disobedience” characteristic of the reign, were expelled from the university and sent to their “homeland.” Later, another group of students left Kazan University in protest against the repression. Among those who voluntarily left the university was Ulyanov’s cousin, Vladimir Ardashev. After petitions from Lyubov Alexandrovna Ardasheva, Vladimir Ilyich’s aunt, Ulyanov was exiled to the village of Kokushkino, Laishevsky district, Kazan province, where he lived in the Ardashevs’ house until the winter of 1888-1889.

In the fall of 1888, Ulyanov was allowed to return to Kazan. Here he subsequently joined one of the Marxist circles organized by N. E. Fedoseev, where the works of G. V. Plekhanov were studied and discussed. In 1924, N.K. Krupskaya wrote in Pravda: “Vladimir Ilyich loved Plekhanov passionately. Plekhanov played a major role in the development of Vladimir Ilyich, helped him find the correct revolutionary approach, and therefore Plekhanov was surrounded by a halo for a long time: he experienced every slightest disagreement with Plekhanov extremely painfully.”

In May 1889, M. A. Ulyanova acquired the Alakaevka estate of 83.5 dessiatines (91.2 hectares) in the Samara province and the family moved there to live. Yielding to his mother’s persistent requests, Vladimir tried to manage the estate, but had no success. The surrounding peasants, taking advantage of the inexperience of the new owners, stole a horse and two cows from them. As a result, Ulyanova first sold the land, and subsequently the house. During Soviet times, a house-museum of Lenin was created in this village.

In the fall of 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to Samara, where Lenin also maintained contact with local revolutionaries.

In 1890, the authorities relented and allowed him to study as an external student for the law exams. In November 1891, Vladimir Ulyanov passed the exams as an external student for a course at the Faculty of Law of the Imperial St. Petersburg University. After that, he studied a large amount of economic literature, especially zemstvo statistical reports on agriculture.

During the period 1892-1893, Lenin's views, under the strong influence of Plekhanov's works, slowly evolved from Narodnaya Volya to Social Democratic ones. At the same time, already in 1893 he developed a doctrine that was new at that time, declaring contemporary Russia, in which four-fifths of the population was peasantry, a “capitalist” country. The credo of Leninism was finally formulated in 1894: “the Russian worker, rising at the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the Russian proletariat (along with the proletariat of all countries) along the straight road of open political struggle to a victorious communist revolution.”

In 1892-1893, Vladimir Ulyanov worked as an assistant to the Samara attorney (lawyer) A. N. Hardin, conducting most criminal cases and conducting “state defenses.”

In 1893, Lenin came to St. Petersburg, where he got a job as an assistant to the sworn attorney (lawyer) M. F. Volkenshtein. In St. Petersburg, he wrote works on the problems of Marxist political economy, the history of the Russian liberation movement, and the history of the capitalist evolution of the post-reform Russian village and industry. Some of them were published legally. At this time he also developed the program of the Social Democratic Party. The activities of V.I. Lenin as a publicist and researcher of the development of capitalism in Russia, based on extensive statistical materials, make him famous among Social Democrats and opposition-minded liberal figures, as well as in many other circles of Russian society.

In May 1895, Ulyanov went abroad, where he met with Plekhanov in Switzerland, in Germany with V. Liebknecht, in France with P. Lafargue and other figures of the international labor movement, and upon returning to St. Petersburg in 1895, together with Yu. O. Martov and other young revolutionaries united scattered Marxist circles into the “Union of Struggle for the Liberation of the Working Class.”

Under the influence of Plekhanov, Lenin partially retreated from his doctrine proclaiming Tsarist Russia a “capitalist” country, declaring it a “semi-feudal” country. His immediate goal is to overthrow the autocracy, now in alliance with the “liberal bourgeoisie.” The “Union of Struggle” carried out active propaganda activities among workers; they issued more than 70 leaflets.

In December 1895, like many other members of the “Union,” Ulyanov was arrested, kept in prison for more than a year, and in 1897 exiled for 3 years to the village of Shushenskoye, Minusinsk district, Yenisei province.

So that Lenin’s “common-law” wife, N.K. Krupskaya, could follow him into exile, he had to register his marriage with her in July 1898. Since in Russia at that time only church marriages, Lenin, who at that time was already an atheist, had to get married in a church, officially identifying himself as Orthodox. Initially, neither Vladimir Ilyich nor Nadezhda Konstantinovna intended to formalize their marriage through the church, but after a very short time the police chief’s order came: either get married, or Nadezhda Konstantinovna must leave Shushenskoye and go to Ufa, to the place of exile. “I had to do this whole comedy,” Krupskaya said later.

Ulyanov, in a letter to his mother dated May 10, 1898, describes the current situation as follows: “N. K., as you know, was given a tragicomic condition: if he does not immediately (sic!) get married, then return to Ufa. I am not at all inclined to allow this, and therefore we have already begun “troubles” (mainly requests for the issuance of documents, without which we cannot get married) in order to have time to get married before Lent (before Petrovka): it is still possible to hope that the strict authorities will find this sufficient “immediate” marriage.” Finally, at the beginning of July, the documents were received and it was possible to go to church. But it so happened that there were no guarantors, no best men, no wedding rings, without which the wedding ceremony was unthinkable. The police officer categorically forbade the exiles Krzhizhanovsky and Starkov from coming to the wedding. Of course, the troubles could have started again, but Vladimir Ilyich decided not to wait. He invited his acquaintances from Shushensky peasants as guarantors and best men: clerk Stepan Nikolaevich Zhuravlev, shopkeeper Ioannikiy Ivanovich Zavertkin, Simon Afanasyevich Ermolaev and others. And one of the exiles, Oscar Aleksandrovich Engberg, prepared for the bride and groom wedding rings from a copper coin.

On July 10 (22), 1898, in a local church, priest John Orestov performed the sacrament of wedding. An entry in the church register of the village of Shushenskoye indicates that the administrative-exiled Orthodox Christians V.I. Ulyanov and N.K. Krupskaya had their first marriage.

In exile, he wrote a book, “The Development of Capitalism in Russia,” based on the collected material, directed against “legal Marxism” and populist theories. During his exile, over 30 works were written, contacts were established with Social Democrats in St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and other cities. By the end of the 1890s, under the pseudonym “K. Tulin" V.I. Ulyanov gained fame in Marxist circles. While in exile, Ulyanov advised local peasants on legal issues and drafted legal documents for them.

In 1898, in Minsk, in the absence of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle, the First Congress of the RSDLP was held, consisting of 9 people, which established the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, adopting the Manifesto. All members of the Central Committee elected by the congress and most of the delegates were immediately arrested, and many organizations represented at the congress were destroyed by the police. The leaders of the Union of Struggle, who were in exile in Siberia, decided to unite the numerous Social Democratic organizations and Marxist circles scattered throughout the country with the help of the newspaper.

After the end of their exile in February 1900, Lenin, Martov and A.N. Potresov traveled around Russian cities, establishing connections with local organizations. On February 26, 1900, Ulyanov arrived in Pskov, where he was allowed to reside after exile. In April 1900, an organizational meeting was held in Pskov to create an all-Russian workers' newspaper "Iskra", in which V. I. Ulyanov-Lenin, S. I. Radchenko, P. B. Struve, M. I. Tugan-Baranovsky, L. Martov, A. N. Potresov, A. M. Stopani.

In April 1900, Lenin illegally made a one-day trip to Riga from Pskov. At the negotiations with the Latvian Social Democrats, issues of transporting the Iskra newspaper from abroad to Russia through the ports of Latvia were considered. At the beginning of May 1900, Vladimir Ulyanov received a foreign passport in Pskov. On May 19 he leaves for St. Petersburg, and on May 21 he is detained by the police there. The luggage sent by Ulyanov from Pskov to Podolsk was also carefully examined.

After inspecting the luggage, the head of the Moscow security department, S.V. Zubatov, sends a telegram to St. Petersburg to the head of the special department of the police department, L.A. Rataev: “The cargo turned out to be a library and tendentious manuscripts, opened in accordance with the Charter of the Russian Railways, as sent unsealed. After consideration by the gendarmerie police and examination of the department, it will be sent to its destination. Zubatov." The operation to arrest the Social Democrat ended in failure. As an experienced conspirator, V.I. Lenin did not give the Pskov police any reason to accuse him. In the reports of the spies and in the information of the Pskov Gendarmerie Directorate about V.I. Ulyanov, it is noted that “during his residence in Pskov before going abroad, he was not noticed in anything reprehensible.” Lenin’s work in the statistical bureau of the Pskov provincial zemstvo and his participation in drawing up a program for an evaluation and statistical survey of the province also served as a good cover. Apart from an illegal visit to the capital, Ulyanov had nothing to show for it. Ten days later he was released.

In June 1900, Vladimir Ulyanov, together with his mother M.A. Ulyanova and older sister Anna Ulyanova, came to Ufa, where his wife N.K. Krupskaya was in exile.

On July 29, 1900, Lenin left for Switzerland, where he negotiated with Plekhanov on the publication of a newspaper and theoretical journal. The editorial board of the newspaper Iskra (later the magazine Zarya appeared) included three representatives of the emigrant group “Emancipation of Labor” - Plekhanov, P. B. Axelrod and V. I. Zasulich and three representatives of the “Union of Struggle” - Lenin, Martov and Potresov. The average circulation of the newspaper was 8,000 copies, with some issues up to 10,000 copies. The spread of the newspaper was facilitated by the creation of a network of underground organizations on the territory of the Russian Empire. The editorial board of Iskra settled in Munich, but Plekhanov remained in Geneva. Axelrod still lived in Zurich. Martov has not yet arrived from Russia. Zasulich didn’t come either. Having lived in Munich for a short time, Potresov left it for a long time. The main work in Munich to organize the release of Iskra is carried out by Ulyanov. The first issue of Iskra arrives from the printing house on December 24, 1900. On April 1, 1901, after serving her exile in Ufa, N.K. Krupskaya arrived in Munich and began working in the editorial office of Iskra.

In December 1901, the magazine “Zarya” published an article entitled “Years. “critics” on the agrarian issue. The first essay" is the first work that Vladimir Ulyanov signed with the pseudonym "N. Lenin."

In the period 1900-1902, Lenin, under the influence of the general crisis of the revolutionary movement that had arisen at that time, came to the conclusion that, left to its own devices, the revolutionary proletariat would soon abandon the fight against the autocracy, limiting itself to economic demands alone.

In 1902, in the work “What to do? Urgent issues of our movement” Lenin came up with his own concept of the party, which he saw as a centralized militant organization (“a party of a new type”). In this article he writes: “Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will turn Russia over!” In this work, Lenin first formulated his doctrines of “democratic centralism” (a strict hierarchical organization of the revolutionary party) and “introducing consciousness.”

According to the then new doctrine of “bringing in consciousness,” it was assumed that the industrial proletariat itself was not revolutionary and was inclined only to economic demands (“trade unionism”), the necessary “consciousness” had to be “brought in” from the outside by a party of professional revolutionaries, which in this case would become the “avant-garde”.

Foreign agents of the tsarist intelligence picked up the trail of the Iskra newspaper in Munich. Therefore, in April 1902, the newspaper's editorial office moved from Munich to London. Together with Lenin and Krupskaya, Martov and Zasulich move to London. From April 1902 to April 1903, V.I. Lenin, together with N.K. Krupskaya, lived in London, under the surname Richter, first in furnished rooms, and then rented two small rooms in a house not far from the British Museum, in whose library Vladimir Ilyich worked often. At the end of April 1903, Lenin and his wife moved from London to Geneva in connection with the transfer of the publication of the Iskra newspaper there. They lived in Geneva until 1905.

From July 17 to August 10, 1903, the Second Congress of the RSDLP was held in London. Lenin took an active part in the preparations for the congress not only with his articles in Iskra and Zarya; Since the summer of 1901, together with Plekhanov, he worked on a draft party program and prepared a draft charter. The program consisted of two parts - a minimum program and a maximum program; the first involved the overthrow of tsarism and the establishment of a democratic republic, the destruction of the remnants of serfdom in the countryside, in particular the return to the peasants of lands cut off from them by landowners during the abolition of serfdom (the so-called “cuts”), the introduction of an eight-hour working day, recognition of the right of nations to self-determination and the establishment of equal rights nations; the maximum program determined the ultimate goal of the party - the construction of a socialist society and the conditions for achieving this goal - the socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Already at the end of 1904, against the backdrop of a growing strike movement, differences on political issues emerged between the “majority” and “minority” factions, in addition to organizational ones.

The revolution of 1905-1907 found Lenin abroad, in Switzerland.

At the Third Congress of the RSDLP, held in London in April 1905, Lenin emphasized that the main task of the ongoing revolution was to put an end to autocracy and the remnants of serfdom in Russia.

At the first opportunity, in early November 1905, Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg illegally, under a false name, and headed the work of the Central and St. Petersburg Bolshevik Committees elected by the congress; paid great attention to the management of the newspaper “New Life”. Under the leadership of Lenin, the party was preparing an armed uprising. At the same time, Lenin wrote the book “Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution,” in which he points out the need for the hegemony of the proletariat and an armed uprising. In the struggle to win over the peasantry (which was actively waged with the Socialist Revolutionaries), Lenin wrote the pamphlet “To the Village Poor.” In December 1905, the First Conference of the RSDLP was held in Tammerfors, where V.I. Lenin and V. I. met for the first time.

In the spring of 1906, Lenin moved to Finland. He lived with Krupskaya and her mother in Kuokkala (Repino (St. Petersburg)) at the Vaasa villa of Emil Edward Engeström, occasionally visiting Helsingfors. At the end of April 1906, before going to the party congress in Stockholm, he, under the name Weber, stayed in Helsingfors for two weeks in a rented apartment on the first floor of a house at Vuorimihenkatu 35. Two months later, he spent several weeks in Seyviasta (Ozerki village, west of Kuokkala) near the Knipovichs. In December (no later than 14 (27)) 1907, Lenin arrived in Stockholm by ship.

According to Lenin, despite the defeat of the December armed uprising, the Bolsheviks used all revolutionary opportunities, they were the first to take the path of uprising and the last to leave it when this path became impossible.

In early January 1908, Lenin returned to Geneva. The defeat of the revolution of 1905-1907 did not force him to fold his arms; he considered a repetition of the revolutionary upsurge inevitable. “Defeated armies learn well,” Lenin later wrote about this period.

At the end of 1908, Lenin and Krupskaya, together with Zinoviev and Kamenev, moved to Paris. Lenin lived here until June 1912. This is where his first meeting with Inessa Armand takes place.

In 1909 he published his main philosophical work, “Materialism and Empirio-criticism.” The work was written after Lenin realized how widely popular Machism and empirio-criticism had become among Social Democrats.

In 1912, he decisively broke with the Mensheviks, who insisted on the legalization of the RSDLP.

On May 5, 1912, the first issue of the legal Bolshevik newspaper Pravda was published in St. Petersburg. Extremely dissatisfied with the editing of the newspaper (Stalin was the editor-in-chief), Lenin sent L. B. Kamenev to St. Petersburg. He wrote articles to Pravda almost every day, sent letters in which he gave instructions, advice, and corrected the editors’ mistakes. Over the course of 2 years, Pravda published about 270 Leninist articles and notes. Also in exile, Lenin led the activities of the Bolsheviks in the IV State Duma, was a representative of the RSDLP in the II International, wrote articles on party and national issues, and studied philosophy.

When World War I began, Lenin lived on the territory of Austria-Hungary in the Galician town of Poronin, where he arrived at the end of 1912. Due to suspicions of spying for the Russian government, Lenin was arrested by Austrian gendarmes. For his release, the help of socialist deputy of the Austrian parliament V. Adler was required. On August 6, 1914, Lenin was released from prison.

17 days later in Switzerland, Lenin took part in a meeting of a group of Bolshevik emigrants, where he announced his theses on the war. In his opinion, the war that began was imperialist, unfair on both sides, and alien to the interests of the working people. According to the memoirs of S. Yu. Bagotsky, after receiving information about the unanimous vote of German Social Democrats for the military budget of the German government, Lenin declared that he had ceased to be a Social Democrat and turned into a communist.

At international conferences in Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916), Lenin, in accordance with the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress and the Basel Manifesto of the Second International, defended his thesis on the need to transform the imperialist war into a civil war and spoke with the slogan of “revolutionary defeatism.” Military historian S.V. Volkov considered that Lenin’s position during the First World War in relation to his own country can most accurately be described as “high treason.”

In February 1916, Lenin moved from Bern to Zurich. Here he completed his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Popular Essay)”, actively collaborated with the Swiss Social Democrats (among them the left radical Fritz Platten), and attended all their party meetings. Here he learned from newspapers about the February Revolution in Russia.

Lenin did not expect a revolution in 1917. Lenin’s public statement in January 1917 in Switzerland is known that he did not expect to live to see the coming revolution, but that young people would see it. Lenin, who knew the weakness of the underground revolutionary forces in the capital, regarded the revolution that soon took place as the result of a “conspiracy of Anglo-French imperialists.”

In April 1917, the German authorities, with the assistance of Fritz Platten, allowed Lenin, along with 35 party comrades, to travel by train from Switzerland through Germany. General E. Ludendorff argued that transporting Lenin to Russia was expedient from a military point of view. Among Lenin's companions were Krupskaya N.K., Zinoviev G.E., Lilina Z.I., Armand I.F., Sokolnikov G.Ya., Radek K.B. and others.

On April 3 (16), 1917, Lenin arrived in Russia. The Petrograd Soviet, the majority of which were Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, organized a ceremonial meeting for him. To meet Lenin and the procession that followed through the streets of Petrograd, according to the Bolsheviks, 7,000 soldiers were mobilized “alongside.”

Lenin was personally met by the chairman of the executive committee of the Petrograd Soviet, Menshevik N. S. Chkheidze, who on behalf of the Soviet expressed hope for “unifying the ranks of all democracy.” However, Lenin’s first speech at the Finlyandsky Station immediately after his arrival ended with a call for a “social revolution” and caused confusion even among Lenin’s supporters. The sailors of the 2nd Baltic Crew, who performed honor guard duties at the Finlyandsky Station, the next day expressed their indignation and regret that they were not told in time about the route Lenin took to return to Russia, and claimed that they would have greeted Lenin with exclamations of “Down, back to the country through which you came to us.” Soldiers of the Volyn Regiment and sailors in Helsingfors raised the question of Lenin's arrest; the indignation of the sailors in this Finnish Russian port was even expressed in the throwing of Bolshevik agitators into the sea. Based on the information received about Lenin’s path to Russia, the soldiers of the Moscow regiment decided to destroy the editorial office of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda.

The next day, April 4, Lenin made a report to the Bolsheviks, the theses of which were published in Pravda only on April 7, when Lenin and Zinoviev joined the editorial board of Pravda, since, according to V. M. Molotov, the new The leader’s ideas seemed too radical even to his close associates. They were famous "April Theses". In this report, Lenin sharply opposed the sentiments that prevailed in Russia among Social Democrats in general and the Bolsheviks in particular, which boiled down to the idea of expanding the bourgeois-democratic revolution, supporting the Provisional Government and defending the revolutionary fatherland in a war that changed its character with the fall of the autocracy. Lenin announced the slogans: “No support for the Provisional Government” and “all power to the Soviets”; he proclaimed a course for the development of the bourgeois revolution into a proletarian revolution, putting forward the goal of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and the transfer of power to the Soviets and the proletariat with the subsequent liquidation of the army, police and bureaucracy. Finally, he demanded widespread anti-war propaganda, since, according to his opinion, the war on the part of the Provisional Government continued to be imperialistic and “predatory” in nature.

On April 8, one of the leaders of German intelligence in Stockholm telegraphed the Foreign Ministry in Berlin: “Lenin’s arrival in Russia is successful. It works exactly the way we would like it to.”

In March 1917, until Lenin’s arrival from exile, moderate sentiments prevailed in the RSDLP(b). Stalin I.V. even stated in March that “unification [with the Mensheviks] is possible along the Zimmerwald-Kinthal line.” On April 6, the Central Committee passed a negative resolution on the Theses, and the editorial board of Pravda initially refused to print them, allegedly due to mechanical failure. On April 7, the “Theses” nevertheless appeared with a comment from L. B. Kamenev, who said that “Lenin’s scheme” was “unacceptable.”

Nevertheless, within literally three weeks, Lenin managed to get his party to accept the “Theses.” Stalin I.V. was one of the first to declare their support (April 11). According to the expression, “the party was taken by surprise by Lenin no less than by the February coup... there was no debate, everyone was stunned, no one wanted to expose themselves to the blows of this frantic leader.” The April party conference of 1917 (April 22-29) put an end to the Bolsheviks’ hesitations, which finally adopted the “Theses”. At this conference, Lenin also proposed for the first time that the party be renamed "communist", but this proposal was rejected.

From April to July 1917, Lenin wrote more than 170 articles, brochures, draft resolutions of Bolshevik conferences and the Party Central Committee, and appeals.

Despite the fact that the Menshevik newspaper Rabochaya Gazeta, when writing about the arrival of the Bolshevik leader in Russia, assessed this visit as the emergence of “danger from the left flank”, the newspaper Rech - the official publication of the Minister of Foreign Affairs P. N. Milyukov - according to historian of the Russian revolution S.P. Melgunov, spoke positively about the arrival of Lenin, and that now not only Plekhanov will fight for the ideas of socialist parties.

In Petrograd, from June 3 (16) to June 24 (July 7), 1917, the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets of Workers' and Soldiers' Deputies was held, at which Lenin spoke. In his speech on June 4 (17), he stated that at that moment, in his opinion, the Soviets could gain all power in the country peacefully and use it to solve the main issues of the revolution: give the working people peace, bread, land and overcome economic devastation. Lenin also argued that the Bolsheviks were ready to immediately take power in the country.

A month later, the Petrograd Bolsheviks found themselves involved in anti-government protests on July 3 (16) - 4 (17), 1917 under the slogans of transferring power to the Soviets and negotiations with Germany on peace. The armed demonstration led by the Bolsheviks escalated into skirmishes, including with troops loyal to the Provisional Government. The Bolsheviks were accused of organizing an “armed uprising against state power"(subsequently the Bolshevik leadership denied its involvement in the preparation of these events). In addition, the case materials provided by counterintelligence about the connections of the Bolsheviks with Germany were made public (see Question about the financing of the Bolsheviks by Germany).

On July 20 (7), the Provisional Government ordered the arrest of Lenin and a number of prominent Bolsheviks on charges of treason and organizing an armed uprising. Lenin went underground again. In Petrograd, he had to change 17 safe houses, after which, until August 21 (8), 1917, he and Zinoviev hid not far from Petrograd - in a hut on Lake Razliv. In August, on the steam locomotive H2-293, he disappeared into the territory of the Grand Duchy of Finland, where he lived until the beginning of October in Yalkala, Helsingfors and Vyborg. Soon the investigation into Lenin's case was discontinued due to lack of evidence.

Lenin, who was in Finland, was unable to attend the VI Congress of the RSDLP(b), which was held semi-legally in August 1917 in Petrograd. The Congress approved the decision on Lenin's failure to appear in the court of the Provisional Government, and elected him in absentia as one of its honorary chairmen.

During this period, Lenin wrote one of his fundamental works - the book "State and Revolution".

On August 10, accompanied by the deputy of the Finnish Sejm K. Wikka, Lenin moved from Malm station to Helsingfors. Here he lives in the apartment of the Finnish social democrat Gustav Rovno (Hagnes Square, 1, apt. 22), and then in the apartment of the Finnish workers A. Usenius (Fradrikinkatu St., 64) and B. Vlumkvist (Telenkatu St., 46) . Communication goes through G. Rivne, railway. postman K. Akhmalu, driver of steam locomotive No. 293 G. Yalava, N.K. Krupskaya, M.I. Ulyanov, Shotman A.V. N.K. Krupskaya comes to Lenin twice with the ID of Sestroretsk worker Agafya Atamanova.

In the second half of September, Lenin moved to Vyborg (the apartment of the editor-in-chief of the Finnish workers' newspaper "Tue" (labor) Evert Huttunen (Vilkienkatu St. 17 - in the 2000s, Turgenev St., 8), then settled with Latukka near Vyborg Talikkala, alexanderinkatu (now the village of Lenina, Rubezhnaya St. 15.) On October 7, accompanied by Rakhya, Lenin left Vyborg to move to St. Petersburg. They traveled to Raivola on a commuter train, and then Lenin moved to the booth of steam locomotive No. 293 to driver Hugo Yalava. Udelnaya station on foot to Serdobolskaya 1/92 quarter 20 to M.V. Fofanova from where Lenin left for Smolny on the night of October 25.

On October 20, 1917, Lenin arrived illegally from Vyborg to Petrograd. On November 6, 1917 (24.10) after 6 pm Lenin left the safe house of Margarita Fofanova, at Serdobolskaya Street, building No. 1, apartment No. 41, leaving a note: “...I went to where you didn’t want me to go. Goodbye. Ilyich." For the purpose of secrecy, Lenin changes his appearance: he puts on an old coat and cap, and ties a scarf around his cheek. Lenin, accompanied by E. Rakhya, heads to Sampsonievsky Prospekt, takes a tram to Botkinskaya Street, crosses the Liteiny Bridge, turns onto Shpalernaya, is twice delayed by cadets along the way, and finally comes to Smolny (Leontyevskaya Street, 1).

Arriving in Smolny, he begins to lead the uprising, the direct organizer of which was the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet L. D. Trotsky. Lenin proposed to act tough, organized, and quickly. We can't wait any longer. It is necessary to arrest the government without leaving power in the hands of Kerensky until October 25, disarm the cadets, mobilize the districts and regiments, and send representatives from them to the Military Revolutionary Committee and the Bolshevik Central Committee. On the night of October 25-26, the Provisional Government was arrested.

It took 2 days to overthrow the government of A.F. Kerensky. On November 7 (October 25) Lenin wrote an appeal for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. On the same day, at the opening of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin's decrees on peace and land were adopted and a government was formed - the Council of People's Commissars, headed by Lenin. On January 5 (18), 1918, the Constituent Assembly opened, the majority of which was won by the Socialist Revolutionaries, representing the interests of the peasants, who at that time made up 80% of the country's population. Lenin, with the support of the Left Social Revolutionaries, presented the Constituent Assembly with a choice: ratify the power of the Soviets and the decrees of the Bolshevik government or disperse. The Constituent Assembly, which did not agree with this formulation of the issue, lost its quorum and was forcibly dissolved.

During the 124 days of the “Smolny period,” Lenin wrote over 110 articles, draft decrees and resolutions, delivered over 70 reports and speeches, wrote about 120 letters, telegrams and notes, and participated in the editing of more than 40 state and party documents. The working day of the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars lasted 15-18 hours. During this period, Lenin chaired 77 meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, led 26 meetings and meetings of the Central Committee, participated in 17 meetings of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and its Presidium, and in the preparation and conduct of 6 different All-Russian Congresses of Working People. After the Central Committee of the Party and the Soviet government moved from Petrograd to Moscow, from March 11, 1918, Lenin lived and worked in Moscow. Lenin's personal apartment and office were located in the Kremlin, on the third floor of the former Senate building.

On January 15 (28), 1918, Lenin signed the decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the creation of the Red Army. In accordance with the Peace Decree, it was necessary to withdraw from the world war. Despite the opposition of the left communists and L.D. Trotsky, Lenin achieved the conclusion of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty with Germany. On March 3, 1918, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, in protest against the signing and ratification of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty, withdrew from the Soviet government. On March 10-11, fearing the capture of Petrograd by German troops, at the suggestion of Lenin, the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the RCP (b) moved to Moscow, which became the new capital of Soviet Russia.

On August 30, 1918, an attempt was made on Lenin, according to the official version, by a Socialist Revolutionary Party, which led to severe injury. After the assassination attempt, Lenin was successfully operated on by doctor Vladimir Mints.

The denunciation of the Brest-Litovsk Peace Treaty by the All-Russian Central Executive Committee in November 1918 significantly strengthened Lenin’s authority in the party. Doctor of Philosophy in history, Harvard University professor Richard Pipes describes this situation as follows: “By shrewdly accepting a humiliating peace that gave him the necessary time and then collapsed under its own gravity, Lenin earned the widespread trust of the Bolsheviks. When they tore up the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk on November 13, 1918, followed by Germany's capitulation to the Western Allies, Lenin's authority in the Bolshevik movement was elevated to unprecedented heights. Nothing better served his reputation as a man who made no political mistakes; never again did he have to threaten to resign to get his way.”

As Chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, from November 1917 to December 1920, Lenin chaired 375 meetings of the Soviet government out of 406. From December 1918 to February 1920, out of 101 meetings of the Council of Workers' and Peasants' Defense, only two he did not preside over. In 1919, V.I. Lenin led the work of 14 plenums of the Central Committee and 40 meetings of the Politburo, at which military issues were discussed. From November 1917 to November 1920, V.I. Lenin wrote over 600 letters and telegrams on various issues of defense of the Soviet state, and spoke at rallies over 200 times.

In March 1919, after the failure of the Entente countries’ initiative to end the Civil War in Russia, V. Bullitt, who secretly arrived in Moscow on behalf of US President William Wilson and British Prime Minister D. Lloyd George, proposed that Soviet Russia make peace with all other governments, formed on the territory of the former Russian Empire, while paying off its debts together with them. Lenin agreed to this proposal, motivating this decision as follows: “The price of the blood of our workers and soldiers is too dear to us; We, as merchants, will pay for peace at the price of a heavy tribute... just to save the lives of workers and peasants.” However, the initially successful offensive of A.V. Kolchak’s army on the Eastern Front against Soviet troops, which began in March 1919, instilling confidence in the Entente countries in the imminent fall of Soviet power, led to the fact that negotiations were not continued by the United States and Great Britain.

In 1919, on the initiative of Lenin, the Communist International was created.

On the night of July 16-17, 1918, the former Russian Emperor Nicholas II was shot along with his family and servants by order of the Ural Regional Council in Yekaterinburg, led by the Bolsheviks.

In February 1920, the Irkutsk Bolshevik Military Revolutionary Committee secretly executed without trial Admiral A.V. Kolchak, who was under arrest in the Irkutsk prison after his allies had extradited him to the Socialist-Revolutionary-Menshevik Political Center. According to a number of modern Russian historians, this was done in accordance with Lenin's order.

Illness and death of Vladimir Lenin

At the end of May 1922, due to cerebral vascular sclerosis, Lenin suffered his first serious attack of the disease - speech was lost, the movement of his right limbs was weakened, and there was almost complete memory loss - Lenin, for example, did not know how to use a toothbrush. Only on July 13, 1922, when Lenin’s condition improved, was he able to write his first note. From the end of July 1922, Lenin's condition deteriorated again. Improvement came only at the beginning of September 1922.

In 1923, shortly before his death, Lenin wrote his last works: “On cooperation”, “How can we reorganize the workers’ krin”, “Less is better”, in which he offers his vision of the economic policy of the Soviet state and measures to improve the work of the state apparatus and parties. On January 4, 1923, V.I. Lenin dictates the so-called “Addition to the letter of December 24, 1922,” in which, in particular, the characteristics of individual Bolsheviks claiming to be the leader of the party (Stalin, Trotsky, Bukharin, Pyatakov) were given. .

Presumably, Vladimir Ilyich’s illness was caused by severe overwork and the consequences of the assassination attempt on August 30, 1918. At least these reasons are referred to by the authoritative researcher of this issue, surgeon Yu. M. Lopukhin.

Leading German specialists in nervous diseases were called in for treatment. Lenin's chief physician from December 1922 until his death in 1924 was Otfried Förster. Last thing public speaking Lenin took place on November 20, 1922 at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet. On December 16, 1922, his health condition again deteriorated sharply, and on May 15, 1923, due to illness, he moved to the Gorki estate near Moscow. Since March 12, 1923, daily bulletins on Lenin's health were published. The last time Lenin was in Moscow was on October 18-19, 1923. During this period, he, however, dictated several notes: “Letter to the Congress”, “On giving legislative functions to the State Planning Committee”, “On the issue of nationalities or “autonomization””, “Pages from the diary”, “On cooperation”, “About our revolution (regarding N. Sukhanov’s notes)”, “How can we reorganize the Rabkrin (Proposal to the XII Party Congress)”, “Less is better”.

Lenin's "Letter to the Congress" (1922) is often viewed as Lenin's testament.

In January 1924, Lenin's health suddenly deteriorated; On January 21, 1924 at 18:50 he died.

The official conclusion on the cause of death in the autopsy report read: “...The basis of the disease of the deceased is widespread atherosclerosis of blood vessels due to their premature wear (Abnutzungssclerose). Due to the narrowing of the lumen of the arteries of the brain and disruption of its nutrition from insufficient blood flow, focal softening of the brain tissue occurred, explaining all the previous symptoms of the disease (paralysis, speech disorders). The immediate cause of death was: 1) increased circulatory disorders in the brain; 2) hemorrhage into the pia mater in the quadrigeminal region.” In June 2004, an article was published in the European Journal of Neurology, the authors of which suggest that Lenin died of neurosyphilis. Lenin himself did not exclude the possibility of syphilis and therefore took salvarsan, and in 1923 he also tried to be treated with drugs based on mercury and bismuth; Max Nonne, a specialist in this field, was invited to see him. However, his guess was refuted by him. “There was absolutely nothing to indicate syphilis,” Nonna later wrote.

Vladimir Lenin's height: 164 centimeters.

Personal life of Vladimir Lenin:

Apollinaria Yakubova and her husband were close associates of Lenin and his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, who lived in London periodically from 1902 to 1911, although Yakubova and Lenin were known to have had a tumultuous and tense relationship due to politics within the RSDLP.

Robert Henderson, specialist Russian history from the University of London, discovered a photograph of Yakubova in the bowels of the State Archive of Russian Federation in Moscow in April 2015.

Apollinaria Yakubova

Major works of Vladimir Lenin:

"On the Characteristics of Economic Romanticism", (1897)
What inheritance are we giving up? (1897);
Development of capitalism in Russia (1899);
What to do? (1902);
One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904);
Party organization and party literature (1905);
Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution (1905);
Marxism and Revisionism (1908);
Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1909);
Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism (1913);
On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914);
On the breakdown of unity covered by cries for unity (1914);
Karl Marx (a short biographical sketch outlining Marxism) (1914);
Socialism and War (1915);
Imperialism as the highest stage of capitalism (popular essay) (1916);
State and Revolution (1917);
Tasks of the proletariat in our revolution (1917)
The Impending Catastrophe and How to Deal with It (1917)
On dual power (1917);
How to Organize a Competition (1918);
The Great Initiative (1919);
The childhood disease of “leftism” in communism (1920);
Tasks of youth unions (1920);
About the food tax (1921);
Pages from the diary, About cooperation (1923);
About the pogrom persecution of Jews (1924);
What is Soviet power? (1919, publ.: 1928);
On leftist childishness and petty-bourgeoisism (1918);
About our revolution (1923);
Letter to the Congress (1922, read out: 1924, published: 1956)