Vladimir Lenin: Quotes, Death & Body
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With the advance of the war, the industrial and cultural backwardness of Russia became evident, the financial system came to complete decline, the army suffered defeat after defeat, and the whole country came to the brink of social disaster. For some, he is a figure of communist oppression, while for others, he is a symbol of hope and a man who fought for equality and a better life for all human beings. However, it cannot be disputed that his legacy was a legacy of revolution that disrupted the existing power structures and set in motion a state of affairs that would define the 20th century and shape the world for centuries to come. After the assassination attempt in August 1918, the activities of the Cheka increased further. Thousand of “class enemies” were silenced during a period known as the Red Terror that lasted until February 1922.
Upon taking power, Lenin believed that a key policy of his government must be to withdraw from the First World War by establishing an armistice with the Central Powers of Germany and Austria-Hungary. He believed that ongoing war would create resentment among war-weary Russian troops, to whom he had promised peace, and that these troops and the advancing German Army threatened both his own government and the cause of international socialism. In August 1917, while Lenin was in Finland, General Lavr Kornilov, the Commander-in-Chief of the Russian Army, sent troops to Petrograd in what appeared to be a military coup attempt against the Provisional Government. Premier Alexander Kerensky turned to the Petrograd Soviet, including its Bolshevik members, for help, allowing the revolutionaries to organise workers as Red Guards to defend the city. The coup petered out before it reached Petrograd, but the events had allowed the Bolsheviks to return to the open political arena.
Revolution of 1905 and its aftermath: 1905–1914
This is said to be one of the most influential pamphlets in pre-revolutionary Russia, with Lenin himself claiming that three out of five workers had read it or had had it read to them. He continued to travel in Europe and participated in many socialist meetings and activities, including the Prague Party Conference of 1912 and the Zimmerwald Conference of 1915. His frustrations extended to his fellow Marxists, in particular, the group calling itself the Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov. The issues centered around party structure and the driving forces of a revolution to fully seize control of Russia. While his comrades believed that the power must reside with the bourgeoisie, Lenin passionately distrusted that segment of the population. Instead, he argued, a real and complete revolution, one that could lead to the Socialist Revolution that could spread outside of Russia, must be led by the workers, the country’s proletariat.
In response, Lenin urged an attack on Warsaw, believing that the proletariat would rise up and overthrow the Polish government. Nonetheless, the Bordigism of the International Communist Party abides Bordiga's strict Leninism. Ideologically aligned with the Dutch-German left, among the ideologists of contemporary communisation, the theorist Gilles Dauvé criticised Leninism as a "by-product of Kautskyism". In The Soviet Union Versus Socialism , Noam Chomsky said that Stalinism was the logical development of Leninism and not an ideological deviation from Lenin's policies, which resulted in collectivisation enforced with a police state. In light of the tenets of socialism, Leninism was a right-wing deviation from Marxism. Marxism is a set of social, political, and economic theories created and espoused by Karl Marx that became a prominent school of socialist thought.
Vladimir Ilici Lenin
Vladimir Lenin was one of the most influential people in history who brought about significant change in his country that reverberated around the world and impacted the lives of millions. Though his thoughts on Marxism and capitalism are read to this day and influence many individuals and nations, his legacy will also be remembered for his brutal regime and the deaths of millions. Through violent means, he established a system of Marxist socialism called communism in the former Russian Empire, which attempted to impose collective control over the means of production, redistribute wealth, abolish the aristocracy, and create a more equitable society for the masses. Stalin, a close member of Lenin’s inner circle, became general secretary of the Communist Party in April 1922.
The Soviet government commissioned the well-known German neuroscientist Oskar Vogt to study Lenin's brain and to locate the precise location of the brain cells that are responsible for "genius." The study was performed in Vladimir Bekhterev's Institute of the Brain. Vogt published a paper on the brain in 1929 in which he reported that while the brain was discolored, shrunken, and showed "widespread areas of softening," some pyramidal neurons in the third layer of Lenin's cerebral cortex were very large. However, the conclusion of this discovery’s relevance to genius was contested. Further research was continued by the Soviet team, but the work on Lenin's brain was no longer advertised. Contemporary anatomists are no longer convinced that morphology alone can determine the functioning of the brain. However, according to Zvi Gitelman, University of Michigan Preston Tisch professor of Judaic studies, "Never before in Russian history—and never subsequently has a government made such an effort to uproot and stamp out antisemitism."
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Eventually, his activities got him exiled to Siberia for three years, from 1897 to 1900. After that he adopted the pseudonym, "Lenin", and moved to Europe, to continue his revolutionary activities. He returned to Russia to agitate for the, ultimately failed, Revolution of 1905, then returned abroad to Europe in 1907.
It called for a small party that was tightly run, carefully planned, hard-working, disciplined and secretive. While Lenin remained opposed to outward forms of anti-Semitism and allowed Jewish people to rise to the highest offices in both party and state, the record of his government in this regard was highly uneven. Lenin was aware of pogroms carried out by units of the Red Army during the war with Poland, though the whole issue was effectively ignored.
It is difficult to identify any particular events in his childhood that might prefigure his turn onto the path of a professional revolutionary. Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk, which was renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour. (He adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine party work after exile in Siberia.) He was the third of six children born into a close-knit, happy family of highly educated and cultured parents. His mother was the daughter of a physician, while his father, though the son of a serf, became a schoolteacher and rose to the position of inspector of schools. Lenin, intellectually gifted, physically strong, and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a voracious passion for learning. He distinguished himself in Latin and Greek and seemed destined for the life of a classical scholar.
Her death deeply affected him, and he became depressed, fearing that he too would die before seeing the proletarian revolution. The vanguard-party revolution of Leninism became the ideological basis of the communist parties in the socialist political spectrum. In the People's Republic of China, the Chinese Communist Party organised itself with Maoism , socialism with Chinese characteristics.
Widespread strikes in cities and in rural sections of the country broke out, threatening the stability of Lenin’s government. During World War I Lenin went into exile again, this time taking up residence in Switzerland. During this period he wrote and published Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism , a defining work for the future leader, in which he argued that war was the natural result of international capitalism.
He was the posthumous source of "Leninism," the doctrine codified and conjoined with Marx's works by Lenin’s successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist worldview. He has been regarded as the greatest revolutionary leader and thinker since Marx. Service described Lenin as "a bit of a snob in national, social and cultural terms".
In doing so, he adopted SR slogans regarding "armed insurrection", "mass terror", and "the expropriation of gentry land", resulting in Menshevik accusations that he had deviated from orthodox Marxism. In turn, he insisted that the Bolsheviks split completely with the Mensheviks; many Bolsheviks refused, and both groups attended the Third RSDLP Congress, held in London in April 1905 at the Brotherhood Church. Lenin presented many of his ideas in the pamphlet Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution, published in August 1905. At the conference, a schism emerged between Lenin's supporters and those of Julius Martov.
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