7 Vladimir Ilich Lenin 7of the Bolshevik Revolution in 1917, and the first head of
the Soviet state.
Early Life
Born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov into a middle-class family,
Lenin nevertheless became an advocate of Marxism in
- In 1891 he received a degree in law from St.
Petersburg University. He moved to St. Petersburg in
August 1893 and, while working as a public defender,
associated with revolutionary Marxist circles. His com-
rades sent him abroad to make contact with Russian
exiles in western Europe, and, upon his return in 1895,
Lenin and other Marxists succeeded in unifying the
Marxist groups of the capital. In December 1895 he and
other Marxist leaders were arrested. Lenin was jailed for
15 months and thereafter was sent into exile in Siberia for
three years.
After 1900, Lenin lived mostly in western Europe.
While in Germany, he and other comrades developed the
newspaper Iskra (“The Spark”), which they hoped would
unify the Russian Marxist groups into a cohesive Social-
Democratic party.
Iskra’s success in recruiting Russian intellectuals to
Marxism led Lenin and his comrades to believe that the
time was ripe for a revolutionary Marxist party. In 1903 an
organizing committee for the Russian Social-Democratic
Workers’ Party (RSDWP) was convened in London, where
Lenin emerged as the leader of the Bolshevik faction. He
put forth his theory of the party as the vanguard of the
proletariat, a centralized body organized around a core of
professional revolutionaries. His ideas, later known as
Leninism, would be joined with Karl Marx’s theories to
form Marxism-Leninism.