Lenin years of life biography. AT

main alias Lenin

Russian revolutionary, major theorist of Marxism, Soviet politician and statesman, founder of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), main organizer and leader of the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, first chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (government) of the RSFSR, creator of the first in world history socialist state

Vladimir Lenin

short biography

Lenin(real name - Ulyanov) Vladimir Ilyich - the largest Russian Soviet politician, statesman, publicist, Marxist, founder of Marxism-Leninism, one of the organizers and leaders of the October Revolution of 1917, founder of the Communist Party, creator of the first socialist state, the Communist International, one of leaders of the international communist movement. Ulyanov was from Simbirsk, where he was born on April 22 (April 10, O.S.), 1870. His father was an official, an inspector of public schools. In the period 1879-1887. Vladimir Ulyanov successfully studied at the local gymnasium, which he graduated with a gold medal. Until the age of 16, being baptized Orthodox, he was a member of the Simbirsk religious Society of St. Sergius of Radonezh.

The turning point in the biography of V. Lenin is the execution in 1887 of his elder brother, Alexander, who took part in the preparation of the assassination attempt on Alexander III. Although there was no particularly close relationship between the brothers, this event made a huge impression on the whole family. In 1887, Vladimir became a student at Kazan University (Faculty of Law), but participation in student unrest turned into expulsion and exile to Kokushkino, his mother's estate. He was allowed to return to Kazan in the autumn of 1888, and exactly one year later the Ulyanovs moved to Samara. Living in this city, Vladimir, thanks to his active reading of Marxist literature, begins to get acquainted with this doctrine in the most detailed way.

In 1891, after graduating externally from the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, Lenin moved to this city in 1893, working as an assistant to a barrister. However, he is not concerned with jurisprudence, but with issues of state structure. Already in 1894, he formulated a political credo, according to which the Russian proletariat, having led all democratic forces, should lead society to a communist revolution through open political struggle.

In 1895, with the most active participation of Lenin, the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class was created. For this, he was arrested in December and then more than a year later he was deported for three years to Siberia, the village of Shushenskoye. While in exile, in July 1898 he married N. K. Krupskaya due to the threat of her transfer to another place. For the rest of her life, this woman was his faithful companion, companion and assistant.

In 1900, V. Lenin went abroad, lived in Germany, England, Switzerland. There, together with G.V. Plekhanov, who played an important role in his life, he started the publication of Iskra, the first all-Russian illegal Marxist newspaper. At the II Congress of Russian Social Democrats, which was held in 1903 and was marked by a split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, he headed the first, subsequently creating the Bolshevik Party. He caught the revolution of 1905 in Switzerland, in November of the same year, under a false name, he illegally arrived in St. Petersburg, where he lived until December 1907, taking over the leadership of the Central and St. Petersburg Committees of the Bolsheviks.

During the First World War, V. I. Lenin, who was in Switzerland at that time, put forward the slogan about the need to defeat the government with the transformation of the imperialist war into a civil one. Having learned from the newspapers news about the February Revolution, he began to prepare for his return to his homeland.

In April 1917, Lenin arrived in Petrograd, and the very next day upon his arrival, he proposed a program for the transition of the bourgeois-democratic revolution to a socialist one, proclaiming the slogan "All power to the Soviets!" Already in October, he acts as one of the main organizers and leaders of the October armed uprising; in late October and early November, detachments sent on his personal orders contribute to the establishment of Soviet power in Moscow.

The October Revolution, the repressive first steps of the government headed by Lenin, turned into a bloody Civil War that lasted until 1922, which became a national tragedy that claimed the lives of millions of people. In the summer of 1918, the family of Nicholas II was shot in Yekaterinburg, and it was established that the leader of the world proletariat approved of the execution.

Since March 1918, Lenin's biography has been associated with Moscow, where the capital was transferred from Petrograd. On August 30, he was seriously injured during an assassination attempt, the answer to which was the so-called. red terror. On the initiative of Lenin and in accordance with his ideology, the policy of war communism was carried out, which in March 1921 was replaced by the NEP. In December 1922, V. Lenin became the founder of the USSR - a state of a new type, which had no precedent in world history.

The same year was marked by a serious deterioration in health, which forced the head of the country of the Soviets to curtail his active work in the political arena. In May 1923, he moved to the Gorki estate near Moscow, where he died on January 21, 1924. The official cause of death was problems with blood circulation, premature wear of blood vessels, caused, in particular, by huge loads.

IN AND. Lenin refers to individuals whose assessment of activities ranges from harsh criticism to the creation of a cult. However, no matter how his contemporaries and future generations treat him, it is quite obvious that, being a world-class politician, Lenin, with his ideology and activities, had a tremendous impact on world history at the beginning of the last century, setting a further vector of development for it.

Biography from Wikipedia

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov(main alias Lenin; April 10 (22), 1870, Simbirsk - January 21, 1924, Gorki estate, Moscow province) - Russian revolutionary, major theorist of Marxism, Soviet politician and statesman, founder of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (Bolsheviks), main organizer and leader of the October Revolution 1917 in Russia, the first chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (government) of the RSFSR, the 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 imperialism, the theory and practice of implementing the socialist revolution, building socialism and communism, political economy of socialism.

Opinions and assessments of the historical role of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) are extremely polar. Regardless of the positive or negative assessment of Lenin's activities, even many non-communist scholars consider him the most significant revolutionary statesman in world history.

Childhood, education and upbringing

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in 1870 in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), in the family of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831-1886), an inspector of public schools in the Simbirsk province, the son of a former serf in the village of Androsovo, Sergach district, Nizhny Novgorod province, Nikolai Ulyanov (variant spelling of the last name: 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 (nee Blank, 1835-1916), of Swedish-German origin on her mother's side and, according to various versions, Ukrainian, German or Jewish on her 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 by Catherine II. The well-known researcher of the Lenin family M. Shahinyan claimed that Alexander Blank was a Ukrainian.

I. N. Ulyanov rose to the rank of real state councilor, who 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 led by F. M. Kerensky, father of A. F. Kerensky, the future head of the Provisional Government (1917). In 1887 he graduated from the gymnasium 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 Faculty of History and Literature of the University due to the great success of the younger Ulyanov in Latin and literature.

The room of V. I. Lenin, in which he lived from 1878 to 1887. Now the House-Museum of the Ulyanov family

Until 1887, nothing is known about any revolutionary activity of Vladimir Ulyanov. He was baptized according to the Orthodox rite and until the age of 16 belonged to the Simbirsk religious Society of St. Sergius of Radonezh, moving away from religion, probably in 1886. His grades in the law of God in the gymnasium were excellent, as in almost all other subjects. In his matriculation certificate, only one four - in logic. In 1885, the list of students of the gymnasium indicated that Vladimir - " the student is very gifted, diligent and accurate. He excels in all subjects very well. behaves approximately”(Extract from the “Conduit and apartment list of students of the VIII grade of the Simbirsk gymnasium”. House-Museum of V. I. Lenin in Ulyanovsk). The first award, by decision of the pedagogical council, was presented to him already in 1880, after graduating from the first grade - a book with gold embossing on the cover: “For good manners and successes” and a commendation sheet.

The historian V. T. Loginov, in his work on Lenin’s childhood and youth, cites a large fragment from the memoirs of V. Ulyanov’s classmate A. Naumov, the future minister of the tsarist government. The same memoirs are quoted by the historian V.P. Buldakov, in whose opinion Naumov's evidence is valuable and unbiased; the historian considers such a description of V. Ulyanov to be very characteristic:

He had absolutely exceptional abilities, possessed a huge memory, was distinguished by insatiable scientific curiosity and extraordinary capacity for work ... Truly, it was a walking encyclopedia ... He enjoyed great respect and business authority among all his comrades, but ... one cannot say that he was loved, rather appreciated ... In the class, his mental and labor superiority was felt ... although ... Ulyanov himself never showed or emphasized it.

According to Richard Pipes,

What is surprising about Lenin as a youth is precisely that, unlike most of his contemporaries, he did not show any interest in public life. In the memoirs that came out from the pen of one of his sisters before the iron paw of censorship fell on everything that was written about Lenin, he appears as an extremely diligent, accurate and pedantic boy - in modern psychology this is called the compulsive type. He was an ideal high school student, getting excellent marks in almost all subjects, including behavior, and this brought him gold medals year after year. His name was at the top of the list of high school graduates. Nothing in the meager information we have suggests rebellion, neither against the family nor against the regime. Fyodor Kerensky, the father of Lenin's future political rival, who was the director of the gymnasium in Simbirsk, which Lenin attended, recommended him for admission to Kazan University as "withdrawn" and "unsociable" young man. “Neither in the gymnasium, nor outside it,” wrote Kerensky, “not a single case was noticed behind Ulyanov when, by word or deed, he evoked an uncommendable opinion about himself in the bosses and teachers of the gymnasium.” By the time he graduated from high school in 1887, Lenin had no "definite" political convictions. Nothing at the beginning of his biography revealed in him a future revolutionary; on the contrary, there was much evidence that Lenin would follow in his father's footsteps and make a notable service career.

In the same year, 1887, on May 8, his older brother, Alexander, was executed as a member of the Narodnaya Volya conspiracy to attempt on the life of Emperor Alexander III. What happened was 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 "Narodnaya Volya" headed by Lazar Bogoraz. Three months after entering, he was expelled for participating in student unrest caused by the new university charter, the imposition of student policing, and a campaign against "unreliable" students. According to the inspector of students, 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 were expelled from the university and sent to the "place of the motherland" in the manner typical for the period of the reign of Alexander III of the methods of combating "disobedience". Later, another group of students left Kazan University in protest against the repressions. Among those who voluntarily left the university was Ulyanov's cousin, Vladimir Ardashev. After the petitions of Lyubov Alexandrovna Ardasheva (nee Blank), Vladimir Ilyich's aunt, Ulyanov was sent to the village of Kokushkino, Laishevsky district, Kazan province, where he lived in the Ardashevs' house until the winter of 1888-1889.

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 forbidden to be reinstated at the university, and his mother's corresponding petitions were rejected over and over again. As described by Richard Pipes,

During the period described, Lenin read a lot. He studied the "progressive" journals and books of the 1860s and 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: the Simbirsk society boycotted them, as connections with the family of an executed terrorist could attract unwanted attention from the police ...

Beginning of revolutionary activity

In the autumn 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 K. Marx, F. Engels and 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 right revolutionary approach, and therefore Plekhanov was surrounded by a halo for him 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 acres (91.2 hectares) in the Samara province, and the family moved there to live. Yielding to the persistent requests of his mother, 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 sold the land first, and later the house. In Soviet times, the house-museum of Lenin was created in this village.

In the autumn of 1889, the Ulyanov family moved to Samara, where Lenin also kept in touch with local revolutionaries.

According to Richard Pipes, in the period 1887-1891, the young Ulyanov, following his executed brother, became a supporter of Narodnaya Volya. In Kazan and Samara, he consistently sought out Narodnaya Volya, from whom he learned information about the practical organization of the movement, which at that time looked like a secret, disciplined organization of "professional revolutionaries."

In 1890, the authorities relented and allowed him to study externally for the legal exams. In November 1891, Vladimir Ulyanov passed the exams externally for the law faculty of the Imperial St. Petersburg University. After that, he studied a large amount of economic literature, especially Zemstvo statistical reports on agriculture.

In the period 1892-1893 Lenin's views, strongly influenced by Plekhanov's writings, slowly evolved from Narodnaya Volya to Social Democratic. 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 the peasantry, a “capitalist” country. The credo of Leninism was finally formulated in 1894: "The Russian worker, having risen at the head of all democratic elements, will overthrow absolutism and lead the Russian proletariat (along with the proletariat of all countries) on the straight road of open political struggle to the victorious communist revolution."

As researcher M. S. Voslensky writes in his work “Nomenclature”,

From now on, the main practical goal of Lenin's life was to achieve a revolution in Russia, regardless of whether the material conditions for new production relations were ripe there or not.
The young man was not embarrassed by what was a stumbling block for other Russian Marxists of that time. Even if Russia lagged behind, he thought, even if its proletariat was weak, even if Russian capitalism had not yet deployed all its productive forces, that was not the point. The main thing is to make a revolution!
... the experience of "Land and Freedom" showed that the hope for the peasantry as the main revolutionary force did not justify itself. The handful of revolutionary intelligentsia were too small in numbers to overthrow the colossus of the tsarist state without relying on some large class: the futility of the terror of the Narodniks demonstrated this with all clarity. Such a large class in Russia in those conditions could only be the proletariat, which rapidly increased in numbers at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries. By virtue of its concentration on production and the discipline developed by working conditions, the working class was the social stratum that could best be used as a striking force to overthrow the existing order.

In 1892-1893, Vladimir Ulyanov worked as an assistant to the Samara barrister (lawyer) A.N.

With great humor, he began to tell us about his short legal practice in Samara, that of all the cases that he had to conduct by appointment (and he only conducted them by appointment), he did not win a single and only one of his clients. received a more lenient sentence than the one the prosecutor insisted on.
Maria Ilyinichna Ulyanova, memoirs

In 1893, Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg, where, on the recommendation of Hardin, he got a job as an assistant to the sworn attorney (lawyer) M. F. Volkenstein. In St. Petersburg, he wrote works on the problems of Marxist political economy, the history of the Russian liberation movement, the history of the capitalist evolution of the Russian post-reform 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 on the basis of extensive statistical materials make him famous among social democrats and opposition-minded liberal figures, as well as in many other circles of Russian society.

Police photograph of V. I. Ulyanov, December 1895

According to Richard Pipes, Lenin as a person was finally formed at the age of 23, by the time he moved to St. Petersburg in 1893:

… this unattractive man exuded such inner strength that people quickly forgot about the first impression. The striking effect that the combination of willpower, inexorable discipline, energy, asceticism and unshakable faith in the cause produced in him can only be described by the worn-out word “charisma”. According to Potresov, this “nondescript and rude” person, devoid of charm, had a “hypnotic effect”: “Plekhanov was revered, Martov was loved, but only Lenin was unquestioningly followed, as the only undisputed leader. For only Lenin was, especially in Russia, a rare phenomenon of a man of iron will, indomitable energy, merging fanatical faith in movement, in deed, with no less faith in himself.

Vl. Ulyanov ... sharply and definitely opposed the feeding of the starving. His position, as far as I remember it now - and I remember it well, because I had to argue with him a lot about it - was as follows: hunger is a direct result of a certain social system; as long as this system exists, such hunger strikes are inevitable; they can be destroyed only by destroying this system. Being inevitable in this sense, famine now also plays the role of a progressive factor. Destroying the peasant economy, throwing the peasant from the countryside into the city, the famine creates a proletariat and promotes the industrialization of the region ... It will make the peasant think about the foundations of the capitalist system, break faith in the tsar and tsarism and, therefore, in due time will facilitate the victory of the revolution.

At the end of the civil war, the Bolshevik government committed an action that the historian Latyshev described as one of its most shameful acts - the expulsion from the country in the fall of 1922 of famous Russian philosophers, writers and other representatives of the intelligentsia. Lenin was the initiator of this action.

For the first time, Lenin voiced his idea of expelling the enemies of Soviet power abroad as early as March 1919, in an interview with the American journalist Lincoln Steffens. He again returned to this idea in the spring of 1922 after a forced transition to the policy of the NEP. By this time, he felt a threat to the one-party dictatorship he had created, which, under the new conditions of economic liberalization, could come from independent intelligentsia - by that time in Moscow alone, the number of private and cooperative publishing houses exceeded 150, independent unions and societies of writers were registered throughout Soviet Russia, philosophers, artists, associations of poets, etc.

In March 1922, in On the Significance of Militant Materialism, Lenin lashed out at the author and publishers of The Economist and ultimately wished that the Russian working class would have "similar teachers and members learning societies... politely escorted me to the countries of the bourgeois "democracy".

Such a method of combating dissidents as expulsion abroad had to be given the appearance of a legal one, and therefore, on May 15, 1922, Lenin sent a letter to the People's Commissar of Justice of the RSFSR D. Kursky with instructions to introduce additional articles into the new Criminal Code being developed at that moment, namely:

... add the right to replace execution by expulsion abroad, by decision of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (for a term or indefinitely) ... add: execution for unauthorized return from abroad, ... expand the use of execution with replacement by expulsion abroad ... to all types of activities of the Mensheviks, p.- R. etc.
V. I. Lenin

May 19, 1922 Lenin sent detailed instructions F. E. Dzerzhinsky, in which he carefully described the practical measures that the GPU must carry out in order to organize the upcoming expulsion of "writers and professors helping the counter-revolution." This letter was written in restrained tones; Lenin proposed appointing an "intelligent, educated and accurate person" to the leading position for the implementation of this plan. At the end of May 1922, Lenin suffered the first serious attack of the disease due to cerebral sclerosis - speech was lost, movement of the right limbs weakened, almost complete memory loss was observed - 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 the first note. And already on July 17, apparently only under the influence of a depressed state of health, he wrote a letter to I.V. Stalin, filled with fierce attacks on the exiled Russian intelligentsia:

T. Stalin!
On the question of the expulsion of the Mensheviks from Russia, n. s., cadets, etc. I would like to ask a few questions in view of the fact that this operation, begun before my vacation, has not been completed even now. Has it been decided to "extirpate" all the popes...?
In my opinion, send everyone ...
The commission ... must provide lists and several hundred such gentlemen should be sent abroad ruthlessly. Clear Russia for a long time. ... All of them - get out of Russia.
Arrest several hundred and without declaring motives - leave, gentlemen!
With [communist] greetings, Lenin.
V. I. Lenin. The letter has been preserved in a copy transcribed by the hand of Heinrich Yagoda. It bears a resolution: Dzerzhinsky with a return. Stalin"

From the end of July 1922, Lenin's condition worsened again. Improvement came only at the beginning of September 1922. During this period, the question of how the expulsion of the intelligentsia was proceeding worried Lenin no less than before. After meeting with Lenin on September 4, 1922, F. Dzerzhinsky made a note in his diary: “Directives of Vladimir Ilyich. Continue steadily expelling the active anti-Soviet intelligentsia (and the Mensheviks in the first place) abroad...”. Lenin tirelessly, as soon as his health allowed, took an interest and hurried the deportation, personally checking the compiled lists and making notes in the margins of the lists. In total, about two hundred figures of science and literature were sent abroad. The total number of those expelled from their homeland, including family members, amounted to more than three hundred people.

Attitude towards religion

The religious scholar and sociologist M. Yu. Smirnov in his work “Religion and the Bible in the Works of V. I. Lenin: a new look at an old topic” writes that Lenin could speak positively about those clergymen whose activities corresponded to his ideas about the struggle for social justice . In the article "Socialism and Religion" (1905), Lenin called for the support of "honest and sincere people from the clergy" in their demands for freedom and protests against the "official bureaucracy", "official arbitrariness" and "police investigation" imposed by the autocracy. While preparing the “Draft Speech on the Agrarian Question in the Second State Duma” (1907), he wrote: “... we, Social Democrats, have a negative attitude towards Christian teaching. But in stating this, I consider it my duty to say right now, frankly and openly, that the Social Democracy is fighting for complete freedom of conscience and treats every sincere conviction in matters of faith with full respect…” At the same time, he described the priest Tikhvinsky as "a deputy from the peasants, worthy of all respect for his sincere devotion to the interests of the peasantry, the interests of the people, which he fearlessly and resolutely defends ...".

On January 20, 1918, Lenin, as chairman of the Council of People's Commissars, signed the Decree on Freedom of Conscience, Church and Religious Societies, in the editing of which he took part. In the Collection of Legalizations and Orders of the Workers' and Peasants' Government, this decree was published on January 26 under a different title - On the separation of the church from the state and the school from the church. By this decree, all the property of the church and religious societies that existed in Russia was declared "public property". The decree forbade “to issue any local laws or regulations that would restrict or restrict the freedom of conscience” and established that “every citizen can profess any religion or not profess any. Any right deprivation associated with the confession of any faith or non-profession of any faith is canceled.

During civil war Lenin drew attention to the danger of infringing on the interests of believers. He spoke about this, speaking at the First All-Russian Congress of Working Women on November 19, 1918, wrote in the draft Program of the RCP (b) in 1919 (“to carry out the actual liberation of the working masses from religious prejudices, achieving this through propaganda and raising the consciousness of the masses, at the same time carefully avoiding any insult to the feelings of the believing part of the population ...”) and in an instruction to V. M. Molotov in April 1921.

Lenin supported the requests of believers from the Yaganovsky volost of the Cherepovets district to contribute to the completion of the local temple, founded back in 1915 (in a note from Lenin to the chairman of the Afanasyevsky village council V. Bakhvalov dated April 2, 1919, it was said: “The completion of the construction of the temple, of course, is allowed ...”).

Numerous examples demonstrate a wide range of V. I. Lenin's judgments on the "religious question" and a variety of practical approaches to it. Behind the categoricalness in some cases and the manifestation of tolerance in others, one can see a clear position in relation to the sphere of religion. It is based, firstly, on the fundamental incompatibility of the dialectical-materialist worldview with any religion, the idea of exclusively earthly roots of religions. Secondly, anti-clericalism, which in the post-revolutionary period turned into a militant attitude towards religious organizations as political opponents of the Communist Party. Thirdly, Lenin's conviction in the much lesser importance of the problems associated with religion, in comparison with the solution of the tasks of reorganizing society, and therefore the subordination of the former to the latter.

In Socialism and Religion, Lenin writes:

Religion is one of the types of spiritual oppression that lies everywhere and everywhere on the masses of the people, crushed by eternal work for others, want and loneliness. The impotence of the exploited classes in the struggle against the exploiters just as inevitably gives rise to faith in a better afterlife, just as the impotence of the savage in the struggle with nature gives rise to faith in gods, devils, miracles, etc. Religion teaches humility to those who work and need all their lives and patience in earthly life, consoling with the hope of a heavenly reward. And for those who live on the labor of others, religion teaches charity in earthly life, offering them a very cheap excuse for their entire exploitative existence and selling tickets to heavenly prosperity at a fair price. Religion is the opium of the people. Religion is a kind of spiritual sivuha, in which the slaves of capital drown their human image, their demands for a life that is somehow worthy of a human being.

In private correspondence, Lenin spoke even more sharply:

every religious idea, every idea about every god, every flirtatiousness even with a god is the most inexpressible abomination, which is especially tolerated (and often even benevolently) met by the democratic bourgeoisie - that is why it is the most dangerous abomination, the most vile "infection".

In the autumn of 1920, while relaxing in the village of Monino near Moscow, Lenin stayed at the house of the local priest Predtechin, who lived next to the functioning church. Having learned on the hunt that Predtechin was a clergyman, the head of the Soviet government did not show any hostile feelings towards him and later recalled this acquaintance quite good-naturedly.

In March 1919, in the Novgorod province, priest Vasily Pyatnitsky was arrested by the local Cheka. He was charged with disobedience to Soviet power, beating officials, etc. The priest's brother Konstantin Pyatnitsky wrote a detailed letter to Lenin, in which, in particular, he noted that "... for many, wearing a cassock is already a crime." As a result, the priest survived and was soon released.

After the Soviet government moved to the Kremlin in 1918, Patriarch Tikhon continued to serve liturgies, vigils, prayers, memorial services, which often took place near Lenin's place of work and residence - in the Assumption and Archangel Cathedrals of the Moscow Kremlin.

Role in the defeat of the Orthodox Church

The historian Latyshev believed that in world history it is rare to find statesman who would hate religion so much and so persecute the church, considering religion one of the most vile things that only exists in the world, like Lenin.

First of all, the Russian Orthodox Church was subjected to persecution, which Lenin, long before coming to power, stigmatized as “a department of police Orthodoxy”, “a police-state church”. At the same time, Islam was seen by Lenin as an ally in spreading the world revolution in the East. In persecuting Western Christian churches, the Bolsheviks faced protests from the Vatican and European states, which they had to reckon with. Sectarian communities were often supported in order to weaken Orthodox Church, which, after the defeat of the White Fronts in the Civil War, remained defenseless in the face of the power of the people's commissars.

According to Latyshev, Lenin was the initiator of four mass campaigns against Orthodoxy, which, in his opinion, testify to Lenin's desire to destroy as many Orthodox clergy as possible:

November 1917 - 1919 - deprivation of the rights of the Church legal entity, deprivation of the clergy of political rights, the beginning of the closure of monasteries, some churches, the requisition of their property.
1919-1920 - opening of the holy relics.
Since the end of 1920 - the organization of the schism of the Church.
From the beginning of 1922 - the looting of all churches, while the execution of the maximum number of Orthodox clergy.

The campaign to confiscate church valuables provoked resistance from representatives of the clergy and part of the parishioners. The execution of parishioners in Shuya caused a great resonance. In connection with these events, on March 19, 1922, Lenin wrote a secret letter in which he outlined his plan for reprisals against the church, taking advantage of the famine and the events in Shuya. On March 22, at a meeting of the Politburo of the Central Committee of the RCP (b), a plan of measures prepared by L. D. Trotsky was adopted to crush the church organization.

Ideas were born in Lenin's head about how in the future it would be possible to replace religion in the lives of believers. So, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, M. I. Kalinin, recalled that at the beginning of 1922, Lenin, in a private conversation on this subject, told him: “this task<замены религии>lies entirely on the theater, the theater must excommunicate the peasant masses from ritual gatherings. And when discussing the problem of electrification with V.P. Milyutin and L.B. Krasin, Lenin noted that the peasant would replace God with electricity, to which he would pray, feeling the power of the central government instead of heavenly power.

As Lenin's illness progressed, he was less and less able to work full-blooded. But the questions of the anti-church struggle worried Lenin until the very last days of his active life. So, in a few days of improving health in October 1922, Lenin imposed on the decision of the Organizing Bureau of the Central Committee of the RCP (b) “On the Creation of a Commission for Anti-Religious Propaganda” of October 13, 1922, a resolution demanding that the GPU be involved in the work of the commission. A week before the final retirement as a result of another bout of illness - December 5, 1922 - Lenin protested the decision of the Small Council of People's Commissars to stop the work of the special VIII department of the People's Commissariat of Justice for the separation of church and state, noting: "As for the assertion that the process of separation of church and state is completed , then this is probably true; We have already separated church from state, but we have not yet separated religion from people.”

After Lenin's final retirement, his successor as head of the Soviet government, A. I. Rykov, to some extent reduced the pressure of the Soviet state on the Orthodox Church.

Foreign policy

V. I. Lenin in 1920

We are told that Russia will split up, break up into separate republics, but we have nothing to fear from this. No matter how many independent republics there are, we will not fear this. For us, it is not important where state border but that an alliance be maintained between the working people of all nations for the struggle against the bourgeoisie of any nation.

In the appeal "To all working Muslims of Russia and the East", published on November 24, 1917 and signed by Lenin and Stalin, Soviet Russia renounced the terms of the Anglo-French-Russian agreement of 1915 and the Sykes-Picot agreement on the division of the world after the war:

We declare that the secret treaties of the deposed tsar on the capture of Constantinople, confirmed by the deposed Kerensky, are now torn and destroyed. The Republic of Russia and its government, the Council of People's Commissars, are against the seizure of foreign lands: Constantinople must remain in the hands of the Muslims.
We declare that the treaty on the division of Persia has been broken and destroyed. As soon as hostilities cease, the troops will be withdrawn from Persia and the Persians will be provided with the right to freely determine their fate.
We declare that the agreement on the partition of Turkey and the taking away of Armenia from it has been torn and destroyed. As soon as hostilities cease, the Armenians will be guaranteed the right to freely determine their political destiny.

Immediately after the October Revolution, Lenin recognized the independence of Finland.

During the Civil War, Lenin tried to reach an agreement with the powers of the Entente. In March 1919, Lenin negotiated with William Bullitt, who arrived in Moscow. Lenin agreed to the payment of pre-revolutionary Russian debts in exchange for an end to the intervention and support of the whites from the Entente. A draft agreement was drawn up with the Entente powers.

In 1919 he had to admit that the world revolution "will, judging by the beginning, continue for many years." Lenin forms a new concept foreign policy“for the period when socialist and capitalist states will exist side by side”, which he characterizes as “peaceful cohabitation with peoples, with workers and peasants of all nations”, the development international trade. In addition, V. Lenin called "to use the opposites and contradictions between the two groups of capitalist states, setting them against each other." He put forward "the tactics of playing the imperialists against each other" for a period "until we have conquered the whole world." And he simply explained its meaning: “If we didn’t adhere to this rule, we would all be hanging on different aspens for a long time, to the pleasure of the capitalists.” Lenin had a negative attitude towards the League of Nations due to the lack of "a real establishment of the equality of nations", "real plans for peaceful cohabitation between them."

The decline in revolutionary unrest in the capitalist countries forced Lenin to have more hopes in the implementation of the world revolution on the "exploited masses" of the East. “Now our Soviet Republic will have to group all the awakening peoples of the East around itself in order to fight together with them against international imperialism,” this was the task set by V. Lenin in his report at the 11th All-Russian Congress of Communist Organizations of the Peoples of the East on November 22, 1919. In order to so that in the "history of the world revolution" the Eastern working masses could play "a big role and merge in this struggle with our struggle against international imperialism", according to V. Lenin, it was necessary to "translate the true communist doctrine, which is intended for the communists of more advanced countries, into the language of every nation."

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 (1922). Peace treaties were concluded and diplomatic relations were established with a number of border states: Finland (1920), Estonia (1920), Georgia (1920), Poland (1921), Turkey (1921), Iran (1921), Mongolia (1921). The most active was the support of Turkey, Afghanistan and Iran, which resisted European colonialism.

In October 1920, Lenin met with a Mongolian delegation that arrived in Moscow, hoping for the support of the "Reds" who were victorious in the Civil War on the issue of Mongolian independence. As a condition for supporting Mongolian independence, Lenin pointed out the need to create a "unified organization of forces, political and state", preferably under a red banner.

Last years (1921-1924)

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

At the same time, Lenin insisted on the development of state-type enterprises, on electrification (with the participation of Lenin, a special commission, GOELRO, was created to develop a project for the electrification of Russia), and on the development of cooperation. Lenin believed that in anticipation of a world proletarian revolution, while keeping all large-scale industry in the hands of the state, it was necessary to gradually build socialism in one country. All this could, in his opinion, help to put the backward Soviet country on the same level with the most developed European countries.

And in 1922, V. I. Lenin declared the need for a legislative settlement of terror, which follows from his letter to the People's Commissar of Justice, Kursky, dated May 17, 1922:

The court must not eliminate terror; to promise this would be self-deception or deceit, but to substantiate and legitimize it on principle, clearly, without falsehood and without embellishment. It is necessary to formulate as broadly as possible, because only a revolutionary sense of justice and a revolutionary conscience will set the conditions for applying in practice, more or less broad. With communist greetings, Lenin.
PSS. T. 45. S. 190–191

In a letter to Kursky dated May 15, 1922, Lenin proposed adding to the Criminal Code of the RSFSR the right to replace execution by expulsion abroad, by decision of the Presidium of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (for a period or indefinitely).

In 1923, shortly before his death, Lenin wrote his last works: “On cooperation”, “How can we reorganize the worker’s committee”, “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 dictated 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 . Stalin in this letter was given an unflattering description. In the same year, taking into account repentance for "acts against the state system," the Supreme Court of the RSFSR released Patriarch Tikhon from custody.

Illness and death. Question about cause of death

V. I. Lenin during his illness. Podmoskovnye Gorki. 1923

In March 1922, Lenin presided over the work of the 11th Congress of the RCP(b), the last party congress at which he spoke. In May 1922 he fell seriously ill, but returned to work in early October. Presumably, Vladimir Ilyich's illness was caused by severe overload and the consequences of the assassination attempt on August 30, 1918. At least, the authoritative researcher of this issue, the surgeon Yu. M. Lopukhin, refers to these reasons. 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 City Council. On December 16, 1922, his health deteriorated sharply again, and on May 15, 1923, due to illness, he moved to the Gorki estate near Moscow. From March 12, 1923, bulletins about Lenin's health were published daily. Lenin was in Moscow for the last time on October 18-19, 1923.

During this period, however, he dictated several notes: "Letter to the Congress", "On giving legislative functions to the State Planning Commission", "On the question of nationalities or "autonomization"", "Pages from a diary", "On cooperation", “On our revolution (on 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) dictated by Lenin is often regarded as Lenin's testament.

In January 1924, Lenin's health suddenly deteriorated sharply. On January 21, 1924, at 18:50, at the age of 54, 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 (Abnutzungssclerosis). Due to the narrowing of the lumen of the arteries of the brain and the violation of its nutrition from insufficient blood flow, focal softening of the brain tissues 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 in the pia mater in the region of the quadrigemina. In June 2004, an article was published in the journal European Journal of Neurology, the authors of which suggest that Lenin died of neurosyphilis. Lenin himself did not rule out the possibility of syphilis and therefore took salvarsan, and in 1923 he still tried to be treated with drugs based on mercury and bismuth; a specialist in this field, Max Nonne, was invited to him. However, the guess was refuted by him. " There was absolutely no evidence of syphilis”, Nonne later wrote.

Personality

British historian Helen Rappaport, who wrote a book about Lenin, The Conspirator, citing memoir sources, described him as "demanding", "punctual", "neat" and "very clean" in everyday life. At the same time, "Lenin was obsessed with obsessive ideas", "he was very authoritarian, very inflexible, did not tolerate disagreement with his opinion." "Friendship for him was a secondary matter." Rappaport points out that "Lenin was a cynical opportunist - he changed his party tactics depending on circumstances and political gain. Perhaps this was his outstanding talent as a tactician. "He was ruthless and cruel, shamelessly using people for his own ends."

The English writer Arthur Ransom wrote: “Lenin struck me with his love of life. I could not think of a single person of similar caliber with the same joyful temperament. This short, bald, wrinkled man, swaying in his chair this way and that, laughing at this or that joke, is at any moment ready to give serious advice to anyone who interrupts him to ask a question - advice so well reasoned, that for his followers he has a far greater motive power than any orders; all his wrinkles are from laughter, not from anxiety.

After the victory of the October Revolution, Lenin and his wife lived in a five-room, one-bedroom apartment in the Kremlin. On trips around Moscow, Lenin used several cars, one of which was a Rolls-Royce. Throughout his life, Lenin played chess.

Appearance

According to Trotsky, appearance Lenin was distinguished by simplicity and strength. He was below average height (164 cm), with a Slavic type of face and piercing eyes.

The Russian inventor Lev Theremin, who personally met with Lenin, noted that he was very surprised by the bright red hair of the leader.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had a noticeable speech defect - burr. This can be heard on the surviving records of the speech of the leader. Burr was inherent in the incarnations of the image of Lenin in the cinema.

Aliases

In December 1901, Vladimir Ulyanov in the Zarya magazine for the first time used the pseudonym N. Lenin. The exact reason for its appearance is unknown, so there were many versions about the origin of this pseudonym. For example, toponymic Siberian river Lena (family version of the Ulyanovs). According to historian Vladlen Loginov, the version associated with the use of the passport of the real-life Nikolai Lenin seems to be the most plausible.

After coming to power, V. I. Lenin signed official party and state documents “V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin)." Lenin is the most famous pseudonym, but far from the only one. In total, due to conspiracy, Ulyanov had more than 150 pseudonyms.

In addition to pseudonyms, Lenin also had a party nickname, which was used by his comrades and himself: "The Old Man."

Creation

Party ticket No. 527, early 1920

Party ticket No. 224332, after September 1920

Party ticket No. 114482, 1922

Key Ideas

The assessment of the theoretical heritage of V. I. Lenin is extremely controversial and politicized, it includes both positive and negative reviews.

Historiosophical analysis of contemporary capitalism

Today, many of Lenin's ideas are very relevant. For example, criticism of bourgeois democracy as a hidden form of the dictatorship of capital. He wrote: who owns, he rules. In such a situation, ranting about the power of the people is just a hoax. The Leninist theory of imperialism is also relevant, especially with regard to its transition to financial capitalism. This is a self-devouring monster, an economy for the production of money that ends up with the bankers. This is what caused the current global crisis. Read Lenin, he predicted this.

Political philosophy

According to researchers, in order to know itself through theory, philosophy must recognize that it is nothing but a replacement for politics, a kind of continuation of politics, a kind of chewing on politics - and it turns out that Lenin was the first to say this.

Lenin's political philosophy was oriented toward a radical reorganization of society, eliminating all oppression and social inequality. Revolution was to be the means of such a reorganization. Summarizing the experience of previous revolutions, Lenin developed the doctrine of the revolutionary situation and the dictatorship of the proletariat as a means of defending and developing the gains of the revolution. Like the founders of Marxism, Lenin considers the revolution as a consequence primarily of objective processes, pointing out that it is not done at the request or at the request of the revolutionaries. At the same time, Lenin introduces into Marxist theory the proposition that the socialist revolution does not have to take place in the most developed capitalist countries; the chain of imperialist states can break through at the weakest link, due to the intertwining of many contradictions in it. In Lenin's perception, Russia in 1917 was such a link.

By politics, Lenin meant, first of all, the actions of large masses of people. “... When there is no open political action of the masses,” he wrote, “no coups will replace it and will not artificially provoke it.” Instead of talking about elites and parties, typical of other politicians, Lenin spoke about the masses and social groups Oh. He carefully studied the life of different sections of the population, trying to identify changes in the mood of classes and groups, the balance of their forces, etc. On this basis, conclusions were drawn about class alliances, about the slogans of the day and possible practical actions.

At the same time, Lenin assigned a large role to the subjective factor. He argued that socialist consciousness does not arise of itself from the economic situation of the proletariat, that its development requires the activity of theoreticians who rely on broader foundations, and that this consciousness must be introduced into the working class from outside. Lenin developed and put into practice the doctrine of the party as the leading part of the class, pointed out the role of subjective components in the revolution, which themselves do not arise from the revolutionary situation. In connection with these provisions, some interpreters began to speak of Lenin's significant contribution to Marxist theory, while others began to speak of his voluntarism.

Lenin also made a number of provisions that developed the Marxist idea of the withering away of the state, which, according to Lenin, should be preceded by its radical democratization, including the election and replacement of deputies and officials, whose work should be paid at the level of wages of workers, the ever-wider involvement of representatives of the people in state administration. of the masses, so that in the end everyone will rule in turn, and management will no longer be a privilege.

Communism, socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat

According to Lenin, every state has a class character. In the article “The petty-bourgeois position on the question of ruin” (Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 32), V. I. Lenin writes: conducts” (p. 247). In the Program of the RCP(b) prepared by Lenin, it was written: “In contrast to bourgeois democracy, which hid the class character of its state, the Soviet government openly recognizes the inevitability of the class character of any state, until the division of society into classes has completely disappeared, and with it all state power” ( S. 424). In the pamphlet “Letter to the Workers and Peasants on the Victory over Kolchak” (Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 39), V. I. Lenin emphasizes the class character of the state in the most decisive way: capitalists, or the dictatorship of the working class.

In the Abstracts of the report on the tactics of the RCP at the Third Congress of the Communist International (Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 44), V. I. Lenin notes: “The dictatorship of the proletariat does not mean the end of the class struggle, but its continuation in a new form and with new tools. As long as classes remain, as long as the bourgeoisie, overthrown in one country, multiplies its attacks on socialism on an international scale, this dictatorship is necessary.” (P. 10) And since, as emphasized in the Report on the tactics of the RCP at the Third Congress of the Communist International on July 5, 1921 (Poln. sobr. soch., vol. 44), “the task of socialism is to destroy classes” ( P. 39), insofar as the period of the dictatorship of the proletariat covers the entire first phase of communism, that is, the entire period of socialism.

Before building communism, an intermediate stage is necessary - the dictatorship of the proletariat. Communism is divided into two periods: socialism and communism proper. Under socialism, there is no exploitation of man by man, but there is still no abundance of material goods that would satisfy any needs of all members of society.

Lenin considered the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in October 1917 as the beginning of a socialist revolution, the success of which was problematic for him for a long time. The declaration of the Soviet republic as socialist meant for him only "the determination of the Soviet government to make the transition to socialism" (V. I. Lenin, Poln. sobr. soch. Vol. 36, p. 295).

In 1920, in his speech "The Tasks of the Youth Unions", Lenin argued that communism would be built in the years 1930-1940. In this work, V. I. Lenin argued that one can become a communist only by enriching one’s memory with the knowledge of the wealth that mankind has developed, while critically rethinking them to build a new socialist society. In one of his last works “On Cooperation”, V. I. Lenin considered socialism as a system of civilized cooperators with public ownership of the means of production and the class victory of the proletariat over the bourgeoisie.

Attitude towards the imperialist war and revolutionary defeatism

According to Lenin, the First World War was of an imperialist nature, was unfair for all the parties involved, alien to the interests of the working people. Lenin put forward the thesis about the need to transform the imperialist war into a civil war (in each country against its own government) and the need for the workers to use the war to overthrow "their" governments. At the same time, pointing out the need for the Social Democrats to participate in the anti-war movement, which came out with pacifist slogans of peace, Lenin considered such slogans to be a “deception of the people” and emphasized the need for a civil war.

Lenin put forward the slogan of revolutionary defeatism, the essence of which consisted in not voting in parliament for military loans to the government, in creating and strengthening revolutionary organizations among the workers and soldiers, in combating government patriotic propaganda, and in supporting the fraternization of soldiers at the front. At the same time, Lenin considered his position to be patriotic - national pride, in his opinion, was the basis of hatred towards the "slave past" and the "slave present".

The possibility of the victory of the socialist revolution in one country

In an article "On the slogan of the United States of Europe" in 1915, Lenin wrote that the socialist revolution would not necessarily take place simultaneously throughout the world, as Karl Marx believed. It can first occur in one, separately taken country. This country will then help the revolution in other countries.

About absolute truth

V. Lenin, in his work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism, argued that “human thinking, by its nature, is capable of giving and gives us absolute truth, which is made up of the sum of relative truths. Each stage in the development of science adds new grains to this sum of absolute truth, but the limits of the truth of each scientific statement are relative, being either expanded or narrowed by the further growth of knowledge ”(PSS, 4th ed., T., 18, p. 137) .

Lenin's idea of the dialectic of objective, absolute and relative truths is based on the Marxist theory of knowledge. Feelings and concepts, being reflections of the objective world, contain an objective content. This is the objective content in the sensations and consciousness of a person, but at the same time not depending either on a person or on humanity, Lenin called objective truth. “Historical materialism and all the economic teachings of Marx are thoroughly saturated with the recognition of objective truth,” Lenin emphasized.

The movement of human cognition, that is, the movement of objective truth itself, is saturated with the dialectic of the interaction of absolute and relative truths.

On class morality

“Our morality is completely subordinated to the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat. Our morality is derived from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat and the liberation of all working people from the oppression of the capitalists. Lenin argued that morality is what serves to destroy the old exploitative society and unite all working people around the proletariat, which is creating a new communist society.

As the political scientist Alexander Tarasov notes, Lenin brought ethics from the realm of religious dogmas to the realm of verifiability: ethics must be checked and proved whether this or that action serves the cause of the revolution, whether it is useful to the cause of the working class.

On social justice and equality

For V. I. Lenin, as a practice of revolutionary struggle, the achievement of social justice was a concentrated expression of all his activities, but he understood it, first of all, in a practical aspect, as the destruction of exploitative relations, a gradual process of the destruction of class differences, which would allow all working people, regardless from their social status in the hierarchy of power, to participate in government, to receive equal access, approximately the same share of public wealth and public goods: "justice and equality, therefore, the first phase of communism (socialism) cannot yet give: differences in wealth will remain and differences unfair, but the exploitation of man by man will be impossible, because it is impossible to seize the means of production, factories, machines, land, etc. in private ownership (Lenin V.I. PSS, T.33, p.93).

Public transformations

Pay reform

On November 18, 1917, the Council of People's Commissars, following the project of V. I. Lenin, adopted a resolution limiting the salary of people's commissars to 500 rubles a month and instructing the Ministry of Finance and the commissars to "cut all exorbitant salaries and pensions." A decree of the Council of People's Commissars dated June 27, 1918 established the maximum wage: for specialists - 1200 rubles, for people's commissars - 800 rubles, which roughly equalized the highest echelon of power and skilled workers in wages. In 1920, the All-Russian Central Executive Committee adopted a resolution establishing a single tariff scale for all managers, the maximum wage for their work was not to exceed the wage of a skilled worker, and the upper and lower allowable wage levels were established: the state minimum and the party maximum. At the third congress of trade unions (April 1920), a new wage system was approved, according to which the salary of a specialist could not exceed the salary of an unskilled worker by more than 3.5 times, while discrimination against women was abolished and wages for women and men were equalized.

In Soviet Russia, for the first time in the world, an eight-hour working day was legally approved. By the Decree of June 14, 1918 “On Vacations”, for the first time in the history of Russia, all workers received a state-guaranteed right to vacation, etc. - all this contributed to an increase in labor productivity and the conviction of the majority of the population that the new government has as its main goal the care to improve the living conditions of workers. For the first time in the history of Russia, workers received the right to old-age pensions.

Despite the largely just accusations of the political opponents of the socialist system of the excessive egalitarianism of the socialist wage system, this system contributed to the formation of social homogeneity and the constitution of the Soviet people, who have a common civic identity; it constantly developed and differentiated on the basis of many criteria, where one of the main ones was the assessment of the real contribution of a citizen to labor and public life countries.

Right to education

The most important element in overcoming social inequality and building a new society for V. I. Lenin was the development of education, ensuring equal access to education for all workers, regardless of their national origin and gender differences (Education in the USSR). In October 1918, at the suggestion of V. I. Lenin, the “Regulations on the unified labor school of the RSFSR” was introduced, which introduced free and joint education of school-age children. Modern researchers note that the communist attack on the system of distributing scientific statuses began in 1918, and the point was not so much in the "re-education of the bourgeois professors", but in establishing 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 to all groups of workers served as the basis for the fact that in 1959 the political opponents of the USSR believed that the Soviet education system, especially in engineering and technical specialties, occupies a leading position in the world.

Right to healthcare

Lenin's health care policy, 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.

socialist democracy

According to researchers (Bell D.), the most important criterion for a democratic society is the openness of its social structure, the ability to create equal opportunity to promote the most talented representatives of the lower social classes to the elite of the country (Meritocracy, Post-Industrial Society). The participation of the broad masses of workers in government was one of the main tasks of the revolution. The decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People's Commissars (RSFSR) of November 11, 1917 "On the destruction of estates and civil ranks", signed by Lenin, eliminated all estate privileges and restrictions and proclaimed the equality of citizens.

Lenin believed that “we know that any unskilled worker and any cook are not able to immediately enter into government, but we demand an immediate break with the prejudice that running the state, carrying out the everyday daily work of government, is only possible for rich or taken officials from wealthy families. "(V. I. Lenin. Will the Bolsheviks keep state power, 1917).

“Capitalism stifled, suppressed, smashed a mass of talents among the workers and working peasants. These talents perished under the yoke of need, poverty, abuse of the human person. Our duty now is to find these talents and put them to work ”(V. I. Lenin, PSS, 4th ed., Vol. 30, p. 54)

Much of what Lenin planned to do to build a mechanism for the renewal of the Soviet elite, democratization of the state apparatus, its control by society, was not carried out, in particular, the expansion of the Central Committee at the expense of representatives of workers and peasants, the organization of worker-peasant control over the activities of the Politburo (As we to reorganize the Rabkrin), but the criterion of worker-peasant origin introduced by Lenin as one of the main conditions for moving up the social ladder, the full encouragement of the nomination of workers and peasants to the state apparatus (the institute of nominees), opened up opportunities for promotion to the highest status positions in society.

Despite the shortcomings reflected in the criticism of the opponents of Soviet power (totalitarianism, nomenklatura) of the principles of Soviet democracy and the real participation of citizens in government, the social structure of the USSR gave citizens confidence in the future and was democratic and open: it had significant opportunities to promote citizens (rising social mobility, social lift), located on the lower rungs of the social ladder - into the country's elite (political, military, scientific), which gave them real opportunities to govern the country. According to data for 1983, among respondents aged 50-59 years, 82.1% the status is higher than their parents, among respondents aged 40-49 - 74%, and among respondents aged 30-39 - 67%, while these figures are approximately identical for both men and women, which serves as an example of female emancipation in Soviet society . The USSR was the only country in the world where all the top leaders of the state, except Lenin, came from the social lower classes and had a worker-peasant origin: I. Stalin, G. Malenkov, N. Khrushchev, L. Brezhnev, Yu. Andropov, K. Chernenko, M. Gorbachev.

The Soviet social system had a much greater social homogeneity, democracy and openness, not only in comparison with the post-Soviet, but also in comparison with its main geopolitical opponent: the United States, where there has been an increasing trend of increasing social inequality and reducing the opportunities for representatives of lower and middle social groups. achieve the highest status positions, while reducing the ability of the middle class to maintain their status (Capital in the XXI century).

cultural revolution

Lenin believed that proletarian culture is a natural development of those stocks of knowledge that humanity has developed under the yoke of capitalist society (PSS, ed. 4, vol. 41, p. 304). In the article "On Cooperation" (January 1923), V. Lenin argued that the cultural revolution is a necessary condition for Russia, overcoming its civilizational backwardness, to become a completely socialist country. The cultural revolution is ... a whole coup, a whole strip of cultural development of the entire mass of the people (V. I. Lenin, PSS, 5th edition, vol. 40, p. 372, 376-377). In "Pages from a Diary", V. Lenin believed that one of the main tasks of the cultural revolution is to increase the authority of the people's teacher: bourgeois society (V. I. Lenin, PSS, 4th ed., vol. 40, p. 23).

In this work, V. Lenin set the following tasks for the cultural revolution:

Liquidation of cultural backwardness, first of all, illiteracy of the population.
Providing conditions for the development of the creative forces of the working people.
Formation of the socialist intelligentsia.
The establishment of communist ideology in the minds of the broad masses.

On the methodology of revolutionary struggle

From the balcony of the Moscow City Council building
On November 3, 1918, Lenin spoke to demonstrators in honor of the Austro-Hungarian Revolution, as well as on other occasions.

In the article “The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power,” Lenin substantiated the general principles of Soviet power and argued that it was not enough to be a revolutionary and a supporter of socialism or communism in general. One must be able to find at every particular moment that particular link in the chain that one must grab hold of with all one’s strength in order to hold the whole chain and prepare firmly for the transition to the next link, and the order of the links, their form, their cohesion, their difference from each other in the historical chain of events does not so simple and not so stupid as in an ordinary blacksmith-made chain.

Historian Richard Pipes wrote that in order to save the revolution in backward Russia, Lenin considered it necessary to export the revolution to more developed countries. Western Europe even during the First World War - to "unleash an all-European civil war." Lenin provoked workers' strikes and military mutinies both in the countries of the Entente and among its opponents. The historian wrote that Lenin made attempts to export the revolution to those countries that had only recently gained independence, before being part of Russian Empire: In the winter of 1918-1919, there were attempts at a military coup in Finland and a military invasion of the Baltic countries. And a document discovered in the archives by the historian Yu. N. Tikhonov indicates that Lenin was directly involved in the practical organization of the “Afghan-Hindu mission” in the summer of 1920, which was tasked with exporting the revolution to British India through Tashkent and Afghanistan.

On the other hand, according to Academician E. M. Primakov, as well as Candidate of Philosophical Sciences, Head of the Department of History and Cultural Studies, Professor I. S. Shatilo, Lenin rejected the idea of imposing the revolution from outside. In 1918, at a congress of trade unions in Moscow, he declared: “Of course, there are people who think that a revolution can be born in a foreign country by order, by agreement. These people are either crazy or provocateurs.” He noted that the theory of "pushing" revolutions in other countries through wars means "a complete break with Marxism, which has always denied the "pushing" of revolutions that develop as the sharpness of class contradictions that give rise to revolutions matures." Revolution is a natural result of the internal development of each country, the cause of its masses.

About the national question

In 1916, V. I. Lenin highly appreciated the Irish uprising of 1916, considering it as an example confirming the importance of the national question in the revolutionary struggle. In the national uprisings in Europe, he saw a special force that could significantly "aggravate the revolutionary crisis in Europe." Therefore, the significance of the Irish rebellion is a hundred times greater than the uprisings in Asia or Africa. Small nations, powerless as an independent factor in the struggle against imperialism, are considered by Lenin as "one of the bacilli" that help the real force, the socialist proletariat, to come out. The use of nationalist and revolutionary movements, in his opinion, is correct. Drawing on this experience, he writes:

We would be very bad revolutionaries if, in the great liberation war of the proletariat for socialism, we failed to use every popular movement against the individual calamities of imperialism in the interests of sharpening and widening the crisis.

In the articles Critical Notes on the National Question, On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination, and On the National Pride of the Great Russians, Lenin formulated a program for solving the national question.

Complete equality of nations; the right of self-determination of nations; the fusion of the workers of all nations—this national program is taught to the workers by Marxism, the experience of the whole world and the experience of Russia.

Artworks

In the USSR, five collected works of Lenin and forty "Lenin collections" were published, compiled by a specially created by decision of the Central Committee of the All-Union Communist Party of Bolsheviks for the study of Lenin's creative heritage Lenin Institute. Many of the works included in it were edited and corrected before publication, many of Lenin's works were not included in it at all. In Soviet times, a collection of selected works was published periodically (once every few years), in two to four volumes. In addition, in 1984-1987 "Selected Works" were published in 10 volumes (11 books). V. Lavrov claims that the works of Lenin occupy the first place in the world among translated literature; the modern UNESCO translation index gives 7th place.

Among the main works - "The Development of Capitalism in Russia" (1899), "What to do?" (1902), "Materialism and Empirio-Criticism" (1909), "Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism" (1916), "The State and Revolution" (1917), "The Great Initiative" (1919), "On the Pogrom Persecution of the Jews" (1924) .

In 2012, an employee of the Institute Russian history RAS V. M. Lavrov appealed to the Investigative Committee of Russia with a statement on the verification of Lenin's works for the presence of extremism in them. For verification, Lavrov proposed a list of works, many of which were not included in Lenin's collected works.

In 1919-1921, Lenin recorded 16 speeches on gramophone records.

Bibliography

Collections of documents

Lenin, V.I. unknown documents. 1891-1922 - Moscow: ROSSPEN, 2000. - 607 p.

Compositions

Lenin V.I. Complete Works (PDF format). - 5th ed. - M.: Publishing house of political literature, 1967.
Lenin V.I. Complete Works (page by page). - 5th ed. - M.: Publishing house of political literature, 1967.
Lenin V.I. Complete Works (in DOC format). - 5th ed. - M.: Publishing house of political literature, 1967.

Awards

Lenin's only official state award was the Order of Labor of the Khorezm People's Soviet Republic (which makes Lenin the first cavalier of this order). Lenin did not have other state awards, both from the RSFSR and the USSR, and from foreign states.

On January 22, 1924, N.P. Gorbunov, Lenin's secretary, removed the Order of the Red Banner from his jacket and pinned it to the jacket of the already deceased Lenin. This award was on the body of Lenin until 1943. Another Order of the Red Banner was laid at the coffin of Lenin along with a wreath from the Military Academy of the Red Army.

Family and relatives

Ulyanov family
Anna Ilyinichna Elizarova-Ulyanova is Lenin's older sister.
Alexander Ilyich Ulyanov - Lenin's older brother

Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich at Rodovod. Tree of ancestors and descendants

Dmitry Ilyich Ulyanov - Lenin's younger brother
- Olga Dmitrievna Ulyanova (1922-2011) - Lenin's niece. Information appeared in the media that with her death there were no direct descendants of the Ulyanov family. This information was refuted by the head of the Lenin House-Museum Tatiana Brylyaeva:
  - firstly, there is a daughter of Olga Dmitrievna - Nadezhda Alekseevna Maltseva
    - and granddaughter Elena. All of the listed descendants of the Ulyanovs live in Moscow.
- Viktor Dmitrievich (1917-1984) - Lenin's nephew, illegitimate son of D. I. Ulyanov
  - Maria Viktorovna Ulyanova (b. 1943)

V. I. Lenin, whose brief biography is given later in the article, was the leader of the Bolshevik movement in Russia, as well as the leader of the October Revolution of 1917.

The full name of the historical figure is Vladimir Ilyich. He can rightfully be called the founder of a new state on the world map - the USSR.

An outstanding personality, philosopher and ideologist, leader of the country of the Soviets, in his short life managed to turn the fate of countless people.

Lenin Vladimir Ilyich - meaning for Russia

The activity of the leader became a decisive factor in the course of preparing and carrying out the revolution in Tsarist Russia.

His numerous and stubborn appeals, articles and speeches became the detonator of the struggle for people's power not only in Russia, but also in other countries.

The highest ability for self-education allowed him to thoroughly study everything about the Marxist theory of building the world. Scientists suggest that Vladimir Ilyich knew 11 foreign languages. Unshakable self-confidence made the Marxist the leader of the revolution.

The majority of the Social Democrats rushed after the competent and active agitator, who suppressed any listener with his pressure, and with his help made the "preparatory" revolution of 1905-1907.

It was possible to completely crush the power of the Russian Empire only 10 years later, during the unfolding revolutionary actions of 1917. The result of the uprising was the formation of a new state with a government based on unlimited violence.

After a 7-year struggle against hunger, devastation and people's ignorance, Lenin at the end of his life realized the doom of the entire capitalist idea.

Unable to speak due to paralysis, he wrote the most important words about the failure and change of point of view on socialism. But his last weak appeals did not reach the masses, the Soviet state began its difficult path.

When and where was Lenin born

The world leader of the people's liberation movement was a descendant of the ancient Ulyanov family. His paternal grandfather was a Russian serf, his maternal grandfather was a baptized Jew.

Vladimir's parents were Russian intellectuals. For his services, his father was awarded the Order of St. Vladimir III degree, which gave him a title of nobility, inherited. Mother was educated as a teacher, was engaged in raising children.

Volodya was born in April 1870, he became the third child in a family that lived in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk). The date of his birth, the 22nd according to the new style, subsequently began to be celebrated as a holiday in the Soviet Union.

The real name of Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich at the beginning of his political activity published personal works under various pseudonyms, including Ilyin and Lenin.

The latter became his second surname, under which the leader entered world history.

The blood name of the leader was Ulyanov, it was worn by Vladimir's father Ilya Vasilyevich.

Vladimir's mother was the daughter of a doctor, Israel Moishevich, a Jew by nationality, and as a girl, she bore the surname Blank.

Lenin as a child

Vladimir differed from other children in the Ulyanov family by his noisiness and clumsiness. The boy's body developed disproportionately, he had short legs and a large head with blond, later slightly reddish hair.

Due to weak legs, Volodya learned to walk only by the age of three, often fell with a roar and a roar and, unable to get up on his own, beat his big head on the floor in despair.

The roar accompanied almost any activity of the baby, he was very fond of breaking and disassembling toys and objects. However, the child grew up conscientious, and nevertheless admitted to his tricks after some time.

Ophthalmologist by mistake early age diagnosed Ulyanov with strabismus, his left eye saw very poorly. And only towards the end of his life, Lenin learns that in reality he has myopia in one eye, and he should have worn glasses all his life.

Due to poor eyesight, Vladimir developed the habit of squinting during a dialogue with an interlocutor, thus his characteristic “Lenin squint” was born.

Lenin in his youth

Some physical handicaps did not affect mental capacity Vladimir. His intelligence and memory were significantly higher than those of his peers.

The director of the Simbirsk gymnasium, where the boy entered in 1879, recognized the primacy of the young Ulyanov among other gymnasium students. After 8 years, the best student completed his secondary education with a gold medal.

On the day of the final exam in geography, May 8, 1887, Vladimir's elder brother was executed for his part in the assassination attempt on Alexander III, the Russian emperor.

Volodya did not have a close relationship with his executed brother, but his death left a terrible wound in the boy's heart. The entire subsequent struggle with the monarchy was waged by Lenin with a hidden thirst for revenge for the grief that befell the whole family.

In the same year, Vladimir entered Kazan University, however, he was soon expelled for a student meeting and exiled to the village of Kukushkino, where he educated himself.

In 1891, having prepared on his own, he nevertheless received a law degree from St. Petersburg University, having passed all the exams externally.

Participation of V.I. Lenin in political circles

After a short exile in 1888, Vladimir Ulyanov, returning to Kazan, joined the Marxist circle led by N.E. Fedoseev, actively sought connections with professional revolutionaries.

The next year, the Ulyanov family moved to Samara, where Vladimir himself created a Marxist circle.

Among its participants, the future leader distributed his own translation from the German "Manifesto of the Communist Party", the work of F. Engels and K. Marx.

In 1893, the thirst for space led Ulyanov to St. Petersburg, where he actively began to lecture in working circles, becoming a member of the Marxist circle of the Technological Institute.

How did Lenin come to power?

For organizing the activities of the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, the revolutionary was exiled to the Yenisei province.

There, over the years of his life in the village of Shushenskoye, many volumes of works published under various pseudonyms came out from his pen.

In the same place, 3 years later, Vladimir Ilyich married his faithful companion exiled after him, his wife's name was Krupskaya Nadezhda Konstantinovna.

In 1900, the future leader went abroad for 3 years. Upon his return, he becomes the leader of the Bolshevik Party in Russia.

As a former exile, Ulyanov was forbidden to live in large cities and the capital, so the leadership of the revolution in 1905-1907. he carried out, living in St. Petersburg illegally.

After the workers' strikes died down, Vladimir Ilyich spent 10 years abroad, where he actively participated in conferences, made contacts with like-minded people and published newspapers. Lenin learned about the overthrow of the monarch in February 1917 from the newspapers, at that time he lived in Switzerland.

The future leader immediately arrived in St. Petersburg with the aim of preparing the last, October socialist revolution, as a result of which he headed the new Soviet government - the Council of People's Commissars and took the post of chairman.

The role of Lenin in the October events of 1917

After a forced long emigration, on April 3, Ulyanov returned to his homeland as a world-famous personality among the Social Democrats, the leader of the Bolsheviks and the leader of the future socialist revolution.

A peaceful demonstration in St. Petersburg on June 18 under the slogan "All power to the Soviets!" did not bring the desired results. And so the capture state power should have occurred during an armed uprising.

The Central Committee of the Party was slow to initiate armed actions; Lenin's calls for insurrection in letters were not brought to the attention of the people. And therefore, despite the threat of arrest, the revolutionary personally arrived at Smolny on October 20.

He took up the organization of the uprising so actively that on the night of October 25-26, the Provisional Government was arrested and power passed into the hands of the Bolsheviks.

Works and reforms of Lenin

The first working document of the new government, which was presented at the congress on October 26, was the decree on peace created by Vladimir Ilyich, which declared illegal any armed encroachment of a large state on weak nations.

The Decree on Land abolished private ownership of land; all land was transferred without redemption to committees and Soviets of Deputies.

For 124 days, working for 15-18 hours, the leader signed the decree on the creation of the Red Army, concluded a forced peace with Germany, and created a capable new state apparatus (SNK).

In April 1918, the newspaper "Pravda" published the work of the leader "The Immediate Tasks of Soviet Power". In July, the Constitution of the RSFSR was approved.

In order to split the peasant strata and liquidate the rural bourgeoisie, power in the villages was transferred to the poorest representatives of the peasants.

In response to the outbreak of the Civil War in the summer of 1918, the "Red Terror" was organized, the word "shoot" became one of the most frequently used.

A severe economic crisis as a result of the exhausting Civil War forced the leadership to create a New Economic Policy that allowed free trade, after which the difficult growth of the economy began in the country.

As an inflexible atheist, Vladimir Ilyich waged an uncompromising struggle with representatives of the clergy, allowing them to rob churches and shoot their ministers. In 1922, the USSR was officially created.

When Lenin died

After being wounded in 1918 and a busy working regime, the leader's health deteriorated. In 1922 he suffered 2 strokes.

In March 1923, a third stroke left him completely paralyzed. In 1924, in the village of Gorki near Moscow, the leader of the Russian revolution died, the date of death is January 21 according to the modern style.

When asked how many years Lenin lived, the answer is: 54 years.

Historical portrait of Lenin

As a historical figure, V.I. Ulyanov laid a solid foundation for the Bolshevik ideology, which was realized during the October Revolution.

The power of the Bolshevik Party, which later became the only one in the country, was held by the unlimited terror of the Cheka.

Lenin became a cult personality during his lifetime.

After the death of Vladimir Ilyich, thanks to the efforts of V.I. Stalin, the former leader of the revolution, began to be idolized.

The role of Lenin in the history of Russia

A brilliant Marxist revolutionary, a cunning and prudent avenger for his executed brother, Vladimir Ulyanov served to accomplish the All-Russian Socialist Revolution in a short time.

Millions of people became victims of military actions under his leadership: both opponents of the Bolshevik regime at the hands of the Red Terror, and people ruined and starved to death during the formation of the USSR.

The sparkling revolution, the merciless destruction of the enemies of Soviet power, the execution of the royal family, laid down the political portrait of Vladimir Ilyich as a brilliant leader and tyrant who fought for power for so long and ruled for so short.

Conclusion

Vladimir Ulyanov dreamed of a world revolution. Russia in his plans was only the beginning of a long journey, carefully prepared during the years of forced emigration.

But illness and death stopped the never tired revolutionary who played his significant role in history. His mummified body in the mausoleum was the object of worship for millions of people, but this time has passed.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (real name - Ulyanov) is a great Russian political and public figure, revolutionary, founder of the RSDLP party (Bolsheviks), creator of the first socialist state in history.

The years of Lenin's life: 1870 - 1924.

Lenin is known primarily as one of the leaders of the great October Revolution of 1917, when the monarchy was overthrown and Russia turned into a socialist country. Lenin was the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (government) of the new Russia - the RSFSR, considered the founder of the USSR.

Vladimir Ilyich was not only one of the most prominent political leaders in the entire history of Russia, he was also known as the author of many theoretical works on politics and social sciences, the founder of the theory of Marxism-Leninism and the creator and main ideologist of the Third International (an alliance of communist parties from different countries) .

Brief biography of Lenin

Lenin was born on April 22 in the city of Simbirsk, where he lived until the end of the Simbirsk gymnasium in 1887. After graduating from the gymnasium, Lenin left for Kazan and entered the university there at the Faculty of Law. In the same year, Alexander, Lenin's brother, was executed for participating in the assassination attempt on Emperor Alexander 3 - this becomes a tragedy for the whole family, as it is about Alexander's revolutionary activities.

While studying at the university, Vladimir Ilyich is an active participant in the banned Narodnaya Volya circle, and also participates in all student riots, for which he is expelled from the university three months later. A police investigation carried out after the student riot revealed Lenin's connections with forbidden societies, as well as his brother's participation in the assassination of the Emperor - this entailed a ban on Vladimir Ilyich to recover at the university and the installation of close supervision over him. Lenin was included in the list of "unreliable" persons.

In 1888, Lenin again came to Kazan and joined one of the local Marxist circles, where he began to actively study the works of Marx, Engels and Plekhanov, which in the future would have a huge impact on his political self-consciousness. Around this time, Lenin's revolutionary activity begins.

In 1889, Lenin moved to Samara and there he continued to look for supporters of a future coup d'état. In 1891, he externally took exams for the course of the law faculty of St. Petersburg University. At the same time, under the influence of Plekhanov, his views evolved from populist to social democratic, and Lenin developed his first doctrine, which laid the foundation for Leninism.

In 1893, Lenin came to St. Petersburg and got a job as an assistant lawyer, while continuing to conduct an active journalistic activity - he published many works in which he studied the process of capitalization of Russia.

In 1895, after a trip abroad, where Lenin met with Plekhanov and many other public figures, he organized the "Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class" in St. Petersburg and began an active struggle against the autocracy. For his activities, Lenin was arrested, spent a year in prison, and then sent into exile in 1897, where, however, he continued his activities, despite the prohibitions. During the exile, Lenin was officially married to his common-law wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya.

In 1898, the first secret congress of the Social Democratic Party (RSDLP) was held, headed by Lenin. Soon after the Congress, all its members (9 people) were arrested, but the beginning of the revolution was laid.

The next time, Lenin returned to Russia only in February 1917 and immediately became the head of another uprising. Despite being ordered to arrest him pretty soon, Lenin continues his activities illegally. In October 1917, after the coup d'etat and the overthrow of the autocracy, power in the country completely passes to Lenin and his party.

Lenin's reforms

From 1917 until his death, Lenin was engaged in the reformation of the country in accordance with social democratic ideals:

Makes peace with Germany, creates the Red Army, which takes an active part in the civil war of 1917-1921;
Creates the NEP - the new economic policy;
Gives civil rights peasants and workers (the working class becomes the main one in the new political system of Russia);
Reforms the church, seeking to replace Christianity with a new "religion" - communism.

He dies in 1924 after a sharp deterioration in health. By order of Stalin, the body of the leader is placed in a mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow.

The role of Lenin in the history of Russia

The role of Lenin in the history of Russia is enormous. He was the main ideologist of the revolution and the overthrow of the autocracy in Russia, organized the Bolshevik Party, which was able to come to power in a fairly short time and completely change Russia politically and economically. Thanks to Lenin, Russia turned from an Empire into a socialist state based on the ideas of communism and the rule of the working class.

The state created by Lenin existed for almost the entire 20th century and became one of the strongest in the world. Lenin's personality is still controversial among historians, but everyone agrees that he is one of the greatest world leaders that ever existed in world history.

How did the children of serfs become hereditary nobles, why did the Soviet authorities keep information about the maternal ancestors of the leader secret, 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 Provided by 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 the 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 such problems began to grow, that his sisters took up these studies. Therefore, when in 1922 Lenin received a detailed party census questionnaire, when asked about the occupation of his paternal grandfather, he sincerely answered: “I don’t know.”

GRANDSON OF serfs

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 courtyard man of the landowner of the village of Androsov, Sergach district of the 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 there, but were considered yard cornets Stepan Mikhailovich Brekhov. According to the revision of 1795, Lenin's grandfather Nikolai Vasilievich, 25 years old, single, lived with his mother and brothers all 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 ...

The Astrakhan archive contains the document “Lists of registered landlord peasants who have come in from different provinces and are expected to be counted”, where under number 223 it is written: “Nikolai Vasiliev, son of Ulyanin ... Nizhny Novgorod province, Sergach district, Androsov village, landowner Stepan Mikhailovich Brekhov, a peasant. Absent in 1791. He was a fugitive or released for quitrent and redeemed - it is not known for sure, but in 1799 in Astrakhan Nikolai Vasilyevich was transferred to the category of state peasants, and in 1808 he was accepted into the bourgeois class, into the workshop of artisans-tailors.

Having got rid of serfdom and becoming a free man, Nikolai Vasilievich 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 Shahinyan put forward a version according to which Anna Alekseevna is not Smirnov’s own daughter, but a baptized Kalmyk girl, rescued by him from slavery and allegedly adopted only in March 1825.

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

FATHER'S TEACHER'S CAREER

After the death of Nikolai Vasilyevich, the care of the family and the upbringing of children fell on the shoulders of his eldest son Vasily Nikolayevich. Working at that time as a clerk of the well-known Astrakhan firm "The Sapozhnikov Brothers" and not having his own family, he managed to provide prosperity in the house and even gave his younger brother Ilya an education.

ILYA NIKOLAEVICH ULYANOV GRADUATED FACULTY OF PHYSICS AND MATHEMATICS OF KAZAN UNIVERSITY.
He was asked to remain at the department for "improvement in scientific work"- the famous mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky insisted on this

In 1850, Ilya Nikolayevich 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 schools. educational institutions. And although he was asked to stay at the department for "improvement in scientific work" (the famous mathematician Nikolai Ivanovich Lobachevsky, by the way, insisted on this), Ilya Nikolayevich preferred a career as a teacher.

Monument to Lobachevsky in Kazan. Beginning of XX century. Provided by M. Zolotarev

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

On July 15 of the same year, after successfully passing external exams at the Samara Men's Gymnasium, "the daughter of the court counselor, the 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 played a wedding, and “maiden Maria Blank” became the wife of court adviser Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov - this rank was also granted to him in July 1863.

"ON THE POSSIBILITY OF JEWISH ORIGIN"

The pedigree of the Blank family began to be studied by Lenin's sisters, Anna and Maria. Anna Ilyinichna said: “The elders could not find out for us. The surname seemed to us a French root, but there was no evidence of such an origin. For a long time, I personally began to think about the possibility of Jewish origin, which was prompted mainly by the mother’s message that my grandfather was born in Zhytomyr, a well-known Jewish center. Grandmother - mother's mother - was born in St. Petersburg and was a German by origin from Riga. But while mother and her sisters kept in touch with their mother’s relatives for quite a long time, her father’s relatives, A.D. Blanc, no one heard. He was like a cut off piece, which also led me to think about his Jewish origin. None of the grandfather's stories about his childhood or youth have been preserved in the memory of his daughters.

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

“To be absolutely silent about him” was Stalin's categorical answer. Yes, and the second sister of Lenin, Maria Ilyinichna, also believed that this fact "let it be known sometime in a hundred years."

Lenin's great-grandfather Moshe Itskovich Blank- Born, apparently, in 1763. The first mention of it is contained in the revision of 1795, where among the townspeople of the city of Starokonstantinov, Volyn province, Moishka Blank is recorded at number 394. Where he came from in these places is unclear. However…

Panorama of Simbirsk from the side of the Moscow tract. 1866–1867. Provided by M. Zolotarev

Some time ago, a well-known bibliographer Maya Dvorkina introduced a curious fact into scientific circulation. Somewhere in the mid-1920s, an archivist Yulian Grigorievich Oksman, who, on the instructions of the director of the Lenin Library, Vladimir Ivanovich Nevsky, was studying the genealogy of the leader of the world proletariat, discovered a petition from one of the Jewish communities of the Minsk province, allegedly referring to early XIX century, about the exemption from the tax 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 came 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?” They took the word from Oksman 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 Jewish and Russian, had his own house, was engaged in trade, and besides, he rented 5 morgues (about 3 hectares) of land from the town of Rogachevo, which were sown with chicory.

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

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 "excessively 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, to 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 Blank", as a result of which in 1850 Jews were forbidden to wear national clothes, and in 1854 they introduced the corresponding text of the prayer. The researcher Mikhail Stein, who collected and carefully analyzed the most complete data on the Blank pedigree, rightly noted that due to hostility to his people, Moshe Itskovich “can be compared, perhaps, only with another baptized Jew - one of the founders and leaders of the Moscow Union of the Russian people V.A. . Gringmuth "...

Alexander Dmitrievich Blank (1799–1870). Provided by M. Zolotarev

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

In April, a "high rank" arrived in Zhytomyr on a business trip - the ruler of the affairs of the so-called Jewish Committee, senator and poet Dmitry Osipovich Baranov. Somehow, Blanc 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 sympathize with the Jews at all, but the conversion of two "lost souls" to Christianity, which was quite rare at that time, in his opinion, was a good deed, and he agreed.

The brothers immediately went to the capital and filed a petition addressed to Metropolitan Mikhail of Novgorod, St. Petersburg, Estland and Finland. “Having now settled down to live in St. Petersburg,” they wrote, “and having the constant treatment of Christians who profess the Greco-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 Hospitable 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 Nikolayevich Golitsyn, the brothers were identified as “pupils of the Medical and Surgical Academy”, which they graduated in 1824, having received the academic title of doctors of the 2nd department and a present in the form of a pocket set of surgical tools.

MARRIAGE OF THE HEADQUARTER

Dmitry Blank remained in the capital as a police doctor, and in August 1824 Alexander began his service in the city of Porechie, Smolensk province, as a county doctor. True, already in October 1825 he returned to St. Petersburg and was enrolled, like his brother, as a doctor in the city police staff. In 1828 he was promoted to the staff doctor. It's time to think about getting married...

His godfather, Count Alexander Apraksin, was at that time an official for special assignments at the Ministry of Finance. So Alexander Dmitrievich, despite his origin, could well count on a decent game. Apparently, at his other benefactor, Senator Dmitry Baranov, who was fond of poetry and chess, who visited Alexander Pushkin and almost all of “enlightened Petersburg” gathered, the younger Blank met the Groshopf 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 consultant of the State Justice College of Livonian, Estonian and Finnish affairs and rose to the rank of provincial secretary. His wife Anna Karlovna, nee Estedt, was a Swedish 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, head of the Riga customs, and five daughters - Alexandra, Anna, Ekaterina (married von Essen) , Carolina (married Biuberg) and the younger Amalia. Having got acquainted with this family, the staff doctor made an offer to Anna Ivanovna.

MASHENKA BLANK

At first, Alexander Dmitrievich's affairs were going well. As a police doctor, he received 1,000 rubles a year. For "quickness and diligence" he was repeatedly awarded thanks.

But in June 1831, during the cholera riots in the capital, his brother Dmitry, who was on duty in the central cholera hospital, was brutally killed by a rebellious crowd. This death shocked Alexander Blanc so much that he quit the police and did not work for more than a year. Only in April 1833 did he again enter the service - as an intern at the City Hospital of St. Mary Magdalene for the poor from the river regions of 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 Naval 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 POSITION OF DIRECTOR OF THE PEOPLE'S SCHOOLS OF THE SIMBIRSK PROVINCE.
And in 1877 he was awarded the rank of real state councilor, equal in the table of ranks to the rank of general and giving the right to hereditary nobility

The private practice of Alexander Dmitrievich also expanded. Among his patients were representatives of the highest nobility. This allowed him to move to a decent apartment in the wing of one of the luxurious mansions on the English Embankment, which belonged to the emperor's life physician and president of the Medical and Surgical Academy, Baronet Yakov Vasilievich Willie. Maria Blanc was born here in 1835. Mashenka's godfather was their neighbor, former adjutant of the Grand Duke Mikhail Pavlovich, and since 1833 Ivan Dmitrievich Chertkov, the ringmaster of the Imperial Court.

In 1840, Anna Ivanovna fell seriously ill, died and was buried in St. Petersburg at the Smolensk Evangelical Cemetery. Then her sister Ekaterina von Essen, who was widowed in the same year, completely took care of the children. Alexander Dmitrievich, apparently, had sympathized with her before. It is no coincidence that he named his daughter, born in 1833, Catherine. 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, such marriages - with the godmother of daughters and the sister of the late wife - were not allowed by law. And Catherine von Essen becomes his common-law wife.

In the same April, they all leave the capital and move to Perm, where Alexander Dmitrievich received the post 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 Alexandrovich Zalezhsky, who married another daughter, Catherine.

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 of 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 bought in the Laishevsky district. On August 4, 1859, the Senate approved Alexander Dmitrievich Blank and his children in the hereditary nobility, and they were entered in the book of the Kazan noble assembly.

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 Blanc sisters before, was played in Kokushkino. On September 22, the newlyweds left for Nizhny Novgorod, where Ilya Nikolayevich was appointed to the position of senior teacher of mathematics and physics at the male gymnasium. On August 14, 1864, daughter Anna was born. A year and a half later - on March 31, 1866 - son Alexander ... But soon - 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 Nikolayevich 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 a little over 40 thousand inhabitants, of which 57.5% were listed as petty bourgeois, 17% as military, 11% as peasants, 8.8% as nobles, 3.2% - merchants and honorary citizens, and 1.8% - people of the clergy, persons of other classes and foreigners. Accordingly, the city was divided into three parts: noble, commercial and petty-bourgeois. In the nobles' quarters there were kerosene lanterns and plank sidewalks, and in the petty-bourgeois quarters they kept all sorts of cattle in the yards, and this living creature, contrary to prohibitions, roamed the streets.
Here, on April 10 (22), 1870, the Ulyanovs' son Vladimir was born. On April 16, priest Vasily Umov and deacon Vladimir Znamensky baptized the newborn. The godfather was the head of the specific office in Simbirsk, the actual state councilor Arseniy Fedorovich Belokrysenko, and the godfather was the mother of a colleague Ilya Nikolaevich, collegiate assessor Natalia Ivanovna Aunovskaya.

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

The family continued to grow. On November 4, 1871, the fourth child was born - daughter Olga. Son Nikolai died before he even lived a month, and on August 4, 1874, son Dmitry was born, on February 6, 1878, daughter Maria. Six children.
On July 11, 1874, Ilya Nikolayevich received the post of director of public schools in the Simbirsk province. And in December 1877, he was awarded the rank of real 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 an old dream. Having changed six rented apartments since 1870 and having accumulated 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 adviser Ekaterina Petrovna Molchanova. It was wooden, one floor from the facade and with mezzanines under the roof from the side of the courtyard. And behind the yard, overgrown with grass and chamomile, there is a beautiful garden with silvery poplars, thick elms, yellow acacia and lilac along the fence ...
Ilya Nikolaevich died in Simbirsk in January 1886, Maria Alexandrovna - in Petrograd in July 1916, outliving her husband by 30 years.

WHERE DID "LENIN" COME FROM?

The question of how and where in the spring of 1901 Vladimir Ulyanov got the pseudonym Nikolai Lenin has always aroused the interest of researchers, there were many versions. Among them are toponymic ones: both the Lena River (analogy: Plekhanov - Volgin) and the village of Lenin near Berlin appear. At the time of the formation of "Leninism" as a profession, "amorous" sources were looked for. Thus, the assertion was born 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 could stand up to the slightest degree of serious scrutiny.

However, back in the 1950s and 1960s, the Central Party Archives received letters from relatives of a certain Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin, in which a fairly convincing everyday story was presented. The deputy head of the archive, Rostislav Aleksandrovich Lavrov, forwarded these letters to the Central Committee of the CPSU, and, naturally, they did not become the property of a wide circle of researchers.

Meanwhile, the Lenin family originates from the Cossack Posnik, who in the 17th century was awarded the nobility, the surname Lenin and an estate in the Vologda province for his services related to the conquest of Siberia and the creation of winter quarters on the Lena River. Numerous descendants of him distinguished themselves more than once both in military and civil service. One of them, Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin, fell ill and retired, having risen to the rank of State Councilor, in the 80s of the XIX century and settled in the Yaroslavl province.

Volodya Ulyanov with his sister Olga. Simbirsk. 1874 Provided by 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 working school in St. Petersburg, where she met Nadezhda Krupskaya. And when there was a fear that the authorities might refuse to issue a foreign passport to Vladimir Ulyanov, 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 came to him, apparently, from his friend, the statistician Alexander Dmitrievich Tsyurupa, who in 1900 met the future leader of the proletariat.

Sergey Nikolayevich himself knew Vladimir Ilyich - from meetings in the Free Economic Society in 1895, as well as from his works. In turn, Ulyanov also 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 his father, Nikolai Yegorovich, who by that time was already quite ill (he died on April 6, 1902).

According to family tradition, in 1900 Sergei Nikolaevich went to Pskov on official business. There, on behalf of the Ministry of Agriculture, he received Sacca plows and other agricultural machines arriving in Russia from Germany. In one of the Pskov hotels, Lenin handed over his father's passport with a revised date of birth to Vladimir Ilyich, who then lived in Pskov. Probably, this is how the origin of Ulyanov's main pseudonym, N. Lenin, is explained.

Stein M.G. Ulyanovs and Lenins. Secrets of the pedigree and pseudonym. SPb., 1997
Loginov V.T. Vladimir Lenin: how to become a leader. M., 2011

Russian revolution

(1870 - 1924)

Lenin's biography is very long, some things in it are subject to doubt, some events, for sure, are still hidden.

The great leader and teacher of the working people of the whole world, the successor of the revolutionary teachings of K. Marx and F. Engels, the organizer of the CPSU and the founder of the Soviet state, was born on April 22 (April 10, according to the old style), 1870, in the city of Simbirsk, in the family of an inspector of public schools. Elder brother Alexander - Narodnaya Volya - was executed in 1887 and participated in the preparation of the assassination attempt on the king. In the year of his brother's death, Lenin graduated from high school and entered the law faculty of Kazan University. However, in December of the same year, he was arrested for participating in the revolutionary movement of students, which was the reason for his expulsion and deportation to the village of Kokushkino, Kazan province.

In 1888 he returned to Kazan, where he joined a Marxist circle, and the following year he moved to Samara. In 1891, he passed his exams as an external student at the Faculty of Law at St. Petersburg University and began working as an assistant to a barrister in Samara. In the book "What are the "friends of the people" and how do they fight against the social democrats?" (1984), "The Development of Capitalism in Russia" (1899) Lenin completed the ideological defeat of populism.

The next part is better presented in the form of a brief biography of Lenin (Ulyanov) - at this time Vladimir Ilyich made many useful acquaintances and trips.
In April 1895, L. went abroad to establish contact with the Emancipation of Labor group. In Switzerland he met Plekhanov, in Germany - with W. Liebknecht, in France - with P. Lafargue and other figures of the international working-class movement. In September 1895, returning from abroad, Lenin visited Vilnius, Moscow, and Orekhovo-Zuevo, where he established contacts with local Social Democrats. And already in the autumn of 1895, on the initiative and under the leadership of Vladimir Ilyich, the Marxist circles of St. Petersburg united into a single organization - the St. Petersburg "Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class", which was the embryo of a revolutionary proletarian party, for the first time in Russia began to unite scientific socialism with a mass working-class movement.

On the night of December 8 (20) to December 9 (21) of the same year, Lenin, along with his associates in the Union of Struggle, was arrested and imprisoned, from where he continued to lead the Union. However, Ulyanov's activities did not subside even in prison - there he wrote "The 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". After 2 years, in February, Lenin was exiled for 3 years to the village. Shushenskoye, Minusinsk district, Yenisei province. For active revolutionary work, his future wife, N. K. Krupskaya, was also sentenced to exile. As the bride of L., she was also sent to Shushenskoye, where she became his wife. While in exile, Vladimir Ilyich established and maintained contact 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, rallied the exiled Social Democrats of the Minusinsk district around him. In addition, he wrote over 30 works while in exile.

Lenin left Shushenskoye immediately after the end of his exile (January 29 (February 10), 1900) left Shushenskoye. He established contacts with the Social Democrats everywhere - in Ufa, Moscow, St. Petersburg (he visited it illegally), and in other cities. In 1900, he settled in Pskov, where he did a great job of organizing the newspaper, in a number of cities he created strongholds for it. In July of the same year, Lenin went abroad, where he set up the publication of the Iskra newspaper - he was its direct supervisor. Iskra played an exceptional role in the ideological and organizational preparation of the revolutionary proletarian party. Subsequently, Lenin noted that "the whole color of the conscious proletariat took the side of Iskra" . It was one of his articles published in Iskra that Ulyanov wrote under the "fatal" pseudonym - Lenin. It happened in December 1901.

The next five years (1900 - 1905) Vladimir Ilyich lived in Munich, London, Geneva.
In the struggle to create a new type of party, Lenin's work What Is To Be Done? Sore Questions of Our Movement" (1902), in which Lenin criticized "economism", highlighted the main problems of building the party, its ideology and politics.

In 1903, the 2nd Congress of the RSDLP was held. 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 Lenin. A proletarian party of a new type, the Bolshevik Party, was created. After the congress, Ulyanov launched a struggle against Menshevism.

During the Revolution of 1905-07, Lenin directed the work of the Bolshevik Party in leading the masses. Already on November 8 (21), 1905, he arrived in St. Petersburg, where he directed the activities of the Central Committee and the St. Petersburg Committee of the Bolsheviks, the preparation of an armed uprising, and also headed the work of the Bolshevik newspapers Vperyod, Proletary, New life". In the summer of 1906, due to police persecution, Lenin moved to Kuokkala (Finland), and already in December 1907 he was again forced to emigrate to Switzerland, and at the end of 1908 to Paris.

During the reaction years of 1908-1810, Lenin fought for the preservation of the illegal Bolshevik Party against the Menshevik Liquidators, the Otzovists, and against the splitting actions of the Trotskyists. , against conciliation to opportunism ( detailed description these currents will not be given in a brief biography of Lenin). He deeply analyzed the experience of the Revolution of 1905–07. At the same time, L. rebuffed the offensive of reaction against the ideological foundations of the party.
From the end of 1910, a new upsurge of the revolutionary movement began in Russia. In December 1910, on the initiative of Lenin, new newspapers began to be published in St. Petersburg (Zvezda, Pravda). To train cadres of party workers, in 1911 Lenin organized a party school in Longjumeau (near Paris), in which he gave 29 lectures. In January 1912, under the leadership of L., the Sixth (Prague) All-Russian Conference of the RSDLP was held in Prague. In order to be closer to Russia, Lenin 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 Pravda newspaper, and directs the activities of the Bolshevik faction of the 4th State Duma.
During World War I (1914-1918), the Bolshevik Party, led by Lenin, raised high the banner of proletarian internationalism, exposed the social-chauvinism of the leaders of the Second International, and put forward the slogan of turning the imperialist war into a civil war.

On July 26 (August 8), 1914, on a false denunciation, Lenin was arrested by the Austrian authorities and imprisoned in Novy Targ. Thanks to the assistance of the Polish and Austrian Social Democrats, he was soon released, after which he continued to remain abroad. Having received in Zurich on March 2 (15), 1917, the first reliable news of the February bourgeois-democratic revolution that had begun in Russia, Lenin defined the new tasks of the proletariat and the Bolshevik Party. On April 3 (16), 1917, L. returned from exile to Petrograd. Solemnly greeted by thousands of workers and soldiers, he made a short speech, ending it with the words: "Long live the socialist revolution!" Under the leadership of L., the party launched political and organizational work among the masses of workers, peasants, and soldiers.

In July 1917, after the liquidation of dual power and the concentration of power in the hands of the counter-revolution, the peaceful period of the development of the revolution ended. On July 7 (20) the Provisional Government ordered the arrest of Lenin, and he was forced to go underground. Until August 8 (21), 1917, L. was hiding in a hut behind the lake. Spill, near Petrograd, then until the beginning of October - in Finland (Jalkala, Helsingfors, Vyborg). However, even in the underground, he continued to direct the activities of the party, publishing various pamphlets.
On the evening of October 24 (November 6), Lenin illegally arrived at 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 in the localities into the hands of the Soviets, he delivered 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 Lenin.

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.

Lenin led the struggle of the Communist Party and the masses of Russia for solving the problems of the dictatorship of the proletariat, for building socialism, under his leadership the party and government created a new, Soviet state apparatus. The confiscation of landed estates was carried out and the nationalization of all land, banks, transport, large-scale industry, a monopoly of foreign trade was introduced. The Red Army was created. The national oppression has been destroyed. The party enlisted the broad masses of the people in the grandiose work of building the Soviet state and carrying out fundamental socio-economic transformations. In December 1917, Lenin in his article "How to organize a competition?" put forward the idea of socialist competition of the masses as effective method building socialism.
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 May 1918, on the initiative and with the participation of Lenin, decrees on the food question were drawn up and adopted. At the suggestion of L., food detachments were created from workers sent to the village to raise the poor to fight against the kulaks, to fight for bread. The socialist measures of the Soviet government met with fierce resistance from the overthrown exploiting classes. They launched an armed struggle against Soviet power and resorted to terror. On August 30, 1918, Lenin was seriously wounded by the Socialist-Revolutionary terrorist F. E. Kaplan.

During the years of the Civil War and the military intervention of 1918–20, Lenin was chairman of the Workers' and Peasants' Defense Council, which was set up on November 30, 1918, to mobilize all forces and resources to defeat the enemy. He 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 the leadership of Lenin, the party and the Soviet government in a short time managed to rebuild the country's economy on a war footing, developed and put into practice a system of emergency measures, called "war communism".
After the victorious end of the Civil War, Lenin led the struggle of the party and all the working people of the Soviet Republic for the restoration and further development of the economy, and directed cultural construction.

In late 1920 and early 1921, a discussion unfolded in the party about the role and tasks of the trade unions, in which questions were actually decided about the methods of approaching the masses, the role of the party, and the fate of the dictatorship of the proletariat and socialism in Russia. Lenin opposed the erroneous platforms and factional activities of Trotsky, N. I. Bukharin, the "workers' opposition", the "democratic centralism" group. He pointed out that, being the school of communism in general, the trade unions should be for the working people, in particular, the school of economic management.

At the Tenth Congress of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) in 1921, L. summed up the results of the trade union discussion in the party and put forward the task of transitioning from the policy of “war communism” to the New Economic Policy (NEP). The congress approved the transition to the New Economic Policy, which ensured the strengthening of the alliance between the working class and the peasantry and the creation of a production base for socialist society. Many economic issues were resolved, including the development of
the principles of unification of the Soviet republics into a single multinational state on the basis of voluntariness and equality - the Union of the SSR, which was created in December 1922.

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, the consequences of being wounded in 1918 undermined Lenin's health, and after 2 months he fell seriously ill and returned to work only in early October. His last public speech was November 20, 1922 at the plenum of the Moscow City Council. December 16, 1922 Lenin's health again deteriorated sharply. In late December 1922 and early 1923, L. dictated letters on internal party and state issues: “Letter to the Congress”, “On the Attribution of Legislative Functions to the State Planning Commission”, “On the Question of Nationalities or “Autonomization”” ”and a number of articles -“ Pages from a diary”, “On cooperation”, “On our revolution”, “How do we reorganize the Rabkrin (Proposal to the XII Party Congress)”, “Better less, but better”. These letters and articles are rightly called L.'s political testament. They were the final stage in Lenin's development of a plan for building socialism in the USSR. In them, L. outlined in a generalized form the program for the socialist transformation of the country and the prospects for the world revolutionary process, and the fundamentals of the party's policy, strategy, and tactics.
In May 1923, due to illness, Lenin moved to Gorki, and in January 1924 his condition deteriorated sharply, and on January 21, 1924 at 6 o'clock. 50 min. Lenin died in the evening. On January 23, the coffin with the body of the former leader was transported to Moscow and installed in the Hall of Columns, where everyone who wanted to say goodbye to him could. On January 27, the funeral took place on Red Square; the coffin with the embalmed body of L. was placed in a specially built Mausoleum.

This is where Lenin's biography ends. Of course, in our time, the attitude towards Vladimir Ilyich is not unambiguous, but there is no doubt that he was an unsurpassed philosopher. He developed all the components of Marxism - philosophy, political economy, scientific communism. Summarizing from the standpoint of Marxist philosophy the achievements of science, especially physics, of the late 19th and early 20th centuries, Lenin 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, developed the fundamental problems of the theory of human reflection of objective reality and the theory of knowledge. Lenin's great merit is the comprehensive development of materialist dialectics, in particular the law of unity and struggle of opposites. L. made a major 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 societies.