Born on April 22, 1870, in the city of Simbirsk in the Simbirsk Province of the Russian Empire (today Simbirsk in the Ulyanovsk Oblast), Lenin was of Russian, Mordovan, Kalmyk-Mongol, Jewish, Volga German, and Swedish ancestry.
Lenin's father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, came from a poor family, and he went to school on a part-time basis, and later, as a result of his hard work and excellence, he became the provincial director of national education, and did a great deal of work in the field of education. Lenin's mother was a housewife, but she was a woman of noble qualities, kind and upright, and had a wealth of knowledge. They had a close and respectful relationship. They loved their children and attached great importance to their education. This kind of family itself is bound to play a good role in the growth of the child.
Several of his siblings had the same upbringing and character. The elder brother, Alexander . Ulyanov, who excelled in his studies at the University of Petersburg, was executed in 1887 at the age of 21 for his active participation in the preparations for the assassination of the Tsar by the POP, an event which had a great influence on Lenin. Lenin was greatly influenced by the death of his sister, Anna, who had been involved in the revolutionary movement since 1886 and had been arrested several times by the tsarist government. Her younger sister Olga was very talented, but unfortunately she died of typhoid fever while she was studying at the Higher Girls' School. She and Lenin were very close friends, often reading Marx's writings together, and were progressive in their thinking. Her younger brother, Dmitry, who excelled in his studies, was a doctor by profession and had been engaged in revolutionary activities since 1897. The youngest sister, Maria, also took part in revolutionary activities while studying at the university and became a professional revolutionary.
Lenin graduated from high school in 1887 and enrolled in the law faculty of Kazan University. In his first year at the university, he was expelled from school for his participation in the student movement at the school and was exiled to the village of Kokushkino, near Kazan, where he was under surveillance, and then, because of his mother's application to the government authorities, he was transferred to the countryside of Samara province, where Lenin's brother-in-law resided, where he continued to live under open surveillance by the police.
Here he studied on his own in university law faculty courses as well as Marxist writings, especially the ****Productive Manifesto and Capital, thus accepting and firmly believing in ****productivism for the rest of his life. Returning to Kazan in 1888, he became an active member of the Kazan Marxist Group, and in 1889 moved his family to Samara, where he organized the first local Marxist group.
In 1892, wrote his first book, New Economic Changes in Peasant Life. In the same year, he received approval from the Ministry of Education of the Tsarist government to take the state examination for university graduation in Petersburg with the qualification of an external auditor of the Law Faculty of the University of Petersburg, and was awarded a gold graduation medal and a certificate of graduation from the university. He then joined a law firm in Petersburg as a trainee lawyer and took part in the activities of a workers' group organized by local Marxists.
In 1893, he moved to Petersburg, where he worked for the establishment of a proletarian revolutionary party in Russia, and in 1894 he wrote a book entitled "What are the "Friends of the People" and how do they attack the Social Democrats", which was a comprehensive criticism of the economic and political theories of the Populists, especially their idealistic worldview.
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In 1895, the Marxist groups in Petersburg were united to form the "Association for the Emancipation of the Working Class", marking the beginning of the integration of scientific socialism and the Russian workers' movement.
In December of the same year, Lenin was arrested and imprisoned, and in February 1897, he was exiled to Eastern Siberia, where he completed his book The Development of Capitalism in Russia in 1899, thus completely liquidating the erroneous theories of the Populists.
Lenin was permitted to return to Petersburg (renamed Leningrad in 1924-1991) at the end of his exile in 1900, and then to study at the University of Geneva in Switzerland, and then at the University of Stuttgart, and then at the University of Stuttgart. , and then to Stuttgart, Munich, Leipzig, Prague, Vienna, Manchester, and London, where he engaged in professional anti-government political activity. In Munich, Germany he co-founded with Martov the first Russian Social Democratic Labor Party newspaper, The Martian, which was then published in Leipzig and London. He used a number of aliases during this period, eventually adopting "Lenin" as his official name.
In 1901-1902, he wrote what would become the influential book of the Russian Revolution, What is to be Done? a book that would later become very influential in the Russian Revolution.
In 1901-1902, he wrote what would become the influential book What to Do?, in which he explicitly rejected Bernstein's revisionism, criticized the party's "economicist" line, and argued that the backward groups should accept the leadership of the advanced groups, and demanded that the party should be built into an institution with a vanguard core of "professional revolutionaries" and a tightly disciplined system (i.e., democratic centralism). （In 1903, Lenin attended the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party, in which Lenin's views were opposed by Martov, Trotsky and others, and his ideas were criticized as "Jacobinism". As a result of the contradictions on the issue of principle, the party gradually split into the Bolsheviks (meaning majority) led by him and the Mensheviks (minority) led by Martov.
After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution in 1905, he led the Third Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party (RSDLP), which was attended only by the Bolsheviks, and formulated the strategy of the Bolsheviks in this revolution. At the climax of the revolution, in early November, Lenin returned home to Petersburg, where he directly led the Bolshevik Central Committee and the Petersburg Committee, and took part in the editing and publishing of the party's organ, Nezavisimaya Gazeta. 1906, he was elected to the Presidium of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party.
After the failure of the revolution, Lenin left Russia in December 1907 and lived in exile in Paris and other places in Western Europe, where he continued to engage in political writing in relatively poor conditions. In response to the debate over the question of socialist revolution, he completed his book Materialism and Empirical Criticism in 1909, which would later become the basic philosophical principle of Marxism-Leninism. He was busy attending socialist gatherings across Europe, such as the Prague Congress of 1912. Lenin had met socialist revolutionary Inessa Almand in Paris, and the two established a secret lover's relationship.
After the outbreak of World War I, Lenin criticized the Social Democrats who supported the war in his own country, claiming that the Second International was dead, and coining the slogan, "Imperialist wars become domestic wars. During the war, he was briefly detained by the authorities while living in the Austrian town of Boronin. In 1914 he moved to Bern, Switzerland, a neutral country, and later to Zurich. And in August 1915 he suggested for the first time that socialism might triumph within a few or even a single capitalist country.
In September 1915, he attended the Zimmerwald Conference in Switzerland, which opposed the First World War. Lenin, as leader of the Zimmerwald left, argued that the imperialist war should be transformed into a class war, calling on the working class to take advantage of the opportunity to wage civil war to seize power. The majority of the conference rejected his ideas and believed that the program of the conference should be limited to pacifism. At a second anti-war conference in Switzerland, he led the Zimmerwald left in reaffirming its position, but ended up with a compromise declaration.
In the spring of 1916, in Zurich, he completed another theoretical work, "Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism," which criticized his polemical enemy Kautsky while popularizing the latter's correct views in the 19th century.
The February Revolution broke out in Russia in 1917, which led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II of the Russian Empire, the complete overthrow of the Romanov dynasty, and the establishment of the Provisional Government of Russia, a coalition of parties dominated by the Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRP) and the Constitutional Democratic Party (CDP). At the same time, a Soviet was established in Petrograd. Lenin, who was still in the neutral country of Switzerland, knew that he needed to return to Russia immediately, but was unable to do so because his neighboring country was embroiled in WWI. Nevertheless, Fritz Plattin, a Swiss Social Democrat, actively negotiated with the German authorities, and Germany, wishing to use Lenin to ease the fighting with Russia on the Eastern Front, agreed to assist Lenin's return by means of a German-arranged "hermetically sealed train". Lenin crossed the German border and arrived in Sweden by ship. With the help of the Swedish Social Democrats Otto Grünzmühlen and Ture Nyman, he passed through Scandinavia without any problems, and on April 16, 1917, he took a train to the Finland station in Petrograd.
Lenin quickly became a leader of the revolutionary movement after his return. He put forward the famous April Program, pointing out that the Russian Revolution must make the transition from a bourgeois democratic revolution to a proletarian socialist revolution, opposing the so-called "bourgeois Provisional Government", protesting against its deliberate delay in the election of the Constituent Assembly, and putting forward the slogan "All power to the soviets! and proposed the slogan "All power to the soviets". At first his leftist politics isolated the party, but later his uncompromising position made all those who distrusted the Provisional Government see the Bolsheviks as their allies. The Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRP) leaders who opposed the Bolsheviks, such as Kerensky, smeared Lenin as a spy sent by Germany.
In July 1917, during the July Incident in Petrograd, the Provisional Government cracked down on Bolshevik-backed demonstrations by workers and soldiers and declared Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders wanted. Lenin, believing that the time was not yet ripe, gave up the idea of seizing power by force for the time being. He lurked in a hayloft on the shores of Lake Ratzliv and continued to direct the revolutionary struggle, leaving Russia proper on August 9 and arriving in Finland (then in a semi-independent situation), where he finished writing The State and the Revolution. on September 7, the commander-in-chief of the Russian army, Kornilov, staged a coup d'état aimed at overthrowing the Provisional Government, which had to call for help from the Red Guard of the Bolsheviks. The coup was eventually crushed and the Bolsheviks took the opportunity to strengthen their power. After analyzing the new situation, Lenin, in two letters of instruction written on September 12-14 to the Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, the Petrograd Committee, and the Moscow Committee, clearly put forward the proposal of seizing power through an uprising, and secretly returned to Petrograd from Finland on October 7 of the same year. He drafted the resolution on the armed uprising adopted by the Plenum of the Party Central Committee, and on the night of October 24, 1917 arrived at Smolny Palace to personally direct the uprising.
Launching the October Revolution, the pro-Bolshevik workers, soldiers and sailors occupied the Winter Palace, the seat of the Provisional Government, at 2:00 a.m. the next morning, proclaimed the overthrow of the Provisional Government of Russia and the establishment of the People's Committees, and stated that elections for a Constituent Assembly should be held immediately, and demanded the exclusion of the Constitutional Democratic Party and the establishment of a purely socialist and democratic government, i.e., "all power to the soviets. On November 8, 1917, Lenin was elected Chairman of the People's Committee and promulgated the Peace Decree and the Land Decree. After Lenin seized power by launching the October Revolution, he said that he would immediately convene a Constituent Assembly to realize socialist democratic elections. At the same time, he cracked down on the bourgeois opposition press and suppressed the Constitutional Democratic Party. However, as the peasants, who constituted the majority of the Russian population at that time, generally supported the populist Socialist Revolutionary Party (while the workers in the big cities generally voted for the Bolsheviks), the result was that the Socialist Revolutionary Party won the election of the Constituent Assembly by a clear margin over the Bolsheviks. Unwilling to see the fruits of the revolution lost, Lenin, stating that he "relies on public opinion, but must not forget the rifle," dissolved the Constituent Assembly in Petrograd's Tavrida Palace on January 5, 1918, and sent his troops to break up demonstrations against the dissolution of the Assembly, then claimed that "all power to the Assembly" was counterrevolutionary and that "all powers are vested in the Assembly," which was a counterrevolution. The "Constituent Assembly" was a counter-revolutionary slogan, which aroused fierce opposition from the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the Mensheviks, the Constitutional Democratic Party and other parties.
In order to safeguard Soviet power against the forces of the opposition, on December 20, 1917, Lenin proposed the formation of an All-Russian Extraordinary Committee for the Purge of Counterrevolution and Idleness (known as the Cheka). In February 1918, the Central Committee issued the "Letter of the People's Committee to the Working People of Russia," and in the decree "The Socialist Fatherland in Danger," Lenin personally added that "bourgeois men and women capable of working should be organized into dugout battalions under the surveillance of the Red Guards, and those who resisted should be shot. All enemy spies, speculators, thugs, hooligans, counter-revolutionary agitators, and German spies should be shot on the spot." ...... In September 1918, Lenin openly claimed that he wanted to create a "Red Terror" against the bourgeois counterrevolution, which brought panic to the society. Studies by various scholars indicate that between 1917 and 1922, the number of people hanged and shot by the Cheka may have amounted to hundreds of thousands to millions. Those struck were not only members of the opposition, but also civilians from all levels of society. The entire family of the last Tsar Nicholas II was also shot at this time. Some Marxists and social democrats denounced Lenin; Martov, the Menshevik leader, and Kautsky, the leader of the "center" wing of the German Social Democratic Party (SPD), called the Bolsheviks' rule a "reign of terror," and Pletzhan Pletzhan, the father of Russian Marxism (and later Menshevik), called it a "reign of terror". Plekhanov, the father of Russian Marxism (and later the Mensheviks), called Lenin "a new Robespierre".
On Jan. 14, 1918, after a speech in Petrograd, Lenin was riding in a car with Swiss Social Democrat Fritz Plattin*** when he was suddenly confronted by 12 unidentified gunmen who opened fire on him as he crossed a bridge. Plattin rushed to hold Lenin's head under the seat, while his own hand, which was covering Lenin, was bloodied. In the aftermath Cheka personnel were unable to capture the shooters or identify the killers. According to the assassin, who later emigrated, it was the Duke of Shakovsky who organized the operation, sponsoring 500,000 rubles for it.
On Aug. 30, 1918, as Lenin was about to step into his car after speaking to workers at the Mikhelson factory outside the capital, Moscow, a woman approached him to talk to him, and as Lenin was answering her, a hand with a Browning pistol reached out at close range at three paces, and then three shots rang out. The first shot hit Lenin in the left shoulder, the second hit him in the left chest and passed through his neck, and the third hit the woman he was talking to. Lenin immediately fell unconscious.
After regaining consciousness he refused to go to a hospital for treatment because he thought the next assassination might await him, and was quickly taken to the Kremlin. The second bullet was in a dangerous position and doctors were unable to remove it. The bullet did not penetrate the left lung, but the situation remained urgent as blood flowed into the lung. And still Lenin continued to work, his health
gradually recovering. But the assassination took a serious toll on Lenin's health, and many believe his late-life strokes had something to do with it.
She was a member of the Social Revolutionary Party. Arrested by the Cheka shortly after the incident, Kaplan confessed to the assassination, saying that no one was behind it and that it was entirely personal because Lenin was a "traitor to the revolution". The body was burned, and in February 1938, the Soviet authorities at one point claimed that Bukharin was behind the assassination, and then in February 1988 vindicated Bukharin. Due to the many doubts in the documentation of the assassination, some scholars believe that the real culprit was not Kaplan but someone else, with Lenin's deputy, Sverdlov, the chairman of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, being a major suspect. In the wake of this case and the assassination of Moisei Uritsky, head of the Cheka, Stalin proposed an 'open and systematic national terror ...... against those responsible'. On January 15, 1918, the People's Council passed a decree establishing the Red Army and appointed Leon Trotsky as the Military People's Commissar and Chairman of the Supreme Military Council.In March 1918, Lenin led the Seventh Congress of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers' Party (Bolsheviks), and the Bolsheviks were officially renamed the Russian ****production Party (Bolsheviks), or the Russian ***(B). The name was officially changed to the Russian *** Proletarian Party (Bolsheviks), abbreviated as "RUSSIA***. In the same year, a constitution was promulgated, giving the official name of the country as the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist **** and State, or Soviet Russia.
In 1920, when Lenin claimed that the Soviet regime could not survive without Baku's oil, Soviet Russia supported the Bolshevik forces in Azerbaijan, and in March 1922 the three countries formed the Transcaucasian Soviet Federated Socialist **** and State, or Transcaucasian Federation.
When the Bolsheviks came to power, Russia and Germany remained at war. Lenin advocated accepting Germany's terms for withdrawal from World War I, while Bukharin argued that the offensive to liberate Germany should continue, and Trotsky supported no war and no peace. At first the supporters of Lenin's program were in the minority so the resolution for an armistice was not passed, and with the advance of the German army, some of the leaders changed their position and eventually signed the Peace of Brest with Germany on March 3, 1918, withdrawing from World War I. The treaty made it possible for Poland, Lithuania, and Estonia to withdraw from the First World War. The treaty led to the independence of Poland, Estonia, Lithuania, Latvia, Ukraine, Finland, and Georgia, which cost Russia large tracts of territory and provoked strong resentment among nationalists at home. The leftist Socialist Revolutionary Party (SRP) also took the opportunity to split with the Bolsheviks and withdrew from the coalition government in March of the same year.
After the Bolsheviks dispersed the Constituent Assembly and signed the Treaty of Brest, the domestic situation was in violent turmoil, and in the spring of 1918, the Czechoslovak Legion rebelled and took control of the Siberian Railway near the Ural Mountains. On June 8 of the same year, the Social Revolutionary Party, the Constitutional Democratic Party and the Mensheviks set up the Committee of the Constituent Assembly (later renamed the All-Russian Provisional Government) in Samara and took control of the areas around Saratov, Simbirsk, Kazan and Ufa, while in November Gorchak set up the Siberian Government in Omsk, and soon afterwards staged a coup d'état to overthrow the All-Russian Provisional Government and crowned himself the "Supreme Ruler of Russia". He was proclaimed "Supreme Ruler of Russia". At the same time, he united with Dunnikin in the south and Yudenich in the Baltic region, and launched the White Guard Movement against the Bolsheviks with the support of Britain, France, the United States, Japan and many other countries. The Central Committee of the People's Commissariat under Lenin appointed Trotsky as the Chairman of the Supreme Military Council to form and lead the Red Army, which included a large number of officers from the former Tsarist era, against the White Guard movement.In 1919, the Baltic Fleet of the Red Army on the Western Front defeated Yudenich and the British fleet, and the Red Army on the Eastern Front, under the command of Frunze and others, routed the White Army of the Eastern Road of Golchak.In 1920, Buchonyi, Tukha Tukhachevsky and others led the Red Army to defeat the South Road White Army of Dunnikin and Wrangel. Until October 1920, Soviet Russia basically stabilized the domestic situation.
During 1918-1919, socialist revolutionary movements such as the November Revolution in Germany, the Hungarian Revolution, and the Finnish Revolution took place continuously in Europe, and the smooth development of the world situation aroused Lenin's optimism in launching the proletarian world revolution. He predicted that the next part of the Russian Revolution would be the German Revolution. To assist the workers' movement in other countries of Western Europe, he hoped to infiltrate Poland and set up a soviet government, which would then be extended to Germany to support the socialist revolution there. Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks established the Ukrainian Soviet Socialist **** and State and the Lithuanian-Belarusian Soviet Socialist **** and State. The leader of the nascent Polish Second ****hestate, Bielski, who hoped to use the opportunity to establish a national union of Central and Eastern European countries to break up the Soviet Union and block its westward expansion, formed an alliance with the Ukrainian nationalist leader, Simon Petliura, in 1920, and sent his troops into the Ukraine to occupy Kiev. Friction between the two sides led to the Polish-Soviet War. After several rounds of tug-of-war with the Polish army led by Tukhachevsky, the Soviets were repulsed at the Battle of Warsaw, and on March 18, 1921, the two sides signed the Treaty of Riga to end the war. As a result of the intense revolution and war, Lenin's health had been severely compromised prior to the assassination. The bullet was left in his neck, very close to his spine, about 1cm, and the medical conditions of the time did not allow for the safe removal of the bullet. It was not until April 24, 1922, that the bullet was surgically removed by a German doctor. In May 1922, Lenin suffered his first stroke, partially paralyzing his right side, and began to reduce his political duties. After his second stroke in December of the same year, he stopped his political activities.After his third stroke in March 1923, he remained bedridden and unable to speak until his death.
After his first stroke, Lenin completed a will and gave it to his wife, Krupskaya, commenting on six senior leaders of the Soviet ****, including: Trotsky, Stalin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Bukharin, and Pidakov. One of the comments on Stalin was "I am not sure that he will always be able to use this power with great care". As a result of a serious dispute between Lenin and Stalin over the monopolization of foreign trade and the Georgian affair during the same period, on January 4, 1923, Lenin made an addition to his dictation, which was directed specifically at Stalin: Stalin is too violent, a fault which is perfectly tolerable among us, in our dealings with the ****-producers, but intolerable in the post of General Secretary. I therefore suggest to the comrades that they find a way of removing Stalin from this position and appointing another person as General Secretary.On March 5, 1923, Lenin, furious at learning that his wife, Krupskaya, had been verbally abused and intimidated by Stalin, proposed to Stalin to break off diplomatic relations. Stalin apologized to Lenin and eventually things calmed down.
Lenin died at the age of 53 on January 21, 1924, at 18:50 Moscow time in the village of Gorky. More than 900,000 people attended the memorial service when they viewed Lenin's body and observed a moment of silence. Sun Yat-sen, who regarded Lenin as his mentor and friend, delivered a eulogy after hearing the news:
The five continents are vast, and all people are in the world; who is the first to realize that the blessing of the people? The first thing I want to say is that I'm not going to be able to do anything about it, but I think I'm going to be able to do something about it. The first thing you need to do is to get your hands on a new country, and you'll be able to do it in a way that makes you feel like you're in the right place. We are born in the same world, in the same continent, and in the same country; we have been looking at each other for many years, and we have brought up the left and the right. I hope to be with you on the same track and in the same way. The enemy is not happy, but the people are happy; far away from ten thousand miles, the spirit of return. The world's most important thing is that we can't afford to lose time and money, and we can't afford to lose time and money, and we can't afford to lose time and money.
And British Prime Minister Winston Churchill, who maintains an anti-***ist stance, commented that the Russian people had fallen into a quagmire and were struggling, and that there was nothing worse for them than the birth of Lenin, while the second worst thing was his death. After Lenin's death, the Soviet government commemorated him by building Lenin's tomb in Moscow's Red Square and mummifying Lenin's body in a crystal coffin using modern embalming techniques. In the early 1920s, when the Russian cosmopolitan movement was quite popular, Leonid Borisovich Krasin and Alexander Alexandrovich Bogdanov proposed to freeze Lenin's body in order to revive him in the future. The equipment for freezing had to be purchased abroad, but for various reasons the plan was not realized. Instead, the plan was to embalm the body and place it on permanent display on January 27, 1924, at Lenin's tomb in Moscow. The Russian Academy of Sciences and other institutions proposed to move Lenin's body out of Red Square for burial in Lenin's Tomb, which was supported by some members of Parliament. But the proposal was also opposed by a number of political figures, including Vladimir Putin.
Three days after Lenin's death, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad and then St. Petersburg after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, with the Leningrad Oblast, in which St. Petersburg is located, retaining its original name.
The exact cause of Lenin's death has long been the subject of speculation. What did medical experts find when they dissected and carefully analyzed Lenin's brain? Monika Spivak, an associate doctor of philosophy and author of the best-selling book "Diagnosis of a Genius in Death," who has had privileged access to secret archival documents, helps us solve the mystery.
Spivak says that after Lenin's untimely death at age 54, scientists began studying Lenin's brain. Here is a quote from the report of Academician Nikolai Semashko, People's Commissar for Health: "The cause of Lenin's death was thought to be the hardening of the walls of blood vessels (arteriosclerosis). The autopsy proved that this was the main cause of Lenin's illness and death. The cause of the disease was in the carotid arteries." Spivak said that during the autopsy, Lenin's brain was found to be in terrible condition. The total **** of Lenin's cranial tissue was only 1,340 grams, which is not even a standard brain weight. Academician Semashko's report says that "atherosclerosis affects the brain first, that is, the organ that directly governs the body's activity." In the expert's words, the disease directly affects "the most vulnerable parts", and Lenin's cranial tissue was such a "vulnerable" part.
Later, the expert put Lenin's brain, heart and the bullets removed from his body into glass vials at the institute for close study. In 1925, according to Spivak, the Soviet Union set up a laboratory specializing in Lenin's brain. The young Soviet state had no specialists of its own and had to turn to foreign countries. The famous German neurologist Oskar Fugate (1870-1959) presided over the research. According to Fugate's plan, a macroscopic cutter (cut into several large pieces) and a microscopic cutter (made into 34,000 slices) were made in Germany.
In 1927, Fugate submitted his research report. The report said that Lenin's brain structure was different from normal people, which made his career as a leader possible. Lenin's cone cells were very well developed, the connecting fibers between the cells were very strong, and the inner core of the cells was extremely solid and clear. Scientists compared Lenin's brain with those of other geniuses and concluded that Lenin's brain was of higher texture. Lenin has more sulcus gyrus in the forehead area than Lunacharsky, Michurin and Mayakovsky.