Vladimir Lenin



Portrait of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin by Pavel Semyonovich Zhukov in July 1920. Image provided by Das Bundesarchiv. Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons, Public Domain.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin

1870-1924

Lenin is famous as the father of modern communism.

Main Ideas

  • Similar to Marx, Lenin believed that a capitalist democracy would never give power to the workers of a country.
  • He believed that the ultimate outcome of capitalism was imperialism, whereby rich nations and their corporations would control the poorer nations of the world.
  • Unlike Marx, he believed a revolution of industrial workers was not necessary and that a revolution of the rural population of peasant farmers could be used to begin a communist state
  • The peasant and working class must rise up under the leadership of an organized group of intellectuals to establish the dictatorship of the proletariat.

Famous Statements

  • A lie told often enough becomes truth

  • Liberty is precious - so precious that it must be rationed

  • The Capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them

  • Freedom in capitalist society always remains about the same as it was in ancient Greek republics: Freedom for slave owners.

Famous Works

  • What is to be Done?
  • Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism
  • The State and Revolution
  • Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

Interesting Trivia: Lenin was born into an intellectual, prosperous family.  He was expelled from university for revolutionary activity.  He eventually completed his law degree in St. Petersburg (named Leningrad during communist rule) where he learned about the ideas of Karl Marx.  He and other Bolsheviks (a communist movement) began to try to spread these ideas, and he was arrested and imprisoned.  On his release, he went to Switzerland. He and Leon Trotsky, another prominent communist, returned to lead the 1917 October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks led the people, suffering from food shortages and enormous military losses during WW I and dissatisfied with the current regime, rose up and established a communist government.  

Lenin was a prolific writer and tireless worker, working 14 to 16 hours every day. He was injured in several assassination attempts, and he lived with a bullet in his neck for several years until it was removed by a German doctor.

Lenin died in 1924 after a series of strokes left him bedridden and unable to speak.