LENIN, VLADIMIR ILICH,

born April 10 [April 22, New Style], 1870, Simbirsk, Russia died Jan. 21, 1924, Gorki [later Gorki Leninskiye], near Moscow original name Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov founder of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks), inspirer and leader of the Bolshevik Revolution (1917), and the first head of the Soviet state (191724). As a thinker, he was the formulator of Marxism-Leninism, which until the late 1980s and early '90s was the official ideology of the Soviet Union and several other communist nations. Lenin was born into a middle-class family but became a revolutionary through the influence of his brother Aleksandr. He became an adherent of Marxism in 1889. He received a degree in law in 1891 from St. Petersburg University, as an external student. Between 1887 and the autumn of 1893 he lived in various places, all on or near his native Volga. By the time he moved to St. Petersburg in 1893 he had become an authority on Marxism. Arrested as a subversive in 1895, he served a term of exile in Siberia; after 1900, he lived mostly in western Europe, where he emerged as the leader of the Bolshevik faction among the Russian Social Democrats. He returned to Russia after the overthrow of the tsarist regime in March 1917, and under his leadership the Bolsheviks, the only group with strict discipline and definite purpose, emerged from the chaos of wartime Russia and channeled the leaderless discontent of the Russian masses into revolutionary action. Lenin thus led the Bolsheviks to power in the October Revolution (in November, New Style) of 1917. The new Bolshevik (or Soviet) government established a dictatorship, abolished the newly won political and civil liberties in Russia, and renamed its political party the Communist Party. Lenin became the head of the new government and guided the Soviet state through its earliest formative years. The Soviet state maintained itself in power during the Russian Civil War (191820) largely through the dynamic leadership of Lenin and Leon Trotsky. In economics, Lenin initially tried to introduce a socialist system into the Soviet Union by the forced abolition of markets, exchange, and money, but in 1921 he retreated from this policy and allowed the Soviet Union's temporary reversion to a market economy. From 1922 until his death Lenin was incapacitated by serious health problems. The body of political principles that Lenin formulated and attempted to put into practice is known as Leninism (q.v.).