Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin)
Predecessor:	Position established
Successor:	Alexey Ivanovich Rykov
Predecessor:	Position established; Alexander Fyodorovich Kerensky as Prime Minister of the Provisional Government
Successor:	Alexey Ivanovich Rykov
	RSDLP, later RCP(b)
Education:	Kazan University, Petersburg University
Profession:
Religion:
Birth:
Buried:	Lenin Mausoleum, Moscow
	Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov
	Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova
	Nadezhda Konstantinovna Krupskaya
	Missing
Autograph:

Biography

First emigration 1900-1905

Return to Russia

Press reaction

July - October 1917

Role in the Red Terror

Foreign policy

Last years (1921-1924)

Lenin's main ideas

On class morality

After death

The fate of Lenin's body

Lenin's awards

Titles and awards

Posthumous awards

Personality of Lenin

Aliases of Lenin

Works of Lenin

Works of Lenin

Interesting Facts

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin(real name Ulyanov; April 10 (22), 1870, Simbirsk - January 21, 1924, Gorki estate, Moscow province) - Russian and Soviet politician and statesman, revolutionary, founder of the Bolshevik Party, one of the organizers and leaders October revolution 1917, chairman of the Council of People's Commissars (government) of the RSFSR and the USSR. Philosopher, Marxist, publicist, founder of Marxism-Leninism, ideologist and creator of the Third (Communist) International, founder Soviet state. The scope of the main scientific works is philosophy and economics.

Biography

Childhood, education and upbringing

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk), in the family of an inspector and director of public schools Simbirsk province Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831-1886), - the son of the former serf peasant of the Nizhny Novgorod province Nikolai Ulyanov (variant spelling of the last name: Ulyanina), married to Anna Smirnova - the daughter of an Astrakhan tradesman (according to Soviet writer Shaginyan M.E., who came from a family of baptized Chuvashs). Mother - Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (nee Blank, 1835-1916), of Swedish-German origin on her mother, and Jewish - on her father. I. N. Ulyanov rose to the rank of real state councilor.

In 1879-1887, Vladimir Ulyanov studied at the Simbirsk gymnasium, 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.

In the same year, 1887, on May 8 (20), the elder brother of Vladimir Ilyich, Alexander, was executed as a participant in the Narodnaya Volya conspiracy to attempt on the life of Emperor Alexander III. Three months after admission, Vladimir Ilyich was expelled for participating in student unrest caused by the new university charter, the introduction of police supervision of students, and a campaign to combat "unreliable" students. According to the inspector of students, who suffered from student unrest, Vladimir Ilyich was in the forefront of the raging students, almost with clenched fists. As a result of the unrest, Vladimir Ilyich, along with 40 other students, was arrested the next night and sent to the police station. All those arrested were expelled from the university and sent to the "place of the motherland." Later, another group of students left Kazan University in protest against the repressions. Among those who voluntarily left the university was Lenin's cousin, Vladimir Aleksandrovich Ardashev. After the petitions of Lyubov Alexandrovna Ardasheva, Vladimir Ilyich's aunt, he was sent to the village of Kokushkino, Kazan province, where he lived in the Ardashevs' house until the winter of 1888-1889.

Beginning of revolutionary activity

In the autumn of 1888, Ulyanov was allowed to return to Kazan. Here he 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 correct revolutionary path, and therefore Plekhanov was surrounded by a halo for him for a long time: he experienced every slightest disagreement with Plekhanov extremely painfully.

For some time, Lenin tried to farm in the estate bought by his mother in Alakaevka (83.5 acres) in the Samara province. 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.

In 1891, Vladimir Ulyanov passed the exams externally for the course of the law faculty of St. Petersburg University.

In 1892-1893, Vladimir Ulyanov worked as an assistant to the Samara barrister (lawyer) N. A. Hardin, conducting most of the criminal cases, and conducted "state protection".

In 1893, Lenin arrived in St. Petersburg, where 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.

In May 1895 Ulyanov went abroad. He meets Plekhanov in Switzerland, W. Liebknecht in Germany, P. Lafargue and other leaders of the international labor movement in France, and upon his return to the capital in 1895, together with Yu. O. Martov and other young revolutionaries, unites scattered Marxist circles in the Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.

The "Union of Struggle" carried out active propaganda activities among the workers, they issued more than 70 leaflets. In December 1895, like many other members of the "Union", Ulyanov was arrested and after a long stay in prison in 1897 he was sent to the village of Shushenskoye for 3 years. Yenisei province, where in July 1898 he married N. K. Krupskaya. In exile, he wrote a book based on the collected material, The Development of Capitalism in Russia, directed against "legal Marxism" and populist theories. During the exile, more than 30 works were written, contacts were established with the Social Democrats of St. Petersburg, Moscow, Nizhny Novgorod, Voronezh and other cities. By the end of the 90s, under the pseudonym "K. Tulin ”V. I. Ulyanov is gaining fame in Marxist circles. In exile, Ulyanov advised on legal matters local peasants, drew up legal documents for them.

First emigration 1900-1905

In 1898 in Minsk, in the absence of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Union of Struggle, the First Congress of the RSDLP was held, which "established" the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, adopting the Manifesto; all members of the Central Committee elected by the congress and most of the delegates were immediately arrested; many of the organizations represented at the congress were crushed by the police. The leaders of the Union of Struggle, who were in Siberian exile, decided to unite the numerous Social Democratic organizations and Marxist circles scattered throughout the country with the help of a newspaper.

After the exile ended in February 1900, Lenin, Martov and A. N. Potresov traveled around Russian cities, establishing ties with local organizations; On July 29, 1900, Lenin leaves for Switzerland, where he negotiates with Plekhanov on the publication of a newspaper and a theoretical journal. The editorial board of the newspaper, called "Iskra" (later a magazine appeared - "Zarya"), included three representatives of the emigrant group "Emancipation of Labor" - Plekhanov, P. B. Axelrod and V. I. Zasulich and three representatives of the "Union of Struggle" - Lenin, Martov and Potresov. The average circulation of the newspaper was 8,000 copies, and some issues - up to 10,000 copies. The distribution of the newspaper was facilitated by the creation of a network underground organizations on the territory of the Russian Empire.

In December 1901, Lenin for the first time signed with the pseudonym "Lenin" one of his articles published in Iskra. In 1902, in the work “What is to be done? Sore Problems of Our Movement" Lenin spoke with own concept party, which he saw as a centralized militant organization. In this article, he writes: "Give us an organization of revolutionaries, and we will turn Russia over!".

Participation in the work of the II Congress of the RSDLP (1903)

From July 17 to August 10, 1903, the II Congress of the RSDLP was held in London. Lenin took an active part in the preparation of the congress not only with his articles in Iskra and Zarya; since the summer of 1901, together with Plekhanov, he worked on a draft party program, prepared a draft charter. The program consisted of two parts - the minimum program and the maximum program; the first assumed the overthrow of tsarism and the establishment of a democratic republic, the destruction of the remnants of serfdom in the countryside, in particular the return to the peasants of the lands cut off from them by the landowners when serfdom was abolished (the so-called "segments"), the introduction of an eight-hour working day, the recognition of the right of nations to self-determination and the establishment of equality nations; the maximum program determined the ultimate goal of the party - the construction of a socialist society and the conditions for achieving this goal - socialist revolution and the dictatorship of the proletariat.

At the congress itself, Lenin was elected to the bureau, worked on the program, organizational and mandate commissions, chaired a number of meetings and spoke on almost all issues on the agenda.

Organizations that were in solidarity with Iskra (and were called Iskra) and those that did not share its position were invited to participate in the congress. During the discussion of the program, a controversy arose between the supporters of the Iskra, on the one hand, and the "economists" (for whom the provision on the dictatorship of the proletariat turned out to be unacceptable) and the Bund (on the national question) on the other; as a result, 2 "Economists" and later 5 Bundists left the congress.

But the discussion of the Party Rules, the 1st point, which defined the concept of a party member, revealed disagreements among the Iskra-ists themselves, who were divided into "hard" - supporters of Lenin and "soft" - supporters of Martov. “In my draft,” Lenin wrote after the congress, “this definition was as follows: “A member of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party is considered to be anyone who recognizes its program and supports the party both materially and personally. participation in one of the party organizations“. Martov, instead of the underlined words, suggested saying: work under the control and leadership of one of the party organizations ... We argued that it was necessary to narrow the concept of a party member in order to separate the workers from the talkers, to eliminate organizational chaos, to eliminate such disgrace and such absurdity, so that there could be organizations consisting of party members, but not party organizations, etc. Martov stood for the expansion of the party and spoke of a broad class movement requiring a broad - vague organization, etc. ... "Under control and leadership," I said, - mean in fact no more and no less than: without any control and without any leadership. Lenin's opponents saw in his formulation an attempt to create not a party of the working class, but a sect of conspirators; the wording of paragraph 1 proposed by Martov was supported by 28 votes to 22, with 1 abstention; but after the departure of the Bundists and economists, Lenin's group won a majority in the elections to the Central Committee of the party; this accidental, as subsequent events showed, forever divided the party into "Bolsheviks" and "Mensheviks".

Member of the Central Committee of the RSDLP Rafail Abramovich (in the party since 1899) recalled in January 1958: “Of course, I was still a very young man then, but four years later I was already a member of the Central Committee, and then in this Central Committee, not only with Lenin and with other old Bolsheviks, but also with Trotsky, with all of them we were in the same Central Committee. Plekhanov, Axelrod, Vera Zasulich, Lev Deutsch and a number of other old revolutionaries were still living then. Here we all worked together until 1903. In 1903, at the Second Congress, our lines parted. Lenin and some of his friends insisted that the methods of dictatorship must be used within the party and outside the party. Lenin always supported the fiction of collective leadership, but even then he was the master of the party. He was the actual owner of it, they called him that - “master”.

Split

But it was not disputes over the Rules that split the Iskra-ists, but the election of the editors of Iskra. From the very beginning, there was no mutual understanding in the editorial board between the representatives of the Emancipation of Labor group, long cut off from Russia and from the labor movement, and the young Petersburgers; controversial issues were not resolved, because they split the editorial board into two equal parts. Long before the congress, Lenin tried to solve the problem by proposing to introduce L. D. Trotsky to the editorial board as the seventh member; but the proposal, supported even by Axelrod and Zasulich, was decisively rejected by Plekhanov. Plekhanov's intransigence prompted Lenin to choose a different path: to reduce the editorial board to three people. The congress, at a time when Lenin's supporters were already in the majority, was offered an editorial board consisting of Plekhanov, Martov and Lenin. “The political leader of Iskra,” testifies Trotsky, “was Lenin. Martov was the main journalistic force of the newspaper. Nevertheless, the removal from the editorial office of the respected and well-deserved "old men", albeit not working well, seemed to both Martov and Trotsky himself to be unjustified cruelty. The congress supported Lenin's proposal with a small majority, but Martov refused to serve on the editorial board; his supporters, among whom was now Trotsky, declared a boycott of the "Leninist" Central Committee and refused to cooperate in Iskra. Lenin had no choice but to leave the editorial office; Left alone, Plekhanov restored the former editorial board, but without Lenin, and Iskra became the press organ of the Menshevik faction.

After the congress, both factions had to create their own structures; at the same time, it turned out that the congress minority had the support of the majority of the members of the party. The Bolsheviks, on the other hand, were left without a print organ, which prevented them not only from propagating their views, but also from responding to the sharp criticism of their opponents - only in December 1904 was the Vperyod newspaper created, which briefly became the print organ of the Leninists.

The abnormal situation that had developed in the party prompted Lenin in letters to the Central Committee (in November 1903) and the Party Council (in January 1904) to insist on convening a party congress; finding no support from the opposition, the Bolshevik faction eventually took the initiative. All organizations were invited to the III Congress of the RSDLP, which opened in London on April 12 (25), 1905, but the Mensheviks refused to participate in it, declared the congress illegal and convened their own conference in Geneva - the split of the party was thus formalized.

First Russian Revolution (1905-1907)

Already at the end of 1904, against the backdrop of a growing strike movement, disagreements on political issues were revealed between the "majority" and "minority" factions, in addition to organizational ones.

The revolution of 1905-1907 found Lenin abroad, in Switzerland.

At the III Congress of the RSDLP, held in London in April 1905, Lenin emphasized that the main task of the ongoing revolution was to put an end to the autocracy and the remnants of serfdom in Russia. Despite the bourgeois nature of the revolution, according to Lenin, its main driving force the working class was supposed to become the most interested in its victory, and its natural ally was the peasantry. Having approved the point of view of Lenin, the congress determined the tactics of the party: organizing strikes, demonstrations, preparing an armed uprising.

At the first opportunity, in early November 1905, Lenin illegally, under a false name, arrived in St. Petersburg and headed the work of the Central and St. Petersburg Committees of the Bolsheviks elected by the congress; paid great attention to the management of the newspaper " New life". Under the leadership of Lenin, the party was preparing an armed uprising. At the same time, Lenin wrote the book "Two Tactics of Social Democracy in a Democratic Revolution", in which he points out the need for the hegemony of the proletariat and an armed uprising. In the struggle to win the peasantry over to his side (which was actively waged with the Socialist-Revolutionaries), Lenin wrote the pamphlet Towards the Rural Poor.

In 1906, Lenin moved to Finland, and in the autumn of 1907 he emigrated again.

According to Lenin, despite the defeat of the December armed uprising, the Bolsheviks used all revolutionary opportunities, they were the first to embark on the path of the uprising and the last to leave it when this path became impossible.

Role in the Revolutionary Terror of the early 20th century

During the years of the revolution of 1905-1907, the peak of revolutionary terrorism was observed in Russia, the country was swept by a wave of violence: political and criminal murders, robberies, expropriations and extortion. Like the Social Revolutionaries, who widely practiced terror, the Bolsheviks had their own military organization (known under the names "Combat Technical Group", "Technical Group under the Central Committee", "Military-Technical Group"). In the conditions of rivalry in extremist revolutionary activity with the Socialist-Revolutionary Party, "famous" for the activities of their Combat Organization, after some hesitation (his vision of the issue changed many times depending on the current situation), the Bolshevik leader Lenin developed his position on terror. As historian Professor Anna Geifman, a researcher of the problem of revolutionary terrorism, notes, Lenin's protests against terrorism, formulated before 1905 and directed against the Socialist-Revolutionaries, are in sharp contradiction with Lenin's practical policy, developed by him after the start of the Russian revolution "in the light of the new tasks of the day" in the interests of of his party. Lenin called for “the most radical means and measures as the most expedient”, for which, Anna Geifman quotes the documents, the Bolshevik leader proposed to create “detachments of the revolutionary army ... of all sizes, starting with two or three people, [who] should arm themselves, who than he can (a gun, a revolver, a bomb, a knife, brass knuckles, a stick, a rag with kerosene for arson ...) ”, and concludes that these Bolshevik detachments were essentially no different from the terrorist “combat brigades” of the militant Social Revolutionaries.

Lenin, in the changed conditions, was already ready to go even further than the Socialist-Revolutionaries and, as Anna Geifman notes, even went to a clear contradiction with the scientific teachings of Marx in order to promote the terrorist activities of his supporters, arguing that combat detachments should use every opportunity to active work without postponing their actions until the start of a general uprising.

Lenin essentially ordered the preparation of terrorist acts, which he himself had previously condemned, calling on his supporters to attack city and other government officials, in the autumn of 1905 he openly called for the murder of policemen and gendarmes, Black Hundreds and Cossacks, to blow up police stations, to pour water over soldiers with boiling water, and policemen with sulfuric acid.

Later, dissatisfied with the insufficient level of terrorist activity of his party, in his opinion, Lenin complained to the St. Petersburg Committee:

Striving for immediate terrorist action, Lenin even had to defend the methods of terror in the face of his fellow Social Democrats:

The followers of the Bolshevik leader did not take long to wait, so in Yekaterinburg, according to some evidence, members of the Bolshevik combat detachment under the leadership of Y. Sverdlov “constantly terrorized the supporters of the Black Hundreds, killing them at every opportunity.”

As one of Lenin's closest colleagues testifies, Elena Stasova, the leader of the Bolsheviks, having formulated his new tactics, began to insist on its immediate implementation and turned into an "ardent supporter of terror." The greatest concern for terror during this period was shown by the Bolsheviks, whose leader Lenin wrote on October 25, 1916, that the Bolsheviks did not object at all to political assassinations, only individual terror should be combined with mass movements.

Analyzing the terrorist activities of the Bolsheviks during the years of the first Russian revolution, the historian and researcher Anna Geifman comes to the conclusion that for the Bolsheviks, terror turned out to be effective and often used on different levels revolutionary hierarchy tool.

In addition to persons specializing in political assassinations in the name of the revolution, in each of the social democratic organizations there were people engaged in armed robbery, extortion and confiscation of private and state property. Officially, such actions were never encouraged by the leaders of the social democratic organizations, with the exception of the Bolsheviks, whose leader Lenin publicly declared robbery an acceptable means of revolutionary struggle. The Bolsheviks were the only social-democratic organization in Russia that resorted to expropriations (the so-called "exams") in an organized and systematic way.

Lenin was not limited to slogans or simply recognition of the participation of the Bolsheviks in combat activities. Already in October 1905, he announced the need to confiscate public funds and soon began to resort to "exes" in practice. Together with two of his then closest associates, Leonid Krasin and Alexander Bogdanov (Malinovsky), he secretly organized within the Central Committee of the RSDLP (which was dominated by the Mensheviks) a small group, which became known as the "Bolshevik Center", specifically to raise money for the Leninist faction. The existence of this group "was hidden not only from the eyes of the tsarist police, but also from other members of the party." In practice, this meant that the "Bolshevik Center" was an underground body within the party, organizing and controlling expropriations and various forms extortion.

The actions of the Bolshevik militants did not go unnoticed by the leadership of the RSDLP. Martov proposed that the Bolsheviks be expelled from the party for their illegal expropriations. Plekhanov called for a fight against "Bolshevik Bakuninism", many members of the party considered "Lenin and Co" ordinary crooks, and Fyodor Dan called the Bolshevik members of the Central Committee of the RSDLP a company of criminals. Lenin's main goal was to strengthen the position of his supporters within the RSDLP with the help of money, and to bring certain people and even entire organizations to financial dependence on the "Bolshevik Center". The leaders of the Menshevik faction understood that Lenin was operating with huge expropriated sums, subsidizing the Bolshevik-controlled St. Petersburg and Moscow committees, giving the former a thousand rubles a month and the latter five hundred. At the same time, a relatively small part of the proceeds from the Bolshevik robberies ended up in the general party treasury, and the Mensheviks were outraged that they could not force the "Bolshevik Center" to share with the Central Committee of the RSDLP.

The Fifth Congress of the RSDLP provided the Mensheviks with the opportunity to vehemently criticize the Bolsheviks for their "bandit practices". At the congress it was decided to put an end to all participation of the Social Democrats in terrorist activities and expropriations. Martov's calls for the revival of the purity of the revolutionary consciousness made no impression on Lenin, the Bolshevik leader listened to them with undisguised irony and, during the reading of the financial report, when the speaker mentioned a large donation from an anonymous benefactor, X, Lenin sarcastically remarked: “Not from X, but from ex"

Continuing the practice of expropriation, Lenin and his associates in the "Bolshevik Center" also received money from such dubious sources as fictitious marriages and forced indemnities. Finally, Lenin's habit of not honoring his faction's financial obligations angered even his supporters.

In late 1916, even when the tide of revolutionary extremism had almost died down, the Bolshevik leader Lenin argued in his letter of October 25, 1916, that the Bolsheviks were by no means opposed to political assassinations. Lenin, historian Anna Geifman points out, was ready to once again change his theoretical principles, which he did in December 1916: in response to a request from the Bolsheviks from Petrograd about the official position of the party on the issue of terror, Lenin expressed his own: "at this historical moment, terrorist actions are allowed." Lenin's only condition was that, in the eyes of the public, the initiative for the attacks should come not from the party, but from its individual members or small Bolshevik groups in Russia. Lenin also added that he hoped to convince the entire Central Committee of the expediency of his position.

Big number terrorists remained in Russia after the Bolsheviks came to power and participated in the Leninist policy of "Red Terror". A number of founders and major figures of the Soviet state, who had previously participated in extremist actions, continued their activities in a modified form after 1917.

Second emigration (1908 - April 1917)

In early January 1908, Lenin returned to Geneva. The defeat of the revolution of 1905-1907 did not force him to lay down his hands, he considered the repetition of the revolutionary upsurge inevitable. “Broken armies learn well,” Lenin later wrote about this period.

At the end of 1908, Lenin, together with Zinoviev and Kamenev, moved to Paris. It is also here that he first met and became intimately acquainted with Inessa Armand, who became his mistress until her death in 1920.

In 1909 he published his main philosophical work Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. The work was written after Lenin realized how widespread Machism and empirio-criticism were among the Social Democrats.

In 1912, he decisively broke with the Mensheviks, who insisted on the legalization of the RSDLP.

On May 5, 1912, the first issue of the legal Bolshevik newspaper Pravda was published in St. Petersburg. Extremely dissatisfied with the editing of the newspaper (Stalin was the editor-in-chief), Lenin seconded L. B. Kamenev to St. Petersburg. He wrote articles to Pravda almost daily, sent letters in which he gave instructions, advice, and corrected editorial errors. For 2 years, about 270 Leninist articles and notes were published in Pravda. Also in exile, Lenin led the activities of the Bolsheviks in IV State Duma, was a representative of the RSDLP in the Second International, wrote articles on party and national issues, studied philosophy.

When did the first World War Lenin lived on the territory of Austria-Hungary in the Galician town of Poronin, where he arrived at the end of 1912. Because of the suspicion of spying for the Russian government, Lenin was arrested by the Austrian gendarmes. For his release, the help of a socialist deputy of the Austrian parliament, V. Adler, was required. On August 6, 1914, Lenin was released from prison.

After 17 days in Switzerland, Lenin took part in a meeting of a group of Bolshevik émigrés, where he announced his theses on the war. In his opinion, the outbreak of the war was imperialistic, unfair on both sides, alien to the interests of the working people.

At the international conferences in Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916), Lenin, in accordance with the resolution of the Stuttgart Congress and the Basel Manifesto of the Second International, defended his thesis on the need to turn the imperialist war into a civil war and came up with the slogan " revolutionary defeatism».

In February 1916, Lenin moved from Bern to Zurich. Here he finishes his work “Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Popular Essay)”, actively cooperates with the Swiss Social Democrats (including the left-wing radical Fritz Platten), attends all their party meetings. Here he learns from the newspapers about February Revolution in Russia.

Lenin did not expect a revolution in 1917. We know Lenin's public statement in January 1917 in Switzerland that he did not expect to live to see the coming revolution, but that the youth would see it. Lenin, who knew the weakness of the underground revolutionary forces in the capital, regarded the revolution that took place soon as the result of a "conspiracy of the Anglo-French imperialists."

Return to Russia

In April 1917, the German authorities, with the assistance of Fritz Platten, allowed Lenin, along with 35 party comrades, to leave Switzerland by train through Germany. Among them were Krupskaya N.K., Zinoviev G.E., Lilina Z.I., Armand I.F., Sokolnikov G.Ya., Radek K.B. and others.

April - July 1917. "April Theses"

April 3, 1917 Lenin arrives in Russia. The Petrograd Soviet, the majority of which were Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries, organized a solemn meeting for him as a prominent fighter against the autocracy. The next day, April 4, Lenin addressed the Bolsheviks with a report, the abstracts of which were published in Pravda only on April 7, when Lenin and Zinoviev joined the editorial board of Pravda, since, according to V. M. Molotov, new the ideas of the leader seemed too radical even to close associates. These were the famous "April Theses". In this report, Lenin sharply opposed the sentiments that prevailed in Russia among the Social Democracy in general and the Bolsheviks in particular, and which boiled down to the idea of ​​expanding the bourgeois-democratic revolution, supporting the Provisional Government and defending the revolutionary fatherland in the war, which changed its character with the fall of the autocracy. Lenin announced the slogans: "No support for the Provisional Government" and "all power to the Soviets"; he proclaimed a course towards the development of the bourgeois revolution into a proletarian one, putting forward the goal of overthrowing the bourgeoisie and transferring power to the Soviets and the proletariat, followed by the liquidation of the army, police and bureaucracy. Finally, he demanded extensive anti-war propaganda, since, according to him, the war on the part of the Provisional Government continued to have an imperialist and "predatory" character. Taking control of the RSDLP (b) into his own hands, Lenin implements this plan. From April to July 1917, he wrote more than 170 articles, brochures, draft resolutions of the Bolshevik conferences and the Central Committee of the party, appeals.

Press reaction

Despite the fact that the Menshevik organ, the newspaper Rabochaya Gazeta, when writing about the arrival of the Bolshevik leader in Russia, assessed this visit as the appearance of a "danger from the left flank", the newspaper Rech - the official work of the Minister of Foreign Affairs P. N. Milyukov - according to historian of the Russian revolution S.P. Melgunov, spoke in a positive light about the arrival of Lenin, and that now not only Plekhanov will fight for the ideas of the socialist parties.

July - October 1917

On July 5, during the uprising, the Provisional Government made public the information it had about the connections of the Bolsheviks with the Germans. On July 20 (7), the Provisional Government ordered the arrest of Lenin and a number of prominent Bolsheviks on charges of high treason and organizing an armed uprising. Lenin goes underground again. In Petrograd, he had to change 17 secret apartments, after which, until August 21 (8), 1917, he, along with Zinoviev, hid not far from Petrograd - in a hut on Lake Razliv. In August, on the steam locomotive N-293, he moves to the Grand Duchy of Finland, where he lives until early October in Yalkala, Helsingfors and Vyborg.

October Revolution of 1917

Lenin arrived in Smolny and began to lead the uprising, the direct organizer of which was the chairman Petrograd Soviet L. D. Trotsky. It took 2 days to overthrow the government of A.F. Kerensky. November 7 (October 25) Lenin wrote an appeal for the overthrow of the Provisional Government. On the same day, at the opening of the II All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin's decrees on peace and land were adopted and a government was formed - the Council of People's Commissars, headed by Lenin. January 5, 1918 opened constituent Assembly, in which the Social Revolutionaries received the majority, representing the interests of the peasants, who at that time made up 90% of the country's population. Lenin, with the support of the Left SRs, put the Constituent Assembly before a choice: ratify the power of the Soviets and the decrees of the Bolshevik government, or disperse. The Constituent Assembly, which did not agree with this formulation of the question, was forcibly dissolved.

For 124 days of the "Smolnin period" Lenin wrote over 110 articles, draft decrees and resolutions, delivered over 70 reports and speeches, wrote about 120 letters, telegrams and notes, participated in editing more than 40 state and party documents. The working day of the chairman of the Council of People's Commissars lasted 15-18 hours. During this period, Lenin presided over 77 meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, led 26 meetings and meetings of the Central Committee, participated in 17 meetings of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and its Presidium, in the preparation and holding of 6 various All-Russian Congresses of Workers. After the Central Committee of the Party and the Soviet government moved from Petrograd to Moscow, on March 11, 1918, Lenin lived and worked in Moscow. Lenin's personal apartment and office were located in the Kremlin, on the third floor of the former Senate building.

After the Revolution and during the Civil War (1917-1921)

On January 15 (28), 1918, Lenin signs the decree of the Council of People's Commissars on the creation of the Red Army. In accordance with the Peace Decree, it was necessary to withdraw from the world war. Despite the opposition of the left communists and L. D. Trotsky, Lenin achieved the conclusion of the Brest Peace Treaty with Germany on March 3, 1918, the Left Social Revolutionaries, in protest against the signing and ratification of the Brest Peace Treaty, withdrew from the Soviet government. March 10-11, fearing the capture of Petrograd German troops, at the suggestion of Lenin, the Council of People's Commissars and the Central Committee of the RCP (b) moved to Moscow, which became the new capital Soviet Russia. On July 6, two Left Social Revolutionaries, members of the Cheka Yakov Blyumkin and Nikolai Andreev, presenting the mandates of the Cheka, went to the German embassy in Moscow and killed the ambassador, Count Wilhelm von Mirbach. This is a provocation to cause an aggravation of relations with Germany, up to the war. And there was already a threat that German military units would be sent to Moscow. Right there - the Left Socialist-Revolutionary rebellion. In a word, everything balances on the edge. Lenin is making great efforts to somehow smooth out the imposed Soviet-German conflict, to avoid a clash. On July 16, the last Russian Emperor Nicholas II and his entire family, along with servants, were shot in Yekaterinburg.

In his memoirs, Trotsky accuses Lenin of organizing the execution of the royal family:

My next visit to Moscow fell after the fall of Yekaterinburg. In a conversation with Sverdlov, I asked in passing:

Senior Special Investigator important matters Prosecutor General's Office In Russia, Vladimir Solovyov, who led the investigation of the criminal case into the death of the royal family, found that in the minutes of the meeting of the Council of People's Commissars, at which Sverdlov announced the decision of the Ural Council regarding the execution of the royal family, the name of Trotsky appeared among those present. So, he later composed that conversation “after his arrival from the front” with Sverdlov about Lenin. Solovyov came to the conclusion that Lenin was against the execution of the royal family, and the execution itself was organized by all the same Left Socialist-Revolutionaries, who had tremendous influence in the Ural Council, in order to disrupt the Brest peace between Soviet Russia and Kaiser Germany. The Germans after the February Revolution, despite the war with Russia, were worried about the fate of the Russian imperial family, because the wife of Nicholas II, Alexandra Feodorovna, was German, and their daughters were both Russian princesses and German princesses. The spirit of the Great French Revolution with the then execution of the king and queen hovered over the heads of the Ural Social Revolutionaries and the local Bolsheviks who joined them, the leaders of the Ural Council (Alexander Beloborodov, Yakov Yurovsky, Philip Goloshchekin). Lenin became, in a certain sense, a hostage to the radicalism and obsession of the leaders of the Ural Council. To publish the "feat" of the Urals - the murder of German princesses and find themselves between a rock and a hard place - between the White Guards and the Germans? Information about the death of the entire royal family and servants was hidden for years. Referring to the fake of Trotsky, the famous Russian director Gleb Panfilov made the film “The Romanovs. The Crowned Family, where the organizer of the execution of the royal family is Lenin, who was played by the People's Artist of Russia Alexander Filippenko.

On August 30, 1918, an assassination attempt was made on Lenin, according to official version- SR Fanny Kaplan, which led to a serious wound.

As chairman of the Council of People's Commissars of the RSFSR, from November 1917 to December 1920, Lenin held 375 meetings of the Soviet government out of 406. From December 1918 to February 1920, out of 101 meetings of the Council of Workers 'and Peasants' Defense, only two did not chair. In 1919, V. I. Lenin directed the work of 14 plenums of the Central Committee and 40 meetings of the Politburo, at which military issues were discussed. From November 1917 to November 1920, V. I. Lenin wrote over 600 letters and telegrams on various issues of the defense of the Soviet state, spoke at rallies over 200 times.

Lenin devoted considerable attention to the development of the country's economy. Lenin believed that in order to restore the economy destroyed by the war, it was necessary to organize the state into a "nationwide, state "syndicate"". Soon after the revolution, Lenin set the task for scientists to develop a plan for the reorganization of industry and the economic revival of Russia, and also contributed to the development of the country's science.

In 1919, on the initiative of Lenin, the Communist International was created.

Role in the Red Terror

During civil war in Russia, Lenin was one of the main organizers of the policy of the Red Terror pursued by the Bolsheviks, carried out directly on his instructions. These Leninist instructions ordered to start mass terror, organize executions, isolate the unreliable in concentration camps, and carry out other emergency measures. On August 9, 1918, Lenin sent instructions to the Penza Provincial Executive Committee, where he wrote: “It is necessary to carry out a merciless mass terror against the kulaks, priests and White Guards; doubtful ones to be locked up in a concentration camp outside the city.” On August 10, 1918, Lenin sent a telegram about the suppression of the kulak uprising in the Penza province, in which he called for 100 kulaks to be hanged, all their bread taken away and hostages appointed.

A description of the ways to put into practice the instructions of the Bolshevik leader on the massive Red Terror is presented in the acts, investigations, certificates, summaries and other materials of the Special Commission for Investigating the Atrocities of the Bolsheviks.

The KGB history textbook states that Lenin spoke to the Cheka, received Chekists, was interested in the progress of operational developments and investigations, and gave instructions on specific cases. When the Chekists fabricated the Whirlwind case in 1921, Lenin personally participated in the operation, certifying with his signature the false mandate of an agent provocateur of the Cheka.

In mid-August 1920, in connection with the receipt of information that in Estonia and Latvia, with which Soviet Russia concluded peace treaties, there is a record of volunteers in anti-Bolshevik detachments, Lenin in a letter to E. M. Sklyansky called for "hanging kulaks, priests, landlords." In another letter, he wrote about the admissibility of "imprisoning several tens or hundreds of instigators, guilty or innocent" in order to save the lives of "thousands of Red Army soldiers and workers."

Even after the end of the Civil War, in 1922, V. I. Lenin declared the impossibility of ending terror and the need for its legislative regulation.

In Soviet historiography, this problem was not raised, but at present it is being studied not only by foreign, but also by domestic historians.

The doctors historical sciences Yu. G. Felshtinsky and G. I. Chernyavsky explain in their work why only today it becomes obvious that the image of the Bolshevik leader, traditional for Soviet historiography, does not correspond to reality:

... Now, when the veil of secrecy has been removed from the Lenin archival Fund in the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History (RGASPI) and the first collections of previously unpublished manuscripts and speeches of Lenin have appeared, it becomes even more obvious that the textbook image of a wise state leader and thinker who , allegedly only thinking about the welfare of the people, was a cover for the real appearance of a totalitarian dictator who cared only about strengthening the power of his party and his own power, ready to commit any crimes in the name of this goal, tirelessly and hysterically repeating calls to shoot, hang, take hostages etc. The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archives

The textbook of 2007 on the history of Russia says:

Foreign policy

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.

After the end of the civil war foreign policy Lenin was unsuccessful. Of the great powers, only Germany established with the USSR diplomatic relations until the death of Lenin, signing the Rappal Treaty with the RSFSR (1922). Peace treaties were concluded and diplomatic relations were established with a number of border states: Finland (1920), Estonia (1920), Poland (1921), Turkey (1921), Iran (1921), Mongolia (1921).

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 of support 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 (NEP) 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 enterprises state type, on electrification (with the participation of Lenin, a special commission was created to develop a project for the electrification of Russia - GOELRO), on the development of cooperation. Lenin believed that in anticipation of the world proletarian revolution By keeping all large-scale industry in the hands of the state, it is necessary to build socialism little by little in one country. All this, in his opinion, could contribute to putting a backward Soviet country on par with the most developed European countries.

Lenin was one of the initiators of the campaign to confiscate church valuables, which 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 qualifying the events in Shuya as just one of the manifestations of general plan resistance to the decree of Soviet power on the part of "the most influential group of the Black Hundred clergy." On March 30, at a meeting of the Politburo, on the recommendations of Lenin, a plan was adopted to destroy the church organization.

Lenin contributed to the establishment of a one-party system in the country and the spread of atheistic views. In 1922, on his recommendations, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was created.

In 1923, shortly before his death, Lenin wrote his last works: “On cooperation”, “How can we reorganize the worker’s committee”, “Better less, but better”, in which he offers his vision of the economic policy of the Soviet state and measures to improve work state apparatus and parties. On January 4, 1923, V. I. Lenin dictated the so-called “Addendum 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.

Illness and death. Question about cause of death

The consequences of the injury and overload, according to the surgeon Yu. M. Lopukhin, led Lenin to a serious illness. 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. For treatment, leading German specialists in nervous diseases. Lenin's chief physician from December 1922 until his death in 1924 was Otfried Förster. Lenin's last public speech took place on November 20, 1922, at the plenum of the Moscow Soviet. On December 16, 1922, his health deteriorated sharply again, and in May 1923, due to illness, he moved to the Gorki estate near Moscow. In Moscow last time Lenin was 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 the notes of N. Sukhanov)”, “How can we reorganize the Rabkrin (Proposal to the XII Party Congress)”, “Better less, but better”.

Lenin's "Letter to the Congress" (1922) dictated by Lenin is often regarded as Lenin's testament. Some believe that this letter contained the real testament of Lenin, from which Stalin later deviated. Supporters of this point of view believe that if the country had developed along the true Leninist path, many problems would not have arisen.

In January 1924, in Lenin's state of health, a sudden onset sharp deterioration; On January 21, 1924, at 6:50 p.m., he died.

The widespread belief that Lenin was ill with syphilis, which he allegedly contracted in Europe, was never officially confirmed by the Soviet or Russian authorities.

The official conclusion on the cause of death in the autopsy protocol read: “The basis of the disease of the deceased is widespread atherosclerosis of the vessels due to their premature wear (Abnutzungssclerose). 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 into the soft meninges in the region of the quadrigemina."

According to Alexander Grudinkin, rumors about syphilis arose due to the fact that advanced syphilis was one of the preliminary diagnoses put forward by doctors at the beginning of the disease; Lenin himself also did not rule out such a possibility and took salvarsan, and in 1923 - preparations based on mercury and bismuth.

Lenin's main ideas

Historiosophical analysis of contemporary capitalism

Communism, socialism and the dictatorship of the proletariat

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, but not yet abundance wealth to meet the needs of all members of society.

In 1920, in his speech "The Tasks of the Youth Unions", Lenin stated that communism would be built in the years 1930-1950.

Attitude towards the imperialist war and revolutionary defeatism

According to Lenin, the First World War was of an imperialist nature, was unfair for all 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 anti-war movement, which came out with pacifist slogans for peace, Lenin considered such slogans 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 was to vote in parliament against military loans to the government, to create and strengthen revolutionary organizations among the workers and soldiers, to combat government patriotic propaganda, and to support 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 initial victory of the revolution in one country

In an article "On the Slogan of a United States of Europe" in 1915, Lenin wrote that the revolution would not necessarily take place all over the world at the same time, as Marx believed. It can first occur in one, separately taken country. This country will then help the revolution in other countries.

On class morality

There is no universal morality, but only class morality. Each class enforces its own morality, its own moral values. The morality of the proletariat is morally that which meets the interests of the proletariat (“Our morality is completely subordinated to the interests class struggle the proletariat. Our morality is derived from the interests of the class struggle of the proletariat.

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.

After death

The fate of Lenin's body

On January 23, the coffin with the body of Lenin was transported to Moscow and installed in the Hall of Columns. The official farewell took place over five days and nights. On January 27, the coffin with the embalmed body of Lenin was placed in the Mausoleum specially built on Red Square (architect A. V. Shchusev).

In 1923, the Central Committee of the RCP(b) created the Institute of V. I. Lenin, and in 1932, as a result of its merger with the Institute of K. Marx and F. Engels, a single Institute Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU). More than 30 thousand documents are stored in the Central Party Archive of this institute, the author of which is V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin).

During the Great Patriotic War, Lenin's body was evacuated from the Moscow Mausoleum to Tyumen, where it was kept in the building of the current Tyumen State Agricultural Academy. The Mausoleum itself was disguised as a mansion.

After the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991, some political parties expressed the opinion that it was necessary to remove Lenin's body and brain from the Mausoleum and bury it (the brain is stored separately, at the Brain Institute, including in the form of tens of thousands of histological preparations). Statements about the removal of Lenin's body from the Mausoleum, as well as the elimination of memorial burials near the Kremlin wall, are periodically heard to this day from various Russian statesmen, political parties and forces, representatives of religious organizations.

Attitude towards Lenin after death. Grade

The name and ideas of V. I. Lenin were glorified in the USSR along with the October Revolution and I. V. Stalin (until the XX Congress of the CPSU). On January 26, 1924, after the death of Lenin, the 2nd All-Union Congress of Soviets granted the request of the Petrograd Soviet to rename Petrograd to Leningrad. The delegation of the city (about 1 thousand people) participated in Lenin's funeral in Moscow. Cities, towns and collective farms were named after Lenin. In every city there was a monument to Lenin. Numerous stories about "grandfather Lenin" were written for children, including Stories about Lenin written by Mikhail Zoshchenko, partly based on the memoirs of his sister Anna Ulyanova. Even his driver Gil wrote memoirs about Lenin.

The cult of Lenin began to take shape during his lifetime through party propaganda and means mass media. In 1918 the city of Taldom was renamed into Leninsk, and in 1923 the highest educational institutions in the USSR they received the name of Lenin.

In the 1930s, villages, streets and squares of cities, premises educational institutions, assembly halls of factories began to fill tens of thousands of busts and monuments to Lenin, among which, along with works of Soviet art, were typical “objects of worship” devoid of artistic value. There were mass campaigns of renaming various objects and giving them, contrary to the wishes of N. Krupskaya, the name of Lenin. The Order of Lenin became the highest state award. Sometimes the opinion is expressed that such actions were coordinated by the Stalinist leadership in the context of the formation of Stalin's personality cult with the aim of usurping power and declaring Stalin the successor and worthy disciple of Lenin.

After the collapse of the USSR, the attitude towards Lenin among the population of the Russian Federation became differentiated; according to a poll by FOM, in 1999, 65% of the Russian population considered Lenin's role in the history of Russia positive, 23% - negative, 13% found it difficult to answer. Four years later, in April 2003, the FOM conducted a similar survey - this time 58% positively assessed the role of Lenin, 17% negatively, and the number of those who found it difficult to answer increased to 24%, in connection with which the FOM noted a trend.

Lenin in culture, art and language

In the USSR, a lot of memoirs, poems, poems, short stories, novels and novels about Lenin were published. Many films about Lenin were also made. In Soviet times, the opportunity to play Lenin in the cinema was considered for the actor a sign of high trust provided by the leadership of the CPSU.

Monuments to Lenin have become an integral part of Soviet tradition monumental art. After the collapse of the USSR, many monuments to Lenin were dismantled by the authorities or destroyed by various individuals.

Shortly after the rise of the USSR, a cycle of anecdotes about Lenin arose. These anecdotes are still in circulation today.

Lenin belongs to many statements that have become popular expressions. At the same time, a number of statements attributed to Lenin do not belong to him, but first appeared in literary works and cinema. These statements became widespread in the political and everyday languages ​​of the USSR and post-Soviet Russia. Such phrases include, for example, the words “We will go the other way”, allegedly uttered by him in connection with the execution of his elder brother, the phrase “There is such a party!”, pronounced by him at the First All-Russian Congress of Soviets, or the characterization “Political prostitute”.

Lenin's awards

Official lifetime award

The only official state award that V. I. Lenin was awarded was the Order of Labor of the Khorezm People's Socialist Republic (1922).

Other state awards, both the RSFSR and the USSR, and foreign countries, Lenin did not have.

Titles and awards

In 1917, Norway took the initiative to award the Nobel Peace Prize to Vladimir Lenin, with the wording "For the triumph of the ideas of peace", as a response to the "Decree on Peace" issued in Soviet Russia, which led Russia out of the First World War separately. The Nobel Committee rejected this proposal due to the delay of the application by the deadline - February 1, 1918, however, it decided that the committee would not object to awarding the Nobel Peace Prize to V. I. Lenin if the existing Russian government establishes peace and calmness in the country (as you know, the path to establishing peace in Russia was blocked by the Civil War, which began in 1918). Lenin's idea of ​​turning the imperialist war into a civil war was formulated in his work "Socialism and War", written back in July-August 1915.

In 1919, by order of the Revolutionary Military Council of the Republic, V. I. Lenin was admitted to the honorary Red Army soldiers of the 1st department of the 1st platoon of the 1st company of the 195th Yeysk rifle regiment.

Posthumous awards

On January 22, 1924, N.P. Gorbunov, Lenin's secretary, removed the Order of the Red Banner (No. 4274) from his jacket and pinned it to the jacket of the already deceased Lenin. This award was on the body of Lenin until 1943, and Gorbunov himself received a duplicate of the order in 1930. According to some reports, N. I. Podvoisky did the same, standing in the guard of honor at the coffin of Lenin. 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. Currently, the orders of N.P. Gorbunov and the Military Academy are kept in the Lenin Museum in Moscow.

The fact of the presence of the order on the chest of the deceased Lenin during the funeral ceremony in the Hall of Columns of the House of Unions was captured in V. Inber's poem "Five Nights and Days (On the Death of Lenin)".

Personality of Lenin

British historian Helen Rappaport, who wrote a book about Lenin, described him as "demanding", "punctual", "neat", "brilliant" and "very clean" in everyday life. At the same time, Lenin is described as "very authoritarian", "very inflexible", he "did not tolerate disagreement with his opinion", "ruthless", "cruel". It is indicated that friendship for Lenin was secondary in relation to politics. Rappaport points out that Lenin "changed his party tactics depending on the circumstances and political advantage."

Aliases of Lenin

At the end of 1901, Vladimir Ulyanov got the pseudonym "N. Lenin”, with which, in particular, he signed his printed works during this period. Abroad, the initial "N" is usually deciphered as "Nikolai", although in reality this initial was not deciphered in any of Lenin's lifetime publications. There were many versions about the origin of this pseudonym. For example, toponymic - along the Siberian river Lena.

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.

The Lenin clan can be traced back to the Cossack Posnik, who in the 17th century was awarded the nobility and the surname Lenin for his services related to the conquest of Siberia and the creation of winter quarters along the Lena River. Numerous descendants of him distinguished themselves more than once both in military and civil service. One of them, Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin, having risen to the rank of State Councilor, retired and in the 80s of the XIX century settled in the Yaroslavl province, where he died in 1902. His children, who sympathized with the emerging social democratic movement in Russia, were well acquainted with Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and, after the death of their father, gave Vladimir Ulyanov his passport, albeit with a corrected date of birth. There is a version that Vladimir Ilyich got a passport back in the spring of 1900, when Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin himself was still alive.

According to the family version of the Ulyanovs, the pseudonym of Vladimir Ilyich comes from the name of the Lena River. So, Olga Dmitrievna Ulyanova, the niece of V. I. Lenin and the daughter of his brother D. I. Ulyanov, acting as an author studying the life of the Ulyanov family, writes in defense of this version based on the stories of her father:

After V. I. Lenin came to power, the official party and government documents signed " V. I. Ulyanov (Lenin)».

He also had other pseudonyms: V. Ilyin, V. Frey, Iv. Petrov, K. Tulin, Karpov, Starik and others.

Works of Lenin

Works of Lenin

• What are "friends of the people" and how do they fight against the Social Democrats? (1894);
• "On a Characterization of Economic Romanticism", (1897)
• Development of capitalism in Russia (1899);
• What to do? (1902)
• One step forward, two steps back (1904);
• Party organization and party literature (1905);
• Materialism and Empiriocriticism (1909);
• Three Sources and Three Components of Marxism (1913);
• On the Right of Nations to Self-Determination (1914);
• Karl Marx (a short biographical sketch outlining Marxism) (1914);
• Socialism and War (1915);
• Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism (Popular Essay) (1916);
• State and Revolution (1917);
• On dual power (1917);
• How to Organize a Competition (1918);
• Great Initiative (1919);
• Childhood disease of "leftism" in communism (1920);
• Tasks of youth unions (1920);
• On the food tax (1921);
• Pages from a diary, About cooperation (1923);
• On the pogrom persecution of Jews (1924);
• What is Soviet power?;
• On Left Childishness and Petty-Bourgeoisness (1918);
• About our revolution

Speeches recorded on gramophone records

In 1919-1921. V. I. Lenin recorded 16 speeches on gramophone records. For three sessions in March 1919 (on the 19th, 23rd and 31st), 8 recordings were made, which became the most famous and were published in ten thousand copies, including “The Third Communist International”, “Appeal to the Red Army” (2 parts recorded separately) and the especially popular "What is Soviet power?", which was considered the most successful in technical terms.

During the next recording session on April 5, 1920, 3 speeches were recorded - “On work for transport”, part 1 and part 2, “On labor discipline” and “How to save the working people forever from the oppression of landlords and capitalists.” Another entry, most likely dedicated to the beginning Polish war, was damaged and lost in the same 1920.

Five speeches recorded during the last session on April 25, 1921, turned out to be technically unsuitable for mass production - in connection with the departure of a foreign specialist, engineer A. Kybart, to Germany. These gramophone records remained unknown for a long time, four of them were found in 1970. Of these, only three were restored and released for the first time on long-playing discs - one of the two speeches “On Tax in Kind”, “On Consumer and Industrial Cooperation” and “Non-Party and Soviet power "(Firma" Melodiya ", M00 46623-24, 1986).

In addition to the second speech “On the Tax in Kind”, which has not been found, the entry of 1921 “On Concessions and the Development of Capitalism” has not yet been published. The first part of the speech "On work for transport" has not been reprinted since 1929, and the speech "On the pogrom persecution of Jews" has not appeared on discs since the late 1930s.

Descendants

Lenin's niece (daughter of his younger brother Olga Dmitrievna Ulyanova), the last direct descendant of the Ulyanov family, died in Moscow at the age of 90.

• During his famous speech at the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets, Lenin did not have a beard (conspiracy), although Vladimir Serov's iconic painting depicts him with a traditional beard.
• Nizhny Novgorod residents joke (and not without reason) that Lenin was conceived in Nizhny Novgorod, since Ilya Ulyanov was there as a teacher at the provincial male gymnasium until the end of 1869, and his son Vladimir was born in Simbirsk in the spring of 1870.
• On June 16, 1921, Bernard Shaw sent the book Back to Methuselah to Lenin. On the title page, he wrote: "To Nikolai Lenin, the only statesman in Europe who has the talent, character and knowledge corresponding to his responsible position". Lenin subsequently left numerous notes in the margins of the manuscript, testifying to his keen interest in the work of Bernard Shaw.
• Albert Einstein wrote about Lenin: “I respect in Lenin a man who, with complete selflessness, gave all his strength to the implementation of social justice. His method seems inappropriate to me. But one thing is certain: people like him preserve and renew the conscience of mankind..
• On January 19, 1919, the car that Lenin and his sister were in was attacked by a group of bandits led by the famous Moscow raider Yakov Koshelkov. The bandits got everyone out of the car and stole it. Subsequently, having learned about who was in their hands, they tried to return and take Lenin hostage, but by that time the latter had already fled.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Ulyanov) was born on April 10 (April 22, according to a new style), 1870 in the city of Simbirsk ( modern name city ​​of Ulyanovsk) in the family of the inspector of public schools Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831–1886). National composition family V.I. Lenin is heterogeneous, it is possible to distinguish several main nationalities in it - Russians, Jews, Germans, Swedes and even Kalmyks and Chuvashs. Mother V.I. Lenina Maria Alexandrovna Blank (1835-1916) of his father before the name change was called Israel Moishevich Blank, and after baptism Alexander Dmitrievich Blank. All members of the V.I. Lenin were from a non-poor estate, landowners, nobles. Senior brother V.I. Lenin, Alexander, was conceived from one of the great princes in the state, and all his life he hoped, thanks to his native blood, to break through to the court, but to no avail. This further gave rise to hatred of the king and tsarist regime, and this hatred was organically transferred to Volodya Ulyanov-Lenin. With Volodya Ulyanov, it turned out as always in Russia - the father is Chuvash, the mother is Jewish, and the son, oddly enough, turned out to be Russian.

The life of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin at the beginning was simple and ordinary, unless, of course, you count the fact that, according to the famous humorist Zoshchenko, Volodya was an honest and truthful, but mischievous boy and lied only once, having cut down a crystal decanter.

Volodya Ulyanov studied in 1879-1887 at the Simbirsk gymnasium, from which he graduated with a gold medal. In 1887, his older brother Alexander was executed for attempting to assassinate the tsar. Young Lenin thought about this fact for a long time and decided We would go the other way. At first, the interpreters of Lenin's works thought that this phrase meant that we would give up such individual terror, and in principle they turned out to be right. When Lenin came to power, for an attempt on the rulers, they began not only to execute the assassin, but also to destroy his entire family and sometimes even all his work colleagues and some of the inhabitants who were lucky enough to live next to him. It was in this other way that Lenin entered history. But let us return again to the biography. From 1888 to 1900, Lenin was engaged in all sorts of different activities, for example, he worked as a lawyer, defending the proletarians in various petty cases of stealing a sack of grain and other small things. But again, remembering that We will go a different way after the revolution, he abolished the institution of lawyers as a bourgeois relic, and began to shoot for stealing not only a sack of grain, but also several spikelets.

Realizing that nothing shines in the civil service, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin took up revolutionary activities, began to communicate with underground workers, and as a result, after a short exile in Russia, he had to emigrate to Germany, which lasted from 1900 to 1905. During these years, he finally got together and paraphrased the famous saying of Archimedes about the fulcrum and the earth. He did say Give us an organization of revolutionaries and we will turn Russia over!. The beautiful is seen from afar, because Lenin, being indifferent to Russia, constantly hung around abroad. For example, in 1905, during the revolution, he was in Switzerland, and in order not to miss his piece of the pie, he immediately came to Russia in a branded cap to start teaching workers how to live. Realizing that it was becoming dangerous in Russia, Lenin hid in Finland in 1906 and went on to ride around Europe.

Walking around Europe, Switzerland and Paris, Volodya Ulyanov met Inessa Armand and realized that it was time to write his main philosophical work, Materialism and Empirio-Criticism. Inessa Armand used to complain to Lenin: “They wanted to send me another 100 miles to the north, to the village of Koidu. But firstly, there are no politicians there at all, and secondly, there, they say, the whole village is infected with syphilis, but this doesn’t smile at me very much.” So meeting with different women, and in a fit of passion, writing letters and articles to the oppressed people, regularly going to prison and getting out on big bail, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, despite the First World War, walked around Europe until 1917. Vladimir Ilyich Lenin went so far into his theoretical research. that the revolution of 1917 again came as a complete surprise, Lenin generally learned about this revolution from the newspapers. Trying to be in time again for the section of the pie, Lenin went to Russia in a sealed carriage. despite all the haste, having been on the road from February to April, Lenin finally came to Russia. It’s hard to disagree with him, in February it’s damn cold in Russia ...

In Russia, Lenin began to actively destroy the army, the state system and all institutions of power. at the same time, he tries to be at the head of all spontaneous actions of the workers. At this time, he spent the night everywhere trying to hide from government gendarmes. I even had to live in a hut on Lake Rozliv. But on this issue, historians still disagree. Some claim that Lenin was hiding in Rozliv with Inessa Armand from Nadezhda Krupskaya, other historians claim that Lenin was hiding in Rozliv together with Zinoviev from both Inessa Armand and Nadezhna Krupskaya, still others claim that no one was hiding from anyone, just fishing there is excellent in summer. One way or another, with the first cold weather, Lenin left for Finland. The fact that he rode around Europe with such ease then turned out sideways to all the inhabitants of Russia - after the revolution, travel outside the country was prohibited. Some researchers think that Lenin decided to joke like that while sitting in a hut in Razliv.

After the revolution of 1917, Lenin became the head of the RCP(b) and began to conduct experiments. War communism was introduced in the country, then in 1921 it was replaced by the NEP - the New Economic Policy. Tired of such work, Lenin wrote that Stalin was not very good man and January 21, 1924 at 6 o'clock. 50 min. evening retired forever. For services to the fatherland, the body of V.I. Lenin was put on public display in the mausoleum of V.I. Lenin. Since then, he has directed the country's actions from there.

Throughout his life, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, from the time he learned to write until the time he forgot how to write (1922), wrote a lot of smart and not very thoughts, in total it turned out to be 55 volumes of the complete Collected Works, which are published with slight reductions on this site. One of the main thoughts that runs through all his works is the need to quickly seize railway stations, mail, telegraph, telephone and televisions. In addition, realizing that after the revolution the level of education and culture in the country fell catastrophically, V.I. Lenin says that of all the arts, he understands only cinema. But this all happened after Eisenstein painted the flag with a red felt-tip pen at a speed of 24 frames per second in the film about the battleship Potemkin. And when Lenin saw how Eisenstein makes 24 frames per second with a felt-tip pen, he immediately decided that Cinema is the most understandable of all arts.

In Simbirsk (now Ulyanovsk) in the family of an inspector of public schools, who became a hereditary nobleman.

Elder brother, Alexander, participated in populist movement, in May of the year he was executed for preparing an assassination attempt on the king.

In 1887, Vladimir Ulyanov graduated from the Simbirsk gymnasium with a gold medal, was admitted to Kazan University, but three months after admission was expelled for participating in student riots. In 1891, Ulyanov externally graduated from the law faculty of St. Petersburg University, after which he worked in Samara as an assistant to a barrister. In August 1893 he moved to St. Petersburg, where he joined the Marxist circle of students at the Technological Institute. In April 1895, Vladimir Ulyanov went abroad and got acquainted with the Emancipation of Labor group. In the autumn of the same year, on the initiative and under the leadership of Lenin, the Marxist circles of St. Petersburg united into a single "Union of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class." In December 1985, Lenin was arrested by the police. He spent more than a year in prison, then was sent for three years to the village of Shushenskoye, Minusinsk district, Krasnoyarsk Territory, under open police supervision. In 1898, the participants of the "Union" held the first congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in Minsk.

While in exile, Vladimir Ulyanov continued the theoretical and organizational revolutionary activity. In 1897 he published the work "The Development of Capitalism in Russia", where he tried to challenge the views of the populists on socio-economic relations in the country and thereby prove that Russia was brewing bourgeois revolution. He got acquainted with the works of the leading theoretician of German social democracy, Karl Kautsky, from whom he borrowed the idea of ​​organizing the Russian Marxist movement in the form of a centralized "new type" party.

After the end of his exile in January 1900, he went abroad (for the next five years he lived in Munich, London and Geneva). Together with Georgy Plekhanov, his associates Vera Zasulich and Pavel Axelrod, as well as his friend Julius Martov, Ulyanov began publishing the social democratic newspaper Iskra.

From 1901, he began to use the pseudonym "Lenin" and from then on was known in the party under this name.

From 1905 to 1907, Lenin lived illegally in St. Petersburg, exercising leadership of the left forces. From 1907 to 1917, Lenin was in exile, where he defended his political views in the Second International. In 1912, Lenin and like-minded people separated from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), in fact, founding their own - the Bolshevik. The new party published the newspaper Pravda.

At the beginning of the First World War, while on the territory of Austria-Hungary, Lenin was arrested on suspicion of spying for the Russian government, but thanks to the participation of the Austrian Social Democrats, he was released, after which he left for Switzerland.

In the spring of 1917, Lenin returned to Russia. On April 4, 1917, the day after his arrival in Petrograd, he delivered the so-called " April theses", where he outlined the program for the transition from the bourgeois-democratic revolution to the socialist one, and also began preparations for an armed uprising and the overthrow of the Provisional Government.

In early October 1917, Lenin illegally moved from Vyborg to Petrograd. On October 23, at a meeting of the Central Committee (CC) of the RSDLP (b), at its proposal, a resolution was adopted on armed uprising. On November 6, in a letter to the Central Committee, Lenin demanded an immediate offensive, the arrest of the Provisional Government and the seizure of power. In the evening, he illegally arrived in Smolny to directly lead the armed uprising. The next day, November 7 (October 25, according to the old style), 1917, an uprising took place in Petrograd and the Bolsheviks seized state power. At the meeting of the Second All-Russian Congress of Soviets that opened in the evening, the Soviet government was proclaimed - the Council of People's Commissars (SNK), whose chairman was Vladimir Lenin. The congress adopted the first decrees prepared by Lenin: on the cessation of the war and on the transfer of private land for the use of the working people.

On the initiative of Lenin, in 1918 the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was concluded with Germany.

After the transfer of the capital from Petrograd to Moscow in March 1918, Lenin lived and worked in Moscow. His personal apartment and office were located in the Kremlin, on the third floor of the former Senate building. Lenin was elected to the Moscow Soviet.

In the spring of 1918, Lenin's government began the fight against the opposition by closing down anarchist and socialist workers' organizations; in July 1918, Lenin led the suppression of the armed uprising of the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries.

The confrontation intensified during the civil war, the Socialist-Revolutionaries, Left Socialist-Revolutionaries and anarchists, in turn, attacked the leaders of the Bolshevik regime; On August 30, 1918, an attempt was made on Lenin's life.

With the end of the Civil War and the cessation of military intervention in 1922, the process of restoring the national economy of the country began. To this end, at the insistence of Lenin "war communism", the food appropriation was replaced by a food tax. Lenin introduced the so-called New Economic Policy (NEP), which allowed private free trade. At the same time, he insisted on the development of state-type enterprises, on electrification, and on the development of cooperation.

In May and December 1922, Lenin suffered two strokes, but continued to lead the state. The third stroke, which followed in March 1923, left him practically incapacitated.

Vladimir Lenin died on January 21, 1924 in the village of Gorki near Moscow. On January 23, the coffin with his body was transported to Moscow and installed in the Hall of Columns. The official farewell took place over five days. On January 27, 1924, the coffin with the embalmed body of Lenin was placed in the Mausoleum, specially built on Red Square, designed by the architect Alexei Shchusev. The body of the leader is in a transparent sarcophagus, which was made according to the plans and drawings of engineer Kurochkin, the creator of ruby ​​glass for the Kremlin stars.

In the years Soviet power memorial plaques were erected on various buildings associated with Lenin's activities, and monuments to the leader were erected in the cities. The following were established: the Order of Lenin (1930), the Lenin Prize (1925), the Lenin Prizes for achievements in the field of science, technology, literature, art, architecture (1957). In 1924-1991, the Central Lenin Museum worked in Moscow. A number of enterprises, institutions and educational institutions were named after Lenin.

In 1923, the Central Committee of the RCP(b) created the Institute of V.I. Marxism-Leninism under the Central Committee of the CPSU). The Central Party Archive of this institute (now the Russian State Archive of Socio-Political History) stores more than 30,000 documents authored by Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin on Nadezhda Krupskaya, whom he knew from the Petersburg revolutionary underground. They got married on July 22, 1898 during the exile of Vladimir Ulyanov to the village of Shushenskoye.

The material was prepared on the basis of information from RIA Novosti and open sources

On the occasion of the centenary of the Great October Revolution, Lev Danilkin wrote a biography "Lenin: Pantocrator of Solar Dusts"; April 22 marks 147 years since the birth of Vladimir Ulyanov. "Gorky" begins a series of materials about the leader of the Bolsheviks, today - an article by historian Alexander Shubin about how ideas about Lenin changed in memoirs and scientific research throughout the 20th and 21st centuries.

Lenin is one of the largest figures not only in Russian but also in world history. No wonder thousands of pages have been written about him. scientific texts. However, after Lenin's death, his scientific biography was in no hurry to appear: his contemporaries either hated him and published journalistic pamphlets, or were in awe. Even M. Gorky, who was a political opponent of Lenin, but at the same time collaborated with the Bolsheviks in the field of cultural projects, in 1924 published an apology for "Vladimir Lenin".

The Bolsheviks began with memories. Trotsky wrote “About Lenin. Materials for a biography. He recalled a man with whom he often disagreed, but whom, since 1917, he had revered as his leader. Volumes of memoirs about Lenin continued to be published throughout the Soviet era and retain their value to this day - both as a source for historians and as interesting reading for anyone interested in Lenin. These memories often captivate with sincere intonations. But when reading them, be careful. After all, only those who were under the strong influence of his charm were published in the USSR: his associates, those who were among the winners, in the "Leninist guard" or near it.

Lenin is one of the heroes of N. Sukhanov's semi-memoir book "Notes on the Revolution" (M., 1991), written with ardor. It retains the value of the source, but its research component is already outdated. Sukhanov watches Lenin from a great distance, he was not close to the leader of the Bolsheviks. On the other hand, he is somewhat less apologetic than the Bolsheviks.

Then biographies followed: Lenin's life was specified in detail - only positive ones, of course. Marxist-Leninist science did not stand still. The canonical biography of Lenin, prepared by the Institute of Marxism-Leninism, grew from 600 to 770 pages during the 1960s and 70s. A multi-volume biochronicle has been published. A 55-volume "complete" collection of the leader's works was published. In 1999, this multipath was supplemented by one volume of documents that had not been published before due to a discrepancy with the canonical image: “V.I. Lenin. unknown documents. 1891-1922". But Leninists and full assembly found a lot of compromising evidence in the form of harsh letters about terror, comrades and vacillators. So documentary publications to this day have not revealed sensational compromising evidence.

The memoirs of such a familiar Lenin as N. Valentinov (Volsky) (“Meetings with V.I. Lenin”, “Unfamiliar Lenin”) were not published in the USSR. Having met Lenin in 1904, he quickly became disillusioned with him and moved away from Bolshevism. But he continued to treat Lenin without hostility - more like a researcher than an enemy. In the 1920s, Valentinov continued to closely follow the course of the political struggle in Moscow until he was able to move abroad. He became the first non-communist biographer of Lenin, which is still interesting to read today. Valentinov began with an early biography, expressing a number of curious assumptions. However, many of them have not stood the test of time, and the most interesting are Valentinov's personal observations about Lenin's life in exile.

He wrote a two-volume biography of Lenin former supporter communist movement L. Fischer. This classic Sovietological work struck the imagination of Soviet readers brought up on the apology of Lenin, if they could get it in tamizdat. Fischer shows the pros and cons of Leninism, relying on open sources. As a former ideological communist, he pays great attention to Lenin's ideas, which is very important for understanding the leader's motives. An analysis of Lenin's ideology is intended to show that he betrayed his principles, and this is not very fair: tactical maneuvering in itself does not mean abandoning goals, and adjusting goals does not mean abandoning fundamental principles. Although today this work is already largely outdated, it was a good help for those who freed themselves from Lenin's aura towards a balanced understanding, and not according to the principle "from love to hate - one step." Alas, this path turned out to be typical for most domestic authors of the 1990s. The classic case of a jump from an apology to a collection of compromising evidence (not always verified) is the work of N. Volkogonov.

With the opening of the archives in the 1990s, it became possible to investigate Lenin's activities on the basis of much more a wide range sources. Both domestic and foreign authors participate in the development of this material. An attempt to write a biography of Lenin, illustrating it with new archival materials, was undertaken by R. Service. It turned out, in my opinion, rather superficially, the book contains many inaccuracies and little novelty. Serious historians understand the responsibility and difficulty of writing a complete scholarly biography of Lenin. The work is carried out piecemeal, gradually. Whole books are dedicated to individual stages Lenin's life, historical periods where his role is great, primarily in 1917.

Vladimir Lenin on a walk in Gorki, 1922 Photo: leninism.su

The love-hate pendulum oscillated and stopped in the middle. Today, a serious reader will no longer accept either an apology or a compromising collection. He knows how to draw his own conclusions, even reading books by authors with whom he disagrees ideologically. Arguments, references to sources are important. If there are no such references, the book falls in price for an attentive reader who does not want to be deceived. The largest friendly biographer of Lenin is V. Loginov, the author of a detailed early biography “Vladimir Lenin. Path choice. Biography” (M., 2005). In this meticulous study, even Lenin's opponents find it hard to find fault with something (I was able to do this with some difficulty on a couple of occasions). Loginov's research analyzes what has been written on this topic before, and gives a completely balanced picture. Unfortunately, it ends in 1900 - one might say, the most interesting place.

Unfortunately, the period of Lenin's life in 1905–1916 has not yet been systematically studied. Since Soviet times, the preparation and course of the II Congress of the RSDLP, which led to the formation of Bolshevism, have been studied in great detail. But further vicissitudes need more careful study. The book of the Soviet author R. Kaganova "Lenin in France" (M., 1977) remains the largest study of the period 1908-1912. Soviet science has done a lot here, but still its apologetic point of view has left a lot of important things in the shade. And here literature helps not about Lenin, but about his opponents (for example, Tyutyukin S.V., Shelokhaev V.V. Marxists and the Russian Revolution. M., 1996; Tyutyukin S.V. Menshevism: pages of history. M., 2002).

Another monograph by V. Loginov "Unknown Lenin" is devoted to the key year for the political biography of the leader in 1917. Here, Loginov's sympathies are more noticeable and acquire an ideological connotation. Lenin's actions in 1917 are vulnerable to criticism, which the author often does not refute - ignores. However, this is not a communist pamphlet, but a serious analysis, replete with interesting details that are important for the reader, regardless of his ideological orientation. For example, Loginov shows that Lenin returned to Petrograd without the knowledge of the Central Committee as early as September 29th. To restore the course of events in the autumn of 1917, this is an important nuance.

To understand Lenin, one must read literature about the development of the socialist movement and the revolution, about the formation of Soviet power. First of all, we can recommend the books of A. Rabinovich, who analyzes in detail and carefully the development of the revolution in 1917 (Bolsheviks come to power. M., 1989; bloody days. M., 1992; The Bolsheviks are in power. M., 2007). Lenin's activity is presented here against the backdrop of the struggle of parties, the clash of social forces. In 2017, my student A. Sakhnin’s book “The Experience of October 1917” was published. How a revolution is made”, dedicated to the struggle of factions in the Bolshevik Party in 1917. Lenin is among the main characters of this book.

I had the opportunity to contribute to the study of the ideas and practice of Lenin in a broader context. The development of Lenin's views at the beginning of the 20th century is reviewed in my book Socialism. "Golden Age" of Theory" (M., 2007). Lenin is one of the main characters in my books about the Russian revolution and the civil war (The Great Russian Revolution: from February to October 1917, M., 2014; Start of the Land of Soviets. Revolution. October 1917 - March 1918, St. Petersburg, 2017; Makhno and his time, On the Great Revolution and the Civil War of 1917-1922 in Russia and Ukraine, M., 2013). When forming the image of Lenin, one should pay attention to the development of his ideas, for the sake of which he acted. It is for the sake of ideas, and not for the sake of enrichment and fame, like many modern politicians. Base motives are systematically attributed to Lenin, in my opinion, completely unfairly. Like, since Lenin took money from the German General Staff, what do you want from the current powerful owners of yachts and estates. But Lenin is interesting in that he was an unmercenary who was able to captivate huge masses with him, turn the life of the country upside down. This was the result of his personal qualities, will and intellect - not the most subtle and deep in that era, but very suitable for the current situation. Therefore, in order to understand Lenin and the consequences of his intervention in history (in my opinion, rather tragic), one must consider in detail his ideas and the environment in which he carried them out.

The biography of Lenin will always be insufficiently detailed, because at the same time it is necessary to write the biography of his supporters, enemies and opponents. It is impossible to understand the victory of Lenin without understanding the reasons for the defeat of the latter. And at the same time kind history book impossible without nuances, seemingly unimportant details. While working on a book about the beginning of Soviet power, I discovered that at the first meetings of the Council of People's Commissars, Lenin sat with his back to the audience, turning to them from time to time. This everyday detail seemed insignificant and very vital, I was looking for a place for it in my narrative in order to draw some thoughtful conclusions. In the end, I realized that very different conclusions can be drawn from such a detail, but it is interesting in itself. As a picture of real life - not front and not compromising. It just happened. And we, historians, are most interested in how things happened.

We are all accustomed to viewing Lenin mainly as a professional revolutionary.

Indeed, in this field, Vladimir Ilyich achieved extremely much, becoming the most successful theoretician and practitioner. social revolution throughout the history of our country, and perhaps the whole world.

However, few people today think about the fact that Lenin was also a grandiose scientist. Works on economics, philosophy, sociology, political science and many other disciplines put him on a par with the most prominent figures in science.

Many current detractors of V. I. Lenin like to portray him as a half-educated and failed lawyer. What can be said here? As you know, Vladimir Ilyich was expelled from Kazan University for revolutionary activities and exiled to the village of Kokushkino, Kazan province. He managed to get a higher education only after the end of his exile. And he brilliantly coped with this task, although he had to take exams externally. But he passed the exams not in some provincial, but in the capital's university, in St. Petersburg, which in itself already characterizes the level of his intellect. Pass exams to metropolitan professors, without deep knowledge objects at that time was impossible. Therefore, the version of inferiority higher education Lenin is untenable.

Lenin's subsequent practice as a lawyer cannot be considered successful. However, this is not due to the low qualifications of Vladimir Ilyich, but to the fact that in the courts he had to defend the poor and disadvantaged peasants. And the then Themis (like the current one) has always been on the side of the rich, not the poor.

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One of the first large-scale scientific works of Lenin fell on the period of his fierce polemics with the populists. At that time they dominated on the left flank and believed that Russia would come to socialism through the traditional community and terror in relation to power structures.

Based on the analysis statistical material Lenin proved that after the abolition of serfdom, the Russian community began to collapse, separating from its midst the rural bourgeoisie and the proletariat. And this meant that the community could not serve as the basis of socialism.

The ideological defeat of populism was completed by Lenin with the publication of the books "What are the "friends of the people" and how they fight against the Social Democrats" and "The Development of Capitalism in Russia". Read these books and you won't be able to deny Lenin's indisputability and brilliance scientific logic. And the work “The Development of Capitalism in Russia” is quite consistent with a doctoral dissertation, the analysis is so deep and thorough economic condition Russian Empire. As for the scientific results of this period of Lenin's activity, today even Western researchers who are far from sympathetic to the ideas of communism recognize him as the founder of such a science as sociology.

After the ideological defeat of the populists, Lenin faced the task of uniting the small social democratic groups in Russia into a single party. From a scientific point of view, the correct formulation of the problem is already half of its solution. However, the decision itself was rather complicated.

Any party begins with a program and charter. Lenin was able to correctly formulate the main programmatic theses of the communists, based on the Marxist base, which he adapted to the agrarian Russian society. Answering the questions, “How to win over the working peasantry to its side in the struggle for socialism?”, “Should we strengthen the peasant community or fight against landlordism?”, Lenin came to the conclusion that the main economic brake on the development of the proletariat in the countryside was not the community at that time. , and the landowner. The vector of the main program strike was directed against him.

Another major problem for the party program was the national one. Russia, as a multinational country, could easily be divided along national lines, building a new party on a federal basis. Lenin very strongly opposed the manifestation of such tendencies, especially on the part of the Bund, which united the Jewish Social Democrats.

No less difficult was the task of drafting the party's rules. The easiest way then was to follow the beaten path of the Western left parties, as, for example, the Communist Party of the Russian Federation did in the 90s. However, analyzing the political practice of Europe, Lenin realized that the bourgeoisie formally gives power to the parliamentary parties of the social democratic type only on condition of a complete and unconditional renunciation of the struggle for the interests of the working people. And that didn't suit him. Therefore, Vladimir Ilyich had to create and then fight for the charter of a party that could actively fight for power, and having achieved power, could keep it and build a new state. social type on the basis of social production. Before Lenin, no one set the task like that. That's why he is the founder new science, the science of party building and the creator of the Bolshevik Party, a party that is fundamentally different from the Western Social Democratic parties of the parliamentary type.

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V. I. Lenin made a significant contribution to the understanding of the fundamental question of philosophy. He gave a clear definition of the concept of matter, which has such flexibility, due to which any discovery of previously unknown and unexpected properties of matter cannot conflict with the fundamental positions of dialectical materialism.

“A consistent Marxist,” emphasized V.I. Lenin in his work “Materialism and Empiriocriticism,” must always recognize the unconditional cognizability of matter, which is infinite in its depth, inexhaustible in all its forms and forms. The motion of matter cannot take place otherwise than in time and space.

In the same work, Lenin made a significant contribution to the theory of knowledge, where he drew Special attention on the role of practice in the process of knowing the world; on the ratio of absolute, relative and objective truth; pointed out the causal relationships that are rooted in the objective nature of things and phenomena.

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The First World War has come. Unlike other social-democratic parties in Europe, the Bolsheviks, led by Lenin, immediately defined this war as an aggressive one. A deep analysis of the economic causes of the First World War allowed Lenin to write and publish in 1917 another scientific work, Imperialism as the Highest Stage of Capitalism. V. I. Lenin did not have academic degrees in economics and did not strive for this, but throughout his conscious life he, like a real scientist, using scientific methods, constantly analyzed the economy. He understood that the processes taking place in the sphere of industrial relations, first of all, determine the strategy and tactics political party in the struggle for power.

V. I. Lenin was the first of the Marxists to reveal the economic and political essence of imperialism, the new stage that capitalism had entered by the beginning of the 20th century. At the time of K. Marx, this phenomenon did not yet exist. That is why Lenin's work can be considered a continuation of Capital, in which he comprehensively substantiated the main features of imperialism. And although almost 100 years have passed since the publication of the book, the portrait resemblance of imperialism at the beginning of the 20th century with modern look remains remarkably accurate.

“As a result of the concentration of production and capital,” V. I. Lenin noted, “a monopoly is created that crushes the market, dictating prices, and has a decisive influence not only on the economy, but also on the socio-political sphere. Banking capital merges with industrial capital and on this basis forms finance capital with the corresponding oligarchy. The export of capital under imperialism becomes more important than the export of goods. International monopoly unions of capitalists divide the world among themselves into spheres of influence.

Today, post-Soviet "democratic" Russia has found itself in this imperialist cauldron. Monopolies - power engineers, railroad workers, owners of oil, gas, communications - dictate their terms to society, inflate prices for electricity, utilities, gasoline, telephone communications, etc. International financial octopuses are strangling our country, dictating their conditions to us, transnational corporations are pushing Russia out of the markets for high-tech goods.

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The restoration of the national economy after the Civil War and intervention is another stage in the scientific and practical activities of V. I. Lenin. The situation was extremely difficult, almost hopeless. Still wandering in certain regions the country's unfinished White Guard gangs, and the threat of a repetition of the intervention has not completely disappeared. It was necessary to restore industry and agriculture as soon as possible. It depended on whether the Bolsheviks would retain power or not. And Lenin wrote the work "On the food tax", which at first could not be accepted and appreciated even by some of the closest associates of V. I. Lenin. In this work, Vladimir Ilyich substantiated the need for a transition from the policy of "war communism" to the NEP. At the same time, Lenin managed to solve a problem that is unique in its complexity. scientific task transition period from capitalism to socialism. Before him, no one had taken on such a task. And he undertook and managed to restore the national economy of the country, destroyed by two wars, in five years.

But V. I. Lenin did not stop there either, although he already understood that his life was drawing to a close. It was necessary to lay the foundations for a new socialist type of management. Almost on his last breath, he writes the works “On Cooperation”, “How We Reorganize the Rabkrin”, “Better Less, But Better”. All the works of V. I. Lenin are so deep and multifaceted that they are relevant in our time, and even at that time they were simply a vital necessity.

Unfortunately, Vladimir Ilyich himself could not see the results of his scientific and practical activities. However, I. V. Stalin, his faithful disciple and follower, implemented many of Lenin's plans, introducing his own creative amendments to them. At the same time, the growth rates of industry and the entire national economy were so great that no one has reached them yet.

Even such a brief retrospective analysis of the main works of V.I. Lenin allows us to boldly assert that he really was a great scientist, the founder of such sciences as sociology, party building and the theory of revolution. He also made a significant contribution to the development of the works of K. Marx, which allowed him to carry out a socialist revolution in such a backward agrarian country as Russia, and in as soon as possible restore the national economy of Russia, destroyed to the lowest limit.

However, contrary to common sense, many current perverters of history stubbornly continue to consider Vladimir Ilyich a dropout. The entire civilized world recognizes the leader of the world proletariat as the greatest thinker. Even Lenin's ideological opponents in the West pay tribute to him as one of the outstanding statesmen of the last century. But for our "democratic" pseudo-historians, even the West is not a decree in denigrating the Soviet past.

"The Truth About the Soviet Era"