Table of Content
Vladimir Lenin was one of the most influential people in history who brought about significant change in his country that reverberated around the world and impacted the lives of millions. Though his thoughts on Marxism and capitalism are read to this day and influence many individuals and nations, his legacy will also be remembered for his brutal regime and the deaths of millions. Through violent means, he established a system of Marxist socialism called communism in the former Russian Empire, which attempted to impose collective control over the means of production, redistribute wealth, abolish the aristocracy, and create a more equitable society for the masses. Stalin, a close member of Lenin’s inner circle, became general secretary of the Communist Party in April 1922.
Initially, the Stalinists also rejected the national industrialisation of Russia but then pursued it in full, sometimes brutally. In both cases, the Left Opposition denounced the regressive nature of Stalin's policy towards the wealthy kulak social class and the brutality of forced industrialisation. Trotsky described Stalinist vacillation as a symptom of the undemocratic nature of a ruling bureaucracy. In instituting government policy, Stalin promoted the doctrine of socialism in one country , wherein the Soviet Union would establish socialism upon Russia's economic foundations .
READ NEXT
In September 1917, Lenin published Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, which argued that imperialism was a product of monopoly capitalism, as capitalists sought to increase their profits by extending into new territories where wages were lower and raw materials cheaper. He believed that competition and conflict would increase and that war between the imperialist powers would continue until they were overthrown by proletariat revolution and socialism established. He spent much of this time reading the works of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Ludwig Feuerbach, and Aristotle, all of whom had been key influences on Marx.
The Communist government responded to the assassination attempt, and to the increasingly mobilizing anti-communist offensive of which it was a component, with what they termed the Red Terror. Tens of thousands of real and perceived enemies of the Revolution, many accused of actively conspiring against the Bolshevik government, were executed or put in labor camps. The Red Terror coincided with the escalation of the Civil War and the implementation of a policy known as “War Communism.” Among other things, this involved forced grain requisitions from the peasantry, and became a cause of widespread famine. To protect the newly-established Bolshevik government from counter-revolutionaries and other political opponents, the Bolsheviks created a secret police, the Cheka . The Bolsheviks had planned to hold a trial for the former tsar, but in August 1918 the White Army was advancing on Yekaterinburg . Jacob Sverdlov (1885–1919), the party official in charge, submitted to the request of the local Soviets to execute the tsar immediately, rather than having him taken by the Whites.
Censorship of Lenin's writings
In late 1917 Lenin led what was soon to be known as the October Revolution, but was essentially a coup d’état. The anti-Soviet forces headed mainly by former tsarist generals and admirals, fought desperately to overthrow Lenin’s Red regime. They were aided by World War I Allies, who supplied the group with money and troops.
Foreign powers such as France, Britain, the United States, and Japan also intervened in this war , though their impact was peripheral at best. Eventually, the more organizationally proficient Red Army, led by Leon Trotsky, won the civil war, defeating the White Army and their allies in 1920. In March 1919 Lenin and other Bolshevik leaders met with revolutionary socialists from around the world and formed the Communist International. Members of the Communist International, including Lenin and the Bolsheviks themselves, broke off from the broader socialist movement. In Russia, the Bolshevik Party was renamed the Russian Communist Party , which eventually became the CPSU. On April 16, 1917, Lenin arrived in Petrograd and took a leading role within the Bolshevik movement, publishing the April Theses, which called for an uncompromising opposition to the provisional government.
Studiul creierului lui Lenin[modificare | modificare sursă]
He was the posthumous source of "Leninism," the doctrine codified and conjoined with Marx's works by Lenin’s successors to form Marxism-Leninism, which became the Communist worldview. He has been regarded as the greatest revolutionary leader and thinker since Marx. Service described Lenin as "a bit of a snob in national, social and cultural terms".
Lenin advocated for Russian defeat in World War I, arguing that it would hasten the political revolution he desired. It was during this time that he wrote and published Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism in which he argued that war was the natural result of international capitalism. Kazan [V.I. Lenin] State University), but within three months he was expelled from the school, having been accused of participating in an illegal student assembly. He was arrested and banished from Kazan to his grandfather’s estate in the village of Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna had already been ordered by the police to reside. In the autumn of 1888, the authorities permitted him to return to Kazan but denied him readmission to the university. During this period of enforced idleness, he met exiled revolutionaries of the older generation and avidly read revolutionary political literature, especially Marx’s Das Kapital.
Lenin spent his adult life agitating for and leading revolutionary communist activities in Russia. This culminated in the 1917 October Revolution, which brought Lenin's Bolshevik faction to power. His defeat of an opposition that wished to keep Russia tethered to Europe’s capitalist system, ushered in an era of international retreat for the Lenin-led government. Russia, as he saw it, would be void of class conflict and the international wars it fostered. Lenin quickly returned home and, perhaps sensing his own path to power, quickly denounced the country’s newly formed Provisional Government, which had been assembled by a group of leaders of the bourgeois liberal parties.
Fearing a counter-revolution from right-wing forces hostile to socialism, the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries who dominated the Petrograd Soviet had been instrumental in pressurising the government to normalise relations with the Bolsheviks. Both the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries had lost much popular support because of their affiliation with the Provisional Government and its unpopular continuation of the war. The Bolsheviks capitalised on this, and soon the pro-Bolshevik Marxist Trotsky was elected leader of the Petrograd Soviet.
On arrival, Lenin delivered a speech at Finland Station that became the basis for his famous April Theses. It called for an immediate socialist revolution, for a transfer of political power to the Soviets and an end to co-operation with the Provisional Government. A police mugshot of Vladimir Ulyanov, after his arrest in 1895Entering adulthood, Ulyanov became obsessive about socialism and revolution.
Accordingly, the Treaty was deeply unpopular across Russia's political spectrum, and several Bolsheviks and Left Socialist-Revolutionaries resigned from Sovnarkom in protest. After the Treaty, Sovnarkom focused on trying to foment proletarian revolution in Germany, issuing an array of anti-war and anti-government publications in the country; the German government retaliated by expelling Russia's diplomats. The Treaty nevertheless failed to stop the Central Powers' defeat; in November 1918, the German Emperor Wilhelm II abdicated and the country's new administration signed the Armistice with the Allies.
However Lenin argued that the elite revolutionary vanguard of which he was a part would be able to inculcate proletarian values and identity into the working class through their leadership and through means such as the creation of a newspaper that would reach out to the working class. Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the name Lenin (April 22, 1870 – January 24, 1924), was a Marxist leader who served as the key architect of the October Revolution, and the first leader of the Soviet Russia. Lenin's legacy, around which a personality cult developed in the USSR, was an oppressive system that dictated how people lived their lives, where they lived, and what they thought. Yet Lenin’s original conversion to Marxism stemmed from a profound sense of disappointment and disdain for Tsarist rule.
In Europe, this resulted in the creation of new communist-led states in Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, Belarus, and Ukraine, all of which were officially independent of Russia, while further east it led to the creation of communist governments in Outer Mongolia. Various senior Bolsheviks wanted these absorbed into the Russian state; Lenin insisted that national sensibilities should be respected, but reassured his comrades that these nations' new Communist Party administrations were under the de facto authority of Sovnarkom. A faction of the Bolsheviks known as the "Left Communists" criticised Sovnarkom's economic policy as too moderate; they wanted nationalisation of all industry, agriculture, trade, finance, transport, and communication. In late 1919 successes against the White Russian forces convinced Lenin that it was time to spread the revolution to the West, by force if necessary. When the newly independent [Poland
