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Person1870 – 1924

Vladimir Lenin

Also called: Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov

Leader of the Bolsheviks who set up the Soviet government in the October Revolution of 1917, chaired it, and founded the USSR in 1922

Born Vladimir Ulyanov, he turned revolutionary after his brother was hanged for plotting against the tsar. When the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party split in 1903 he led the Bolsheviks, arguing for a vanguard party of professional revolutionaries. In long exile he wrote Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism. Returning in April 1917 he demanded “All power to the Soviets”, and after October he founded the Comintern (1919) to promote world revolution and back national movements in the colonies.

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6 related events

  1. 1
    1917February Revolutionrelated figure

    Exhausted by war and hunger, the workers and soldiers of Petrograd rose up; Nicholas II abdicated and the Romanov dynasty came to an end. Power was split between the Provisional Government and the Soviet.

  2. 2
    1917October Revolutionleader

    The Bolsheviks led by Lenin overthrew the Provisional Government in an armed rising and set up a Soviet government — the world’s first socialist regime.

  3. 3
    1918Treaty of Brest-Litovskleader

    Soviet Russia made a separate peace with Germany and the other Central Powers and left the war, giving up vast lands including Poland, the Baltic region and Ukraine.

  4. 4
    1918 – 1922Russian Civil War and War Communismleader

    The Bolsheviks’ Red Army fought and defeated the counter-revolutionary Whites and foreign interventionist forces, while the government imposed War Communism — forced grain requisitioning and the nationalization of industry.

  5. 5
    1921 – 1928New Economic Policy (NEP)leader

    With the economy shattered by civil war and peasants in revolt, Lenin ended grain requisitioning and allowed small-scale private trade and enterprise. The economy gradually recovered to pre-war levels.

  6. 6
    1922Founding of the Soviet Unionleader

    Four Soviet republics — Russia, Ukraine, Belarus and Transcaucasia — joined to form the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, the world’s first socialist federal state.

Related works

People who appear alongside

  • Leon Trotsky1879 – 1940

    Bolshevik leader who directed the armed rising of the October Revolution, negotiated with Germany as foreign commissar, and built the Red Army that won the Civil War

  • Alexander Kerensky1881 – 1970

    Minister of justice and war and then prime minister (1917) of the Provisional Government after the February Revolution; he kept Russia in the war and was overthrown in October

  • Nicholas II1868 – 1918

    Last emperor of Russia (1894–1917), who abdicated in the February Revolution of 1917 and was executed with his family by the Bolsheviks the next year

  • Joseph Stalin1878 – 1953

    General Secretary of the Soviet Communist Party who ruled the USSR from the late 1920s until his death, led the war against Germany and drew Eastern Europe into the Soviet bloc

Themes this person appears in

  • World War I and the Russian Revolution1908 – 1923

    From the Balkan crises to a war of trenches and total mobilization that toppled four empires; the Russian Revolution it unleashed, which created the first socialist state; and the Versailles settlement of national self-determination and the League of Nations