Vladimir Lenin was not actually his birth name, he was actually named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. He was born in Simbirsk next to the river Volga, Russia in April 22 1870. He came from a huge variety of backgrounds like Russia, Germany and Judaism. But he was baptised in the Russia Orthodox Church.

His family were also very wealthy and his father was a Russian official in Public Education and he wanted democracy. His father and his elder brother were very opposed to the Tsar and wanted change for example his brother was arrested and hanged for trying to assassinate the Tsar. This greatly affected his views on the Tsar and about revolution. At the time of his brothers death Lenin was entering the Kazan State University and while he was there he got involved in student protests and was arrested and expelled from Kazan State University. While he was out of college he started to read the book ‘Das Kapital’ by Karl Marx, which was his most famous book about the ideals of communism.

He was then later allowed to continue his degree at the University of Saint Petersburg. In 1882 Lenin was given a first degree in Law and did very well in Latin and Greek and attempted to learn German, English and French.

Lenin was expected to carry on a career in law but ended up getting caught up in Revolutionary protests and propaganda. In 1895 Lenin was then arrested and held then exiled to Siberia where he met other Marxist revolutionaries who had been exiled there, and of them he met Georgy Plekhanov who introduced socialism to Russia.

Later he married an activist of socialism and published a book about ‘The development of Capitalism’. in 1900 he was allowed to leave Siberia and he went to explore Russia and Europe. He lived all over Europe from Manchester and London to Prague and Vienna. And he was the co-producer of ‘The Spark’ (Iskra). He wrote about revolution and movements.

In 1905 Lenin came back to Russia to help In the November Revolution. In 1907 the Tsarist authorities crushed the revolutions and he went be in exile in Europe (Finland). When Lenin left he started to become increasingly poor but still continued to write his revolutionary articles. In the First World War he fled to Zurich in Switzerland, which was neutral at the time.

In 1917, when the Tsar had been overthrown, Lenin realized that he had to come back to Russia, but he was surrounded by wars and couldn’t get back to Russia. But then a Swiss Communist called Fritz Platten negotiated with the Germans to give him a train to get back to Russia, because the Germans thought that Lenin would go back to Russia and create havoc making it easier for the Germans.

As soon as he got back to Russia he elected himself as head of the Bolshevik party and wrote the ‘April Theses’ which was calling for an end to the provisional government, no war, food and land for the peasants. He got the support of the peasants and he stormed the Winter Palace, showing the beginning of their Soviet rule.

Lenin was later elected as the head of state for the Communist State. Lenin made speeches on how electricity should be brought to all areas of the country so that they can advance technologically and so that he could stop the split between town and country and finally to stop the ignorance disease and poverty that the parts of the country without electricity was starting to show. To follow this he started the GOELRO plan which was a plan to give rights to all the people such as healthcare, rights for women, schooling etc. But before they could go ahead they need to pull the country out of the First World War.

The opposition of the Bolsheviks was starting to emerge and Lenin set up the secret police called the ‘Cheka’ who where there to arrest the main figures in the opposition and arrested and sometimes beat up anyone who they thought opposed the Bolsheviks. And then he set up a public censorship, where it was illegal to write or speak out about ideals against the revolution or the Bolsheviks.

Lenin also tried to tackle all the Anti-Semitism in Russia which had been cooked up by the Tsar. The Tsars secret police used to fight against the Jews but Lenin brought shame to anyone who was anti-Semitic.

There were many assassination attempts against Lenin, for example the one in 1918 which was where an unrecognised gunman tried to shoot Lenin who was in the back of his car with Fritz Platten, but Fritz heard the shot can put his hand on Lenin’s head that then shoved it down and as he did this the bullet drew blood on Fritz’s hand as it missed his head. There was a slightly more successful attempt made at his life when he was talking to a woman and someone shouted his name and as he turned around the gunman fired three shots, one in his arm, one in his jaw and the other in the woman he was talking to. He was taken back to his apartment because he refused to go to hospital, as he thought that the assassins would also be waiting there for him. The shot to his jaw was potentially fatal as the blood from the wound in his jaw was bleeding into his lungs, but the Bolsheviks purposefully understated the whole ordeal, so that the people had an impression that the situation was perfectly in control and that there was no worry that there was going to be any threat to the Bolsheviks seize of power.

Following this assassination attempt and a successful one on the head of the secret police, Lenin initiated a red terror. This was where the ‘Cheka’ went around killing and mercilessly abusing any people who were believed even to be slightly against the Bolsheviks. Many people weren’t even against the Bolsheviks, who were still beaten up and publicly tortured in order to show the public what happens to anyone who they find against them in order to scare them into taking sides with the Bolsheviks. In may 1919 there was an estimated 16,000 people in the labour camps that had been set up, which produced high mortality rates for the people sent there, and by 1921 there were more than 70,000 people in them. From 1918-1920 there were 12,733 people executed by the Bolsheviks but after that, the numbers of dead were becoming much greater and historians estimate that 280,000 people were shot, hanged or executed from 1917-1922. The number of people also killed by one of the opposing white parties was as merciless, as 115,000 Ukrainian Jews were killed in 1919 alone. In the end of the civil war the Reds came out on top even though the odds seemed to be against them because they were so committed to the cause whereas the allies couldn’t spare much in the civil war because they had to sent most of their resources into the battlefields against the Germans.

During the civil war there was an economic collapse as there was not enough food that was to be supplied to the cities and all the funds and resources was going into fighting the civil war. The Bolsheviks and Lenin set up the requisitioning of supplies from the peasant farmers to try to manage the situation, but it was thought that most of the corn was then being held onto and sold to the black market. Then the Cheka started to wage war against some of the communists and use poisonous gasses and death camps to stop this from happening and from them uprising.

After the revolution and the civil war signs of bad health started to show in Lenin and he started to have a series of strokes and health problems such as him being paralysed on his right side and this started to seem as though it were a problem for his leadership and there was a decline in his political power from then on.  Finally in March 1932, he suffered from a third and final stroke he was paralysed and unable to speak for the rest of his life. After his first stroke he started to worry about if he would be able to communicate his ideals so he started to dictate to his wife about his ideals and a famous one was ‘Lenin’s Testament’ which was where he talked about how he was worried that Stalin has too much power in his hands and that he needed to be removed from office. But when he died the Testament was mailed to the central committee but they ignored it and it was only published in America. After Lenin died there was a censorship of his work in the Soviet Union after his death.

I think in conclusion that Russia would be a lot different to how it is today if it wasn’t for Lenin. Although if he wasn’t around someone else may have stepped into his shoes such as Stalin but when Stalin did come into power he made some very merciless and bad decisions. Lenin has to also make some decisions, which were seen as brutal, but these were all needed to assert his authority and show the opposition he was in control. The times when Lenin were in power were bad times where there was much massacring from both sides but I think that if the situation had been different Lenin’s seize to power would have been a lot cleaner and easier. I think that it was sad the way that Lenin died and he deserved to have had his say and been able to stop Stalin from achieving power. Lenin was a very charismatic person and I think he made a huge difference to Russia and it would be strange to see what Russia would be like today without him.