Lenin Passes On

On 21 January 1924, Lenin fell into a coma and died later that day. His official cause of death was recorded as an incurable disease of the blood vessels. The Soviet government publicly announced Lenin’s death the following day. On 23 January, mourners from the Communist Party, trade unions, and Soviets, visited his Gorki home to inspect the body, which was carried aloft in a red coffin by leading Bolsheviks. Transported by train to Moscow, the coffin was taken to the House of Trade Unions, where the body lay in state. Over the next three days, around a million mourners came to see the body, many queuing for hours in the freezing conditions.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He served as the first and founding head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party socialist state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union (CPSU). As a Marxist, he developed a variant of communist ideology known as Leninism.

Born on 22 (actually 10) April 1870 to a upper middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother’s 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire’s Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).

In 1903, he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov’s Mensheviks. Following Russia’s failed Revolution of 1905, he campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which, as a Marxist, he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution that ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the Great October Socialist Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.

Lenin’s Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected Soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin’s administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty conceding territory to the Central Powers, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International (Comintern).

Opponents of the revolution were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations had secured independence from the Russian Empire after 1917, but three were re-united into the new Soviet Union in 1922.

His health failing, Lenin died in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Party and Soviet government. Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and a prominent influence over the international communist movement. Lenin is viewed by his supporters as a champion of socialism and the working class, and is renown for the slogan:

ALL POWER TO THE PEOPLE!

Castro Khwela
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