Lenin's path to revolution began with his brother's execution in 1887
Vladimir Ulyanov grew up the son of a school inspector who had earned hereditary noble rank, in a family of loyal monarchists. Then in May 1887 his older brother Aleksandr was hanged for plotting to kill Tsar Alexander III. Within months the seventeen-year-old had joined a revolutionary cell at university.
Lenin arrived on 22 April 1870 in Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk, the third of eight children. His father Ilya came from a family of former serfs but studied physics and mathematics, became director of public schools for the province, and in 1874 gained a state rank that made him a hereditary noble. The parents supported the reforms of Alexander II and kept clear of radicals. Ilya died of a brain haemorrhage in January 1886, and the fifteen-year-old Vladimir turned confrontational and abandoned his faith in God.
Aleksandr, known as Sasha, joined a cell planning to assassinate Alexander III and was chosen to build the bomb; the plotters were caught before acting. Entering Kazan University that August, Vladimir joined a group trying to revive the People's Will and was soon expelled for protesting. His mother bought a farm estate hoping he would take up agriculture, but he showed no interest. In Samara he translated The Communist Manifesto into Russian and embraced Marxism, then passed law exams externally at St Petersburg with first-class results in 1890, a success clouded by his sister Olga's death from typhoid.
In Saint Petersburg from 1893 he became a senior Marxist organiser, was arrested for sedition in 1897 and banished to the Siberian village of Shushenskoye; Nadezhda Krupskaya became his wife there. From Western Europe he led the Bolshevik faction after the 1903 party split, and after the February Revolution of 1917 he returned to help overthrow the Provisional Government in October.
His government redistributed land, nationalised banks and big industry, and took Russia out of World War I by ceding territory. It centralised power in the Communist Party by 1918 and crushed opponents in the Red Terror, in which tens of thousands were killed or interned. After civil war and famine he introduced the New Economic Policy in 1921. He died at Gorki on 21 January 1924, and Joseph Stalin rose to take his place.
Source: Vladimir Lenin
