Vladimir Lenin

Known for ActingBorn 1870-04-21Died 1924-01-21Simbirsk

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1922 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. A Marxist, he developed a variant of this communist ideology known as Leninism. Born to a moderately prosperous 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 ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October 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. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. 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 market-oriented 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 Soviet government.Read more

Movies & web series

USSR (1917-1991)

Laissez-faire

Latest News About Doomsday

Faith of the Century: A History of Communism

A Nation Denied: Ukraine's Battle for History

Aurora's Sunrise

Our Cinema

The Fight For Peace

Beyond the Movie: The Return of the King

V.I.Lenin. Pages of Life

JFK to 9/11: Everything is a Rich Man's Trick

Caudillo

A Grin Without a Cat

Lenin and the Other Story of the Russian Revolution

The Corporation

The Guns of August

Apocalypse: Stalin

Doomsday: World War I

Hitler & Stalin: Portrait of Hostility

The Soviet Story

Human Remains

The Century of Icons

Karl Marx und seine Erben

Life and Fate by Vassili Grossman

A History of Antisemitism

The UnXplained

How to Stage a Coup

The Anarchists

La Rabbia

To Arms, We Are Fascists!

The Russian Revolution

The Society of the Spectacle

American Experience

The Romanovs: Glory and Fall of the Czars

Reagan

Naqoyqatsi

The Chosen

Rasputin: Murder in the Tsar's Court

Anniversary of the Revolution

Tsar to Lenin

Theremin: An Electronic Odyssey

Beginning

História do Comunismo

The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty

Three Songs About Lenin

The Return of Vertov

The Brain of Soviet Russia

Kino-Pravda No. 21: Lenin Kino-Pravda. A Film Poem About Lenin