Under war communism, Lenin quickly nationalized all manufacturing and industry throughout Soviet Russia. He requisitioned surplus grain from peasant farmers to feed his Red Army.
These measures proved disastrous. Under the new state-owned economy, both industrial and agricultural output plummeted. An estimated five million Russians died of famine in and living standards across Russia plunged into abject poverty. Mass unrest threatened the Soviet government. As a result, Lenin instituted his New Economic Policy, a temporary retreat from the complete nationalization of War Communism.
As the economy deteriorated during the Russian Civil War , Lenin used the Cheka to silence political opposition, both from his opponents and challengers within his own political party. But these measures did not go unchallenged: Fanya Kaplan, a member of a rival socialist party, shot Lenin in the shoulder and neck as he was leaving a Moscow factory in August , badly injuring him. Lenin became the first head of the USSR, but by that time, his health was declining.
Between and his death in , Lenin suffered a series of strokes which compromised his ability to speak, let alone govern. Lenin dictated a number of predictive essays about corruption of power in the Communist Party while he was recovering from a stroke in late and early Lenin died on January 21, , in Gorki Leninskiye near Moscow.
He was 53 years old. By that time, Stalin had already come to power power he would do anything to keep, as evidenced by the Great Purge of About a million people braved the cold Russian winter to stand in line for hours before paying their respects to Lenin, who was lying in state at the House of Trade Unions in Moscow. Vladimir Lenin; pbs. Vladimir Lenin ; BBC. Secret Police; Library of Congress. The work did not go unnoticed, and in December Lenin and several other Marxist leaders were arrested.
Lenin was exiled to Siberia for three years. Following his release from exile and then a stint in Munich, where Lenin and others co-founded a newspaper, Iskra, to unify Russian and European Marxists, he returned to St. Petersburg and stepped up his leadership role in the revolutionary movement.
At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in , a forceful Lenin argued for a streamlined party leadership community, one that would lead a network of lower party organizations and their workers.
In Russia went to war with Japan. The conflict had a profound impact on Russian society. The situation was heightened on January 9, , when a group of unarmed workers in St. They were met by security forces, who fired on the group, killing and wounding hundreds. The crisis set the stage for what would be called the Russian Revolution of Hoping to placate his citizens, the emperor issued his October Manifesto, offering up several political concessions, most notably the creation of an elected legislative assembly known as the Duma.
But Lenin was far from satisfied. His frustrations extended to his fellow Marxists, in particular, the group calling itself the Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov. The issues centered around party structure and the driving forces of a revolution to fully seize control of Russia. While his comrades believed that the power must reside with the bourgeoisie, Lenin passionately distrusted that segment of the population. The fighting would continue until a party conference in Prague, when Lenin formally split to create a new, separate entity.
As always, his mind stayed focus on revolutionary politics. During this period he wrote and published Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism , a defining work for the future leader, in which he argued that war was the natural result of international capitalism. In , a tired, hungry and war-weary Russia deposed the tsars. Other Russian revolutionaries likewise used pseudonyms, in part to confuse the authorities. Lenin hoped Russia would lose World War I.
In March , with inflation rampant, food supplies low and the army in tatters, Czar Nicholas II was forced to abdicate. A sealed railroad car provided by Germany brought Lenin back to Russia the following month. On his first day in office, his regime abolished private landownership and began truce talks with the Germans.
Despite agreeing to give up a huge chunk of territory in Finland, Ukraine, the three Baltic states and elsewhere in exchange for peace, the Bolsheviks annulled the deal once Germany surrendered to the Allied powers in November A few years later, much of that land was then incorporated into the newly formed Soviet Union. Lenin quickly did away with an experiment in democracy.
Before taking power, Lenin spoke in favor of a popularly elected Constituent Assembly that would hash out a post-revolutionary form of government. But he quickly changed his tune after the Bolsheviks won only a quarter of the seats in November elections. When the assembly convened the following January in St. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights. Measure content performance. Develop and improve products.
List of Partners vendors. Through violent means he established a system of Marxist socialism called communism on the former Russian Empire, which attempted to impose collective control over the means of production, redistribute wealth, abolish the aristocracy, and create a more equitable society for the masses. Lenin spent his adult life agitating for and leading revolutionary communist activities in Russia.
This culminated in October Revolution, which brought Lenin's Bolshevik faction to power. In the wake of the Revolution, the reign of the Bolshevik regime under Lenin was marked by economic chaos and deprivation; bloody civil war; massive sometimes deliberate famines among the rural working class; and brutal repression, torture, and murder of those suspected or accused of dissent, insufficient loyalty to the Revolution, or of holding out food or other goods.
Despite these crimes, Lenin is still revered among some communists, communist sympathizers and citizens of former USSR republics. Lenin was born in in what was then Simbirsk, about miles east of Moscow. His family, with the last name Ulyanov, was middle class and prosperous. Two events shaped his revolutionary beliefs: the execution of his older brother, Alexandr for an attempt to murder the Russian Tsar; and his expulsion from Kazan University for being the ringleader of a student uprising.
While becoming a Marxist in , he later was allowed to sit for his law examinations and earned a law degree from St. Petersburg University. He became a public defender and part of a group of revolutionary Marxists. Eventually, his activities got him exiled to Siberia for three years, from to After that he adopted the pseudonym, "Lenin", and moved to Europe, to continue his revolutionary activities.
He returned to Russia to agitate for the, ultimately failed, Revolution of , then returned abroad to Europe in Lenin returned to Russia in April after the czar had abdicated and the Soviet Revolution was underway.
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