(Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov; Simbirsk, 1870 - Nijni-Novgorod, 1924) born on april 22 was a Russian communist leader who led the October Revolution and created the Soviet communist union. A member of a middle-class family in the Volga region, his animosity against the tsarist regime was exacerbated after the execution of his brother in 1887, accused of conspiracy. He studied at the Universities of Kazan and Saint Petersburg, where he settled as a lawyer in 1893.

His activities against the tsarist autocracy led him to come into contact with the main Russian revolutionary leader of the time, Georgy Plekhanov, in his exile from Switzerland (1895); it was he who convinced him of the Marxist ideology. Under his influence, he helped found in Saint Petersburg the League of Combat for the Liberation of the Working Class, the embryo of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party chaired by Plekhanov.

In 1897, Lenin was arrested and deported to Siberia, where he devoted himself to the systematic study of the works of Marx and Engels. After his liberation in 1900 he went into exile and founded the newspaper Iskra (the spark) in Geneva, in collaboration with Plekhanov

In the II Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Party (1903), Lenin imposed those ideas at the head of the radical Bolshevik group, which defended his strongly disciplined party model as the vanguard of a revolution that he believed was viable in the short term; In 1912, the break with the Plekhanov and Martov Menshevik minority would be definitively confirmed, attached to a mass party model that would prepare the conditions for the triumph of the workers' revolution in the longer term.

In 1905 Lenin returned to Saint Petersburg to participate in the revolution that had broken out in Russia, Lenin considered that movement as a "dress rehearsal" of the socialist revolution, of which he especially appreciated the spontaneous organizational form of the Russian revolutionaries, such as the soviets or popular councils. he would go into exile again in 1907 due to the failure of the revolution.

Lenin was completing a revolutionary program of immediate application for Russia: mixing the heritage of Marxism with the insurrectionary tradition of Louis Auguste Blanqui, he proposed to anticipate the revolution in Russia by being this one. from the "weak links" of the capitalist chain, where a small group of determined and well-organized revolutionaries could drag the working and peasant masses into a revolution, from which a socialist state would emerge.

The outbreak of the First World War (1914-18) gave him the opportunity to put his ideas into practice: he defined the conflict as the result of the contradictions of capitalism and imperialism and, in the name of proletarian internationalism, later, the deterioration of the tsarist regime as a result of the war allowed him to think about launching the socialist revolution in his country as the first step towards an era of world revolution.

The Russian Revolution USSR

When the February Revolution of 1917 overthrew Tsar Nicholas II and brought Kerensky to power, Lenin rushed back to Russia with the help of the German army (which saw in Lenin an agitator capable of weakening his enemy Russia). He published his April Theses ordering the Bolsheviks to cease support for the provisional government and to prepare their own revolution by claiming "all power to the Soviets."

A first failed attempt in July forced him to take refuge in Finland, leaving Trotsky to lead the party to seize power through a coup in early November 1917 . The coup became the triumphant October Revolution thanks to the Bolshevik strategy of focusing their demands on the end of the war and the distribution of land . Lenin immediately returned to preside over the new government or Council of People's Commissars.

As the leader of the Bolshevik Party , he has since directed the building of the first socialist state in history. He fulfilled his initial promises by removing Russia from the war for the Peace of Brest-Litowsk (1918) and distributing expropriated land to peasants from large landowners.

He delegated to Trotsky the organization of the Red Army, with which he managed to resist the combined attack of the white armies and foreign intervention in the course of a long Civil War (1918-20). Once control of the old empire of the czars was recovered, he articulated the territory by creating the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (1922), which he gave a formal organization by the Constitution of 1923.

Driven by the needs of the war, but also following his own ideological convictions, he imposed a policy of immediate socialization of the economy, nationalizing the main means of production and subjecting activities to strict central planning (war communism); the difficulties of such a radical transformation caused the collapse of production and a general disorganization of the Russian economy.

Lenin then had to rectify his initial mistakes, convincing his party of the need to introduce the New Economic Policy (1921), which consisted of going back on the path of socialization, leaving a certain margin for freedom of movement. market and private initiative (authorization of foreign investments, freedom of wages), with which it achieved an appreciable economic recovery.

Plagued by a serious illness, Lenin gradually retired from the political leadership, while he saw how his collaborators - especially Trotsky and Stalin - began the dispute over the succession. he eventually passed away in 1924

Lenin is known for establishing the political tradition of Marxism-Leninism, which emphasizes the creation of a dictatorship of the proletariat by means of a revolutionary vanguard party and democratic centralism, in which political decisions reached through free discussion are binding upon all members of the political party.

Lenin is one of the most influential political thinkers of modern history, authoring influential communist texts such as "Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism", "State and Revolution", and "What Is to Be Done? Burning Questions of Our Movement".

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  • very_poggers_gay [they/them]
    ·
    7 months ago

    i presented some of my research at a virtual conference on friday at one of the primary (albeit small) conferences for my small research niche. it's a conference i look forward to every year, because my research area is pretty small, and i think what i bring to the field is pretty unique (i'm a filthy commie in a field of liberals very-normal )

    so i had spent most nights in april staying up until 2am working on my research and presentation, because i was really stoked to present, and i knew that some of the bigger names in the field would be attending. i was really nervous because of these stakes and because everything was coming together so last minute (compared to how i usual approach presentations)

    my presentation went so fucking poorly in my eyes. i immediately went off my script and into adhd overexplaining on the background info, and I was missing the mediator's signals that i was running out of time, until i had less than 1 minute left in the 15 minute talk, and I had just started talking about the results from all of my analyses. i spent like 75% of my talk on the 25% least important information.

    as soon as the presentation ended i slammed my laptop shut and i banged my head a lot and just wailed under my blankets. i don't know if i ever felt so crushed in my entire life. my partner said the talk didn't look so bad, and some friends/colleagues sent nice messages about my talk too, but i was devastated. i just put so much into the talk, and it all just crumbled in on me. i put off so much other work and shit to focus on this presentation, and i have to play so much catch up and send so many apologetic e-mails about that. i feel so small cri

    • Hexagons [e/em/eir]
      ·
      7 months ago

      I'm so sorry! Talks are really hard and can go poorly in so many different ways, I hate giving them so much. It really did probably go better than you felt like it did. Still though, I know that feeling of veering off into an unnecessary explanation. It always feels at the time like I really should have included this background, what was I thinking leaving it out, I'll just explain it real quick, and then oops, I've spent way too long here and now don't have time for the actually important stuff!

      Just a terrible feeling, all in all. Still, what's important is that your colleagues vaguely know what you're working on so they can talk to you or read your papers or what have you. It's ok! A terrible talk isn't the end of the world, you're still cool and intelligent and competent!