Vladimir Lenin Research Paper

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth.” (-Vladimir Lenin) Lenin is the founder of the Soviet Union. He was one of the most influential political leaders of the 20th century. His ideas on Marxism and communism have become known as Leninism (Nelson, Ken). (Communism is a type of society in which there is no private property, everyone is equal and earns the same income, and the state makes all the economic decisions.) The world would have been very different if it hadn’t been influenced by the life of Vladimir Lenin.

He was born on the 10th of April, 1870 in Simbirsk (today Ulyanovsk), Russia. His actual birth name was Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. His father, Ilya Nikolayevich Ulyanov, was a high official in the area's educational system.

Although he would fight as an adult for a revolution by the working lower classes, he did not come from such a hard-working background himself. Lenin received the typical education given to the sons of the Russian upper class. When Lenin was sixteen years old, his father died. This made Lenin angry and he said he no longer believed in God or the Russian Orthodox Church. Lenin was intellectually gifted, physically strong, from a loving home, and displayed a passion for learning, but he rarely showed warmth. Nevertheless, as a young man he began to develop extreme political views in disagreement with the existing Russian form of government (Wilson, David). Lenin graduated from secondary school with high honors and enrolled at Kazan University. He began to study the writings of Karl Marx, a German social and economic philosopher (1818–1883), and became convinced that Marxism was the ideal form of government. Marxism teaches that because of the repressed state of the working class, the natural way of history is an international revolution (overthrow of the government) of those poor and lower-class workers (called the proletariat) who would

Petersburg where he quickly became a leader among the Marxists. Eventually, Lenin created his own group of Marxists called the Bolsheviks. In December 1895, Lenin, who was now 25 years old, and the other leaders of the Union were arrested. Lenin was jailed for a year and then exiled to Siberia for a term of three years. After his exile ended in 1900, Lenin went to western Europe, where he continued his revolutionary activity. It was during this time that he adopted the pseudonym Lenin. Eventually Lenin returned to Russia from exile. He also organized a lot of protests and speeches against the czar and the czar’s government. In 1905, a demonstration went badly when the czar's soldiers attacked the protesters. This protest made many Russians unhappy with their leader, which is what Lenin wanted to prepare the country for his revolution. In 1914, World War I started and Russia was quickly drawn into the fighting which required not only many soldiers but also financial resources. After a couple of years Russia couldn’t keep up with the millions of deaths and the cost of the war. Lenin saw this as an opportunity for revolutionary change and his way to