Vladimir Iich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk in 1870, later renamed Ulyanovsk after him. He later changed his name to Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine party work after exile in Siberia (Resis). He was the third of six children in a close, happy family of highly educated and cultured parents. His mother was the daughter of a physician and his father, the son of a serf but became a schoolteacher and rose to the position of inspector of schools. Lenin was intellectually gifted, physically strong, and reared in a warm, loving home, early displayed a passion for learning. He graduated first in his high school class (Resis).
Lenin suffered from many strokes, the first in May 1922, the second in December that year. In March of 1923, Stalin’s health dealt with another severe stroke, this one taking away his ability to speak and ending his political work. About ten months
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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 (Resis).
In 1904, Russia went to war with Japan. When an unarmed crowd of workers marched to the city’s Winter Palace on January 9.to submit a petition to Emperor NIcholas II, security forces fired on the crowd, killing or wounding several hundred marchers. When war broke out, in August 1914, Socialist parties throughout Europe rallied behind their governments despite the resolutions of prewar congresses of the Second International obliging them to resist or even overthrow their respective governments if they plunged their countries into an imperialist war (“Vladimir Lenin”).
Lenin succeeded in reaching neutral Switzerland in September 1914, there joining a small group of anti-war Bolshevik and Menshevik emigres (“Vladimir Lenin