Biography Of Lenin & Russian Revolution P1

BIOGRAPHY OF LENIN AND RUSSIAN REVOLUTION PART – 1

WHAT WE WILL STUDY?

CHILDHOOD

Lenin was not born, Lenin was constructed. The child who was to become Lenin, Vladimir Il’ich Ulyanov, was born on 22 April 1870 in the town of Simbirsk on the Volga.
He was the fourth child of a moderately prosperous, teacher and public official, Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov (1831–86) and his wife Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova (1835–1916) .
Volodya was a brilliant child and became a passable piano player but gave up when he was ten years old. The children themselves were successful learners and the Ulyanov sisters, Maria, Anna and Olga, were also intelligent and accomplished.
Like Alexander, Volodya shone at school. At the end of his secondary school he was given a glowing report by his headmaster and achieved top marks in almost all his subjects.

CONSTRUCTION(Young Revolutionary)

The question was: could Russia bypass capitalism and go straight to the construction of a socialist society?Marxism was very much established untill then.
It was not Marx who made the greatest impact on Volodya.The novel What is to be Done? Tales of the New People (1864), written by the academic economist Nikolai Chernyshevsky (1828–89), had a greater effect.
The first key problem was his educational career. As a top student Volodya would have been entitled to walk into the best of universities. However, it took a long struggle for his headmaster, Fyodor Kerensky, to get him admitted to the local university in Kazan.
The young Volodya had received a number of severe jolts. In January 1886 his father had died unexpectedly of a brain haemorrhage. Following that there was Alexander’s arrest in March 1887, followed by his execution two months later
In 1890 and 1891 the pace of his qualification as a lawyer speeded up. He was granted permission to visit St. Petersburg to take his exams as an external student.In his finals he obtained first place with excellent marks and was awarded a first-class degree in law in January 1892.

RISE OF LENIN

In December 1895 Lenin and several other Marxist leaders were arrested. Lenin was exiled to Siberia for three years. His fiancée and future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, joined him and supported him tremendously. The wedding duly took place on 22 July 1898.
For Lenin, peasants were the victims of unremitting repression by landowners and state. They were poor, ignorant and often lived short, brutish lives curtailed by alcohol and domestic violence.
In January 1901, for the first time, he used the name Lenin in place of Tulin and Ilyin which he had used most frequently while escaping from the authority.

It seems curious that, at this time and Building a unified party was an obvious task. The problem for social democrats in exile was that they had an excess of architects and no bricklayers.
Russia, was to produce a Party newspaper. A major split was trheir in the party on the ideology and hence two newspapers came out. Iskra (The Spark) was dominated by Lenin and Martov. The elders produced a less frequently appearing journal Zarya (The Dawn).
The compromise did not run smoothly. Party unity and harmony seemed far away. Frequent quarrels and disputes broke out. Such arguments crop up with increasing frequency in he next phase of Lenin’s life but none is more crucial than the upcoming debates which led to the fateful split into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks.

POLITICAL PROBLEMS

After his exile, Lenin settled in Pskov in early 1900.There, he began raising funds for a newspaper, Iskra (“Spark“), a new organ of the Russian Marxist party, now calling itself the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP).
Iskra was smuggled into Russia, becoming the country’s most successful underground publication for 50 years. he published the political pamphlet What Is To Be Done?in 1902. Enraged at the Mensheviks, Lenin resigned from the Iskra editorial board and in May 1904 published the anti-Menshevik tract One Step Forward, Two Steps Back.
The stress made Lenin ill, and to recuperate he went on a hiking holiday in rural Switzerland. The Bolshevik faction grew in strength; by the spring, the whole RSDLP Central Committee was Bolshevik, and in December they founded the newspaper Vpered(Forward).

BLOODY SUNDAY

A leading role in this events was played by a priest Father Georgy Gapon.On Sunday, 22 January 1905 in St Petersburg, Russia, when unarmed demonstrators led by Father Georgy Gapon were fired upon by soldiers of the Imperial Guard as they marched towards the Winter Palace to present a petition to Tsar Nicholas II of Russia.
In 1904 Russia went to war with Japan. The conflict had a profound impact on Russian society. After a number of defeats put a strain on the country’s domestic budget, citizens from all walks of life began to vocalize their discontent over the country’s political structure and called for reform.
The situation was heightened on January 9, 1905, when a group of unarmed workers in St. Petersburg took their concerns directly to the city’s palace to submit a petition to Emperor Nicholas II. 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 1905.