Founder of the Communist party, he plotted and made the Russian Revolution and ordered the murders of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra and their children. Then renamed Russia to Soviet Union and became the first Soviet dictator.
Used 140 pseudonyms during his life.
His father was of Russian, and possibly some Chuvash (Asiatic), ancestry. His maternal grandfather was from a Jewish family, and his maternal grandmother was of German and Swedish descent.
Portrayed in movies by such actors as Klaus Maria Brandauer , Michael Bryant , Steven St. Croix , Ben Kingsley , Vasili Nikandrov , Maximilian Schell , Roger Sloman , Patrick Stewart , Innokentiy Smoktunovskiy and Kirill Lavrov.
Much archive footage of Lenin is actually actor Vasili Nikandrov portraying him in scenes taken from the Soviet film Oktyabr made by directors Sergei M. Eisenstein and Grigoriy Aleksandrov on the orders of Joseph Stalin.
V. I. Lenin (then known as Ulyanov) was expelled from the University of Kazan Faculty of Law after participating in radical student movements in 1888. Nevertheless, he enrolled in the Law School of the University of St. Petersburg as an "external student" (one who was not entitled to attend lectures) and graduated in 1891. Upon graduation, he worked for a labor union where he founded the first Communist group.
Lenin recommended Joseph Stalin to the communist ruling body, called the Politburo. In 1923 Stalin had a violent argument with Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenins wife, and was forced by Lenin to apologize officially.
His elder brother was executed in 1887 for participating in a plot against the Tsars life. Supposedly, this inspired Lenin to take a stance against the regime.
He intended Leon Trotsky to have a leading role in the Soviet Union, describing Joseph Stalin in a 1922 letter to the Party Central Committee as too "rude" and unfit for leadership, worrying about the amount of personal power Stalin had gathered. At the time, Lenin had already suffered a stroke and was not expected to live long. However, Trotsky was more of an intellectual and Stalin was successful in getting influential people on his side and liaising with the party bureaucracy. In time, he successfully took control and eventually exiled Trotsky and later ordered his murder.
In cooperation with the German government, Lenin and about 30 other Bolsheviks were allowed to ride home from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) about a month after Tsar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate. No one outside the train car was allowed contact with them while they traveled through Germany, which was at the time at war with Russia. Winston Churchill , who intensely disliked the Bolshevik regime from its inception, likened this operation to transferring "a plague bacilli in a closed bottle".
Recently unlocked archives of the Kremlin have proved that it was Lenin and his circle of communists who ordered the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, children and servants.
During the October Revolution, he revived the word "Communists" as a political designation - up till then, the word in use had been "Social Democrats". Outside of Russia, the two labels soon became widely used to separate the reformist socialists who would accept capitalist society from the hardline, Marxist revolutionary parties. In Soviet Russia, the reformists were soon outlawed and jailed.
Upon seizing power in October 1917 he immediately did his utmost to stamp out the violence against Jews and homosexuals that had existed during the reigns of Czar Aleksandr III and Tsar Nicholas II.
He was a militant anti-smoker.
Took the custom-made Rolls-Royce previously owned by the murdered Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra.
Came from a relatively wealthy family.
He is regarded even in non-Communist circles as one of the greatest revolutionary leaders in history.
Was a passionate chess player.
Despite the innumerable cities and landmarks named after him and statues of his likeness, Lenin himself was strictly against all forms of hero-worship.
Soviet Russia was the only country to recognize the self-proclaimed Irish Republic in 1919. The republic was succeeded by the Irish Free State in 1922.
Naivete in politics is worse than a crime.
The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.
Destroy the family, you destroy the country.
