VLADIMIR Lenin was born on April 22, 1870, in the town of Simbirsk in the Russian Empire.
His mother was a schoolteacher and his father was an education official (technically, his father’s job made him and his family noblemen).
Lenin began studying politics in high school. Lenin was good in school and learned the Latin and Greek languages.
In 1887, he was thrown out of Kazan State University because he protested against the Tsar who was the king of the Russian Empire. He continued to read books and study ideas by himself, and in 1891 he got a license to become a lawyer.
In the same year that Lenin was expelled from University, his brother Alexander was hanged for his part in a bomb plot to kill Tsar Alexander III, and their sister Anna was sent to Tatarstan. This made Lenin furious, and he promised to get revenge for his brother’s death.
While he studied law in St. Petersburg he learned about the writings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, who were both philosophers from Germany. Karl Marx’s thoughts were called Marxism. To talk or write about Marxism like it was a good thing was illegal in Russia, and Lenin was arrested for that and sent to prison in Siberia. This punishment was harsh because Siberia is known for being very cold and isolated, and almost impossible to escape.
In July 1898, when he was still in Siberia, Lenin married Nadezhda Krupskaya. In 1899 he wrote a book called The Development of Capitalism in Russia. In 1900, Lenin was set free from prison and allowed to return home.
He later began to publish a Marxist newspaper called Iskra, the Russian word for “spark” or “lightning”. He also became an important member of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, or RSDLP.
In 1903, Lenin had a major argument with another leader of the Party, Julius Martov, which divided the Party in two. Lenin wanted to establish socialism right away, rather than establishing capitalism first and then making the transition to socialism.
Martov disagreed, he wanted to cling to the Classical Marxist idea that in order to achieve socialism, you must go through capitalism first.
People who agreed with Martov were called Mensheviks (meaning “the minority”). The people who agreed with Lenin were called Bolsheviks (“the majority”).PC
