Lenin was born on April 22nd in 1870 in a town named Simbirsk near the capital of the Russian Empire Saint Petersburg. His mother was a schoolteacher and his father was an official government educator. Upon Lenin’s birth, he was baptized in the church of Saint Nicholas into the Russian Orthodox Church. Lenin was born into a comfortable middle class family due to the strong efforts of his father and his government work. His father had risen through the ranks of his career field and was even referred to as ‘Your Excellency’. Lenin and his siblings were raised to be explicitly intellectual and were forced extracurricular studies by their parents in the topics of violations of human rights, psychology, history, as well as philosophy. It was during this time that Lenin became a huge follower and supporter of the philosopher Karl Marx and even extended many of his ideas later in his political life.
In January of 1886 Lenin’s father suffered and died from a brain hemorrhage and in May of 1887 Lenin’s eldest brother was tried then hung for conspiring in the assassination attempt against the Tsar Alexander III. His sister was also arrested during this attempt and banished from the homeland. It was these series of events that shaped Lenin’s mind and idea about radicalization. Lenin still pursued a degree in Law even though he was constantly followed by police under suspicion of his own conspiracies and being the brother of a well known ‘terrorist’ of that time.
On December 7th 1895, as a member of the Marxist group, Lenin was arrested for plotting against Tsar Alexander III and was imprisoned for 14 months in solitary confinement than exiled. It was during his time in exile that he wrote one of 30 of his books “The Development of Capitalism in Russia” in 1899. Lenin also participated in many revolutionary attempts such as the Russian Revolution and the socialist revolution and in 1914 he opposed the first world war saying that it would be a war of the imperialists that would be fought by workers and farmers.
As Lenin became more of an important political figure with many works that he had written himself under his belt, his support and amount of followers gradually increased. So much in fact that two different assassination attempts were made against Lenin but both failed which in turn made him much more popular in the public eye as everyone grew to be aware of who he was and what he stood for. His second assassination attempt left him in a slow recovery but still a successful one which led him to lead an even more predominant and influential future. All of the work the Lenin had been doing with leading revolutions, political agendas, writing, and speeches combined with the wounds that were left from his assassination attempt left his body to degrade over time.
On January 21st 1924 at age 53 Lenin died leaving over 900,000 followers to mourn. His final position in office was that of Chairman of the People’s Commissars of the Soviet Union. Ultimately, Lenin believed in the working man and the laborers freedom above anything else and that people shouldn’t be controlled and told to live or die by imperialist power like that of Capitalism or Disposition.
Sources:
“Lenin’s Jewish Artifacts” By Frank Weltner, Founder The Jew Watch Project