How Did Lenin Contribute To Communism

This research paper is about Vladimir Lenin’s early life, how it led him to communism, and his life as a communist. Communism is a political theory derived from Karl Marx, advocating class war and leading to a society in which all property is publicly owned and each person works and is paid according to their abilities and needs. Vladimir is known for his various efforts and contributions to the communist and socialist parties. One of his famous quotes is, “The goal of socialism is communism.” He was difficult to satisfy which made him a strong political leader, always pushing for what he wanted, during the Russian Revolution.
Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov was born on April 10th, 1870 in Simbirsk (later named Ulyanovsk in his honor), Russia. He later
took the last name Lenin in 1901 while doing underground party work. He was close to his parents and siblings. Lenin was a part of a well-educated family. His parents pushed Vladimir to be the best when it came to his academics. School was the central of his childhood. He finished first in his high school class and had a gift for Latin and Greek. Unfortunately, in 1887 his older brother, Aleksandr, while in at university, was arrested and put to death for being a part of a group planning to assassinate Emperor Alexander the third. During this unfortunate incident Lenin’s father was already dead so Lenin became the man of the family. All of Lenin’s siblings would take part in some degree in revolutionary activities. The same year his brother was put to death, he enrolled at Kazan University to study law.
There are various factors that led Lenin to his life with communism. Lenin was banished to his grandfather’s estate in the village of Kokushkino, where Lenin took up residence with his sister Anna, who the police had ordered to live there because of her own suspicious activities. During this time, he started to read a variety of radical literature including the novel What is to Be Done? by Nicolai Chernyshevsky which tells the story of a character named Rakmetov, who carries a single-minded devotion to revolutionary politics. He also read the writings of Karl Marx, the German philosopher whose famous book Das Kapital would have a huge impact on Lenin’s thinking. On January 1889, Lenin declared himself a Marxist. He finished his schoolwork in 1892 and received his law degree. He moved to Samara where his consumer base was largely made up of Russian peasants. Their struggles against what Lenin saw as a class-biased legal system only reinforced his Marxist beliefs. Eventually, Lenin focused more of his time on revolutionary politics. He left Samara in the mid-1890s and moved to St. Petersburg, the Russian capital at the time. While he was there he connected with other compatible Marxists and began to take an increasingly active role in their activities. Their work did not go unnoticed and in December 1895 Lenin and several other Marxist leaders were arrested. He was then exiled to Siberia for three years. His fiancée and future wide, Nadezhda Krupshaya joined him. After he was released from exile he and some others co-founded a newspaper called Iskra in Munich to bring Russians and European Marxists together. From there he returned to St. Petersburg and stepped up his leadership role in the revolutionary movement. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in 1903, Lenin argued for a reorganized party leadership community, one that would lead an arrangement of lower party organizations and their workers. “Give us an organization of revolutionaries,” Lenin said, “and we will overturn Russia!”
Lenin had a very large power role in the growth and creation of communism.
Lenin was the founder of the Russian Communist Party, the leader of the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, as well as the architect, builder, and first head of the Soviet Union. In 1904 Russia went to war with Japan. Russia had a number of defeats and it put damage on the country’s national budget. The problem was intensified 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 the second. They were met by security forces, who fired on the group, killing and wounding hundreds. The crisis set the stage for what would called the Russian Revolution of 1905. Lenin was far from satisfied. His frustrations extended to his fellow Marxists, in particular the group calling itself the Mensheviks, led by Julius Martov. The party’s idea and structure was built around wanting to fully seize control of Russia. From the Mensheviks’ point of view, however, Lenin’s ideas really paved the way for a one-man dictatorship over people he claimed he wanted to empower. The two groups had argued since party’s Second Congress, which has handed Lenin’s group, known as the Bolsheviks, a slim majority. The fighting would continue until a 1912 party conference in Prague, when Lenin formally split to create a new separate entity. During World War 1Lenin went into exile again, this time taking up residence in Switzerland. As always, his mind stayed focus on revolutionary politics. During this period, he wrote and published Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1916), a defining work for the future leader, in which he argued that war was the natural result of international capitalism. During this time, he was able to avoid several assassinations attempts on him. Lenin later dies on January 21st, 1924 from intracerebral hemorrhage (bleeding in the brain) in Gorki Leninskiye,
Russia. To conclude, Lenin though he was exiled and even on almost killed on several occasions continued full force to put forth his ideas on the people of Russia. He created one of the worst political parties in all of history. He laid down the foundation for the party to come about and affect many people. The communist party itself, affected history for many years. Communism is still relevant today in several countries such as: Vietnam, China, and North Korea.