XVII.
SOME REVOLUTIONARY LEADERS.
Nicholai Lenin (V. I. Ulianov),[1] President of the Council of Peoples' Commissars, is the central figure in the Russian revolution. He was born in Simbirsk, Russia, on April 10, 1870, of a family of the lower nobility. He was educated at the Universities of Kazan and Petersburg. Like his brother, Alexander, who was shot in 1887 for his revolutionary activities, Lenin was a born rebel. He was expelled from the Kazan University for helping organize a students' demonstration there. In 1897 he was exiled to Siberia, where he served three years. He left Russia in 1900, and travelled over Europe, taking an active part in the international movement. He became the leader of the left wing of the Russian Social Democratic Party. In 1903 this became the Bolshevik, or majority, faction. It was the forerunner of the modern Russian Communist Party. During the big uprising in 1905 Lenin returned to Russia, but he had to flee when the movement broke down. Then ensued another long period of wandering, during which he wrote a number of important books. Right after the first revolution in 1917 he went back to Russia. From that time on he has played a tremendous part in Russian and world affairs. More than any other man he has been responsible for the great revolutionary policies that have been carried out. The organizing of the resistance to Kerensky, the Brest-Litovsk treaty, the introduction of compulsory military service and the ex-czarist officers into the Red Army, the gradual transference of the management of industry from the actual producers' hands into those of the experts, the new economic policies of industrial treaties with capitalist nations, the granting of concessions in Russia, free trade the grain tax, etc.—are either his own propositions, or he early associated himself with
- ↑ In the old days the Russian Communist Party was an underground organization because of official persecution, and its members all had assumed names. Many of the leaders (Lenin, Trotzsky, Radek, etc.) are now much better known by these "party" names, which they constantly use, than by their real names.
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