Section 6: Lenin and the Bolsheviks. Did Lenin always want to be a Dictator?

Because Lenin became the leader of Russia after the Bolshevik revolution of November 1917 and led the Bolshevik party to supreme power, it is obviously important to look at the role he was playing during the earlier years of Nicholas II's reign. It is tempting to think that he must have been gaining popularity within Russia continually throughout this period but this was not the case. What he was doing successfully however, was shaping a party of professional revolutionaries under his strict personal control. It was a party that proved to be well organised and disciplined enough to be able to impose its rule on Russia even though it was far from being the most popular party in the country. How did this happen?

Lenin's early life

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin was a codename adopted to avoid detection by the tsarist secret police) was the son of a school inspector and his mother was from the landed aristocracy. He lived the life of a country squire for a time and some historians trace his intolerance to subordinates to this time when he was used to ordering around peasants on his mother's estates. He became more revolutionary in his thought after his brother Alexander was executed in 1887 for being the ringleader in a bomb plot against Tsar Alexander III. He was expelled from Kazan university because of his involvement in student revolutionary groups. He was vastly influenced by a novel about a revolutionary written by Cherneshevsky called "What Is To Be Done?" and named his first major book on communism with the same title in 1902. In 1896 he was imprisoned for three years and then exiled to Siberia for his part in organising strikes in St. Petersburg. In 1900 he started a newspaper called ISKRA (The Spark) that was printed in Germany and secretly smuggled into Russia.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. Artist's impression from photograph of the period.

1902 "What Is To Be Done?"

Lenin's book "What Is To Be Done?" was published in 1902 and its ideas were radically different from any other political group in Russia at this time. Most Marxists (see Section 5) believed that Russia would first have to experience a middle class revolution where an elected parliament would be set up before it could then get rid of tsarism altogether. One faction known as Economists argued that the best thing to do was to argue for improved wages and living conditions for the working class first and then move on to more sweeping changes.