Lenin: A Biography

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Nadezhda Konstantinovna (Krupskaya) – First name and patronymic of Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife

Nadya – Krupskaya’s diminutive first name

Olga Ilinichna (Ulyanova) – First name and patronymic of one of Lenin’s younger sisters

Olya – Diminutive of Christian name of Olga Ilinichna Ulyanova

Sasha – Diminutive of Christian name of Lenin’s elder brother Alexander Ilich Ulyanov

Lenin was an exceptional figure. He founded a communist faction, the Bolsheviks, which he turned into a party that made the October Revolution of 1917. The world’s first socialist state was proclaimed. This state – which was the territorial core of what eventually became the USSR – survived against the odds. Lenin and the communist leadership withdrew Russia from the First World War and won the Civil War. By setting up the Communist International, they imprinted themselves upon politics across the continent. The USSR was a beacon to the world’s far-left socialists and a dangerous rock to conservatives, liberals and other socialists. Lenin’s interpretation of the doctrines of Marx and Engels became holy writ for communists, and at his death was designated as Marxism–Leninism. After the Second World War the communist model – the one-party state, ideological monopoly, legal nihilism, militant atheism, state terror and the elimination of all rival institutions of authority – was transferred to eastern Europe, China, south-eastern Asia and eventually parts of the Caribbean and Africa. Communism was dismantled in eastern Europe in 1989 and in the USSR at the end of 1991. But no one had made a greater impact upon the development and establishment of the communist order than Lenin.

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