Keys to understanding the importance of Lenin, the leader of the Soviet Union

It is the night of April 16, 1917. Thousands of people wait with flashlights on a platform at the Finland Station in Petrograd (Saint Petersburg). At that moment, a man comes down the stairs of a train and begins a speech to the crowd:

“The people need peace, the people need bread, the people need land…”.

The people he refers to are Russian and the man is Vladimir Ilích Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.

This is how one of the great figures of 20th century Europe began his assault on power, who came to change the history of Russia forever, being admired and feared in equal measure.

Born during the Tsarist Russian Empire, he spent a significant part of his life outside his country. But his return that night in 1917 shook the foundations of a country immersed in a broth of revolutions.

To the point that five years later he became the first leader of the Soviet Union.

But how did he manage to revolutionize Russia in less than seven years? And what was her main legacy? We review three keys that explain it.

1. A one-party state

The young Vladimir was born in 1870 in the Russian city of Simbirsk, on the banks of the Volga River.

A town that was later precisely renamed Ulyanovsk in honor of Lenin's surname.

Although his family was certainly wealthy, Lenin showed a rebellious personality early on. But there was an event that finally awakened his anti-imperialist mentality: the execution of his older brother Aleksandr.

And the eldest son of the Ulyanovs was executed in 1887 when he was accused of having tried to assassinate the then Tsar Alexander III.

At that time, in the Russian Empire, life was quite difficult for the vast majority of the population, who were mainly dedicated to agriculture and suffered from hunger and hardship.

In this context Lenin took his first revolutionary steps and in 1895 he went to prison for distributing social democratic propaganda.

More than a year later, he was released but had to spend another three years in exile in remote Siberia. Until 1900 he fled to Geneva (Switzerland) where he started, together with other social democrats, his first big project: the newspaper Iskra.

This publication, which we can translate as 'The Spark', sought to coordinate the Russian social democratic movement from abroad.

And during this exile of several years he was accompanied by his wife, Nadia Krupskaya, who shared his same revolutionary ideas. Both supported the Marxist approach developed by the German Karl Marx.

But it was not until 1903 that Lenin truly began to have some political influence. It happened while he was temporarily living in London, since the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party was held there and Lenin was the protagonist.

A congress that sought to unite all those Russians who opposed tsarism and capitalism, but which, however, made the appearance of two factions evident.

On the one hand, the Mensheviks, more moderate and connected to European democratic parliamentarism. And, on the other, the Bolsheviks, with Lenin at their head and who had another idea of ​​how to come to power.

“While the idea of ​​the Mensheviks connects more with Western European society, the conception of the Bolsheviks was of a centralized, strong, conscious, vanguard party, which is more unconcerned with the conquest of power through parliamentarism,” he says. Professor of Contemporary History Julián Casanova told BBC Mundo.

The Bolshevik model ended up prevailing and they formed the Communist Party, which governed the Soviet Union since its creation on December 30, 1922.

A model of a single-party State and whose first leader was precisely Vladmir Lenin.

But how did the Bolsheviks manage to impose this model?

2. Violence and repression

To answer this question, we must go back to the year that changed Russian history forever and that we already mentioned at the beginning: 1917.

At that time Lenin was still in exile and the situation of the Russian population had not improved. Added to the famines in the countryside and exploitation in the industries was Russia's participation in the First World War.

This is how in February of that year, according to the Russian calendar, or already in March, according to ours, the first great revolution of 1917 took place.

An uprising that caused the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II, who had already lost much of popular support, and put an end to the Russian monarchy.

This gave way to the creation of a provisional government, which included the Mensheviks, although it soon had a counterbalance of power with the so-called Petrograd Soviet, as Saint Petersburg was then known.

And this Soviet was led by the Bolsheviks, “who had had no relevance in the previous fall of tsarism,” Casanova clarifies.

A role that did come months later.

After receiving news of the February Revolution, Lenin left his exile in Switzerland and undertook a long train journey, crossing Germany, Sweden and Finland.

You already read its destination before: the Finland station in Saint Petersburg (Russia). And you can already guess the objective: to launch their own revolution, the Bolshevik one. That's why his speech that April night ended like this:

“We must fight for the social revolution, fight until the end, until the complete victory of the proletariat. “Long live the international social revolution.”

This is how in October, according to the Russian calendar, or November, for us, the second great revolution occurred. The provisional government, still very weak and unstable, was overthrown by the Bolshevik Soviets, who took control.

And Lenin then managed to fulfill the first objective of his famous speech, that of peace, removing Russia from the First World War, thanks to the treaty of Brest-Litovsk.

But peace behind closed doors was just a mirage, since after the October Revolution a bloody civil war began between Russians. On one side, the Red Army of the Bolsheviks and on the other, the White Movement, which brought together conservatives, liberals and more moderate socialists.

A conflict that left several million dead and in which the Bolsheviks executed the former Tsar Nicholas II and his family. For Casanova, it was an especially cruel conflict:

“The civil war is the very clear brutalization of an important sector of Bolsheviks and soldiers who came from tsarism in that concept of using violence. And it is not only violence against political and ideological dissidents, but also against the peasants whose crops are requisitioned as the Red Army advances and also violence against parts of other Soviet republics that do not have a Russian population as important as the one Lenin Looking For”.

This use of violence and repression was justified by Lenin as the only way to achieve the consolidation of the new State. Other persecuted groups were intellectuals or the Russian Orthodox Church.

Finally the Red Army prevailed and the Soviet Union was founded in 1922, with Lenin at its head. But he could only stay in office for a little more than a year, since he died in January 1924 from a stroke.

However, experts assure that he did have time to lay the foundations of the repressive machinery that Joseph Stalin later perfected.

Millions of people attended his funeral in Moscow's Red Square and his body was embalmed and remains so to this day. In recent years there have been voices calling for him to be buried, but, for the moment, his body can still be visited in the mausoleum.

3. An “international” communism

To conclude, a third point is key to understanding Lenin's legacy: he wanted to make the socialist revolution a global cause.

You just have to take a look at the end of his famous speech: “Long live the international social revolution.”

Let us remember that Lenin's policy was based on the theses of Marxism. However, when Marx and Engels thought about the “dictatorship of the proletariat” they imagined it for a developed country like Germany and not a more backward one like Russia.

But Lenin did not see this as a problem, since for him, the Russian revolution was only the first socialist revolution in the world and his goal was for socialism to spread to developed countries as well.

In that quest, Lenin and several Marxists from around the world launched the Third International, also known as the Communist International, in 1919. Therefore, from this moment on, its members began to be known as communists.

But the project to expand socialism did not succeed. And this is how Casanova explains it: “In the process of internationalization that occurred in the years 18, 19, up to 20, insurrections were attempted in Germany, Austria, or Hungary. And the latter is the only country in which for a few months Bla Kun comes to power in a Bolshevik style.”

“But all those revolutions that were attempted ended up bathed in blood because the power not only had the mechanisms of coercion, order, capitalism, but also, in all those countries there were very powerful paramilitary groups that were anti-Bolshevik, anti-socialist and anti-democratic. ”.

Lenin did not achieve the desired expansion of socialism in his time, but he did lay the foundations of what would become the Soviet Union: a superpower that came to compete for world hegemony and that extended its influence over the next 70 years.

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