Biography for
V.I. Lenin More at IMDbPro »

Date of Birth

22 April 1870, Simbirsk, Russian Empire [now Ulyanovsk, Russia]

Date of Death

21 January 1924, Gorki, Moscow Governorate, Russian SFSR, USSR [now Gorki Leninskiye, Moscow Oblast, Russia] (after a series of strokes)

Birth Name

Vladimir Ilich Uliánov

Height

5' 5" (1.65 m)

Spouse

Nadezhda Krupskaya

(22 July 1898 - 21 January 1924) (his death)

Trivia

Founder of the Communist party, he plotted and made the Russian Revolution and ordered the murders of Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra and their children. Then renamed Russia to Soviet Union and became the first Soviet dictator.

Used 140 pseudonyms during his life.

His mixed ancestry was Russian, German and Asiatic (either Tatar or Kalmyk).

Portrayed in movies by such actors as Klaus Maria Brandauer, Michael Bryant, Steven St. Croix, Ben Kingsley, Vasili Nikandrov, Maximilian Schell, Roger Sloman, Patrick Stewart, Innokenti Smoktunovsky and Kirill Lavrov.

Much archive footage of Lenin is actually actor Vasili Nikandrov portraying him in scenes taken from the Soviet film October (Ten Days that Shook the World) (1928) made by directors Sergei M. Eisenstein and Grigori Aleksandrov on the orders of Joseph Stalin.

V. I. Lenin (then known as Ulyanov) was expelled from the University of Kazan Faculty of Law after participating in radical student movements in 1888. Nevertheless, he enrolled in the Law School of the University of St. Petersburg as an "external student" (one who was not entitled to attend lectures) and graduated in 1891. Upon graduation, he worked for a labor union where he founded the first Communist group.

Lenin recommended Joseph Stalin to the communist ruling body, called the Politburo, but later he and Stalin clashed often on matters of ideology and were barely on speaking terms. In 1918 Lenin was shot and severely wounded in a plot loosely linked to Stalin's security. In 1923 when Lenin publicly showed his support for Leon Trotsky (his close ally and Stalin's bitter rival). Stalin responded by calling Lenin's wife and bitterly cursing her out. Lenin suffered a stroke and never spoke to Stalin again.

His elder brother was executed in 1887 for participating in a plot against the Tsar's life. Supposedly, this inspired Lenin to take a stance against the regime.

He intended Leon Trotsky to have a leading role in the Soviet Union, describing Joseph Stalin in a 1922 letter to the Party Central Committee as too "rude" and unfit for leadership, worrying about the amount of personal power Stalin had gathered. At the time, Lenin had already suffered a stroke and was not expected to live long. However, Trotsky was more of an intellectual and Stalin was successful in getting influential people on his side and liaising with the party bureaucracy. In time, he successfully took control and eventually exiled Trotsky and later ordered his murder.

In cooperation with the German government, Lenin and about 30 other Bolsheviks were allowed to ride home from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd (St. Petersburg) about a month after Tsar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate. No one outside the train car was allowed contact with them while they traveled through Germany, which was at the time at war with Russia. Winston Churchill, who intensely disliked the Bolshevik regime from its inception, likened this operation to transferring "a plague bacilli in a closed bottle".

Recently unlocked archives of the Kremlin have proved that it was Lenin and his circle of communists who ordered the execution of Tsar Nicholas II and his wife, children and servants.

During the October Revolution, he revived the word "Communists" as a political designation - up till then, the word in use had been "Social Democrats". Outside of Russia, the two labels soon became widely used to separate the reformist socialists who would accept capitalist society from the hardline, Marxist revolutionary parties. In Soviet Russia, the reformists were soon outlawed and jailed.

Upon seizing power in October 1917 he immediately did his utmost to stamp out the violence against Jews and homosexuals that had existed during the reigns of Czar Aleksandr III and Tsar Nicholas II.

He was a militant anti-smoker.

Took the custom-made Rolls-Royce previously owned by the murdered Tsar Nicholas II and Tsarina Alexandra.

Came from a relatively wealthy family.

He is regarded even in non-Communist circles as one of the greatest revolutionary leaders in history.

Personal Quotes

Naivete in politics is worse than a crime.

The capitalists will sell us the rope with which we will hang them.

Give me four years to teach the children and the seed I have sown will never be uprooted.

[from his instruction to Feliks Dzierzynski, founder of the KGB] Of all the arts, the cinema is the most important for us, communists, to keep the people under control.

Destroy the family, you destroy the country.

We shall destroy all churches and kill all priests. Then we'll have total control over people.

Comrade Stalin ]Joseph Stalin] is unfit for leadership. He is too rude and undereducated.

We do not need intellectuals, because their brains are full of shit!

If you want to be alive - get out of this country [Russia] and sever all connections.