Look back at history
In his early years, Vladimir Lenin didn’t look like a future revolutionary.
Born on April 22, 1870 in Simbirsk, 400-odd miles from Moscow, his father had overcome his serf background to excel at school and ultimately become a middle-class teacher, comfortable financially and a fan of the monarchy and a conservative.
Not the sort of man to be thrilled by the thought of his son turning Russia into a one-party Communist state and shaking politics by the throat. His mother was even posher, with a RussianJewish physician father and a wealthy German-Swedish Lutheran mother.
Only after Lenin’s death would anyone discover his mother’s Jewish background, in fact.
Lenin was great at school, in sports and in everything else, top of the class and best student of the year, getting gold medals for his hard work and intelligence.
His beloved brother Sasha was brainy, too, and a revolutionary before Vladimir. He was caught while part of a gang plotting to blow up the Tsar and hanged – even then, though, Vladimir kept his head down, his nose buried in books, getting a great education.
His father’s death, when Lenin was just 15, had seen him give up any pretence that he believed in God, and all he wanted was to get on to university and gain even more knowledge.
It would be there that he became a revolutionary, too. His mother worried about his new interests, but it was too late. Lenin discovered Capital, Karl Marx’s 1867 book, and it prompted a growing belief that socialism and communism would one day replace capitalism worldwide.
His beliefs and the kind of people he hung around with saw him exiled to Siberia, where he was placed in a peasant’s hut.
Lenin would later travel to England and Switzerland, and he also stayed in Paris, but all the while he was intently observing the upheaval back in Russia.
When the 1917 Revolution came, he eventually got back to Petrograd, modern-day St Petersburg.
He was a passionate public speaker, knew how to have the people eating out his hand and doing as he suggested.
In government, he would see his country go through monumental change. Lenin hoped that invading Poland would push all Europe into revolution, but it didn’t pan out as he had hoped.
Famine and terrible times would follow, and his own health went into steep decline in his 50s.
Joseph Stalin, of course, would bring much, much worse, for his own country and others.
Seen as an authoritarian by his enemies, a champion of the people by his friends, Lenin died, aged 53, in 1924.