60 Fun Facts About Vladimir Lenin

What was Lenin's real surname?

He first used the pen name Lenin in December 1901.

In which Volga city, later renamed after his family, was Lenin born?

It became Ulyanovsk in 1924, the same year Petrograd became Leningrad.

What was the profession of Lenin's father, Ilya?

He oversaw the founding of over 450 schools and his rank of State Councillor made the family hereditary nobles.

What happened to Lenin's elder brother Aleksandr in May 1887?

He had been chosen to build the bomb for a plot against Alexander III; the shock pushed the 17-year-old Vladimir towards revolution.

From where was Lenin expelled in December 1887 for taking part in a student demonstration?

He had enrolled to study law only months earlier; his mother later got him permission to sit his exams externally in Saint Petersburg.

Which 1863 Chernyshevsky novel enthralled young Lenin and gave his 1902 pamphlet its title?

He read it voraciously while exiled to the family estate at Kokushkino.

Which Marxist pamphlet did Lenin translate into Russian while living in Samara?

He was following Plekhanov's argument that Russia's revolution would come from the urban proletariat, not the peasantry.

To which Siberian village was Lenin exiled for three years from 1897?

He was allowed to swim in the Yenisei and hunt duck and snipe; the journey there took 11 weeks.

Whom did Lenin marry in Siberian exile on 10 July 1898?

A Marxist schoolteacher, she had been arrested for organising a strike and talked the authorities into moving her from Ufa to join him.

Under what pseudonym did Lenin publish The Development of Capitalism in Russia in 1899?

His longest book to date received predominantly poor reviews.

What was the name of the underground Marxist newspaper Lenin launched from Munich in 1900?

The name means 'Spark'; it became Russia's most successful underground publication since the 1850s.

The pen name Lenin, first used in December 1901, is thought possibly to derive from what?

He often signed 'N. Lenin'; the N stood for nothing, though people later assumed it meant Nikolai.

Under what false name did Lenin obtain a reader's ticket for the British Museum Reading Room?

He later returned to the same room in 1908 to write Materialism and Empirio-criticism.

At the 1903 RSDLP Congress in London, Lenin's faction took its name from which Russian word?

His rival Martov's followers became the Mensheviks, the 'minoritarians', though the majority was on that one vote alone.

Which rival did Lenin fall out with at the 1903 Congress over party members' independence from the leadership?

Martov coined the word 'Leninism' in 1904, and not as a compliment.

To finance the party after 1905, Lenin endorsed what?

The best-known heist was Stalin's 1907 robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis; Lenin then tried to launder the numbered notes in Switzerland.

How did Lenin describe Paris, where he lived from December 1908?

While there he sued a motorist who knocked him off his bicycle.

Which French Bolshevik became Lenin's close friend in Paris, and possibly his lover from 1910 to 1912?

When she died of cholera in 1920 a visibly grief-stricken Lenin oversaw her burial beneath the Kremlin Wall.

Which Okhrana spy did the secret police plant in the party as a vocal Lenin supporter?

It is unclear whether Lenin knew; he may have used him to feed the Okhrana false information.

What nickname did Lenin give Stalin when he visited him in Kraków in January 1913?

They discussed the future of the empire's non-Russian peoples, Stalin's speciality.

How many Russian exiles crossed Germany by train with Lenin in April 1917?

The 'sealed train' was not really sealed; passengers got off to spend a night in Frankfurt.

Where in Petrograd did Lenin arrive by train in April 1917 and denounce the Provisional Government?

He had written his 'April Theses' on the journey from Switzerland.

After the July Days, the government accused Lenin of being what?

He fled Petrograd in disguise with Zinoviev and hid in Finland, where he wrote The State and Revolution.

By what vote did the Bolshevik Central Committee approve armed insurrection on 10 October 1917?

Zinoviev and Kamenev were the two dissenters, doubting workers would back a coup.

Which cruiser fired the blank shot that signalled the storming of the Winter Palace?

The Military Revolutionary Committee had already taken Petrograd's key hubs without bloodshed.

What was the name of the new government the Bolsheviks formed in October 1917, with Lenin as chairman?

The Council of People's Commissars; Lenin initially turned down the chairmanship.

Roughly what share of the vote did the Bolsheviks win in the November 1917 Constituent Assembly election?

They lost to the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the government forcibly disbanded the Assembly in January 1918.

In March 1918, the Bolsheviks dropped the old RSDLP name in favour of what?

Lenin wanted distance from the reformist German Social Democrats.

Who shot and severely wounded Lenin outside a Moscow arms factory on 30 August 1918?

She was executed on 3 September; the bullets left in his body were not removed until 1922.

Which Swiss communist shielded Lenin during a January 1918 assassination attempt in Petrograd?

Platten had also organised the train journey through Germany the previous year.

Lenin's Russia led the world in legalising what on demand?

The regime also eased divorce, decreed an eight-hour day and separated church and state.

Which March 1918 agreement took Russia out of the First World War at a huge territorial cost?

It handed over 26% of the old empire's population and three-quarters of its coal and iron; Lenin had to fight his own party to sign it.

Which Bolshevik opposed peace with Germany, wanting a 'war of revolutionary defence' instead?

Lenin only won a small majority after the German army resumed its advance and took Dvinsk in a day.

Who led the Cheka, the political police Lenin created in December 1917?

By 1920 the Cheka had become the most powerful institution in Soviet Russia.

Lenin's August 1918 Penza telegram ordered at least how many 'kulaks, rich men and bloodsuckers' publicly hanged?

His published speeches rarely called for executions; his coded telegrams regularly did.

Whom did Lenin task with building the Red Army?

He chaired the Revolutionary Military Council from 1918 to 1925 and allowed ex-tsarist officers to serve under watch.

To which earlier event did Lenin liken the killing of the tsar and his family in July 1918?

Historians still disagree over whether he personally sanctioned the killings in Yekaterinburg.

Which 1920 defeat ended Lenin's hope that a Red Army invasion of Poland would ignite European revolution?

The Polish proletariat did not rise, and Russia ceded territory in the Peace of Riga.

Which body did Lenin found in Moscow in March 1919 to rival the revived socialist international?

Zinoviev became its president, but only parties endorsing Bolshevik views were allowed to join.

Sailors at which naval base rebelled against the Bolsheviks in March 1921?

The Red Army crushed the revolt on 17 March; survivors went to labour camps.

What term did Lenin use for the New Economic Policy of 1921, which allowed some private enterprise?

Many Bolsheviks saw it as betrayal; biographers rank it among his most significant achievements.

Complete Lenin's slogan: 'Communism is Soviet power plus...'

The GOELRO electrification plan began in February 1920.

Which two of these visited Lenin in Russia in 1920: an English novelist and a philosopher?

The anarchists Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman also came that year.

What did the seriously ill Lenin ask both Krupskaya and Stalin to obtain for him in 1921–22?

He had begun to contemplate suicide; twenty-six physicians were hired to treat him in his final years.

In 'Lenin's Testament', dictated in 1922–23, what did he recommend regarding Stalin?

He praised the intellect of his other main rival but criticised his self-assurance and love of administration.

What personal incident sharpened Lenin's anger at the General Secretary in late 1922?

Lenin sent Stalin a letter expressing his annoyance.

What name did Lenin propose for the new federation before Stalin changed it to USSR?

The dispute over Georgia was the deepest political split between the two men.

How old was Lenin when he died on 21 January 1924?

He had suffered three strokes; his official cause of death was an incurable disease of the blood vessels.

Which senior Bolshevik missed Lenin's funeral, later claiming Stalin had telegraphed him the wrong date?

He was convalescing in the Caucasus at the time.

What was removed from Lenin's body during embalming and later studied by a dedicated institute?

The 1925 institute found severe sclerosis; Krupskaya had protested against the embalming.

To which Siberian city was Lenin's body moved for safety from 1941 to 1945?

The permanent granite mausoleum had been finished in 1933.

Which classical languages was Lenin fluent in, reading Virgil, Ovid and Juvenal in the original?

He also spoke French, German and English, and was fond of cats and Swiss mountain walking.

Which Russian president intended to close the mausoleum and bury Lenin beside his mother?

Putin opposed the idea; the body remains on display on Red Square.

In a 2024 Levada poll, what share of Russians said Lenin played a positive role in the country's history?

Russia still has roughly 6,000 Lenin monuments; Ukraine ordered all of its dismantled in 2015.

Which German ambassador was assassinated by Left SR Yakov Blumkin in July 1918?

The Left SRs hoped to provoke a revolutionary war with Germany, then shelled the Kremlin in a coup that Trotsky's forces crushed.

Where did the Second Congress of the Comintern open in July 1920, Lenin's last visit outside Moscow?

For the congress he wrote 'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder, urging British and German communists to enter parliaments and unions.

Which senior Bolshevik fled Petrograd with Lenin in disguise to Razliv after the July Days?

Hiding at Razliv, Lenin began writing the book that became The State and Revolution.

Which two American anarchists were among the Western figures who visited Lenin in 1920?

The same year Lenin was mortified when the Bolsheviks threw a large party for his 50th birthday.

Roughly how many camps had been set up across Soviet Russia by the end of 1920?

An April 1919 decree entrusted the camps to the Cheka; they held about 50,000 prisoners by late 1920 and 70,000 by October 1923.

Besides Russian and the classical languages, which three modern languages did Lenin speak and read?

He stayed passionate about Latin all his life, reading Virgil, Ovid and Juvenal in the original.