59 Fun Facts About Vladimir Lenin

What was Lenin's real surname?

Ulyanov. He was 31 when he adopted the name Lenin, in 1901, as cover for his underground party work.

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

Simbirsk. The town took its new name in 1924, months after his death, and kept it when Leningrad went back to being St Petersburg in 1991.

Thanks to his father's rise as a schools official, the young Lenin legally belonged to which class of tsarist society?

The nobility. His father Ilya, director of the province's public schools, reached a civil-service rank that made the family hereditary nobles: on paper, the future leader of a workers' revolution was an aristocrat.

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

He was executed for plotting to kill the tsar. Aleksandr, a 21-year-old student, had made the bombs; he was hanged with four comrades, and the loss turned his younger brother towards revolution.

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

Kazan University. He was thrown out in his first term as a law student, yet in 1891 he took the degree anyway by sitting the exams as an external candidate.

Which Russian novel enthralled the young Lenin and gave his 1902 pamphlet its title?

What Is to Be Done? was written in prison by the radical Nikolai Chernyshevsky. Lenin reread it many times and kept its author's photograph in his album.

Which Marxist work did Lenin translate into Russian while living in Samara around 1890?

The Communist Manifesto was not what his mother had planned for him. She had bought a farm near Samara hoping he would take up agriculture, but he made no success of running it and she sold the land.

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

Shushenskoye was exile, not prison: under police watch Lenin still hunted duck and snipe, received visiting comrades and got married there in 1898.

Whom did Lenin marry in Siberian exile in July 1898?

Nadezhda Krupskaya, a fellow Marxist arrested after a strike, had been sentenced to exile in Ufa. She won a transfer to his village by describing herself as his fiancée, and they married soon after she arrived.

The headmaster of Lenin's school was the father of which man, whose government Lenin overthrew in 1917?

Alexander Kerensky's father, Fyodor, wrote the character reference that eased Lenin's way into university. Thirty years later Lenin's Bolsheviks toppled the son's Provisional Government.

Which underground newspaper, its name meaning 'The Spark', did Lenin help launch from exile in 1900, years before Pravda?

Iskra was printed abroad, its first issue in Leipzig, and smuggled into Russia. Its editors hoped it would pull the scattered Russian Marxist groups into a single party.

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

The Siberian river Lena is the usual explanation, yet the exact reason is unknown. A rival theory has him taking the name from the passport of a real man called Lenin, handed to him by that man's children.

At which London institution did Lenin hold a reader's ticket under the false name Jacob Richter?

The British Museum drew him for its library, not its galleries: his wife recalled that he spent half his time there. He came back in 1908 to research a book on philosophy.

The name Bolsheviks, taken by Lenin's faction at the 1903 party congress, comes from a Russian word meaning what?

'Majoritarians' is the usual sense of Bolsheviks, from the Russian for 'larger'. That majority was temporary, won in votes for the party's leading bodies after rival delegates walked out, but Lenin kept the name.

Which former friend of Lenin's won the 1903 congress vote on party membership rules and went on to lead the Mensheviks?

Julius Martov won that vote, but some of his allies then walked out and Lenin's men took the party's leading bodies.

To finance the party after 1905, Lenin endorsed what?

Robbing banks, trains and post offices raised cash the party could not always spend. The big notes from a 1907 hold-up in Tiflis had listed serial numbers, and Bolsheviks who tried to change them abroad were arrested.

Which city, his home from December 1908, did Lenin call 'a foul hole' in a letter to his sister?

Paris is 'a rotten hole in many respects' in another translation of the letter. A viscount's motor car smashed his bicycle outside the city, and Lenin took him to court and won.

Which revolutionary became Lenin's close friend in exile, and possibly his lover, in the years before the First World War?

Inessa Armand died of cholera in 1920 and was buried by the Kremlin Wall. A comrade recalled Lenin as utterly broken by her death, with his cap pulled down over his eyes.

Which Okhrana spy led the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma while Lenin defended him against suspicion?

Roman Malinovsky was exposed after the tsar fell and the police archives were opened. He came back to Russia in 1918, was tried by a revolutionary tribunal and shot.

How did Lenin describe Stalin in a 1913 letter to the writer Maxim Gorky?

'The wonderful Georgian', or 'marvellous' in another translation, was then writing a long article on the empire's national minorities. Four years later Lenin gave him the nationalities post in the first Soviet government.

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

The Finland Station was mobbed that night. Lenin was put on an armoured car to speak to the crowd and rode it to Bolshevik headquarters, and a statue of him still stands in the square outside.

After the July Days unrest of 1917, the government accused Lenin of being what?

A German agent provocateur was the charge, and a warrant went out for his arrest. Lenin went into hiding in a wig and later slipped across the border disguised as a locomotive fireman.

Which two Bolsheviks cast the only votes against Lenin's call for an armed uprising in October 1917?

Zinoviev and Kamenev argued against a rising, and word of the plan then reached the newspapers. A furious Lenin wrote to party members demanding that the pair be expelled.

Which warship fired the blank shot that signalled the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917?

Aurora's blank came late in a nearly bloodless takeover: the insurgents already held the capital's key transport and communication hubs. The cruiser is now moored in Saint Petersburg as a museum.

What title did members of Lenin's 1917 government take in place of 'minister'?

People's Commissars replaced a word Lenin found vile and hackneyed, by one colleague's account. The title lasted until 1946, when the Soviet government went back to ministers.

Which party beat Lenin's Bolsheviks in the November 1917 election for Russia's Constituent Assembly?

The Socialist Revolutionaries, the peasants' party, won the most seats, while the Bolsheviks took about a quarter of the vote. The assembly met for a single session in January 1918 before Lenin's government dissolved it.

In March 1918, Lenin's Bolsheviks dropped the 'Social Democratic' label and renamed their party what?

The Russian Communist Party was the name Lenin had urged since his April Theses of 1917. He wanted to cut the link to Europe's Social Democrats, whose leaders he accused of betraying socialism.

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.

In which Moscow square was a mausoleum built to display Lenin's embalmed body?

Red Square has held the tomb since 1924. Stalin's embalmed body was laid beside Lenin's in 1953, then taken out in 1961 and buried by the Kremlin wall.

In 1920, Lenin's Russia became the first modern state to legalise what?

First-trimester abortion on request was legalised by a 1920 decree. The freedom did not last: Stalin's government banned it again in 1936, and the ban stood until 1955.

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

The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk cost Russia Ukraine and its Polish and Baltic lands. It lasted only eight months: the armistice that ended the war in November 1918 annulled it.

Which Bolshevik led the Left Communists against Lenin's 1918 peace with Germany, wanting a revolutionary war instead?

Nikolai Bukharin called the peace a betrayal of international socialism. A few years later he had swung the other way, becoming the leading defender of the market-friendly New Economic Policy.

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

Felix Dzerzhinsky, a Polish nobleman's son, had been arrested six times under the tsars and was freed from prison only by the February Revolution. Months later 'Iron Felix' was running Lenin's own secret police.

In an August 1918 telegram, Lenin told Penza's Bolsheviks to publicly hang at least 100 of whom?

Kulaks, the better-off peasants, had risen in five districts near Penza. Lenin also ordered their names published and their grain seized, so that people for hundreds of miles around would see and tremble.

What did the Bolsheviks' best-known slogan of 1917 promise alongside peace and land?

Bread completed the slogan 'Peace, Land and Bread'. It was a pointed promise: food shortages in Petrograd had set off the revolution that toppled the tsar earlier that year.

In which Urals city were the former tsar Nicholas II and his family shot in July 1918?

Yekaterinburg's Bolsheviks shot the family in the cellar of a merchant's house as White forces closed in, to prevent a rescue. Historians still disagree over whether Lenin gave the order.

Which 1920 battle, Poland's 'Miracle on the Vistula', ended Lenin's hope of carrying revolution into Europe?

The Battle of Warsaw threw the Red Army into retreat at the gates of the capital. Lenin had seen Poland as the bridge to revolutionary Germany; instead the peace that followed split Ukraine and Belarus with the Poles.

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

The Comintern, short for Communist International, was meant to spread revolution abroad. Stalin dissolved it in 1943 to calm his wartime allies' fears of communist subversion.

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

Kronstadt's sailors had been vital allies in 1917, but by 1921 they wanted soviets without Bolsheviks. The Red Army stormed the island fortress across the sea ice, and survivors were shot or imprisoned.

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

'State capitalism' was Lenin's defence of the change. Farming, shops and small workshops went back into private hands, while the state kept heavy industry, banking and foreign trade.

Which phrase completes Lenin's slogan 'Communism is Soviet power plus…'?

'The electrification of the whole country' was his cure for backwardness: without modern power, he told a congress in 1920, Russia would stay a land of small peasants. A state commission, GOELRO, was already drawing up the plan.

Which two British writers each met Lenin in Moscow in 1920?

H. G. Wells and Bertrand Russell each published an account of the trip. Russell, who had welcomed the revolution, came home to write a book critical of Bolshevism, while Wells described a country in near-total collapse.

What did the seriously ill Lenin ask Stalin to obtain for him in 1922?

Potassium cyanide was his planned way out. Plagued by headaches and insomnia and no longer able to work as before, he had begun to think of suicide and pressed Stalin to get him the poison.

What did Lenin's 1922–23 'Testament' recommend regarding Stalin?

Lenin wrote that Stalin was too rude and that he should be removed as General Secretary in favour of someone more tolerant, loyal and polite. The letter reached party leaders only after Lenin's death, and Stalin stayed on.

What personal incident of December 1922 set Lenin against Stalin?

Stalin shouted at Lenin's wife on the telephone for letting the sick leader dictate a letter. When Lenin found out, he wrote demanding an apology and threatened to cut off relations.

What name did Lenin propose in 1922 for the federation that became the USSR?

'Union of Soviet Republics of Europe and Asia' was Lenin's way of making Russia one member among equals. Stalin's draft had the other republics simply entering Russia, and he gave way.

What hit Lenin three times from May 1922, ending his political life?

A stroke in March 1923, his third in under a year, took away his speech. He lived ten more months but could no longer govern, which gave Stalin room to build his power.

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

Trotsky was travelling south for a rest cure when the news reached him. By his account the Kremlin wired that the funeral would be on Saturday, too soon for him to return; it was held on Sunday.

What was removed from Lenin's body after his death and later studied by a dedicated institute?

His brain went to the German neurologist Oskar Vogt, called to Moscow by the Soviet government to study it. He reported unusually large and numerous nerve cells in its cortex, which he took to explain Lenin's sharp mind.

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

Tyumen took the body in secret when German forces threatened Moscow in 1941. It lay hidden in a college building, now the city's agricultural academy, until the war was won.

Which composer's piano sonata did Lenin call 'superhuman music' he could hear every day, as Maxim Gorky recalled?

Beethoven's 'Appassionata' was the piece. Lenin added that he could not listen to music often: it made him want to pat people's heads, at a time when heads had to be hit.

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

Boris Yeltsin proposed the reburial in Saint Petersburg in 1997. It did not happen in his time, and his successor, Vladimir Putin, opposed the idea.

Whose 1933 mural at New York's Rockefeller Center was destroyed after he refused to remove a portrait of Lenin?

Diego Rivera added Lenin after a newspaper attacked the unfinished mural as anti-capitalist propaganda. The Rockefellers had it destroyed, and Rivera painted a new version in Mexico City.

Which calendar did Lenin's government adopt in February 1918, so that 31 January was followed by 14 February?

The Gregorian calendar put Russia in step with the West, thirteen days ahead of its old dates. That gap is why the Bolsheviks' 'October Revolution' falls in November on today's calendar.

Which work did Lenin write for delegates to a 1920 world congress?

'Left-Wing' Communism: An Infantile Disorder scolded radicals abroad who refused to sit in parliaments or join trade unions. Lenin urged them to work inside both, and every delegate was handed a copy.

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

Grigory Zinoviev shared Lenin's hideout, first a workman's barn and then a lakeside hut where Lenin posed as a mower. In 1936 Stalin had Zinoviev shot after a show trial.

Which two anarchists, deported from the United States, met Lenin in 1920?

Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman arrived as friends of the revolution. When they raised the muzzling of the press, Lenin told them it was justified while the revolution was in danger, and both later left Russia disillusioned.

Which art form did Lenin reportedly single out as 'of all the arts the most important for us'?

Cinema was his pick, his education chief recalled. In 1922 Lenin sent out instructions fixing a share of propaganda films in every programme and asking for special attention to screenings in the villages.

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

French, German and English were the languages of his exile. When he reached London, his wife recalled, nobody could understand them, so he traded Russian lessons for English ones.