Vladimir Lenin Trivia
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59 free Vladimir Lenin trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Oct 2026.
This Vladimir Lenin trivia quiz follows Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov from a comfortable childhood in Simbirsk to the granite mausoleum on Red Square. The easy questions cover the basics: his real surname, the faction he led, the revolution he returned to lead in 1917, the woman he married in Siberian exile, the man who succeeded him and what was done with his body. From there it moves through the execution of his brother, his expulsion from Kazan University, the years of exile and émigré newspapers, the 1903 split that gave the world the words Bolshevik and Menshevik, and where his pen name may have come from. The harder end covers the sealed train that was not really sealed, the Finland Station, the July Days, the vote of 10 October, the cruiser that fired the signal shot, the Constituent Assembly, the Cheka, Fanny Kaplan's bullets, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the famine and Kronstadt, the New Economic Policy, the Georgian affair, the Testament, his strokes and the doctors who removed his brain. It finishes with the statues, the polls and the fact that he is still on display. Every answer was checked against Lenin's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Russian Revolution and Joseph Stalin quizzes pick up where this one ends.
30 of 59 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01What was Lenin's real surname?
Ulyanov
Ulyanov. He was 31 when he adopted the name Lenin, in 1901, as cover for his underground party work.
Q 02In which Volga city, later renamed after his family, was Lenin born?
Simbirsk
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.
Q 03Thanks to his father's rise as a schools official, the young Lenin legally belonged to which class of tsarist society?
The nobility
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.
Q 04What happened to Lenin's elder brother Aleksandr in May 1887?
He was executed for plotting to kill the tsar
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.
Q 05From where was Lenin expelled in December 1887 for taking part in a student demonstration?
Kazan University
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.
Q 06Which Russian novel enthralled the young Lenin and gave his 1902 pamphlet its title?
What Is to Be Done?
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.
Q 07Which Marxist work did Lenin translate into Russian while living in Samara around 1890?
The Communist Manifesto
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.
Q 08To which Siberian village was Lenin exiled for three years from 1897?
Shushenskoye
Shushenskoye was exile, not prison: under police watch Lenin still hunted duck and snipe, received visiting comrades and got married there in 1898.
Q 09Whom did Lenin marry in Siberian exile in July 1898?
Nadezhda Krupskaya
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.
Q 10The headmaster of Lenin's school was the father of which man, whose government Lenin overthrew in 1917?
Alexander Kerensky
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.
Q 11Which underground newspaper, its name meaning 'The Spark', did Lenin help launch from exile in 1900, years before Pravda?
Iskra
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.
Q 12The pen name Lenin, first used in December 1901, is thought possibly to derive from what?
The Siberian river Lena
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.
Q 13At which London institution did Lenin hold a reader's ticket under the false name Jacob Richter?
Q 21Where in Petrograd did Lenin arrive by train in April 1917 and denounce the Provisional Government?
The Finland Station
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.
Q 22After the July Days unrest of 1917, the government accused Lenin of being what?
A German agent provocateur
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.
Q 23Which two Bolsheviks cast the only votes against Lenin's call for an armed uprising in October 1917?
The British Museum
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.
Q 14The name Bolsheviks, taken by Lenin's faction at the 1903 party congress, comes from a Russian word meaning what?
'Majoritarians'
'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.
Q 15Which former friend of Lenin's won the 1903 congress vote on party membership rules and went on to lead the Mensheviks?
Julius Martov
Julius Martov won that vote, but some of his allies then walked out and Lenin's men took the party's leading bodies.
Q 16To finance the party after 1905, Lenin endorsed what?
Robbing banks, trains and post offices
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.
Q 17Which city, his home from December 1908, did Lenin call 'a foul hole' in a letter to his sister?
Paris
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.
Q 18Which revolutionary became Lenin's close friend in exile, and possibly his lover, in the years before the First World War?
Inessa Armand
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.
Q 19Which Okhrana spy led the Bolshevik deputies in the Duma while Lenin defended him against suspicion?
Roman Malinovsky
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.
Q 20How did Lenin describe Stalin in a 1913 letter to the writer Maxim Gorky?
'The wonderful Georgian'
'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.
Zinoviev and Kamenev
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.
Q 24Which warship fired the blank shot that signalled the storming of the Winter Palace in 1917?
Aurora
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.
Q 25What title did members of Lenin's 1917 government take in place of 'minister'?
People's Commissars
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.
Q 26Which party beat Lenin's Bolsheviks in the November 1917 election for Russia's Constituent Assembly?
The Socialist Revolutionaries
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.
Q 27In March 1918, Lenin's Bolsheviks dropped the 'Social Democratic' label and renamed their party what?
The Russian Communist Party
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.
Q 28Who shot and severely wounded Lenin outside a Moscow arms factory on 30 August 1918?
Fanny Kaplan
She was executed on 3 September; the bullets left in his body were not removed until 1922.
Q 29In which Moscow square was a mausoleum built to display Lenin's embalmed body?
Red Square
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.
Q 30In 1920, Lenin's Russia became the first modern state to legalise what?
First-trimester abortion
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.