Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich (, originally Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov) 1870 -- 1924

　　Marxist revolutionary, born in Ulyanovsk (formerly, Simbirsk), Russia. He studied at Kazan and St Petersburg, where he graduated in law. From 1897 to 1900 he was exiled to Siberia for participating in underground revolutionary activities. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1903), he caused the split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions.

　　Following the February 1917 revolution, he returned to Petrograd (St Petersburg) from Zürich, and urged the immediate seizure of political power by the proletariat under the slogan "All Power to the Soviets'. In October 1917 he led the Bolshevik revolution and became head of the first Soviet government. At the end of the ensuing Civil War (1918--21), he introduced the New Economic Policy, which his critics in the Party saw as a "compromise with capitalism' and a retreat from strictly Socialist planning.

　　On his death, his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum near the Moscow Kremlin. In 1924 Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour, but since the collapse of Communism the city is once more St Petersburg.