23 Facts About Vladimir Ilyich

1. Vladimir Ilyich was willing to use military force to ensure this unity, resulting in armed incursions into the independent states that formed in Ukraine, Georgia, Poland, Finland, and the Baltic states.

2. Vladimir Ilyich believed that although Russia's economy was dominated by the peasantry, that monopoly capitalism existed in Russia meant that the country was sufficiently materially developed to move to socialism.

3. Vladimir Ilyich adapted his ideas according to changing circumstances, including the pragmatic realities of governing Russia amid war, famine, and economic collapse.

4. Vladimir Ilyich sent her to a sanatorium in Kislovodsk in the Northern Caucasus to recover, but she died there in September 1920 during a cholera epidemic.

5. Vladimir Ilyich deemed the unions to be superfluous in a "workers' state", but Lenin disagreed, believing it best to retain them; most Bolsheviks embraced Lenin's view in the 'trade union discussion'.

6. Vladimir Ilyich issued the Decree on Popular Education that stipulated that the government would guarantee free, secular education for all children in Russia, and a decree establishing a system of state orphanages.

7. Vladimir Ilyich publicly condemned both the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries—who dominated the influential Petrograd Soviet—for supporting the Provisional Government, denouncing them as traitors to socialism.

8. Vladimir Ilyich organised a plan with other dissidents to negotiate a passage for them through Germany, with whom Russia was then at war.

9. Vladimir Ilyich decided to return to Russia to take charge of the Bolsheviks, but found that most passages into the country were blocked due to the ongoing conflict.

10. Vladimir Ilyich still perceived himself as an orthodox Marxist, but he began to diverge from some of Marx's predictions about societal development; whereas Marx had believed that a "bourgeoisie-democratic revolution" of the middle-classes had to take place before a "socialist revolution" of the proletariat, Lenin believed that in Russia, the proletariat could overthrow the Tsarist regime without an intermediate revolution.

11. Vladimir Ilyich attended the Zimmerwald Conference in September 1915 and the Kienthal Conference in April 1916, urging socialists across the continent to convert the "imperialist war" into a continent-wide "civil war" with the proletariat pitted against the bourgeoisie and aristocracy.

12. Vladimir Ilyich stayed in close contact with the RSDLP, which was operating in the Russian Empire, convincing the Duma's Bolshevik members to split from their parliamentary alliance with the Mensheviks.

13. Vladimir Ilyich finished The Development of Capitalism in Russia, his longest book to date, which criticised the agrarian-socialists and promoted a Marxist analysis of Russian economic development.

14. Vladimir Ilyich was granted a few days in Saint Petersburg to put his affairs in order and used this time to meet with the Social-Democrats, who had renamed themselves the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.

15. Vladimir Ilyich proceeded to Paris to meet Marx's son-in-law Paul Lafargue and to research the Paris Commune of 1871, which he considered an early prototype for a proletarian government.

16. Vladimir Ilyich authored a political tract criticising the Narodnik agrarian-socialists, What the "Friends of the People" Are and How They Fight the Social-Democrats, based largely on his experiences in Samara; around 200 copies were illegally printed in 1894.

17. Vladimir Ilyich began a romantic relationship with Nadezhda "Nadya" Krupskaya, a Marxist schoolteacher.

18. Vladimir Ilyich wrote a paper on peasant economics; it was rejected by the liberal journal Russian Thought.

19. Vladimir Ilyich devoted much time to radical politics, remaining active in Sklyarenko's group and formulating ideas about how Marxism applied to Russia.

20. Vladimir Ilyich joined a revolutionary cell bent on assassinating the Tsar and was selected to construct a bomb.

21. Vladimir Ilyich became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism–Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement.

22. Vladimir Ilyich moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist.

23. Vladimir Ilyich served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924.