After the end of his exile, in 1900, Lenin went to
Western Europe, where he continued his revolutionary activity. It was during this
time that he adopted the pseudonym Lenin. In 1902, he published a pamphlet
titled What Is to Be Done? which argued that only a disciplined party of
professional revolutionaries could bring socialism to Russia. In 1903, he met
with other Russian Marxists in London and established the Russian
Social-Democratic Workers' Party (RSDWP). However, from the start there was a
split between Lenin's Bolsheviks (Majoritarians), who advocated
militarism, and the Mensheviks (Minoritarians), who advocated a
democratic movement toward socialism. These two groups increasingly opposed
each other within the framework of the RSDWP, and Lenin made the split official
at a 1912 conference of the Bolshevik Party.
After the outbreak of the Russian Revolution of 1905,
Lenin returned to Russia. The revolution, which consisted mainly of strikes
throughout the Russian empire, came to an end when Nicholas II promised
reforms, including the adoption of a Russian constitution and the establishment
of an elected legislature. However, once order was restored, the czar nullified
most of these reforms, and in 1907 Lenin was again forced into exile. Lenin
opposed World War I, which began in 1914, as an imperialistic conflict and
called on proletariat soldiers to turn their guns on the capitalist leaders who
sent them down into the murderous trenches. For Russia, World War I was an
unprecedented disaster: Russian casualties were greater than those sustained by
any nation in any previous war. Meanwhile, the economy was hopelessly disrupted
by the costly war effort, and in March 1917 riots and strikes broke out in
Petrograd over the scarcity of food. Demoralized army troops joined the
strikers, and on March 15 Nicholas II was forced to abdicate, ending centuries
of czarist rule. In the aftermath of the February Revolution (known as such
because of Russia's use of the Julian calendar), power was shared between the
ineffectual Provincial Government and the soviets, or
"councils," of soldiers' and workers' committees.
After the outbreak of the February Revolution, German
authorities allowed Lenin and his lieutenants to cross Germany en route from
Switzerland to Sweden in a sealed railway car. Berlin hoped (correctly) that
the return of the anti-war Socialists to Russia would undermine the Russian war
effort, which was continuing under the Provincial Government. Lenin called for
the overthrow of the Provincial Government by the soviets, and he was condemned
as a "German agent" by the government's leaders. In July, he was
forced to flee to Finland, but his call for "peace, land, and bread"
met with increasing popular support, and the Bolsheviks won a majority in the
Petrograd soviet. In October, Lenin secretly returned to Petrograd, and on
November 7 the Bolshevik-led Red Guards deposed the Provisional Government and
proclaimed soviet rule. Lenin became the virtual dictator of the world's first
Marxist state. His government made peace with Germany, nationalized industry,
and distributed land but beginning in 1918, had to fight a devastating civil
war against czarist forces. In 1920, the czarists were defeated, and in 1922
the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was established. Upon Lenin's
death in early 1924, his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum near the
Moscow Kremlin. Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honor. After a struggle
of succession, fellow revolutionary Joseph Stalin succeeded Lenin as leader of
the Soviet Union.
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