Lenin's Childhood

One can make a very strong argument that the person who had the most influence on the course of history in the twentieth century was Vladimir Ilyich Lenin. Without him, the Bolsheviks could not have siezed power after the fall of the Tsar, and there would have been no Stalin. The course of events in Europe would have been completely different, and the world may have been spared the horrors of the second world war in Europe. Therefore, the events that created the revolutionary are extremely interesting, and in this short work we learn much about the young Lenin and his family. Lenin's family, (the Ulyanovs), was an intellectual one, apparently, they were of a very low social class until his paternal grandfather managed to rise to a level where he appears in the historical records. This began a family tradition of education and scholarship, Lenin's father was sponsored by the great Russian mathematician , Nikolai Lobachevski. They were one of many such families, where their loyalty to the Tsar and his country conflicted with the intellectual understanding that the current political system could not survive for long. This led to what was clearly the event that turned Vladimir Ulyanov, a bright capable boy, into a committed revolutionary. His older brother, Alexander, was a chemistry student who was studying under Mendeleev, the discoverer of the periodic table of the elements. He joined a group of idealistic romantics that irrationally hoped to foment a revolution. They were captured and Alexander took full responsibility, refusing to ask for mercy, and he was hanged for treason. His mother was devastated and Lenin acknowledges how much it changed his outlook on the world. In what has to be one of the greatest of historical coincidences, one of Lenin's teachers was Fyodor Kerensky, the father of Alexander Kerensky, the man who headed the government that Lenin overthrew. Despite the subsequent communist propaganda to the contrary, the elder Kerensky was a significant influence on the young Lenin. This is more a history of the events in Lenin's family early in his life than it is about Lenin. Nevertheless, it is very well researched and you can see how this bright young man of lower social class was molded by events, some of which he controlled, into a committed revolutionary. A revolutionary who took a small minority party and swept it into power, ultimately controlling the largest nation on Earth, dramatically changing the course of history.