Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, 22 April [O.S.

10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924) is a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist who serves as the leader of the Russian SFSR from 1917, and then concurrently as Premier of the Soviet Union from 1922, until 1924.

Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin gains an interest in revolutionary leftist politics following the execution of his brother in 1887.

Briefly attending the University of Kazan, where he is ejected for his involvement in anti-Tsarist protests, he devotes the next few years to gaining a degree in law and to radical politics, converting to Marxism.

In 1893, he moves to Russia's capital at St. Petersburg, where he continues with his political agitation, becoming a senior figure within the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class.

Arrested and exiled to Siberia for three years, he subsequently flees to Western Europe, living in Germany, England and then Switzerland.

Following the February Revolution of 1917, in which the Tsar is overthrown and a provisional government takes power, he decides to return home.

As the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, he takes a senior role in orchestrating the October Revolution in 1917, which leads to the overthrow of the Russian Provisional Government and the establishment of the Russian Socialist Federative Soviet Republic, the world's first constitutionally socialist state.

Immediately afterwards, Lenin proceeds to implement socialist reforms, including the transfer of estates and crown lands to workers' soviets.

Faced with the threat of German invasion, he argues that Russia should immediately sign a peace treaty—which leads to Russia's exit from the First World War.

In 1921, Lenin proposes the New Economic Policy, a system of state capitalism that starts the process of industrialization and recovery from the Russian Civil War.

In 1922, the Russian SFSR joins former territories of the Russian Empire in becoming the Soviet Union.

The Bolshevik faction later becomes the Communist Party of the Soviet Union, which acts as a vanguard party presiding over a single-party dictatorship of the proletariat.

As a politician, Lenin is a persuasive and charismatic orator.

As an intellectual, his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produces Marxism–Leninism, a pragmatic Russian application of Marxism that emphasizes the critical role played by a committed and disciplined political vanguard in the revolutionary process, while defending the possibility of a socialist revolution in less advanced capitalist countries through an alliance of the proletarians with the rural peasantry.

Lenin remains a controversial and highly divisive world figure.

Critics label him a dictator whose administration oversees multiple human rights abuses, but supporters counter this criticism by citing the limitations on his power and promote him as a heroic champion of the working class.

He has had a significant influence on the Marxist-Leninist movement, which since his death had developed into a variety of schools of thought, namely Stalinism, Trotskyism and Maoism.