Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (Lenin) was born into a family of progressive Russian intellectuals on April 10 (new calendar April 23, 1870, in Simbirsk (Ulyanovsk), a town on the great Russian river - the Volga.

There were six children in the Ulyanov family. All of them became revolutionaries. His eldest brother, Alexander, was executed in May of 1987 for implication in the attempt to assassinate Tsar Alexander III.

When as a young man, Lenin began to study Marxism and at the age of 17 he joined the revolutionary struggle against the despotic Tsarist autocracy and was persecuted for it. In December of 1897 Lenin was expelled from Kazak University and banished to the village of Kokishkino. From then on, he was placed under police surveillance.

He began to write pamphlets, theoretical works and books, and also organized students, workers and peasants in many struggles. In February 1897 Lenin was banished by the Tsarist government to three years exile in Siberia. In that year he was joined by Nadezha Krupskaya, a revolutionary - later to become his wife.

As soon as Lenin got back from exile he began the plan to publish a newspaper for the working class and on July 16, 1900 he left for Germany where he started the newspaper Iskra (The Spark). This newspaper was smuggled into Russia by Lenin’s followers. Iskra was the decisive organizer in building the party.

At the Second Party Congress there took place a split and from then on, it was a struggle between the majority (Bolsheviks led by Lenin) and the minority (Mensheviks) led by Trotsky.

The first revolution took place in January of 1905 which Lenin and the Bolsheviks regarded as a bourgeois democratic one and Lenin said that this has to be followed by a socialist revolution that will do away with capitalism and unite the working class with the peasants.

After the defeat of the 1905 revolution Lenin had to go abroad again. The defeat of the 1905-1907 revolutions, prompted Lenin to write very important Marxist analyses which provided the revolutionary workers and peasants with new energy and understanding and also laid the plans for the February bourgeois democratic revolution. Lenin started the upsurge of activities that culminated in the victory of the Great October Socialist Revolution.

There followed extreme danger to the Land of the Soviets from within and from outside by imperialist forces that tried, as Churchill said "…drown the baby in its cradle."

Then in the spring of 1918, the American, British, French and Japanese imperialists started a war against the young Soviet Republic. They were joined by the internal White Guards and all of the remaining counter-revolutionaries who were armed and supported by the 14 foreign countries who invaded the young Soviet State and thus the civil war and foreign interventionist war had to be fought and defeated.

After the defeat of the foreign interventionists and the internal enemies, the Soviet people started rebuilding the ruined economy and began the construction of Socialism through the many Five Year Plans that the Communist Party saw as the only means to bring peace and to build the industries and the economy that were in complete ruins. The civil war only ended in 1920.

The Tenth Congress adopted Lenin’s proposal to go over to the New Economic Plan in order to speed up the rebuilding, since war danger was looming again in the near future.

V.I. Lenin struggled to live on after an attempt to assassinate him by a counter-revolutionary named Kaplan in 1921. A bullet still was embedded in Lenin’s body. In December of 1922 Lenin’s health grew worse and in March of 1923 Lenin‘s heath began to wane very sharply and on January 21, 1924 at 6.50 pm Lenin died of a brain haemorrhage.

The news of Lenin’s death spread like lightning throughout the Soviet Union and all over the world.

Lenin’s name is immortal, like his ideas and his deeds.

The name of Stalin, who fulfilled the behests and ideas of Lenin like no one else, will also go down in history as the fateful follower of Lenin and in building Socialism and helping to defeat Nazism-Fascism and thus saving humanity from this scourge.

We all should remember that:

It is impossible to be a Marxist without being a Leninist, and, it is also impossible to be a Leninist if you are not a Stalinist!