It is challenging to pinpoint specific childhood events that foreshadowed Vladimir Lenin’s trajectory towards becoming a professional revolutionary. Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov in Simbirsk, later renamed Ulyanovsk in his honor, he adopted the pseudonym Lenin in 1901 during his clandestine political activities following exile in Siberia. He was the third of six children in a close, supportive family with highly educated and cultured parents. His mother was a physician’s daughter, and his father, despite being born a serf, became a schoolteacher and eventually a schools inspector. Lenin, intellectually gifted, physically robust, and nurtured in a loving environment, displayed an early and intense thirst for knowledge. He graduated top of his class from high school, excelling in Latin and Greek, seemingly destined for a career as a classical scholar. At 16, there was little to suggest Lenin’s future as a rebel, let alone a professional revolutionary—perhaps with the exception of his embrace of atheism. However, despite their comfortable upbringing, all five Ulyanov children who reached adulthood joined the revolutionary movement. This was not uncommon in Tsarist Russia, where even the highly educated intelligentsia were denied basic civil and political rights.
Two significant events during Lenin’s adolescence profoundly influenced his decision to pursue revolution. Firstly, his father faced the threat of premature retirement shortly before his death from a reactionary government apprehensive about the expansion of public education. Secondly, in 1887, his older brother Aleksandr, a University of St. Petersburg student, was executed for his involvement in a revolutionary terrorist group plotting to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. Suddenly, at 17, Lenin became the family’s male figurehead, now stigmatized as the family of a “state criminal.”
Fortunately, his mother’s pension and inheritance sustained the family comfortably, although it couldn’t prevent the frequent imprisonments or exiles of her children. Moreover, Lenin’s high school principal, the father of Aleksandr Kerensky (who would later lead the Provisional Government overthrown by Lenin’s Bolsheviks in the October Revolution of 1917), stood by the “criminal’s” family. He bravely wrote a character reference that facilitated Lenin’s admission to university.
In the autumn of 1887, Lenin enrolled in law at the Imperial Kazan University. However, within three months, he was expelled for participating in an illegal student assembly. Arrested and banished from Kazan, he was sent to his grandfather’s estate in Kokushkino, where his older sister Anna had already been placed under police order. In the autumn of 1888, authorities allowed him to return to Kazan but denied his university readmission. During this forced period of inactivity, he encountered exiled revolutionaries from older generations and voraciously consumed revolutionary political literature, particularly Marx’s Das Kapital. He embraced Marxism in January 1889, marking a pivotal turn in his ideological development.
