LYCOS RETRIEVER 
Vladimir Lenin: Russian Revolution
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Vladimir distinguished himself in the study of Latin and Greek. Two tragedies occurred early in his life. The first occurred when his father died of a cerebral haemorrhage in 1886. The following year, in May of 1887, his eldest brother Alexander Ulyanov was hanged for participation in a plot threatening the life of Tsar Alexander III. This, in turn, radicalized Vladimir. His official Soviet biographies have this event as central to Lenin's revolutionary exploits.
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At the same time, Lenin, more than most Marxists, made a clear distinction between the workers' movement, on the one hand, and the theoretical contribution to be made by intellectuals, on the other. Of the two, he considered the theoretical contribution the more important, the workers' movement being a merely spontaneous reaction to capitalist exploitation, whereas theory was an expression of consciousness, meaning science and rationality. Throughout his life Lenin insisted that consciousness must maintain leadership over spontaneity for revolutionary Marxism to succeed. This implies that the intellectual leaders must prepare the proletariat for its political tasks and must guide it in its action. Leadership and hierarchy ... become key concepts in the Leninist vocabulary, and the role and structure of the party must conform to this conception. The party is seen as the institutionalization of true consciousness.
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Lenin and Trotsky and their followers already have been poisoned by the rotten venom of power. The proof of this is their attitude toward freedom of speech and of person and toward all the ideals for which democracy was fighting. Blind fanatics and conscienceless adventurers are rushing at full speed on the road on the road to a social revolution - in actuality, it is a road toward anarchy.
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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.
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Lenin often said no communist state was possible without Ukraine as a part. He... complained there were no trustworthy leaders in Ukraine. His mistrust was so profound that he recommended the country be led by Kristian Rakovsky, a Russian-speaking Bulgarian of Romanian descent, and closely followed the process of forming his party in the unreliable neighboring state.
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The revolutionary events of 1905 in Russia caught Lenin unawares, like most other exiled socialists, and he returned to Russia only in November. In his work Two Tactics of Social Democracy in the Democratic Revolution he argued that the workers would have to take a leading role in the bourgeois revolution, co-operating with revolutionary elements in the peasantry. This latter point was unusual in Marxist thinking, perhaps showing underlying populist influence on Lenin. He made some moves towards reconciliation with the Mensheviks, putting forward the idea of "democratic centralism", in which his 1902 model of the party was modified by emphasis on the democratic electivity and accountability of the leadership. But, once in exile again in 1907, he resumed his policy of promoting schisms, designed to strengthen the revolutionary vanguard. Differences with the Mensheviks continued to widen, now reflecting disagreement on the whole approach to revolution, and the split became final in 1912.
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