Vladimir Lenin

Origin and religion

He identified as Russian. His father, Ilya Ulyanov, was Russian, from a family that had risen out of serfdom into the civil service. His mother, Maria Blank, had a German-Swedish Lutheran grandmother and a father, Alexander Blank, who was born Jewish and baptized into the Orthodox Church. That genealogy is in the research associated with M. G. Shtein and is discussed by Robert Service and Dmitri Volkogonov. Lenin was baptized Orthodox.

Baptized Russian Orthodox. Atheist as an adult. Maternal grandfather Alexander Blank was born Jewish and baptized.

Responsibilities

• Founder of the Bolshevik faction (1903)
• Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (1917–1924)
• Author of the one-party state

He ran Sovnarkom, set the line of the party, dispersed the elected Constituent Assembly, banned rival socialists from politics, and drove War Communism: grain requisitioning, nationalization, and the suppression of strikes and peasant risings. The Cheka was created under his government in December 1917 and reported, in practice, to the party leadership.

The record

The clearest document is his 11 August 1918 telegram to Penza: hang at least a hundred kulaks in public, publish their names, take their grain, seize hostages. A week later he called local inaction criminal. In early September 1918 he told Nikolay Krestinsky to prepare terror secretly. He defended concentration camps and hostage-taking as tools of a “dictatorship of the proletariat.” He was shot and wounded by Fanny Kaplan on 30 August 1918; the official Red Terror followed within days. Strokes from 1922 left him sidelined. He died on 21 January 1924. His body was put on display, which he had not asked for.