Up to RevolutionVladimir Lenin was born on April 22, 1870 to Ilya Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Blank. During his years as an attorney, Lenin read a lot and was influenced by Nicholas Chernyshevsky, a writer who called opponents of the existing political in Russia to become revolutionaries. Lenin also was attracted to the theories of Karl Marx and Russian Marxists whose ideas focused on revolutions and they anticipated that a revolution would come from factory workers. In 1893, Lenin settled in St. Petersburg and became involved in the Marxist Movement. He there met a fellow revolutionary named Nadezhda Krupskaya who he later married during their time in an Siberian Exile. Lenin made his mark on the Marxist Movement in 1903 when a group of Russian marxists met in London to set up a unified political party, the Second Congress of Russian Social Democrats. Lenin claimed that the movement would have to consist of professional, full-time revolutionaries and that factory workers would only play an auxiliary role. He also said that peasantry should be included in the movement because they were a mass of angry people who would fight effectively in the revolution. The revolution broke out in 1905, but failed, so Lenin returned to Switzerland and began a new period of foreign exile until 1917. In 1912 at a conference in Prague, he formally broke with his opponents and formed an independent Bolshevik Party. During World War I, Lenin found an opportunity to take power. He took a position on the war and Marxists also decided to join in their country’s war efforts. Lenin declared that military defeat for Russia was a desirable step in bringing on revolution. At Zimmerwald in 1915, he was voted down but he convinced a stronger minority to back him at Kiental in 1916 and by the start of 1917, Lenin gave a speech to young Swiss sympathizers and declared that the revolution would only come in their generations. A few weeks later the news reached Lenin of “bread riots” in Petrograd. The riots quickly developed to become the spontaneous March Revolution.
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