Vladimir Lenin: life of the week
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Few people had as much impact on the course of the 20th century as Vladimir Lenin, from his years as an émigré across the capitals of Western Europe to his role in the October Revolution of 1917 and the inception of the world's first self-described socialist state. In this episode of the History Extra podcast, historian Lara Dowd speaks to Danny Bird about the revolutionary leader, from his radical theories and his elevation into a saint-like figure in some quarters, to his contested legacy in Putin's Russia and around the world. Lara, let's start right at the beginning. Who was Lenin? What kind of world was he born into?
And what were some of the major events from his childhood? So the boy who would become Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov in a provincial town in the Russian Empire, about 400 miles east of Moscow. It's on the Volga River. He's born in April 1870. The context is one of a Russian empire which is characterized by autocracy.
This is a czarist regime which is absolutist, it is repressive, it had only nine years previously abolished serfdom. You know, economically it's coming out of serfdom but very slowly and it's a country that is full of social inequalities, hierarchies between those, you know, of the nobility and the peasants. And it's one in which we're seeing the beginnings of, in those couple of decades before Lenin's birth, the development of a revolutionary movement in the Russian Empire, which mainly intellectuals, educated elites who come to despise the the inequalities, the injustices that they're seeing and are trying to think about ways to remake the world.
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