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Young Vladimir was deeply influenced by the Russian revolutionary tradition stemming from the anarchists, by the peasant-dreamer Tkachev, and by the demonic intriguer Nechaev. Vladimir accepted without qualification Nechaev's famous dictum: "Everything that promotes the success of the revolution is moral; everything that hinders it is immoral."
Then, in 1888, he discovered Marx, who had died only five years before.
Provincial Grocer. Vladimir Ulyanov sat on the stove in a spare kitchen in his grandfather's house and read Das Kapital, convinced that here at last was the weapon to bring down the state and lift oppression from the backs of the people. Among his first disciples were his younger brother and his sisters. While he worked for a law degree and wherever he went, Vladimir founded or joined Marxist study groups, and he traveled abroad to meet the exiled leaders of the outlawed Marxist party, then still known as the Social Democrats.
During the St. Petersburg textile strikes of 1895, Vladimir was arrested, spent a year in jail, followed by three years' banishment to Siberia. "It is in prison," he said later, "that one becomes a real revolutionary."
When he reached Shushenskoe, a small Siberian village near the Mongolian border, he was 25, already bald, and looked more like a provincial grocer than a leader of men. He acted as law yer without fee for his peasant neighbors and showed a local merchant how to keep accounts, while at the same time explaining that the merchant was a parasite of capitalism.
While in Shushenskoe, Lenin married a fellow exile, Nadezhda Krupskaya, a thin, hot-eyed girl with carroty hair and many of the strong-minded qualities of the young women in the pages of Chekhov and Turgenev. The honeymooners spent their time translating The Theory and Practice of Trade Unionism, by the British Socialist sages Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Of necessity, every revolutionary needed a pen name, and Vladimir chose his: Lenin, presumably from the Lena River, the longest and one of the coldest in Siberia.
Brussels Fleabag. After banishment came foreign exile. Traveling on forged passports, using such names as Meyer, Petrov and Jordanoff, Lenin lived as a cafe conspirator in the West, spending long hours in the great libraries of Europe. Occasionally, he slipped back into Russia and out again. From the beginning, the Marxists were rent by savage quarrels. As soon as three or more gathered together, they divided into left, center and right. The "European" wing, under the German Karl Kautsky, who was savagely denounced for seeking to "reform" Marx, eventually evolved into today's democratic socialists. The Russian wing, under George Plekhanov, a nobleman and former army officer who was the antithesis of Lenin, underwent a momentous split, mostly on the issue of just how tough, disciplined and dictatorial the movement should be.
It happened at the Second Congress of the Social Democratic Party in 1903, which began in a flea-ridden hall in Brussels, and after several police arrests moved on to quarters in a London slum, where boys hooted and