Lenine’s father was a governmental official employed in the Department of Public Instruction.  It is one of the many anomalies of the life of the Russian Dictator that he himself belongs by birth, training, culture, and experience to the bourgeoisie against which he fulminates so furiously.  Even his habits and tastes are of bourgeois and not proletarian origin.  He is an Intellectual of the Intellectuals and has never had the slightest proletarian experience.  As a youth still in his teens he entered the University of St. Petersburg, but his stay there was exceedingly brief, owing to a tragedy which greatly embittered his life and gave it its direction.  An older brother, who was also a student in the university, was condemned to death, in a secret trial, for complicity in a terrorist plot to assassinate Alexander III.  Shortly afterward he was put to death.  Lenine himself was arrested at the same time as his brother, but released for lack of evidence connecting him with the affair.  It is said, however, that the arrest caused his expulsion from the university.  Lenine was not the only young man to be profoundly impressed by the execution of the youthful Alexander Ulyanov; another student, destined to play an important role in the great tragedy of revolutionary Russia, was stirred to bitter hatred of the system.  That young student was Alexander Kerensky, whose father and the father of the Ulyanovs were close friends.

Lenine’s activities brought him into conflict with the authorities several times and forced him to spend a good deal of time in exile.  As a youth of seventeen, at the time of the execution of his brother, he was dismissed from the Law School in St. Petersburg.  A few years later he was sent to Siberia for a political “crime.”  Upon various occasions later he was compelled to flee from the country, living sometimes in Paris, sometimes in London, but more often in Switzerland.  It was through his writings mainly that he acquired the influence he had in the Russian movement.  There is nothing unusual or remarkable about this, for the Social Democratic party of Russia was practically directed from Geneva.  Lenine was in London when the Revolution of 1905 broke out and caused him to hurry to St. Petersburg.

As a young man Lenine, like most of the Intelligentsia of the period, gave up a good deal of his spare time to teaching small groups of uneducated working-men the somewhat abstract and intricate theories and doctrines of Socialism.  To that excellent practice, no doubt, much of Lenine’s skill as a lucid expositor and successful propagandist is due.  He has written a number of important works, most of them being of a polemical nature and dealing with party disputations upon questions of theory and tactics.  The work by which he was best known in Socialist circles prior to his sensational rise to the Premiership is a treatise on The Development of Capitalism in Russia.  This work made its appearance in 1899, when the Marxian