Marxist revolutionary, born in Simbirsk, W Russia. He studied at Kazan and St Petersburg, where he graduated in law. From 1897 to 1900 he was exiled to Siberia for participating in underground revolutionary activities. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (1903), he caused the split between the Bolshevik and Menshevik factions. Following the February 1917 revolution, he returned to Petrograd (St Petersburg) from Zürich, and urged the seizure of political power by the proletariat under the slogan ‘All Power to the Soviets’. In October 1917 he led the Bolshevik revolution and became head of the first Soviet government. He aimed, above all, to maintain the Revolution and to pit the power of the new Soviet regime against domestic and foreign enemies. With Trotsky, he brought it successfully through the ensuing Civil War (1918–21), after which he introduced the New Economic Policy, restoring a market economy and some of the pluralism that characterized the early years of the Soviet government. His critics in the Party saw it as a ‘compromise with capitalism’ and a retreat from strictly Socialist planning. On his death, his body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum near the Moscow Kremlin. In 1924 Petrograd was renamed Leningrad in his honour, but since the collapse of Communism the city is once more St Petersburg; similarly, Simbirsk was renamed Ulyanovsk during that period. Some historians regard Lenin's early ideas as similar to those of Stalin. However, he is still regarded by many as one of history's greatest revolutionaries, whose practical strategies achieved the revolutionary's main goals - the seizure and maintenance of power.