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Vladimir Lenin Quotes
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Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known by the alias Lenin , was a Russian communist revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He served as head of government of the Russian Republic from 1917 to 1918, of the Russian Soviet Federative Socialist Republic from 1918 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, he developed political theories known as Leninism.

Born to a wealthy middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's execution in 1887. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior figure in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party . In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent party theorist through his publications. In 1903, he took a key role in a RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Encouraging insurrection during Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he later campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which as a Marxist he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.

Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty with the Central Powers and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish-Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the market-orientated New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations secured independence after 1917, but three re-united with Russia through the formation of the Soviet Union in 1922. In increasingly poor health, Lenin expressed opposition to the growing power of his successor, Joseph Stalin, before dying at his dacha in Gorki.

Widely considered one of the most significant and influential figures of the 20th century, Lenin was the posthumous subject of a pervasive personality cult within the Soviet Union until its dissolution in 1991. He became an ideological figurehead behind Marxism-Leninism and thus a prominent influence over the international communist movement. A controversial and highly divisive individual, Lenin is viewed by supporters as a champion of socialism and the working class, while critics on both the left and right emphasize his role as founder and leader of an authoritarian regime responsible for political repression and mass killings.

✵ 10. April 1870 – 21. January 1924   •   Other names Wladimir Iljitsch Lenin
Vladimir Lenin photo
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Vladimir Lenin Quotes

“The entire trend of development is towards abolition of coercive domination of one part of society over another.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 23, pp. 28–76.
Collected Works

Parting

“There are times when the interests of the proletariat call for ruthless extermination of its enemies in open armed clashes.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Lessons of the Commune, Collected Works, Vol. 13, page 478.
Attributions

Time

“The proletarian revolution is impossible without the sympathy and support of the overwhelming majority of the working people.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 30, pp. 52–62.
Collected Works

People , Support

“To become a power the class-conscious workers must win the majority to their side. As long as no violence is used against the people there is no other road to power. We are not Blancists, we do not stand for the seizure of power by a minority.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 38–41.
Collected Works

People

“The war of 1914-18 was imperialist (that is, an annexationist, predatory, war of plunder) on the part of both sides; it was a war for the division of the world, for the partition and repartition of colonies and spheres of influence of finance capital.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917)

War , World , Parting

“The truth about Kolchak (and his double, Denikin) has now been revealed in full. The shooting of tens of thousands of workers. The shooting even of Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries. The flogging of peasants of entire districts. The public flogging of women. The absolutely unbridled power of the officers, the sons of landowners. Endless looting. Such is the truth about Kolchak and Denikin.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 436–455.
Collected Works

Women , Truth

“In view of the undoubted honesty of those broad sections of the mass believers in revolutionary defencism who accept the war only as a necessity, and not as a means of conquest, in view of the fact that they are being deceived by the bourgeoisie, it is necessary with particular thoroughness, persistence and patience to explain their error to them, and to prove that without overthrowing capital it is impossible to end the war by a truly democratic peace.”

Vladimir Lenin

April Thesis (1917)

War , Peace , Error , Patience

“Classes still remain, and will remain everywhere for years after the proletariat's conquest of power.”

Vladimir Lenin book "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

CH 5, "Left Wing Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Mass"
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

“It is necessary to be able to withstand all this, to agree to any and every sacrifice, and even—if need be—to resort to all sorts of stratagems, manoeuvres and illegal methods, to evasion and subterfuges in order to penetrate the trade unions, to remain in them, and to carry on Communist work in them at all costs.”

Vladimir Lenin

Reported in "'Left-Wing' Communism, An Infantile Disorder", V. I. Lenin; Selected Works (1938), vol. 10, p. 95.
1900s

“All the marvels of science and the gains of culture belong to the nation as a whole, and never again will man’s brain and human genius be used for oppression and exploitation.”

Vladimir Lenin

Third All-Russia Congress Of Soviets Of Workers, Soldiers’ And Peasants : Report On The Activities Of The Council Of People’s Commissars" (January 1918) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/jan/10.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26, p. 453-82.
1910s

Science

“Discrimination among citizens on account of their religious convictions is wholly intolerable. Even the bare mention of a citizen’s religion in official documents should unquestionably be eliminated.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 10, pp. 83–87.
Collected Works

Religion

“Modern monopolist capitalism on a world-wide scale — imperialist wars are absolutely inevitable under such an economic system, as long as private property in the means of production exists.”

Vladimir Lenin

Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917)

War , World

“Recovery proceeding excellently. Am sure that the crushing of the Kazan Czechs and whiteguards, as well as of the kulak extortioners supporting them, will be exemplarily ruthless.”

Vladimir Lenin

Telegram to Leon Trotsky (7 September 1918) http://marxists.anu.edu.au/archive/lenin/works/1918/sep/07ldt.htm as translated by Andrew Rothstein; the recovery he mentions was of the wounds he received in the assassination attempt on him a few days earlier; published in Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 359
I am confident that the suppression of the Kazan Czechs and White Guards, and likewise of the bloodsucking kulaks who support them, will be a model of mercilessness.
As translated in The Cheka : Lenin’s Political Police (1981) by George Leggett, p. 119,
1910s

Support

“It is precisely now and only now, when in the starving regions people are eating human flesh, and hundreds if not thousands of corpses are littering the roads, that we can (and therefore must) carry out the confiscation of church valuables… I come to the categorical conclusion that precisely at this moment we must give battle to the Black Hundred clergy in the most decisive and merciless manner and crush its resistance with such brutality that it will not forget it for decades to come… The greater the number of representatives of the reactionary clergy and reactionary bourgeoisie we succeed in executing for this reason, the better.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), pp. 152-4.
Attributions

People , Decision , Forgetting

“For the first time the peasant has seen real freedom — freedom to eat his bread, freedom from starvation.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 30, pp. 107–117.
Collected Works

Freedom , Time

“One cannot live in society and be free from society.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works,Vol. 10, pp. 44–49.
Collected Works

“Modern militarism is the result of capitalism. In both its forms it is the “vital expression” of capitalism — as a military force used by the capitalist states in their external conflicts and as a weapon in the hands of the ruling classes for suppressing every kind of movement, economic and political, of the proletariat.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 15, pp. 191–201.
Collected Works

“The centralized state power that is peculiar to bourgeois society came into being in the period of the fall of absolutism. Two institutions are most characteristic of this state machine: bureaucracy and a standing army.”

Vladimir Lenin

2.2, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)

“Materialism is the recognition of "objects in themselves", or outside the mind; ideas and sensations are copies of images of those objects.”

Vladimir Lenin

Materialism and Empirio-Criticism (1908)

Idea

“Imperialism is capitalism in that stage of development in which the domination of monopolies and finance capital has established itself; in which the export of capital has acquired pronounced importance; in which the division of the world among the international trusts has begun; in which the partition of all the territories of the globe among the great capitalist powers has been completed.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Seven

World

“It is obvious that a whiteguard insurrection is being prepared in Nizhni. You must strain every effort, appoint three men will) dictatorial powers (yourself, Markin and one other), organise immediately mass terror, shoot and deport the hundreds of prostitutes who are making drunkards of the soldiers, former officers and the like.”

Vladimir Lenin

Statement (9 August 1918) Collected Works, Vol. 35, p. 349 http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1918/aug/09gff.htm
1910s

Men , Effort

“Where and when have riots and anarchy been provoked by wise measures? If the government had acted wisely, and if their measures had met the needs of the poor peasants, would there have been unrest among the peasant masses?”

Vladimir Lenin

Report on Land (8 November 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/oct/25-26/26d.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 26.
1910s

“Tsarism regards the war as a means of diverting attention from the mounting discontent within the country and of suppressing the growing revolutionary movement.”

Vladimir Lenin

The War and Russian Social-Democracy (September 1917), The Lenin Anthology
1910s

War , Country

“It is essential to grasp the incontestable truth that a Marxist must take cognisance of real life, of the true facts of reality, and not cling to a theory of yesterday, which, like all theories, at best only outlines the main and the general, only comes near to embracing life in all its complexity.”

Vladimir Lenin

Letters on Tactics (April 1917) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1917/apr/x01.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 24.
1910s

Life , Truth , Reality

“Hundreds of thousands and millions of wage slaves of capital and peasants downtrodden by the serf-owners are going to the slaughter for the dynastic interests of a handful of crowned brigands, for the profits of the bourgeoisie in its drive to plunder foreign lands.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 41.
Collected Works

“To belittle the socialist ideology in any way, to turn aside from it in the slightest degree means to strengthen bourgeois ideology. There is much talk of spontaneity. But the spontaneous development of the working-class movement leads to its subordination to bourgeois ideology; for the spontaneous working-class movement is trade-unionism, and trade unionism means the ideological enslavement of the workers by the bourgeoisie. Hence, our task, the task of Social-Democracy, is to combat spontaneity, to divert the working-class movement from this spontaneous, trade-unionist striving to come under the wing of the bourgeoisie, and to bring it under the wing of revolutionary Social Democracy.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

Way , Democracy

“The statement that cartels can abolish crises is a fable spread by bourgeois economists who at all costs desire to place capitalism in a favorable light. On the contrary, when monopoly appears in certain branches of industry, it increases and intensifies the anarchy inherent in capitalist production as a whole.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter One

Light , Appearance

“The state is the product and the manifestation of the irreconcilability class antagonisms. The state arises when, where and to the extent that class antagonisms cannot be objectively reconciled. And, conversely, the existence of the state proves that the class antagonisms are irreconcilable.”

Vladimir Lenin

1.1, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)

“Our aim is to achieve a socialist system of society, which, by eliminating the division of mankind into classes, by eliminating all exploitation of man by man and nation by nation, will inevitably eliminate the very possibility of war.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 24, pp. 398–421.
Collected Works

War

“The principal feature of modern capitalism is the domination of monopolist combines of the big capitalists.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Six

“He who accepts the class struggle cannot fail to accept civil wars, which in every class society are the natural, and under certain conditions inevitable, continuation, development and intensification of the class struggle… To repudiate civil war, or to forget about it, is to fall into extreme opportunism and renounce the socialist revolution.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in The Military Programme of the Proletarian Revolution, Collected Works, Vol. 23, pages 78-9.
Attributions

War , Nature , Forgetting

“It is logical to assert that all matter possesses a property which is essentially akin to sensation, the property of reflection.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 14, pp. 17–362.
Collected Works

“The capture of Simbirsk, my home town, is a wonderful tonic, the best treatment for my wounds. I feel a new lease of life and energy.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 28, p. 98.
Collected Works

Life , Feeling , Home

“In its struggle for power the proletariat has no other weapon but organisation. Disunited by the rule of anarchic competition in the bourgeois world, ground down by forced labour for capital, constantly thrust back to the 'lower depths' of utter destitution, savagery, and degeneration, the proletariat can, and inevitably will become an invincible force only through its ideological unification on the principles of Marxism being reinforced by the material unity of organisation, which welds millions of toilers into an army of the working class.”

Vladimir Lenin

Lenin Anthology, pp. 119
1900s, One Step Forward, Two Steps Back (1904)

World

“It is in prison … that one becomes a real revolutionary.”

Vladimir Lenin

Attributed in "Communists: The Battle over the Tomb" in TIME (24 April 1964).
Attributions

“First, we will take Eastern Europe, then the masses of Asia, then we will encircle the United States which will be the last bastion of capitalism. We will not have to attack. It will fall like an overripe fruit into our hands.”

Vladimir Lenin

Cardinal Francis Spellman used this attribution in his speech to the 1954 National Convention of the American Legion. It has been debunked repeatedly, for example in They Never Said It (1999) by Paul F. Boller and John H. George. The last two sentences have also been misattributed to Nikita Krushchev. The metaphor of the ripe fruit appears much earlier in US policy discussions about Cuba:
If an apple, severed by the tempest from its native tree, cannot choose but fall to the ground, Cuba, forcibly disjoined from its unnatural connexion with Spain, and incapable of self-support, can only gravitate towards the North American Union.
John Quincy Adams, letter to Hugh Nelson (28 April 1823)
The fruit will fall into our hands when it is ripe, without an officious shaking of the tree. Cuba will be ours … in due season, without the wicked impertinence of war.
Parke Godwin, "Annexation" (February 1854)
Misattributed

“The principal and primary function of banks is to serve as an intermediary in the making of payments. In doing so they transform inactive money capital into active capital, that is, into capital producing a profit; they collect all kinds of money revenues and place them at the disposal of the capitalist class.”

Vladimir Lenin

Source: Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917), Chapter Two

Money

“Use both bribery and threats to exterminate every Cossack to a man if they set fire to the oil in Guriev.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), p. 69.
Attributions

“The practical activity of man had to lead his consciousness to the reptetition of various logical figures thousands of millions of times in order that these figures could obtain the significance of axioms.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 29, p. 172.
Collected Works

Time

“This fear of criticism displayed by the advocates of freedom of criticism cannot be attributed solely to craftiness. No, the majority of the Economists look with sincere resentment upon all theoretical controversies, factional disagreements, broad political questions, plans for organising revolutionaries, etc.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

Fear , Question , Freedom , Sincerity

“The uprising of the five kulak districts should be mercilessly suppressed… Hang (hang without fail, so the people see) no fewer than one hundred kulaks, rich men, bloodsuckers… Do it in such a way that for hundreds of versts [km] around, the people will see, tremble, know, shout: they are strangling and will strangle to death the bloodsucker kulaks.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Richard Pipes, The Unknown Lenin: From the Secret Archive (1996), page 50.
Attributions

Death , Men , People , Way

“We are waging a struggle against the "labour aristocracy" in the name of the masses of the workers and in order to win them over to our side; we are waging struggle against he opportunist and social chauvinist leaders in order to win the working class over to our side.”

Vladimir Lenin book "Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder

CH 5, "Left Wing Communism in Germany. The Leaders, the Party, the Class, the Mass"
"Left-Wing" Communism: An Infantile Disorder (1920)

“Every cook must learn to rule the State.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Woman's Place by Florence Becker, in New International, Vol. 2 No. 5 (August 1935), pp.175-176; also in Woman in Soviet Russia (1935) by Fannina W. Halle.
Attributions

Learning , Cooking

“No revolution is worth anything unless it can defend itself.”

Vladimir Lenin

Collected Works, Vol. 28, pp. 113–126.
Collected Works

“This struggle must be organised, according to “all the rules of the art”, by people who are professionally engaged in revolutionary activity.”

Vladimir Lenin

What is to be Done? (1902)

People , Art

“The whole of society will have become a single office and a single factory with equality of work an equality of pay.”

Vladimir Lenin

5.4, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
(1917)

“The bourgeoisie incites the workers of one nation against those of another in the endeavor to keep them disunited. Class-conscious workers, realising that the break-down of all the national barriers by capitalism is inevitable and progressive, are trying to help to enlighten and organise their fellow-workers from the backward countries.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Capitalism and Workers’ Immigration", in Za Pravdu No. 22 (29 October 1913) http://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1913/oct/29.htm; Collected Works, Vol. 24.
1910s

Help , Country

“We are in favor of a democratic republic as the best form of state for the proletariat under capitalism; but we have no right to forget that wage-slavery is the lot of the people even in the most democratic bourgeois republic.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

§ 1.4, "The Withering Away of the State and Violent Revolution", Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)

People , Forgetting