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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
Vladimir Lenin: 336   quotes 145   likes

Vladimir Lenin Quotes

“The retreat has come to an end; it is now a matter of regrouping our forces. These are the instructions that the Congress must pass so as to put an end to fuss and bustle. Calm down, do not philosophize; if you do, it will be counted as a black mark against you. Show by your practical efforts that you can work no less efficiently than the capitalists. The capitalists create an economic link with the peasants in order to amass wealth; you must create a link with peasant economy in order to strengthen the economic power of our proletarian state. You have the advantage over the capitalists in that political power is i n your hands; you have a number of economic weapons at your command; the only trouble is that you cannot make proper use of them.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Communism and New Economic Policy",(April 1921)
1920s

Wealth , Making love , Effort

“Retreat is a difficult matter, especially for revolutionaries who are accustomed to advance; especially when they have been accustomed to advance with enormous success for several years; especially if they are surrounded by revolutionaries in other countries who are longing for the time when they can launch an offensive.”

Vladimir Lenin

1920s

Success , Time , Country

“We need a real test. The capitalists are operating alongside us. They are operating like robbers; they make profit; but they know how to do things. But you - you are trying to do it in a new way: you make no profit, your principles are communist, your ideals are splendid; they are written out so beautifully that you seem to be saints, that you should go to heaven while you are still alive. But can you get things done? We need a test, a real test, not the kind the Central Control Commission makes when it censures somebody and the All-Russia Central Executive Committee imposes some penalty. Yes, we want a real test from the view point of the national economy.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Communism and New Economic Policy",(April 1921)
1920s

Way , Making love , Penalty

“Let us get down to work, to slower, more cautious, more persevering and persistent work!”

Vladimir Lenin

"New Times and Old Mistakes in a New Guise",(August, 1921)
1920s

“Admidst the colossal ruin of the country and the exhaustion of the forces of the proletariat, by a series of almost superhuman efforts, we are tackling the most difficult job: laying the foundations for really existing socialist economy, for the regular exchange of commodities (or, more correctly, exchange of products) between industry and agriculture.”

Vladimir Lenin

1920s

Effort , Country

“There is no doubt that in a country where the overwhelming majority of the population consists of small agricultural producers, a socialist revolution can be carried out only through the implementation of a whole series of special transitional measures which would be superfluous in highly developed capitalist countries where wage-workers in industry and agriculture make up the vast majority.”

Vladimir Lenin

Introducing the New Economic Plan, (March, 1921)
1920s

Making love , Country

“The way the enemies of the proletariat take advantage of every deviation from a thoroughly consistent communist line was perhaps most strikingly shown in the case of the Kronstadt mutiny, when the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries and whiteguards in all countries of the world immediately expressed their readiness to accept the slogans of the Soviet system, if only they might thereby secure the overthrow of the dictatorship of the proletariat in Russia, and when the Socialist revolutionaries and the bourgeois counter-revolutionaries in general resorted in Kronstadt to slogans calling for an insurrection against the Soviet Government of Russia ostensibly in the interest of the Soviet power.”

Vladimir Lenin

"Resolution on Party Unity" (May, 1921)
1920s

World , Way , Country

“The economic basis for the complete withering away of the state is such a high stage of development of communism at which the antithesis between mental and physical labour disappears, at which there consequently disappears one of the principal sources of modern social quality - a source, moreover, which cannot on any account be removed immediately by the mere conversion of the means of production into public property, by the mere expropriation of the capitalists.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

The Lenin Anthology, p.379
The State and Revolution (1917)

Communication

“A state arises, a special force is created in the form of special bodies of armed men, and every revolution, by destroying the state apparatus, demonstrates to us how the ruling class strives to restore the special bodies of armed men which serve it, and how the oppressed class strives to create a new organization of this kind, capable of serving not the exploiters but the exploited.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

1.2, Essential Works of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)

Men

“In such circumstances, in view of the incredibly widespread nature of the distortions of Marxism, our first task is to restore the true doctrine of Marx on the state.”

Vladimir Lenin book The State and Revolution

1.1, Essential Workers of Lenin (1966)
The State and Revolution (1917)

Nature

“Imperialism is the epoch of finance capital and of monopolies, which introduce everywhere the striving for domination, not for freedom. Whatever the political system, the result of these tendencies is everywhere reaction and an extreme intensification of antagonisms in this field. Particularly intensified become the yoke of national oppression and the striving for annexations, i. e., the violation of national independence (for annexation is nothing but the violation of the right of nations to self-determination).”

Vladimir Lenin

The Lenin Anthology, p. 268
Imperialism, The Highest Stage of Capitalism (1917)

Self-confidence , Freedom

“We must now try to sum up, to draw together the threads of what has been said above on the subject of imperialism. Imperialism emerged as the development and direct continuation of the fundamental characteristics of capitalism in general. But capitalism only became capitalist imperialism at a definite and very high stage of its development, when certain of its fundamental characteristics began to change into their opposites, when the features of the epoch of transition from capitalism to a higher social and economic system had taken shape and revealed themselves in all spheres. Economically, the main thing in this process is the displacement of capitalist free competition by capitalist monopoly.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

Drawing , Change

“Generally speaking, under capitalism, the ownership of capital is separate from the application of capital to production; money capital is separate from industrial or productive capital; the rentier, living entirely on income obtained from money capital, is separated from the entrepreneur and from all those directly concerned in the management of capital.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

Money

“You must side with one of the two immensely wealthy and immensely powerful groups of imperialist predators - that is how capitalist reality poses the basic issue of present-day foreign policy.”

Vladimir Lenin

1910s, "The Foreign Policy of the Russian Revolution"

Reality

“The basic question of every revolution is that of state power. Unless this question is understood, there can be no intelligent participation in the revolution, not to speak of guidance of the revolution. The highly remarkable feature of our revolution is that it has brought about dual power.”

Vladimir Lenin

This fact must be grasped first and foremost: unless it is understood, we cannot advance. We must know how to supplement and amend old "formulas".
Lenin Anthology, p. 301
1910s, "The Dual Power" (1917)

Intelligence , Question

“One step forward, two steps back. … It happens in the lives of individuals, and it happens in the history of nations and in the development of parties. It would be the most criminal cowardice to doubt even for a moment the inevitable and complete triumph of the principle of revolutionary Social-Democracy, of proletarian organization and Party discipline. We have already won a great deal, and we must go on fighting, undismayed by reverses, fighting steadfastly, scorning the philistine methods of circle wrangling, doing our very utmost to preserve the hard-won single Party tie linking all Russian Social-Democrats, and striving by dint of persistent and systematic work to give all Party members, and the workers in particular, a full and conscious understanding of the duties of Party members, of the struggle and Second Party Congress, of all the causes and all the stages of our divergence, and of the utter and disastrousness of opportunism., which, in the sphere of our programme and our tactics, helplessly surrenders to the bourgeois psychology, uncritically adopts the point of view of bourgeois democracy, and blunts the weapon of the class struggle of the proletariat.”

Vladimir Lenin

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

Democracy , Fight , Understanding , History

“This so-called bipartisan system prevailing in America and Britain has been one of the most powerful means of preventing the rise of an independent working-class, i.e., genuinely socialist, party.”

Vladimir Lenin

The Results and Significance of the U.S. Presidential Elections https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1912/nov/09.htm (November 1912)
1910s

“Give me four years to teach the children, and the seed I have sown shall never be uprooted.”

Vladimir Lenin

As quoted in Pan-Sovietism: The Issue Before America and the World, Bruce Campbell Hopper, Boston and New York, Houghton Mifflin Company (1931) p. 87
Attributions

Children

“Without an alliance with non-Communists in the most diverse spheres of activity there can be no question of any successful communist construction.”

Vladimir Lenin

“On the Significance of Militant Materialism” https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/works/1922/mar/12.htm, (12 March 1922)
1920s

Question , Success

“One may become a demagogue out of sheer political innocence.”

Vladimir Lenin book What Is to Be Done?

Source: What is to be Done? (1902), Chapter Four

“There are no morals in politics; there is only expedience.”

Vladimir Lenin

Original: Морали в политике нет, а есть только целесообразность.
Source: As quoted in S. D. Mstislavskii (1925), Memoirs. https://twitter.com/DrRadchenko/status/1475027465588416512