Vladimir Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary, theorist, and leader of the Bolshevik Party who led the first successful socialist revolution in history. Born in Simbirsk in 1870, he was radicalized as a young man after the tsarist state hanged his older brother for plotting against the tsar. Expelled from university for his political activity, he threw himself into organizing among the workers of St. Petersburg and was arrested and exiled to Siberia. There and in the years of exile that followed, he built a revolutionary movement with his comrade and partner Nadezhda Krupskaya, founding the newspaper Iskra and setting out in What Is to Be Done? his vision of a disciplined party of professional revolutionaries.

When the First World War broke out and most of Europe's socialist parties lined up behind their own governments, Lenin denounced the war as an imperialist slaughter and called on workers to turn it into a revolution against their rulers. In Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism, he showed how monopoly capital and the scramble for colonies had driven the great powers into war. After the tsar fell in February 1917, he returned to Russia and demanded all power to the soviets, the councils of workers and soldiers, along with peace, land, and bread. In The State and Revolution he argued that the working class must replace the old state with its own. In October 1917 the Bolsheviks led the insurrection that brought the soviets to power.

The revolutionary government took Russia out of the war, gave land to the peasants, and declared the right of all nations to self-determination. It then defended the revolution through a brutal civil war against the old ruling classes and the invading armies of more than a dozen foreign powers, among them the United States, Britain, France, and Japan. Lenin founded the Communist International and placed the liberation of the colonies at the center of world revolution, inspiring revolutionaries from Ho Chi Minh to the anticolonial movements of Africa and Asia. He died in 1924. His legacy endures as the proof that working people can take power, and as a guide for revolutionaries determined to win a world free from exploitation and empire.