On April 22, 2025, the 155th anniversary of the birth of Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is celebrated on all continents. A great thinker and fearless revolutionary, a truly popular leader and wise statesman, an ardent internationalist and a champion of the brotherhood of people of all nationalities – this is how he entered world history. Lenin will forever remain in the memory of future generations as the herald and creator of a new society – without grief and poverty, without hunger and enslavement, without mutual hatred and enmity. For millions of people all over the world, this name has become a symbol of the unyielding struggle for the liberation of labor, intellectual power and moral purity.
Relying on the immortal teachings of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, Lenin was able to hear the menacing tread of History, to understand and apply the laws of social development better than anyone else. It is no accident that Russia became the birthplace of Leninism. At the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, it turned out to be the “weak link”, the nodal point of all the contradictions of the world capitalist system. All the prerequisites for a revolutionary explosion were present in the country. The semi-feudal order and the economic oppression of the landlords and capitalists were aggravated by the absolute lack of rights, poverty, and ignorance of the people.
Leninism was formed in a fierce ideological battle with political currents that rejected or distorted the teachings of Marx. The young Vladimir Ulyanov directed his first theoretical blows against Narodism, “legal Marxism” and the so-called “economism”, which belittled the revolutionary potential of the Russian proletariat. The future leader of October resolutely rejected the elected Narodnaya Volya, the path of struggle is the terrorist path of individuals. Lenin’s main historical merit was the founding of a political vanguard party with mass social support. A striking manifestation of Lenin’s organizational talent was the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class, the prototype of the future proletarian party, which in 1895 united disparate Marxist circles. This was a key stage in the preparation of the First Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, held in Minsk in the spring of 1898.
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