I'm starting to hate school

2. How did Lenin's approach to world politics change after he assumed power in Russia?

“Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov April 22, 1870 in the city of Simbirsk His father was the director of public education for the province of and during Lenin’s childhood, and his service to the state earned him the title of hereditary nobleman. While Lenin was finishing school in Simbirsk in 1887, his older brother, Aleksandr, was arrested and executed in Saint Petersburg (then the capital of Russia) for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Russian emperor Alexander III.”

Lenin became radicalized after loss of his father and brother within a year of each other and the banishment of his sister to the family estate. While living on his mother’s estate in Kokushkino after being kicked out of Kazan University for being involved in a student demonstration he became further radicalized by reading by reading Karl Marx’s Das Kapital and What Is To Be Done? (1863), by Russian writer Nikolay Chernyshevsky. He translated the Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx before he reached the age of 21 . His affinity for languages allowed him to travel throughout Europe as he and his wife could make money translating while agitating for socialist causes . His hopes of becoming a successful attorney were stifled by his arrests and exile in Siberia, where he had married his wife Nadezhda .

Lenin dreamed of a proletarian revolution that would spread throughout the world, starting in industrialized Europe. After he was elected as the Chair of the Council of People’s Commissars by the Russian Congress of Soviets on November 8, 1917 Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had to push aside those lofty goals in order to deal with more pressing matters, like consolidating Bolshevik (now called Communist p76, Roskin/Berry) power inside Russia.

The pressure of dealing with the Russian_Revolution_of_1917 and the civil war , and WWI may have led to the increase in number and usage of the gulag system inside Russia. According to an article titled “Seasons in Hell , How the Gulag grew” by David Remnick April 14, 2003 in the New Yorker “The Bolsheviks practiced terror inside the country from the first days of the regime . They shuttered the Constituent Assembly and murdered leaders of rival parties such as the Kadets and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries. Yet, as early as January of 1918, Lenin complained that his secret police, originally known as the Cheka, were “inordinately soft, at every step more like jelly than iron.” Lenin cast an iron example. In September, 1918, he ordered the authorities in Nizhni Novgorod to “introduce at once mass terror, execute and deport hundreds of prostitutes, drunken soldiers, ex-officers, etc.” Trotsky, for his part, warned that if soldiers drafted into the Red Army defied their officers “nothing will remain of them but a wet spot.”

Thus began the Red Terror, which helped win the civil war for the Bolsheviks and defined the nature of Communist power.”

Mr. Remnick interviews “Dmitri Likhachev, an eminent scholar of medieval Russian literature and an embodiment of the tragic history of his city. (The city was called St. Petersburg when he was born, Petrograd when he was growing up, Leningrad through his long adulthood, and, for the last eight years of his life, St. Petersburg again.) Likhachev was then eighty-four and a director of the literary institute known as Pushkin House. He had vivid memories of the first days of the Communist era—“When we opened the windows of our flat in Lakhtinskaya Street, we could hear all night long the volleys and short bursts of automatic fire from the Peter and Paul Fortress”—and now he was stealing time from his literary work to make impassioned, morally serious speeches about the liberal era that he hoped was coming. A great deal of Likhachev’s authority derived from his biography. He was living proof that the Gulag had been the invention not of Stalin but, rather, of Lenin, the Bolshevik founder, because, he said wearily, “I was a prisoner at Lenin’s first concentration camp” Anne Applebaum also asserts the rise of the gulag system began its growth during Lenin’s leadership in her book Gulag.

These internal pressures were intensified when “on March 3, 1918, the German and Soviet Governments signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in which the Soviet government ceded to Germany a vast amount of Russian territory, containing about one-third of Russia’s population, one-third of its cultivated land, and one-half of its industry. Although Lenin was convinced that these harsh terms must be accepted in order to end Russia’s involvement in the war, the treaty was widely unpopular, even within the Soviet government. It contributed to a split between the Bolsheviks and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries in 1918, which left Lenin and the Bolsheviks in sole control of the Soviet government. World War I continued until November of that year.”

“Foreign Policy, 1921-28

In the 1920s, as the new Soviet state temporarily retreated from the revolutionary path to socialism, the party also adopted a less ideological approach in its relations with the rest of the world. Lenin, ever the practical leader, having become convinced that socialist revolution would not break out in other countries in the near future, realized that his government required normal relations with the Western world for it to survive. Not only were good relations important to national security, but the economy also required trade with the industrial countries. Blocking Soviet attainment of these objectives were lingering suspicions about communism on the part of the Western powers and concern over foreign debts incurred by the tsarist government, which the Soviet government had unilaterally repudiated. In April 1922, the Soviet commissar of foreign affairs, Georgiy Chicherin, circumvented these difficulties by achieving an understanding with Germany, the other pariah state of Europe, in the Treaty of Rapallo. Under the treaty, Germany and Russia agreed on mutual recognition, cancellation of debt claims, normalization of trade relations, and secret cooperation in military development. Soon after concluding the treaty, the Soviet Union obtained diplomatic recognition from other major powers, beginning with Britain in February 1924. Although the United States withheld recognition until 1933, private American firms began to extend technological assistance and to develop commercial links in the 1920s.

Toward the non-Western world, the Soviet leadership limited its revolutionary activity to promoting opposition among the indigenous populations against "imperialist exploitation." The Soviet Union did pursue an active policy in China, aiding the Guomindang (Nationalist Party), a non-Marxist organization committed to reform and national sovereignty. After the triumph of the Guomindang in 1927, a debate developed among Soviet leaders concerning the future status of relations with China. Stalin wanted the Chinese Communist Party to join the Guomindang and infiltrate the government from within, while Trotsky proposed an armed communist uprising and forcible imposition of socialism. Although Stalin's plan was finally accepted, it came to naught when in 1927 the Guomindang leader Chiang Kai-shek ordered the Chinese communists massacred and Soviet advisers expelled.”

“According to Soviet theorists, the basic character of Soviet foreign policy was set forth in Vladimir I. Lenin's Decree on Peace, adopted by the Second Congress of Soviets in November 1917. It set forth the dual nature of Soviet foreign policy, which encompasses both proletarian internationalism and peaceful coexistence. On the one hand, proletarian internationalism refers to the common cause of the working classes of all countries in struggling to overthrow the bourgeoisie and to establish communist regimes. Peaceful coexistence, on the other hand, refers to measures to ensure relatively peaceful government-to-government relations with capitalist states. Both policies can be pursued simultaneously: "Peaceful coexistence does not rule out but presupposes determined opposition to imperialist aggression and support for peoples defending their revolutionary gains or fighting foreign oppression."^[1]

The general foreign policy goals of the Soviet Union were formalized in a party program ratified by delegates to the Twenty-Seventh Party Congress in February-March 1986. According to the program, "the main goals and guidelines of the CPSU's international policy" included ensuring favorable external conditions conducive to building communism in the Soviet Union; eliminating the threat of world war; disarmament; strengthening the "world socialist system"; developing "equal and friendly" relations with "liberated" [Third World] countries; peaceful coexistence with the capitalist countries; and solidarity with communist and revolutionary-democratic parties, the international workers' movement, and national liberation struggles.^[1]”

Collections of Lenin’s writings are archived here .

Poke me with a fork, I'm so done. I am no Condoleezza Rice, that's fer sure. Sick of Russian history? Yeah, me too, how about some Russian current events?