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2. How did Lenin's approach to world politics change after he assumed power in
“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
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
Lenin dreamed of a proletarian revolution that would spread throughout the world, starting in industrialized
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
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
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
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
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
“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
Collections of Lenin’s writings are archived here .
