On January 24, 1924, Lenin died. His body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow.
Lenin was one of the leading political figures and revolutionary thinkers of the 20th century. He was the architect of the Bolshevik coup in Russia in 1917 and was the first leader of the USSR, the BBC recalls.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in Simbirsk on the Volga River on April 22, 1870, into a well-educated family. He excelled at school and went on to study law. At university he encountered radical thinking, and his views were also influenced by the execution of his older brother, a member of a revolutionary group.
Expelled from university for his radical political views, Lenin graduated from law school as an external student in 1891. He moved to St. Petersburg and became a professional revolutionary. Like many of his contemporaries, he was arrested and sent to Siberia, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya.
After his Siberian exile, Lenin - the pseudonym he adopted in 1901 - spent most of the next fifteen years in Western Europe, where he became a prominent figure in the international revolutionary movement and became the leader of the "Bolshevik" faction of the Russian Social Democratic Workers' Party.
In 1917, exhausted by World War I, Russia was ready for change. With the help of the Germans, who hoped that he would undermine the Russian war effort, Lenin returned to his homeland and began working against the Provisional Government that had overthrown the Tsarist regime.
Nearly three years of civil war followed. The Bolsheviks were victorious and took complete control of the country. During this period of revolution, war, and famine, Lenin displayed a cold indifference to the suffering of his countrymen and ruthlessly crushed any opposition.
Although Lenin was ruthless, he was also pragmatic. When his efforts to transform the Russian economy into a socialist model stalled, he introduced the New Economic Policy, which re-authorized private enterprise - a policy that continued for several years after his death.
In 1918, Lenin narrowly survived an assassination attempt, but was seriously injured. His health was affected for a long time, and in 1922 he suffered a stroke from which he never fully recovered. In the last years of his life he worried about the bureaucratization of the regime and expressed concern about the growing power of his eventual successor, Joseph Stalin. Lenin died on 24 January 1924. His body was embalmed and placed in a mausoleum on Red Square in Moscow.