If Mahatma Gandhi was one of the most luminous personalities of the 20th century, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870-1924) was one of the darkest. Born as Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov to a middle-class family in Simbirsk (renamed Ulyanovsk after his death), Lenin was attracted by the revolutionary leftist politics following the execution of his brother in 1887. Expelled from Kazan State University for his radical attitude, he completed his law degree as an external student in 1891. In 1893 he moved to Saint Petersburg, where he began his career of professional revolutionary as cofounder of the League of Struggle for the Emancipation of the Working Class. Arrested and exiled to Siberia for three years, he married Nadezhda Krupskaya, and fled to Western Europe, where he emerged as a prominent figure in the international revolutionary movement and became the leader of the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Worker's Party.
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