What was vladimir lenins religion

His parents, both educated and highly cultured, invoked a passion for learning in their children, especially Vladimir. A voracious reader, Lenin went on to finish first in his high school class, showing a particular gift for Latin and Greek.

But not all of life was easy for Lenin and his family. Two situations, in particular, shaped his life. The first came when Lenin was a boy and his father, an inspector of schools, was threatened with early retirement by a suspicious government nervous about the influence public school had on Russian society.

With his father already dead, Lenin now became the man of the family. His time there was cut short, however, when, during his first term, he was expelled for taking part in a student demonstration. In January , Lenin declared himself a Marxist. Eventually, Lenin received his law degree, finishing his schoolwork in He moved to the city of Samara, where his client base was largely composed of Russian peasants.

Their struggles against what Lenin saw as a class-biased legal system only reinforced his Marxist beliefs. In time, Lenin focused more of his energy on revolutionary politics. He left Samara in the mids for a new life in St. Petersburg, the Russian capital at the time. There, Lenin connected with other like-minded Marxists and began to take an increasingly active role in their activities. The work did not go unnoticed, and in December Lenin and several other Marxist leaders were arrested.

Lenin was exiled to Siberia for three years. Following his release from exile and then a stint in Munich, where Lenin and others co-founded a newspaper, Iskra, to unify Russian and European Marxists, he returned to St.

Petersburg and stepped up his leadership role in the revolutionary movement. At the Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party in , a forceful Lenin argued for a streamlined party leadership community, one that would lead a network of lower party organizations and their workers.

In Russia went to war with Japan. The conflict had a profound impact on Russian society. The situation was heightened on January 9, , when a group of unarmed workers in St. They were met by security forces, who fired on the group, killing and wounding hundreds. The crisis set the stage for what would be called the Russian Revolution of In an intensifying spiral of recrimination, not only did Moshko denounce them in turn but, the records reveal, he became an informer against Judaism itself.

In his way of thinking, Jewish converts, whether to Christianity or Communism, are no longer Jews, period, and they should be neither claimed nor charged as such. Yet even if one grants this in principle, there may still be much to learn from the often influential participation of former or ex-Jews in the development of modern anti-liberal movements. Instead of dwelling on the question of Jews and Communism, as many a scholar has done, might historians not do better to focus their attention on renegade Jews and Communism?

There, as the Yiddish expression has it, may be where the dog lies buried. Reprinted with permission from Jewish Ideas Daily. Anti-Jewish violence sweeping the Russian Empire in the late 19th century spurred many Jews to emigrate and organize politically. Modern Israel. Modern Jewish History. We use cookies to improve your experience on our site and bring you ads that might interest you.

Join Our Newsletter Empower your Jewish discovery, daily. Sign Up. In this respect, the Russian revolution is in a particularly favourable position, since the revolting officialism of the police-ridden feudal autocracy has called forth discontent, unrest and indignation even among the clergy. However abject, however ignorant Russian Orthodox clergymen may have been, even they have now been awakened by the thunder of the downfall of the old, medieval order in Russia. We socialists must lend this movement our support, carrying the demands of honest and sincere members of the clergy to their conclusion, making them stick to their words about freedom, demanding that they should resolutely break all ties between religion and the police.

Either you are sincere, in which case you must stand for the complete separation of Church and State and of School and Church, for religion to be declared wholly and absolutely a private affair.

Or you do not accept these consistent demands for freedom, in which case you evidently are still held captive by the traditions of the inquisition, in which case you evidently still cling to your cosy government jobs and government-derived incomes, in which case you evidently do not believe in the spiritual power of your weapon and continue to take bribes from the state.

And in that case the class-conscious workers of all Russia declare merciless war on you. So far as the party of the socialist proletariat is concerned, religion is not a private affair.

Our Party is an association of class-conscious, advanced fighters for the emancipation of the working class. Such an association cannot and must not be indifferent to lack of class-consciousness, ignorance or obscurantism in the shape of religious beliefs. We demand complete disestablishment of the Church so as to be able to combat the religious fog with purely ideo logical and solely ideological weapons, by means of our press and by word of mouth.

But we founded our association, the Russian Social-Democratic Labour Party, precisely for such a struggle against every religious bamboozling of the workers. And to us the ideological struggle is not a private affair, but the affair of the whole Party, of the whole proletariat. If that is so, why do we not declare in our Programme that we are atheists? Why do we not forbid Christians and other believers in God to join our Party? The answer to this question will serve to explain the very important difference in the way the question of religion is presented by the bourgeois democrats and the Social-Democrats.

Our Programme is based entirely on the scientific, and moreover the materialist, world-outlook. An explanation of our Programme, therefore, necessarily includes an explanation of the true historical and economic roots of the religious fog. Our propaganda necessarily includes the propaganda of atheism; the publication of the appropriate scientific literature, which the autocratic feudal government has hitherto strictly forbidden and persecuted, must now form one of the fields of our Party work.

We shall now probably have to follow the advice Engels once gave to the German Socialists: to translate and widely disseminate the literature of the eighteenth-century French Enlighteners and atheists.

It would be stupid to think that, in a society based on the endless oppression and coarsening of the worker masses, religious prejudices could be dispelled by purely propaganda methods.