Vladimir Lenin
Birth : 1870-04-21, Simbirsk
Death : 1924-01-21
History
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1922 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia and then the wider Soviet Union became a one-party communist state governed by the Russian Communist Party. A Marxist, he developed a variant of this communist ideology known as Leninism.
Born to a moderately prosperous middle-class family in Simbirsk, Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics following his brother's 1887 execution. Expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in protests against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government, he devoted the following years to a law degree. He moved to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and became a senior Marxist activist. In 1897, he was arrested for sedition and exiled to Shushenskoye for three years, where he married Nadezhda Krupskaya. After his exile, he moved to Western Europe, where he became a prominent theorist in the Marxist Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). In 1903, he took a key role in the RSDLP ideological split, leading the Bolshevik faction against Julius Martov's Mensheviks. Following Russia's failed Revolution of 1905, he campaigned for the First World War to be transformed into a Europe-wide proletarian revolution, which as a Marxist he believed would cause the overthrow of capitalism and its replacement with socialism. After the 1917 February Revolution ousted the Tsar and established a Provisional Government, he returned to Russia to play a leading role in the October Revolution in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the new regime.
Lenin's Bolshevik government initially shared power with the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, elected soviets, and a multi-party Constituent Assembly, although by 1918 it had centralised power in the new Communist Party. Lenin's administration redistributed land among the peasantry and nationalised banks and large-scale industry. It withdrew from the First World War by signing a treaty conceding territory to the Central Powers, and promoted world revolution through the Communist International. Opponents were suppressed in the Red Terror, a violent campaign administered by the state security services; tens of thousands were killed or interned in concentration camps. His administration defeated right and left-wing anti-Bolshevik armies in the Russian Civil War from 1917 to 1922 and oversaw the Polish–Soviet War of 1919–1921. Responding to wartime devastation, famine, and popular uprisings, in 1921 Lenin encouraged economic growth through the market-oriented New Economic Policy. Several non-Russian nations had secured independence from the Russian Empire after 1917, but three were re-united into the new Soviet Union in 1922. His health failing, Lenin died in Gorki, with Joseph Stalin succeeding him as the pre-eminent figure in the Soviet government.
Description above from the Wikipedia article Vladimir Lenin, licensed under CC-BY-SA, full list of contributors on Wikipedia.
Self - Politician (archive footage)
Atlantic Ocean, off the coast of Iceland, July 9, 2016. The surprising discovery of a canister —containing four reels of The Village Detective (Деревенский детектив), a 1969 Soviet film—, caught in the nets of an Icelandic trawler, is the first step in a fascinating journey through the artistic life of film and stage actor Mikhail Ivanovich Zharov (1899-1981), icon and star of an entire era of Russian cinema.
Self - Politician (archive footage)
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin, is remembered as the instigator of the October Revolution of 1917 and, therefore, as one of the men who changed the shape of the world at that time and forever, but perhaps the actual events happened in a way different from that narrated in the history books…
Self (archive footage)
Self - Politician (archive footage)
The convoluted and moving story of Russian writer Vassili Grossman (1905-64) and his novel Life and Fate (1980), a literary masterpiece, a monumental and epic account of life under Stalin's regime of terror, a defiant cry that the KGB tried to suffocate.
Himself - Politician (archive footage)
Russia, 1917. After the abdication of Czar Nicholas II Romanov, the struggle for power confronts allies, enemies, factions and ideas; a ruthless battle between democracy and authoritarianism that will end with the takeover of the government by Vladimir Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
Self (archive footage)
Starting in 1881 this film shows the personal battle between Lenin's Ulyanov family and the royal Romanovs that eventually led to the Russian revolution.
Himself (archive footage)
St. Petersburg, Russia, December 30th, 1916. Grigori Rasputin is assassinated. The story of the humble peasant who became the most influential adviser to czarina Alexandra Feodorovna, wife of the last czar, Nicholas II Romanov.
Himself - Politician (archive footage)
Spain, 1937. Ramón Mercader, a young communist combatant, is recruited and trained by the Soviet intelligence service to participate in a top secret mission ordered by the ruthless dictator Joseph Stalin: the assassination of his former political rival, Leon Trotsky, who is living in exile in Mexico.
Self (archive footage)
In the last 250 years, free-market ideology has played a central role in the development of the logic and rhetoric that have influenced the daily life of populations throughout the world. It was cornered for a few decades during the twentieth century in favor of a social economy for the public interest, and then returned to the limelight in the last thirty years of the century to dominate the logics that drive world economies, doing the favor of the elites at the expense of 99%. Through the testimony of six people informed about the facts, Laissez-faire offers a historical and ideological perspective through which to identify the fundamental problems of the economic mechanism on which societies are based.
Self (archive footage)
The real reasons and orchestrators behind Hitler, to an incredible theory of the JFK assassination, all the way to 9/11 and the current age of the terrorist. Taken from an historical perspective starting around World War 1 leading to present day.
Himself (archive footage)
Yekaterinburg, Russia, July 17th, 1917. Czar Nicholas II Romanov and his entire family are brutally murdered by the Bolsheviks. This tragic event puts an end to the long dynasty that had ruled the country with an iron hand since the coronation of Michael I Romanov in 1613.
Himself
Self (archive footage)
Based on the story of Americas enigmatic career of one of the revered architects of the modern world - icon, screen star, and two-term president, Ronald Reagan.
Self (archive footage)
A double portrait of two dictators who were thousands of miles apart but were constantly fixated on each other.
Self (archive footage)
Since the late 18th century American legal decision that the business corporation organizational model is legally a person, it has become a dominant economic, political and social force around the globe. This film takes an in-depth psychological examination of the organization model through various case studies. What the study illustrates is that in the its behaviour, this type of "person" typically acts like a dangerously destructive psychopath without conscience. Furthermore, we see the profound threat this psychopath has for our world and our future, but also how the people with courage, intelligence and determination can do to stop it.
Self (archive footage)
A visual montage portrait of our contemporary world dominated by globalized technology and violence.
Self (archive footage)
Human Remains is a haunting documentary which illustrates the banality of evil by creating intimate portraits of five of the 20th century's most reviled dictators. The film unveils the personal lives of Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini, Joseph Stalin, Francisco Franco and Mao Tse Tung. We learn the private and mundane details of their everyday lives -- their favorite foods, films, habits and sexual preferences. There is no mention of their public lives or of their place in history. The intentional omission of the horrors for which these men were responsible hovers over the film.
Himself
In 1978, just after Le fond de l'Air Est Rouge, which mercilessly analyzed the previous ten years of the revolutionary left's momentum until its collapse, Chris Marker made this complementary piece entitled Quand le Siècle a Pris Forme (Guerre et Révolution).
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
French essay film focusing on global political turmoil in the 1960s and '70s, particularly the rise of the New Left in France and the development of socialist movements in Latin America.
himself (archive footage)
Guy Debord's analysis of a consumer society.
Philosophical essay about the October Revolution of 1917 in Russia, its influence on the destiny of the world in the 20th century.
Self (archive footage)
Traces the origins and actions of World War I, from the funeral of Britain's King Edward VII to the Versailles Treaty.
Self (archive footage)
Documentary footage (from the 1950s) and accompanying commentary to attempt to answer the existential question, Why are our lives characterized by discontent, anguish, and fear? The film is in two completely separate parts, and the directors of these respective sections, left-wing Pier Paolo Pasolini and conservative Giovanni Guareschi, offer the viewer contrasting analyses of and prescriptions for modern society. Part I, by Pasolini, is a denunciation of the offenses of Western culture, particularly those against colonized Africa. It is at the same time a chronicle of the liberation and independence of the former African colonies, portraying these peoples as the new protagonists of the world stage, holding up Marxism as their "salvation", and suggesting that their "innocent ferocity" will be the new religion of the era. Guareschi's part, by contrast, constitutes a defense of Western civilization and a word of hope, couched in traditional Christian terms, for man's future.
Self (archive footage) (uncredited)
Documentary compiled from archives and accompanied by a poet's commentary, shows the sweep of modern Italian history from 1911 to 1961, centering on the conditions leading to Fascism and the post-WWII reaction to the Fascist experience.
(archive footage)
Self (archive footage)
A documentary about the threat of war breaking out in Europe, focusing on Hitler, Stalin and Mussolini.
Self (archive footage)
A documentary film account of the Russian Revolution, based on archival footage.
Himself
This documentary, made up of 3 episodes, is based on three songs sung by anonymous people in Soviet Russia about Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
Self (archive footage)
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was pieced together by documentarian Esfir Shub from material recorded between 1913 and 1917, and represents the final years leading up to the Russian Revolution. Through editing, Shub casts a critical, ironic light on the former czarist regime. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty is the first film in Esfir Shub's trilogy that continued with The Great Road (1927), and concluded with Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicolai II (1928).
Author
The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty was pieced together by documentarian Esfir Shub from material recorded between 1913 and 1917, and represents the final years leading up to the Russian Revolution. Through editing, Shub casts a critical, ironic light on the former czarist regime. The Fall of the Romanov Dynasty is the first film in Esfir Shub's trilogy that continued with The Great Road (1927), and concluded with Lev Tolstoy and the Russia of Nicolai II (1928).
Himself (archive footage)
Dziga Vertov-directed Soviet newsreel made to commemorate the first anniversary of the death of Vladimir Ilich Lenin (21st January 1924 - 1925) drawn from 'The Final Journey', a Pravda feuilleton written on the occasion of Lenin's funeral by the man who had introduced Vertov to cinema, Mikhail Koltsov. Contains: First anniversary of Lenin's death: 1. Assassination attempt on Lenin and Soviet Russia's progress under his leadership / 2. Lenin's illness, death and funeral / 3. The year after Lenin's death
Himself
This film shows us leaders of organizations that emerged after the Russian Revolution.
Self - Politician
A chronicle of the Russian Revolution of 1917, from the bourgeois democratic February Revolution to the great socialist October Revolution and the final triumph.
