Vladimir Lenin

Vladimir Lenin was the architect of Russia’s 1917 Bolshevik revolution and the first leader of what became the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. Vladimir Lenin was born Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov in 1870 into a middle-class family in Ulyanovsk, Russia. He was the third of six siblings in an educated family and would go on to become first in his class in high school.

In August 1887, just a few months after his brother’s death, 17-year-old Lenin entered Kazan University to study law. He was expelled that December, however, for taking part in a student protest.

In 1889, Lenin declared himself a Marxist. He later finished college and received a law degree. Lenin practiced law briefly in St. Petersburg in the mid-1890s.

Lenin published his first Marxist essay in 1894, and the following year he traveled to France, Germany and Switzerland in order to meet with like-minded revolutionaries.

He soon was arrested for engaging in Marxist activities and exiled to Siberia. His fiancée and future wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, joined him there. The two would marry on July 22, 1898.

Lenin later moved to Germany and then Switzerland, where he met other European Marxists. Lenin first moved to London in April 1902, where he met the ill-fated Leon Trotsky. From a small office at 37a Clerkenwell Green, he published Iskra, a leading socialist newspaper.

The term 'Bolshevik' was coined by Lenin in London, during a congress in July 1903. The word meant 'those in the majority' (in favor of a strong top-down leadership), in contrast to the rival Mensheviks, who were in the minority. Lenin returned to Russia in April 1917 after the czar had abdicated and the Soviet Revolution was underway.

Lenin and his Red Guards, a secretly organized army of peasants, workers, and disaffected Russian military men, seized control of the government in a nearly bloodless coup d'état in November 1917.

Lenin died on January 21, 1924 in Gorki at the age of 53 years. Although some doctors suggested that the origin of his health problems was neurosyphilis, the autopsy findings were consistent with a severe atherosclerosis.
Vladimir Lenin

Che Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967)

Che Guevara was born in the Argentine city of Rosario, which is located in northern Argentina on the famous Parana River.

He was known as an Argentine born Marxist revolutionary and Cuban guerilla leader.

His parents were of upper class origin. His father, Ernesto Guevara Lynch, was an entrepreneur and a builder-architect who studied architecture but never received a degree.

Che Guevara attended a secondary school in Cordoba, The Colegia Naciones Dean Funes, from where he went on to study medicine at the University of Buenos Aires in 1948.

In 1953 after graduating, as a doctor in March, Ernesto Guevara sets off to travel through Latin America, he visits Bolivia, observing the aftermath of the 1952 revolution.

Horrified by the hardship and poverty he witnessed in the countries he visited, and the exploitation of the poor by-US-controlled corporations, Che Guevara began to embrace a form of Pan-American Marxism.

Under the influence of Castro, writer Alberto Bayo, and the writings of Mao Tse-Tung, Che Guevara began to form the tenets of his philosophy of guerrilla. Later in 1956, he joined Castro and his brother Raul invading Cuba.

Once the new Cuban government has been installed, Che Guevara served under Castro as an official at the National Institute of Agrarian Reform, President of the National Bank of Cuban and Minster of Industries.

Che Guevara left Cuba in 1966 to sow seeds of revolution in other countries, first in the Democratic Republic of Congo and later in Bolivia.

Guevara was captured by Bolivian troops, with support of the CIA. Che Guevara was executed on October 9, 1967 and his body was buried in a secret grave. He was thirty-nine years old.
Che Guevara (June 14, 1928 – October 9, 1967)