Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (Russian: Владимир Ильич Ленин) (22 April 1870 - 21 January 1924), born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov and commonly known by the names V.I. Lenin or simply Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, Bolshevik leader, communist politician, principal leader of the October Revolution and the first head of the Soviet Union. In 1998, he was named by Time magazine as one of the 100 most influential people of the 20th century. His contributions to Marxist theory are commonly referred to as Leninism.

Born in Simbirsk – later renamed Ulyanovsk after its most famous son – beside the Volga River in the Russian Empire, Lenin was the son of Ilya Nikolaevich Ulyanov and Maria Alexandrovna Ulyanova.

Lenin's father worked as an inspector, and later as the Director of the public schools in the Simbirsk Gubernia (Province). His mother was a house-wife. His father eventually became a successful Russian official in public education who wanted democracy. The family was of mixed ethnicity, his ancestry being “Russian, Mordovian, Kalmyk, Jewish (see Blank family), Volgan German, and Swedish, and possibly others” according to biographer Dmitri Volkogonov.They imparted to their children a hostility toward all violations of human rights, an active hatred for servile psychology and an active readiness to struggle for higher ideals, free society and equal rights. Subsequently all the Ulyanov children except for Olga (she died at age 19) set out on the path of revolutionary struggle. Lenin was baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church. In January 1886, Lenin’s father, a schoolmaster, died of a cerebral hemorrhage, and, in May 1887, when Lenin was 17 years old, his eldest brother Alexander was arrested and hanged for participating in a terrorist bomb plot threatening the life of Tsar Alexander III.