Soviet Russian Political Leader. Vladimir Lenin is recognized as a Russian Communist politician, who served as the first governmental head of Soviet Russia after the Russian Revolution in 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, the third of eight children in a close-knit middle-class family, he was fifteen years old when his father suddenly died from a stroke and his older brother was executed for political reasons. Two years later in 1887, he began law studies at Kazan University but was expelled for his revolutionary activities against the Russian Empire's Tsarist government. In 1890 he received a degree with honors from the University of St Petersburg and began to practice law while continuing his far-left rebellious political activities. A follower of Karl Marx, he translated Marx's "Communist Manifesto" from German to his native Russian language with illegal printing and distribution. He also printed his many own publications. Although acclaimed Marxist, he adapted his own ideologies to Karl Marx's classic document. Meeting with Marxist followers outside of Russia, he traveled to Switzerland and Paris. Shortly after returning to Russia, he was arrested for his political activities, waited at least a year in jail before being sentenced without trial in January of 1897 to a three-year exile to Siberia under house arrest. While in Siberia on July 10, 1898, he married a school teacher, Nadezhda Krupskaya, who had been arrested and sentenced to Siberia for rebellious political activities. Using the pseudonym "Vladimir Ilyin", he published 2,400 copies in March of 1899 of "The Development of Capitalism in Russia." Considered one of his major publications, a second edition with little changes was published in 1908. Upon his release from his Siberian sentencing, he relocated first to Switzerland in July of 1900, adopting the name Lenin in December of 1901. He became a part of the underground publications that infiltrated Russia including his 1902 publication, "What Is to Be Done?", which was to educate the working class on Marxism. Later in 1907, he relocated to Germany and then over the next ten years, hopping from England, to Poland, and Paris before returning to Switzerland. The was a failed Russian Revolution in 1905, which led to him supporting violence and criminal activities. He had a political colleague, Leon Trotsky and there was a split in the political movement. On April 16, 1917 with the help of ambitious colleague Joseph Stalin, he returned to Russia through Germany when Bolsheviks of the Russian Social Democratic Party, which was renamed the Communist Party, supplied him with monetary funds to organize a political party and a press. Russian Tsar Nicholas II had been forced to abdicate in March of 1917 and by July 17, 1918, he and his entire royal family were executed. With a carefully-planned classic coup d'état, the Russian Empire fell in October of 1917. Upon coming to power, he managed to organize a small but totally devoted and highly disciplined party that touched on every level of the Russian society. His Decree on Land declared that the lands belonging to the aristocrats and the Orthodox Church should be nationalized and redistributed to peasants by local government, and this followed with Decree on the Press in 1917, which gave no freedom of the press; along with rewriting laws for the courts; and reorganizing the armed forces. To combat Russia's mass illiteracy, he also declared means for public education, established a 40-hour workweek and a separation of government and religion. His plans made a negative turn with the Russian Famine of 1921 causing the death of an estimated five million people from starvation. With the hording of their harvest by local communities instead of distributing the grain nationally as planned, Lenin pled with Europe and the United States for help, receiving the aide of 768 million tons of flour, grain, rice, beans, pork, milk, and sugar, with a value at the time of over $98 million, which can be credited with saving the fall of Communist Russia. In March of 1921, the New Economic Policy, which ended the system of grain requisitioning and permitted the peasant to sell his harvest on an open market, was in place thus resulting to a form of capitalism. In August of 1918, an attempted assassination on his life was made after making a speech in a factory. Two bullets were fired hitting Lenin's neck but he recovered but this would lead to his death years later. In the spring of 1922, he became seriously ill. His physicians removed one of the lodged bullets from his neck that he received from the attempted assassination, but the complication of a stroke followed a month later with him becoming paralyzed, and by March 10, 1923, another stroke made him aphasic ending his political career. He had a third stroke the following January, which ended his life. During his political career, he established the prototype of totalitarian dictatorship, controlling every aspect of the Russian life. This would be the groundwork for him and his successors for years to come. After a four-day funeral in the freezing temperatures of a Russian January, his remains, which were originally planned to be buried, were on exhibit for nearly two months in a wooden mausoleum. A decision was made to use a special expensive embalming to preserve his remains for a display on a bed of red silk in an ornate glass sarcophagus, which was housed in a wooden mausoleum from death until the completion in 1930 of the Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square.