Born Wladimir Iljitsch Uljanow on April 22nd, 1870, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin ruled the Soviet Union from 1917 until his death on January 21st, 1924. He was a Russian Marxist revolutionary and communist politician who led the October Revolution of 1917. As leader of the Bolsheviks, he headed the Soviet state during its initial years, as it fought to establish control of Russia in the Russian Civil War and worked to create a socialist economic system. As a politician, Lenin was a persuasive orator, as a political scientist his extensive theoretic and philosophical developments of Marxism produced Marxism