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April 22, 1870 - Nikolai Lenin

The architect of the Bolshevik seizure of power in 1917, Lenin built a centralized, single-party state whose instruments of political repression — including the secret police and the forced labor system — would outlast him by decades. His doctrine of the vanguard party provided ideological cover for the consolidation of authority in the hands of a narrow cadre, while his direction of the Red Terror established state violence as a legitimate governing tool. The scale of displacement, famine, and death produced under his leadership, including during the civil war and early Soviet period, place him among the most consequential and destructive political figures of the twentieth century.

From Wikipedia

Nikolai Lenin

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (22 April [O.S. 10 April] 1870 – 21 January 1924), better known as Vladimir Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician and political theorist. He was the first head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 until his death in 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 until his death. As the Bolsheviks' founder, Lenin led the October Revolution, which established the world's first communist state. His government won the Russian Civil War and created a one-party state under the Communist Party. Ideologically a Marxist, his developments to the ideology are called Leninism.

Lenin embraced revolutionary socialist politics after his brother was executed in 1887 for plotting to assassinate Tsar Alexander III. He was expelled from Kazan Imperial University for participating in student protests, and earned a law degree before moving to Saint Petersburg in 1893 and becoming a prominent Marxist activist. In 1897, Lenin was exiled to Siberia for three years, after which he moved to Western Europe, including Switzerland, and became a leading figure in the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party. In 1903, the party split between Lenin's Bolshevik faction and the Mensheviks, with Lenin advocating for a vanguard party to lead the proletariat in establishing socialism.

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