Vladimir Ilyich Lenin 1870 - 1924 Driven by ideological zeal, Lenin reshaped Russia and made communism into a potent global force.

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin 1870 - 1924 By Bijan Adatia Driven by ideological zeal, Lenin reshaped Russia and made communism into a potent global force. -------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Not long after the Bolsheviks had seized power in 1917, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin filled out a bureaucratic questionnaire. For occupation, he wrote "man of letters." So it was that a son of the Russian intelligentsia, a radical straight from the pages of Dostoyevsky's novel The Possessed, became the author of mass terror and …

…when he too--the last General Secretary of the Communist Party--admitted, "I can only say that cruelty was the main problem with Lenin." After the collapse of the coup in August 1991, the people of Leningrad voted to call their city St. Petersburg once more. When Brodsky, who had been exiled from the city in 1964, was asked about the news, he smiled and said, "Better to have named it for a saint than a devil." Bijan Adatia