Vladimir Lenin was a Russian Marxist revolutionary born in 1870 who died in 1924. He was the leader of the Bolshevik party and was instrumental in the October Revolution of 1917, in which the Bolsheviks overthrew the provisional government and established the Soviet Union, with Lenin as its first head of government. Lenin was committed to Marxist and socialist political ideologies from his student days and played a pivotal role in the Russian revolutions and the founding of the Soviet state.