But there was another man, whom Marx and Engels never knew, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, later known as Lenin. It was Lenin’s destiny to lead the first successful communist revolution, about which Marx and Engels had dreamed so long. He was the man who took communist _theory_ and galvanized it into communist _organization_ and _action_. Lenin’s activation of communist theory resulted in the seizing of power in Russia. Lenin stands today, just after Marx and Engels, as the movement’s third force. More than any other man he is the “developer” of modern-day communism and the father of Party structure and dictatorship. His importance is reflected in the communist description of its way of life as the “science of Marxism-Leninism.” Today Lenin’s prestige has been inflated even more as a result of the “downgrading” of Stalin. He is looked upon as the “ideal” communist leader and, in the words of N. A. Bulganin, Chairman of the U.S.S.R. Council of Ministers, “the great founder of our party and the Soviet State.” Lenin was born April 22, 1870, in Simbirsk, now Ulyanovsk (changed after Lenin’s death in 1924), a town on the Volga River, deep in Russia. His father was a school inspector and a devout member of the Russian Orthodox Church. Vladimir, one of six children, was a model student. He had a great capacity for concentration and could quickly answer his father’s questions about schoolwork. Youth, however, was short-lived; Lenin soon was on the way to becoming a “revolutionary.” It is interesting and important to note here, as with Marx and Engels, that atheism was the first step toward communism. At the age of sixteen, as he later said, Lenin ceased to believe in God. It is reported that he tore the cross from his neck, threw this sacred relic to the ground, and spat upon it. Soon after, in 1887, when Lenin was seventeen, Alexander Ulyanov, his elder brother and boyhood hero, was hanged in the courtyard of Schlusselburg Fortress in Saint Petersburg, later known as Petrograd and Leningrad, along with four companions, charged with conspiracy to assassinate the Czar of Russia. Alexander was a member of People’s Will, a revolutionary organization. This event deeply affected young Lenin.