death, in a secret trial, for complicity in a terrorist plot
to assassinate Alexander III. Shortly afterward he was put to death. Lenine
himself was arrested at the same time as his brother, but released for lack
of evidence connecting him with the affair. It is said, however, that the
arrest caused his expulsion from the university. Lenine was not the only
young man to be profoundly impressed by the execution of the youthful
Alexander Ulyanov; another student, destined to play an important role in
the great tragedy of revolutionary Russia, was stirred to bitter hatred of
the system. That young student was Alexander Kerensky, whose father and the
father of the Ulyanovs were close friends.

Lenine's activities brought him into conflict with the authorities several
times and forced him to spend a good deal of time in exile. As a youth of
seventeen, at the time of the execution of his brother, he was dismissed
from the Law School in St. Petersburg. A few years later he was sent to
Siberia for a political "crime." Upon various occasions later he was
compelled to flee from the country, living sometimes in Paris, sometimes in
London, but more often in Switzerland. It was through his writings mainly
that he acquired the influence he had in the Russian movement. There is
nothing unusual or remarkable about this, for the Social Democratic party
of Russia was practically directed from Geneva. Lenine was in London when
the Revolution of 1905 broke out and caused him to hurry to St. Petersburg.

As a young man Lenine, like most of the Intelligentsia of the period, gave
up a good deal of his spare time to teaching small groups of uneducated
working-men the somewhat abstract and intricate theories and doctrines of
Socialism. To that excellent practice, no doubt, much of Lenine's skill as
a lucid expositor and successful propagandist is due. He has written a
number of important works, most of them being of a polemical nature and
dealing with party disputations upon questions of theory and tactics. The
work by which he was best known in Socialist circles prior to his
sensational rise to the Premiership is a treatise on _The Development of
Capitalism in Russia_. This work made its appearance in 1899, when the
Marxian Socialist movement was still very weak. In it Lenine defended the
position of the Marxians, Plechanov and his group, that Russia was not an
exception to the general law of capitalist development, as was claimed by
the leader