proletarian experience. As a youth still in his teens he entered the
University of St. Petersburg, but his stay there was exceedingly brief,
owing to a tragedy which greatly embittered his life and gave it its
direction. An older brother, who was also a student in the university, was
condemned to 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 rôle 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