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60 free Vladimir Lenin trivia questions with answers — history quiz, new questions added Aug 2026.
This Vladimir Lenin trivia quiz follows Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov from a comfortable childhood in Simbirsk to the granite mausoleum on Red Square. The easy questions cover the basics: his real surname, the faction he led, the revolution he returned to lead in 1917, the woman he married in Siberian exile, the man who succeeded him and what was done with his body. From there it moves through the execution of his brother, his expulsion from Kazan University, the years of exile and émigré newspapers, the 1903 split that gave the world the words Bolshevik and Menshevik, and where his pen name may have come from. The harder end covers the sealed train that was not really sealed, the Finland Station, the July Days, the vote of 10 October, the cruiser that fired the signal shot, the Constituent Assembly, the Cheka, Fanny Kaplan's bullets, the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, the famine and Kronstadt, the New Economic Policy, the Georgian affair, the Testament, his strokes and the doctors who removed his brain. It finishes with the statues, the polls and the fact that he is still on display. Every answer was checked against Lenin's encyclopaedia entry before publishing and the supporting sentence is stored with each question. Our Russian Revolution and Joseph Stalin quizzes pick up where this one ends.
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Q 01What was Lenin's real surname?
Ulyanov
He first used the pen name Lenin in December 1901.
Q 02In which Volga city, later renamed after his family, was Lenin born?
Simbirsk
It became Ulyanovsk in 1924, the same year Petrograd became Leningrad.
Q 03What was the profession of Lenin's father, Ilya?
Director of schools
He oversaw the founding of over 450 schools and his rank of State Councillor made the family hereditary nobles.
Q 04What happened to Lenin's elder brother Aleksandr in May 1887?
He was executed for plotting to kill the tsar
He had been chosen to build the bomb for a plot against Alexander III; the shock pushed the 17-year-old Vladimir towards revolution.
Q 05From where was Lenin expelled in December 1887 for taking part in a student demonstration?
Kazan University
He had enrolled to study law only months earlier; his mother later got him permission to sit his exams externally in Saint Petersburg.
Q 06Which 1863 Chernyshevsky novel enthralled young Lenin and gave his 1902 pamphlet its title?
What Is to Be Done?
He read it voraciously while exiled to the family estate at Kokushkino.
Q 07Which Marxist pamphlet did Lenin translate into Russian while living in Samara?
The Communist Manifesto
He was following Plekhanov's argument that Russia's revolution would come from the urban proletariat, not the peasantry.
Q 08To which Siberian village was Lenin exiled for three years from 1897?
Shushenskoye
He was allowed to swim in the Yenisei and hunt duck and snipe; the journey there took 11 weeks.
Q 09Whom did Lenin marry in Siberian exile on 10 July 1898?
Nadezhda Krupskaya
A Marxist schoolteacher, she had been arrested for organising a strike and talked the authorities into moving her from Ufa to join him.
Q 10Under what pseudonym did Lenin publish The Development of Capitalism in Russia in 1899?
Vladimir Ilin
His longest book to date received predominantly poor reviews.
Q 11What was the name of the underground Marxist newspaper Lenin launched from Munich in 1900?
Iskra
The name means 'Spark'; it became Russia's most successful underground publication since the 1850s.
Q 12The pen name Lenin, first used in December 1901, is thought possibly to derive from what?
The Siberian river Lena
He often signed 'N. Lenin'; the N stood for nothing, though people later assumed it meant Nikolai.
Q 13Under what false name did Lenin obtain a reader's ticket for the British Museum Reading Room?
Jacob Richter
He later returned to the same room in 1908 to write Materialism and Empirio-criticism.
Q 21How many Russian exiles crossed Germany by train with Lenin in April 1917?
32
The 'sealed train' was not really sealed; passengers got off to spend a night in Frankfurt.
Q 22Where in Petrograd did Lenin arrive by train in April 1917 and denounce the Provisional Government?
The Finland Station
He had written his 'April Theses' on the journey from Switzerland.
Q 23After the July Days, the government accused Lenin of being what?
A German agent provocateur
He fled Petrograd in disguise with Zinoviev and hid in Finland, where he wrote The State and Revolution.
Q 14At the 1903 RSDLP Congress in London, Lenin's faction took its name from which Russian word?
'Majoritarians'
His rival Martov's followers became the Mensheviks, the 'minoritarians', though the majority was on that one vote alone.
Q 15Which rival did Lenin fall out with at the 1903 Congress over party members' independence from the leadership?
Julius Martov
Martov coined the word 'Leninism' in 1904, and not as a compliment.
Q 16To finance the party after 1905, Lenin endorsed what?
Robbing banks, trains and post offices
The best-known heist was Stalin's 1907 robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis; Lenin then tried to launder the numbered notes in Switzerland.
Q 17How did Lenin describe Paris, where he lived from December 1908?
'A foul hole'
While there he sued a motorist who knocked him off his bicycle.
Q 18Which French Bolshevik became Lenin's close friend in Paris, and possibly his lover from 1910 to 1912?
Inessa Armand
When she died of cholera in 1920 a visibly grief-stricken Lenin oversaw her burial beneath the Kremlin Wall.
Q 19Which Okhrana spy did the secret police plant in the party as a vocal Lenin supporter?
Roman Malinovsky
It is unclear whether Lenin knew; he may have used him to feed the Okhrana false information.
Q 20What nickname did Lenin give Stalin when he visited him in Kraków in January 1913?
'The wonderful Georgian'
They discussed the future of the empire's non-Russian peoples, Stalin's speciality.
Q 24By what vote did the Bolshevik Central Committee approve armed insurrection on 10 October 1917?
Ten to two
Zinoviev and Kamenev were the two dissenters, doubting workers would back a coup.
Q 25Which cruiser fired the blank shot that signalled the storming of the Winter Palace?
Aurora
The Military Revolutionary Committee had already taken Petrograd's key hubs without bloodshed.
Q 26What was the name of the new government the Bolsheviks formed in October 1917, with Lenin as chairman?
Sovnarkom
The Council of People's Commissars; Lenin initially turned down the chairmanship.
Q 27Roughly what share of the vote did the Bolsheviks win in the November 1917 Constituent Assembly election?
About a quarter
They lost to the Socialist-Revolutionaries, and the government forcibly disbanded the Assembly in January 1918.
Q 28In March 1918, the Bolsheviks dropped the old RSDLP name in favour of what?
The Russian Communist Party
Lenin wanted distance from the reformist German Social Democrats.
Q 29Who shot and severely wounded Lenin outside a Moscow arms factory on 30 August 1918?
Fanny Kaplan
She was executed on 3 September; the bullets left in his body were not removed until 1922.
Q 30Which Swiss communist shielded Lenin during a January 1918 assassination attempt in Petrograd?
Fritz Platten
Platten had also organised the train journey through Germany the previous year.