Voice of Britain's Youth
Our March by Vladimir Mayakovsky, 1917.
Vladimir Mayakovsky (1893-1930) was a Bolshevik revolutionary and came to be one of the most celebrated communist poets in the Soviet Union and internationally. He was also a talented playwright, artist and actor who used art as a medium to convey the politics and ideals of the new socialist state.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to us as Lenin, was born 150 years ago on the 22nd of April. His effect on history, on revolutionary thought and on the minds of the people of this world, all remain possibly unparalleled by any figure of the tumultuous 20th century. One of the ways in which Lenin remained immortalised was by the admiration displayed for him by various artists around the world, especially writers. Lenin remains, as Marcel Liebman once wrote, a figure which nearly every insurrectionary movement claims as their heritage.
On the 22nd April, communists around the world took part in birthday celebrations like no other. 150 years previous, leader of the Great October Socialist Revolution, Vladimir Lenin, was born. While the Coronavirus has changed our lives and restricted our ability to campaign, it has not hampered our spirit, nor our pride in remembering the heroes of our movement who came before us.
