Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was born on April 22, 1870 in the family of a school teacher in the provincial town of Simbirsk on the banks of the mighty Volga. From his early youth, Lenin dedicated himself to the cause of the revolution of the working class. His life was a daily re-dedication to its service as one supreme goal. Lenin started his political activities while still a student. When he had barely crossed into his 'twenties', he started organising and educating the workers of St. Petersburg(later name Leningrad). His activities among the working classes attracted the displeasure of the Czarist regime and he was exiled to Siberia. From 1898 till 1917, he had to live a life of a persecuted revolutionary, either hiding from the police in Russia or forced to lice abroad. The greatest contribution of Lenin was his leadership of the Great October Socialist Revolution in 1917.

Lenin was the head of the first Soviet Socialist State and worked out all its decrees, led the victorious defensive war against the foreign interventionists and laid down the broad guide-lines for the future development of the Soviet Union. Lenin was convinced that Socialism was a supierior system, that ir had immense potentialities, and that mankind had entered a new stage of development. Lenin always combined practical revolutionary work with profound study and scientific thought.

His collected works run into fifty volumes and lead in the number of transactions in the world. He paid great attention to the freedom movement in the East, especially India. Lenin had an abiding interest in India and this found a wide range of expression-frequent regerences to India in his writings, discussions material on India and collection of books by Indian authors for his personal library. He condemned the arrest of Lokmanya Tilak in 1908 and vigorously protested against the Jallianwala Bagh massacre in 1919.

He hailed the unity of the Hindus and Muslim in the struggle against British imperialism in the 1920's and personally received many Indian revolutionaries. In his utterances on India, Lenin presented a remarkably profound appraisal of the characteristic developments of his times. On January 21, 1924, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin succumbed to cerebral haemorrage, caused by bullet injuries recevied some years earlier. His body is preserved in the Lenin Mausoleum in Moscow, a place of pilgrimage for millons.

The Posts and Telegraphs Departmentis indeed proud to pay its homage to V. I. Lenin by bringing out a special commemorative stamp on the occasion of his first birth centenary.

Source : Information Folder issued by Indian Posts & Telegraph Department, Government of India