Vladimir Lenin

The professional revolutionary who seized the "vanguard of the proletariat" and turned the theories of Marx into the reality of the Soviet state. A man of cold, surgical intellect, he believed that history could be accelerated through the "dictatorship of the heartless." He represents the "Break with the Past"—the architect of a new world order that would haunt and shape the 20th century. He is the sealed train and the red banner, the spark of the Bolshevik fire.