Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870 - 1924), better known by his alias Lenin, was a Russian revolutionary, politician, and political theorist. He served as the head of government of Soviet Russia from 1917 to 1924 and of the Soviet Union from 1922 to 1924. Under his administration, Russia, and later the Soviet Union, became a one-party Marxist-Leninist state governed by the Communist Party of the Soviet Union. Ideologically a Marxist, he developed a variant of it known as Leninism.