Lenin used 130 to 150 pseudonyms in practice. But, as you know, he stopped at "Lenin". Historians are still wondering what caused this choice. One of the versions - Ilyich was named in honor of the German monastery Lenin, known to believing Europeans for his "Lenin prophecy".
Gorokhov, Ivanov, Ilyin, Karpov, Kuprianov, Petrov, Osipov, Volkov, Pravdin, Frey, Tulin, Strauss, Old Man … Any of these pseudonyms could theoretically become "final" for Ulyanov (and then, for example, St. Petersburg could would be called Gorokhovgrad or Strausgrad for almost 70 years). Why did Ilyich stop at Lenin?
Let's start with the fact that even already bearing the surname "Lenin" he was also called "Nikolai". This combination appears in the years 1899-1901 - when, by the way, more than a decade remained before the Lena execution. In 1924, Krupskaya recalled in the party press: “Dear comrades! I do not know why Vladimir Ilyich took the pseudonym "Lenin" for himself, I never asked him about it. His mother was called Maria Alexandrovna, his deceased sister was called Olga. The Lena events took place after he took this pseudonym for himself. He was not in exile on Lena. The nickname was probably chosen by chance."
True, in exile Krupskaya allegedly explained to Ilya Ehrenburg that initially Ulyanov planned to take the pseudonym Olenin for himself - in honor of the hero of Leo Tolstoy's story "The Cossacks". But this memory is apocryphal, and lies entirely on the conscience of Ehrenburg.
There is also a version about the foreign passport (with a forged date of birth) allegedly transferred to him in 1900 by State Councilor Nikolai Yegorovich Lenin, who lived in the Yaroslavl province. But Ulyanov never used this passport, and except for the historian Vladlen Loginov, no one seriously adheres to this version.
But in Russia, for some reason, no one is considering another version of the origin of the pseudonym "Lenin" - from the established name of the German monastery Lenin (Kloster Lehnin), which is very famous among the believers in Europe. It is located near Potsdam and dates back to the end of the 12th century.
Let's not bore the dear reader with the full history of this monastery - for example, it is described on the website of the monastery itself.
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Here are just a few important details. As it was then in Central Europe, the monastery played the role of a German outpost in the struggle against the Slavs. The Lenin Monastery was demonstratively erected on the site of the pagan sanctuary of the Slavs, and the oak insert in the altar step, according to local historians, was previously part of the sacred oak, revered by the Slavs.
The word Lehnin itself originated from the Old Slavonic Lanye - a female deer. To this day, the coat of arms of the Lehnin commune depicts a deer under an oak tree.
As was customary in the Middle Ages, the monastery was a large economic center: it owned 4,500 hectares of land and forests, 39 villages and 2 towns, and was engaged in usurious activities. Hundreds of monasteries in Europe lived in the same way (though the monastery is also known for the fact that for the first time in European practice it began to cut off the ears of pigs and cook stew out of them - "the pigs are safe and the monks are fed").
That is why Lenin became famous not for his conquest of the Slavs and "effective management", but for "Lenin's prophecy." It is believed that in 1639 a monk of the monastery Lenin discovered a prophecy dating from the 13th century. True, it first appeared in print in 1723 to Konigsberg. Today it has already been proven that the "prophecy", like many "manuscripts of the XII-XIII centuries, is a fake, painstakingly written by semi-politicians, semi-businessmen of the XVIII century.
The appearance of Lenin's prophecy in the first quarter of the 18th century is no coincidence - this forgery describes in detail how the Hohenzollern dynasty should come to an end and the house of the German Askanievs will reign. In the end, "Germany under the rule of Catholicism will become a single state, and its possessions will extend to the eastern border of the natural settlement of the Goths - that is, to the Crimea." Interestingly, the Russian Empress Catherine II was also from the Askaniev family.
In the early 1900s, "Lenin's prophecy" in Europe in a romanticized form was perceived as a striving for unity in Central and Eastern Europe, the creation of a huge state from the "Rhine to the Volga", headed by the wise German Catholic emperor.
Vladimir Ulyanov, as an educated man of his time and as a German intellectual in essence, knew very well about this prophecy. And only a little time was not enough for V. I. Lenin for this prophecy to come true.