Krupskaya, Nadezhda Konstantinovna, << KROOP skah yah, nah DEHZH dah `kawn` stahn TEE nov nah >> (1869-1939), was a Russian revolutionary leader and the wife of V. I. Lenin. In 1903, she helped Lenin establish the Bolsheviks, a group that later became the Russian Communist Party.
Krupskaya was born on Feb. 26, 1869, in St. Petersburg. Krupskaya and Lenin met in 1894 at a meeting of revolutionaries. They were married in 1898 in Siberia, where both had been exiled for revolutionary activities. Through the years, Krupskaya aided Lenin with his writings and in the translation of other Communist works.
Krupskaya participated in the October Revolution of 1917, in which the Bolsheviks seized control of the Russian government. Krupskaya became deputy people’s commissar of education in the new government and helped form the Soviet system of public education. After Lenin’s death in 1924, she served on the Central Committee of the Communist Party. But she had little influence on Joseph Stalin, who headed the government. She died on Feb. 27, 1939.
