1917 was the year of the two Revolutions in Russia: in February, with the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II and the disintegration of the Russian Empire and in October, when the Bolsheviks seized power, promising to build a socialist state. This led to the Russian Civil War, at the end of which the Red Army emerged victorious. In 1922, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was founded. During these events, until his death in 1924, Vladimir Lenin was the undisputed political leader and founder of the one-party socialist state. Leninism was the dominant doctrine in Russia - a variant of Marxism which aimed for a proletarian dictatorship led by the Bolshevik party - and had been the driving force for the socio-political turnover.

Such a charismatic and powerful political figure could not but be appealing for Warhol, and Lenin became the subject of one of the last series of paintings and screenprints created by the artist, in the year of his death in 1987. Seventy years from the Russian Revolution, Warhol used a photograph by Philipp Schönborn to transformed the Russian leader into an icon of the 1980s. Unlike other icons 'manipulated' by the artist, the framework is here more minimal: Lenin's face and lapel, in a bright orange/yellow, emerge from a broad scarlett red 'sea' - the symbolic colour of the October Revolution and the Red Army, but also of the Red Terror, the campaign of repressions and executions carried out by the Bolsheviks during the Civil War. The leader's silhouette is undefined and the only other figurative detail appears on the bottom edge, where his forearm rests on a stack of books, to symbolize Lenin's committment as a theorist and intellectual.

The present impression has been stored and exhibited in the Andy Warhol Museum of Modern Art in Medzilaborce, Slovakia, since its foundation in 1991. Formerly The Warhol Family Museum of Modern Art, it was established by members of Warhol's family and the Slovak Ministry of Culture. Warhol's parents were Ruthenian from the village of Miková close to where the Museum was later established, and emigrated to United States before his birth.