The long and the short of it is that the adaptation of pseudonyms was quite common within the subculture of Russian revolutionary circles. There was a real practical reason for doing so. A pseudonym was a way to evade police surveillance. The tsarist secret police was quite active in monitoring, spreading disinformation, and occasionally flipping suspected revolutionaries. A pseudonym gave the police little to go on if they intercepted correspondence between revolutionaries. These small circles often knew whose face was behind the pseudonym, but the police would have to start from square one when trying to piece together these networks and their families. Moreover, the very size of Russia also made it hard for the tsarist government to monitor the whole of the country. Revolutionaries exiled to Siberia or kicked out of the country could evade recapture partly by adapting a fake name. So it made a good deal of sense for revolutionaries to use a pseudonym within this context. Lenin was not the only pseudonym Ulyanov used in his early career; one count has him using around 150 fake names.

There was another tactical reason for using pseudonyms. Russian revolutionary circles were often very literary in nature. Revolutionary groups printed a bewildering variety of books, newspapers, broadsheets, and pamphlets both within Russia and abroad. Lenin became the public pseudonym of Ulyanov in his broadsides in the newspaper Iskra (Spark). Most of this printed material was illegal under Russian law, so it made little sense to use real names and give the police an advantage. But there was another reason at work. Revolutionary circles were often quite small in number and pseudonyms were a way to give an artificial strength of the movement by inflating their numbers. Lenin was only one of the names Ulyanov wrote under for Iskra, although Lenin was his favorite and the one that carried the most global recognition.