Often, people go by a name other than their birth name. This was Vladimir Lenin's. He was christened, shortly after his birth in 1870, as Vladimir Ilich Ulyanov. ‘Ilich’ is a patronymic, meaning ‘son of Ilya’.  At the onset of his revolutionary career in the early 1890s, the exigencies of the underground led our hero to distance himself from his given name. While not legally changed, as a wanted anti-Tsarist dissident who had been arrested and exiled to Siberia, the use of false names helped him escape the secret police, dodge surveillance, and write or publish illegal political pamphlets. (Picture from 1920)