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It's April 3rd, 1917, Easter Monday. A steam engine chugs through the icy expanse of Finland. On board, among the passengers in third class, one man in particular cannot wait to reach his destination. It will mark the end of a perilous journey. He is a native Russian, but has lived abroad almost continually for the last seventeen years. The train is destined for Petrograd, or St. Petersburg as it was known when he last lived there.
and after the best part of two decades in political exile, Vladimir Lenin is coming home to lead a revolution. As the train crosses the border, he jumps to his feet, pumping his fist in the air and shouting: "We are on home territory now! We will show them we are the worthy masters of the future!" As Petrograd nears, the revolutionaries decorate the carriages with red flags and bunting. When they pull into the station just after 11 o'clock,
They are greeted by a clamoring crowd. The local Bolsheviks have arranged for a party of some 2,000 people to welcome Lenin. Word has been put about that anyone who heads to the station will get free beers. Lenin emerges from his carriage clad in a shabby old coat. He has been up for 48 hours. He is gasping for a cup of tea. But this is not the moment to slip quietly into the night as an armored car that the Bolsheviks have requisitioned.
Donning the peaked cap, which will soon become his trademark, Lenin climbs on top of the vehicle, looking out across the sea of well-wishers. "Prepare for the revolution to spread from Russia around the world," he urges them. "Any day now, the whole of European capitalism will crash." Lenin finally gets away at midnight, driven to the grand mansion that functions as Bolshevik headquarters. But the night's work is still not done.
He inhales some tea and sandwiches and then addresses an audience of around 60 local party bigwigs. It's no great work of oratory, he's far too tired for all that, but his audience applauds wildly, breaking into revolutionary song. It feels like a hero's return. But Lenin has faced enough setbacks over the years to know that even now there is much work to be done. From Neuser, this is part three of the Lenin story.
And this is Real Dictators. Just a few weeks ago, Lenin had been languishing in Zurich, Switzerland, telling an audience of hopeful socialists that the revolution was still years away. So what is it that has changed the picture so dramatically? The short answer is that a spontaneous popular revolt has just broken out in Russia. Known as the February Revolution, this has not been a particularly organized or centralized uprising.
It's simply an explosion of popular anger. Dr. James Ryan. It's sparked by women demonstrating in the streets of St. Petersburg for bread. The crucial moment in the February Revolution then becomes when the soldiers, the garrison soldiers in the capital, decide to support those on the streets rather than obey their command, rather than obey authority. Basically, the tsarist authorities have lost control.
The Russia of Tsar Nicholas II has long had an end-of-the-Roman-Empire feel about it. His reign has coincided with an artistic and intellectual golden age. The paintings of Kandinsky and Chagall have wowed Europe. Diaghilev's Ballet Russe has toured the continent, playing to packed houses. Rachmaninoff, Stravinsky and Prokofiev have redefined the musical topography.
In the sciences, Dmitri Mendeleev created the periodic table and Ivan Pavlov has earned a Nobel Prize training his famous dogs. But away from this cultural and academic flowering, social and political discontent has put down deep roots. The First World War has only increased division within society. The rich have become more decadent than ever. They quaff champagne still, while the poor have been required to give up their aqua vita, vodka,
The Tsar did not trust the masses to carry out their role as cannon fodder if they had access to the demon drink. When prohibition was enforced at the beginning of the war, the people simply turned to homemade hooch instead. Not only has the Tsar failed to inspire sobriety, he's blown a hole in his government budgets. Vodka taxes used to bring in a lot of revenue. The war has caused inflation to spike. The price of bread increases by 500% between 1914 and 1917.
and the cost of medicine rockets too. One can expect to queue for 40 hours a week to access a family's basic provisions. A full working week stood waiting in line at the shops. Most significantly, the armed forces have lost a staggering 5 million men by the start of 1917, killed, wounded or missing in action. Against his minister's best advice, the Tsar took personal control of the military back in 1915,
So now, the buck stops with him alone. The Russian Empire encounters enormous difficulties because it's waging a major massive total war and it is the first of four European empires that collapses under the weight of a waging struggle during wartime. The other three being the German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires. Morale among Russian troops is desperately low.
and there are now a quarter of a million disgruntled soldiers, some awaiting deployment, others injured or on leave, rattling around Petrograd. Professor Catherine Merridayll,
The February Revolution happened because the Russians were losing the war. And instead of extending aid in any way to the population to keep the factories working and to keep the population fed, the Tsarist elite was manifestly both corrupt and incompetent. And revolution had been building in Russia since 1905, actually. One reason was that the Tsar had taken personal command of the war effort and was very bad at it.
Another reason was the known influence at court of the monk Rasputin, which is a great story. The Tsarina, the Tsar's wife, who is in charge while the Tsar is away at the front, was known to be under the influence of a monk who was corrupt, dissolute, drunk, difficult, and of course bypassing the official constitutional government, which was supposedly taking decisions.
But by that stage, the political class, or at least the more liberal part of it, was beginning to think that Russia would win the war more effectively and quickly if it had a different kind of government. For most of February 1917, Petrograd is frozen over. Transport grinds to a halt. There is not nearly enough food getting into the city, or into Moscow either. On the 23rd, the temperature rises above freezing for the first time in weeks.
People take the opportunity to gather for a wave of strikes and protests. At this moment, Tsar Nicholas is out of the city, playing at being a general on the Eastern Front. The president of the Duma, his parliament, telegraphs to warn him of the dangerous situation building in Petrograd. But Nicholas has too many voices in his ear. It's just a few hooligans causing trouble. They'll doubtless go home when the weather turns bad again.
When the last of the telegrams arrives, Nicholas barely glances at it. What started as a bread riot quickly turns into a mutiny by regiments who have been loyal to the Romanovs for centuries. Troops ordered to disperse the crowds refuse to fire on their fellow citizens. Things escalate rapidly, and to an extraordinary degree. Soon, junior soldiers are murdering their senior officers, police stations are overrun, and the men inside slaughtered.
The city's police chief is stoned to death by a mob. Jails are liberated. Armed gangs roam the streets, setting them ablaze. Nearly 1,500 people die in Petrograd during the February violence. In Moscow, the death toll is almost twice as large. If this isn't anarchy, then it's very close to it. In response, the Tsar attempts to call time on his parliament. But the Duma has its own solution. They too have had enough of royal whims.
They move to topple the Tsar by establishing a provisional government in his place. An assortment of liberals, center-right democrats and moderate socialists, this new administration demands the Tsar abdicate in favor of his brother Michael. Nicholas' generals tell him he has no choice. On March 1st, he boards a train from the Eastern Front to the northwestern city of Pskov.
Meeting Duma representatives on arrival, he agrees a draft statement. It reads: "We hand over the succession to our beloved brother, the Grand Duke Michael Alexandrovich, and bless him on his succession." Nicholas bows his head, dips his pen in ink, and signs himself as Tsar for the final time. But it's not yet a done deal. Michael refuses the new role offered him.
He has no interest in replacing his brother as a lightning rod for the people's anger. Michael states that the Russian people must be allowed a say on whether or not they want a monarchy at all. He will not take the crown until they have spoken. Suddenly, with the succession in limbo, Russia finds itself without a head of state for the first time in centuries. With a stroke of Nicholas' pen in a nondescript railway outhouse,
300 years of Romanov rule have drawn to a close. The day after the Tsar's abdication, far away in Zurich, Vladimir Lenin is finishing lunch with his wife, Nadia. He prepares to head to the library for an afternoon's work. He's putting on his coat when they hear footsteps coming up the stairs. There's a rap at the door. It's Bronski, one of the young Bolsheviks here in Switzerland. "'Have you not heard the news?' he asks breathlessly. "'There's been a revolution in Russia!'
Once again, as in 1905, Lenin has been caught napping. At just the wrong moment, he finds himself miles away from where he needs to be. Author and biographer of Lenin, Victor Sebastian. He'd spent his entire career describing how the revolution was going to come soon, soon, soon. But then when it came, it was a complete surprise to him. Back in Russia, the new provisional government takes office.
But the provisional government isn't really a provisional government, it's provisional governments. There are several in the course of 1917 because there are various crises and the composition of the so-called provisional government changes. It becomes more left wing because leading members of revolutionary parties, more moderate than the Bolsheviks, but still pretty radical like Mensheviks, joined the provisional government relatively early.
The leader of the new government is Prince Georgi Liov, an aristocrat in his mid-fifties. Liov spends his first few weeks ushering in a package of reforms. He grants universal adult suffrage, including for women. He relaxes censorship laws and eases restrictions on freedom of speech. Capital punishment is abolished. These are bold steps towards a more democratic system, but Liov cannot act alone.
He must share power with his new partners, and that brings him problems. The February uprising came from the streets. The political entity regarded as most representative of the common man and woman is a body called the Soviet of soldiers, workers, and peasants' deputies. On this basis, the Provisional Government concedes that new legislation must also be approved by the Soviet.
In practice then, there are two governments working in tandem: one of the Duma, another of the working people. Hardly an ideal state of affairs when there are massive decisions to be made. None more so than what to do about Russia's participation in World War I.
the working class of Petrograd, the working people organised into this Soviet, which is a council. It's Soviet is from the Russian word, Sovietovats to council. But there was still also the old government, the old parliament, as it were, the old Duma. Because without people in suits with watch chains, how are we going to get the generals to do what we want them to do? We actually need a government that looks like a government. Heck, we've got to deal with the British.
So they put a provisional government in power, but real power, the actual power of the revolution resided with the working people in the Soviet. People were marching in and out all the time, soldiers, people with bandages, nurses, workers, factory workers, politicians. The Soviet was a great big, loud, messy, chaotic talking shop. People slept in it. People fought in it. It was the center of what was really happening.
But the Provisional Government and the Soviet came to a compromise, which was to protect Russia's gains so far in the war up to this point, we must go on fighting. We must honour our treaties. We must not let down our army. Because if we pull out of the war, what have they died for? So from February 1917 onwards, Russia continues to fight the war. On March 6th, in Zurich, Vladimir Lenin gathers a crowd of fellow Bolshevik emigres.
Pacing about with excitement, he tells them it's imperative they find their way back to Russia, whatever the cost. Even if they must go through hell, that's hardly an exaggeration. Any route home requires navigating swathes of war-torn territory. The British would not let him cross the Channel and go by the obvious route, which was to go up to Newcastle and sail to Sweden and then go back to Russia that way.
His first idea was to disguise himself as a Swede and go across the Swiss border and across Denmark and into Sweden disguised as a Swede. And because he didn't speak Swedish, he said he'd go as a deaf and dumb Swede and he'd travel that way until Nadezhda Krupskaya, his wife, said, well, yeah, Lenin, but in your sleep you'll start talking about revolution and everybody will know you're not a deaf and dumb Swede. So that was no good. Other ideas, he was invited to try and take a plane, but he was actually terrified of flying.
And just the idea of flying over the front line at that time in those primitive planes just didn't work. So his only way out, which didn't involve British cooperation, and the British were being very fierce about it, was to go via Germany. To travel with the help of Russia's deadliest adversary, their avowed enemy in the war? It's a bold and controversial decision. Dr. Helen Rapoport.
He was absolutely hysterical to get back to Russia. The Germans equally were waiting for their moment. They knew the war was going badly for Russia. They knew the Bolsheviks had already promised that they would take Russia out of the war. The obvious thing they're going to do is pump money into the Bolshevik propaganda campaign, which they did. You know, thousands of German marks were sent to help them.
And the next best thing, of course, is to help get their leader Lenin back into Russia to lead the campaign. So it was a very pragmatic and straightforward decision, I think, on both sides. There are those, especially in Russia, who are not favorably disposed to Lenin and the Bolsheviks, who see it as a sort of, as a form of treachery, that these were revolutionaries who were acting at the behest of the enemy Germans to overthrow the Russian government.
That narrative has always persisted. The bottom line is Lenin would have taken money from anyone if it advanced the revolution. The Germans wanted the Bolsheviks to engineer a defeatist peace.
where Russia would capitulate and they could then divert all their troops stuck on the Eastern Front to the Western Front. But, of course, because the war was raging across Europe, Lenin couldn't get back directly from Switzerland straight through the middle. So the Germans had to facilitate in getting up from Switzerland through Germany up to the Baltic coast, across to Sweden, and then quite a long train ride up and down through Finland, which they did.
The Germans will bring a special train carriage to the Swiss border. On board, Lenin and his retinue will enjoy extraterritorial rights. In effect, it will be a travelling embassy, its passengers protected from the normal legal red tape. At 11am on March 27th, the Bolsheviks head for Zurich's main station, the Hauptbahnhof,
An angry crowd of activists awaits them, ready to make their feelings known. "Pigs!" they yell. "Traitors!" "German spies!" Lenin is unfazed. Within six months, he tells his companions, he will either be in power or swinging from the gallows. From Zurich, they travel to Gottmerdingen in Germany. It's here they pick up their so-called sealed train. Apart from the Russian exiles, this transport is filled with German soldiers.
A no-mixing rule is studiously observed, with a chalk line on the carriage floor dividing them. The journey home takes a week in total. In the cramped conditions, Lenin's temper strains. A lot of them wanted to smoke. The trouble with the smoking was Lenin really didn't like smoking. And so he said that all smokers should use the one lavatory, which was at the front of the carriage, if they wanted to smoke.
The trouble was they therefore did. And so people who wanted to use that as the lavatory couldn't get into it. And so there was a lot of arguing going on in the corridor between the smokers and the people who needed the loo. And that arguing was right outside Lenin's carriage because he was in the front carriage. So he had to put a stop to that. And with classic Leninist aplomb, he issued tickets. So you had a first class ticket if you actually needed to go to the loo and you had a second class ticket if you wanted to smoke.
A missed connection with the ferry to Norway leads to an extra night in the carriage, followed by a rough sea crossing. Then it's another train to Malmö and a sleeper to Stockholm. Lenin finds time to go shopping in the Swedish capital, buying himself a smart new suit and a peaked cap, proletariat chic. Then it's another overnight train to Finland, where Lenin shares a sleeping compartment with both Nadia and Inessa, his former lover having joined up with the band of rebels.
Old habits die hard. They get to Haparanda in Sweden, which is on the border with Finland. And it's three or four days later, but it's winter up there. It's freezing cold. The river is frozen. They've got to cross the river at night. And the border post between Sweden and Finland was the international border between Sweden and the Russian Empire at that stage.
And the British put a man in it to try and stop Lenin. They knew Lenin was coming. And they put a man in that border post. Harold Gruner was his name. And his job was to try and delay Lenin for as long as possible to get the Russian provisional government to say the man had to be stopped. The British had no right to stop a Russian national from returning to Russia at the border. But if the Russian government would forbid it, then they could have apprehended him. The trouble was it was Orthodox Easter.
And the whole lot of the provisional government that Gruner wanted to contact were away from their offices. They were either praying or they were out at the family dacha or wherever they were. They weren't in their offices. So poor Gruner, he strip-searched Lenin. He went through all Lenin's books. He tried every conceivable trick to hold the man up. But in the end, having not got hold of anyone, he had to let him go. Safely over the border, it's a clear run to Petrograd's Finland station and its adoring crowds.
As Winston Churchill will note a few years later, "The Germans turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed train, like a plague bacillus, from Switzerland to Russia." Word of Lenin's return quickly gets around. He doubles down on his radical agenda. He publishes what becomes known as the April Theses, outlining why the Provisional Government is surely doomed. "It's a slave to compromise," he writes.
There should be no backroom deal-making. Power must go straight to the Soviets. The civil service, army and police, relics of the Tsarist age must be abolished and the banking sector nationalized. And without delay, the war must end. Despite the unpopularity of the war, this is still a tough sell, especially since Lenin has just called on the Germans to get him home. Opponents label him a traitor. Some even demand he be run through with a bayonet.
But as the weeks pass, Lenin's message increasingly cuts through, while he himself remains largely immune to scrutiny.
No one in Russia knew who Lenin was, except the close members of the party. I've got accounts from my eyewitnesses who lived in Petersburg while it was Petrograd, for many years saying, oh, I've been hearing talk about this guy called Lenin, who's just arrived and is going to be the new leader. Who is he? Do you know who he is? No one knew who Lenin was. He was this completely grey man in a bowler hat who
who arrived, okay, the close entourage you knew were coming were all there waving flags and shouting long live the revolution. But as such, it was a very low-key return. Although no great orator like Trotsky, Lenin does begin making more regular public appearances.
First, when he came back and demanded the socialist revolution, it seemed he seemed mad. His extremism seemed actually out of place considering the fairly significant revolution that they'd already had, the kind of freedoms that the February Revolution had brought. Lenin's extremism that you needed immediately to go to a Marxist socialist revolution straightaway seemed outlandish, totally odd, even amongst his own people.
But he comes to understand his audience. He's not writing treatises on Marxist theory anymore. He's talking to the people on the street. His increasingly simplistic and tub-thumping speeches win him new fans, bald and grizzled in his crumpled suits. He might look like a provincial college professor, but the people like him. His straightforward language hits home.
He just spoke about peace, land, bread, three very, very simple, direct words everyone could understand. And he just did everything he could to destroy the provisional government. That was a campaign of skill, real skill, political skill, political tactics. Luck, of course, but you ride your luck. And that campaign was extremely skillful. On one hand, he remains an idealist.
On the other, he is totally Machiavellian. He will promise virtually anything if it serves his ends. He tells the peasants that in the new Russia they will have land all of their own. Really, he intends to seize it for the state-run collective farms. The factories shall be run by the workers, he says, when in truth they will come under the control of the party. All the while the provisional government lurches from crisis to crisis.
In eight and a half months, it ushers in four coalitions and numerous cabinet reshuffles. The lack of solid leadership heralds the further collapse of law and order. Peasants seize country estates and turn on their landlords. In the cities, violent crime is endemic now. Always media savvy, Lenin uses his newspaper Pravda to spread the word. Before long, it's selling 85,000 copies a day in Petrograd alone.
By July 1917, Prime Minister Lyov is at enough. He resigns in favour of his Minister of War, Alexander Kerensky. Kerensky, if you remember, is the son of Lenin's kindly old headmaster from Simbirsk, but there will be no love lost between them. Kerensky Jr. seeks talks with Lenin, who refuses. When they last met, Kerensky had not pulled his punches. "You proposed to lead us the way of France in 1792," he had said.
It ended in the fall of the Republic and the rise of a dictator. Instead of reconstruction, you clamour for more destruction. History may prove Kerensky correct, but that is not how the common folk feel right now. The leader may have dipped in and out of the fight, but the people like what the Bolsheviks are offering.
The Bolsheviks had a lot of people on the factory floor and because Lenin was away, they had to make things up as they went along. Their leaders were not here to talk to them. So when workers said, "Does your party support the eight-hour day?" They could instantly say yes. And does it support hot water and hot food for workers in the factory? They could instantly say yes. And they were also very good at listening. They were very sensitive to workers' concerns.
And particularly on things like workers' legal rights, what to do in the event of a strike, sick pay, strike pay, all those sorts of things. They were particularly good at getting workers to understand where they stood. And that made the Bolsheviks appear like the party of the shop floor in a way that the Mensheviks hadn't quite managed to do. Lenin's position is consolidated when the Provisional Government adopts a calamitous new strategy in the war. The Russian Empire has taken unsustainable losses.
But the administration will not sign an armistice for fear of being blamed for a national humiliation. Instead, they plan for a big summer push against the Germans and Austrians in Ukraine. A major artillery offensive begins on June 16th. For a couple of days, things seem to be going to plan. But then comes the inevitable counterattack, which scatters the Russian forces. Some 200,000 men are lost.
With morale shattered, thousands are arrested for desertion. Russia cedes a million square miles of territory in just a few weeks. This all plays neatly into Lenin's hands. Now, in his opposition to the war, he seems like a sage. The loss of the war, the unpopularity of the war, the economic dislocation of the war explains the revolution in the most simple terms.
It needn't have been Lenin's revolution, but there would have been something. It could have been a revolution from the right just as easily. It was society that had completely run out of steam. Lenin's efforts are taking their usual toll on his mental and physical health. He leaves Petrograd to recuperate, holing up in a small fishing village on the Karelian Isthmus. It is in early July, while he's away, that further protests in Petrograd snowball into full-scale riots.
By July 3rd, soldiers sympathetic to the Bolshevik cause have seized control of much of the city. If they wanted to, they could probably take the Duma and the Winter Palace. Lenin, you may be surprised to hear, is furious. He is adamant that this is the wrong moment to attack. Even if they grabbed power now, he says, they would not hang on to it. He refuses to give the order to proceed. For a man who talks about revolution more than anyone,
Lenin always seems to dawdle at the crucial moment. On this occasion, however, he has a point. Government forces are soon hitting back at the rioters. As street battles rage, 300 soldiers and civilians are killed. Lenin ends his holiday early to rush back to Bolshevik HQ. He bursts in on a meeting of the Central Committee. He bellows that they should all be thrashed. He then goes outside to address the gathering crowd.
He calls for an end to the riots and the return to peace. He is determined to play his hand at exactly the right time. So he was not somebody who believed you could have a revolution in Russia until Russia was ready for one. He did not want to push a revolution on a country that wasn't socially and politically ripe for revolution. If you make a revolution at the wrong moment, it's going to be worse than useless. So tumultuous are the so-called July Days that Lenin opts for a profound shift in approach.
The curtain must come down on the era of mass protest, he proclaims. Street agitation has been extremely effective in destabilizing the provisional government, but now it risks spinning events beyond the Bolsheviks' control. They risk being perceived as anarchists. Lenin's emphasis will now be on rigorous organization.
The Bolsheviks must develop cells of highly disciplined armed loyalists, the so-called Red Guards. These professional revolutionaries will be the ones to take power when the time comes. Leon Trotsky is fully on board with this new direction. He officially joins Lenin's faction of the party. This signals a rapprochement between the two communist figureheads after years of simmering rivalry.
Even though Trotsky wrote quite bitter criticisms of Lenin, in 1917, Lenin has no hesitation really accepting Trotsky into the party, into the Bolshevik party. Trotsky joined the Bolshevik party only in 1917, but Trotsky was an immensely talented theoretician and revolutionary organizer. And so Lenin thought, well, great, that's fine. And Lenin and Trotsky had a very good working relationship.
Prime Minister Kerensky meanwhile puts out a warrant for Lenin's arrest on a charge of high treason. At this crucial moment, Lenin is forced back underground once more. He moves from safe house to safe house, sometimes more than once a day. But wherever he goes in Petrograd, the heat is too high. So once again for the umpteenth time, he prepares to depart for Finland. Joseph Stalin is among those to help give Lenin a makeover.
They shave off his facial hair and put away his customary suits, dressing him as a Finnish peasant instead. Accompanied by his old comrade, Grigori Zinoviev, Lenin heads to one of the capital's suburban stations. Here the two men hide for hours under a stationary goods wagon. At one o'clock in the morning, their train arrives. As it passes through the station, they leap unseen onto the final freight carriage.
In Finland, Lenin and Zinoviev head for a hut nestled in a forest. The nights are cool, the sky an expanse of stars. In the mornings they swim, in the evenings their wooden dwelling fills with the scent of venison cooking on the open fire. It's the kind of back-to-nature existence that Lenin adores, even if the midges are a trial. At night the pair sleep crammed together in a hayloft, so close that Zinoviev can hear Lenin's heartbeat.
Messengers from Petrograd row across the lake each day with the latest news. Lenin is still writing prodigiously, currently working on a new book, "The State and Revolution." He envisages that when the workers take control, it will signal the death of the government as traditionally conceived. "Where there's the state, there's no freedom," he writes, "and where there's freedom, there will be no state."
And by the summer of 1917, Lenin is increasingly saying, just give all power to the Soviets. That's what the people want and that's what will actually solve the problems we face because the provisional government is basically a bunch of imperialists. They're going to continue the war and they're not going to solve these problems and we need to take control of the revolution. One day out in the woods, Zinoviev has a close call when he's almost spotted by a local forester.
So Lenin decides they must depart for the Finnish capital, Helsinki, with just a few cucumbers for sustenance. They make the first leg of their treacherous journey on foot. They brave smoke inhalation as they traverse a burning peat bog. They wade across fast-flowing rivers. They skirt around the military checkpoints dotted throughout the countryside. Dressed as stokers, they jump on board another steam locomotive, travelling on the footplate to avoid ID checks from Helsinki.
Lenin writes to his comrades in Petrograd, telling them to prepare for the second major revolution of the year. This time, he has a very specific timetable in mind.
The Second Congress of Soviets was due to meet in Petrograd in October 1917. It would have been a multi-party gathering. That is to say, there would have been a lot of Bolsheviks, but there would also have been a lot of Mensheviks and a lot of social revolutionaries, socialist revolutionaries, I should say, and probably anarchists. You know, the whole revolutionary gamut would have been represented.
And there would have been a lot of talk. But at the end of it, undoubtedly, the Congress of Soviets was going to say, we are going to replace the provisional government. We are going to be the government. And it was his decision to seize power in advance of the Congress of Soviets meeting. And the reason for that was if the Bolsheviks took power, they could dictate the terms. If the Congress of Soviets took power, the Bolsheviks would only be part of it.
Lenin's comrades in the capital refuse to sanction his plan to return to Petrograd. They fear that his presence in the city as a wanted man puts the revolution at risk. But Lenin has the bit between his teeth. He visits a theatrical costumier in Helsinki and buys a grey hairpiece. It puts 20 years on him instantly. He then sources a black hat and a jacket with a dog collar.
Voila! He's transformed from communist dissident to elderly Lutheran pastor. He returns to Russia on October 7th, holing up in a friend's apartment. Hardly anyone knows he's back, but he wastes no time in reasserting his control over the Bolsheviks. Three days later, still disguised as a priest, Lenin skulks to a riverside flat that serves as a Bolshevik safe house.
Present here are 12 of the 21 members of the party's central committee, all sat around a table. Lenin bursts in unannounced. He launches into an hour-long tirade, banging his fist on the table repeatedly. "The moment is now!" he tells them, but they are far from convinced. The meeting goes on for seven hours, fueled by sausages and tea. At midnight, the electricity goes off, so they light oil lamps and candles.
Finally, at dawn, they vote. Lenin wins by ten ballots to two. For a start, he had to persuade his own people, which was extremely difficult. They were scared. They thought it couldn't possibly work. And they were very reluctant to go for takeover of power. He was losing them. He threatened to resign. He used every trick in the book.
We like to think that everything in history is drama and barricades and storming of this and battles. But actually the most significant part of the Russian Revolution was this all-night meeting, done with the lights mostly off and the candlelight. And he dragged them along with him and often history is made just in boring committee rooms. Lenin reaches across the table and picks up a pencil and a children's exercise book, the only paper to hand.
He scrawls a note to record that the committee is agreed, an armed uprising is inevitable, and the time is perfectly ripe. The countdown to insurrection is curiously public. One of the two committee members to oppose Lenin's motion was his old pal Zinoviev. He is happy to discuss the issue at the press. The Bolsheviks' impending revolution becomes the worst-kept secret in Petrograd, a subject of running commentary in the newspapers.
Prime Minister Kerensky appears to welcome the challenge, daring them to do it. He's adamant they should simply wait for the Bolsheviks to make their move and then swat them away. It will prove a monumental miscalculation. Even in the few days before that, if Kerensky and the provisional government had seen that the real danger was Lenin, if they'd arrested and kept Lenin, there may not have been a Bolshevik revolution. On Tuesday, October the 24th,
The day before the Congress of Soviets is due to meet, Lenin sits in yet another Bolshevik safehouse. This one, a stuffy second-floor apartment in Petrograd's Vyborg district. Lenin is no soldier, so this is the safest place for him. Across the city, Trotsky, freshly installed as the head of the Military Revolutionary Committee, is directing events from the grand palladium building of the Smolny Institute.
Even on the day it was supposed to happen, Lenin was worried they wouldn't go along with him and they wouldn't actually do it. They'd organise small groups of red guards to take over the police stations, take over the railway station, all the routine things you had to do in a coup attempt. But he was really worried they weren't going to do it. At 9pm, word reaches Lenin that the government plans to raise all the bridges across the river.
If they do that, they stand a good chance of cutting off the Red Guards and stifling any power grab. Lenin will be stuck in Vyborg, isolated and useless. Yet again, he puts on a disguise, although this will be one of the last he will ever require. He dons that peaked cap with that same grey wig underneath. He then ties a handkerchief around his face. If anyone wants to know why he's wearing it, he will claim acute toothache.
With his bodyguard, Aino Rakia, alongside, he slips out of the apartment block. They take a train in the direction of Smolny. Disembarking, they encounter a group of government soldiers. To avoid suspicion, they totter and sway their way past them, passing themselves off as a couple of old drunks. Soon the Institute rises up before them, a hive of activity. The lights are on throughout its many rooms and corridors.
Outside, clusters of red guards stand around bonfires, inspecting their guns and bayonets and chatting nervously. Inside, the air is thick with tobacco smoke, the floor strewn with litter. As Lenin prowls its corridors, still incognito, the odor of urine and boiled cabbage hits him. He is ushered into room 10. This is the control room. Finally, he can pull the levers. All is calm just now.
There's a pile of bedding in the corner. Someone suggests he try and get some rest. Instead, Lenin scours the campaign maps and waits nervously for news. At 2:00 AM, Trotsky checks his watch. It has begun, he says. Lenin, the committed atheist, appears to make the sign of the cross. Platoons of Red Guards swing into action. The takeover is not the wild affair you might expect. Most of the city sleeps blissfully unaware.
There is the occasional rally of gunfire, but hardly any fighting of note. The government troops simply aren't up for it. With just 10,000 or so men in a city of two million, the Bolsheviks seize control of one strategic target after another. By morning, all of the railway stations are under their command. By the time the coup is over, there will be just six dead and no more than twenty injured. All of these unfortunates caught in crossfire.
Conversation in Room 10 turns to what they will call their new government. After some to-ing and fro-ing, they decide on the not-so-snappy Soviet of People's Commissars. Munificent as ever, Lenin offers the premiership to Trotsky. He is, after all, the public face of Bolshevism. But Trotsky declines, just as Lenin knew he would. As a Jew, Trotsky is painfully aware of the deep vein of anti-Semitism that runs through Russian society.
It must be Lenin, he says. Only Lenin. But as dawn breaks on the 25th, the Winter Palace remains stubbornly in the hands of the Provisional Government. At 9:00 AM, Lenin demands their surrender. He is met with silence. Kerensky has already fled, hurried away in a car provided by the US Embassy. The longer the impasse continues, the more Lenin's frustration grows.
The Congress of Soviets will be meeting in just a few hours. He wants the job done by then, by 3pm. He can delay making an address no longer. To the citizens of Russia, he declares. The provisional government has been deposed, but this is a fib, as he well knows. It's not yet a fait accompli. And so the final act of the drama begins. At 6.30pm, two battlecruisers, the Aurora and the Amur,
now under Bolshevik control, are sailed up the river from the local naval base. They are then positioned opposite the Winter Palace. Lenin delivers his ultimatum: the Provisional Government must step down in the next 40 minutes or he will open fire. But the ministers refuse. Instead, they sit down to a supper of fish, borscht and artichokes. Finally, at 9:30 pm, the Aurora opens fire.
A detachment of Red Guards floods into the palace. They begin searching its maze of rooms. When they eventually discover the ministers, they place them under arrest and march them off to the fortress. With the provisional government deposed, some of the Red Guards take the opportunity to start looting, but then the order comes from above: nothing is to be taken. The Tsar's treasures belong to the state now. Just like that, there is a new boss in town.
Most people in Petrograd wouldn't have even known it happened. The restaurants were all open, the theatres were open, the trams were running. The so-called storming of the Winter Palace was a few score people. The Bolsheviks effectively picked power up because they could. It didn't require an enormous amount of effort to take power in late 1970. As revolutions go, this was pretty straightforward.
Back at the Smolny Institute, the Congress of Soviets reconvenes in the ballroom at 10:30 pm. Tensions are running high. Many are wary of Lenin's power grab. They've worked towards revolution for years. They resent being outmaneuvered at the last by a Bolshevik cabal. This is not how they imagined the workers' paradise beginning.
Most of the other moderate parties, not all of them, but most of them basically said, "Okay, well, we're walking out." And that's what happened. A situation was almost forced or engineered where the really hardline Bolsheviks, led by Lenin and Trotsky, drove through a situation where effectively they got the sort of Soviet revolution that they wanted, which is not the same as the Soviet revolution per se. It could have been different. It could have looked very different indeed.
Trotsky rails against those who were already withdrawing their support. "You are miserable bankrupts," he tells them. "This has been an uprising, not a conspiracy. Go where you ought to, into the dustbin of history." A couple of hours later, with a smile playing at his mouth, Lenin steps up to address those still gathered. He sets out the immediate agenda: a quick end to the war and the state seizure of private land. At long last, Lenin has achieved his life's dream.
he has overthrown Russia's old order. And it was his strength of will, strength of character, for good or ill, Trotsky said, and Trotsky was no mean egomaniac himself, that if it hadn't been for Lenin in St. Petersburg in October 1917, there would not have been a Bolshevik revolution. Now the real work begins, the work of government. And while the atmosphere may be jubilant in Petrograd,
The coming years will be some of Russia's bloodiest yet. Next time, in the final part of the Lenin story, with power finally in Bolshevik hands, state terror arrives in the new Soviet Union. The peasant classes in particular will bear the brunt of Lenin's assault on the Anshan regime. As the leader's own health ails, he considers the issue of succession. But which of Lenin's lieutenants, jostling for position, will take up the baton?
That's next time.