Lenin Returns to Petrograd: Revolution Ignites

Vladimir Lenin stepped off a train at Petrograd's Finland Station on April 16, 1917, and within hours had turned the Russian Revolution in a direction nobody expected. He arrived from exile in Switzerland, having crossed wartime Germany in a sealed railway car provided by the German government, which calculated that Lenin's revolutionary agitation would knock Russia out of the war. Lenin had been abroad for a decade, disconnected from the events that had toppled the Tsar just five weeks earlier. The February Revolution had produced a power vacuum rather than a new order. A Provisional Government led by liberal politicians shared authority uneasily with the Petrograd Soviet, a council of workers' and soldiers' deputies. Most socialists, including Lenin's own Bolsheviks, supported cooperation with the Provisional Government and continuation of the war against Germany. Lenin rejected both positions with a ferocity that stunned even his allies. His April Theses, delivered the day after his arrival, demanded immediate withdrawal from the war, transfer of all power to the soviets, nationalization of land, and abolition of the police, army, and bureaucracy. Fellow Bolsheviks initially thought he had lost his mind. Pravda published the theses with an editorial disclaimer. The Menshevik leader Irakli Tsereteli called them "the ravings of a madman." But Lenin's positions appealed to exhausted soldiers who wanted peace, hungry workers who wanted bread, and peasants who wanted land. Within three months, Lenin had won over his own party. Within six months, he had seized power. The October Revolution in November 1917 overthrew the Provisional Government in a nearly bloodless coup, installing Bolshevik rule over the Russian Empire. Germany's gamble paid its short-term dividend when Russia signed the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in March 1918, withdrawing from the war. But the revolution Lenin ignited at Finland Station produced a state that would challenge German and Western interests for the next seven decades.