In April 1917 a train pulled into the Finland Station and shook the politics of a country at war. The man who stepped down from the carriage forced his party to accept, within three weeks, a programme it had judged wrong that very day.
From the sealed carriage to the Finland Station
Lenin spent the winter of 1917 in Switzerland. When news of the February Revolution reached Zurich, the Tsar had already left the throne in Petrograd and a Provisional Government had taken his place. But the front held, and the bread queues grew longer. For the exiles the real question was blunt: how do we get back to Russia?
Germany allowed that return, hoping to stir Russia from within. Some thirty exiles boarded the train that left Zurich at the end of March; Krupskaya and Inessa Armand shared the same carriage. The route ran through Sweden to Finland. No one at the border tried to stop Lenin; a British officer glanced at the papers and waved him through. The Provisional Government sent no word to the train and did not block the line.
The train drew into the Finland Station on the night of 3 April. Lenin spoke to the crowd from the roof of an armoured car. The next day he sat down with the party's leading men; he had a text in his hand.
The party hardly recognised its own leader
While Lenin was away, Kamenev and Stalin were putting out Pravda. The paper gave the Provisional Government conditional support and called the fighting at the front a 'war of defence'. The party had settled on the view that the bourgeois stage of the revolution was not yet over; socialists marching to power on their own looked like an adventure.
Lenin brought the exact opposite. He read the theses out himself. The Central Committee rejected the text on the first round; Kamenev objected in the open and Pravda carried the opposing line. Plenty said exile had cut him off from Russia.
The core of the theses
The theses were short, numbered and hard. They said the revolution would end if the war did not: the fighting at the front was the business of two imperialist camps, and the Russian soldier was not dying there for his own sake. No support for the Provisional Government; every concession only meant the guns would keep firing a while longer.
The second claim was stranger still: power should pass to the Soviets. Lenin was pointing not at a parliament but at the councils built by workers' and soldiers' deputies. The great estates should go to peasant committees, the banks should be gathered into one hand, and a people's militia should replace the police and the scattered army.
- An end to the war: the only step that would stop the killing at the front.
- No support for the Provisional Government.
- All power to the Soviets.
- The land to the peasant committees, workers' control in the factories.
The slogan at the factory gate
As long as the theses stayed in the newspaper they were a text. Through April the text shrank to four words: 'All power to the Soviets.' The sentence was heard at factory gates on the Vyborg side, in the Putilov shops, in barracks rooms. From April on, Bolshevik agitation spread fast through the barracks.
Factory committees, strike funds, the bread queues of soldiers' wives carried the words. Pravda's print run rose and pamphlets passed from hand to hand. For a worker the theses were not an argument about theory but a promise of bread and peace.
To the soldier the same words arrived differently. He did not want to hear 'war of defence'; in mid-April the note the government sent to the Allies read like a sentence of war without end.
The April crisis: the street's first test
Milyukov's note threw Petrograd into confusion in mid-April. It said Russia would go on fighting until victory. Armed demonstrations began and clashed with counter-demonstrations. Milyukov resigned; in May a coalition government was formed with socialists inside it.
The Bolsheviks fought that coalition hard. To Lenin, socialist ministers were sharing responsibility for a government that kept the war going. After the April crisis Kornilov resigned his command in Petrograd. For the first time the street had heard what the Bolsheviks were saying.
The price of the seal
The political bill for the journey came due at once. Coming home on Germany's permission opened the door to the heaviest charge that could be laid against Lenin: German agent. Menshevik papers and the right-wing press played that card from April on; 'the sealed carriage' travelled the streets like an insult.
Lenin did not shrug the accusation off; he had to defend the terms of the journey. The charge reached its peak in the July Days, when the government moved to arrest him and he went into hiding. The same fear ran through the language of the generals: 'Lenin's German agents'.
Trotsky was not yet on the scene
Trotsky spent April in Canada, in the Amherst camp. By the time he reached Petrograd in early May the stage already belonged to Lenin. His own ideas sat surprisingly close to the theses; but Trotsky did not join the Bolsheviks at once, and for a while he led the small Mezhrayontsy group.
That delay never raised the question of leadership, because Lenin had come back a month earlier. The two men had spent ten years writing harsh things about each other up to 1917; the merger came at the end of July, on Lenin's insistence.
The balance of April
At the party conference at the end of April Lenin's line took the majority; Kamenev's moderate course had lost. From then on the Bolsheviks moved into open opposition to the majority in the Soviet. The radical left gathered around Lenin's party; the partnership with the Left SRs was formed in government only after October.
The real test of the theses came in the autumn. In September the Bolsheviks won majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow soviets; 'All power to the Soviets' then stopped being a wish and became a timetable. The words spoken from the roof of an armoured car in April reached the door of the Winter Palace in October.