On 2 April, the Bolsheviks got word from Lenin that he would be back in Petrograd the next day. The leader was coming. They hastened to prepare. So it was that the following evening, at the little Belo Ostrov border station where Finland and Russia met, a small, select group of Bolsheviks awaited the train: Kollontai, Kamenev, Shlyapnikov, Lenin’s sister Maria, a few others.
They were not the only ones who had heard that Lenin was returning. Some hundred eager workers were on the platform too, to greet the train that wheezed slowly in. As his comrades watched, while the engine idled for half an hour, those gathered mortified Lenin by calling him out of his carriage and parading him jubilantly on their shoulders. ‘Gently, comrades,’ he muttered. At last they let him go and he took his seat again with relief, joined now by his excited party escort.
They were in for a shock.
As best he could, Lenin had kept up with his comrades’ writings on the war and the Provisional Government. ‘We had hardly got into the car and sat down,’ said Raskolnikov, a Kronstadt Bolshevik naval officer, ‘when Vladimir Ilyich burst out at Kamenev: “What’s this you’re writing in Pravda? We saw several issues and really swore at you.”’ This was his greeting to an old comrade.
The revolutionaries rocked homeward through a darkening landscape. Was he at risk of arrest? Lenin asked uneasily. His welcome party smiled at that. He would soon understand why.
When the train pulled in to Petrograd at 11 p.m., the Finland Station echoed to a vast cheer of welcome. Lenin at last began to grasp his own standing in the revolutionary capital. His comrades had arranged a showcase of the party’s strength, convoking friendly garrisons, but the excitement of the crowd clamouring for him was quite real. The station was festooned with vivid red banners. As he stepped, dazed, onto the platform, someone handed Lenin an incongruous bouquet. Thousands had come to salute him: workers, soldiers, Kronstadt sailors.
A throng of well-wishers propelled Lenin into the splendid chamber still called the ‘Tsar’s Room’. There, officials from the Soviet waited for their own chance to greet him. The Soviet chairman, the Georgian Menshevik Chkheidze, a serious, honest activist, had lost his usual amiable veneer. When the Bolshevik leader entered, Chkheidze launched into a welcome speech that was neither welcoming nor a speech. Sukhanov, who was of course present, called it a ‘sermon’, and a ‘glum’ one.
‘Comrade Lenin, in the name of the Petrograd Soviet and of the whole revolution we welcome you to Russia,’ said Chkheidze. ‘But we think’, he continued anxiously, ‘the principal task of the revolutionary democracy is the defence of the revolution against attacks from without or within. We consider this end to require not disunity, but the closing of democratic ranks. We hope you will pursue these objectives with us.’
The flowers dangled half-forgotten from Lenin’s fingers. He ignored Chkheidze. He looked up at the ceiling. He looked everywhere but at the beseeching Menshevik.
When Lenin at last replied, it was not to the Soviet chair, nor to anyone from its delegation. He spoke instead to everyone else present, to the crowd – his ‘dear comrades, soldiers, sailors and workers’. The imperialist war, he roared, was the start of European civil war. The longed-for international revolution was imminent. Provocatively, he praised by name his German comrade Karl Liebknecht. Ever the internationalist, he concluded with a stirring call to build from this first step: ‘Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!’
His Soviet hosts were stunned. They could only watch numbly as the crowds demanded a further speech. Lenin hurried from the station, climbed onto the bonnet of a car and began to hold forth. He denounced ‘any part in shameful imperialist slaughter’; he excoriated ‘lies and frauds’ and the ‘capitalist pirates’.
So much for postol’ku-poskol’ku.
February and March were festive bursts of architectural expropriation. Revolutionary groups captured and occupied government buildings, along with various sumptuous others. The Provisional Government and the Soviet had little option but to tolerate such appropriations. On 27 February, as the city convulsed, the legendary ballerina Matilda Kshesinskaya and her son Vladimir had fled her modern mansion at 1–2 Kronverkskiy Prospect on the Neva’s north side, below the towering minarets of Petrograd’s main mosque: almost immediately, revolutionary soldiers had taken it over.
The house displayed a striking, strange asymmetry of interconnected structures, stairwells and halls. In mid-March the Bolsheviks had decided it would make an excellent headquarters, and had moved in without ado. On the night of 3 April, it was in its main meeting hall, amid precise art nouveau stylings, that Lenin made his views clear to the comrades who had gathered to welcome him home.
It had been the last day of the All-Russian Conference of Soviets. There, the Bolshevik caucus had unanimously approved their leadership’s policy of ‘vigilant control’ over the Provisional Government, and had broadly accepted Stalin and Kamenev’s opposition to ‘disorganising activities’ at the front. The next day, unity talks between the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks were due to start. Such was the mood music that Lenin interrupted.
‘I will never forget’, said Sukhanov, ‘that thunder-like speech, which startled and amazed not only me, a heretic … but all the true believers … It seemed as though all the elements had risen from their abodes, and the spirits of universal destruction … were hovering around Kshesinskaya’s reception room above the heads of the bewitched disciples.’
What Lenin demanded was continual revolution. He scorned talk of ‘watchfulness’. He denounced the Soviet’s ‘revolutionary defencism’ as an instrument of the bourgeoisie. He raged at the lack of Bolshevik ‘discipline’.
His comrades listened in stricken silence.
The next day at the Tauride Palace, Lenin intervened again, twice. First at a session of Bolshevik delegates from the Soviet Congress; then, with breathtaking audacity, at a Bolshevik–Menshevik meeting scheduled to discuss unity. Aware of his isolation, he made it clear that he was expounding personal opinion rather than party policy, as he presented his seminal document of the revolution: the April Theses.