Lenin’s Train
April 1917, a Train passes across Europe; destination Petrograd. The train passes through Switzerland, Germany, Sweden, and Finland. Petrograd, the new name of St-Petersburg since the start of the Great War, had witnessed rioting in February 1917 which led to the abdication of the Czar Nicholas II in March and the end of the Tsarist Regime.
On the train there are 32 exiled Bolsheviks, amongst them Vladimir Ilitch Oulianov. He is 47 years old, going back to Russia after 17 years of exile in Switzerland to establish a “dictatorship of the Proletariat.” Vladimir is thinking about only one thing: A revolution that had obsessed him for years.
At the time, he is a leader of a small group of dissidents from the social democratic party whose influence was insignificant in Russia and most Russians didn’t even know of his existence.
Growing in a Russian Bourgeois family loyal to the Church and the state. Vladimir admired his older brother Alexandre.
Alxandre joined a group of revolutionary anarchists. He was arrested after a failed assassination attempt on the Czar Alexander III and was Hanged at 21 years of age with 4 of his group members. This incident turned the life of Vladimir upside down. The 17 years old was ravished, shattered, broken. This incident plunged the teenager into the tragic destiny that would change the face of history. Lenin developed an obsessive, absolute and pathological hate towards the establishment, against aristocracy, against the Czar. “They will pay for it” he tells his sister Anna.
Vladimir starts compulsively reading book after book. He reads the works of Marx and Engels and is particularly influenced by Nikolay Chernyshevsky’s “What Is to Be Done?” He spends a lot of time with Marxists where the ideas of the destruction of capitalism, class struggle and the rule of proletariat start taking root and shape in his thought.
In 1895, Vladimir is arrested for distributing revolutionary propaganda and is sentenced without trial to 3 years exile in Siberia. It’s in Siberia where he finishes writing “The development of capitalism in Russia” and he continues to be devoted to a violent revolution. He also marries Nadezhda Krupskaya, who he had met earlier in St-Petersburg. It is in Siberia that Vladimir adopts the nom de guerre “Lenin.”
After his sentence, in July 1900 Lenin leaves Russia to Western Europe with his wife. They travel to Paris, London, Prague, Munich, and end up in Switzerland. Lenin spends 17 years in Switzerland thinking about the inevitable revolution that will come through the force of history. On March 15, 1917, Mieczyslaw Bronski, a young Polish revolutionary announces the news to Lenin: “Haven’t you heard? There’s a revolution in Russia!” a Month later Lenin boards the Train in Zurich to a trip that will change the history of Russia, Europe, and the world.
