Lenin arrived a stranger to Russia. Apart from a six-month stay in 1905–6, he had spent the previous seventeen years in exile abroad. Most of the workers who turned out to meet him at the Finland Station could never have seen him before.fn6 ‘I know very little of Russia,’ Lenin once told Gorky. ‘Simbirsk, Kazan, Petersburg, exile — that is all I know.’ During 1917 he would often claim that the mass of the ordinary people were even further to the Left than the Bolsheviks. Yet he had no experience of them, and knew only what his party agents told him (which was often what he wanted to hear). Between 5 July and the October seizure of power Lenin did not make a single public appearance. He barely set foot in the provinces. The man who was set to become the dictator of Russia had almost no direct knowledge of the way its people lived. Apart from two years as a lawyer, he had never even had a job. He was a ‘professional revolutionary’, living apart from society and supporting himself from the party’s funds and from the income of his mother’s estate (which he continued to draw until her death in 1916). According to Gorky, it was this ignorance of everyday work, and the human suffering which it entailed, which had bred in Lenin a ‘pitiless contempt, worthy of a nobleman, for the lives of the ordinary people … Life in all its complexity is unknown to Lenin. He does not know the ordinary people. He has never lived among them.’51
‘Well there it is,’ Lenin wrote to Kollontai on 2 March. ‘This first stage of the revolution (born of the war) will be neither the last, nor confined to Russia.’ Lenin was already thinking of a second revolution — a revolution of his own. In his five ‘Letters from Afar’, written between 7 and 26 March, he mapped out his party’s programme for the transition from ‘the first to the second stage of the revolution’: no support for the Provisional Government; a clean break with the Mensheviks and the Second International; the arming of the workers; the foundation of Soviet power (the ‘democratic dictatorship of the proletariat and the poorest peasants’); and the conclusion of an immediate peace. Lenin boiled all this down into ten punchy theses — his famous April Theses — during the train journey from Switzerland and began to agitate for them upon his arrival at the Finland Station. Brushing aside the formal welcome of the Soviet leaders, the returning exile proclaimed the start of a ‘worldwide Socialist revolution!’, and then went out into the square, where he climbed on to the bonnet of a car and gave a speech to the waiting crowd. Above all the noise Sukhanov heard only the occasional phrase: ‘ … any part in the shameful imperialist slaughter … lies and frauds … capitalist pirates …’ Lenin was then taken off in an armoured car, which proceeded with a military band, workers and soldiers waving red flags, through the Vyborg streets to the Bolshevik headquarters — the palace of Kshesinskaya, the former ballerina and sometime mistress of the Tsar.52
