When I emigrated to New York in 1976, I met the last living participant of that legendary assassination attempt, Nikolai Martyanov. The polite and gentle Martyanov told me that he considered Lenin a very lucky man. Among the terrorists were some of the best shots in the Russian Army, but Lenin escaped unscathed. “Amazing luck!”117
So in 1918, Martyanov, never giving up, began preparing a new attempt on Lenin’s life, but somebody denounced Martyanov and his friends. They would have been executed by the Bolsheviks, but Lenin’s orders came. “Stop the case. Free them. Send them to the front.” As one of Lenin’s comrades commented, “In this case, he showed great nobility.”118
On March 10, 1918, Lenin and his entourage left Petrograd for Moscow on special train No. 4001. The journey was comparatively long, almost twenty-four hours, and in that time Lenin managed to write an article in which he proclaimed, “The history of mankind in our days is making one of the greatest and most difficult turns with—and it can be said without the slightest exaggeration—immense significance for world liberation.” For Petrograd, at any rate, those days were truly historical.
On March 16, the All-Russian Congress of Soviets rubber-stamped Lenin’s resolution, “In the conditions of the crisis the Russian revolution is undergoing at the given moment, the situation of Petrograd as the capital has changed sharply. In view of this, the Congress resolves that until these conditions change, the capital of the Russian Socialist Federated Soviet Republic will temporarily be moved from Petrograd to Moscow.”119
That this declaration was intended only as a smoke screen is clear, in particular, from Lunacharsky’s secret report to the Soviet of People’s Commissars, written in early March 1918 but published only in 1971. “The government firmly and absolutely correctly decided to leave Petersburg and move the capital of Soviet Russia to Moscow even if we were to achieve a more or less stable peace.” And further, continuing to call the capital Petersburg, as so many of its inhabitants did, Lunacharsky accurately and ruthlessly predicted the results of this fateful step. “Things will be hard for Petersburg. It will have to go through the agonizing process of reducing its economic and political significance. Of course, the government will try to ease this painful process, but still Petersburg cannot be saved from a terrible food crisis or further growth of unemployment.”120
At that moment the majority of Petrograd’s intellectuals did not view this dramatic change in the city’s status pessimistically. The Bolshevik
On March 16, the Bolsheviks signed a separate peace with the Germans and Petrograd was spared German occupation. The elite of the former capital experienced an ambivalent reaction.
There is a rumor in the city that Petersburg will be declared a free city. On the streets, in the trolleys and in cafés, you can hear a lot about the future “free” Petersburg. The so-called “clean public” is building its faith on that rumor so dear to their hearts of the evacuation of the capital and the government’s move to Moscow. They say, “There’s a reason they left, there’s a secret paragraph in the peace treaty about making Petrograd an open city.” The bourgeoisie is building the most fantastic hopes on ridiculous rumors, and everywhere that fat cats meet they talk about these hopes. And that’s understandable. What else is left to the totally defeated bourgeoisie, but dreaming about what could have been?122
Who would find it surprising that in March 1918 the populace of Petrograd believed the most fantastic rumors more than the decrees and editorials in official newspapers? People refused to look truth in the eye, still not understanding that the circle of Russian history had closed. Pushkin once described Peter the Great’s move of the capital of the Russian Empire from Moscow to Petersburg:
