The Bolshevik coup went through two phases. In the first, which lasted from April to July, Lenin attempted to take power in Petrograd by means of street demonstrations backed by armed force. It was his intention to escalate these demonstrations, on the pattern of the riots of February, into a full-scale revolt that would transfer power initially to the soviets and immediately afterward to his party. This strategy failed: the third attempt, in July, nearly resulted in the destruction of the Bolshevik Party. By August, the Bolsheviks recovered sufficiently to resume their drive for power, but this time they used a different strategy. Trotsky, who took charge while Lenin was hiding from the police in Finland, avoided street demonstrations. Instead, he disguised preparation for a Bolshevik coup behind the façade of a spurious and illegitimate Congress of Soviets, while relying on special shock troops to seize the nerve centers of the government. In name, the power seizure was carried out provisionally and on behalf of the soviets, but, in fact, permanently and for the benefit of the Bolshevik Party.
The outbreak of the February Revolution found Lenin in Zurich. Cut off from his homeland since the outbreak of the war, he had thrown himself into Swiss socialist politics, injecting into them an alien spirit of intolerance and contentiousness.1 His log for the winter of 1916–17 reveals a pattern of frenetic but unfocused activity, now given to pamphleteering, now to intrigues against deviant Swiss Social-Democrats, now to the study of Marx and Engels.
News from Russia reached Switzerland after a delay of several days. Lenin first learned of the disorders in Petrograd nearly a week late from a report in the
Lenin decided he had to get back to Russia at once: he now reproached himself for not having “risked” a move to Scandinavia in 1915 when it had been possible.*3 But how? The only point of entry into Russia was through Sweden. To reach Sweden, one had either to transit Allied territory, by way of France or England and Holland, or to cross Germany. Lenin requested Inessa Armand to explore, with utmost discretion, the chances of obtaining a British visa, but he placed little hope in this prospect because the British, aware of his defeatist program, were almost certain to refuse. He next conceived a fantastic scheme of traveling to Stockholm on a forged passport: he requested his agent there, Fürstenberg-Ganetskii, to find a Swede whose papers he could use, with the proviso that the man not only resemble him physically but also, since he knew no Swedish, be both deaf and dumb.4 None of these plans had any realistic chance of success. Lenin, therefore, seized on a scheme proposed by Martov in Paris on March 6/19 to a group of socialist émigrés: the Russians would ask the German Government, through a Swiss intermediary, for transit rights across its territory to Sweden in exchange for German and Austrian internees.5
While raging in Zurich, in the words of Trotsky, like a caged animal, Lenin did not lose sight of the political situation at home. He was concerned that his followers in Russia adopt a correct political course until he appeared on the scene. He was particularly anxious that they not emulate the “opportunistic” tactics of the Mensheviks and SRs of supporting the “bourgeois” Duma government. He outlined his policy in a telegram dispatched on March 6/19 to Petrograd by way of Stockholm:
Our tactics: complete mistrust, no support for the new government. We especially suspect Kerensky. The arming of the proletariat provides the only guarantee. Immediate elections to the Petrograd [Municipal] Duma.
