The Day that Turned Russia Red

In the second part of the story of Vladimir Lenin taking down, we learn how his fanaticism ignited the coup and later the Red Terror.

Anti-Bolshevik poster, in which Lenin is depicted in a red robe aiding other Bolsheviks in sacrificing Russia to a statue of Marx, circa 1918–1919. Public Domain

At 10:00 p.m., on the blustery night of Nov. 6, 1917, two ragged figures made their way through the barren streets of Petrograd, and with them went the doom of Russia. One of the men wore a wig and had a handkerchief tied around his face, allegedly to allay the pain of a toothache. Both men wore ragged workers’ cloaks and caps, flapping in the frigid wind, but they were not workers.

The two men were bound for the Smolny Institute, once an educational institution for young women of the nobility, now the headquarters for the revolutionary Bolshevik party, the central hub from which their tentacles reached out into the city and from which they planned to execute their coup. It was a fitting transformation for this venerable old building, symbolic of the fate of Russia as a whole, for the old aristocratic and noble order was about to be obliterated in fire and blood and replaced with the first communist state the world had ever seen.

"1917: Red Banners White Mangle" by Warren H. Carroll.

As historian Warren Carroll relates in “1917: Red Banners, White Mantle,” the two men successfully crossed the Neva River while a guard’s attention was diverted. But their next obstacle was not so easily overcome: Two guards on horseback halted the travelers and demanded to see their passes. They had no passes.

One of the two travelers, a young Finn named Eino Rahja, thinking quickly, pretended to be drunk. In the end, the guards decided they didn’t want to bother with scum like that, a pair of low-life drunkards, and they let them pass.

Eino Rahja. Public Domain

Except they weren’t drunkards. They were revolutionaries. And Rahja’s companion, the man with the wig and the fake toothache, was Vladimir Lenin, the architect of the downfall of Russia. And this was to be the hour of his triumph.

A Fanatic’s Insistence

The idea of the coup had been Lenin’s, though he didn’t personally play a role in it prior to that nighttime walk on Nov. 6. Aided by German logistics and funding—including a sealed train and money to organize his party and set up a press—Lenin had been sent back into Russia from exile earlier in 1917 in order to destabilize the country from the inside. This, the Germans hoped, would lead to Russia’s surrender, bringing Germany one step closer to final victory in “The Great War.”

Leon Trotsky, 1933. (Leonidas Theodoropoulos /CC BY-SA 4.0)

Once in Russia, Lenin was joined by another formidable revolutionary, Leon Trotsky, who had been living in New York until news of the tsar’s abdication reached him. Lenin and his team quickly got to work. “If ever one man, alone, made a world-historic revolution, that man was Lenin,” Caroll writes in “The Crisis of Christendom: 1815-2005.” Lenin was remarkable for his dominating personality and fanatical focus on his goals. He used this intense focus to begin the work of destabilization. As historian Ted Widmer informs us in “Lenin and the Russian Spark,” a German diplomat wrote a message to a colleague that read, “Lenin’s entry into Russia successful. He is working exactly as we would wish.”

From his hiding place in an agronomy student’s apartment, Lenin wrote an article on how to conduct a revolution. Carroll quotes a key line from it: “The success of both the Russian and the world revolution depends upon two or three days of struggle.” Those days were coming.