Real Dictators - Lenin Part 2: Underground, On the Run

Episode Date: October 4, 2022

Vladimir Lenin meets Joseph Stalin. Turning to crime to pay their way, the revolutionaries struggle to stay ahead of the authorities. As the First World War upends Russia, the Bolsheviks wait for their moment. In the meantime, Lenin’s love life takes an unconventional turn... A Noiser production, written by Dan Smith. This is Part 2 of 4. For ad-free listening, exclusive content and early access to new episodes, join Noiser+. Now available for Apple and Android users. Click the Noiser+ banner on Apple or go to noiser.com/subscriptions to get started with a 7-day free trial. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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It's Christmas Day, 1905. We're in Tampere, in the Grand Duchy of Finland. The city is playing host to a conference. The Bolsheviks, a faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party, have gathered here, in this corner of the Russian Empire. Though no one knows it now, in their midst are two dictators in the making. Men who will go down in history as originators of left-wing tyranny. The star of the show is the Bolshevik's de facto

leader, dictator number one. He is currently using one of his many aliases to stay ahead of the authorities. According to the papers he's carrying, he is Vladimir Karpov. But with his distinctive beard and moustache, and his heavily receding red hair, no one at this conference is in any doubt as to Karpov's true identity. There's just something about Lenin. Not conventionally charismatic, perhaps, but a man with undeniable presence. He exudes intellectualism, yet is able to communicate complex ideas as hard-hitting slogans. Anticipation is high amongst the delegates as they wait to make his acquaintance.

Among them is a 27-year-old man, dictator number two. His skin bears the scars of smallpox. He's still handsome though, rugged and unshaven, with a dramatic sweep of thick, dark hair. If you look closely, you notice his left arm is shorter than his right, the result of a childhood accident. Like Lenin, he goes under any number of monikers. Is he Ivanovich today, or Koba, or Soso? Or perhaps the name that will stick, the Man of Steel, Joseph Stalin. His background could hardly be more different to Lenin's own. He hails from Georgia, on the southwestern frontier of the empire. Far from idyllic, Stalin's childhood was peppered with violent outbursts, even kidnappings

by his drunken father. Lenin emerged from the comfort of the middle classes. Stalin has pulled himself up by his bootstraps. He expects to be wowed by the Bolshevik leader. But on this occasion, Stalin is left disappointed. There is no dramatic entrance, no great speech from Lenin. Just handshakes and small talk. Thoroughly unremarkable. In 18 months' time, they will be introduced again,

and Lenin will have forgotten Stalin's name. But, however inauspicious it may be, this Christmas Day meeting will go down as a crucial point in history. The moment the two pivotal figures of the 20th century enter each other's orbits for the very first time. Upon this foundation, the fate of nations will be decided. From Noisa, this is part two of the Lenin story. And this is Real Dictators.

In 1905, as he meets Stalin for the first time, it's been five years since Vladimir Lenin set foot in Russia. He's been in self-imposed exile in Western Europe. In this period, he's worked to establish a network of contacts across the continent, men and women who can do his bidding while he evades the authorities. For a man as secretive and emotionally insular as Lenin, building a team of trusted lieutenants hasn't come easily. Dr. James Ryan

I would say that first and foremost and above all else, Lenin was an intellectual. Lenin was not overly empathetic towards ordinary people. He was not especially driven by a deep sense of empathy towards individual members of the downtrodden. But that's not to say that he was indifferent to suffering. He wasn't. It's not to say that he was indifferent to ordinary individual people. But Lenin was able to distinguish between any one individual person that he might meet and the broader picture, the broader historic canvas of what was required in Lenin's famous expression, what is to be done and how do we achieve it. One of Lenin's most reliable comrades to emerge is a man called Grigory Zinoviev.

He is a devout follower who had committed himself early to the Bolsheviks when the split came with the rival Menshevik faction. Leon Trotsky too is trusted, at least for a while, having swept into Lenin's life a few years earlier. But while Lenin's friendships may be genuine, they always have limits. Dr Helen Rappaport. The cause was everything, and he didn't care who was sacrificed in getting to that objective. I find him incredibly cold, and yet there is this terrible irony that he loved little children.

And I've got one or two accounts of him playing with activist children in London letting them sit on his back and ride around on him like a bear you know so there's this contradiction in his personality. Many outwardly solid relationships are jettisoned when they conflict with the cause. His friendship with Yuli Martov for example. Victor Sebastian. His friendship with Yuli Martov, for example. Victor Sebastian. Well, the closest friend he had, probably throughout his life, was Yuli Martov, who became then leader of the Mensheviks. And at the start, when they worked, first of all, on the Iskra,

the first of the Marxist papers, they were very close friends. But then there was rivalry, political rivalry. Who was going to lead this movement? Lenin was always going to be the leader. He always saw himself as the leader. The moment he could spot anyone else who was a potential rival, a potential danger, he got rid of that danger one way or another. Professor Catherine Merriday.

I suppose the way he projected himself was, I am the big one, I am the serious one, I am the bulldog, and the rest of them are sheep, or the rest of them are puppies. His whole attitude was the firebrand, the one who will go to the extreme, who will never compromise. And in that sense, his party, his political party, was always splitting off from other political parties, separating itself. Always Lenin is defining himself in terms of his policies versus everybody else's. Dr. Brendan Gautier. Those that Lenin found around him were true believers. Joseph Stalin himself was a genuine Marxist fanatic. The story of Lenin's Bolshevik collaborators

is a mutual infatuation with Marxism, a deep, deep wetness to the notion of ideology is offering the story, the truth, that everything we're trying to do is to make sense of this reality we find ourselves in. Dialectical materialism offered certainties and Lenin and those around him were deeply wedded to that. That we have discovered what is and what will be.

Stalin is, according to some schools of thought, Lenin's unruly political son. But it will take time for Lenin to trust his understudy. He will promote him only gradually. Lenin may be the driving force of the movement, a leader to whom others are drawn, but he's given a helping hand by his principal foe of all people. Inadvertently, Tsar Nicholas II is proving himself a boon to the communist cause. Nicholas had ascended to the throne on his father's death in 1894.

He had been completely unprepared for the job. What will happen to me and all of Russia, he had despaired. I know nothing of the business of ruling. He spent the last ten years proving the point. The Nadia was a disastrous war with Japan in 1904, resulting in a landmark Japanese victory. Now, one year later, popular discontent is accelerating as food shortages start to pinch. Russia goes to war with Japan. War destabilizes. War is a destabilizing factor because it tends to bring problems to crisis point. And in 1904, 1905, it results in a humiliating defeat for Russia because Russia loses to an Asian power. to Asians. Europeans are supposed to be superior. And so that leads to quite a lot of tension amongst liberal, educated middle classes. But it also becomes a kind of a spark for

more ordinary people to give voice to deep-seated grievances. Peasants feel that they should have more land. Peasants are paying landlords for land that they think is rightfully theirs because they actually work it. Workers encounter really quite terrible conditions. Workers in cities are working very long hours. They have very few rights. They are not really respected. There's a lot of tension stored up in various reasons. Get groceries delivered across the DTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express.

Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started. On January the 9th, 1905, the sun rises in a pale blue sky over St. Petersburg. The rooftops and streets of the capital are covered with snow. A crowd of protesters has gathered to demand higher wages, better conditions in the factories, and bread in the shops. Many of them are women and children, unarmed and peaceful. They are led by a popular local priest, Father Gheorghe Gapon.

Suddenly, a cavalry unit rounds the corner and charges towards them. The mounted officers wield sabers. Most of the protesters flee. The unlucky ones are slaughtered. As the snow turns red, Father Gapon despairs. There is no god any longer. There is no Tsar. Estimates vary, but it's likely over a thousand civilians are killed.

This day will be remembered as Bloody Sunday. as Bloody Sunday. The massacre in St. Petersburg inspires more protests. For a while, it seems as if Lenin's longed-for revolution is happening spontaneously. The Tsar's troops do wrestle back control of the streets over the coming weeks,

but as word of the atrocity and its fallout reaches Lenin in faraway Geneva, Switzerland. He is profoundly shocked. He has been complacent. He's devoted his life to an uprising that he almost missed when it finally came around. His judgment was often way off because he wasn't there. Even though he had plenty of people writing to him and telling him his judgement was way off. He predicted the 1905 revolution in theory, but then when

the moment actually came, he had no idea it was going to happen. The Tsar is on borrowed time. A bigger revolution, the ultimate one, feels closer than ever. Lenin is adamant. The next time, he won't miss the boat. Yet even now, Lenin shows no great urgency to head for home. The question was, what do we in exile do about this? And the danger was, if we go back to Russia now, we'll all be arrested. So what do we do? And some people went back and some people didn't go back to Russia now, we'll all be arrested, so what do we do? And some people went back and some people didn't go back.

So you can see the big problem is they're dealing with this incredibly repressive state and they're sitting talking about it from a long distance away at a time when travel is very slow and it will take them a long time, it's expensive and they don't know what awaits them at the other end. Russian aristocrats are now speaking nervously of how the social contract has changed. They sense a lack of deference from those who are supposed to be their inferiors. Increasingly, business people and figures of industry pivot away from the Tsar and donate money to liberal and socialist movements.

The cause of the common man and woman is suddenly rather chic. Some of this is self-interest. In this tinderbox atmosphere, canny commercial minds don't want to find themselves on the wrong side if tensions explode again. But there is also genuine growing antipathy to the Tsar amongst the middle classes, not just the workers. We entrepreneurs and industrialists are the real engine of Nicholas's Russia, so the thinking goes. He ought to be drawing us close. Instead, his loyalties lie with people like himself,

the scions of old money families. The events of early 1905 had demonstrated the people's willingness to rise up, but they've also highlighted just how small the Bolshevik influence is. They were little more than bystanders. They need to get amongst the downtrodden masses. Of Lenin's entourage abroad, Martov leaves for Russia, as does Trotsky. He will fast become the poster boy of Russia's socialist movement,

a figurehead far better known than the absent Lenin. Trotsky will also prove his mettle as an organiser. He throws his weight behind the St Petersburg Soviet, the city's elected representative council. This is, in fact, the original Soviet, the unit of governance that will underpin the future USSR. The Trotsky-led council is, for a few short months, the focal point of anti-Tsarist opposition, until it's closed down by the authorities.

Rather than St. Petersburg, Lenin heads back to London. This does not go unnoticed amongst his comrades. There are whispers now that he is dodging the fight. But Lenin is playing the long game. He regarded himself as the leader, and he wasn't going to get arrested for no reason at all somewhere hopeless. Cowardice too, no doubt. But also, there probably wouldn't have been a Bolshevik revolution if Lenin had been shot in some meaningless demonstration in 1905.

The loyalists to Lenin accepted that he was the mastermind behind it all and he had to be free to write and guide the revolution. So I think that the leadership accepted that Lenin had to be protected and stay in exile. Belatedly, the Tsar agrees to some social and political reforms. These are set out in the October Manifesto of 1905. Political parties are legalised for the first time. Amnesty is granted to many political prisoners. The rules on censorship are relaxed.

Most sensationally, there is to be a new elected parliament, the Duma. But this is still the Tsar's Russia, so he retains the right to overrule it at will. so he retains the right to overrule it at will. In this somewhat more progressive climate, Lenin decides it's finally safe to venture homeward. He makes the trip in November, in disguise of course. He has right to be wary. The Okhrana, the dreaded secret police, are still on his tail.

Back in St. Petersburg, he flits from safe house to safe house. Next, he heads to the empire's autonomous Grand Duchy of Finland, where he keeps a low profile in a succession of villages. It is in Finland, of course, where his Christmas Day encounter with Stalin takes place. Out of sight for the most part, Lenin makes his presence felt via the written word. Lenin lambasts the Tsar's reforms. He suggests a boycott of the Duma, whose true power and influence he rightly doubts. Occasionally now he gives speeches. In May 1906 he addresses some 3,000 people at the palace of Countess Sophia Panina, a

socialist sympathizer. It's the biggest crowd he's addressed to date. He might wish to remain in the shadows, but he knows that if he's too elusive, the Mensheviks will triumph in the great factional struggle for control of the party. During the 1905-1906 revolutionary events, the split between the two factions becomes more significant. The Mensheviks felt that they needed to take a relatively back seat and allow the revolution to happen. Lenin wants to be more directly involved in driving the revolutionary process, whereas the Mensheviks take more of a wait-and-see

approach. Lenin can't lead a world revolution without cash in his pocket. Despite the groundswell of anti-Zarist feeling, the Bolsheviks' finances are as precarious as ever. Lenin awards himself a modest party salary, but remains reliant on his trust fund. His mother, quietly installed on the family estate, dips into the kitty whenever her boy requires. He comes to the view that the only way the communists can fund themselves properly is through crime. Robbery becomes a crucial method of fundraising, of banks, post offices, railway stations,

even steamships docked for the night. The Bolsheviks law breaking further deepens the split with the Mensheviks, but for his part Joseph Stalin is all in. In 1907 in Georgia a band of robbers coordinated by Stalin and sanctioned by Lenin attacks a stagecoach carrying bank cash deposits. As they open fire and lob grenades into the town square, a bloodbath ensues. At least 40 people die. Violence is becoming the communists' calling card. becoming the communists calling card. In the two years following the October Manifesto some two and a half thousand government officials are murdered, mostly by socialist revolutionaries. This of course is PR gold for the Tsar who

begins a ferocious crackdown on opposition. Terror must be met by terror he says. He appoints a tough new prime minister, Pyotr Stolypin, who oversees a system of kangaroo courts, as a result of which thousands are executed. Much of the Russian Empire is placed under martial law. Troublesome villages are razed to the ground as a warning to others. Nationalist risings in Ukraine, the Baltic, and the Caucasus are savagely repressed. Nicholas rolls back his previous reforms. He dismisses the Duma when it

doesn't act as he requires. He also lends his support to the far-right Union of the Russian People. They battle the left through a militant wing, the Black Hundreds By 1906, the Union boasts 300,000 members as compared to the Bolsheviks' paltry 3,000 When the Black Hundreds attack a peaceful demonstration in the St. Petersburg suburbs Lenin is spotted running away at the first sign of trouble So fast, one witness reports, that his bowler hat falls off. With the heat well and truly on, Lenin flees to Sweden at the end of 1907. He shaves off his trademark facial hair and assumes the identity of a Professor Müller,

a German geologist specialising in limestone deposits. Lenin will later describe this year as the worst of his life. Constantly on the run, his influence over the movement is waning. From Sweden, he sneaks his way back down to Geneva, and from there on to Paris. Through this turbulent period, Lennon's rock is his devoted wife, Nadia. In her forties now, Nadia suffers from Graves' disease, a debilitating thyroid problem.

But her focus is squarely on her husband and their shared work. Before she met Lennon, she taught in a school to teach working-class people how to read and write. She actually had met working-class people, which Lenin virtually never had. He was going to make a revolution for them, as he saw it, but he didn't really have any understanding at all. On top of that, Lenin relied very heavily on his mother and his two sisters in Russia, sending him money, sending him books, helping them out in practical terms. His two sisters both went

to jail because they were in the revolutionary activist cells in Russia. They suffered, Lenin didn't. He was sitting there writing letters saying, send me this book, send me that book, I need this, I need that. One day in late May 1909, Lenin is delivering a talk at a Paris café, one of the French capital's popular leftist hangouts. In the audience is a 35-year-old woman by the name of Inessa Armand. She is cool and glamorous. On top of her head of wavy chestnut hair, she wears a hat with a jaunty red feather. Lenin is introduced to her.

She is in awe of the way he speaks about politics. But up close, he's more than a little unsettling. politics. But up close, he's more than a little unsettling. Because of his short-sightedness, he has this habit of fixing people with a stare and then screwing up one of his eyes into a squint. Inessa has quite the history. She was born in Paris, then raised in the French quarter of Moscow. At 19, she fell for Alexander Armand, the son of a wealthy industrialist. They married and had four children in quick succession. But Inessa was a restless spirit.

Taking herself to various study groups, she became a committed feminist and a Marxist. Then, at 28, she began an affair with her husband's 17-year-old brother. Her estranged spouse continued to bail her out when her activism got her into trouble with the authorities. In the end, though, she couldn't outrun the Ukrainer. She was arrested and exiled to Russia's remote north. But her dramatic story was not yet done. Inessa escaped and made her way to the south of France, where she was reunited with her young lover. Two weeks later, he died of tuberculosis.

Heartbroken, she settled in Paris. As with Nadia all those years before, Lenin's love affair with Inessa is a slow burner. Some 18 months after their first meeting, things get physical. Lenin is utterly smitten. She was an incredibly clever, cultivated woman, multilingual, a brilliant mind.

Maybe he fell in love with her mind if he loved her. Nadia was rather plodding and dutiful. Nadia would spend hours sitting, coding and decoding letters and keeping contact with all the revolutionary networks across Europe. Nadia was the dog's body who did all the boring stuff.

Inessa was much more clever. She went and gave lectures and speeches. She was very beautiful. Lenin soon gets Inessa translating documents and attending meetings as his proxy. Eventually, she heads up the Bolsheviks' international bureau and is made the Bolshevik delegate to the French Socialist Party. The great love of Lenin's life was revolution. The great love of Lenin's life, number two, was revolution. Revolution was far more important than she was, and he was giving her revolutionary tasks.

He wasn't clutching her to his bosom and saying, let's run away to the Caucasus, darling. It was all about revolution the whole time. Quite when Nadia becomes aware of the affair is uncertain. When she does, it is surely a blow. Nadia cannot walk more than a few hundred yards without getting breathless these days. She is receiving brutal electroconvulsive therapy and will soon be on the operating table in Switzerland, having half her thyroid removed. Nadia, though, does something unexpected.

Not only does she overlook Lenin's adultery, but she accepts Inessa into their lives. Another sacrifice for the cause. Nadja turned a blind eye to it. She, I think, understood that Lenin's attitude to sex was, it was something you did like eating a meal when you were hungry. It was something that fulfilled a basic human need, but had no other relevance in his life. And they used to sit mending Lenin's clothes together in the Alps, talking about revolution, I should imagine. I don't think they were talking about the wonderful poetry that Lenin wrote them, or the Valentine cards. Before the year is out, Inessa has an apartment just a few doors down from Lenin and Nagy's.

It seems as if the Ménageage a trois might carry on forever. But Inessa is a marked woman. At Lenin's behest, she returns to St. Petersburg on party business. The Akhrana aren't about to miss the opportunity. They arrest her and throw her in jail. Once again, her estranged yet still infatuated husband bails her out. This stint inside marks the beginning of the end of her affair with Lenin. But they stay in touch.

But ultimately, all the women in the Bolshevik movement, and that includes Inessa Amon, were, you know, two steps behind the more important men, suckering them, feeding them, taking the risk, smuggling bombs here and there and everywhere across St. Petersburg. I think the men never fully acknowledged how much the women in the revolutionary movement contributed to their safety and well-being. their safety and well-being. In 1912, Lenin launches yet another left-wing newspaper.

This one will stick. He calls it Pravda, or Truth. 110 years later, it's still going. Soon after launch, it's selling 60,000 copies a day. Each time it's banned, it reappears with a variation of the title. It has 36 editors in its first 38 editions. All of them are arrested at one time or another. Lenin and Naja leave Paris and move to the Austro-Hungarian Empire, just a few miles

from the Soviet border. Here, Lenin decides the time has come to take a new political direction. It will take almost everyone by surprise. Ever since the Duma's inception in 1905, he has ordered the Bolsheviks to boycott the parliament. But in May 1912, he permits them to field candidates at the elections for the very first time. Whoever wants to approach socialism by any other path than that of political democracy will inevitably arrive at absurd and reactionary conclusions, he says, without any discernible tone of irony. If this sudden U-turn takes Lenin's opponents off guard, it really is just another

example of his utter pragmatism. The Bolsheviks, despite their name meaning of the majority, are still a minority movement. This strategy is designed to attract new members, while wrong-footing his enemies, czarists, liberals and Mensheviks alike. Lenin is not the dangerous revolutionary. He wants to bring change via the ballot box. It seems like a solid enough plan, but it soon spectacularly blows up in his face. The seven Bolsheviks who win seats in the Duma need a leader. Lenin appoints to the role a Russian Pole in his thirties, Roman Malinovsky.

Smart and charming, he is a tailor-turned metal worker. But he's also served three years for robbery. And he has a charge of rape hanging over his head. He's also an undercover agent for the Ukrana. Political opponents have been conveniently swept away to ensure that Malinovsky has a clear path to the Duma.

He's already betrayed several high-profile Bolsheviks. Lenin hasn't the slightest inkling. Any rumour of Malinovsky's disloyalty is simply Menshevik pot-stirring. By 1914, Malinowski is proving troublesome to his handlers in the secret police. He has been making incendiary anti-Tsarist speeches in parliament to divert communist

suspicion away from himself. The Okhrana feel he has outlived his use as a double agent. With one last payment in his back pocket, he is sent packing abroad. Lenin maintains that his man in the Duma has had a nervous breakdown. Malinovsky is thrown out of the party, not for his alleged treachery, but for abandoning his position. The Bolsheviks are left in disarray. Such a scandal could sound the death knell for Lenin's movement.

But the Malinovsky drama will shortly be eclipsed. A gun fired not at the Tsar, but at another European royal, will change the terms of the game. On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary and his wife, the Duchess Sophie, are assassinated in Sarajevo. The dominoes of international diplomacy begin to topple. Austria blames Serbia for the atrocity, and the allies of each nation come out to declare war on one another.

Russia is a friend of Serbia, so the Triple Alliance of Germany, Austria-Hungary and Turkey declares war on St. Petersburg. Meanwhile, France, Belgium and Britain come out against Germany. The First World War is underway. At the time the conflagration begins, Lenin is living in Poronin, a village about 50 miles south of Krakow, in Austro-Hungarian territory. He'd been writing endlessly about the logic of the way capitalism was going, the way he would describe it, was that there would be a war between the imperialist nations.

But then when it came, he got himself stuck in Austria-Hungary near Krakow in Poland, which was then part of Austria-Hungary, knowing that it would probably be an enemy nation if Russia was going to go to war. Like, kind of ridiculous, if you really believed the war was going to happen then. I mean, it was a complete miscalculation. In Polonin, with Austria-Hungary and Russia now officially enemies, Lenin is immediately suspected of being a spy.

The local priest goes as far as to warn his congregation that the Russians amongst them might even poison the wells. The police search Lenin's house and confiscate an old Browning pistol and numerous notebooks. Lenin is thrown into prison. Fearing he could be lynched, he pleads his case that he is no friend of the Tsar. To his relief, the Austro-Hungarian authorities release him after 11 days. He promptly upsticks, makes for Bern in neutral Switzerland. In St. Petersburg, the Tsar is surrounded by those warning that the Great War will bring only disaster.

Rasputin, the Romanov family's resident mystic, cautions that it is folly. The Interior Minister Donoval is particularly prescient, predicting that when Russia suffers its first few setbacks, the government will be blamed, revolutionaries will take their chance to agitate, and anarchy will ensue. But the Tsar is deaf to these warnings. He's riding a wave of popular support. When he appears on the balcony of the Winter Palace to officially declare war, he takes the public's acclaim.

To protect this patriotic fervour, St. Petersburg itself is even renamed to make it sound less Germanic. It will now be called Petrograd. The optimists say the fighting will be over by Christmas, with predictions that Russia will assert its dominance in the Balkans. They might even take the prized scalp of Constantinople. But early successes quickly give way to reversals. The Russian army loses men by the hundreds of thousands. By the end of October, out of an army of 6.5 million, over 1.2 million are dead, wounded or missing. The deceased are replaced by poorly trained men The army is badly equipped too, lacking arms and transportation

Some troops have their bullets rationed, even as they face the enemy Morale plummets and desertions skyrocket As ever, Lenin sees opportunity amid the suffering. Pravda is banned in early September 1914 for its anti-war stance, but Lenin is unrelenting in his position. Many of his allies consider this ill-advised. It risks making the Bolsheviks appear unpatriotic. Lenin brushes aside their concerns. The world War is the chance to ignite global revolution. Lenin's immediate instinctive response is to go to a library. It's to go to a library and get out massive haul of heavy tomes, surround himself with those books, dig into the philosophy of Hegel in the case of the First World War in 1914. That's what Lenin does.

He doesn't sort of think, well, what practically do we need to do now? Do I need to go to Russia? Do I need to organize? He is, I need to read Hegel. This philosopher has been dead for a very long time. That's his instinct. Fill out his notebooks

and then eventually come up with a philosophical Marxist reading of that particular moment in which Lenin becomes convinced in his own mind, this is what we need to do. He doesn't act on a sort of a knee jerk. He needed to make sense of what was happening in order to be able to direct the party,

and most importantly of all, to act correctly, to make the correct decisions that needed to happen. But by the turn of 1917, Lenin is more downbeat. His mother died recently, cutting off one of his most important lines of finance. He's making virtually nothing from writing. He relies on Nadia's teaching and administrative work to bring in an income. Since March 1916, the couple have found

themselves in Zurich. They take a single room in a rundown boarding house. The only work he could see himself doing in early 1917 in January was trade union work in Switzerland, which he put himself to do and he actually worked very hard with the Swiss trade unions. So it's not as if he did spend his entire life in the library. But it's also true that throughout the first years of the First World War, he was in Zurich Public Library virtually every single day. Lenin was in there with his notebooks and his pens, reading and reading and reading, to create a book called Imperialism, the Highest Stage of Capitalism,

which was a very important text in terms of his future policy. But in terms of knowing what's happening in Russia, Zurich Library is not the place to go, obviously. One day, Lenin gives a lecture at a Zurich concert hall to an audience of students and workers. He discusses the 1905 revolution. He exhorts his listeners to be ready for the next one when it comes around. When do you think that will be? One young man asks. Perhaps in two years, comes Lenin's reply. Perhaps in five, at the latest ten.

Not for the first time, he has totally misjudged the situation. In just a few weeks, the so-called February Revolution will begin in earnest. And once again, Lenin will be caught entirely off guard. Next time, as the Tsar is finally deposed, radical change comes to the empire. But even this will not be enough for the Bolsheviks. As power beckons, Lenin prepares to tear down the entire old order. But will he be able to build the utopia in its place? That's next time.