This arrival was a disaster for the nation but a salvation for the city. For its development carne to a full stop, as did the economic life of the whole country. This city froze as if in total mute bewilderment before the impending era, unwilling to attend it. If anything, Comrade Lenin deserves his monuments here for sparing St. Petersburg both ignoble membership in the global village and the shame of becoming the seat of his government: in 1918 he moved the capital of Russia back to Moscow.
The significance of this move alone could equate Lenin with Peter. However, Lenin himself would hardly approve of naming the city after him if only because the total amount of time he spent there was about two years. Had it been up to him, he would have preferred Moscow or any other place in Russia proper. Besides, he didn't care much for the sea: he was a man of the terra firma, and a city dweller at that. And if he felt uncomfortable in Petrograd, it was partly because of the sea, although it wasn't the flood which he was mindful of, but the British Navy.
There were perhaps only two things he had in common with Peter 1: knowledge of Europe and ruthlessness. But while Peter, with his variety of interests, boisterous energy, and the amateurishness of his grand designs, was either an up- or outdated version of a Renaissance man,
Lenin was very much a product of his time: a narrow- minded revolutionary with a typical petit bourgeois, mon- omaniacal desire for power, which is in itself an extremely bourgeois concept.
So Lenin went to Petersburg because that's where he thought it was: power. For that he would go to any other place if he thought that place had it (and, in fact, he did: while living in Switzerland he tried the same thing in Zurich). In short, he was one of the first men for whom geography is a political science. But the point is that Petersburg never, even during its most reactionary period under Nicholas I, was a center of power. Every monarchy rests on the traditional feudal principle of willing submission or resignation to the rule of one, backed by the church. After all, either of these—submission or resignation—is an act of will, as much as casting a ballot is. Whereas Lenin's main idea was the manipulation of will itself, the control over minds; and that was news to Petersburg. For Petersburg was merely the seat of imperial rule, and not the mental or political locus of the nation—since the national will can't be localized by definition. An organic entity, society generates the forms of its organization the way trees generate their distance from one another, and a passerby calls that a "forest." The concept of power, alias state control over the social fabric, is a contradiction in terms and reveals a woodcutter. The city's very blend of architectural grandeur with a web-like bureaucratic tradition mocked the idea of power. The truth about palaces, especially about winter ones, is that not all of their rooms are occupied. Had Lenin stayed longer in this city, his idea of statehood might have grown a bit more humble. But from the age of thirty, he lived for nearly sixteen years abroad, mostly in Germany and Switzerland, nourishing his political theories. He returned to Petersburg only once, in 1905, for three months, in an attempt to organize workers against the czarist government, but was soon forced abroad, back to his cafe politicking, chess playing, and Marx reading. It couldn't help him to get less idiosyncratic: failure seldom broadens perspectives.
In 1917, in Switzerland, upon learning from a passerby about the Czar's abdication, with a group of his followers Lenin boarded a sealed train provided by the German General Staff, which relied on them to do a fifth-column job behind the Russian lines, and went to Petersburg. The man who stepped down from the train in 1917 at the Finland Station was forty-seven years old, and this was presumably his last gamble: he had to win or face the charge of treason. Except for 12 million in German marks, his only luggage was the dream of world socialist revolution which, once started in Russia, would produce a chain reaction, and another dream of becoming head of the Russian state in order to execute this first dream. On the sixteen-year-long, bumpy journey to the Finland Station, the two dreams merged into a somewhat nightmarish concept of power; but climbing onto that armored car, he didn't know that only one of those things was destined to come true.
So it wasn't so much his coming to Petersburg to grab power as it was the idea of power which grabbed him long ago that was carrying Lenin now to Petersburg. What's rendered in the history books as the Great October Socialist Revolution was, in fact, a plain coup d'etat, and a bloodless one at that. Following the signal—a blank-fire shot of the cruiser Aurora's bow gun—a platoon of the newly formed
Red Guards walked into the Winter Palace and arrested < bunch of ministers of the Provisional Government idlinj there, vainly trying to take care of Russia after the Czar': abdication. The Red Guards didn't meet any resistance they raped half of the female unit guarding the palace am looted its chambers. At that, two Red Guardsmen were sho and one drowned in the wine cellars. The only shooting tha ever took place in the Palace Square, with bodies falling and the searchlight crossing the sky, was Sergei Eisenstein's
It's perhaps in reference to the modesty of that Octobei 25 night enterprise that the city has been termed in officia propaganda "the cradle of the Revolution." And a cradli it remained, an empty cradle, and quite enjoyed this status To a degree, the city escaped the revolutionary carnage "God forbid us to see," said Pushkin, "the Russian debacle meaningless and merciless," and Petersburg didn't see it The civil war raged all around and across the country, an< a horrible crack went through the nation, splitting it int< two mutually hostile camps; but here, on the shores of th( Neva, for the first time in two centuries, quiet reigned am the grass started to shoot up through the cobblestones o emptied squares and the slates of sidewalks. Hunger tool its toll, and so did the Cheka (the maiden name of thi KGB); but other than that, the city was left to itself anc to its reflections.