April 1917: How Lenin Rearmed
The intersection of theory and practice in the Russian Revolution
“Now one has to engage in excavations, as it were, in order to bring undistorted Marxism to the knowledge of the mass of the people.”
–Vladimir Lenin, State and Revolution
When Bolshevik Party leader Lenin returned from exile to Petrograd on April 3, 1917—scarcely more than a month after the February revolution that overthrew Russia’s autocracy—he delivered a speech to a gathering at Bolshevik headquarters, where, according to an eyewitness, N. N. Sukhanov, he declared: “We don’t need a parliamentary republic, we don’t need bourgeois democracy. We don’t need any government except the Soviet of workers’, soldiers’, and farm-laborers’ deputies!”1