Lenin, the Bolsheviks, and the Radicalization of 1917

Lenin was living in exile in Switzerland when the February Revolution broke out. German authorities facilitated his transport, along with other exiled revolutionaries, from Switzerland to Russia in a "sealed train" in April 1917, calculating that his presence would help weaken the Russian war effort. Lenin arrived at Petrograd's Finland Station on April 16, 1917, and the following day presented his "April Theses," a program that surprised even many Bolshevik leaders with its radicalism: it rejected any cooperation with the "bourgeois" Provisional Government, demanded the immediate transfer of power to the soviets, and called for an immediate end to the "imperialist war," land nationalization, and worker control of production. The slogan "peace, bread, and land" effectively captured the population's most urgent demands, and although figures such as Kamenev initially considered the Theses excessively radical, Lenin gradually imposed his position within the party.