tow sand nse aadlaes and following in the footsteps of great revolutionaries St Petersburg (formerly Petrograd and Leningrad) was the main stage for the Russian revolutions of 1905, February 1917 and October 1917.So there have been better times to visit, but travel there this July and you can demonstrate the world's leaders at the G8 summit.
Travel companies run a 'revolution tour, but its easy
make your OWI way around. The socialist classic, "Ten Days that Shook the World'', gave me an invaluable background to the scenes of the most inpiring events of the last century. Walking through the city. I really felt I was following in the footsteps of great revolutionaries.
A Stalinist legoland of towerblocks stretches across the plain from the international airport. Taxis speed to LOWIL along the 9km Moskovisky prospect past the huge Monument to lne Defenders Leningrad, commemorating starving citizens who resisted a Nazi siege for three years during World War Two. The taxi drivers are offended by tourists wearing seatbelts but you'll probably want to risk their offence.
The architecture changes as you swing into the 4.5 km long Nevsky prospect. You can see the old St Petersburg of "broad streets, the mighty open spaces, the great canals curving through the city, the the immense facades of government buildings'?. The Nevsky is still as in 1917 'one of the great streets of the
In February 1917, thousands of workers challenged the torces of sarist repression there. Battles with the police left many workers dead and police stations in flames. Cossacks started to traternise with the workers and regiments mutinied.
As Trotsky stated an insurrection is 'not so much a struggle against the army, as a struggle for the army'4. As Tsarist troops were marched out of their barracks they were downed m woe mosurection.
Workers, women, youths,
soldiers, swarmed around them on 'all sides. either considering the regiment their own or striving to make it so, and did not let them move anv wav but with the multitude. To fight with this thick swarming, inexhaustible, all-penetrating mass, which now feared nothing, was as easy as to fence in dough'5.
The soldiers were won over to the side of the revolution and Tsarism was vanquished.
Today, most tourist attractions and hotels are near the Winter Palace end of Nevsky Prospekt. In 1917, Toe American revolutionaries, John Reed and Louise Bryant stayed at the Astoria Hotel. Rasputin, the mad monk and reputed lover of Tsar Nicholas Il's wife was also a guest, spied here by police cavorting with one of his mistresses.
Nobles blamed the drunken peasant for all the ill-fated decisions of his royal patrons and murdered him in the nearby Yusupov Palace. Press reports of his scandalous life and death undermined the monarchy.
A waxwork Rasputin now holds court in the Palace cellar. This grandiose residence with its own theatre reveals the fabulous wealth of the aristocracy under sarism
However such wealth is dwarfed by the fortunes of Russia's rich today. The net worth of the country's billionaires has escalated from $90 billion in 2005 to $172 billion in 2006.
Many of the Tsars palaces are on the outskirts of St Petersburg. The Nazis gutted some of them when the Red Army forced their retreat in 1944, but they have since been restored. Most tourists visit Tsarkoe Selo (the Tsar's village) and the Pavlovsk and Catherine Palaces. The Peterhof overlooking the Gulf of Finland is also a popular cav-oul.
Nicholas II liked to watch his navy from the Peterhof. He ordered the mobilisation of Russian troops there in 1914, resulting in four million dying before the year was out. Nicholas didn't do any fighting himself, but according to his diary he liked shooting CLOWS Paintings in his palaces show him posing in military uniform. The tyrant was killed by a Bolshevik firing squad in 1918 and has recently been canonised as a
by the Russian Orthodox Church.
The Tsar tried to muster his troops in Tsarkoe Selo to crush the February Revolution in 1917, but his Generals realised the game was up when his own bodyguards rebelled.
Later Kerensky, the leader of Une Provisional Government. attempted to destroy the October Revolution by launching cossacks against the Bolsheviks
His forces unere. were repelled and Kerensky dressed as a sailor fled alone from his base at the Gatchina Palace. The Reds led by Trotsky finished off another white army at Gatchina in 1919. The playgrounds of the Walking through the city. I really felt I was Old Order. the city centre is Vyborg. This industrial District was the very cauldron of the revoution'°
In February 191% its women textile workers fed up with growing breadlines went over the coals'&. on strike (remembered now by Womens Day) and sparked February revolution.
auer me sars tau. ractor. workers at its great industrial
establishments formed military detachments of Red Guards to protect working class demonstranons
When Lenin returned to Russia from exile in April 1917 he stepped off a train at the Finland Station Vyborg. gical crowd jammed the square in front of the station roaring Lenin'.
Addressing the crowd, Lenin laid into the bourgeois Provisional Government
"they are deceiving ... the whole Russian people. The people need peace; the people need bread; the people need land. And they give you war, hunger, no bread-leave the landlords still on the land...
We must fight for the social
revolution, fight to the end,
till the complete victory of the proletariat!" quote foot note
Now the square is called Ploschad Lenina and the Soviet Union's first statue of Lenin dominates still, facing a dirty motorway beside the Neva.
It is a short walk from the
Finland Station to what is now the Russian Museum of Political History. The capped figure of Lenin is depicted in a stained glass window in the entrance hall. A huge painting of Lenin speaking at the Finland Station hangs above a staircase.
Upstairs is Lenin's study Tsar became graveyards of the and a meeting room used by the Bolshevik Central Across the River Neva from Committee. When Lenin arrived his comrades wanted to give him tea and to treat suburb of St Petersburg in him to speeches of welcome 1917. Trotsky described it as but he made them talk about tactics?. He addressed another crowd from the bal cony of the Palace and then 'hauled the Bolsheviks...
Lenin made a series of speeches in April 1917 (the the April Theses) criticising 'old Bolsheviks' like Kamenev and Stalin for sowing illusions in the Provisional In February textile workers fed up with growing went on strike (remembered now by and sparked the February revolution. Government and not exposing lne support by Lne Socialist Revolutionaries, and Mensheviks for the imperialist war. He condemned the conciliatory approaches by the party to such currents. He raised the slogans 'Down with the Provisional Government' and 'All Power to the Soviets' (workers councils).
Yet initally his 'April theses'(exhibited now in the museum), were strongly opposed by many of the Party's leaders. He overcame this opposition as he articulated the views of rank and file members. At the end of April a party conterence supported his positions and the Bolsheviks became the party of insurrection.
Yet when a million workers demonstrated the Provisional Government in the July days of 1917, the Bolsheviks cautioned an uprising was premature. The Government dealt with the disturbances and clamped down on the the Bolsheviks. They were driven out of the Kshesinskaya Palace and Lenin had to go underground.
He was still in hiding in the Vyborg in October. When the Government decided to move against the St Petersburg Soviet and Bolshevik papers, the party made its bid for power.
Lenin wanted to be at the Smolny Institute, the base for the insurrection, at the decisive hour. He was afraid that once the revolution started the bridges across the Neva would be raised cutting him off from his comrades at the home to the St Petersburg