A small man with a large certainty. Years of exile and party splits, a sealed train in April 1917, the seizure of power in October, the Red Terror, then a series of strokes while the succession fight starts around a man still alive.
The fork
April 1917. The Tsar is gone, the war goes on, and Germany sends him home because it wants Russia out of the war. Without the train he is a café theorist in Zurich; with it he is in Petrograd demanding the next revolution.
What they wanted
He wants a revolution that does not stop at a liberal parliament. Peace with Germany is a tool. The Cheka, his secret police, is a tool. Theory becomes a cellar because he thinks history will not wait.
What it cost
The Red Terror, the dispersal of the elected Constituent Assembly in January 1918, the banning of other parties and factions, and a one-party state that outlives him by seventy years.
The fight
Soviet historians wrote a saint, the necessary midwife of a workers' state. Since the archives opened, the man who taught the century to make opposition a crime has come into focus.