This Day in History: Lenin's Ghost -A Man Who Changed the 20th Century

A ghost who changed the course of the 20th Century, Lenin, died today in 1924. This strange but fascinating YouTube Video montage of Lenin’s life shows his arrival in a sealed train at the Finland Station in St. Petersburg after a decade of obscurity and exile in Germany. The year is 1917. Russia is torn asunder by bloodshed and revolution.

A short, stocky, muscular figure, with the hunched shoulders of a prize-fighter, stepped down off the train and into the whirlwind of history. The platform was crisscrossed by spotlights and bands were playing the Marseillaise; a detachment of sailors with bayonets stood at attention; a great roar of a cheer went up from the crowd of revolutionary workers that was pressing all around, roaring one word: ‘Lenin.’ A shadowy figure stepping down behind Lenin  is Alexander Israel Helphand, who played a significant role in selecting Lenin and sending him into Russia with the goal of sparking a Bolshevik revolt. The objective was to help Germany win World War I. Lenin won the revolution and fulfilled the plots of his German conspirators by pulling Russian troops from the front. Lenin was a Russian, but it was his duty, as he saw it, to aim at Tsarist Russia’s defeat and at the dismemberment of the Russian Empire. The course of his life was an accident of history-the seizing of power by the force of a single will, a solitary ruthless intellectual who changed the course of the 20th century.

Video Montage

Comments

[Carbonfish]

A very vivid and evocative description. Someone at The Daily Galaxy can write. Well done.

KC