2. return of Lenin

• Lenin returned to Russia on a sealed train provided by the Germans, who were hoping his defeatist views would undermine the Russian war effort
• Lenin arrived in Petrograd


  3 April
• April Theses


  Ten-point programme for a second revolution based on giving power to the Soviets
• Lenin had turned the Party programme on its head. Instead of accepting the need for a 'bourgeois stage' of the revolution he was calling for a 'proletarian revolution' in one step
• Gradually Lenin won the party round to his Theses
• Main factor for Lenin winning the party round

  • Mass enrolment into the party of workers and soldiers, who knew little about Marxist theory and could not understand the need for a 'bourgeois revolution'
• Workers and soldiers could not understand why their leaders wanted to reach socialism in two stages when they could get there in one