Studio Davide Monteleone

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The April Theses #1

In March 1917 Vladimir Ilych Ulyanov (LENIN) was leaving exiled and in poverty in Zurich. Within eight months he assumed the leadership on 16000000 people occupying one-sixth of inhabited surface of the world. On April 9th 1917, with the support of German authorities, at that time in war with Russia, he travelled back to his own country on a train across Germany, Sweden and Finland to reach Finland Station in St. Petersburg on April 16th.  By the time he was back in St Petersburg he wrote a ten points program known as “The April Theses”. 

Lenin's Statue at "RGASPI" - Moscow. ©Davide Monteleone.

Part of the documents concerning Lenin's life between March 27th and April 22nd 1917 which I reviewed to research about the trip and "The April Theses".


100 year later I created a chronology of that 2 weeks of Lenin’s life just before the events that changed Russia and the entire world. In search of the original draft of “The April Theses” I recreated and sometime reacted on a real non-invented trip Lenin’s epic journey on the base of archival documents found it at the R.G.A.S.P.I (Political History Russian State Archive of Political History ) and historical books including “To Finland Station” by Edmund Wilson and “The sealed train” by Michael Pearson.