St. Petersburg: What’s in a Name? - The Wise World Traveler: Becoming a Part of All that You Meet - page 146

years on, in the First World War, Russia's enemy was Germany. A German-sounding cap-
ital city was deemed unpatriotic, so the name was Russified to Petrograd ( grad , the Slavic
word for city). Petrograd was the first city to fall to the Bolshevik revolutionaries; but as
the revolution was being consolidated, Petrograd was deemed too devoted to foreign ideas,
too open to invasion from the West. The capital of the new Soviet Union was moved from
Petrograd closer to the heartland, to Russia's former capital, Moscow. On Lenin's death in
1924, to honor the father of the Revolution, Petrograd was renamed Leningrad. And after
the collapse of the Soviet Union in the early 1990s, the citizens of Leningrad reached back
for happier memories and voted to rename their city St. Petersburg.
WHY WAS THE CITY NAMED FOR LENIN?
Lenin was leader of the most successful group (The Bolsheviks) contending for power
as the Czarist regime collapsed in 1917. From 1917 until his death in 1924, Lenin was
the guiding genius of Communist rule in Russia. Until the collapse of the Soviet Union
in 1991, his likeness was everywhere—pictures, plaques, stamps, and medals. His statues
were heroic—striding forward, arm outstretched, pointing (it was said) to the future. For
seventy years, his memory filled the niche, Father of Communist Russia, and schoolchil-
dren wrote letters to his memory: “Dear Comrade Lenin, Teach us to be Good Commun-
ists”.
His initial power base was St. Petersburg, and from there, the Communist regime
extended outward to all of Czarist Russia. “Like a bacillus sealed in a flask,” to use
Churchill's famous words, Lenin in 1917 was spirited from his exile in Switzerland and put
by the Germans on a sealed train that roared through the Baltic basin until it came to a halt
at St. Petersburg's Finland Station. Germany's military motives were simple: to foment re-
volution in Russia and force it out of the war, thereby relieving the German army from its
eastern front, ready to turn for “a final assault” on the West.
WHAT FORCES AND EVENTS FED THE RUSSIAN REVOLUTION?
Russia had a sprawling, poorly organized and equipped army, suffering almost constant
defeat and terrible casualties. It had an obsolete industrial system unable to meet military
needs and soaring inflation. The Czar, Nicholas II, asserting himself as commander-in-
chief, was an incompetent military leader, constantly distracted by family problems (a he-
mophiliac child) and a wife in thrall to the “healing powers” of a mystical monk, Rasputin.