One hundred years ago this month, a train pulled by locomotive No. 293 arrived at the Finland Station in Petrograd (St. Petersburg). Though it was late at night, a large crowd waited waving red flags and flowers. Within a sealed railcar was a passenger who would soon become dictator of the world's first Marxist state: Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin.
Returning from a decade in exile, he was jubilantly greeted by socialist comrades, old and new, who a month earlier had deposed Nicholas II. “The Russian Revolution achieved by you,” Lenin declared at the station, “has opened a new epoch.” A new epoch, to be sure, but certainly not a better one for the more than 100 million people who, over the course of the next century, would be tortured, persecuted, and murdered in the name of communism.
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