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The Lenin myth portrays him as the master theoretician of Communist revolutions. In fact, not one successful 20th century revolution—not even the Russian—followed the pattern that Lenin advocated. As he saw it, small bands of professional revolutionaries would inspire the masses and lead them in forcibly overthrowing established regimes. This was his hope as he waited in self-imposed exile in Western Europe around the turn of the century. There, amid endless quarrels with rival Socialist exiles, he created his own cadre of disciples who expected revolutions to break out in Europe and then spread throughout the world. Lenin's journal Iskra (The Spark), was printed abroad and smuggled into Russia. "Out of this spark," grandly proclaimed the first issue, "will come a conflagration."
As the years passed and the spark failed to light any major fires, he grew discouraged. Six weeks before the February 1917 revolution, which would depose Czar Nicholas II, Lenin, then 46, told a group of young Socialists in Zurich: "We old people will probably not live to see the decisive battles of the coming revolution." Less than a year later, he was established as the heir of the Romanovs.
The February revolution, Russia's only spontaneous popular uprising, created a constitutional government that Lenin despised. He viewed it as "giving power to the bourgeoisie, because of the proletariat's insufficient awareness and organization." In his immediate shock over the revolution, he even described it as a plot by France and England to prevent Russia from signing a peace treaty with Germany. Lenin may have been unprepared for this momentous turning point, but he had the political genius to capitalize on it. He persuaded the Bolsheviks—a band of perhaps 20,000 disciplined revolutionaries in a population of 150 million—to destroy the ineffectual provisional government of Socialist Revolutionary Alexander Kerensky, which was giving Russia its only democratic moment in history.
As Lenin put it, the Bolshevik seizure of power during the ten world-shaking days of October 1917 was "as easy as lifting a feather." Lenin and his ideas did not arouse the masses to overthrow an exploiting regime, as his early scenario had called for. Instead, he simply but effectively thrust himself into the vacuum of power that had been created by the disintegration of the Russian state and society. In the name of building socialism, he overthrew the "bourgeois" liberties that Russia had barely begun to enjoy, convinced that he knew what was best for the people. "The will of a class is sometimes fulfilled by a dictator," he explained in 1918. "Soviet socialist democracy is not in the least incompatible with individual rule and dictatorship."