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This split in revolutionary strategies lasted for decades, and though the Bolsheviks claimed a majority, they were often outvoted within the party. Plekhanov tended to side with the Mensheviks, and so did an obstreperously brilliant newcomer named Lev Bronstein, who signed his fiery pamphlets with the name Trotsky. Lenin fought ruthlessly for control. He denounced his opponents as not Social Democrats but "Social Chauvinists," as "puerile," as "windbags"; after he lost a vote, he would accuse the winners of spiritless "parliamentarianism." When the Russian workers rose up in the largely spontaneous revolt of 1905, it was Trotsky, still only 25, who headed St. Petersburg's first soviet of workers and temporarily seized power in its name; when the Czar's soldiers crushed the revolt, Trotsky was sent to Siberia (he soon escaped on a hijacked sleigh). Lenin remained in Geneva, planning, maneuvering. In 1912 he finally had the strength to expel all the Mensheviks from his party.
It was World War I, which the exiled Lenin fervently opposed, that finally brought him to the threshold of victory. Battered by German triumphs, disheartened by bread riots and other signs of popular hostility, Czar Nicholas II abdicated in March 1917 and handed over power to a provisional government headed by the conservative Prince Lvov. Lenin passionately argued that the time for revolution was now.
Lenin could hardly lead a revolution from exile in Geneva, of course, but when he asked Berlin for permission to travel home through Germany, the Germans happily agreed to provide him with a sealed railway carriage (rather like a container for a deadly bacillus) and even allocated secret funds to aid his plans to stop the war. And so, after ten more years of exile, Lenin finally arrived by train at the Finland Station in Petrograd on April 16, 1917. He climbed onto an armored car and began making a speech. "The people need peace. The people need bread. The people need land," he cried. "And they give you war, hunger, no bread . . . We must fight for the social revolution."
When rioting broke out in July, Prince Lvov banned the Bolsheviks (who grew fourfold, to hundreds of thousands, in 1917), sent Lenin into hiding and % arrested Trotsky (newly arrived from New York City and newly allied with Lenin). Lvov then resigned in favor of his War Minister, Alexander Kerensky, who called in troops to maintain order in the capital and shut down Bolshevik newspapers. Trotsky, out of jail again, mobilized Red Guards to defend the Petrograd soviet, which he now headed. The government troops would not fight. Lenin called for an armed uprising. Almost without opposition, the Bolsheviks seized government buildings, electric plants, the post office and finally the Winter Palace, where Kerensky's Cabinet had taken refuge.