It has been 100 years since the October Revolution that heralded the Bolshevik takeover of Russia and changed the world. Yet today, Russians have mixed feelings about the centenary and approach it with care.
Even revolutionaries have moments of doubt. Take Vladimir Ulyanov, a Russian emigré in Zurich during World War I whose nom de guerre was Lenin. We old ones, he said in a speech to Swiss socialists in 1917, might not experience the coming revolution. But you young Swiss, you will fight and win! It was January and Ullyanov-Lenin didn’t yet know that the czar would fall a mere seven weeks later. And that he himself would take the czar’s place by the end of the year.
