In February 1917 the revolts against Tsar Nicholas II and the formation of the first soviets all over the former imperial Russia began: first in Petrograd, then in Moscow, then in the rest of oblasts. Lenin receives the news with great enthusiasm from his exile in Zurich. He decides to return to Petrograd and for this purpose Fritz Platten, secretary of the Swiss Social Democratic Party, negotiates with Kaiser Wilhelm II a safe route on a train with extraterritoriality rights that is to cross the whole of Germany – later to be known as “the sealed train”.
In exchange for Lenin’s promise to stop Russia’s war against Germany if the revolution succeeds, the Kaiser guaranteed that “the sealed train” would not be searched by the Prussian authorities and that the identity of its 32 crew members would be protected.
Finally, on April 16, 1917, Lenin arrives with Grigory Zinoviev at the Finlyandsky station in Petrograd to lead the revolts. He does so wearing a bowler hat and hugging a large bouquet of flowers. However, at some point, his secretary (or perhaps Zinoviev himself) notices that Lenin is the only one wearing a bowler hat -a look that surely does not work too well to harangue the proletarian masses-, and urges him to change it for the more than well-known painter’s cap, with which he will be portrayed in numerous official paintings. From that moment on, Lenin abandons his traditional bourgeois bowler worn in exile in favor of a much more epic and workerist iconographic representation of the leader.
