Postcard made in the Soviet Union with the picture of a Lenin statue in front of the Finland Railway Station. Here he delivered his famous speech on top of an armoured vehicle during the October Revolution.
Lenin had been living in exile in Switzerland during the First World War. After the February Revolution he was permitted by the German authorities to travel via sealed train across German territory, take a ferry to Helsinki and thence a train to Petrograd, as Saint Petersburg was then known. Arriving at the city’s Finland Station he was met by a crowd of Bolshevik sympathisers and climbed onto the turret of an armoured car.
He rode the car to the Bolshevik headquarters at the Kshesinskaya Palace and delivered a speech in favour of Bolshevism and denouncing the moderate Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionary Party. After the Russian Civil War, Lenin led the communist Soviet Union, but died of a stroke on 21 January 1924.