Mikhail Sokolov as false witness

The painting above, by Soviet artist Mikhail Sokolov (1885–1947), appeared in an unsigned article entitled “The most useful pawns in interstate chess”, published in issue 29 (October 2016) of the popular history journal #tarih. The caption beneath the image read:

Returned from exile, launched the revolution – Lenin, having returned from 10 years of exile in Switzerland, is greeted with great enthusiasm by the public at Petrograd’s Finland Station, 16 April 1917 (p. 51).

When we look at this 1937 painting by Sokolov – that is, twenty years after Lenin’s return from exile – we see that the person who returned to Russia and was greeted with such enthusiasm on 16 April 1917 was not Lenin alone. In the painting, just behind Lenin – who is raising his hat with his right hand to salute the crowd as he steps off the train – stands Joseph Stalin.

Sokolov’s painting was used by the journal #tarih as visual material, without any accompanying explanatory note. As a result, it is highly likely that many of the magazine’s trusting readers were left with the impression that Stalin returned to Russia on the same train as Lenin. Regrettably, this lack of editorial care has the unintended effect of reproducing the long-standing and astonishingly extensive campaign of falsification, carried out under Stalin’s directives, aimed at distorting the history of the October Revolution and the Soviet Union. Sadly, we occasionally encounter the same lack of rigour in both domestic and foreign publications that lay claim to a Trotskyist stance.

As noted in the article published in #tarih, Lenin – like many other political exiles – arrived at Petrograd’s Finland Station on 16 April 1917 (3 April according to the Julian calendar), five weeks after the February Revolution and the fall of the tsarist regime, having travelled via Germany in a sealed train. Among those who welcomed him was Nikolai Sukhanov, who vividly recounts in his memoirs how thousands had gathered at the station, adorned with red-and-gold banners and placards proclaiming the dawn of the world socialist revolution. He makes no mention, of course, of Stalin appearing directly behind Lenin.

The eight-day journey carried a total of 32 exiles—Bolsheviks as well as members of other revolutionary organisations, including women and children—apart from the train crew. Stalin was most certainly not among them. Moreover, he was not a member of the Petrograd Soviet Executive Committee, nor was he among those officially tasked with welcoming Lenin at the station. That responsibility had been assigned to the Soviet Presidium (the Presidential Bureau), of which Stalin was not a member.

In short: When Lenin arrived at Finland Station and entered the former imperial waiting room once reserved for the Tsars, Stalin was nowhere to be seen. He had neither travelled on the train nor stood among those who had gathered to welcome Lenin at the station.

Stalin, the foremost representative of the bureaucratic caste that had usurped power from the working class, mobilised an army of propagandists, artists, and writers to portray him as a decisive organiser of the October Revolution, Lenin’s closest comrade-in-arms and natural heir, a brilliant orator, and the invincible commander of the Civil War – none of which he actually was. Sokolov’s painting was merely one product of the Stalinist regime’s reactionary propaganda campaign in the Soviet Union, grounded in the criminal falsification of history. This campaign did more than just burnish the image of a blood-soaked dictator; it also served as the principal ideological cement of the counter-revolutionary bureaucratic caste – not only in the Soviet Union but across the world.

Mikhail Sokolov: a painter who gained prominence through his contributions to Stalinist propaganda in the Soviet Union, only to fall victim – like so many others – to Stalinism himself.