In 1917, on this day the Russian Marxist theorist and German Agent Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (codename Lenin) died of a heart attack about upon by the rejection of his call for an immediate socialist revolution (his "April Theses") by the Petrograd Soviet.

Death of LeninWritten on the train from Geneva and based upon his early theory of imperialism, the theses was more radical than virtually anything Lenin's fellow revolutionaries had heard. And just four weeks after the fall of tsarism, his thought process was completely out of context as a result of his isolation from mainstream political doctrine. Only later was the discovery made of an insidious German plot to force Russia out of the Great War.

To Lenin's huge disappointment, resistance was overwhelming. Pravda's editorial board refused to print it on the pretext of a mechanical breakdown in its printing press. And a meeting of the Bolshevik Central Committee on April 6 passed a negative resolution on them. Just twenty-four hours before his heart attack the Petrograd Committee had overwhelmingly voted the manifesto, two voting in favor, thirteen against, with one abstention.

However Lenin's death was not the end of the germ of communism that the Imperial German Government had placed in the sealed train from Switzerland. After the war, his political heir Leon Trotsky left Russia heading Westwards. He would later become a Political Commissar in the Sparticist Government in Berlin. In 1940, he would be sent to Geneva where the League of Nations was debating St Petersburg's request for military assistance to defend Republican Russia's territorial integrity from German Communist aggression.