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Ultimate Guide: Overlanding & Road Tripping in Russia. Best Practices

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For a second part of our adventure, you will visit a network of underground limestone caves with an experienced caver guide. Depending on your adventurism, you can either wander in some easily accessible and beautiful cavern halls or you can search the depths of remote parts and the most challenging kilometers of a lengthy underground network!

Finally, after a long day of exploring, you will have a lovely meal of our traditional food and enjoy a blazing campfire.

During first days we will visit all must-see place in Moscow. Whether you're looking to visit medieval monasteries, historic houses, stunning cathedrals, soviet monumental skyscrapers, wonderful parks and more, there are plenty of landmark destinations to visit when you're in Moscow.

The next 2-3 days we will see life in the typical Russian provinces visiting small towns of the famous Golden ring of Russia. It is a ring of ancient towns, which also played a significant role in the formation of the Russian Orthodox Church. They still preserve the memory of the most important and significant events in Russian history.

The towns are one of the best places to visit in Russia! They have been called "open-air museums" and feature unique monuments of Russian architecture of the 12th–18th centuries, including kremlins, monasteries, cathedrals, and churches. You will also see a lot of rural Russia with its old wooden houses and traditional villages.

Paramus Oradell   River Edge Your Local News for Paramus, Oradell, and River Edge

Man, 33, Killed By Car Trying To Cross Route 3 In East Rutherford, Police Say

A 33-year-old man was struck and killed by a car on Route 3 Thursday night, Sept. 26, police said.

East Rutherford PD

Officers were called to the eastbound lanes of the highway at midnight where the pedestrian had been struck by a 2004 Toyota Camry while trying to cross the highway, ERPD Capt. Jeff Yannacone said.

He was pronounced dead at the scene. No charges have been filed and the investigation is ongoing.

Click here to follow Daily Voice Paramus and receive free news updates.

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Journey to Moscow

   Welcome to Moscow - the capital of Russia, its political, scientific, historical, architectural and business centre, from which power and might of the Russian state developed.

Russian Revolution

Vladimir Lenin’s Return Journey to Russia Changed the World Forever

On the 100th anniversary of the Russian Revolution, our writer set out from Zurich to relive this epic travel

Joshua Hammer

Contributing writer

The town of Haparanda, 700 miles north of Stockholm, is a lonely smudge of civilization in the vast tundra of Swedish Lapland. It was once a thriving outpost for trade in minerals, fur and timber, and the main northern crossing point into Finland, across the Torne River. On a cold and cloudless October afternoon, I stepped off the bus after a two-hour ride from Lulea, the last stop on the passenger train from Stockholm, and approached a tourist booth inside the Haparanda bus station. The manager sketched out a walk that took me past the northernmost IKEA store in the world, and then under a four-lane highway and down the Storgatan, or main street. Scattered among the concrete apartment blocks were vestiges of the town’s rustic past: a wood-shingle trading house; the Stadshotell, a century-old inn; and the Handelsbank, a Victorian structure with cupolas and a curving gray-slate roof.

I followed a side street to a grassy esplanade on the banks of the Torne. Across the river in Finland the white dome of the 18th-century Alatornio Church rose over a forest of birches. In the crisp light near dusk I walked on to the railroad station, a monumental neo-Classical brick structure. Inside the waiting room I found what I’d been looking for, a bronze plaque mounted on a blue tile wall: “Here Lenin passed through Haparanda on April 15, 1917, on his way from exile in Switzerland to Petrograd in Russia.”

Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, joined by 29 other Russian exiles, a Pole and a Swiss, was on his way to Russia to try to seize power from the government and declare a “dictatorship of the proletariat,” a phrase coined in the mid-19th century and adopted by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, the founders of Marxism. Lenin and his fellow exiles, revolutionaries all, including his wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya, had boarded a train in Zurich, crossed Germany, traveled the Baltic Sea by ferry and ridden 17 hours by rail from Stockholm to this remote corner of Sweden.

They hired horse-drawn sleds to head across the frozen river to Finland. “I remember that it was night,” Grigory Zinoviev, one of the exiles traveling with Lenin, would write in a memoir. “There was a long thin ribbon of sledges. On each sledge were two people. Tension as [we] approached the Finnish border reached its maximum....Vladimir Ilyich was outwardly calm.” Eight days later, he would reach St. Petersburg, then Russia’s capital but known as Petrograd.

Lenin’s journey, undertaken 100 years ago this April, set in motion events that would forever change history—and are still being reckoned with today—so I decided to retrace his steps, curious to see how the great Bolshevik imprinted himself on Russia and the nations he passed through along the way. I also wanted to sense some of what Lenin experienced as he sped toward his destiny. He traveled with an entourage of revolutionaries and upstarts, but my companion was a book I’ve long admired,  To the Finland   Station , Edmund Wilson’s magisterial 1940 history of revolutionary thought, in which he described Lenin as the dynamic culmination of 150 years of radical theory. Wilson’s title refers to the Petrograd depot, “a little shabby stucco station, rubber gray and tarnished pink,” where Lenin stepped off the train that had carried him from Finland to remake the world.

As it happens, the centennial of Lenin’s fateful trip comes just when the Russia question, as it might be called, has grown increasingly urgent. President Vladimir Putin has emerged in recent years as a militaristic authoritarian intent on rebuilding Russia as a world power. U.S.-Russian relations are more fraught than in decades.

While Putin embraces the aggressive posture of his Soviet predecessors—the murder of oppositionists, the expansion of the state’s territorial boundaries by coercion and violence—and in that sense is heir to Lenin’s brutal legacy, he is no fan. Lenin, who represents a tumultuous force that turned a society upside down, is hardly the kind of figure that Putin, a deeply conservative autocrat, wants to celebrate. “We did not need a global revolution,” Putin told an interviewer last year on the 92nd anniversary of Lenin’s death. A few days later Putin denounced Lenin and the Bolsheviks for executing Czar Nicholas II, his family and their servants, and for killing thousands of clergy in the Red Terror, and placing a “time bomb” under the Russian state.

The sun was setting as I made my way toward the bus station to catch my ride across the bridge to Finland. I shivered in the Arctic chill as I walked beside the river Lenin had crossed, with the old church steeple reflecting off the placid water in the fading pink light. At the terminal café, I ordered a plate of herring—misidentified by the waitress as “whale”—and sat in the gathering darkness until the bus pulled up, in a mundane echo of Lenin’s perilous journey.

Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov was born in 1870 into a middle-class family in Simbirsk (now called Ulyanovsk), on the Volga River, 600 miles east of Moscow. His mother was well-educated, his father the director of primary schools for Simbirsk Province and a “man of high character and ability,” Wilson writes. Though Vladimir and his siblings grew up in comfort, the poverty and injustice of imperial Russia weighed heavily upon them. In 1887 his older brother, Alexander, was hanged in St. Petersburg for his involvement in a conspiracy to assassinate Czar Alexander III. The execution “hardened” young Vladimir, said his sister, Anna, who would be sent into exile for subversion. Vladimir’s high-school principal complained that the teenager had “a distant manner, even with people he knows and even with the most superior of his schoolmates.”

After an interlude at Kazan University, Ulyanov began reading the works of Marx and Engels, the 19th-century theoreticians of Communism. “From the moment of his discovery of Marx...his way was clear,” the British historian Edward Crankshaw wrote. “Russia had to have revolution.” Upon earning a law degree from St. Petersburg University in 1891, Lenin became a leader of a Marxist group in St. Petersburg, secretly distributing revolutionary pamphlets to factory workers and recruiting new members. As the brother of an executed anti-czarist, he was under surveillance by the police, and in 1895 he was arrested, convicted of distributing propaganda and sentenced to three years in Siberian exile. Nadezhda Krupskaya, the daughter of an impoverished Russian army officer suspected of revolutionary sympathies, joined him there. The two had met at a gathering of leftists in St. Petersburg; she married him in Siberia. Ulyanov later would adopt the nom de guerre Lenin (likely derived from the name of a Siberian river, the Lena).

Soon after his return from Siberia, Lenin fled into exile in Western Europe. Except for a brief period back in Russia, he remained out of the country until 1917. Moving from Prague to London to Bern, publishing a radical newspaper called  Iskra  (“Spark”) and trying to organize an international Marxist movement, Lenin laid out his plan to transform Russia from a feudal society into a modern workers’ paradise. He argued that revolution would come from a coalition of peasants and factory workers, the so-called proletariat—led always by professional revolutionaries. “Attention must be devoted  principally to raising  the workers to the level of revolutionaries,” Lenin wrote in his manifesto  What Is to Be Done?  “It is not at all our task to descend to the level of the ‘working masses.’”

Soon after the outbreak of the world war in August 1914, Lenin and Krupskaya were in Zurich, living off a small family inheritance.

I made my way to the Altstadt, a cluster of medieval alleys that rise from the steep banks of the Limmat River. The Spiegelgasse, a narrow cobblestone lane, jogs uphill from the Limmat, winds past the Cabaret Voltaire, a café founded in 1916 and, in many accounts, described as the birthplace of Dadaism, and spills into a leafy square dominated by a stone fountain. Here I found Number 14, a five-story building with a gabled rooftop, and a commemorative plaque mounted on the beige facade. The legend, in German, declares that from February 21, 1916, until April 2, 1917, this was the home of “Lenin, leader of the Russian Revolution.”

Today the Altstadt is Zurich’s most touristy neighborhood, filled with cafés and gift shops, but when Lenin lived here, it was a down-and-out quarter prowled by thieves and prostitutes. In her  Reminiscences of Lenin , Krupskaya described their home as “a dingy old house” with “a smelly courtyard” overlooking a sausage factory. The house had one thing going for it, Krupskaya remembered: The owners were “a working-class family with a revolutionary outlook, who condemned the imperialist war.” At one point, their landlady exclaimed, “The soldiers ought to turn their weapons against their governments!” After that, wrote Krupskaya, “Ilyich would not hear of moving to another place.” Today that rundown rooming house has been renovated and features a trinket shop on the ground floor selling everything from multicolored Lenin busts to lava lamps.

Lenin spent his days churning out tracts in the reading room of Zurich’s Central Library and, at home, played host to a stream of fellow exiles. Lenin and Krupskaya took morning strolls along the Limmat and, when the library was closed on Thursday afternoons, hiked up the Zurichberg north of the city, taking along some books and “two bars of nut chocolate in blue wrappers at 15 centimes.”

I followed Lenin’s usual route along the Limmatquai, the river’s east bank, gazing across the narrow waterway at Zurich’s landmarks, including the church of St. Peter, distinguished by the largest clock face in Europe. The Limmatquai skirted a spacious square and at the far corner I reached the popular Café Odeon. Famed for Art Nouveau décor that has changed little in a century—chandeliers, brass fittings and marble-sheathed walls—the Odeon was one of Lenin’s favorite spots for reading newspapers. At the counter, I fell into conversation with a Swiss journalist who freelances for the venerable  Neue Zürcher Zeitung . “The paper had already been around for 140 years when Lenin lived here,” he boasted.

On the afternoon of March 15, 1917, Mieczyslaw Bronski, a young Polish revolutionary, raced up the stairs to the Lenins’ one-room apartment, just as the couple had finished lunch. “Haven’t you heard the news?” he exclaimed. “There’s a revolution in Russia!”

Enraged over food shortages, corruption and the disastrous war against Germany and Austria-Hungary, thousands of demonstrators had filled the streets of Petrograd, clashing with police; soldiers loyal to the czar switched their support to the protesters, forcing Nicholas II to abdicate. He and his family were placed under house arrest. The Russian Provisional Government, dominated by members of the bourgeoisie—the caste that Lenin despised—had taken over, sharing power with the Petrograd Soviet, a local governing body. Committees, or “soviets,” made up of industrial workers and soldiers, many with radical sympathies, had begun to form across Russia. Lenin raced out to buy every newspaper he could find—and began making plans to return home.

The German government was at war with Russia, but it nonetheless agreed to help Lenin return home. Germany saw “in this obscure fanatic one more bacillus to let loose in tottering and exhausted Russia to spread infection,” Crankshaw writes.

On April 9, Lenin and his 31 comrades gathered at Zurich station. A group of about 100 Russians, enraged that the revolutionaries had arranged passage by negotiating with the German enemy, jeered at the departing company. “Provocateurs! Spies! Pigs! Traitors!” the demonstrators shouted, in a scene documented by historian Michael Pearson. “The Kaiser is paying for the journey....They’re going to hang you...like German spies.” (Evidence suggests that German financiers did, in fact, secretly fund Lenin and his circle.) As the train left the station, Lenin reached out the window to bid farewell to a friend. “Either we’ll be swinging from the gallows in three months or we shall be in power,” he predicted.

Seated with Krupskaya in an end compartment, Lenin scribbled in an exercise book, expressing views similar to those he had advanced shortly before departure, by telegram to his Bolshevik cohorts in the Petrograd Soviet, urging no compromise: “Our tactics: no support to the new government;...arming of the proletariat the sole guarantee;...no rapprochement with other parties.”

As they rolled toward Berlin, Krupskaya and Lenin took note of the absence of young men in the villages where they stopped—virtually all were at the front or dead.

A Deutsche Bahn regional train second-class compartment bore me across Germany to Rostock, a port city on the Baltic Sea. I boarded the  Tom Sawyer , a seven-deck vessel the length of two football fields operated by the German TT Lines. A handful of tourists and dozens of Scandinavian and Russian truck drivers sipped goulash soup and ate bratwurst in the cafeteria as the ferry lurched into motion. Stepping onto the outdoor observation deck on a cold, drizzly night, I felt the sting of sea spray and stared up at a huge orange lifeboat, clamped in its frame high above me. Leaning over the starboard rail, I could make out the red and green lights of a buoy flashing through the mist. Then we passed the last jetty and headed into the open sea, bound for Trelleborg, Sweden, six hours north.

The sea was rougher when Lenin made the crossing aboard a Swedish ferry,  Queen Victoria . While most of his comrades suffered the heaving of the ship below decks, Lenin remained outside, joining a few other stalwarts in singing revolutionary anthems. At one point a wave broke across the bow and smacked Lenin in the face. As he dried himself with a handkerchief, someone declared, to laughter, “The first revolutionary wave from the shores of Russia.”

Plowing through the blackness of the Baltic night, I found it easy to imagine the excitement that Lenin must have felt as his ship moved inexorably toward his homeland. After standing in the drizzle for a half-hour, I headed to my spartan cabin to catch a few hours sleep before the vessel docked in Sweden at 4:30 in the morning.

In Trelleborg, I caught a train north to Stockholm, as Lenin did, riding past lush meadows and forests.

Once in the Swedish capital I followed in Lenin’s footsteps down the crowded Vasagatan, the main commercial street, to PUB, once the city’s most elegant department store, now a hotel. Lenin’s Swedish socialist friends brought him here to be outfitted “like a gentleman” before his arrival in Petrograd. He consented to a new pair of shoes to replace his studded mountain boots, but he drew the line at an overcoat; he was not, he said, opening a tailor shop.

From the former PUB store, I crossed a canal on foot to the Gamla Stan, the Old Town, a hive of medieval alleys on a small island, and walked to a smaller island, Skeppsholmen, the site of another monument to Lenin’s sojourn in Sweden. Created by Swedish artist Bjorn Lovin and situated in the courtyard of the Museum of Modern Art, it consists of a backdrop of black granite and a long strip of cobblestones embedded with a piece of iron tram track. The work pays tribute to an iconic photo of Lenin strolling the Vasagatan, carrying an umbrella and wearing a fedora, joined by Krupskaya and other revolutionaries. The museum catalog asserts that “This is not a monument that pays tribute to a person” but rather is “a memorial, in the true sense of the word.” Yet the work—like other vestiges of Lenin all over Europe—has become an object of controversy. After a visit in January 2016, former Swedish Prime Minister Carl Bildt tweeted that the exhibit was a “shameful monument to Lenin visiting Stockholm. At least it’s dark & discreet.”

Clambering into the horse-drawn sleds on the bank of the frozen Torne in Haparanda on the night of April 15, Lenin and his wife and comrades crossed to Finland, then under Russian control, and fully expected to be turned back at the border or even detained by Russian authorities. Instead they received a hearty welcome. “Everything was already familiar and dear to us,” Krupskaya wrote in  Reminiscences , recalling the train they boarded in Russianized Finland, which had been annexed by Czar Alexander I in 1809. “[T]he wretched third-class cars, the Russian soldiers. It was terribly good.”

I spent the night in Kemi, Finland, a bleak town on Bothnian Bay, walking in the freezing rain through the deserted streets to a concrete-block hotel just up from the waterfront. When I awoke at 7:30 the town was still shrouded in darkness. In winter, a receptionist told me, Kemi experiences only a couple of hours of daylight.

From there, I took the train south to Tampere, a riverside city where Lenin briefly stopped on his way to Petrograd. Twelve years earlier, Lenin had held a clandestine meeting in the Tampere Workers Hall with a 25-year-old revolutionary and bank robber, Joseph Stalin, to discuss money-raising schemes for the Bolsheviks. In 1946, pro-Soviet Finns turned that meeting room into a Lenin Museum, filling it with objects such as Lenin’s high-school honors certificate and iconic portraiture, including a copy of the 1947 painting  Lenin Proclaims Soviet Power , by the Russian artist Vladimir Serov.

“The museum’s primary role was to convey to the Finns the good things about the Soviet system,” curator Kalle Kallio, a bearded historian and self-described “pacifist,” told me when I met him at the entrance to the last surviving Lenin museum outside Russia. At its peak, the Lenin Museum drew 20,000 tourists a year—mostly Soviet tour groups visiting nonaligned Finland to get a taste of the West. But after the Soviet Union broke apart in 1991, interest waned, Finnish members of parliament denounced it and vandals ripped off the sign on the front door and riddled it with bullets. “It was the most hated museum in Finland,” Kallio said.

Under Kallio’s guidance, the struggling museum got a makeover last year. The curator tossed out most of the hagiographic memorabilia and introduced objects that depicted the less palatable aspects of the Soviet state—an overcoat worn by an officer of Stalin’s secret police, the NKVD; a diorama of a Siberian prison camp. “We want to talk about Soviet society and his effect on history, and not make this a glorification thing,” said Kallio, adding that business has begun to pick up, especially among Finnish schoolchildren.

Finns aren’t alone in wanting to wipe out or otherwise grapple with the many tributes to Lenin that dot the former Soviet bloc. Protesters in the former East German city of Schwerin have battled for more than two years against municipal authorities to remove one of the last Lenin statues standing in Germany: a 13-foot-tall memorial erected in 1985 in front of a Soviet-style apartment block. In Nowa Huta, a suburb of Krakow, Poland, once known as “the ideal socialist town,” locals at a 2014 art festival raised a fluorescent green Lenin poised in the act of urination—near where a Lenin statue was torn down in 1989. In Ukraine, about 100 Lenin monuments have been removed in the last couple of years, commencing with a Lenin statue in Kiev toppled during demonstrations that brought down President Viktor Yanukovych in 2014. Even a Lenin sculpture in a central Moscow courtyard was a recent victim of decapitation.

In the morning I boarded the Allegro high-speed train at Helsinki Central Station for the three-and-a-half-hour, 300-mile trip to St. Petersburg. As I settled into my seat in the first-class car, we sped past birch and pine forests and soon approached the Russian border. A female immigration official scrupulously leafed through my U.S. passport, asked the purpose of my visit (tourism, I replied), frowned, wordlessly stamped it and handed it back to me. Shortly afterward, we pulled into the Finlyandsky Vokzal—the Finland Station.

Lenin arrived here on the night of April 16, eight days after leaving Zurich. Hundreds of workers, soldiers and an honor guard of sailors were waiting. Lenin stepped out of the small, red brick depot and climbed onto the roof of an armored car. He promised to pull Russia out of the war and do away with private property. “The people need peace, the people need bread, the people need land. And [the Provisional Government] gives you war, hunger, no bread,” he declared. “We must fight for the social revolution...till the complete victory of the proletariat. Long live the worldwide Socialist revolution!”

“Thus,” said Leon Trotsky, the Marxist theoretician and Lenin’s compatriot, “the February revolution, garrulous and flabby and still rather stupid, greeted the man who had arrived with a determination to set it straight both in thought and in will.” The Russian socialist Nikolai Valentinov, in his 1953 memoir,  Encounters With Lenin , recalls a fellow revolutionary who described Lenin as “that rare phenomenon—a man of iron will and indomitable energy, capable of instilling fanatical faith in the movement and the cause, and possessed of equal faith in himself.”

I caught a tram outside the Finland Station, rebuilt as a concrete colossus in the 1960s, and followed Lenin’s route to his next stop in Petrograd: the Kshesinskaya Mansion, an Art Nouveau villa given by Czar Nicholas II to his ballet-star mistress and seized by Bolsheviks in March 1917. I’d arranged ahead of time for a private tour of the elegant block-long villa, a series of interconnected structures built of stone and brick and featuring decorative metalwork and colored tiles.

Lenin rode on top of an armored vehicle to the mansion and climbed the stairs to a balcony, where he addressed a cheering crowd. “The utter falsity of all the [Provisional Government’s] promises should be made clear.” The villa was declared a state museum by the Soviets during the 1950s, though it, too, has played down the revolutionary propaganda in the last 25 years. “Lenin was a great historical personality,” museum director Evgeny Artemov said as he led me into the office where Lenin worked daily until July 1917. “As for passing judgment, that’s up to our visitors.”

During the spring of 1917, Lenin and his wife resided with his elder sister, Anna, and brother-in-law, Mark Yelizarov, the director of a Petrograd marine insurance company, in an apartment building at Shirokaya Street 52, now Lenina Street. I entered the rundown lobby and climbed a stairwell that reeked of boiled cabbage to a carefully maintained five-room apartment crammed with Lenin memorabilia. Nelli Privalenko, the curator, led me into the salon where Lenin once plotted with Stalin and other revolutionaries. Privalenko pointed out Lenin’s samovar, a piano and a chess table with a secret compartment to hide materials from the police. That artifact spoke to events after the Provisional Government turned against the Bolsheviks in July 1917 and Lenin was on the run, moving among safe houses. “The secret police came here searching for him three times,” Privalenko said.

The Smolny Institute, a former school for aristocratic girls built in 1808, became the staging ground of the October Revolution. In October 1917 Trotsky, the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, based here, mobilized Red Guards, rebellious troops and sailors and prepared them to seize power from the now deeply unpopular Provisional Government. On October 25, Lenin sneaked inside Smolny, and took charge of a coup d’état. “Lenin was coordinating the military attack, sending messages and telegrams from here,” said Olga Romanova, a guide at Smolny, which now houses both a museum and St. Petersburg administrative offices. She led me down a gloomy hallway to the conference room, a former dance hall where the Bolsheviks (“majority”) swept aside their socialist rivals and declared themselves in charge. “By 3 a.m. they heard that the Winter Palace had fallen, and that the government had been arrested.” Barely six months after his return to Russia, Lenin was the absolute ruler of his country.

The man who dreamed of creating an egalitarian society, in fact dealt ruthlessly with anyone who dared oppose him. In his “attitude to his fellow-men,” the Russian economist and one-time Marxist Pyotr Struve wrote in the 1930s, “Lenin breathed coldness, contempt and cruelty.” Crankshaw wrote in a 1954 essay that Lenin “wanted to save the people from the dreadful tyranny of the czars—but in his way and no other. His way held the seeds of another tyranny.”

Memorial, the prominent Russian human rights group, which has exposed abuses under Putin, continues to unearth damning evidence of crimes by Lenin that the Bolsheviks suppressed for decades. “If they had arrested Lenin at the Finland Station, it would have saved everyone a lot of trouble,” historian Alexander Margolis said when I met him at the group’s cramped, book-lined offices. Communiqués uncovered by Russian historians support the idea that Lenin gave the direct order for the execution of the czar and his immediate family.

When the civil war began in 1918, Lenin called for what he termed “mass terror” to “crush” resistance, and tens of thousands of deserters, peasant rebels and ordinary criminals were executed over the next three years. Margolis says that the Soviet leadership white-washed Lenin’s murderous rampage to the end of its 74-year rule. “At Khrushchev’s Party Congress in 1956, the line was that under Lenin all was fine and Stalin was a pervert who spoiled it all for us,” he says. “But the scale of bloodshed, repression and violence was not any different.”

In spite of such revelations, many Russians today view Lenin nostalgically as the founder of a powerful empire, and his statue still rises over countless public squares and private courtyards. There are Lenin  prospekts , or boulevards, from St. Petersburg to Irkutsk, and his embalmed corpse—Lenin died of a brain hemorrhage in 1924 at age 53—still lies in its marble mausoleum beside the Kremlin. It’s one of the many ironies of his legacy that even as elite Russian troops guard his tomb, which hundreds of thousands of people visit annually, the government doesn’t quite know how to evaluate or even recognize what the man did.

In his 1971 appraisal of  To the Finland Station , Edmund Wilson acknowledged the horrors unleashed by the Bolshevik revolutionary—a darkness that has endured. “The remoteness of Russia from the West evidently made it even easier to imagine that the [aim of] the Russian Revolution was to get rid of an oppressive past,” he wrote. “We did not foresee that the new Russia must contain a good deal of the old Russia: censorship, secret police...and an all-powerful and brutal autocracy.”

As I had crossed Sweden and Finland, watching the frozen ground flash by hour after hour, and crossed into Russia, I envisioned Lenin, reading, dispatching messages to his comrades, looking out at the same vast skies and infinite horizon.

Whether he hurtled toward doom or triumph, he couldn’t know. In the last hours before I arrived at the Finland Station, the experience grew increasingly ominous: I was following, I realized, the trajectory of a figure for whom the lust for power and ruthless determination to raze the existing order overtook all else, devouring Lenin, and sealing Russia’s fate.

After the fall of the Soviet Union, St. Petersburg’s mayor, Anatoly Sobchak, set up his headquarters in the Smolny Institute. In this same building, just down the hall from Lenin’s old office, another politician with a ruthless style and a taste for authoritarianism was, from 1991 to 1996, paving his way to power: Deputy Mayor Vladimir Putin.

Now, on the eve of the centenary of the October Revolution that propelled Lenin to power, Putin is being called upon to pass definitive judgment on a figure that, in some ways, prefigured his own rise.

“Lenin was an idealist, but when he found himself in the real situation, he became a very evil and sinister person,” said Romanova, leading me into Lenin’s corner study, with views of the Neva River and mementos of the five months he lived and worked here, including his trademark worker’s cap. She had “heard nothing” from her superiors about how they should commemorate the event, and expects only silence. “It’s a very difficult subject for discussion,” she said. “Nobody but the Communists knows what to do. I have an impression that everybody is lost.”

Related Reads

Essential Works of Lenin: "What Is To Be Done?" and Other Writings

To the Finland Station: A Study in the Acting and Writing of History (FSG Classics)

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Joshua Hammer | READ MORE

Joshua Hammer is a contributing writer to Smithsonian magazine and the author of several books, including The Bad-Ass Librarians of Timbuktu: And Their Race to Save the World's Most Precious Manuscripts and The Falcon Thief: A True Tale of Adventure, Treachery, and the Hunt for the Perfect Bird .

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Cat Missing in Yellowstone Returns Home to California After an 800-Mile Trek

The owners of Rayne Beau, the 2-year-old Siamese cat, have no idea how their cat made it back, but call his return a “miracle.”

By Sara Ruberg

When a cat dashed into the woods of Yellowstone National Park during a camping trip in June, his California owners, Benny and Susanne Anguiano, thought they’d never see him again.

The couple searched for five days through the woods near their campground at Fishing Bridge R.V. Park but never found their 2-year-old male Siamese cat, Rayne Beau, pronounced “rainbow.” Mrs. Anguiano said that Rayne Beau’s sister, Starr, started to meow through the screen door of the trailer. Eventually, when the couple made the tough decision to drive home to Salinas, Calif., Starr, who had never been away from her brother, meowed all the way back.

“Leaving him was unthinkable,” Mrs. Anguiano said. “I felt like I was abandoning him.”

But almost two months later, Rayne Beau was found wandering the streets of Roseville, Calif., three hours north of where the Anguianos live and more than 800 miles away from Yellowstone National Park, as first reported by the news station KSBW.

When a worker from a local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals notified the couple that rescuers had identified Rayne Beau from his microchip, Mr. Anguiano said they were shocked that the cat had made it back to California.

The couple met Rayne Beau and his sister when they were 11 weeks old and decided to foster and then adopt them. Rayne Beau, who at first seemed timid compared with his playful sister, quickly adjusted to his new home and developed an adventurous streak. Mrs. Anguiano described him as being like a “dog cat” who played fetch and came to her when she called his name.

She said he was also clever. One night he climbed over the fence in their backyard, but he returned home the following morning.

But this time was different. Mrs. Anguiano said that when Rayne Beau dashed out of the truck, the couple quickly lost sight of him in the dense forest. They waited for him to come back, but he never did.

“He didn’t realize that it wasn’t just like his backyard,” she said. “This is like the biggest backyard in the United States.”

During their search, Mr. Anguiano said a campsite worker told him that there had been grizzly bears and coyotes spotted around the area, and that their cat was likely to have been eaten by one of the forest’s predators. After hearing this, Mr. Anguiano persuaded his wife that it was time to leave.

The couple left the park days later without their cat, but Mrs. Anguiano kept hoping Rayne Beau was safe. As they were driving, she said that a double rainbow greeted them as they entered Nevada.

“That gave me hope that our Rayne Beau would be ok,” she said in a text message.

Both Mr. and Mrs. Anguiano believe at some point that their cat had hitched a ride or was picked up by a driver heading toward California for part of his journey, but they do not know for sure. The couple is hoping that someone who might recognize their cat could help explain how he made it back.

“The fact that he was in California and just three hours north of us — I think that proves more that Rayne Beau was the one trying to get towards his home,” Mrs. Anguiano said.

While not common, it’s not the first time a pet has inexplicably traveled hundreds of miles to return home. The distance from their campsite in Yellowstone National Park to Roseville, Calif., where Rayne Beau was found, is more than 800 miles, and a journey would have taken him through four states in mountainous and desertlike conditions.

When the couple reunited with him, they said that Rayne Beau had lost 40 percent of his body weight. He was restless in his carrier, but once they released him in the car he calmed down.

“He just looked at me, and then he put his head down and just fell fast asleep,” Mrs. Anguiano said. “He was so exhausted.”

The couple said that Rayne Beau has been back home since early August and was doing well. Mrs. Anguiano is hesitant to travel with her cats again, but if she does, they won’t be so far away from home.

Sara Ruberg covers breaking news and is a member of the 2024-25 class of Times Fellows , a program for journalists early in their careers. More about Sara Ruberg

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Home › News Releases › McLaren Automotive confirms new ‘1’ car, McLaren W1, as a successor to the F1 and McLaren P1™

McLaren Automotive confirms new ‘1’ car, McLaren W1, as a successor to the F1 and McLaren P1™

McLaren Automotive today confirms the next chapter in the extraordinary story of its legendary ‘1’ car lineage

• By Automotive World

September 27, 2024

McLaren Automotive today confirms the next chapter in the extraordinary story of its legendary ‘1’ car lineage. The new supercar, named McLaren W1, will be revealed at 13:00 BST on Sunday, 6 October 2024.

The W1 name celebrates McLaren’s World Championship mindset, with the public reveal date marking the 50 th  anniversary of McLaren winning its first Formula 1 Constructors’ World Championship, and Emerson Fittipaldi winning the 1974 World Drivers’ Championship with McLaren.

The McLaren W1, is a successor to the iconic McLaren F1, and the era-defining McLaren P1™.

“The McLaren W1 is defined by real supercar principles and is the ultimate expression of a McLaren supercar. Born of our rich racing history and World Championship mindset, W1 pushes the boundaries of performance and is worthy of the ‘1’ name. Like its predecessors the F1 and McLaren P1™, W1 defines the rulebook of a real supercar.” Michael Leiters, Chief Executive Officer, McLaren Automotive

SOURCE: McLaren Automotive

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Sinister convoy of Russian mobile missile launchers on 250-mile journey to Moscow

Putin’s lackey warned the clock is ‘ticking’ towards nuclear war as a convoy of nuclear missile launchers flowed towards Moscow.

Video footage showed the hulking dark green Yars missile launchers being wheeled 250 miles to the capital more than two months ahead of the country’s Victory Day parade in Red Square.

Capable of flying 17,500 miles per hour, 25 times the speed of sound, these mobile intercontinental ballistic missiles are a frequent feature of Russia’s annual celebration of its victory over Nazi Germany in the Second World War .

The convoy clad in Russian flags is just the latest flaunting of Russia ’s nuclear arsenal as 71-year-old Vladimir Putin seeks to taunt the West amidst the military gridlock two years on from Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine .

Just a day earlier, Putin flew in the pilot’s seat of a Tu-160M strategic bomber , a key component of Russia’s nuclear triad.

Yars missiles are currently the core of the ground-based component of Russia’s strategic nuclear force.

They have a range of up to 7,500 miles, enables strikes on countries like the UK and USA, a realistic threat if the words of Putin lapdog Dmitry Medvedev are anything to go by.

Russia’s security council deputy chairman Medvedev, a former president and prime minister, recently said Russia could bomb London, Washington, Berlin and Kyiv in Moscow’s forces were pushed into retreat in Ukraine.

He warned: ‘Sad as it may sound, this [nuclear war] scenario is real. We must do everything we can to prevent it from happening.

‘But this very clock, which is ticking in a certain direction, has now accelerated very much.

‘And in this I also see the inability, excuse me, the impotence of these Western authorities.

‘[They] keep saying the same thing: ‘No, it’s the Russians who are scaring us, they will never do it’. They’re wrong.

‘If it comes to the existence of our country, and I said this recently, what choice is left for the [Russian] leadership, for the head of state? None.’

He said: ‘So this is, unfortunately, a real threat, a direct and clear threat to all of humanity.

‘And secondly, there are also accidents, from which no one is immune.

‘And the accidental, unintentional start of a nuclear conflict cannot be discounted.

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‘So all these games around Ukraine are extremely dangerous.’

Putin has sought to sound the alarm of nuclear escalation since Russia’s invasion of Ukraine ground to a halt and its forces were pushed out of captured land.

By July 2022, Putin had made 35 threats of nuclear war since launching the invasion just five months earlier.

The US warned Putin is planning to launch a nuclear weapon into space this year.

The strategy risks rattling Ukraine’s allies, whose at-times hesitant and disorganised supply of weapons and money to the government in Kyiv has been criticised for potentially jeopardising the war effort.

Russia’s annual Victory Day parade each May is used a vast display of military might, and this year is no difference.

The Yars missile launchers are being moved at a snail’s pace from from Teykovo, in Ivanovo region, west to the Alabino training ground in Moscow region.

Russian state media highlighted the ‘march’ as it was seen off on the 250-mile journey by an orchestra.

Among them were defence ministry channel Zvezda, and pro-Putin outlets like Izvestia and REN TV, belonging to the National Media Group, headed by Putin’s lover Alina Kabaeva, 40, a former Olympic gymnast.

Yuri Malakhov, group commander of the Yars missile compound, said: ‘We make a 400 kilometre [250 mile] march to take part in training, to participate in the Victory Parade.

‘In general, it goes well, all times are observed, periodically we do control inspections.

‘Mechanic-drivers are doing an excellent job, showing their skills and professionalism.

‘The march passes through three regions, Ivanovo, Vladimir, now we have arrived in the Moscow region.’

Get in touch with our news team by emailing us at [email protected] .

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Pickup truck, motorcycle involved in serious crash on route 125 in brentwood.

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A crash involving a pickup truck and motorcycle in Brentwood led to the temporary closure of Route 125 in both directions on Friday morning.

Crews responded to the scene before 9 a.m. The road was back open after 12:30 p.m.

>> Traffic information: Interactive maps | New England 511

Police said the motorcycle was traveling south on Route 125, and the collision occurred when the pickup truck pulled into the road.

The motorcyclist was taken to a hospital with serious injuries, while the truck driver was evaluated at the scene. No other information was released about the drivers.

The crash occurred south of the Epping town line.

This is a developing story. It will be updated as more information comes in.

Explosion averted, evacuations lifted after chemical gas leak near Cincinnati

An "all-clear" was declared Wednesday in a township near Cincinnati, a day after a chemical gas leak from a rail tanker prompted fears of an explosion and triggered hundreds of evacuations.

The evacuation orders that had been issued Tuesday within a half-mile radius of the incident in Whitewater Township — about 22 miles west-northwest of Cincinnati — have been lifted, and all roads have reopened, Little Miami Joint Fire and Rescue District Chief Mike Siefke said during a Wednesday evening news conference.

“All initial reports did not indicate any health concerns. There’s no explosion, no loss of property, and the water is safe to drink," Siefke said.

Roughly 210 households in Whitewater Township had been under evacuation orders after colorless, odorless gas spewing from the tanker at State Route 128 and U.S. Route 50 was reported to first responders shortly after 1 p.m. Tuesday.

Authorities determined the chemical to be styrene, Siefke said. It’s used in the production of plastic, rubber, fiberglass and other structural materials.

By Wednesday morning, the rail car was "no longer venting," Central Railroad of Indiana spokesperson John Keffer said. The car was "stabilized" and moved to its destination, Mike Miller of Central Railroad of Indiana said Wednesday night.

The investigation is ongoing, but the “probable cause” of the leak “was the additive stabilizer in the car became ineffective,” Miller told reporters earlier.

Styrene is an extremely reactive chemical. For safe transport, stabilizing additives are added to control it. The released styrene likely reacted with oxygen and other elements in the air.

“The first responders noticed the venting,” Miller added. “They were on site, we mobilized environmental contractors and we mobilized the scene.”

The chemical can irritate the respiratory system, cause headaches and disorient those who breathe it, according to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Long-term exposure has been associated with some forms of cancer, the CDC says, but it's not known as a direct killer.

Dr. Steve Feagins, the Hamilton County Public Health medical director, said during the Wednesday evening news conference that the amount of styrene exposure from the rail car leak was "not even close" to being enough to cause cancer.

“Any cancers that may have been associated with styrene, it’s more like an industrial accident where people are covered with fluids. And so the venting that occurred into the atmosphere isn’t even close to that type of exposure," he said.

The threat for the community was that the rail car tank had been heating up could explode, Siefke said Tuesday. Firefighters doused the container with water in an attempt to reverse its temperature rise, he said.

Environmental officials were taking parts-per-million measurements in the community to determine the leak's impact, he said. A representative for the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency said Wednesday night that the agency had been checking the air quality "all night long" starting at 7 p.m. Tuesday, and its tests showed that "the air quality is very good."

“I am not aware of any hospitalizations related to this event," Feagins said Wednesday.

Area public schools, the Three Rivers Local School District, shut down instruction early Tuesday and canceled instruction and all activities scheduled for Wednesday, according to the district website.

It wasn't yet clear who owns the rail car or its cargo, officials said Tuesday night. A spokesperson for Central Railroad of Indiana said in a statement that it was cooperating with first responders.

State Route 128 and U.S. Route 50, which takes motorists from coast to coast, were shut down in both directions near the site but reopened Wednesday.

Joe Kottke is an assignment editor at NBC News. They are an NBC News County Captain, covering the 2024 election in Brown County, Wisconsin

Dennis Romero is a breaking news reporter for NBC News Digital.