ABSTRACT
Trotsky arrived in Petrograd on 4 May 1917 and made straight for the Smolny Institute, the home of the Petrograd Soviet. For Trotsky, the prospects for the revolution were quite straightforward: workers should take up where they had left off in 1905 and use the power they exercised via the Soviet to establish a working-class government. As he understood it, during February it had been the workers who had ensured the success of the revolution by seizing control of the postal and telegraph services, the wireless office, all the railway stations and the printing works; if they were prepared to act in this way again, political power could be theirs. He was therefore delighted to discover that Lenin also favoured the principle of the Soviet taking power, and had abandoned the wariness that had marred their co-operation in 1905.
