Moscow becomes the capital of Russia

On 12 March 1918 Izvestia, the daily of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, published a government communiqué on the transfer of Soviet power from Petrograd to Moscow. It was announced after the event. The previous evening a special train had arrived in Moscow carrying the chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Lenin, and part of the government. The city in which as recently as November the Bolsheviks had had to seize power with artillery became the capital of Russia again for the first time since Peter the Great, who at the beginning of the 18th century had moved the court to the Neva. It remains the capital to this day.

Why Moscow

The Council of People’s Commissars decided to leave Petrograd on 26 February, in the darkest days of the German offensive. German troops had then taken Pskov and Reval, and then reached Narva, about 150 kilometres from the capital. No one knew whether the Germans would stop at the armistice line. The Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed on 3 March, did not dispel these fears. Russia had to give up Livonia and Estonia, and the border with independent Finland, where a civil war was raging, ran only about 35 kilometres from Petrograd. The city lay on the edge of the state, within reach of the German fleet and of the troops stationed in Estonia. Some embassies, including the American one, had left the city at the end of February and moved to Vologda.

There were also internal reasons. Petrograd was starving, the garrison was unreliable, the streets swarmed with deserters and criminals, and discontent was growing in the factories. Moscow lay in the middle of the country, at the junction of railways leading east and south, far from the front. The move was opposed by the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, Grigory Zinoviev, who feared a loss of importance. After the government’s departure the city authorities took the name of the Petrograd Labour Commune.

The night train

The move was organised by the executive secretary of the Council of People’s Commissars, Vladimir Bonch-Bruyevich, Lenin’s personal secretary. The preparations were kept secret. A rumour was spread that the government was moving to Nizhny Novgorod. In the night of 10–11 March special train no. 4001 set off not from one of the great stations but from a side freight post on the outskirts of Petrograd. Lenin travelled with his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya and his sister Maria, and the train was guarded by Latvian Riflemen. The windows were covered and no lights were lit in the compartments. At Malaya Vishera station the train stopped beside a train of armed, hostile anarchist sailors, whom the Latvians disarmed.

In the evening of 11 March the train reached Moscow. Lenin lived at first in the Hotel National, renamed the First House of Soviets, in suite no. 107, and soon moved to the Kremlin, which became the seat of government. Further commissariats and offices followed him. On 12 March Izvestia carried a communiqué signed by Leon Trotsky on behalf of the revolutionary committee of the Petrograd Soviet. It explained that the German imperialists remained mortal enemies of the revolution, and that Petrograd was too exposed.

A permanent capital

The transfer was meant to be temporary, but proved permanent. On 14 March the Fourth Extraordinary Congress of Soviets met in Moscow; it ratified the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, and on 16 March approved the transfer of the capital. From then on Moscow was the centre of Soviet power, and from 1922 the capital of the Soviet Union. Petrograd, the cradle of both revolutions of 1917, became a provincial city, although for a long time it remained the country’s second centre.