With the onset of the Russian Revolution in 1917, a new political force known as communism was also born. When the tsarist autocracy was overthrown, a new government was needed to rule Russia. After the abdication of the Russian throne and the civil war between the Bolsheviks (Red Army) and the Russian Republic (White Army), the Bolsheviks emerged victorious and established themselves as the ruling party in Russia. The Bolshevik leader, Vladimir Lenin, preached Karl Marx's infamous pamphlet, The Communist Manifesto, because he believed that communism was the ideal political system for Russia. Despite his beliefs in Marxism, Lenin felt that it had its limitations; he then applied Marxism to the extent he deemed necessary to establish communism in Russia. News of the Russian Revolution first reached Lenin by word of mouth while he was exiled in Switzerland. After learning of the February Revolution and Tsar Nicholas II's abdication of the throne in 1917, Lenin decided to return to Russia and take part in the Revolution. While on a train traveling to Russia, Lenin wrote what would be known as his April Theses: his program for the Bolshevik Party. He felt that the February Revolution was only an initial stage of the revolution and now the proletarians needed to be organized to remove the bourgeoisie and finally put the proletarians in power. The organization of the proletarians would create a revolutionary vanguard party that would govern as a proletarian dictatorship. In Marxist terms a socialist dictatorship would allow the proletariat to have political control. Marx states in his Manifesto that if proletarians organized themselves into a political party they would become a strong political force: “The organization… middle of paper… because he felt that they had only two choices: bourgeois ideology or socialist. Participating in a socialist revolution would be the only reasonable option for the proletarians because they have strained their backs from the painstaking work they have done for the bourgeois. Karl Marx and Vladimir Lenin were both revolutionaries with their radical views of government and society. Marx intended his work to be applied to Western European societies, without any expectation that Russian revolutionaries would use his teachings as a blueprint for their bourgeois overthrow. The scope of Lenin's use of Marxism was limited because Lenin adapted Marx's theories to the Russian proletarians from whom he would gain support. By adding the dimension of Leninism to Marxism, Lenin lit the spark that would lead to imperial Russia becoming the Soviet Union..