Lenin’s coat.
Russia. 1910s.
Drap, bespoke tailoring
Length: 118cm

From 7 to 9 July 1917, Vladimir Ilyich was hiding from his pursuers in the apartment of Sergei Yakovlevich Alliluyev, a party member since 1896, living with his family on 10 Rozhdestvenskaya Street. Alliluyev’s daughter Nadezhda was Stalin’s wife. One of the first museum rarities was a coat of the old Bolshevik S.Ya. Alliluyev, in which Lenin, hiding from the police, left Petrograd and settled in its vicinity, in the village of Sestroretsk, where mainly the workers of the arms factory lived. There, not far from the Razliv railway station, located near the border with Finland, V.I. Lenin settled in the house of the Bolshevik worker N.A. Emelyanov. However, even there the situation was alarming, and therefore, soon Lenin, under the guise of a Finn-mower, was moved to a hut on the shore of the Sestroretsky Razliv Lake. S.Ya. Alliluyev, passing over a coat to Istpart in 1923, recalled: “Vladimir Ilyich shaved off his beard, trimmed his moustache and cut hair on his head. G. Zinoviev followed his example and also cut his curly chevelure. Then changing clothes followed. For the masquerade I got a pair of Russian shirts and a pair of caps. My coat matched the height of Vladimir Ilyich. In this red coat and gray cap, without a beard, with a trimmed mustache, Vladimir Ilyich looked like a Finnish peasant or a German colonist.” For conspiratorial reasons, V.I. Lenin often had to resort to make-up and changing clothes.