Few historical events mattered as much to Lenin and the Bolsheviks as the Paris Commune of 1871. Shortly after coming to power, the Bolsheviks made March 18 — the date the Commune was founded — a Soviet public holiday. The Paris Commune was celebrated as the prototype of the new Soviet republic. Mass festivals and public reenactments took place in its honor in towns and cities across what was now the world’s first avowedly socialist state. It was not uncommon for Pravda and other leading press organs to refer to this new state as the “Russian” or “Soviet Commune.” The implication was that this, much like Paris in 1871, was a revolutionary bastion amid a sea of imperialist aggressors.

Back then, the radicals and discontents of Paris had rejected the authority of the French government, established their own elected municipal administration, and set about implementing a new social and political agenda. They held out for just seventy-two days before the French Army reentered Paris and cut through Commune forces in a series of bloody street battles.

The Commune and those that fell in its defense went on to inspire generations of revolutionaries. Come 1921, on the fiftieth anniversary of the Commune, posters adorning Soviet streets declared that “The Martyrs of the Paris Commune were Resurrected under the Red Flag of the Soviets!” To mark Lenin’s death, in 1924, a delegation of the French Communist Party even gifted an original flag from the Paris Commune to the “workers of Moscow.” Placed next to the Bolshevik leader’s mummified body in his Mausoleum on Red Square, Lenin was symbolically immortalized as a fellow Communard.