In 1912, one of the rooms in this palace was made available to the Russian Socialist Democrats. And it was on this occasion that Lenin engineered a Bolshevik take-over of the party. After 1948 the palace became Prague's Lenin Museum and contained 17,000 items relating to his life and work. It was also from one of the palace's balconies that President Klement Gottwald announced, in February 1948, the glorious communist victory.