The future despotic tyrant on the train

Readers of history are always fascinated by those events that seem unimportant at first but end up shaping reality. In the winter of 2016-17 we are approaching the centenary of the most famous such event, the return of Vladimir Ilich Lenin from exile.

It began as the Kaiser’s generals realized they were losing the war against Britain, France, Canada and other allies — and American troops were on their way. But to the Germans, the immediate problem was Russia. In the Triple Entente, Russia was on the side of the West, so Germany had to fight a two-front war. They couldn’t consolidate their armies in a single force that would overwhelm France and Britain.

German spies reported that many Russians wanted to withdraw from the war with its casualties and food shortages. At the same time, British and French diplomats were doing their best to hold the alliance together.

Winston Churchill, in his dramatic prose, later summed up the decision of the Germans: “They turned upon Russia the most grisly of weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia.”

Lenin was already a formidable socialist leader but he was exiled from Russia by a czarist court. The Germans hoped that if they could smuggle him back into Russia, he might take control and end his country’s part in the war. They did, and he did, and under his direction the Soviet Union was born.

The Germans organized the railway cars for the journey, protected by a squad of their own troops. The journey took eight days and stretched 3,200 kilometres. Lenin treated it as his private office, frequently calling meetings to give orders about everything from food to when toilet breaks should be taken. Catherine Merridale, an expert on Russian history, has recently written a convincing, highly readable book about the trip, Lenin on the Train (Holt).

A dodgy air hung over the whole business. Widespread talk of revolution sometimes produces hucksters who wonder what’s in it for them. In this story the huckster is a Russian named Alexander Parvus, a low-rent leftist journalist.

Arrested by the Russian police for his minor part in the 1905 revolution, he was sentenced to Siberia and escaped to Germany. Having met and talked to Lenin, Trotsky and other revolutionaries, he decided he was an expert on Russian socialism. Soon he was briefing the German Foreign Ministry, for a fee, while also reporting to the revolutionaries. The Germans gave him money to pass along to various Russian socialists, so that they could create unrest. He diverted enough of it to become affluent.