A fine history, but it skips the sordid truth

In the summer of 1914 a small, nasty man was arrested as an enemy alien in a remote corner of the Austrian empire. Six years later that same man, by then much nastier, was the murderous ruler of one sixth of the Earth’s surface, and the Austrian empire had ceased to exist.

The man was Vladimir Lenin, right. He hated Russia, his own country, and he invented the ruthless modern form of communism that went on to tyrannise Europe and Asia. Yet the Austrian and German empires thought they could use him.

They appreciated his efforts to promote Ukrainian nationalism. Then, these ultraconservative monarchists sprang him from

prison and conveyed him to safety in neutral Switzerland. Later, they arranged for him and his clique of Bolshevik agitators to return to Russia across Germany. And there they supplied his movement with nine tons of gold to help him ruin Russia. Thanks to them he was able to overthrow Russia’s first liberal democracy in a ruthless putsch, which was the beginning of 70 years of police-state terror. In return, Lenin pulled

Russia out of World War I, allowing Germany to send huge numbers of troops to the Western Front. He also handed Germany vast slices of Russian territory, not least Ukraine, important then, as now, as a pivot of power. All this is known, including the role in it of the most sinister and cynical secret agent ever known, Parvus Helphand. Yet you will barely find a word of this in Antony Beevor’s new book about the Russian Revolution. Mr Beevor is a fine historian and this volume is well researched and full of telling detail but, like so many before him, he has not felt quite able to acknowledge the role of Germany and its Austrian ally in the deliberate crushing of Russian freedom and the creation of the Soviet prison state. For many decades, leftwing admiration for the Soviet Union made it hard to tell the squalid truth, that Lenin was a German agent and the much-romanticised ‘revolution’ a foreign-inspired coup d’etat.

Now there is a new problem. Post-communist Russia, trying to grope its way back to the lost democracy of 1917, was dismissed as a pariah state by Western neo-conservatives long before Vladimir Putin launched his barbaric war in Ukraine. Russia and Russians are increasingly portrayed as paranoid and obsessed with plots to encircle and attack them. If the truth were better known, perhaps more people would realise they have good reason to fear for their security and stability.