Dear Commons Community,
I have just finished reading Catherine Merridale’s book, Lenin on the Train (Metropolitan Books, 2017). The book retraces Vladmir Lenin’s train journey with a small group of colleagues from Zurich, Switzerland to Petrograd (St. Petersburg), Russia in the spring of 1917. When the train arrived in Petrograd, Lenin gave an impassioned speech before the waiting throng and it was the moment that many historians consider the point at which “the Russian Revolution became Soviet.”
Meridale’s account is well-researched and includes many interesting tidbits of history of which I was not fully aware. For example, Lenin’s train trip was made possible by a well-financed operation by German agents hoping to disrupt the Russian government during World War I. In April 2017, more than 900,000 thousand Russians marched in Petrograd to honor the 1,382 heroes or martyrs killed during the revolution. The well- recognized painting above completed by M.G. Sokolov includes Josef Stalin right behind Lenin. However, Stalin was not on the train and was added as “an act of self-preservation” by the artist. If you are interested in reading this volume, below is an excerpt from the New York Times Book Review.
“To explain the significance of Lenin’s return a month after the czar’s abdication, Merridale reconstructs a familiar story: how the war sapped confidence in the monarchy; how the provisional government had to share power with the radical Soviet of Workers’ Deputies; and how Lenin, learning about the autocracy’s collapse from his place of exile in Zurich, was so bent on returning that he accepted the assistance of Germany to travel more than 2,000 miles over eight days in a sealed railway car through Germany, Sweden and Finland before finally reaching Petrograd in April. Lenin’s sojourn in Zurich remains the stuff of popular imagination; both Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn (in a book called, simply, “Lenin in Zurich”) and Tom Stoppard (in his play “Travesties”) depicted Lenin in Zurich plotting revolution.
Merridale’s account benefits from her thorough research, particularly concerning the circumstances surrounding Lenin’s return; the train’s route, which has confused earlier historians; and the intentions of the Germans, whose armies faced Russian forces on the Eastern front. Lenin had always opposed the war, giving Kaiser Wilhelm II’s regime hope that his return would have the effect of “disabling the Russian colossus” by undermining the provisional government’s resolve to remain loyal to its British and French allies and not seek a separate peace. But Lenin understood he was compromising his credibility by cooperating with the hated German enemy. Lenin, moreover, had accepted the kaiser’s money — “German gold” — to help finance Bolshevik propaganda and amplify his strident appeals against the provisional government and anyone, Bolshevik or otherwise, who thought of cooperating with it. If his enemies were to confirm his reliance on the kaiser’s assistance, he would face arrest for treason and the collapse of the Bolsheviks’ aim to seize power. But Lenin, unable to travel by boat because of Britain’s refusal to help leftist exiles like him, believed he had no alternative except to work with Berlin. (After Trotsky set off by boat from New York at the end of March, British officials arrested him in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and held him for a month with German prisoners of war. Trotsky gained his release only after vehement protests in Russia; he reached Petrograd a month after Lenin.)
The cover of “Lenin on the Train” portends the trouble to follow. In a notorious Soviet-era painting, Lenin is shown descending from the train to greet an exuberant crowd of admirers at Petrograd’s Finland Station. Behind him looms the image of a smiling Stalin, as if that future tyrant had been aboard as well — “a visual fairy tale,” in Merridale’s words, to reinforce Stalin’s claim that he had always been Lenin’s principal lieutenant. In fact, Stalin had faced internal exile in Siberia before reaching Petrograd in March. Lenin was greeted by hundreds of followers, among them prominent Bolsheviks like Lev Kamenev and Fedor Raskolnikov, while others, most notably Grigory Zinoviev and Grigory Sokolnikov, accompanied him on the train. Stalin later had them killed.”
I am not an historian so I found this book a good read that added a bit more to my understanding of the intricacies of the Russian Revolution.
Tony
