Lenin rejected the Germans’ first proposal. The plan was that Lenin and Zinoviev should be escorted through Germany to Russia by a German businessman, Georg Sklarz, who had already made arrangements to pay their train fares and was on his way to Switzerland to meet them. Before he arrived, Lenin scotched the idea as too compromising politically. He did not care about the morality of any deal; he wanted ‘deniability’ if it was ever claimed that he was in Germany’s pocket. Sklarz immediately returned to Berlin.
Lenin heard nothing from the Germans for a few days; he was beside himself with anger and fear that he would never get out of Switzerland. He told Inessa that he wasn’t prepared to risk taking a ship from France to Scandinavia ‘and getting sunk by a U-boat’, which had happened a few days earlier to the steamer Zara, with a few Russian émigrés on board. ‘But this is torture for us,’ he complained. ‘What if no passage whatever is allowed either by Germany or England? This is possible!’5
Grimm was getting nowhere in the other set of negotiations with the German representatives in Berne. On 20 March Lenin, exasperated by the slow pace of the talks, replaced him and appointed another go-between, Fritz Platten, the Secretary of the Swiss Socialist Party. It was he who finally struck a deal with the German Ambassador to Berne, Count Gisbert von Romberg. Lenin had a list of demands. He insisted that he would buy all the tickets ‘at normal tariffs’ – a group of Swiss socialists had raised a substantial amount of money for the journey – and that the returning exiles must travel in a carriage that would ‘enjoy extra-territorial rights’ (which explains the idea that the train was ‘sealed’). As far as possible ‘the journey shall be made without stops and on a through train. No passports will be checked.’ They would not leave the carriage for the entire duration of the journey, and they would talk to nobody apart from each other. Romberg remarked snootily that it was ‘unusual for travellers to propose conditions to the government of the country through which they intended to travel’. But he forwarded a text of the agreement to Berlin. The Germans had demands too. They insisted that everyone who went on the journey signed a declaration that they understood the terms of the deal and accepted full responsibility for whatever reception greeted them in Russia. It was not impossible that they would be immediately arrested and tried for treason. Lenin agreed the terms on behalf of the Bolsheviks. As usual, even if they had doubts, his followers would do as ‘the old man’ told them.
Within two days von Romberg told Platten that the Foreign Ministry in Berlin had approved the plan and would soon send a train carriage to the Swiss border to meet them. There would be space for sixty passengers.6
—
The agreement did not remain a secret for long. The story leaked to reporters in Zurich and spread quickly throughout the émigré cafés where journalists, writers and artists talked of little else. The left-wing press was outraged and could scarcely believe that Lenin, the most radical of all the revolutionaries, would strike a deal with ultra-right-wing German militarists and imperialists. When the first rumours spread, ‘pandemonium broke out in the Plauen Café in Zurich’ (the main meeting place for intellectuals in the city), wrote the leftist journalist J. Ley, who spent most of the day there. ‘Arthur Grumbach, the famous correspondent for l’Humanité, and Otto Pohl of the Viennese Arbeiterzeitung were beside themselves with anger.’ Stefan Zweig loudly expressed his disapproval of Lenin, and the pacifist French writer Romain Rolland, who had won the Nobel Prize two years earlier, was apoplectic with fury. ‘He thought it very wrong of Lenin to enter into an agreement with Ludendorff…and was worried about the repercussions this would have with the international peace movement.’ Rolland at one point reached into his jacket pocket and showed Zweig a telegram he had received from Lenin asking him to see him off at the train station. He declined. James Joyce, who heard the news later in the day, commented, ‘it sounds just like the Trojan horse to me. I suppose Ludendorff must be pretty desperate.’7
Lenin never felt he had to justify his actions. To him, accepting help from the Germans – and, as became clear later, large amounts of their money too – would have seemed rational and reasonable. Lenin by this time in his life had ceased thinking in conventional moral terms and would have felt it entirely acceptable to take help from anyone if it would bring forward the socialist revolution, first in Russia – and then throughout the world.8
He seldom talked about the ‘sealed train’ and defended his actions in writing only once. ‘Nobody asked the Germans for help…but there was a coincidence of interests. We would have been fools not to take advantage of it,’ he said. But he knew it didn’t look good, which is why he was careful to cover his tracks and keep well away from direct personal involvement in the financial nuts and bolts – especially any murky details that could be traced back to Parvus.
The British knew about Lenin’s negotiations with the Germans before the sealed train deal was agreed, well before the news was leaked to the press. The government considered an idea to counter the Germans by bribing Lenin to campaign for Russia to stay in the war. Clearly they didn’t know their man or understand the stakes Lenin was playing for. Lord Milner passed on a note to Prime Minister David Lloyd George from the intelligence services suggesting a possible approach to the Bolshevik leader. Milner’s covering letter said: ‘Even Lenin could be got by bribery…anything can be done in Russia, Turkey or Greece by bribery…the enclosed note is well worth your personal perusal.’ Lloyd George didn’t pursue the idea.9
—
After the details were finalised, things moved rapidly. ‘We had just two hours to pack and…[clear out] our whole household,’ Nadya recalled. ‘We had to settle our accounts with the landlady, return books to the library and so on.’
There was no time, she lamented, to collect her mother’s ashes from the crematorium and take them to Russia to bury them in Petrograd, as Nadya knew Elizaveta Vasilyevna would have wanted. They had to leave them behind in Switzerland.
Herr Kammerer was in Spiegelgasse to wish them goodbye. He told Lenin that he hoped ‘that in Russia you won’t have to work as hard as you have done here in Zurich’. Lenin ‘replied with a classic understatement and said, “I think, Herr Kammerer, that in Petrograd I shall have even more work.” ’ The landlord hoped that he and Nadya would find some good accommodation in Petrograd. Lenin said he was sure he would find somewhere comfortable, ‘but I don’t know that it will be as peaceful as it has been here with you’.
When they left their last place of exile Nadya and Lenin had barely anything to show for almost seventeen years of life in Western Europe. He walked from the lodgings with a knapsack on his back containing some prized books, papers and documents, a battered suitcase with a few clothes and some bedding. They left a few possessions with the Kammerers, but as Nadya described to friends later, their baggage consisted of ‘a basket of household items, a basket of books, a box full of newspaper clippings and another of archival material…and a Swedish kerosene stove’. The last item was for making tea on the train journey.10
At around 11 a.m. on Monday 27 March Lenin and Nadya were joined by a party of thirty others for a lunch at the Zähringer Hof Hotel in the centre of Zurich. When he drew up the names of passengers making the journey and handed them to Fritz Platten, Lenin placed Inessa’s at the top of the list.*1 Most of the Bolshevik clique close to him who were still in Switzerland were there, including Zinoviev and his wife and nine-year-old son Stepan, Olga Ravich, who had found other means of reaching Russia than marrying an elderly Swiss gentleman, Anatoly Lunacharsky, and Karl Radek, a Polish Bolshevik who was technically a deserter from the Austro-Hungarian army and therefore potentially taking a great risk when he boarded the train.
Lenin read out a pugnacious ‘Farewell Address to Swiss Workers’. He repeated his standard call for ‘civil war’ throughout Europe by workers against their rulers. ‘We are not pacifists…We are opposed to imperialist wars over the division of the capitalists’ spoils…but we have always considered it ab
surd for the proletariat to disavow revolutionary wars that may prove necessary in the interests of socialism.’ But he was less upbeat addressing his own group of Bolsheviks privately, some of whom were already celebrating – far too prematurely for Lenin’s liking. ‘Single-handed, the Russian proletariat cannot bring the socialist revolution to a victorious conclusion,’ he warned. Then at 2.30 p.m. the party moved off to Zurich’s Hauptbahnhof.
There was mayhem at the station. The party of revolutionary Russians was greeted by an angry crowd waiting to see them off. Some were shouting ‘Traitors’, ‘German spies’, ‘Pigs’ and ‘Frauds’; others carried placards declaring ‘Shame for taking the Kaiser’s gold’. Amid the general hostility, a few well-wishers turned up. Siegfried Bloch, a young Swiss acquaintance, managed to get near Lenin and say, ‘We hope that we shall see you back among us again.’ Lenin laughed and replied, ‘Well…that would not be a good political sign.’
At the platform for the local train heading to the Swiss-German border at Schaffhausen Lenin stood alone for a while, looking nervous and awkward, checking his watch every few seconds. Lunacharsky was famous for his tendency to exaggerate and romanticise, but he could at times be perceptive. He said at that moment Lenin looked like a man who was thinking, ‘At last, at last the thing for which I was created is happening.’ Lenin climbed up into the carriage, and as he was finding his seat Radek asked him how he was feeling. Lenin whistled and said, ‘In six months’ time we shall either be swinging from gallows, or we shall be in power.’
There was a scuffle when the German revolutionary journalist Oscar Blum broke through the crowd and tried to get on the train to join the Russians. He was physically thrown off it by Lenin personally, who was convinced the interloper was a police spy.
At 3.10 precisely, amid catcalls and boos from the crowd lining the platform, the train slowly steamed out of the station. A seven-day journey lay ahead before Lenin would reach home.11
—
The ‘sealed train’ was waiting at Gottmadingen, a tiny station on the German side of the border. It comprised a locomotive, a green carriage of three second-class compartments and five third-class compartments of hard wooden seats, with a baggage van at the rear. There was a lavatory at each end of the carriage, but no sleeping car. Two German officers accompanied them all the way through Germany to the Baltic port of Sassnitz. They took the compartment at the rear, and before the train moved one of them drew a chalk mark along one side of the corridor which established where the ‘German’ side of the train began. The rule was that not a word would be exchanged between the German soldiers and the Russians. Three of the carriage’s four doors were locked. According to the agreement, at no point were their passports or any documents checked. They were merely counted through into Germany.
Lenin and Nadya demanded their own second-class compartment, so that he could have privacy to get down to work straightaway. He was making revisions to a pamphlet that he had begun writing and nearly completed, which would become known as The April Theses – one of the most dramatic of his ‘deviations’ from Marxist orthodoxy, which became required reading in Soviet schools after Lenin’s death. In little more than 10,000 words Lenin completely overturned Marx’s teaching that every society must go through a ‘bourgeois’ capitalist period as a first stage before there could be a socialist revolution. He declared that backward, mainly agrarian peasant Russia could leap through the industrial, capitalist phase of development and spark a socialist revolution that all of Europe would soon copy. And he outlined more or less exactly how the Bolsheviks would seize power in Russia and institute a ‘dictatorship of the proletariat’. It was heady stuff, and, as he said, complicated to write. He was finding it hard to concentrate on the train.
Sharing a long railway journey in close proximity to Lenin must have been agony for the other passengers. He was a severe martinet at the best of times, but on this journey, with the risks so great and the potential rewards so high, his agitation and frequent explosions of nervous energy were in a heightened state. The excitement and drama of being with him at a moment when history was being made was one thing. But he was bossy and a bully, and enduring his constant whingeing complaints would have been quite another.
The train left Gottmadingen soon after 10 p.m. Within an hour Lenin was telling Nadya that he couldn’t bear the noise coming from the next-door compartment and it was impossible to work under these conditions – ‘it’s simply unendurable’. There was loud laughter and general high spirits in the adjoining compartment. He could hear the high-pitched squeaky giggle of Ravich and the bass baritone of the short, hirsute and erudite Pole Radek – ‘a little revolutionary goblin, a brilliant mimic, full of wit and amusing paradox’ – telling a series of jokes. Lenin recognised that Radek could be useful as a popular journalist and rabble-rouser, but he always thought him ‘an insufferable fool’. He told Nadya he would put up with the noise no more, marched next door, took Ravich by the arm and bundled her to a quieter compartment along the corridor. Some of the comrades tried to protest; Lenin simply ignored them.
Next, he was irritated by the fug of tobacco smoke that had quickly filled almost the whole of the carriage. Lenin instituted a smoking ban on the train and would permit it only in the two lavatories. Predictably a long queue formed, and there were noisy, acrimonious quarrels between the passengers – most revolutionary Russians of that era tended to be chain-smokers. Lenin improvised a socially just answer: he got some paper and carefully cut it into strips for use as ‘tickets’, one set for smoking, the other for normal lavatory use. Lenin, naturally, was the ticket-master. This was the earliest known example of a Lenin-inspired, Communist-run rationing system: imposed from above, no objections permitted, causing maximum sullen dissatisfaction to many.12
It was a long, slow journey. The train seldom went above forty kilometres an hour, but the Germans kept their side of the bargain. At one point they held up a military train with the Crown Prince Wilhelm on board to give Lenin priority. Nonetheless the party was delayed for nearly twenty hours in Berlin – an agonising wait during which they were not allowed out of the carriage. They were running short of food. Many of the Russians had brought some provisions with them – bread, cheese, chocolate – but supplies had long gone and no one could go out to buy any food.*2 At one point a group of German Social Democrats tried to meet the Russians and talk with Lenin. They had reached the carriage steps, but were told that if they tried to get any further they would be thrown off the train. It took another day to arrive at Sassnitz. Lenin, according to Nadya, had barely looked out of the window the entire journey to see for himself the conditions of wartime Germany. He concentrated on rewriting his Theses.
By the time the party reached the tiny port, at around 6 p.m., they had missed the last ferry across the Baltic to Trelleborg. They had to remain in the sealed carriage for an extra uncomfortable night. When they crossed next morning, the day was freezing cold and the sea was rough. Everyone was violently seasick apart from Radek, Zinoviev and Lenin, who spent the entire five hours pacing the deck, looking anxious. He had worked out, while writing the April Theses, his strategy for bringing down the Provisional Government in Petrograd, but would he get the chance? At one point he asked Zinoviev, ‘Will we be arrested as soon as we reach Russia?’ Zinoviev had no answer.13
Ganetsky met them on the quayside early on the Friday evening and had to hurry them to catch the train to Malmö, which was scheduled to depart in fifteen minutes. About an hour later the Social Democrats of Malmö greeted the hungry émigrés with a smorgasbord, which the Russians – even Lenin – ‘annihilated with incredible speed…they seemed like a band of barbarians’, according to one of the restaurant staff. Late that night they took an overnight sleeper train to Stockholm.
The sealed train story and the wanderings of the ‘exotic’ Russian radicals became big news in Sweden. For the first time anywhere there was a picture of Lenin in a newspaper and Sweden’s quality daily Politiken carried a
profile of the man who promised a revolution in Russia and, once in power, an end to the war. He was fêted wherever he went in Stockholm. He was met at the train by Carl Lindhagen, mayor of the city, who gave him breakfast, and there was a lunchtime reception for him laid on at the Hotel Regina by Swedish socialists.
He refused to give any interviews, but he wrote a press release explaining why he had agreed to travel through Germany: he wasn’t ‘helped’ by the Germans, it was simply a travel arrangement, he claimed. He categorically denied that he or the Bolsheviks had accepted any German money.
Parvus had travelled from Copenhagen and asked to meet him, but Lenin refused point-blank. He made sure there were two Bolshevik witnesses in his party who heard the refusal and could report it later
Cut off from news for five days, Lenin read the papers carefully. He ‘flew into a fury’, recalled one of his party, when he read proof that Malinovsky had been a double agent. The Provisional Government had abolished the Okhrana and, selectively, opened its files, which established incontrovertibly that Malinovsky had been paid vast sums as a police informer. ‘How could that bastard have fooled us for so long?’ he asked Nadya rhetorically.
He had a full day of meetings with socialist politicians and Bolshevik exiles in Scandinavia, but he found time for some shopping. Reluctantly, he was persuaded by Radek and Nadya to buy new clothes. ‘I am not going to Petrograd to open a gentleman’s outfitter,’ he complained. But he was persuaded that the man returning to take power in Russia should look the part. The coat and suit he was travelling in were threadbare, the only footwear he had with him were hobnail boots which had been made for him by Herr Kammerer in Zurich, and his derby hat was out of shape. ‘He looked like a workman on a Sunday excursion in unsettled weather,’ one of the Swedes who met him said.
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