With Lenin on a train

Catherine Merridale´s “Lenin on the Train” is a lively and very interesting book about – guess what – Lenin´s notorious 1917 train journey from Switzerland to the Finland Station in Petrograd, Russia. This is easily the most well known piece of train travel in world history – small wonder, since it made it possible for Lenin to lead the October Revolution. I read the book in the Swedish translation, “Lenins Resa”. The book could be confusing to readers completely new to Russian history, since it really does focus rather narrowly on the train journey itself, and the February Revolution in Russia immediately preceding it. It says nothing about the October Revolution – the story stops short with the July Days in Petrograd, when Lenin had to flee from the city to avoid arrest by the Provisional Government. 

That being said, the book is extremely well written and gives the reader the feeling of actually being at the place of the action – in Lenin´s Swiss exile, on the “sealed” train (all kinds of absurd situations are mentioned), among the angry masses in revolutionary Petrograd… Part of the story is set in Sweden, including Haparanda and its Finnish sister town Torneå. I admit I knew next to nothing about 1917 Haparanda before reading this volume! Only Lenin himself remains something of an enigma, combining personal asceticism with an energetic and monomaniac pursuit of “revolution” and ideological orthodoxy.

Controversially, Merridale believes that the Bolsheviks really did get the famed “German gold”. Of course they did. Everyone admits that the fat cat Israel Helphand (Parvus) was on the German payroll. Parvus and another German agent invested heavily in the wartime smuggling business of Jacob Fürstenberg (Ganecki), who was a close confidant of Lenin. It´s difficult to believe that this *wasn´t* the conduit for German money – unless one for ideological reasons has to deny that the great “revolutionary internationalist” Lenin could ever do such a thing. Merridale points out that the Bolsheviks had a lot of financial resources at their disposal, despite having few openly declared incomes. Where did all the money come from? The Germans were using millions for war-time propaganda on the Eastern Front – was *all* that money going to Parvus´ wild swing parties? I assume it´s well established that the Bolsheviks got German subsidies after taking power in Russia, during the period of the Brest-Litovsk peace treaty, so why not before? That being said, Merridale also admits that there isn´t any *direct* evidence of Lenin getting German money, but why should we expect such? Lenin was no fool. The weakest chapter in the book is the author´s weird moral preaching at the end, where she says that Lenin should have come clean about the German money since lies are always psychologically self-destructive. Yeah, whatever.

The book cover of the Swedish translations show the famous painting by M G Sokolov showing how Lenin descends from the train at the Finland Station…followed by Stalin. In reality, Stalin wasn´t even on the train! I sometimes wonder if Stalin had a sick sense of humor when he accused his old Bolshevik comrades of being “German spies” during the Moscow show trials...

For more on this, see my blog post “That elusive Berlin gold”. And yes, I recommend Catherine Merridale´s book to all readers interested in modern history.