Lenin: The Man, the Dictator, and the Master of Terror by Victor Sebestyen

Author:Victor Sebestyen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Biographies & Memoirs, Communism, History, Presidents & Heads of State, Russia & the Former Soviet Union
Publisher: Pantheon Books
Published: 2017-11-07T03:00:00+00:00

*1 Almost no contemporary accounts mention Inessa’s presence on the train and the Soviets later clumsily tried to censor the fact that she was there. Official histories in the Soviet Union until the 1970s did not mention her on the passenger list. Though the ‘sealed train’ idea had originally been Martov’s, he declined to go with Lenin. He wanted to wait until he had received a formal invitation to return from the Petrograd Soviet and an assurance that he would be allowed back into Russia. It was a slow and cumbersome process. He got there a month later. Plekhanov had returned a week earlier, through France and England, and received a hero’s welcome in Petrograd.

*2 There has been much speculation about why the train was held up for so long in Berlin. The obvious answer is that during the war the entire German railway system was severely congested – it was devoted to ensuring that troops and equipment were moved efficiently, and many trains were delayed. But various historians have claimed that the real reason was to enable Lenin to hold a secret meeting with German officials. It has been said that he met high-ranking generals and ministers overnight at the German Foreign Ministry at Wilhelmstrasse, and was handed millions of marks in gold. There is no evidence that this meeting ever took place and it seems highly unlikely. The Germans certainly gave money to the Bolsheviks, but did so using subtler methods and go-betweens. And Lenin, surely, would never have risked meeting German officials, having gone to such lengths to keep German help ‘deniable’.

*3 The writer William Gerhardie, a colleague, suggested – only half facetiously – that Gruner alone may have held the responsibility for having brought about the Bolshevik Revolution. ‘Were he a Japanese he would have committed hara-kiri.’

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