Robert Service - Spies and Commissars

Together with the Menshevik leader Yuli Martov, Lenin explored the opportunities, but Martov worried about the absence of sanction by the Provisional Government. He hated the liberals and thought of them as warmongers and imperialists. But he was loath to risk going back without an official imprimatur. Lenin was made of tougher mettle. He had taken too long to return from Switzerland in the 1905 revolutionary crisis and paid the price of diminished political influence. He was not going to repeat that mistake in 1917.

But he had to be circumspect. If the Provisional Government could in any way accuse him of collaborating with Germany he would be in jeopardy on arrival. He might even be shot for treason. He therefore struck a deal with the German ambassador Gisbert von Romberg that he and his supporters would travel over German territory without contact with Germans. Not even the driver or guard of the locomotive was to approach them. This would call for a ‘sealed’ train. German ministers readily agreed to Lenin’s terms. 23For his part Lenin sought to entice other anti-war emigrants like Karl Radek into putting their names down for the trip. Radek, a bright and witty Polish Jew with a record of criticizing Lenin in past years, belonged simultaneously to the German Social-Democratic Party and a far-left Polish Marxist organization. If he and Martov joined the train, the initiative would look less like an exclusively Bolshevik scheme. Radek consented but Martov continued to refuse. Although Martov was on the far left of Menshevism and deplored the Russian war effort, he continued to worry about being tainted by association with Imperial Germany. Nothing Lenin said would make him budge. Nevertheless thirty-two assorted political emigrants, mainly Bolsheviks, turned up in the cold on 9 April at the railway station in Zurich. Lenin was accompanied by his wife Nadezhda and his principal adjutant Grigori Zinoviev. His ex-lover Inessa Armand was also in the group — and Radek, renowned for his scabrous wit, was cracking jokes from the moment the train departed. 24

Nearly everyone felt pleasantly entertained except Lenin, who took exception to the noise coming from the next-door compartment where Radek, Inessa, Olga Ravich and Varvara Safarova spent the entire time larking about. Olga Ravich had a shrieking voice when she laughed, and Lenin gruffly hauled her out into the corridor until her companions rescued her; but he then told them again to keep the noise down. Throughout the trip he was a killjoy: he was determined to get on with his writing as the train chugged its way through Stuttgart, Frankfurt-on-Main and Berlin on its route to the ferry port at Sassnitz. He reprimanded anyone who smoked. When he saw a queue building up for the toilets, he introduced a ticketed waiting system — this calmed his mood until he discovered that Radek was using his time in the closet to light up his pipe. Another scolding followed.

Once they had arrived in Denmark, Lenin and his fellow travellers made their way to Sweden where a reception committee awaited them in Stockholm. He himself adopted yet another assumed name. For a while this foxed the sympathizers who wanted to escort him on his way. An overture also arrived from Alexander Parvus-Helphand. Parvus was a Marxist from Odessa and a millionaire merchant who conducted political errands for the German government; and he wished to make an arrangement whereby the Germans could subsidize Bolshevik activity in Russia. Although Lenin wanted the money, he could not risk being reported as having met with Parvus. Instead he let subordinates negotiate on his behalf. Not everything went as he wanted. He lacked the strength to resist Radek’s admonishments about his sartorial appearance. Radek explained that he simply did not look the part of a revolutionary leader while walking round in hobnailed mountain boots. As Radek got his own back for being told off on the sealed train, Lenin reluctantly agreed to buy new shoes and trousers. But he would go no further than that. He told his tormentor that he was not going back to Russia in order to establish himself in the clothing business. He might have added that someone with Radek’s eccentricities of dress had little right to tell him what to wear. 25

All this time Lenin was clarifying his thoughts about overthrowing the Provisional Government and introducing a socialist dictatorship. En route to Russia he wrote them up as his ‘April Theses’. After the Swedish socialists had made their fuss of him, it was on to the border with Finland at Haparanda. This was a neat little riverside town where Swedish gendarmes kept order as the baggage was unloaded. Over the bridge was the village of Tornio that already bore signs of the recent revolution. Russian soldiers were slovenly and unhelpful. The gendarmes had disappeared and the rail timetable had lost any semblance of reality. 26For the travelling party from Switzerland it was an emotional moment as they began to experience the sights and smells of a proper revolution. On 13 April they boarded the train at Tornio, taking copies of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda to their compartments with them. At Beloostrov they crossed the Russo-Finnish border, where they were greeted by Bolshevik Central Committee member Lev Kamenev. Shortly before midnight on 16 April they pulled into Petrograd’s Finland Station where a huge crowd was waiting to welcome the returning revolutionary hero. Lenin was less than gracious to the Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries present; he snubbed their ideas about unity among socialists and brusquely called for ‘worldwide socialist revolution’. 27

Martov paid dearly for his scruples. He sat it out in Switzerland until he received formal permission from the Russian Ministry of Foreign Affairs to do what Lenin had done, not arriving in Petrograd until 22 May. 28By then his Mensheviks had fallen decisively under the sway of comrades like Irakli Tsereteli and Nikolai Chkheidze who had persuaded the Petrograd Soviet to support the Provisional Government. Pavel Milyukov, the new Russian Foreign Affairs Minister, was the piggy in the middle of the negotiations about travel permits. He had not sanctioned Lenin’s trip and consented to Martov returning solely because the Petrograd Soviet had stipulated that every single revolutionary emigrant should have the right to a visa. The Provisional Government could not lightly contradict the will of the soviets.

Martov was slow enough but Trotsky was even slower. It was little consolation for him that Lenin, his old opponent on matters of revolutionary strategy, was edging close to his ideas. Lenin’s ‘April Theses’ were proof of this, but years of dispute between the two had to be surmounted before they could actively co-operate. And anyway Trotsky was stuck in New York. As soon as the Russian consulate had issued a visa for him, he booked a passage for himself and his family on the SS Kristianiafjord . The Trotskys left New York on 27 March. The ocean crossing was as perilous as any taken over the North Sea, and indeed that summer a German U-boat sank the Kristianiafjord on an Atlantic crossing. Trotsky gave no thought to the dangers. Any risk was worth taking when revolutionary Petrograd was the destination. In fact things went well until the steamship pulled in at Halifax, Nova Scotia. Canada was a dominion of the British Empire and the authorities were vetting the passenger lists of transatlantic ferries between Canada and Europe. The British control officers based in Halifax had been alerted to Trotsky’s presence on board and were unhappy about facilitating the journey of a well-known anti-war militant to Scandinavia and Russia. He was arrested and, kicking and shouting, bundled off the vessel to a detention camp. He conducted propaganda among German prisoners-of-war while daily demanding the right to rejoin his family.