Lenin on the Train

A gripping account of how, in the depths of the First World War, Russia's greatest revolutionary was taken in a 'sealed train' across Europe and changed the history of the world.

By 1917, the European war seemed to be endless. Both sides in the fighting looked to new weapons, tactics, and ideas to break a stalemate that was itself destroying Europe. In the German government, a small group of men had a brilliant idea—why not sow further confusion in an increasingly chaotic Russia by arranging for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the most notorious of revolutionary extremists, currently safely bottled up in neutral Switzerland, to go home?

Catherine Merridale's Lenin on the Train recreates Lenin's extraordinary journey from harmless exile in Zurich, across a Germany falling to pieces from the war's deprivations, and northwards to the edge of Lapland to his eventual ecstatic reception by the revolutionary crowds at Petrograd's Finland Station.

Many thought Lenin was a mere 'useful idiot', others thought he would rapidly be imprisoned or killed, and others that Lenin had in practice few followers and even less influence. They would all prove to be quite wrong.