By 1917 the European war seemed to be endless. Both sides in the fighting looked to new weapons, tactics and ideas to break the stalemate. 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 Vladmir 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 revolutionary crowds at Petrograd’s Finland Station.
With great insight and imagination Merridale weaves the story of the train and its uniquely strange group of passengers with a gripping account of the now half-forgotten February liberal Russian revolution and shows how these events intersected. She brilliantly uses a huge range of contemporary eyewitnesses, observing Lenin as he travelled back to a country he had not seen for many years. Many thought he was a mere ‘useful idiot,’ others thought he would rapidly be imprisoned or killed, others that Lenin had in practice a few followers and even less influence. They would all prove to be quite wrong.
Lenin on the Train is published by Allen Lane, an imprint of Penguin Books.
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