In 1922, five years after the communist Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, numerous academics, journalists, professors, students, philosophers, and other intellectuals were exiled by Vladimir Lenin, leader of the Bolsheviks.
Before Lenin established the Soviet Union in December of that year, he ordered the deportation of a significant number of intellectuals via two German ships he called called the “Philosophers’ Ships”—the Oberbürgermeister Haken and the Preussen—to what is now Poland. If they returned, Lenin charged, they would be shot.
