Vladimir Lenin and the Downfall of Russia

The train ride that would shake the world

Red Guard unit of the Vulkan factory in 1917. Public Domain

As the spring of 1917 settles over a Europe torn apart by the “Great War,” a train speeds swiftly through the silent forests of Sweden, like a serpent in the dark, gliding toward its prey. Its destination: Petrograd. Its purpose: the destruction of the Russian government.

Germany’s secret weapon to end the war was not what one might expect. It was not an atomic bomb. That wouldn’t be developed for another quarter century. It was not a new chemical weapon, like those used in the slogging trench warfare on the Western Front. It was not a new fighter plane or long-range bomber.

It was something more dangerous than any of these. It was a man, a weaponized intellectual and revolutionary named Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, known to history as Vladimir Lenin.

Sending Lenin to Petrograd on a sealed train was like injecting a poison into the heart of an already weakened victim. According to historian Ted Widmer, German leaders knew that this uncompromising, unscrupulous fanatic—this calculating Marxist saboteur—had the potential to topple Russia’s already unstable provisional government, which had been set up when Tsar Nicholas II was overthrown in March 1917.

Photograph of Nicholas II, 1912. Public Domain

Russia may have been unstable following the constant defeats in the war and subsequent demoralization—the nefarious interference in government by the diabolical Rasputin, the breakdown of the economy and resulting food riots, and, finally, the abdication of the tsar—but it was not yet destroyed. That was the work of Lenin, whose arrival in Petrograd on April 16, 1917, to take control of a revolution already underway marked the beginning of the auto-demolition of all that Russia had been. The country was subsequently reconstructed as the first official communist state the world had ever seen and was to become sickened over.

About Lenin

Lenin’s life, at the time of his return to Russia, had already been eventful. He was born in Simbirsk, on the Volga River, the third of six children. He displayed strong academic ability as a child, graduating at the top of his class in high school. At 16, he became an atheist.

Portrait of Vladimir Lenin, 1920, by Pavel Zhukov. Public Domain

In addition to his commitment to atheism, two other events from his youth seem to have pushed him in a revolutionary direction. First, his father, who was an inspector of schools, was threatened with premature retirement by the government, which was suspicious of the spread of public education.

Second, his brother, Aleksandr, was hanged for conspiring with other revolutionaries to assassinate Emperor Alexander III. As historian Warren Carroll writes in “The Crisis of Christendom, 1815-2005”:

“Ever since his admired brother Alexander had been executed, … Vladimir Ulyanov had been consumed by one fixed, closely reasoned purpose: to make a revolution in Russia to overthrow the tsar and his government as the French Revolutionaries had overthrown Louis XVI and his ‘ancient regime,’ but this time in the name of the working class … under the dictatorship of the party he would found and lead.”

Lenin’s laser focus held throughout 17 years of preparatory work. As he wrote revolutionary papers and intrigued with other radicals, he was in and out of trouble with the law. He was expelled from the university, and later exiled from Russia. In 1916, he was living with his wife in Zurich, Switzerland, spending hours each day in the library reading and daydreaming about his revolution and dictatorship which, seemingly, were forever out of his grasp. As Mr. Widmer relates in “Lenin and the Russian Spark,” Lenin even considered trying to rent a plane to fly over the war-wracked nations to get to Russia, but this was nothing but a mere fantasy. He had little support, and no prospects.

But then something in the cogs of the universe shifted, and everything changed, and the forgotten and lonely rebel received the chance he had been torturously longing for: He was to become the central figure in the fate of Europe and, indeed, the whole world, down to our own day. For the Germans decided to aid his return and put him a German train, sending him off to change history forever. In the words of Carroll, “If ever one man, alone, made a world-historic revolution, that man was Lenin. He bequeathed to the world all the horrors of the twentieth century.”

Getting Lenin to Russia

Winston Churchill famously compared Lenin’s return to Russia to the introduction of a “plague bacillus.” The Germans knew Lenin’s incendiary potential as well as his commitment to get Russia out of the war. He was like an infection. Originally, they planned to send this infection directly from Switzerland, through Austria, to Russia, but, as Carroll describes, Emperor Charles of Austria refused to permit this, accurately predicting the evil that would come upon the whole world by trying to use Lenin as a weapon. So, instead, the plan was to send Lenin north into Germany, Sweden, Finland, and, finally, Russia.

As Mr. Widmer informs us, Lenin and his wife and other companions traveled in a green wooden train car with two toilets, the use of which Lenin controlled with a system of tickets (“second-class” tickets were for smoking, and had to make way for those holding “first-class” tickets for relieving themselves). Technically, the train was not fully “sealed,” as the passengers did get off it in order to spend the night in Frankfurt.

Charles I of Austria, 1919. Public Domain

The train car was separated from its wheels and placed on a ferry in order to cross the Baltic. After passing through Stockholm, the train almost reached the Arctic Circle before crossing into Finland and arcing south to Petrograd (St. Petersburg), arriving at 11 p.m. There, Lenin was welcomed by an enthusiastic crowd and a band playing “La Marseillaise,” the anthem of the French Revolution—an eerie echo of past bloodshed and a foreshadowing of the bloodshed to come.

Once disembarked in Petrograd, Lenin wasted no time, but set to work gathering his team of professional revolutionaries from around the globe. As Winston Churchill described in a speech to Parliament, quoted by Caroll: “With these spirits around him he set to work with demoniacal ability to tear to pieces every institution on which the Russian State and nation depended. Russia was laid low.”

In the end, Lenin got his revolution. On Nov. 7 and 8, 1917, Lenin’s Bolshevik party and its militia of “Red Guards” overthrew the Provisional Government and declared that all power now rested with the Soviets—or councils of workers and soldiers—under the command, of course, of Vladimir Lenin.

Lenin would go on to establish one of the most brutal and bloodthirsty regimes in all of history. His Red Terror and the purges of his successor, Joseph Stalin, resulted in the deaths of millions upon millions of people. All-told, Marxism-Leninism has, by some accounts, killed more than 100 million people, according to “The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression.”

Lenin’s sordid story shows us just how dangerous bad ideas—and the men that wield them—can be. What he unleashed has yet to be reined in, and the rumblings of that fateful train ride in April 1917, have yet to cease shaking the world.

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