Why did Lenin come in a sealed carriage?

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

When the revolution broke out in Russia, Lenin had already lived for 9 years in Switzerland, in cozy Zurich.

The collapse of the monarchy took him by surprise - just a month before February, at a meeting with Swiss politicians of the left, he said that he was unlikely to live to see the revolution, and that "young people will already see it." He learned about what had happened in Petrograd from the newspapers and immediately got ready to go to Russia.

But how to do that? After all, Europe is engulfed in the flames of war. However, this was not difficult to do - the Germans had a serious interest in the return of the revolutionaries to Russia. The chief of staff of the Eastern Front, General Max Hoffmann, later recalled: “The corruption introduced into the Russian army by the revolution, we naturally sought to strengthen by means of propaganda. In the rear, someone who maintained relations with Russians living in exile in Switzerland came up with the idea to use some of these Russians in order to destroy the spirit of the Russian army even more quickly and poison it with poison. " According to M. Hoffman, through the deputy M. Erzberger, this "someone" made a corresponding proposal to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs; the result was the famous "sealed carriage" that brought Lenin and other emigrants through Germany to Russia.

Later, the name of the initiator became known: it was the famous international adventurer Alexander Parvus (Israel Lazarevich Gelfand), who acted through the German ambassador to Copenhagen Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau.

According to U. Brockdorff-Rantzau, Parvus's idea found support in the Foreign Ministry from Baron Helmut von Malzahn and from Reichstag deputy M. Erzberger, head of military propaganda. They persuaded Chancellor T. Bethmann-Hollweg, who suggested the Stavka (that is, Wilhelm II, P. Hindenburg and E. Ludendorff) to carry out a "brilliant maneuver". This information was confirmed with the publication of documents from the German Foreign Ministry. In a memorandum drawn up on the basis of conversations with Parvus, Brockdorff-Rantzau wrote: “I believe that, from our point of view, it is preferable to support the extremists, since this will most quickly lead to certain results. In all likelihood, in three months we can count on the fact that disintegration will reach the stage when we will be able to crush Russia by military force."

As a result, the chancellor authorized the German ambassador in Bern von Romberg to contact the Russian emigrants and offer them travel to Russia through Germany. At the same time, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs asked the Treasury for 3 million marks for propaganda in Russia, which were allocated.

On March 31, Lenin, on behalf of the party, telegraphed the Swiss Social Democrat Robert Grimm, who initially acted as a mediator in negotiations between the Bolsheviks and the Germans (then Friedrich Platten began to play this role) the decision to "unconditionally accept" the proposal to travel through Germany and "immediately organize this trip" … The next day, Vladimir Ilyich demands from his "cashier" Yakub Ganetsky (Yakov Furstenbeerg) money for the trip: "Allocate two thousand, preferably three thousand crowns for our trip."

The conditions of travel were signed on April 4. On Monday, April 9, 1917, the travelers gathered at the Zeringer Hof Hotel in Zurich with bags and suitcases, blankets and groceries. Lenin hit the road with Krupskaya, his wife and comrade-in-arms. But with them was also Inessa Armand, whom Ilyich revered. However, the secret of the departure has already been revealed.

A group of Russian émigrés gathered at a train station in Zurich, who accompanied Lenin and the company with angry shouts: “Traitors! German agents!"

In response, when the train departed, its passengers sang the Internationale in chorus, and then other songs of the revolutionary repertoire.

In fact, Lenin, of course, was not any German agent. He simply cynically took advantage of the Germans' interest in transporting revolutionaries to Russia. In this, their goals at that time coincided: to weaken Russia and crush the tsarist empire. With the only difference that Lenin was then going to arrange a revolution in Germany itself.

The emigrants left Zurich in the direction of the German border and the town of Gottmadingen, where a carriage and two German escort officers were waiting for them. One of them, Lieutenant von Buhring, was an Eastsee German and spoke Russian. The conditions of travel through the territory of Germany were as follows. Firstly, complete extraterritoriality - neither at the entrance to the Second Reich, nor at the exit should there be any document checks, no stamps in passports, it is forbidden to leave the extraterritorial carriage. Also, the German authorities promised not to take anyone out of the car by force (a guarantee against possible arrest).

Of its four doors, three were indeed sealed, one, near the conductor's vestibule, was left open - through it, under the control of German officers and Friedrich Platten (he was an intermediary between emigrants and Germans), fresh newspapers and food from hawkers were bought at the stations. Thus, the legend about complete isolation of passengers and deaf "sealing" is exaggerated. In the corridor of the carriage, Lenin drew a line in chalk - the symbolic border of extraterritoriality that separated the "German" compartment from all the others.

From Sassnitz, the emigrants took the Queen Victoria ship to Trelleborg, from where they arrived in Stockholm, where they were met by journalists. There Lenin bought himself a decent coat and a cap, which later became famous, which was mistaken for the cap of a Russian worker.

From Stockholm there was a thousand-kilometer stretch northward by an ordinary passenger train - to the Haparanda station on the border between Sweden and the Grand Duchy of Finland, which is still part of Russia. They crossed the border on a sleigh, where a train to Petrograd was waiting at the Russian station Tornio …

Lenin tried to refrain from any compromising contacts; in Stockholm, he categorically refused to even meet with Parvus. However, Radek spent almost the whole day with Parvus, negotiating with him with Lenin's approval. “It was a decisive and top secret meeting,” they write in their book “Credit for the Revolution. Parvus Plan Zeman and Scharlau. There are suggestions that it was there that the financing of the Bolsheviks was negotiated. At the same time, Lenin tried to create the impression of a lack of funds: he asked for help, took money from the Russian consul, etc.; upon his return he even presented receipts. However, according to the impression of the Swedish Social Democrats, when asking for help, Lenin was clearly “overplaying”, since the Swedes knew for sure that the Bolsheviks had money. Parvus, after Lenin's departure, went to Berlin and had a long audience there with State Secretary Zimmermann.

Arriving in Russia, Lenin immediately came out with the famous "April Theses", demanding the transfer of power into the hands of the Soviets.

The day after the publication of the Theses in Pravda, one of the leaders of the German intelligence service in Stockholm telegraphed to the Foreign Ministry in Berlin: “Lenin’s arrival in Russia is successful. It works exactly the way we would like it to."

Subsequently, General Ludendorff wrote in his memoirs: “By sending Lenin to Russia, our government assumed a special responsibility. From a military point of view, this venture was justified, Russia had to be brought down. Which was successfully done.