IN MARCH, 1917, Lenin was living in Zurich in poverty, the exiled head of a small extremist revolutionary party that had relatively little following even within Russia. Eight months later, he assumed the rule of 160,000,000 people occupying one-sixth of the inhabited surface of the world.
The Sealed Train is the story of those thirty-four fantastic weeks. The train itself and the bizarre journey across Germany, then at war with Russia, are a vital and dramatic link in the story. For without the train, Lenin could not have reached St. Petersburg when he did, and if Lenin had not returned to Russia, the history of the world would have been very different. For not one of his comrades had the sense of timing, the strength of will, the mental agility, the subtle understanding of the ever-changing mood of the people and the sheer intellectual power of Lenin.
It is one of the great ironies of history that without the help of the German Emperor—the archproponent of the imperialist capitalist system that Lenin was dedicated to destroy—Lenin could never have achieved what he did. His establishment of a socialist state, the first stage in what he hoped would be a world Communist system, was made possible only by German cooperation, a German train and the massive German finance that followed it.
In the unifying of opposing interests that the Sealed Train symbolized, both Lenin and Kaiser Wilhelm took an enormous risk. For Lenin, the tarnish of enemy association, the “unclean hands” with which the train invested him, was highly dangerous politically and nearly destroyed him.
For the Kaiser, the risk, though he discounted it, was that Lenin’s plan for world revolution would spread across the Russian borders to threaten him with the same fate that had already overtaken his cousin, the Tsar.
Strangely, although their interests were opposed, both men achieved a large measure of what they sought. Lenin gained his revolution even if it did not assume the immediate global proportions he expected. The Kaiser gained the separate peace he wanted on the Eastern Front so that he could concentrate his forces in France—as well as a side benefit of vast areas of territory that had once formed part of the Tsarist Empire.
In dealing with the problem of spelling that faces any writer on a Russian subject, I have followed by and large the Library of Congress standard, though I have departed from this in the case of names or words that seemed to me to appear more natural spelled in other ways—such as Zinoviev.