Lenin returns to Petrograd

Late in the evening of 16 April 1917 (3 April in the Julian calendar) a train pulled into the Finland Station in Petrograd carrying the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin, back from exile. Thousands of workers, soldiers and sailors were waiting for him on the platform and in the square outside the station. Lenin had travelled from Switzerland through Germany, Sweden and Finland. Across enemy territory, with the consent of the German government and Supreme Army Command, he had been carried in a special carriage, later called “sealed”. The Germans hoped that one of the most implacable opponents of the war would weaken Russia from within.

An émigré in Switzerland

Lenin had lived in neutral Switzerland since 1914, most recently in Zürich. The leader of the socialist far left and a participant in the Zimmerwald Conference, he had argued since the start of the war that socialists should work for the defeat of their own governments and the transformation of the war into a civil war. He learned of the February Revolution from the newspapers in mid-March and at once wanted to go back. The route through France and Britain was closed to him: the Allies had no intention of letting advocates of immediate peace through to Russia. At the beginning of April the British detained Leon Trotsky, sailing from New York, at Halifax in Canada. That left the route through Germany.

The idea was suggested by the Menshevik Julius Martov. On 19 March the committee of Russian émigrés in Switzerland decided to ask the Germans for permission to pass through in exchange for Russia releasing the same number of interned Germans and Austrians. Most of the émigrés, however, preferred to wait for the consent of the Provisional Government, since a journey through an enemy country risked a charge of treason. Lenin did not want to wait. Negotiations with the German minister in Bern, Gisbert von Romberg, were conducted on his behalf by the Swiss socialist Fritz Platten. On 4 April he handed the minister Lenin’s conditions: the carriage was to have extraterritorial rights, no one could enter it without Platten’s consent, there were to be no passport checks in Germany, and the composition of the group was to be decided by the travellers themselves, regardless of their views on the war.

Berlin’s calculations

The Germans accepted these conditions without haggling. As early as 23 March the Secretary of State, Arthur Zimmermann, had passed on to the Supreme Army Command the news that prominent Russian revolutionaries wished to return through Germany, adding: “Since it is in our interest that the influence of the radical wing should prevail in Russia, permission for the transit seems to me advisable.” The command of Paul von Hindenburg and Erich Ludendorff raised no objections, demanding only that the transit be collective and under a reliable escort. On 2 April the minister in Copenhagen, Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, recommended in a secret memorandum that “the greatest possible chaos” be created in Russia and that the extreme parties be covertly supported against the moderates. He worked closely with Alexander Parvus, a former revolutionary of 1905 who had collaborated with the German government since the start of the war. On 7 April the German Foreign Office, in agreement with the command, accepted Lenin’s conditions. Kaiser Wilhelm II learned of the matter when the journey was already under way.

The “sealed” carriage

On 9 April, Easter Monday, the group left Zürich. It numbered 32 people, including children. According to a chronicle of the revolution published in Moscow in 1923, among them were 19 Bolsheviks, 6 members of the Jewish Bund and 3 supporters of the internationalist newspaper Nashe Slovo (“Our Word”). Travelling with Lenin were his wife Nadezhda Krupskaya, Inessa Armand, Grigory Zinoviev with his family, Grigori Sokolnikov and Karl Radek. At Gottmadingen, just across the border, a passenger carriage was waiting for them with an escort of two German officers. The “seal” consisted in three of the carriage’s four doors being locked, and a chalk line on the corridor separating the Russian part from the German one. Only Platten could cross the line. Lenin and his companions avoided talking to the Germans, and also refused to meet a German trade-union official who boarded at Stuttgart.

By way of Frankfurt and Berlin, where the carriage stood for about 20 hours in a siding, the group reached Sassnitz on Rügen on 12 April and crossed by ferry to Trelleborg. On the morning of 13 April it was in Stockholm, where it was greeted at the station by the city’s mayor and Swedish socialists. Lenin bought himself a new suit there. Parvus wanted to meet him to discuss a German-Russian peace, but Lenin refused. Radek stayed in Stockholm, since as an Austro-Hungarian subject he could not enter Russia. Together with Jakub Hanecki, who lived there, he henceforth ran the Bolsheviks’ foreign bureau. Across northern Sweden the travellers reached Haparanda on 15 April and crossed the frozen river by sledge to Finnish Tornio, on the territory of the Russian state. There the Russian border control refused to let Platten in.

The Finland Station

At the last border station, Beloostrov, the train filled with workers who had come to greet Lenin. Bolsheviks from Petrograd also boarded, among them Lev Kamenev, editor of Pravda. According to participants’ memoirs, Lenin, immediately after greeting him, rebuked him for what the paper had been writing in support of the Provisional Government and the defence of the country. The train arrived in Petrograd late, at about 11 p.m. Outside the station sailors from Kronstadt had formed a guard of honour. In the former imperial waiting room Lenin was awaited by the chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, the Menshevik Nikolay Chkheidze. On behalf of the Soviet he expressed the hope that Lenin would join the ranks of revolutionary democracy, since the first task now was to defend free Russia against enemies within and without. Lenin turned away from him and addressed the crowd. He hailed “the vanguard of the worldwide proletarian army” and ended with the cry: “Long live the worldwide socialist revolution!”

Outside the station he climbed onto an armoured car and, in the glare of searchlights, addressed the assembled crowd once more. The car then drove through the city to the mansion of the ballerina Mathilde Kschessinska, which the Bolsheviks had taken over as the seat of their committee. Lenin spoke there from the balcony, and then talked to the assembled party activists until late at night.

The April Theses

The next day, 17 April, Lenin presented his programme to the Bolsheviks in the Tauride Palace; it was published a few days later in Pravda and became known as the April Theses. No support for the Provisional Government, no concessions to “revolutionary defencism”, all power to the soviets, and explaining to the masses that without overthrowing capital the war could not be ended with a truly democratic peace. Most socialists, including many Bolsheviks, considered this madness. The veteran of Russian Marxism Georgi Plekhanov called the theses delirium. The government did nothing to stop Lenin. According to some historians, the ministers counted on the journey through Germany itself discrediting him in the eyes of public opinion.

Significance

In Berlin the journey was considered a success. On 21 April the Supreme Army Command passed a report to the Foreign Office: “Lenin’s entry into Russia successful. He is working exactly as we would wish.” General Max Hoffmann, chief of staff of the German Eastern Front, explained after the war that since the Germans fired shells into the enemy’s trenches and released gas at them, they also had the right to use propaganda against him. Lenin, however, was nobody’s tool. The journey took place because the interests of both sides briefly coincided: the Germans wanted to weaken Russia and conclude a separate peace in the east, and Lenin wanted a revolution that would not stop at the overthrow of the Tsar. German files published after the Second World War show that in the following months Berlin also supported the Bolsheviks with money. In April 1917 Lenin headed a small party that was in the minority in the Petrograd Soviet. Less than seven months later he seized power in Russia with it.