Bolsheviks on board

Full allowance must be made for the desperate tasks to which the German war leaders were already committed… Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland to Russia.

As so often, Churchill has the best lines. Here he is about one of the most famous episodes in European history: the safe passage given to Lenin by a Germany desperate for victory in the first world war. As long as German high command could dream up ways to eliminate the threat from either the West or East, there was hope it would not suffer defeat.

Lenin, as Churchill wrote, was imperial Russia’s ‘Vengeance’. Germany thought Lenin’s arrival in Russia could mean an early end to the war, as he had so often denigrated the imperialist-capitalist war effort. In fact, they were spectacularly wrong, because the Bolsheviks proved to be as militaristic as their autocratic predecessors.