Lenin on the Train

"The superb, funny, fascinating story of Lenin's trans-European rail journey and how it shook the world"
— Simon Sebag Montefiore, Evening Standard, Books of the Year

By 1917, the European war seemed to be endless. Both sides in the fighting looked to new weapons, tactics, and ideas to break a stalemate that was itself destroying Europe. In the German government, a small group of men had a brilliant idea:
Why not sow further confusion in an increasingly chaotic Russia by arranging for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the most notorious of revolutionary extremists, currently safely bottled up in neutral Switzerland, to go home?

Catherine Merridale's Lenin on the Train

This book recreates Lenin's extraordinary journey from harmless exile in Zurich, across a Germany falling to pieces from the war's deprivations, and northwards to the edge of Lapland to his eventual ecstatic reception by the revolutionary crowds at Petrograd's Finland Station.

With great skill and insight, Merridale:

• Weaves the story of the train and its uniquely strange group of passengers.
• Provides a gripping account of the now half-forgotten liberal Russian revolution.
• Shows how these events intersected, using a huge range of contemporary eyewitnesses.

As Lenin travelled back to a country he had not seen for many years:

• Many thought he was a mere "useful idiot".
• Others believed he would rapidly be imprisoned or killed.
• Some doubted Lenin had significant followers or influence.

They would all prove to be quite wrong.