2. Caged Lion

You can imagine what torture it is for all of us to be stuck here at a time like this. We have to go by some means, even if it is through Hell.

- V. I. LENIN

Lenin's old friend Grigory Zinoviev was in the Swiss capital, Bern, when news of the February Revolution broke. Like his fellow revolutionaries, he was elated by the news: 'The ice has broken,' he wrote, and 'what whole generations of Russian revolutionaries had dreamed of, had finally become a fact.' As he hurried home, still holding the news-sheet proclaiming the news, he discovered a telegram from Lenin already waiting for him. He was, he learned, to leave for Zurich 'immediately'.1

Born Hirsch Apfelbaum on 11 September 1883, on a dairy farm in what is now central Ukraine, Zinoviev joined the RSDLP in 1901 and sided with Lenin's faction when the party split. He was on the streets of St Petersburg, agitating among the workers, during the revolution of 1905, and became a member of the Bolshevik Central Committee two years later. In the decade or so that followed, Zinoviev - who lived in exile in France, Austria and then Switzerland - became Lenin's right-hand man. (When the Mensheviks described him as the Old Man's 'arms bearer', it was not meant as a compliment.) Described by one historian as 'stocky, clean-shaven, short-winded' and with a 'high-pitched voice', Zinoviev - a compelling and inspirational orator - was 'a supreme sycophant, famously cynical, who did a lot of Lenin's dirty work for him'. According to his fellow Bolshevik Angelika Balabanova (who later broke with the party), Zinoviev was 'simply the most despicable human being I ever met. Whenever there was an unfair factional manoeuvre to be made or a revolutionary reputation to be undermined,' she explained, 'Lenin would charge Zinoviev with the task.'2

As the two men walked the streets of Zurich that spring, one thought dominated all else: the urgent need to get back to Russia. Lenin, Zinoviev explained, was becoming increasingly frustrated, 'drawn to work, to fight, but in the Swiss "hole", there was nothing to do but sit around in the libraries. I remember with what "envy" . we looked at the Swiss Social Democrats, who in one way or another lived among their workers and were absorbed in the workers' movement of their country.' Lenin and his comrades, though, were 'cut off from Russia, as never before. We longed for Russian language, for Russian air. At that time, Vladimir Ilyich reminded us of a lion locked in a cage.'3

The problem, of course, was that Lenin's route home was blocked. The Allied powers, desperate to keep Russia in the war, were hardly going to provide safe passage to Europe's leading advocate of 'revolutionary defeatism'. Meanwhile, as a citizen of a hostile power, travel through Germany or Austria-Hungary was illegal.4 In desperation, Lenin and his comrades conjured up a series of increasingly preposterous plans. Repeatedly Lenin sought to procure a false passport, so that he could travel in disguise ('I can wear a wig,' he explained), via France, England, the Netherlands, and then on to neutral Scandinavia. Then he toyed with the idea of returning to Russia by plane. But, as Zinoviev pointed out, they only lacked a few things: 'an aeroplane, the necessary means, the consent of the authorities, etc.' A false Swedish passport was easy to get hold of, but since Lenin neither spoke nor understood a word of the language, using the document presented a challenge. It was in seeming desperation, then, that he concocted a scheme to return to Russia using the passport of a deaf and mute Swede - and even went so far as to ask his comrade Yakov Ganetsky (Jakub Fürstenberg), then living in Stockholm, to 'find a Swede who looked like me'. It was left to Lenin's wife to point out the flaw: '"Imagine yourself falling asleep and dreaming of Mensheviks, which will start you off swearing juicily in Russian! Where will your disguise be then?" I said with a laugh.'5

For Lenin, however, being stuck in Switzerland while revolution played out in his homeland was no laughing matter. As he told Ganetsky, 'You can imagine what torture it is for all of us to be stuck here at a time like this. We have to go by some means, even if it is through Hell.'6

Gradually, the comrades began to realise that they had no other choice. The only viable route home lay through Kaiser Wilhelm II's German Empire - Russia's deadly and most hated foe.

*

In the long, cruel months that had followed the outbreak of war in August 1914, German troops had killed or maimed hundreds of thousands of Russians, taken many more prisoner, and occupied vast tracts of Russian territory. Lenin himself had nothing but contempt for the imperialists, monarchists and bourgeois capitalists who, with the craven support of Germany's SPD, had sacrificed millions of their fellow citizens in order to 'enrich a few, open the road to Baghdad, [and] conquer the Balkans'.7 To travel through Imperial Germany without permission risked almost certain arrest and imprisonment (not least because, as Karl Radek explained, the business of distinguishing between genuine traffickers and German spies proved impossible).8 And yet to do a deal with the Kaiser's government smacked of treachery. The Austrian writer Stefan Zweig, who was in Zurich during the spring of 1917, later wrote that 'it is high treason, of course, to set foot on enemy land and cross it in the middle of a war and with the approval of the enemy general staff.' Lenin, moreover, would have been all too aware that, by enabling his opponents to level the charge that he was a paid agent of the German government, he risked compromising the Bolsheviks, and their cause - perhaps fatally.9

It is not clear who first suggested to Lenin the notion of returning to Russia via Germany. Writing several years later, Radek claimed that he had asked a journalist working for the Frankfurter Zeitung to sound out Gisbert von Romberg, the German ambassador in Bern, about whether Germany might allow Russian émigrés to travel through its territory.10 In doing this, Radek may well have been influenced by his knowledge that Russians working in Copenhagen had recently received transit visas from Berlin.11 At around the same time, though, Lenin's great rival Yuli Martov - addressing a meeting of Russian and Polish émigrés in the Swiss capital - floated the idea that the Provisional Government in Petrograd might release some German and Austrian civil internees in return for Germany allowing safe transit for the exiles. Zinoviev, who was at the meeting, reported back to Lenin, who deemed the idea 'excellent - we ought to get busy with it'.12 As soon became clear, negotiations with the Provisional Government would likely be a long, drawn-out affair. (The hawkish foreign minister, Pavel Milyukov, was far from keen to assist anti-war 'defeatists'.) Lenin, who was kept awake at night by the fear that events in Russia might leave him behind, now moved to cut his own deal.

The complex, fraught and clandestine negotiations that unfolded in the early spring of 1917 involved a cast of individuals who were, by turns, unsavoury, disreputable and politically suspect. Lenin, understandably, insisted on leaving the heavy lifting to intermediaries.13 Robert Grimm, the Swiss socialist leader, journalist and organiser of the Zimmerwald Conference, might have been, in Lenin's words, a 'detestable centrist', but he had useful contacts within the Swiss government, and so was recruited to try to broker a deal with Romberg.14 At the same time, through his old ally Yakov Ganetsky, Lenin made contact with Alexander Helphand (who used the pseudonym 'Parvus'). Seventeen years earlier, Parvus had been a brilliant young Marxist who had helped churn out the early issues of Iskra from a printing press hidden in his Munich home. Now, though, he cut a very different figure: enormously fat, he had made a fortune in Constantinople (allegedly via dubious deals in wheat and arms) and then, with the outbreak of war, had offered his services to the German government, becoming a millionaire as an arms dealer, propagandist and exploiter of the black market in medicines, drugs, rubber and other goods. The once idealistic revolutionary had transformed, in middle age, into a caricature of a tycoon, with a penchant for luxury cars, champagne, cigars and glamorous young blondes. But, by convincing the German leadership that assisting Lenin and his comrades was in their interests, he changed the course of the twentieth century.15

By early 1917, the German government was under intense pressure. With the Royal Navy's economic blockade causing desperate hardship at home, the military command sought to use its formidable...