A Point of History
Souvarine, Boris
The celebrated episode of the trip of the `Bolshevik leaders" across Germany within a "sealed train" has caused as much ink to run as the accusation of being in the pay of the Kaiser,...
...The celebrated episode of the trip of the `Bolshevik leaders" across Germany within a "sealed train" has caused as much ink to run as the accusation of being in the pay of the Kaiser, examined below...
...The journal of P. Miliukov (cadet, Minister of Foreign Affairs) expressed it thus: "A socialist chief as universally known as Lenin must enter into the arena, and we have no alternative but to greet his arrival in Russia, whatever our opinions about his political doctrines is...
...Thus Lenin and his friends had no obligation toward Germany, except that of doing everything possible to exchange an equal number of prison ers detained in Russia...
...A month later, some two hundred Russian refugees, the great majority of them Mensheviks or "social-patriots," who had disavowed the departure of Lenin as premature, lacking the approval at the Soviet, took the same road, having waited for a decision from Petrograd, which never came...
...But the episode is as famous as deformed...
...On the German side, there are Generals Ludendorff and Hoffmann, the memoirs of the Social Democrat Scheidemann, a book by Parvus, etc...
...Soon after the fall of Czarism, the question of the return to Russia was posed for political emigres of all shades...
...The railway car was not leaded, nor the train sealed, still less "armored...
...The Mensheviks require the sanction of the Soviet of worker delegates...
...We offer it as particularly interesting in the light of the recently published, and highly touted, The Russian Revolution by Alan Moorehead—a Book-of-the-Month selection described by the reviewers of the New York Times as the "most readable work yet written on the subject...
...But on what conditions...
...He repulsed with disgust the weak attempt of Parvus, the ex-socialist who had become a businessman and more or less an agent of the German government, who desired to have a talk with him...
...it does not matter that a writer with a facile pen could have done much better all alone in six weeks in a good library...
...As ALWAYS in similar circumstances, some objections arise when theory passes into practice...
...On the other hand, La Pensee Russe, a magazine published in Paris, has devoted to the trip of Lenin across Germany an entire page, of which the least that one can say is that it is worthy of a press which respects itself...
...In fact, it is not true that the German government (some say the staff, others, the Kaiser) "sent" Lenin and his comrades to Russia, and it is false that Lenin had concluded a political pact (do ut des) with German imperialism, as so many authors repeat without knowing the facts...
...the emigres discussed endlessly what people would say, the advantages and disadvantages, the precautions to take, etc...
...On March 31, Lenin sent him a pressing telegram...
...But the resolution declared also with regret that the representatives of "certain political leanings" have agreed to defer their decision (in effect, they wished an approval from the Petrograd Soviet in order to cover themselves...
...We will be suspected...
...On March 28, Lenin telegraphed to J. Ganetski, a Stockholm business man in his confidence: An authorization from Berlin is unacceptable to me...
...As to Lenin, he was not embarrassed with so many scruples, he hastened to participate in the events...
...Meanwhile Lenin, with his decisive spirit, rallied directly to Martov's plan and endeavored to turn words into acts...
...Boris Souvarine discusses these revelations, which apparently form an important part of Mr...
...These authentic texts make it clear that Ganetski, whose own telegrams are not available, inquired in several places in order to find a solution and was by no means the German agent whom so many people have thought...
...But the plan in itself is very good and very just...
...they only fully understood in November 1918, when a box, dispatched to Berlin by diplomatic courier, to the Soviet ambassador Joffe, burst and revealed revolutionary propaganda: relations were broken off, but too late, shortly before the collapse of the Empire...
...our participation would spoil everything...
...That does not resemble any conniving between "Lenin and the Kaiser...
...A phrase of Ludendorff cited a thousand times, very vague and written after the event, does not prove any connivance between Germany and the travelers in the railway car: "In sending Lenin to Russia, our government assumed a heavy responsibility, but it was justified from a military point of view, for it was neces tion" of a book done hastily by a journalist somehow spoken of as a "popular historian" but who is rather a novelistpamphleteer, with the cooperation of an "international team of scholars" [sic] who have, essentially, compiled at third or fourth hand their commonplaces from several books chosen at random...
...Life made a big splash of this material some months ago...
...They reveal themselves as the "condensaThe "sealed train," more readily designated the "leaded car," often turned into the "armored train" [sic] has never involved the least mystery and does not offer a subject for any socalled revelations...
...They made, moreover, the same trip, under the same conditions, neither more nor less innocent or guilty than Lenin...
...On April 9, the first group of 32 persons left Swit zerland, comprising 19 Bolsheviks, 6 Bundists, 3 Menshevik-internationalists...
...This plan was unanimously adopted...
...General von Hoffman in The War of Lost Opportunities, justified also as a "propaganda weapon" what he believed, wrongly, to be German initiative...
...Between March 21 and 23, he telegraphed to his comrade V. Karpinski: Martov's plan is good: it is neces...
...Miliukov will deceive...
...lessly accused him to be...
...the authorization of the passage was only granted by right of exchange with the prisoners or interned Germans and Austrians in Russia (Otto Bauer, notably, would be freed by virtue of this clause...
...Lenin and his partisans were deceived also in counting on the defeat of all the belligerents, on the "proletarian" revolution in Germany and within all countries, and on the "world" revolution...
...And as Grimm, whom he thought to be a "centrist," then suspect, did not carry out his steps with enough conviction, he had confided to Fritz Platten, another Swiss socialist, the care of concluding the matter...
...Send someone immediately to Finland or to Petrograd in order to come to an agreement with Tchkhe!drk (president, Menshevik, of the Soviet] as soon as possible...
...All these close companions of Lenin were later put to death by Stalin...
...Now, on their account, no one spoke of a railway car leaded, sealed, or armored...
...A committee for the evacuation of the emigres, brought together in Zurich, and where 23 groups of different political labels were represented, unanimously took note of the English government's refusal to let the Russian socialists enter their country...
...It was the tenacity and the victory of the "Entente" which created a change of regime in Germany and annulling the treaty of Brest-Litovsk, spared the Soviet regime...
...Moorehead's "most readable" work...
...THESE CONDITIONS figure within a memorandum of F. Platten dated April 4 and are reproduced within other documents of the times...
...among them, "social-patriots" and "defensists" were much more numerous than the small Leninist group...
...On March 19, 1917, in Geneva, a meeting was held in which there participated NatansonBobrov (representing the Socialists), L. Martov (the Mensheviks), G. Zinoviev (the Bolsheviks), Kossovski (the Bund), and it was then that Martov suggested that passage through Germany be negotiated in exchange for the Germans and Austrians interned within Russia...
...We cannot participate either directly or indirectly...
...Lenin was accompanied notably by Zinoviev, Sokolnikov, Safarov and their wives, and by Radek...
...obtain from the Soviet ofworker delegates the exchange for the interned Germans...
...The initiative came then from Martov, spokesman of the Menshevik-internationalists, adversary of the Bolsheviks, and not from Lenin, and not from Berlin...
...Later, Ludendorff wrote that he had "no ideas about Lenin or Kienthal" and that he was restricted "to follow solely the directions of the government" (letter to R. Fester, 20 October 1937...
...focusing on it then will not be useless at a time when some brassy publications abuse the credulity of the public and propagate the most vulgar historical popularizations under the false pretext of revealing something new about the Russian Revolution.* Nora: This article is reprinted, with the permission of the author and publishers, from Le Contrat Social, March 1958...
...Moorehead neither reads nor speaks Russian but that he had access to "hitherto unknown" material gathered by Prof...
...The British authorities refused to Russians living in Switzerland authorization to pass through England...
...On both sides, explicit witnesses abound...
...The intentions of the German Chan cellor von Bethmann-Hollweg who took the responsibility for the operation were evident, to the Bolsheviks as to everyone else...
...However, Robert Grimm, Swiss socialist delegate, took some measures that did not progress quickly, on behalf of the Russians impatient to leave...
...The same day, the Bolshevik group adopted a resolution stating that "the proposition of R. Grimm is fully acceptable since it guarantees the liberty of independent passage of the political partisans" and that "the proposition is founded on the plan of an exchange of Russian emigres for the Germans interned in Russia...
...On the Bolshevik side, there are all the texts of Lenin (letters, telegrams, notes), the memoranda of the participants (Krupskaya, Platten, Ganetski, Shliapnikov, and others...
...He considered successively several unrealizable plans: to procure a passport of a Swedish deaf-mute, to pass across the frontiers with some smugglers, etc...
...He had been welcomed in Stockholm by Ganetski, then at the Russian frontier by Kamenev and Shliapnikov...
...Essentially, they stipulate the right of extraterritoriality recognized for the railway car escorted by Platten who, alone, would be in contact with the German authorities, the travelers being admitted without any distinction of political opinion and freed from all control (which permitted K. Radek, of non-Russian nationality, to leave...
...The truth, known at the time, suffices in itself and the legend does not serve in any way the criticism of the Bolshevism...
...In their Iast declarations, before setting out, the Bolsheviks repeated their irreducible hostility to German imperialism and their desire for "revolutionary war against Germany" after taking power in Russia "for the working class...
...Or that theSwiss government will obtain a car up to Copenhagen, or that the Russian government will negotiate the exchange of all the emigres for the interned Germans...
...Only hope: send someone to Petrograd...
...Lenin refused curtly to see any of the German Social Democrats who climbed on the train in Berlin...
...The Germans, counting on a short-term advantage, were deceived in the long run...
...sary to support it, but we (and you) cannot do it directly...
...On March 30, a new telegram from Lenin to Ganetski: Your plan is unacceptable...
...Stephen T. Possony of Georgetown University under a grant from Pennsylvania University and the magazine Life...
...This compilation "dramatized," according to the American expression, is claimed to have required (Life, March 17, p. 37) a year and a half of work for this same team...
...The fact cannot be contested and it reduces to nonsense all the talk that has made the rounds with respect to the so-caIIed political accord between Lenin and Germany...
...This time, L. Martov was among them...
...The same reviewer also notes that Mr...
...On April 16, Lenin and his traveling companions were welcomed at Petrograd by N. Tchkheidz6, president of the Soviet', and M. Skobelev, vice president, delegates of the Executive Committee...
...sary at all costs to hasten the defeat of Russia" (General Ludendorff: Souvenirs de guerre...
...The brassy articles in Life, weekly illustrated American magazine, reprinted in England, in France, and elsewhere in those journals which are not distinguished either by seriousness or by competence, truly do no honor to the Western press...
...It is necessary that besides Martov, some disinterested Russians and some Russian patriots speak to the Swiss ministers (and to some influential people, some lawyers, etc., all that one can do in Geneva) and ask them to discuss the matter with the German ambassador in Berne...
...It did not matter how, moreover...
...One would blush to reprint the assertions ventured in order to announce the French version where the author becomes "the journalist who devoted ten years of his life to this study:' Let it suffice to note sadly that these "morals of the dailies," singularly made worse since Marcel Schwob, only serve the Communist cause...
...and by an immense crowd that the local Bolsheviks had gathered together...
...On April 5, he telegraphed to Ganetski: We have an incomprehensible delay...
...England will not let me pass, internsme rather...
...N.B...
Vol. 5 • September 1958 • No. 4
