This book tells the story of Lenin's return to St. Petersburg from Switzerland during WW I. It explains how the German government wanted to use Lenin to disrupt Russia and to get them out of the war. The train journey is used as the outline of a book that talks in detail about St. Petersburg before and after the revolution that overthrew the Tsar. It actually does a good job of explaining, on a day by day basis, what happened in the revolution. It is, however, somewhat challenging to read because of the volume of Russian names thrown at the reader. ( )

In April, 1917 when the first Russian Revolution forced Tsar Nicholas II to abdicate, Europe was still in the midst of World War I. The Allies wanted Russia to stay in the war fighting, Tsar or no Tsar, but the Germans desperately wanted the country to withdraw so they would be fighting a war on a single front. But that was not going to happen as long as the Provisional Government of Alexander Kerensky was in power

The Germans best hope was with the leader of the Bolsheviks, Vladimir Lenin. But Lenin was in Zurich and would have to cross the whole of Germany to return to Russia. Everyone who had taken modern European history knows that the Germans provided Lenin with passage across their country in a sealed train so he could lead the second Bolshevik Revolution and end Russia’s participation in the war. But howe this happened and how Lenin became convinced that the only way the Russian Revolution would be successful was by masking a deal with his country’s deadliest enemy is the stuff that great novels of espionage are made. This was a super read that held my interest from the first page to the last. ( )

Lenin on the Train: The Journey that Changed the Course of History by Catherine Merridale is her sixth book on Russian/Soviet history. Merridale has a First Class degree in history from King's College, Cambridge and a Ph.D. from the University of Birmingham. Retiring from her academic career, Merridale became a freelance writer in 2014. She has written for the London Review of Books, the New Statesman, The Independent, The Guardian, and the Literary Review. She has also contributed to BBC Radio.

Arguably the twentieth century was a short century. On the historical scales, the century begins with the First World War and ends with the fall of the Soviet Union. Now, the early events are approaching their centennial marks and with that, there is renewed interest, new information, and thinking of the events. Lenin's train ride was an important event in world affairs that would run long and deep.

Germany, knowing America's entry into the war was only a matter of time would resort to other means to win the war. The war was financially breaking England and draining France of its male population at an alarming rate. Germany, however, was suffering in a two front war. Austria-Hungary, the country who initiated the war, turned out to be a very weak ally. German needed to remove Russia from the fighting and it had a plan.

The Germans knew that there were other ways of winning the war than the battlefield. By distracting the enemy with other problems, it would reduce their will to fight. If Mexico declared war on the US, the US would be unable to fight in Europe. If radicals in France became popular the will to fight would dwindle. If Germany could pull away from the Eastern front, they could concentrate on France and England before America entered the war. To remove Russia, Germany had to disrupt the fragile government and they had the man to do it. It was just a matter of transporting him to Russia.

To some moving one man through Germany and Finland to Russia might seem fairly insignificant. But the man transported eventually did remove Russia from the war. That benefit would eventually haunt Germany in the next World War and for almost fifty years afterward. The man in the train lead a revolution that became one of the focal points of the twentieth century. The spectre of communism became Leninism and Stalinism. The quick move for advantage backfired in the long run.

Merridale takes the reader on the best constructed and plausible route of Lenin's sealed train car. She jumps around quite a bit and perhaps is a bit lacking in background information, but considering her experience she most likely writes for an audience who already has a background in Russian history. For those with a Russian or World War I history experience, it is an excellent source of information on a lesser told part of history. All in all a great book for historians. For others, the light background on Russia and its problems before World War I might make this book a bit challenging.
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In 1917, at the height of the First World War, Germany turned to a new weapon in their fight against the Allied Powers. They found a revolutionary called Lenin, who was living in neutral Zurich, stuck him on a sealed train, and fired him (in Churchill's words) ‘like a plague bacillus’ through Germany and into Russia.

‘What Lenin brought to Russia was class hatred, German money and elaborate works on the application of Marxism in Russia,’ as the chief of police in Petrograd put it (though how much Lenin was actually financed by the Germans is debatable). The point was that he, as a revolutionary socialist, was opposed to the war and would, it was hoped, pull Russia out of it altogether – so Berlin considered that ‘the interests of the German government are identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries’.

The journey was a complicated one, logistically, and Catherine Merridale does her best to retrace the route – but in the end, the train journey itself is the least of what's being written about here. It's an excuse to examine the state of the war, and of the world, in 1917, from the swarming network of spies and chancers, to the competing intellectual arguments about people power versus government authority.

Is the sealed train enough to hold the book together thematically? Well…just about.

It's a useful book for fleshing out the character of Lenin, someone marked by his total intransigence with anyone who disagreed with him even slightly, and also by a sort of infuriatingly fussy authoritarianism. Even on the journey in question, he was legislating his infamous ‘in-train rules’ about when people had to go to sleep and what hand-drawn vouchers they needed to use the toilet. It sounds like sheer pettiness, but the difference between that and the regime he established in Russia – ‘a stifling, cruel, sterile one, a workshop for decades of tyranny’ – is only one of scale.

Given the aims of the Germans in putting Lenin on this train, it is frustrating that Merridale never spells out the result of the journey: namely, that after Lenin's coup, the Bolsheviks did indeed sign a peace treaty with Germany. Unless I missed it, this simple fact is not even stated in the book.

In any case, the real punchline comes when she considers the fate of Lenin's companions on the train once Lenin had died and the journey had passed into myth. The people with him had experienced it as reality, not myth – which from Stalin's point of view meant they knew too much.

Zinoviev was shot with Kamenev in 1936. His son Stefan – who as a little boy in Switzerland had enchanted Lenin so much that the leader once attempted to adopt him – was shot in 1937. Zinoviev's second wife and travelling companion of 1917, who was exiled to one of the most northern labour colonies, was shot in 1938. […] In September 1937, and still protesting his innocence, [Shlyapnikov] was shot for his supposed involvement in Zinoviev's so-called conspiracy.… Radek and Sokolnikov were beaten to death in their respective labour camps within a few days of each other.… Fürstenberg was shot, as were his wife and son, after a fifteen-minute trial.

My problems with the book had to do with its focus – Merridale's prose, by contrast, and her powers of explanation, are excellent. So you need a fair working knowledge of the context, but if you have that, this book makes for a fascinating snapshot on a particularly freighted moment in European history. It's also enjoyable to imagine someone picking it up as an imagined sequel to Girl on the Train. ( )

I studied Russian History in college and the title of this book promised some unknown insights. The problem? The book's title misrepresents what's on the pages. There is little told about the train ride. And, too much detail that perhaps could be better stated in a history class, and not a novel. By promising a picture of Lenin as he makes his way to St. Petersburg the author does not set the stage for a book more about the Russian Revolution than one might expect in this setting. Still, Merridale provides a look at the various forces building towards the development of Lenin as the eventual leader. But that might have been better placed in a book with a more definitive title and theme. ( )