Missed connection
Vladimir Lenin’s railway journey from Switzerland to Russia changed history
Lenin on the Train. By Catherine Merridale. Allen Lane; 353 pages; £25. To be published in America by Metropolitan in March.
A BRITISH intelligence officer dismissed Vladimir Lenin and his fellow revolutionaries as “fanatical and narrow-minded”. That was an understatement. But by early 1917 power in Russia was there for the taking. That February, 300 years of Romanov autocracy had been ended in a few dizzying days, while nothing had been put in its place. Russia, exhausted and desperate from three years of disastrous war with Germany and its allies, was being run by ineffectual and well-meaning moderates. Lenin knew exactly what he wanted, and he would deploy extraordinary energy and ruthlessness to achieve it.
This article appeared in the Culture section of the print edition under the headline "Missed connection"
From the October 8th 2016 edition
Discover stories from this section and more in the list of contents
Explore the editionMore from Culture
The controversial cult of the host club in Japan
Why women pay men in make-up to flatter them
How did the Founding Fathers want Americans to behave?
A journalist tries to figure out what it means to “live constitutionally”
#Tradwives, the real housewives of the internet, have gone viral
Why social-media users are riveted by the domestic toil of homemakers