Sealed Train

Scope of the term

In historiography the "plombirovanny vagon" (sealed carriage) has become the established name of three trains that carried a large group of Russian revolutionary exiles from Switzerland through Germany to Russia in April 1917; in its narrower use it denotes only the carriage in which Lenin travelled on the first of those trains. More generally, a sealed train travels internationally under customs or immigration seal, so that its contents are not legally treated as entering or leaving the countries traversed; in the twentieth century the device was also used for the repatriation of Spanish Civil War combatants, for Jewish emigration from Nazi Germany, and for the transfer of East German refugees to West Germany. Lenin's return is the best known case, although the passengers disembarked to spend a night in Frankfurt, so that journey was not, strictly, a sealed train.

Route and conditions

On 17 March 1917 Kollontai, Pyatakov, Bosch and Ganetsky telegraphed Lenin that he must return to Russia; Lenin replied that leaving Switzerland was extremely difficult. After the Provisional Government's amnesty for political and religious offences became known, on 18 March he asked the British embassy whether he could travel via Britain; the answer was no. At a meeting of Russian political exiles in Bern on 19 March, Yuli Martov proposed transit through Germany in exchange for interned Germans. On 31 March Lenin telegraphed the Swiss Social Democrat Robert Grimm that the party unconditionally accepted the offer of transit through Germany and wanted the journey organised at once.

The transit conditions were signed by Fritz Platten, secretary of the Swiss Social Democratic Party, on 4 April 1917. They provided that only Platten would deal with the German authorities and that no one could enter the carriage without his permission; that the carriage was recognised as extraterritorial, so that no passport or passenger checks would be carried out on entry or exit; that passengers would be accepted regardless of their views on war and peace; and that transit was granted on the basis of an exchange for German or Austrian prisoners of war or internees in Russia. On that last point Sergei Pushkarev argued that since the Bolsheviks were neither in the government nor a majority in the Soviets they could not in practice have carried out an exchange, so the clause had no practical meaning and was included to make the agreement appear equal in the eyes of an outside reader.

Journey and aftermath

At 15:10 on 9 April 1917 thirty-two Russian exiles left Zurich for the German border station of Gottmadingen, where they transferred to the sealed carriage. At Zurich station a crowd of about a hundred patriotically minded exiles denounced them as national traitors and predicted that they would all be hanged in Russia as Jewish provocateurs. The carriage passed through Germany almost without stopping to the station of Sassnitz, where the travellers boarded the steamer Queen Victoria for Sweden. Met at Trelleborg by Ganetsky, Lenin reached Stockholm on 13 April and Petrograd's Finland Station on the evening of 16 April 1917. He delivered his April Theses soon afterwards, and on 8 April 1917 the head of German intelligence in Stockholm telegraphed Berlin that Lenin's arrival in Russia had been a success and that he was working exactly as they had wished.

Lenin's group was not the only one to use the route. In May 1917 a substantial group of Menshevik internationalists, Socialist Revolutionaries and non-factional Social Democrats led by Martov, Pavel Axelrod and Anatoly Lunacharsky travelled the same way. The "black list of the most dangerous pacifists" whose passage the Allies blocked included not only Lenin and Zinoviev but also Trotsky and Martov.

German calculations and disputes

On 3 April 1917 the German Foreign Office asked the treasury for three million marks for propaganda in Russia, and the funds were granted. In his memoirs Max Hoffmann, chief of staff of the Eastern Front, wrote that the disintegration brought into the Russian army by the revolution was naturally to be intensified by propaganda, and that someone in the rear who maintained contacts with Russians living in exile in Switzerland had proposed using some of them for this purpose. In 1921 the initiator became publicly known: Alexander Parvus, acting through Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, the German ambassador in Copenhagen. Opponents of the "German gold" thesis argue that Parvus was not a go-between in the negotiations, that the exiles rejected the mediation of Karl Moor and Robert Grimm because they reasonably suspected them of being German agents, and entrusted the talks to Platten, and that the only political obligation the travellers assumed was to campaign for the passage of interned Germans in exchange. Conversely, many Russian exiles point out that the British route was closed to them because of the black list of pacifists, and that the British internment of Viktor Chernov and Trotsky was what induced Lenin to accept Platten's proposal. Even the sealing is disputed. Winston Churchill famously said that Lenin was brought into Russia in a sealed carriage "like a plague bacillus"; research in previously unknown documents showed the claim was exaggerated, since only three of the carriage's four doors were sealed, the fourth being used for contact with the outside world under Platten's control and that of two German officers. Karl Radek and other participants, as well as some researchers, denied that the carriages were sealed at all and held that there was only a promise not to leave them.

Assessment

The returning revolutionaries justified the journey not as a compromise with German imperialism but as the necessary means of fighting the war and the Provisional Government on a revolutionary course. Writing in 1924, Victor Serge stressed on the Bolshevik side that Lenin refused entry to the carriage to German social-chauvinists, and recorded the three transit conditions and the ten European socialists who endorsed the trip. Erich Ludendorff, for his part, wrote in his memoirs that sending Lenin to Russia was militarily justified because Russia had to be brought down. These are statements by interested parties on opposite sides and should be read as such.