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Juri Vendik is the author and presenter of "The Train From Zurich To The Revolution" a 成人论坛 Russian documentary exploring Germany’s role in Lenin’s 1917 return to revolutionary Russia.

If you ask Russians about Lenin’s return to Petrograd from exile in Switzerland in the spring of 1917, most of them will tell you about the passionate speech that he made upon arrival at Finlyandsky Railway Station, from the top of an armoured car. They will be very familiar with that image of Lenin, his signature cap in his hand, hailing the socialist revolution, surrounded by a crowd; it’s an image that became part of the Soviet Lenin iconography. 

Many also will be familiar with the assertion that Lenin was a “German spy” who was sent to Russia in a “sealed railway carriage” – but in the Soviet times, those assertions would have been ridiculed as impotent malice of the detractors of the leader of the world proletariat.

While Russian history books have undergone changes since the end of the Soviet Union, this particular episode has hardly been reviewed. Nevertheless, arguments continue to this day about Lenin’s fateful eight-day journey from Zurich to Petrograd. Was Lenin’s carriage really “sealed”? Was Lenin a “German spy”? And what about the “German money”, the “German gold” – the big question: were the Bolsheviks financed by the country with which Russia was at a bloody, all-out war?

When the producers behind our Revolution-100 project, Anastasia Uspenskaya and Aleksandra Zaytseva, shared with me the idea of a film, The Train from Zurich to the Revolution, I started to read Western historians.  In the very beginning it seemed that for a major school of thought in the west, the question of the German sponsorship of Bolsheviks in 1917 had a definitive answer: the German government did pay the Russian revolutionaries.  However, as I continued my immersion in the subject, I faced something, that, as a journalist, I have faced a thousand times: the more you study an issue, the fewer reasons you have to be single-minded about it. 

We set off on the Lenin train trip: Bern-Zurich-Gottmadingen-Berlin-Potsdam-Stockholm-Tornio-St Petersburg. The resulting on bbcrussian.com explores the story of a fateful trip of a group of Russian émigrés from Switzerland to the Russian capital, earlier renamed from St Petersburg to Petrograd because of the war with Germany.

Cameraman Alik Grigorian turned my script into four punchy, vivacious, dynamic, and I think beautiful, episodes. The masterful readings by popular Russian actor, Mikhail Yefremov (pictured below), breathed a life in the diaries of key witnesses: Lenin’s closest Bolshevik allies, Grigory Zinoviev and Karl Radek, and the Swiss Social Democrat Fritz Platten (all three of them were prosecuted and eventually shot in Stalin’s purges in 1936, 1939 and 1942 respectively). We focused each episode on a key moment of their journey with Lenin.

In the first episode, we have Swiss historian Dr Gleb J. Albert explain why Germany was interested in facilitating the journey.  We reconstruct the scene at the Zurich railway station on 9 April 1917, where a crowd of Russian exiles cheered or were indignant that their fellow Russians were about to travel to and through an enemy territory. Our narrative – with experts’ commentary, witness memoirs and archival photography - follows Lenin to Berlin and then to Sweden (where our story includes the tale of Lenin’s iconic cap). 

In the final, fourth episode Lenin reaches the then border of the Russian Empire, at the Finnish town of Tornio.  At the time, under the Entente Cordiale, British inspectors manned this part of the Russian border, and in Tornio, Lenin’s team faced the Secret Intelligence Service officer, Harold Gruner.  Having informed the Russian Provisional Government about the suspicious party in his care, he searched them, questioned them and tried to delay them for as long as he could, hoping that the officials in Petrograd would order him to deny Lenin and his coterie entry into Russia. The order never came as Russia’s new democratic government saw such a denial anti-democratic, so in the end Gruner let all of them, except Platten, into the country – we read from Zinoviev’s memoir, telling us that Stalin and other key Bolsheviks met Lenin at the first Russian stop, in Beloostrov. 

At the journey’s end - Petrograd’s Finlyandsky Railway Station - a crowd was waiting for Lenin. The crowds there were welcoming many other political exiles returning to Russia following the February Revolution. However, today it’s Lenin’s statue that stands on the square in front of it and the city went on to bear his name for 67 years after his death in 1924.

As our journey comes to an end, we reach our verdict to the question of whether the Bolsheviks were financed by Germany: Kaiser’s Germany and Lenin must have used each other. In the short term, they did it to a mutual success: the Bolsheviks came to power in November 1917, and Russia signed a separate peace treaty with Germany and the other Central Powers in March 1918. The rest is history. 

The question of the “German gold for Lenin” will remain the subject of debates. But I hope that, having watched our film, our Russian-speaking audiences will know much more about those eight days in April 1917 than their history books have taught them.

Juri Vendik is a journalist for 成人论坛 Russian

• Listen to a clip from The Train From Zurich To The Revolution on