In Europe

opponents within the revolutionary movement, had taken things into their own hands. He must have been at his wit's end: he had missed the crucial moment around which his whole live had revolved. Now he saw that the long-awaited revolution could take place without him, the leader of the rigidly organised Bolsheviks, knowing a thing about it.
    To many Russians, Vladimir Ulyanov was a living symbol. For seventeen years his life had consisted of poverty and exile, persecution by czarist agents, conflicts with the Mensheviks and his own comrades, and all of it at a far remove from the Russian proletariat: that, of course, never stopped him from developing one theory after another about them. His isolation increased even further after the outbreak of the First World War. In 1914, only twenty-six of the members on the roll of Lenin's secret political cell were not living in exile; by 1916, only ten of those were still active. The movement's already slender funding dried up. By early 1917, the Ulyanovs were having a hard time paying the rent for the house on the Spiegelgasse. In his desperation, Lenin quarrelled with almost allof his supporters: the brilliant Nikolai Bukarin, ‘that pig Trotsky’, the gifted German theoretician Rosa Luxemburg, and the charming Polish ‘con man’ Karl Radek.
    Politically, too, he was at the end of his tether. The Swiss police were much more interested in the Cabaret Voltaire, opposite his house, where a group of artists had been giving unintelligible performances since 1916, reading manifestos, shrieking, sobbing, whistling and pounding out rhythms on the tables. That, too, was a form of protest: these poets and painters felt that it was futile to search for truth in bourgeois society, that the world was one big lie, and that only after casting off the ballast of the old culture could they arrive at anything new. Their movement was called Dada, and the impact they had on twentieth-century art was, in retrospect, almost as great as Lenin's on international politics.
    As far as we know, no revolutionary communion was held between the neighbours. Lenin's biographers describe the group of Russian exiles as an unhappy, frustrated, homesick circle. ‘The world in which they lived was small, incestuous in character, marked by fierce conflicts between opposing factions and rigid loyalties within them,’ writes Michael Pearson. ‘Outside these narrow limits of cafés and revolutionary journals, Lenin was virtually unknown.’
    Eight months later, this same man would gain control over an empire of more than 150 million souls. But on 15 March, 1917, Lenin's most serious problem was how to cover the distance between Zurich and Russia, as well as between his theoretical revolution and actual events.
    How was he to go about it? Lenin's first plan was to travel in the guise of a deaf-mute Swede, in order to move as quickly as possible through Germany and Scandinavia to Petrograd. After that he hit upon the idea of chartering a plane, until his comrades convinced him that airplanes and war made for an exceptionally risky combination. Finally, someone came up with the idea of asking the German government for a temporary transit visa.
    Contact was established via the German consul in Bern, and Berlin agreed at once. The authorities were even willing, if necessary, to smuggle the revolutionaries through the front lines into Russia. This generosity was not wholly altruistic. As from 1914, ultra-conservative Germany had developed an intense interest in all revolutionaries who could make lifedifficult for their enemies. And the imperial intelligence service was well equipped to do so: it was already maintaining a measure of regular contact with almost all of the movements that would later play a role in Europe. For a long time, therefore, Germany had been familiar with Lenin's group of Bolsheviks. The Germans were anxious to put a speedy end to the war in the East – the more so after American troops began arriving on the Western Front – and so were willing to export these revolutionary bacilli to the Russian enemy as swiftly as possible.
    For Lenin, the Germans’ eagerness constituted a major political risk; his trip could now be seen as ‘consorting with the enemy’. Especially since Lenin did not bother to wait for permission from the provisional government. It was his idea to have the train granted the same kind of extra-territorial status as a foreign embassy, a kind of political vacuum in which