The next train left in May, 1917, carrying three hundred Russians, and another three hundred went through Germany in July, 1917. In July the French and English governments finally granted permission for a train-load to pass through those countries to Archangel and thence to Russia. This trip lasted two months. I learned that the May and July trains also carried to Russia many active Menshevists, supporters of the Kerensky Government.
In August another group tried to return, but because Kerensky protested, the French and English notified this group that they must have passports from Russia. It was then impossible to go through Germany because of battles going on along the front. They did not get to Russia until December, after the Russian-German armistice.
1. GORKY 2. ZINOVIEFF
Zinovieff, in an address to the Petrograd Soviet, September 6, 1918, told the story of the fabled armored train as follows:
“In March, 1917, Lenin returned to Russia. Do you remember the cries that went up about the ‘armored train’ on which Lenin and the rest of us returned? In reality Lenin felt a profound hatred of German imperialism. He hated it no less than he hated any other brand of imperialism.... When a prominent member of the Scheidemann party attempted to enter our car (which was not armored) in order to ‘greet’ us, he was told, at Lenin’s suggestion, that we would not speak to traitors and that he would be sparing himself insult if he refrained from trying to enter. The Mensheviki and the Social Revolutionists, who were rather stubborn at first, later on came back to Russia in the same way (more than three hundred of them). Lenin put the matter simply, ‘All bourgeois governments are brigands: we have no choice since we cannot get into Russia by any other way.’”
I found the following in a long article of appreciation written by Ernest Nobs, editor of the Swiss Volkrecht, published in Zurich in December, 1917.
“One who has seen the last winter, the medium-sized, square-built man, with a somewhat yellowish face and sharp, sparkling and flashing Mongol eyes, as he was steering towards some library in a wornout ulster coat, with a heap of books under his arm, could hardly foresee in him the future Russian premier.”
In the address mentioned on the foregoing page, delivered at the time Lenin was shot, Zinovieff said:
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanoff (Lenin) was born on April 10, 1870, in the city of Simbirsk. His father, who was of peasant descent, was employed as Director of Public Schools in the Volga region. His elder brother, Alexander Ulyanoff was executed by Czar Alexander III. From that time on his mother showered all her tender affections on Vladimir Ilyich, and Lenin in his turn dearly loved her. Living as an emigrant, an exile, persecuted by the Czar’s Government, Lenin used to tear himself away from the most urgent tasks to go to Switzerland to see his mother in her last days. She died in 1913.