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Red Century

How German Condoms Funded the Russian Revolution

The name Vladimir Ilyich Lenin is not often linked with wartime profiteering and black-market smuggling gangs. A noted prude, he lacked the gene for swashbuckling. Yet crime and speculation helped finance his activities in 1917. A good deal of the cash he needed to prepare the Great October Socialist Revolution was channeled through an import-export company that specialized in contraband pharmaceuticals, lead pencils and German condoms.

The trail begins in Switzerland, where Lenin, exiled from Russia, had been living since the outbreak of World War I. In March 1917, the news of revolution in Petrograd reached him in Zurich. As the leader of the Bolsheviks, Russia’s most radical socialist party, it was his duty to go back at once. The problem was that there was no safe route: Lenin’s call to turn the European war into revolution against the bourgeoisie had not endeared him to the French and British, so going west was likely to result in his detention without trial. But heading north through Germany meant crossing land belonging to his country’s enemy. He could expect arrest on charges of treason if he ever made it home.

It took more than a week of talks to find an answer. The German government agreed to offer Lenin safe-conduct to the Baltic Sea, escorting him inside a special train car with locked trackside doors. In legal terms, Lenin later explained, the carriage was an “extraterritorial entity,” a capsule shooting over German soil without contact with German citizens, potential enemies and spies. But as it trundled slowly up toward the coast, the vehicle was quickly called “the sealed train.”

There was nothing clandestine about the journey. Lenin was eager to solicit the approval of any public figure he could find. At the last minute, in pursuit of international support, he even called the American Legation in Bern, Switzerland. It was a Sunday, and the young man at the desk was leaving for a tennis match. “Call back tomorrow,” he told the future master of the Kremlin. In years to come, when that young man, Allen Dulles, became head of the C.I.A., he dined out on the story of that call.

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Richard von Kühlmann, Germany’s foreign minister, gloated about his country’s role in Russia’s November 1917 Bolshevik coup.Credit...Edward Steichen/Condé Nast, via Getty Images

Lenin did not need the kaiser’s gold to get himself home. He made a point of paying for his (second-class) ticket. But questions started soon after he arrived in Petrograd. Seizing the reins of party leadership at once, Lenin insisted on a program that repudiated all imperialist war. His opposition to the provisional government, the temporary cabinet of liberals and businessmen that was trying to run exactly such a war on Russia’s part, fueled suspicion that he was a German stooge.

The French suggested that they might have proof. Encouraged by that hope, a Russian colonel named Boris Nikitin was put in charge of the investigation. He dispatched a spy to monitor the Bolsheviks’ use of the telegraph and paid informers for all gossip, true or false. Nikitin’s was a full-time job, but the only office space available was in a building partly occupied by yet more suspect Bolsheviks. Not only did the colonel feel like the one being watched, but all his windows opened onto fluttering red flags.

Meanwhile, the provisional government continued to prosecute the war. In late June, it launched an offensive on the Galician front. Though vaunted as a campaign by the crack troops of a free new state, it collapsed within three days. Large-scale disturbances ensued in Petrograd, complete with street battles between right- and left-wing gangs, black flags and socialist banners, panic, shooting and civilian deaths. There were new rumors of a coup.

In desperation, Pavel Pereverzev, the justice minister, tried scapegoating the Bolsheviks for Russia’s dismal plight. His evidence was flimsy (he was promptly ordered to resign), but the idea that Lenin had been working for the Germans prompted a manhunt. As Petrograd descended into chaos, government thugs ransacked the office that produced the Bolshevik newspaper, Pravda. Several leading revolutionaries were imprisoned, among them Leon Trotsky. Beardless and disguised beneath a wig, Lenin fled the Russian capital in fear for his life. In August, after collecting more testimony, the provisional government condemned him in absentia.

The case against Lenin was always thin. Pereverzev’s evidence, which involved a contract Lenin was alleged to have signed in Berlin at some time in the previous year, turned out to be the raving of a fugitive prisoner of war. The press proffered more fairy tales — Lenin’s sister was a spy based in Salonica, Lenin had been murdered, Lenin’s real name was Mytenbladm or Zederbluhm. Years later, Trotsky remembered July 1917 as “the month of the most gigantic slander in world history.”

In fact, Lenin was far from dead. He used the months in Finland to lay new, ambitious plans. By mid-September, he felt bold enough to slip back into Russia and take up the fight again, this time preparing his lieutenants for a Bolshevik seizure of power. The operation took place on Nov. 7, and that same day the streets of Petrograd were littered with leaflets announcing the triumph of Lenin’s new Soviet regime.

But questions about finance have a way of haunting history’s great men. Lenin relied on secrecy; the Germans let him down. At the end of 1917, Germany’s foreign minister, Richard von Kühlmann, gloated about his country’s role in November’s Bolshevik coup. Berlin, he said, had long schemed to subvert Russia. The challenge had been to find a person who could do the job. The Germans had backed a range of hopefuls, from Finnish nationalists to Central Asian jihadists. “It was not until the Bolsheviks had received from us a steady flow of funds through various channels,” Kuhlmann explained in a frank memorandum, “that they were in a position to build up their main organ, Pravda, to conduct energetic propaganda and to extend the originally narrow basis of their party.”

Lenin’s bank records were scrupulous enough. He protested that he had snubbed every agent the Germans sent him. He insisted (rightly) that his party had triumphed by giving voice and shape to real passions and despairs. Still, cash had been essential. In the summer of 1917, the British estimated that it would cost them 2 million pounds a month to match Lenin’s propaganda effort. The high price had to take account of Bolshevism’s genuine appeal, but even Lenin knew that newspapers and posters did not print and distribute themselves.

That’s where the condoms and lead pencils come in. Lenin could not risk accepting direct bribes, but it was easy for Berlin to supply his agents with commodities and then forget to send the bill. Goods were exported to Denmark (which was legal), the packaging was changed (illegal), and then they were resold to countries where imports from Germany were banned. Part of the profit found its way into the Bolsheviks’ coffers via businesses in Stockholm. A key part here was played by Yakov Fürstenberg, the manager of a Scandinavian-based import-export company whose directors, Alexander Helphand and Georg Sklarz, were known agents of Germany. Though Lenin publicly disdained Helphand, Fürstenberg was one of his closest contacts, his north European fixer.

“Lenin’s entry into Russia successful,” the German spy chief in Stockholm reported to his masters in April 1917. “He is working exactly as we would wish.” But it was Lenin who would win the high-stakes gamble in the end. The kaiser and his ministers were swept away, but Lenin’s empire went from strength to strength. As he had put it years before: “Sometimes a scoundrel is useful to our party precisely because he is a scoundrel.”

Catherine Merridale is the author, most recently, of “Lenin on the Train.”

This is an essay in the series Red Century, about the history and legacy of Communism 100 years after the Russian Revolution.

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