Lenin on the Train

By: Catherine Merridale

Narrated by: Gordon Griffin

In April 1917, as Tsar Nicholas II's abdication sent shockwaves across war-torn Europe, the future leader of the Bolshevik revolution, Vladimir Lenin, was far away, exiled in Zurich. To lead the revolt, Lenin needed to return to Petrograd immediately. But to get there, he would have to cross Germany, which meant accepting help from the deadliest of Russia's adversaries and betraying his homeland.

Bringing to life a world of counter-espionage, intrigue, wartime desperation, illicit finance, and misguided utopianism, Catherine Merridale provides a riveting account of this pivotal journey as well as the underground conspiracy and subterfuge that went into making it happen.

©2017 Catherine Merridale (P)2017 Dreamscape Media, LLC

Unoriginal for anyone who has read about Lenin

I was hoping for more insight into Lenin and Bolsheviks funding given the book’s title, however the title should have been some variation of home coming revisited. Anyone familiar with the Lenin story will find it lacking in anything new.

Deteriorates into Unhinged Lenin-Bashing

This book especially in the final chapter rapidly goes from a good read (or hearing as it were) with lots of facts, style, and anecdotes to unhinged Lenin-bashing and spurious assertions that just echoes the capitalist party line, e.g. Lenin as a “mass murderer.”
It seems that Merridale wants to make Lenin responsible for the bloody Russian Civil War which all the powers of Europe united to back the Russian Whites. Lenin’s great crime was to take Russia out of that imperialist slaughterhouse and publish the secret treaties that revealed it’s predatory, looting character. It’s striking that given the prejudice and bile that pours out at the end, that up to then it was fairly good and objective work.