Russian Roulette: How British Spies Thwarted Lenin's Plot for Global Revolution by Giles Milton Read Free Book Online

cabin was covered in a shroud of snow.
    Gruner stepped into the darkness to greet the travellers and immediately saw that they were Russian. He also noticed that they were jumpy when asked to show their papers. There was good reason for their nervousness: among their number was the notorious revolutionary firebrand, Vladimir Ilyich Lenin.
    Lenin had been living in exile for almost a decade, preaching the gospel of class warfare and radical social upheaval. He had also been demanding Russia’s immediate withdrawal from the war. There were many inside the country who viewed him as a dangerous troublemaker.
    Lenin appeared ‘outwardly calm’ as Gruner interrogated him. According to one of those in his party, the fellow revolutionary, Grigori Zinoviev, he was ‘most of all interested in what was happening in far off Petersburg.’ Yet he was also concerned that this young border guard would try to prevent him from crossing the frontier.
    Gruner hoped to do just that: Lenin was a prize catch, one that would earn him plaudits in London. But he found himself in a dilemma. Russia’s new government had sanctioned the return of all political refugees, regardless of the threat they might pose. Lenin was clearly more dangerous than most, but Gruner had no obvious justification in preventing him and his party from crossing the frontier.
    Reluctant to let his quarry slip so easily back onto Russian soil, he sent a telegram to Petrograd informing the government of Lenin’s arrival at Torneå. He also asked ‘whether a mistake had not been made in permitting him to return.’ While he awaited the reply, he submitted all the travellers to a humiliating strip search.
    ‘We were undressed to the skin,’ recalled Zinoviev’s wife indignantly. ‘My son and I were forced to take off our stockings . . . All the documents and even the children’s books and toys my son had brought with them were taken.’
    Lenin, too, was searched and once again interrogated. Gruner asked him why he had left Russia and why he was going back. Lenin said nothing incriminating, much to Gruner’s disappointment. He knew he could not detain the group of Russians indefinitely. He made a meticulous search of Lenin’s luggage in the hope of finding seditious literature. There was none.
    One of the Russians noticed Lenin chuckling with delight as the search finally came to an end. ‘He broke into happy laughter and, embracing me, he said: “Our trials, Comrade Mikha, have ended.” ’ He was confident that the Provisional Government would oblige Gruner to allow them to cross the frontier.
    This was exactly what happened. Gruner received a telegram reminding him that ‘the new Russian Government rested on a democratic foundation. Lenin’s group should be allowed to enter.’
    Gruner had no option but to allow them to proceed. He stamped their papers and let them continue on their journey. It was a decision he would later regret. One of his colleagues recalled that he was teased mercilessly for having set Lenin free.
    ‘You’re a bright lad,’ they would say to him. ‘Locking the stable door when the horse was out, or, rather, in.’
    Another of them joshed that if Gruner had been Japanese, ‘he would have committed hara-kiri.’
    He might have wished he had done so. Within a few months he would be arrested on Lenin’s orders and held under sentence of execution.

    Four thousand miles away in Halifax, Nova Scotia, a tip-off from British intelligence had led to the arrest of Leon Trotsky, another of Russia’s most notorious revolutionary exiles.
    Trotsky had been living in New York since the beginning of 1917, delivering fiery lectures on his hopes of destroying Russia’s new Provisional Government. He even urged the workers of Manhattan to bring down their own political masters, overthrowing them by way of violent revolution. ‘It’s time you did away with such a government once and forever,’ he told them.
    Trotsky’s activities had not gone