WILLIAM GEORGE EDEN Wiseman, the stylish young British baronet with the wide face, neatly combed hair, trimmed mustache, and tweed suits who ran Britain’s intelligence operation in New York City, could not have been happier at the news, both from Washington and from Russia.
Wiseman had built a formidable bureaucratic empire around his office at the southern tip of Manhattan Island. Still under cover of the British Munitions Ministry, Wiseman had now gone far beyond the usual counterespionage work of arranging guards for munitions ships and tracking suspicious Germans. He had made himself one of Britain’s top diplomats in America, the chief behind-the-scenes link between his country and President Woodrow Wilson’s White House, a relationship built on Wiseman’s budding friendship with Wilson’s New York–based confidante Colonel Edward M. House.
To make this connection with Colonel House, Wiseman, the onetime college boxer and German gas-attack survivor, had to shove aside a rival. His name was Captain Guy Reginald Gaunt, the British naval attaché and chief intelligence officer in New York since 1914 who already had the same job. Others described Gaunt, a former battleship commander originally from Australia, as a “bon vivant” and “romantic.” Gaunt himself called it the “breezy sailor act.”318 He made the mistake of taking an extended personal leave over the Christmas and New Year’s holidays into January 1917. In Gaunt’s absence, Wiseman had stepped in and displaced Gaunt’s relationship with Colonel House and restructured the office to eclipse much of Gaunt’s intelligence role. Gaunt, returning to find himself shut out from much of his earlier portfolio, complained bitterly about Wiseman, but to no avail. The British brass and the American Colonel House both decided they liked the new arrangement. Gaunt, to his annoyance, had to accept it. He would carry sore feelings about the incident for years.319
But Wiseman, as a result, now rubbed elbows with top figures on both sides of the Atlantic: the British Foreign Office, the American president, and “C,” his mysterious boss at MI1c. When British ambassador Sir Cecil Spring-Rice complained about security at his embassy in Washington, DC—loose door locks and suspicious German-speaking neighbors—he called Wiseman to come fix things. Along the way, Wiseman’s team in New York had broken a major India-based sabotage ring and accumulated files on thousands of potential troublemakers, according to internal reports.320 His paid staff soon reached between thirty and forty people.
With America now almost certain to enter the European war, Wiseman spent much of his time courting US diplomats, police, and military intelligence, passing tips on everything from German submarine sightings to British shipping procedures.321
And a new question had promised to expand his role even further: What to do about all these Russians?
Wiseman had no special background in Russian affairs before reaching New York City in 1915, but he could hardy miss noticing how the Petrograd revolution had galvanized local immigrants. He expected the celebrations. Wiseman knew how deeply Russians in New York hated the tsar. But beyond the rejoicing, Wiseman saw another, more troubling aspect to the reaction: the large numbers of Russian radical socialists suddenly raising money to go home, apparently to destabilize or overthrow the fragile new provisional government.
For Britain, this meant trouble, and the stakes could not be higher. Germany’s unrestricted submarine warfare, designed to starve Britain of food and ammunition, had started to work, and the country feared losing any further edge against Germany. On this score, the tsar’s abdication had answered a prayer. Kerensky, Miliukov, and the other new leaders all made their intentions clear. They pledged to keep Russia in the war and keep its army, still estimated at five million men, fighting for the Entente. This, in turn, would force Germany to keep splitting its own forces between eastern and western fronts.
But these New York socialists were a whole different story. One sounded more pro-German than the next. The new Russian provisional government held power only by a slender thread. What if a few of these radicals actually managed to get home and organize his comrades to topple it? Or start a civil war. What would they do next? Take Russia out of the fight? Or sign a separate peace with Germany?
Plenty of these local socialists seemed eager to make trouble, and leading the parade was that hothead over at Novy Mir, Leon Trotsky.
Wiseman by now knew plenty about Trotsky, or was learning quickly. He and his team had built a deep network of sources and paid agents around New York. Wiseman’s intelligence officer Norman Thwaites, the one-time newsman and combat veteran, oversaw a stable of spies and informers that included Russian-born Sidney Reilly, later dubbed the Ace of Spies, then in New York arranging arms shipments for Russia while making a nice profit for himself, along with Reilly’s business partner in these deals, Alexander Weinstein, the likely relative of Gregory Weinstein, editor of the radical Novy Mir.322
Through Reilly and Weinstein, the web even reached Nicholas Aleinikoff, the prominent Socialist Party leader who had served on the party’s recent Resolutions Committee along with Trotsky and Louis Fraina. Aleinikoff, as a lawyer, had represented Reilly and Weinstein on several business deals. It all made a cozy little circle.
Casimir Pilenas, the one who had attended Trotsky’s speech at the Lenox Casino, fit neatly in this mosaic, but with a malicious bent. As an undercover agent, Pilenas had a pedigree going back twenty years. Born in Kovno, Lithuania, in 1872, he had landed in London in the late 1890s and had quickly drawn the interests of both Scotland Yard and the Russian Okhrana, the secret police. They both recruited him as an informer. Pilenas mixed easily with German and Russian émigrés. He spoke the languages and made a specialty of penetrating radical groups and snitching on them to his bosses. When Pilenas came to New York in 1913, he used a recommendation from Scotland Yard to land a comfortable niche first with naval officer Guy Gaunt and then with Wiseman and Thwaites.
Whether Pilenas still kept touch with the Okhrana’s New York operation in 1917 is far from clear. He had left its payroll, but the Okhrana had at least one New York–based agent, named George Patrick, reporting on Trotsky in the city during this period.323 Wiseman would later insist, though, that Pilenas worked only for him.324
Still, Pilenas’s ties to the Okhrana connected him to a deep, rich vein of yet another prominent tsarist legacy: aggressive Jew-baiting. It had taken dramatic forms. Pilenas, around this time, started palling around with another Russian transplant named Boris Brasol, a lawyer who in Russia had served on the prosecution team in the notorious 1913 blood-libel case against Menahem Mendel Beilis. Beilis, a Jewish supervisor at a Kiev brick factory, had been charged by the tsarist government with murdering a thirteen-year-old Christian boy in a ritual killing to use his blood for Jewish ceremonies. The case drew global denunciations for its ugly medieval slander. Even the local Kiev prosecutor refused to touch it. No physical evidence connected Beilis to the crime, and after a two-year ordeal, an all-Christian jury acquitted Beilis outright. But years afterward, Boris Brasol, even in New York City, still defended both his own role in the case and its premise of Jewish ritual murder.325
Brasol had landed in New York in 1916 as chief detective for the Russian Supply Committee. Two years later, in 1918, he and Pilenas would find themselves at the center of another notorious anti-Semitic operation, this time as chief promoters of English-language versions of the propaganda piece Protocols of the Elders of Zion, a document forged by the Okhrana in the 1890s that claimed to show Jewish leaders plotting world domination. Brasol and Pilenas would present the Protocols, rarely seen yet in the West at that point, to American military intelligence and submit written reports portraying Bolshevism largely as a Jewish plot. Pilenas himself would try to extract $50,000 from the American Jewish Committee for a copy of the Protocols.326
Now, in March 1917, this same Casimir Pilenas was plying his craft for William Wiseman of British Intelligence, keeping his eye on Russian socialists, especially Jewish ones, watching how they raised money to send revolutionaries back home to destabilize the new Petrograd regime, starting with the very prominent Leon Trotsky.327
Wiseman, whatever his preconceptions, soon found himself struck by the very pattern Pilenas was pushing. The largest number of immigrant radicals in New York happened to be Jewish, not surprising since Jews made up the majority of all Eastern European immigrants. Russian socialists tended to be Russian Jews. German radicals tended to be German Jews. So too of the Finns, Ukrainians, Poles, and any other group from that part of the world.
Wiseman showed no sign of being particularly anti-Semitic. Wiseman dealt with many Jewish people in his life. After the war, he would join Kuhn Loeb, Jacob Schiff’s own financial house, as a partner. In the 1920s, he would be the target of anti-Semitic slurs himself based on his Jewish-sounding last name. US intelligence officials would secretly accuse Wiseman of Jewish ancestry—despite his ten generations of British peerage—as a stain on his loyalty.328 Plenty of analysts in the British, French, and American intelligence services in 1917 viewed Jews as a distinct national group with unique views and interests.
But the innocent-sounding observation had consequences. Anti-Semitism didn’t limit itself to just Russia or Germany. Many police, politicians, and military analysts at the time, even in the West, took the image further, twisted it, and overlaid it with age-old stereotypes, painting Jews as international outsiders; malcontents who lived separately with their own religion, language, food, and hostile nationalism; and manipulative money merchants or bankers with secretive global ties, with their lower classes naturally drawn to radical causes. They described Jews as a separate race, like the Irish, Italian, or African races—the way they used the word back then—but with a special curse, destined to hardship for national sins dating back to the Bible.
All these elements found their way into actual formal government intelligence reports, including at the American War Department’s own Military Intelligence Division.329
Even Winston Churchill, the future British prime minister, produced a 1920 article called “Zionism versus Bolshevism,” which claimed the existence of two types of Jews, “good Jews” versus “bad Jews,” the bad ones including “International Jews” and “Terrorist Jews” at the heart of Bolshevism.330
Be it from ignorance, stereotypes, fear, resentments, religious beliefs, or deliberate slander, the result was the same: the existence in 1917 of a virulent ethnic profiling that, over the next three decades, would crescendo as a pretext for mass murder.
William Wiseman, steeped in this environment and trained as an intelligence officer, could hardly ignore the fact that Jewishness seemed the glue that connected so many New York socialists. But what should he make of it? Few doubted that Jews had legitimate grievances against the Russian tsar or that their hostility toward Russia was a logical reaction to decades of persecution. And yes, Jewish people might constitute a diverse group, mostly loyal and nonpolitical, but Wiseman could say the same thing about Germans, and that didn’t change the fact they were Britain’s mortal enemy.
If nothing else, Wiseman felt obliged to report on the subject. His colleagues in British and American intelligence—driven by their own biases—certainly seemed to find it relevant, and some already were stretching similar reports to remarkable lengths. For instance, one typical file memo from the US War Department shared with Wiseman during this period contained an update on American domestic radicals—Bolsheviks, labor agitators, Irish and Indian dissidents—all in a section titled “Jewish Affairs.”331 Much worse would come over the next few years.
Which brought Wiseman back to Leon Trotsky: a Jew, a Russian, a socialist, a self-proclaimed revolutionary, a talented speaker and charismatic leader with international contacts. All these danger signs Trotsky combined in a single package. Trotsky’s easily topped the pile of reports on Wiseman’s desk, with his recent flurry of high-profile speeches and newspaper interviews. They painted a curious picture. Wiseman had never actually met Trotsky face-to-face, but the evidence made some facts about him undeniable: This Trotsky left no doubt what he thought of the new Petrograd regime. Given the chance, he would gladly replace it. Just that week, an unnamed editor of Novy Mir—Trotsky or one of his friends—had told the New York Call that the “fighting group” from 1905 (Trotsky et al.) was “eager to go back to overthrow autocracy and establish a republic.”332 How much clearer could they have been in announcing their plans?
This Trotsky also minced no words about the world war. He despised it and said so clearly at every chance. But at the same time, he hardly sounded like a friend of Berlin. “The revolutionists, even if they had it in their power, would not make a separate peace with Germany,” Trotsky had told the New York Times that week. “They do not favor Germany. They do not want to see Germany win, but they are tired of war and the privations of war and they wish to stop fighting.”333
Even a superficial reading of Trotsky’s speeches made it clear that his vision took a different direction: “The revolution [will] spread from Russia to Germany and Austria and result in the ending of the war,” he told audiences.334 These didn’t sound like words of a defeatist. Realistic or not, this prediction was a far cry from surrender to Germany. At that point in 1917, few in London or Paris would complain in the least about a revolution in Berlin that ended the war by toppling the kaiser.
Was this Trotsky someone England actually could work with? If Russia’s weak provisional regime ever fell to radicals, might this Trotsky be a better choice than some of the others?
For Wiseman, the question had consequeces. He had power over this situation. Under Britain’s wartime blockade of Germany, every ship leaving New York for Scandinavia—the gateway to Russia and indirectly to Germany—had to stop at Halifax, Nova Scotia, a British port, so that British officials could search both the ship and its passengers for contraband, which they could seize on the spot. The process required each passenger to obtain a visa from the British passport control office, housed in the British consulate at 44 Whitehall, and approved by William Wiseman’s own MI1c unit.
If Wiseman wanted to stop Trotsky or anyone else from reaching Russia, all he had to do was ask the consulate to deny them a visa. If he wanted to avoid publicity in New York, he could cable British officials in Halifax and have them detain the person there. It was that easy.
Britain had used this power repeatedly during the war, much to the annoyance of travelers. In late February that year, British officials in Halifax made headlines when they boarded the Scandinavian passenger liner Frederick VIII, which had stopped there en route to Copenhagen, and confiscated $25,000 in gold from the Hungarian countess Manfred Matuschka of Washington, DC, and smaller amounts from other passengers, claiming them as contraband under the wartime embargo. Count Johann Heinrich von Bernstorff, the former German ambassador recently expelled from Washington, DC, happened to be aboard the ship that day and actually complimented the British for their courteous search. In another case, British officials at Halifax had arrested a man off the Swedish steamer Sven du Rietz on charges of smuggling rubber, seized his trunks, and detained him until he could be extradited back to the United States.335
What would Wiseman do with this Leon Trotsky? Would he dare to interfere with the Russians and Americans if they gave him travel papers? And if he stopped Trotsky, what would he do with the others?
For now, in these heady days just after the revolution in Petrograd, William Wiseman waited. Events would force his hand soon enough.
VLADIMIR ILYICH LENIN, leader of the Bolsheviks, stranded in Switzerland, also wanted desperately to get home. He felt “corked up, as if in a bottle,” his wife, Krupskaya, would write of him in those days.336
Lenin had first heard about the Petrograd uprising from a young Zurich neighbor named Moisei Bronski, who came bounding up the stairs at 14 Spiegelgasse having seen an early-morning newspaper. “Haven’t you heard the news?” he shouted. “There is revolution in Russia!”337 Amazed, Lenin set off with Bronski, wandering through Zurich scrounging for details. He joined scenes of celebration—Russian émigrés hugging, drinking, shaking hands, singing songs.
By the time he returned to his house, he was beside himself, pacing and mumbling. “It’s staggering! Such a surprise!” He began writing letters to longtime friends. “If the Germans aren’t lying, it has happened,” he wrote to Inessa Armand. “I’m so excited I cannot possibly go to Scandinavia!!”338 He cabled Grigory Zinoviev, his closest Bolshevik ally in Switzerland, telling him to come quickly from Berne. They needed to make plans.
Revolution at last! But how could they possibly lead it from Switzerland? Somehow he had to reach Russia. But how?
Getting from Switzerland to Russia seemed near impossible. Lenin could see the problem whenever he looked at a map. Switzerland had no seaports, no border with Russia, and a world war raging between them. Traveling to Russia meant taking one of three routes, each with problems: He could go north, across France to the North Sea, then by boat to Finland. But French military officials would never permit him to cross their territory. He was a known fugitive and revolutionary, and even if they did, the British navy would stop him at sea.
Or he could go south, across Italy to the Mediterranean, then by ship to the Black Sea and Odessa. But Turkey controlled access to the Black Sea through the Bosporus Straits, and Turkey too would hardly permit it.
Then there was the direct route, northeast, across Germany. But this too had problems. Crossing Germany meant getting permission from the German military, a deadly dangerous prospect. If Lenin gave any appearance of conniving with Germans, it could ruin his standing, not just among socialists but particularly within Russia, a country still fighting Germany in a war. He’d be committing treason, a capital offense. “It looks as if we won’t get to Russia!” he wrote despairingly to Inessa Armand. “England won’t let us. [The idea of] going through Germany isn’t working.”339
Lenin’s hunger to get home drove him to consider desperate lengths. At one point, he suggested disguising himself as a mute Swede and sneaking across the border.340 He also considered chartering an airplane to fly over Germany and the battlefront trenches, until someone explained to him that 1917-vintage airplanes didn’t travel that far, often crashed, and could easily be shot down.341
One fellow stranded Russian, Julius Martov, leader of the Mensheviks, suggested yet another convoluted idea, that they would seek permission to cross Germany, but only if Russia agreed to release an equal number of German prisoners of war. This would recast the whole transaction as a prisoner exchange rather than treasonous collusion with Russia’s wartime enemy. But this idea failed too when Russian foreign minister Paul Miliukov objected.
As days passed and details filtered out from Petrograd, Lenin heard the names of the new ministers in the provisional government—Miliukov, Lvoff, Guchkov, and the rest—and this only hardened his resolve. “The bourgeoisie has managed to get its arse onto ministerial seats,” he told Krupskaya, their goal “to make fools of the people.”342 Somehow, he and his Bolsheviks had to stop them.
How? Even from far-off Switzerland, Lenin saw the answer. The key was in the other new body created by the recent revolution: the Petrograd Workers Council (Soviet). Here was their weapon. In 1905 Lenin had dismissed the soviet because it had contradicted his Bolshevik belief that revolutions must be led by committed revolutionaries. But this time he saw it differently. The new 1917 soviet had already made itself a formidable competing power against the provisional government, independent and vocal, positioned to eclipse or replace it. Lenin saw this potential immediately and seized on it.
As early as March 16—the same day Trotsky was telling the New York Times that the new Petrograd regime could never survive—Lenin cabled his favorite messenger, Alexandra Kollontai in Norway, and asked that she signal their Bolshevik friends inside Russia to continue their opposition to the war and resist any rapprochement with the Mensheviks.343 Then he went further. He asked her to send a second cable, this one more direct: “Our tactics—complete distrust. No support for the Provisional Government. Distrust Kerensky above all. Arm the proletariat as the only guarantee. Immediate elections to the Petrograd city council. No alliance with other parties. Wire this to Petrograd.”344
Over coming days and weeks, Lenin would lay out his new thinking in a series of essays later called “Letters from Afar” and in a set of precepts later called his April Theses. These would mark a striking change in Bolshevik ideology. Unlike 1905, this time Lenin would not hesitate in calling for immediate change: elimination of the provisional government and a socialist seizure of power. Within weeks of his return, the slogan on Petrograd streets would reflect the new approach: “All Power to the Soviets.”
But for now, these ambitious plans had to wait. Lenin remained stuck in Switzerland, spinning his wheels. All he could do was wait.
It didn’t take long for frustration finally to force him to reconsider an older, earlier-rejected option. On top of all the other messages he sent during those busy first days after the tsar’s overthrow, Lenin added one more, addressed to Copenhagen, Denmark, and his longtime friend Jakob Furstenberg (or Ganetsky). “We must at all costs get back to Russia,” it read.345 Furstenberg had resources to make this happen. And the biggest of these was his relationship as business partner to Alexander Israel Helphand, known to radical cognoscenti as Parvus, the one-time brilliant socialist theorist and now well-heeled capitalist agent of Germany.
Up until now, Lenin had refused any contact with Parvus, having publicly denounced him as a traitor and pariah. But times had changed. As for Parvus, hearing the news from Petrograd, he already had a plan. He intended to help Lenin whether Lenin wanted his help or not.
PARVUS HARDLY LET his lifestyle suffer from the war. Comfortably settled in Copenhagen, he thrived like the city itself. Denmark had stayed neutral and profited from doing business with both sides. Copenhagen, its capital, brimmed with profiteers: stock traders, food hoarders, arms dealers, and the rest. Locals called them “goulash barons” for the local specialty, the 145 factories sprung up almost overnight to produce portable canned food sold at exorbitant prices to opposing belligerent armies shooting at each other across the trenches.
Parvus fit right in with this milieu, running his businesses and editing his newspaper. His every venture these days seemed to profit. His latest scheme: a business built around shipping German-mined coal into Denmark, underpricing it, and thereby stealing the market from Denmark’s longtime coal provider, Britain. The venture netted him millions of Danish krones while crimping British coal exports, which delighted Germany’s military brass. Money flowed in, and Parvus used it to finance his expansive tastes in food and luxuries. It even allowed him to support a few choice charities, like his high-minded Institute for the Study of the Social Consequences of War and his paying for summer beach vacations for the children of poor German families.
“Be it far from me to justify capitalist gain by personal qualities,” he bragged in 1918, still trying to dress himself up as a socialist. “But I do not see why I should not bring some of the surplus value hoarded by the capitalist class over to my side.”346
But of all his causes, Parvus still held one dearest of all: achieving a socialist revolution in Russia tied to a German military victory in the world war. And for this, his moment had finally come. Hearing of the Russian Revolution, he exulted. “Your victory is our victory,” he wrote in his newspaper Die Glocke. “Democratic Germany must offer democratic Russia a helping hand for the achievement of peace and for effective co-operation in the field of social and cultural progress.”347
Parvus had been planning this opportunity for years, using his German-financed export business to plant agents and pockets of cash inside Russia. Now he visited his friend Ulrich Karl von Brockdorff-Rantzau, Germany’s senior diplomat in Copenhagen, to explain his ideas. Parvus had hatched schemes with Brockdorff-Rantzau before. Brockdorff-Rantzau was a foreign ministry veteran, having served postings in Vienna, Brussels, and Saint Petersburg before Denmark, and saw the logic at once. “These developments are a great stroke of luck for us,” he told colleagues.348 Parvus asked Brockdorff-Rantzau to cable his idea to Berlin, and Brockdorff-Rantzau agreed, telling them: “Revolution is victorious, Russia is politically incapacitated, constituent assembly means peace.” To the German high command, this made good clear sense, and wheels started to spin. This done, Parvus then triggered the other side of the equation. Through his business partner Jakob Furstenberg, Vladimir Lenin’s friend, he sent word to Lenin, offering Lenin a way home to Russia: travel through Germany with Germany’s blessing. If Lenin wanted to make revolution and topple the new Russian government, then Parvus and Germany by all means meant to help him.
Furstenberg quickly relayed the message both by letter and by sending a personal messenger, a man named Georg Sklarz, to meet Lenin in Zurich. Lenin, though, smelled trouble. Through an ally, he telegrammed back a warning: “Letter dispatched. Uncle [Lenin] wants to know more. Official transit for individuals unacceptable.”349 When Sklarz reached Zurich and presented the plan to Lenin personally, Sklarz made matters worse by offering to pay train fares across Germany for both Lenin and his top aides, making them essentially paid agents of Germany. At this point, Lenin sent Sklarz packing and broke off the talks, determined to avoid any visible connection between himself and the German government.
Secret negotiations ensued. Parvus rushed to Berlin and, with help from his friend Brockdorff-Rantzau, managed to schedule a personal visit with German foreign minister Arthur Zimmermann, who clearly grasped the opportunity. He ended up meeting instead with the deputy foreign minister—a result of clashing schedules—but Germany approved the plan regardless. Berlin gave Parvus full authority to negotiate passage for Lenin and his zealots and began lining up money to finance their work.
Through Furstenberg, Parvus now requested a face-to-face meeting with Lenin himself, but Lenin again refused. Instead he sent his aide Karl Radek to Stockholm to act as go-between in ironing out final details. Within days, the German Foreign Ministry requested 5 million marks for Lenin’s work, and the German Treasury approved it.350
The plan fell quickly into place. Thirty-two Russians, including Lenin, Krupskaya, Lenin’s friend Inessa Armand, his Bolskevik ally Zinoviev, Radek, Martov, and a host of other prominent Bolsheviks and Mensheviks, would travel together in a railroad car, part of which would be marked off and considered neutral territory. Lenin and his comrades would pay their own fares, and they would not need to speak to a single German the entire way, keeping their hands as clean as possible. They would later call it a “sealed train,” though not all the doors were actually locked.
For Germany, the plan made perfect strategic sense. It was a gamble to win the war on the eastern front in a single bold stroke, by inserting into chaotic postrevolutionary Russia the most disciplined, determined cadre of radicals available. For Lenin, it provided the chance to achieve his destiny. For Parvus, it meant possible vindication. Everyone seemed to come out a winner.
ALEXANDRA KOLLONTAI, AT her home in Holmenkollen, the picturesque ski town at the foot of Norway’s snow-crusted mountains near Kristiania, had barely time to fall back into a routine since her second New York journey when she heard the exciting news from Petrograd. Of all the Western European capitals, Kristiania sat closest in earshot to Russia itself. Letters smuggled from Petrograd, refugees fleeing through Finland, and cables from Russia all stopped here first. This perch gave Kollontai a unique viewpoint, making her one of the first Westerners to hear news of the street battles in the Russian capital. “My heart began to pound. I was immediately sure this wasn’t a bluff,” she wrote on seeing a report as early as March 11, as the fighting still raged undecided.
She was attending meetings in Kristiania when word finally arrived that the tsar had abdicated. “I darted out into the hall; we hugged one another,” she wrote in her diary of that moment. “I wanted to run somewhere. We had won! We had won! The end of the war! It wasn’t even joy, but some kind of giddy rejoicing.”351 When word came next of amnesty for political refugees, local Russians in Norway immediately began snatching up train tickets to go home.
Kollontai wanted to join them. She had no family in Holmenkollen or Kristiania and had friends in Petrograd from when she had fled nine years earlier. The chance to join the long-awaited revolution drew her strongly. What’s more, for her, getting back to Russia raised far fewer problems than for her comrades Lenin or Trotsky. The trip from Kristiania covered more than a thousand miles by land, endless hours on railroads across Sweden’s forests and tundra, but the borders were far friendlier. No war zones or hostile countries stood in the way.
Kollontai had responsibilities in Norway, particularly her postal duties for the Bolsheviks, passing messages into and out of Russia. But she assumed that it wouldn’t be difficult to arrange a replacement.
Needing direction, she wired Vladimir Lenin in Zurich and heard back within the day: “Fancy asking for ‘instruction’ from here, where information is so scanty,” he told her. “It’s in Peter [Petrograd] where all our leading comrades are now. . . . A week of bloody battles and we get Milyukov, Guchkov and Kerensky! Well, so be it. The first stage of the revolution born of the war will neither be the last nor a purely Russian affair.”352
Postal duties would not be a problem. But as for traveling home, Lenin had a request. He asked her to wait. The announced amnesty for political refugees might be a trap. She should let others go first to see if any were arrested en route. But more important, Lenin needed Kollontai first to do him a favor. On top of the cables he had asked her to send immediately to Petrograd, he also wanted her to carry something for him back to Russia, a set of letters with instructions for local comrades to firmly oppose the provisional government. Lenin asked her to deliver them personally to the Petrograd office of the Bolshevik Party newspaper, Pravda, for immediate publication. He didn’t trust anyone else with the sensitive mission.
Lenin knew she would reach Petrograd long before he did, no matter what complicated arrangement he worked out with the Germans. She must be his courier.
Kollontai agreed to wait—but not for long.