This certainly weighs much heavier than even a sealed railway car! [2]

This may be more important than the carpet itself!

Among the newly arrived anarchists,” wrote Buchanan, “was Lenin, who came through in a sealed train from Germany.

When I arrived in Petrograd in the early part of May, 1917, the campaign about the “sealed car” in which Lenin had made his way through Germany was in full blast.

Illustrative: A symbolic deportation train at the former Nazi transit camp Westerbork, in the Netherlands, January 2018 (Matt Lebovic/The Times of Israel)

When I arrived in Petrograd in the early part of May, 1917, the campaign about the “sealed car” in which Lenin had made his way through Germany was in full blast.

Lenin negotiated the conditions under which he would travel through Germany, insisting on a “sealed train,” precluding the possibility of any contact between himself and representatives of the German state.

A symbolic deportation train at the former Nazi transit camp Westerbork, in the Netherlands, January 2018 (Matt Lebovic/The Times of Israel)

In a way, it’s a modern version of a sealed wagon with Lenin and other anti-Russian “revolutionaries” travelling from Europe and the US to start a bloody revolution.

The so-called “sealed train” left Zurich on March 27, carrying Lenin and 29 others, including Bolshevik leaders such as Krupskaya, Inessa Armand, and Grigory Zinoviev.

The deportees were crammed into hot, sealed wagons for more than three days “without eating or drinking, without being able to lie down, with only a bucket to share as a toilet”.

Cries about Berlin, about German gold, about the sealed train – and on this general background, like pieces of broken bottle in the mud, foul-mouthed abuse.

From the moment of Lenin’s return to Russia via Germany, aboard the “sealed train,” the anti-revolutionary right attempted to portray the Bolshevik leader as an agent of the Kaiser.

This deal was agreed to and Lenin, Martov, Radek and a party of 30 odd Bolsheviks were secretly transported across Germany to Russia in a sealed railway compartment.

I don’t think Lenin, barely out of his sealed train, expected to expound in his answer his whole credo, and all his programme and tactics in the worldwide Socialist revolution.

Later in the same year, on November 6, he compared the Germans sending Lenin back to Russia as sending “a phial containing a culture of typhoid or cholera to be poured into the water supply of a great city.