Historian: Even the Russian Provisional Government dispelled the Lenin spy myth

16.04.2020, Nizhny Novgorod.

The Provisional Government Commission proved Lenin’s lack of involvement in German military intelligence in 1917, said historian, Professor and Doctor of Philosophy Alexander Grekhov with a Rossa Primavera News Agency correspondent on April 11.

Myths combine both reality and fiction, and that is why myths are easily spread and they are easily accepted, said Grekhov.

According to the professor, the “spy mania” myth of Lenin was also loosely based on fact.

“In the spring of 1917, after the February Revolution in Russia and the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II’s arrest, Lenin, who was in exile in neutral Switzerland (at this time, the First World War, in which Russia, England, and France were fighting against Germany and Austria-Hungary, was still underway), received permission from the German government to reach Sweden, Finland, and Russia through German territory. Through the territory of a state that was at war with Russia! Lenin also used this right on April 3, 1917. He was enthusiastically greeted in Petrograd at the Finlyandsky railway station,” the historian explained.

Grekhov noted that pro-government newspapers immediately seized upon this unusual episode and “explicitly began to call the leader of the Bolshevik party a ‘German spy'”.

“Lenin was persecuted in democratic Russia. However, the outcome of this accusation was that the Provisional Government Commission (Alexander Kerensky headed the Government of Russia) established to address this issue in October 1917 recognized Lenin’s lack of involvement with German military intelligence,” said the Doctor of Science.

The first mention of the Bolshevik espionage in favor of Germany appeared in the press on July 5 (18), 1917 in the Zhivoe Slovo newspaper. Then it published an article by former Duma deputy of the 2nd convocation from the Bolshevik party Aleksinsky and former Narodnaya Volya party member Pankratov under the title, “Lenin, Ganetsky and Co are spies!” Despite the fact that the Provisional Government Commission concluded that Lenin had not been involved in German military intelligence, speculation continued to be revisited in the Western press after the October revolution. In the years of perestroika the myth of financing Bolsheviks by foreign intelligence came into a new life.

Alexander Grekhov graduated from N. I. Lobachevsky State University in Gorky (Lobachevsky State University in Nizhny Novgorod) with a degree in history. His doctoral dissertation topic was “The unity of quantization and traditional research methods as a methodological problem of historical knowledge”.

Source: Rossa Primavera News Agency

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