The superb, funny, fascinating story of Lenin's trans-European rail journey and how it shook the world. A splendid jewel among histories, taking a single episode from the penultimate year of the Great War, illuminating a continent, a revolution, and a series of psychologies in a moment of cataclysm, all with wit, judgment, and an eye for telling detail. By 1917, the European war seemed endless. Both sides in the fighting looked to new weapons, tactics, and ideas to break a stalemate that was destroying Europe. In the German government, a small group of men had a brilliant idea: why not sow further confusion in an increasingly chaotic Russia by arranging for Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, the most notorious of revolutionary extremists, currently safely bottled up in neutral Switzerland?.