THE Czar had abdicated on March 15, 1917. The statesmen of the Allied nations affected to believe that all was for the best and that the Russian revolution constituted a notable advantage for the common cause.
In the middle of April the Germans took a sombre decision. Full allowance must be made for the desperate stakes to which the German war leaders were already committed. They were in the mood which had opened unlimited submarine warfare with the certainty of bringing the United States into the war against them. Upon the Western front they had from the beginning used the most terrible means of offence at their disposal. They had employed poison gas on the largest scale and had invented the ‘Flammenwerfer.’*
Nevertheless it was with a sense of awe that they turned upon Russia the most grisly of all weapons. They transported Lenin in a sealed truck like a plague bacillus from Switzerland into Russia.*
The flamethrower. In fact flamethrowers were invented by the ancient Greeks, and used by the Byzantine Emperors to see off at least two Arab attacks in the 7th century; hence they have been dubbed ‘Greek fire’. The German version was first deployed in 1915, at Verdun against the French and at Hooge against the British.
Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov (1870-1924), better known as Lenin, arrived in St Petersburg on April 16th, following the ‘February Revolution’ in what was then the capital city. He saw to the cold-hearted, execution-style murder of the Tsar and his entire family, and inspired the bloodthirsty revolution of November (named the ‘October Revolution’ because it was still October on Russia’s traditional calendar) which ultimately brought about the USSR.