“I want you to understand one simple thing regarding the Swedish realities: everything Russian here is perceived as negative. That’s why the “Russian mail” is precisely a damaged telephone that distorts information. That’s why the idiom “the Russians are coming” exists in the Swedish language as a threat. Children (like our uncle-policeman) were scared: “The Russians will come”...

Hans Björkegren:

Maybe this name is too peaceful, but there is some irony there. "Russian Post" is the name of an old Swedish game, with secret or anonymous postmen of the Russian Tsar, with pledges and Russian kisses.

Vladimir Tolts:

"Russian Post" - a book by the Swedish expert on Russia Hans Björkegren and the "kisses" of Russian revolutionaries in Scandinavia at the beginning of the century - is the topic of today's episode of the "Time Difference" program.

The topic of today's program was given to us by the book of the famous Swedish writer, poet, publicist and translator Hans Björkegren "Russian Post. Russian revolutionaries in Scandinavia in 1906-17." Explaining this name, the author of the letter from Stockholm I have already quoted writes:

“Russian Post” in Swedish is what we call “damaged telephone”, that is, a children’s game where “input” is one thing, and “output” is something else, distorted.

Hans Björkegren:

The fact is that the characters in my book are indeed secret postmen, but of course not the Tsar’s postmen, but vice versa. They smuggle letters, illegal literature and weapons between Scandinavia and Russia via Finland and the Baltic states. And they are engaged in financing, banking, and servicing the German General Staff with money for the Bolsheviks and other revolutionary parties in Russia. They "wash" money obtained through armed attacks on banks in Russia, the Baltic states and Finland, Georgia. - Not very nice ladies and gentlemen...

Vladimir Tolts:

Before we talk about these “not very nice ladies and gentlemen,” we should at least briefly introduce the author of the essay about them, Hans Björkegren.

He is 66 years old. Board member of the Swedish PEN Club. Honorary Doctor of Philosophy from Uppsala University. One of the professions is a translator from English, Norwegian, Danish and Russian. His translations of the works of Nobel laureates Pasternak, Solzhenitsyn and Brodsky, as well as Akhmatova, Mandelstam, Aksenov, Dovlatov, Yevtushenko, Okudzhava were awarded the Zhukovsky Prize by the Russian Culture Foundation - "For outstanding translations of classical and modern literature."

From 1960 to 1968 he worked in Moscow, first as a correspondent for the Stockholm Tidning newspaper, and then as head of the Nordic News Agency. About these years, which probably determined Björkegren’s steady interest and love for Russian themes, Russian literature and culture, the biographical information that I read briefly says: “Journalistic work brought him together with the circles of the intelligentsia of the Thaw period. Many of them became his personal friends. Participation in the fate of Solzhenitsyn closed his way to the Soviet Union for as long as 17 years.”

Björkegren does more than just translate. He is the author of a dozen collections of poems, short stories, essays, and three novels, one of which ( "For the King!" ) has already been published in Russian, and the publication of a translation of another ( "The Russians Are Coming!" ) is expected this year.

The author defines the genre of "Russian Post" as a "research novel." And critics write about this book as “a collection of doctoral dissertations in the form of a detective story.”

- Who are the heroes of this documentary detective story? - I ask Hans Björkegren, who is in Stockholm, over the phone.

Hans Björkegren:

The characters there are revolutionaries such as Lenin, Stalin, Alexander Keskelya, the Estonian nationalist, separatist and Nikolai Bukharin and many others.

Vladimir Tolts:

To the Moscow Freedom Studio, I invited two historians of the Russian revolution to participate in today’s program - Doctor of Historical Sciences Dmitry Borisovich Pavlov - a leading researcher at the Independent Institute of Social and National Problems, this is the former party Institute of Marx, Engels, Lenin (IMEL), and a permanent participant in our program - the author of the monograph "The Red Troubles", Doctor of Historical Sciences Vladimir Prokhorovich Buldakov from the Academic Institute of Russian History.

So, historians (Western, including Hans Björkegren, who speaks in our program) and Russians (primarily, probably, emigrants - such as Sergei Petrovich Melgunov or George Katkov, who became an American) have long established that around 1906, Northern Europe and Scandinavia became the base of Russian revolutionism. But actually - why?

Dmitry Pavlov:

The Scandinavian countries, and primarily Finland, became the base of the Russian revolutionary movement in 1906-1907, especially in 1907. After the end of the first revolution, all radical forces moved there - to Finland. And judging by the reaction of the tsarist government and the Finnish governor-general, this was indeed the case. Why? Well, firstly, it was the geographical proximity and natural proximity and general attraction of St. Petersburg and the province there. After all, St. Petersburg purely geographically does not gravitate towards Central Russia, but precisely there, to the northwest, further to Finland and Sweden. Secondly, there is a certain ideological kinship, since the radical Scandinavian forces sought to overthrow tsarism to the same extent with the goal of gaining independence in this case, if we talk about Finland, as radical or socialist Russian organizations.

Vladimir Buldakov:

I would add this: we must take into account the fact that Finland enjoyed autonomy and, I would say, very, very broad - within the framework of the Russian Empire, that is, it was a completely different environment. Suffice it to say that not only parliament, not only universal suffrage, but also its own coin, its own police, its own customs, should be noted.

I do not completely agree with Dmitry Borisovich that the Finns were so eager for independence. They are quite practical people, they first of all tried to get rid of what bothered them. Let’s say the Russian bureaucracy, of course it bothered them, irritated them with all kinds of Russification, and so on and so forth. There were also some radicals there, but mostly, probably, the whole point was that there were a lot of sympathizers there.

And speaking about Russian revolutionaries in general, it must be said that, among other things, they thought in one other way: we are fighting for a just, holy cause, and the whole world, all progressive humanity, supports us. And to a certain extent, they were right, that is, the sympathy was quite great, despite the fact that the Finns are a completely unique people, they lived completely independently. By the way, there is another point worth noting here: on the one hand, they sympathized with, on the other hand, in some issues the benefits of this autonomy, when they do not need to decide foreign policy issues themselves, they used this moment, in general they took advantage of this position of theirs. A lot of interesting things can be said in general, but in this case it should be emphasized that in order to take advantage of this situation, it was beneficial for them to support the Russian opposition, not only revolutionaries, but also liberals, and maybe even primarily liberals.

Vladimir Tolts:

I want to ask Dmitry Borisovich Pavlov: here we (you and I) are speaking somewhat generally and unwittingly modernizing the past with modern concepts (for example, “the basis of the revolutionary movement” ). Please explain to the listeners what exactly this meant in the situation at that time.

Dmitry Pavlov:

Let's start with the fact that all of the largest Russian all-Russian parties, starting from the Cadets (constitutional democrats) and to the left, all held at least one, in modern terms, all-Russian forum, all-party forum in Sweden and Finland. Well, let's say, the founding congress of the Socialist Revolutionary Party, the largest socialist party in Russia, held its congress in the winter of 1905-1906 in the town of Imatra, in a resort town famous for its 20-meter waterfall. The founding conference of the Union of Socialist-Revolutionary Maximalists, a small terrorist group, but very prominent in the political life of Russia, at least because they attempted to assassinate Stolypin by blowing up his dacha in August 1906 - they held their founding conference in October of the same 1906 year in Abo, this is also the territory of Finland. The 5th Congress of the Cadet Party in October 1907 was held in Helsinfors, as Helsinki was then called. The Stockholm, so-called “unification” , fourth congress of the RSDLP, which took place in April 1906, is well known. I'm not even talking about the Tammersfor Conference of the RSDLP (by the way, there is still a museum dedicated to this event).

Generally speaking, the usual route for illegal immigrants from Western Europe to Russia is Oslo - Stockholm - Helsinki - St. Petersburg, and vice versa, respectively.

Conspiratorial meetings were held on the territory of Finland, mainly Finland, and important issues of coordinating the activities of revolutionary organizations were discussed. Let’s say, in the history of the RSDLP there is such a very characteristic moment when the Bolsheviks were preparing to accept weapons, a large batch of weapons (this happened in the summer of 1905), but in order to somehow preserve these weapons, huge pits were dug on the territory of the estate of the mother of one of the Bolshevik militants (by the name of Ignatiev), where they intended to store 16 thousand rifles that were supposed to arrive by sea in the St. Petersburg area to arm the workers. So, this estate was located right on the border between Russia and Finland. But since Finland is part of Russia, albeit autonomous, the border was very conditional, and as the participants in this event recall, this border ran right along the fence of this estate.

Vladimir Buldakov:

In Finland they kept an eye on the revolutionaries, but there were very difficult relations between the Finnish police and Russian detectives, and so on and so forth.

Vladimir Tolts:

Since we are talking about the police of the Scandinavian countries, who monitored (for better or worse) the activities of the Russian revolutionaries who arrived here, I want to ask Hans Björkegren: to what extent are you familiar with this police activity?

Hans Björkegren:

I worked in Scandinavian archives for many years, especially in our secret Swedish police archives. After the first revolution in Russia, groups of fugitives, especially from the Baltic states, came to Scandinavia. Many of them were involved in bloody robberies in Russia. Because of this, a special police department in Stockholm and Copenhagen began to interrogate all Russian citizens who came to us.

And after the outbreak of World War I, all Russian borders in Europe were of course closed, except for the Swedish-Finnish one. This was a huge problem for the revolutionary emigrants, and because of this Lenin and others began to use Scandinavian territory for their own purposes. In Denmark, Sweden, and Norway they began to organize a rather complex network of smuggling and underground mail between the continent and Russia. Already in the first weeks of the war, several Russian revolutionaries arrived for this purpose, for example Alexander Shlyapnikov, Alexandra Kollontai, Vaclav Vorovsky. In each Scandinavian capital they created their own centers, where they acted with the help of local Social Democrats. At such a center in Copenhagen, Alexander Gelfand-Parvus and Lenin’s special friend, the Polish Bolshevik Yakov Ganetsky-Fustenberg, worked especially with the “laundering” of the so-called “German gold”. Trotsky’s friends, Uritsky and Grigory Chudnovsky, also worked in Copenhagen. Bolsheviks such as Shlyapnikov, Nikolai Bukharin, Vorovsky, Yuri Larin and Karl Radek acted in Stockholm at different stages. And in Christiania (this is today's Oslo), Alexandra Kollontai and Shlyapnikov, her lover, who was generally some kind of Russian super-postman in Scandinavia, acted all the time before the February revolution. The Swedish and Danish police knew quite a lot about their activities, but very often the police could not identify them because many of these revolutionaries worked under pseudonyms.

Vladimir Tolts:

I would like to compare: if Hans Björkegren’s book is based largely on police investigation documents from the Scandinavian countries, then what is the basis for judgments about the “Russian post” (about Russian revolutionism in Scandinavia) for current Russian researchers of this page of the past?

Dmitry Pavlov:

Well, first of all, about literature, Vladimir. Back in 1961, the Englishman Michael Futran published a very detailed book “Noten Underground”, it has the subtitle: “Some episodes of transportation (and I don’t know how to translate) “communication” through Scandinavian countries to Russia.” But the discussion there is mainly about the connections between the Russian revolution and socialist organizations in Sweden and Finland.

The sources, I must say, that Norwegian and Swedish police sources, as far as I know from my Scandinavian friends and colleagues, very poorly reflect the essence of these very connections. In this regard, our Russian sources are much more reliable and more informative. I mean the Police Department, and to some extent the documents of the Finnish Gendarmerie Directorate - this is part of the Police Department - some documents are in the National Archives of Finland according to police data of Finnish origin. But given the scale of these connections and the scale of the operations that were carried out, one must also keep in mind the materials of the foreign agents of the Police Department, which were based in Paris.

Japanese sources are actively involved, since the Japanese were drawn into these very connections. (The very transport of weapons that I was talking about, it was equipped, including the purchase of the weapons themselves, and the ships, and the yachts that accompanied it, with Japanese money.) I believe it is clear to everyone what Japan was guided by in this case - there was a Russian-Japanese war. and Japan was interested in weakening Russia from the inside as much as possible, and, at the most, ideally blowing it up from the inside.

The fact is that the Russian authorities, as Vladimir Prokhorovich rightly noted, were not, to put it mildly, not popular with the Finnish population. Let's say, the favorite pastime of Finnish youth, very Christ-loving, law-abiding and generally moderate by our Russian standards, was spitting in the backs of Russian priests walking along the streets. By the way, one of the most radical Finnish parties was called the Party of Active Resistance, not attack, mind you, but resistance.

So, the Russian gendarmes, who tried to monitor the state of mind in Finland, were in a vacuum and did not have serious agents. At the same time, they are well aware that in St. Petersburg they are waiting for news that Finland is arming itself, preparing for an armed uprising, in order to thereby secede from the Russian Empire and gain independence. It was in this situation that Karl Uthof, colonel of the Separate Corps of Gendarmes, who headed the FJU in the years of interest to us, recruited agents from the dregs of Finnish society: drunkards, degenerate individuals, swindlers, who actually wrote such reports under his dictation. They were all transported to St. Petersburg, the newspaper “Novoye Vremya”, close to government circles, regularly published, based on these reports, articles of threatening content, but in general all this was a “phony”, all this did not correspond to reality. And it all ended only when Utgof was replaced as head of the FJU by Alexander Mikhailovich Eremin, by the way, the same Eremin with whose activities a group of historians associate Stalin’s accusations of provocation. He was appointed head of the Finnish Gendarmerie Directorate in January 1913 and brought relative order there.

Vladimir Tolts:

Let me remind you: today’s issue is entitled, like the book by Hans Björkegren, who participated in the telephone broadcast from Stockholm, “Russian Post” and is dedicated to the actions of Russian and other revolutionaries in Northern Europe in 1906-17. Russian historians Vladimir Buldakov and Dmitry Pavlov take part in the program from the Moscow Freedom Studio.

As you can already understand, a significant place in Björkegren’s book is occupied by the problem of transporting money to Russia for the needs of the revolutionary movement, and in particular, money allocated for the fight against the Russian government and the German General Staff. This problem is not new. It has long attracted the attention of historians. Russian emigrants condemned (for example, Melgunov, whom I already mentioned in his work on the “German golden keys to the Bolshevik revolution”) wrote about this with angry and revealing pathos; foreigners, for example, the British historian Zeman, who was the first, it seems, to study the relevant German documents - calmly and convincingly; Soviet historians preferred to remain silent (or - excuse me - to respond: slander, they say, and a bourgeois invention); this silence was destroyed in Soviet times by Alexander Isaevich Solzhenitsyn, translated by Björkegren, when his famous brochure “Lenin in Zurich” was published in the West, which, as we now know, is part of his epic narrative “The Red Wheel”. Now, when representatives of various Russian parties (from right-wing “democrats” to left-wing Zyuganovites) periodically try to get money from the West for their party projects (we are always talking about saving Russia, of course), the attitude towards foreign money of this kind in Russia once again seems to have changed... (We will talk about this later with the Russian participants in the program).

But first, a question for Hans Björkegren:

— How did you feel about this problem in Sweden?

Hans Björkegren:

I think that the first politician who generally tried to expose the movement of money from the German General Staff to the Bolsheviks was the social democratic Swedish leader Branting, already two or three months before the exposure of the February Revolution. This was of course very scandalous. And now it is clear that due to the closed Russian borders, I think that most of this money went through Scandinavia, through the Swedish bank, whose owner was the millionaire and revolutionary Aspelk. How much is not clear, but these are huge amounts. Immediately after the February Revolution, the Bolsheviks were able to create about a hundred newspapers in Russia with the help of this money.

Vladimir Tolts:

To my question: what’s new in his book about these “German golden keys to the Bolshevik revolution,” Hans Björkegren replied:

Hans Björkegren:

There are facts about the ways how it was done. Quite complex operations using absolutely criminal methods. But here is the large export-import enterprise of Parvus in Copenhagen, where Ganetsky-Furstenberg worked as director, they were engaged in smuggling various medicines to Germany and Russia, and then in this way they “washed” money from Germany or from robberies. There were very large smuggling and financial transactions...

Vladimir Tolts:

Well, how do historians in Russia now view this problem of foreign money?

Vladimir Buldakov:

I think here, first of all, it’s worth noting a peculiar point, this is a continuation of what I have already said. After all, the fact is that revolutionaries, not only liberal revolutionaries in Russia, at one time looked at these most dubious means in our current understanding somewhat differently. This was due to the fact that, as I already said, they believed that all interested, all normal freedom-loving people were interested in renewing or, better yet, destroying the autocracy. And that’s why they give money for a good cause and it’s not a sin to use this money. And to this we can add the fact that figures like Lenin, in this case we are talking not only about Lenin, but about Marxists in a broad sense, they reasoned in this way: if capitalism is destined to destroy itself, then this can happen with its own money, and revolutionaries should only take advantage of this. So from an ethical point of view, this problem looks like this.

As for the other thing, here it is a question of technology, of course. After all, we must pay attention to the fact that revolutionaries and liberals in Russia, mostly revolutionaries, strangely enough, actually used money that came from strange sources. Let’s say that Russian entrepreneurs, who seem to have absolutely no need for socialism, suddenly finance their activities. For what? Somewhere, just in case, somewhere they give money for a “good cause,” but in any case they sympathize with both the oppositionists and the liberals.

Of course, the mass of people in the revolutionary movement used this moment very cynically. In the same way, they used all kinds of foreign channels and not only financial support, but also moral support. This is what I would pay attention to.

As for money, in my opinion, more money came from Russia. If we take, another thing, some critical situations, for example, the Russian-Japanese War or the First World War, here the game was already played according to different rules, here they were already given for very specific goals - disorganization within the Russian situation. But a lot can be said about this, although it must be said, of course, that in all this there is more fiction than any precisely known data. And one more thing must be taken into account: the fact is that they gave money not only to revolutionaries like Lenin, they gave money to various kinds of extremists and separatists.

Vladimir Tolts:

Indeed, in my opinion, the most obvious source of funding was, in my opinion, foreign funding in the 1920s, (in particular German) of the Union for the Liberation of Ukraine.

But here is a question related to historiography: in my opinion, Camus came up with the idea that a person is created not by what he says about himself, but by what he first of all keeps silent about himself; If, as it were, we extrapolate this judgment to the activities of parties, associations of people, then in Soviet historiography the question of foreign financing, the question of transporting all kinds of funds from abroad for all kinds of needs of the Russian revolution, was handled quite elegantly, and sometimes not elegantly.

What is the situation with the development of this topic now and, in fact, why was there such a figure of silence before?

Dmitry Pavlov:

If you allow, I will begin by continuing the thought on assessing the very fact of receiving money, begun by Vladimir Prokhorovich, the whole point is from whom to receive money and under what circumstances.

Russian revolutionaries actually received decent sums in the form of donations from the Russian bourgeoisie. But the textbook figure of 10 thousand rubles given by Savva Morozov for the publication of the newspaper Iskra is known. (This was not the largest and far from the only donation - a normal, one might say legal source.) By the way, the Russian bourgeoisie and people who were not even very wealthy gave very willingly to terror. "Revolutionary Russia" - the Socialist Revolutionary central organ, a newspaper that was published in exile, published entire columns, where it thus reported to people that their money, their donations, had been received. Breshko-Breshkovskaya, the “grandmother of the Russian revolution,” went on a tour of America with the sole purpose of promoting the ideas of the Russian revolution, collecting money, and collected a decent amount. Our socialists traveled to the countries of Scandinavia, by the way, in 1905-1906, in order to receive financial support from, in this case, if we talk about this particular trip, from the Swedish Social Democrats. German Social Democracy has traditionally provided financial support to its Russian supporters. These, again, were completely normal legal sources of financing the Russian revolution. (Probably, all these arguments should have started with the fact that party building and party activities are, in principle, unprofitable, it does not bring profit as a rule, despite the fact that it is possible to replenish the party treasury by distributing newspapers, leaflets, organizing paid lectures, collecting membership dues, but all this is some percentage of the party budget.) And the main way to replenish the party treasury is through expropriations, which all Russian revolutionary organizations sinned in to varying degrees at different stages of activity and donation.

But the situation is completely different when the revolution, revolutionary organizations begin to take money from Russia’s opponents in an armed conflict, I’m talking about the Russian-Japanese War of 1904-1905, and about the First World War, when, as you know, the Germans subsidized the activities of the Bolshevik faction of the RSDLP. This is a completely different situation, comparable to, say, this: during the Second World War, imagine some kind of opposition party, purely theoretically, that would receive money from the Germans. How would we evaluate the activities of this organization, regardless of what “good goals” and high bright ideas they express as the ultimate goal of their activities? - Like high treason. The sensible part of the Russian population assessed the similar practice of Russian revolutionaries in exactly the same way.

By the way, Russian liberals understood this very well, although they were indirectly drawn into these cash flows from Japan during the first revolution, nevertheless, when one of the Socialist Revolutionaries came to Struve, the publisher of the magazine “Liberation”, who lived in Germany, with a direct offer to receive this money in cash, without hiding the source of origin of this money, Struve let him down the stairs and refused in the most direct and immediate meaning of the word, this is described in the memoirs of Ariadne Tyrkova-Williams, who was present at this conversation.

So this is a very delicate intimate moment and there is no single recipe for the moral assessment of both.

Vladimir Tolts:

But, by the way, Lenin, it seems, fully understood this moral aspect of receiving money from the German General Staff and that is why, I think, he did his best to disguise his relationship with Parvus, who represented the opposite side.

Dmitry Pavlov:

Yes, the word “seems” in your phrase seems superfluous to me, because he understood this quite definitely and, by the way, he honed his secret skills in this regard, again, during the years of the Russian-Japanese War. He was the engine behind all the Bolsheviks’ attempts to take a piece of the Japanese pie, but he always stood in the shadows, other people always acted for him. Another thing is that this attempt was not successful for a number of reasons.

Vladimir Tolts:

Let's talk a little about what Vladimir Prokhorovich called technology. The fact is that when I talked with the author of the Swedish work on the transportation of money and resources to Russia with Hans Bjorkegren, he, a man who knows the Russian language well, used the following word: through Scandinavia, Russian revolutionaries, the Bolsheviks “laundered” money, which then went to Russia.

What does this completely modern word mean in such a historical context?

Dmitry Pavlov:

Well, in general, the meaning of this word has not changed even now. In this case, if we talk about money of German origin, it was necessary to hide the fact of their German origin as much as possible, and for this to change their owner several times - that, in fact, is the whole technology. And this was done with the help of Gonetsky and his company in Stockholm, the mechanism is quite well known and described. Money, as you know, does not smell, having passed through several authorities, several companies, it loses its birthright and it is very difficult to understand where it came from, especially since the Bolsheviks, after coming to power, did everything to destroy any documentary traces and facts of their receipt of money from the Germans, and this entire chain. It took the efforts of a large group of historians to restore this very chain and understand how this money got from Germany to Russia.

Vladimir Tolts:

- Dmitry Borisovich, please, about this moment - about the destruction, firstly, of traces and documents, and secondly, about how this chain was reconstructed in a little more detail.

Dmitry Pavlov:

As for the destruction of documents, as far as I know, there are no acts of burning any part of the Central Party Archive, and it was there that, in all likelihood, documents related to this part of the history of the Bolshevik Party were kept. Although, in general, it is not in the traditions of our bureaucratic traditional state to destroy archival documents. But this part was purposefully seized and destroyed.

The very fact that the Germans allocated money based on publications and documents of the German General Staff, which were carried out back in the 60s, from there both the fact and the amounts that were transferred to the Bolsheviks are known. The money went through Parvus, if we talk about technology, to Stockholm. It was in Stockholm that Ganetsky was a social democrat close to the Bolsheviks, a social democrat of Polish origin; the money got there, then was delivered by couriers to Petrograd, where, against a receipt, or more often without, it was transferred to one of the trusted representatives of the Bolshevik leadership. This is, in fact, the whole technology, quite simple, but due to the fact that the money changed its owner several times during this entire operation, it became the money of Ganetsky or Parvus, but not the Germans.

Vladimir Tolts:

The transportation of money and resources, as it were, logically ends with the transportation of living revolutionaries to Russia in 1717, this is the story of the so-called sealed, and now everyone is talking about the unsealed carriage in which Lenin and his closest associates arrived in Petrograd through Scandinavia.

What can you say about this episode of history?

Vladimir Buldakov:

Well, firstly, there is no need to make a big sensation out of this, the fact is that Lenin considered several options for returning to Russia, including the most unusual, unconventional ones, such as the services of smugglers and a completely different route, and so on, and so on. But Lenin in the full sense of the word, not only he alone, all the revolutionaries were eager to go to Russia.

As for the German route from Switzerland, here, of course, they assessed their negative sides, that is, it was clear to Lenin that the press would make a fuss about this, they would talk about them as German spies, and so on, and so on. Of course, he had no moral internal costs in this regard. But he knew very well that this would be perceived completely negatively. And it is no coincidence that when he returns, there is immediately some kind of printed explanation about how we passed through Germany and so on and so forth.

It must be said that then, by the way, many socialists did not evaluate this act so negatively that traveling through Germany in a “sealed” carriage, although in fact it was not even one, that is, they assessed it as a person’s desire to be closer, to finally be closer to Russia. So, I think that it is unlikely that any big sensations can be found here; in my opinion, this issue has already been studied. That is, this was a fairly ordinary act for those times.

There were of course several routes. But the fact is that, let’s say Trotsky, Trotsky was detained at one time, and he returned a month later than Lenin, and the allies detained him - this point must be taken into account. That is, compared to the situation with German money, in my opinion, there is nothing sensational, reprehensible, or particularly reprehensible about the return.

Vladimir Tolts:

Well, both Hans Björkegren’s book and our conversation today convince me that the issue of the so-called Russian mail has already been studied quite well.

And here is my last question to the Russian participants of the program: tell me, does it make sense to further study this topic?

Vladimir Buldakov:

I think yes, it does. After all, it’s not enough to study the details, the technology of all this, in my opinion, it’s much more important to understand the psychology of revolutionaries, extremists, and people who not only sympathized with them, but thought - what’s special about this very thing? Through the psychology of such actions, making such decisions, we begin to understand the era, and this, probably, is the main meaning of all this work. In order to see all this in detail, it is of course desirable to establish the maximum number of details, although we must admit from the very beginning that, of course, we will never be able to find out all the details.

Dmitry Pavlov:

I believe that the answer to the question: why do we study history in general, in this case the history of contacts between Russia and Northern Europe, does not have a utilitarian answer.

There is some kind of desire among people to study their past and some kind of curiosity, but this is characteristic equally of all more or less civilized peoples.