Roughly a century ago, in the heat of World War I, the Germans devised a plan to eliminate the Russians from the fight. The German high command loaded a secret weapon unto a sealed train headed for enemy-territory. Winston Churchill once described that cargo as a plague bacillus, and, it promised to destroy Russia from within. That weapon was Vladimir Lenin and his unlikely band of ragtag revolutionaries. Their story sits at the heart of Lenin on the Train by Catherine Merridale, which covers the ensuing civil war and how it fundamentally changed Russia.