Ah wilhelm II, aka the last kaiser... https://www.dw.com/en/how-germany-got-the-russian-revolution-off-the-ground/a-41195312 >The German chartered train was provided by Kaiser Wilhelm II with the aim of furthering the Russian Revolution. In one of the wagons sat none other than Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, better known as Lenin. With German help, Lenin left his exile in Switzerland and, a week later, reached his destination: Petrograd, which would later be renamed to Leningrad then changed back to today's Saint Petersburg. ... >The Russian communist, with his journalistic background in Germany and business success in Constantinople, wrote the script of a revolution for the Foreign Office. It was a roadmap for what actually happened just a few months later. Over 23 typed pages, Gelfand detailed how a foreign-backed coup could be successful. For him, it was a question of money, sabotage, and toppling the government. One month later the German imperial treasury approved **2 million marks** "to support revolutionary propaganda in Russia." Oh the irony... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sisson_Documents The Sisson Documents are a set of 68 Russian-language documents obtained in 1918 by Edgar Sisson, the Petrograd representative of the United States Committee on Public Information.[1] Published as The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, they purported to demonstrate that during World War I, Trotsky and Lenin as well as other Bolshevik leaders were agents directed by the German Empire to bring about Russia's withdrawal from the conflict. Their authenticity was debated even as they were widely publicized to discredit the Russian Revolution. In 1956, George F. Kennan, in an article in the Journal of Modern History, demonstrated that they were forgeries.[2] Various analyses however, including that of Kennan **did not exclude the possibility that the Bolsheviks received some German logistical or financial support up to 1917,** as opposed to following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918. ...