After a second attempted putsch, known as the July Days, Lenin and 10 other Bolsheviks were charged with “treason and organized armed rebellion.” Scores of witnesses came forward to testify about wire transfers from Stockholm, money-laundering via a German import business, the German financing of the Bolshevik newspaper Pravda (including editions aimed at front-line troops), the going rates for holding up Bolshevik placards in street protests (10 rubles) or for fighting in the Red Guards (40 rubles per day). While Lenin fled to Finland, most of his comrades were arrested. The stage was set for a spectacular show trial.

It was not to be. Just as the provisional government’s case was buttressed in late August 1917 with the testimony of the police agents who had raided Lenin’s headquarters, its prime minister, Alexander Kerensky, granted amnesty to most of the arrested Bolsheviks (though not Lenin) in order to enlist their support against a general, Lavr Kornilov, whom Kerensky believed was plotting a right-wing military coup. In a shortsighted move, Kerensky allowed the Bolshevik military organization to rearm, thus acquiring the weapons they would use to oust him two months later.

Lenin, with wanted posters for his arrest plastered all over Russia on the eve of the October Revolution, did not miss his chance. Once Lenin was in power, far from showing caution in relations with his alleged German paymasters, one of his first acts was to send a cable to German military headquarters on the eastern front, offering an unconditional cease-fire. When the harsh terms of the resulting treaty of Brest-Litovsk were announced in Petrograd’s Tauride Palace in 1918 — terms that included detaching Ukraine and the Baltic States from Russia — Lenin was greeted with shouts of “Down with the traitor!” and “Judas!” and “German spy!”

So was Lenin a German agent?

In his own mind, Lenin could and did justify his actions as tactical maneuvers serving the higher cause of Communism, not the sordid war aims of the German Imperial Government. Fair enough. But it is hard to imagine this defense holding up at trial, if the jury were composed of ordinary Russians while the war was still going on. The evidence assembled by Kerensky’s justice department, much of which has only recently been rediscovered in the Russian archives, was damning. No matter Lenin’s real intentions, it is undeniable that he received German logistical and financial support in 1917, and that his actions, from antiwar agitation in the Russian armies to his request for an unconditional cease-fire, served the interests of Russia’s wartime enemy in Berlin. They also brought about disastrous consequences for Russia herself, from territorial dismemberment in 1918 to decades of agony under the suffocating Bolshevik dictatorship.

The Russian Revolution inaugurated a new era in foreign influence operations. Lenin himself helped to found the Communist International, which for nearly a quarter of a century was dedicated to trying to topple capitalist governments around the world. The Nazis played a similar game in Austria and Czechoslovakia in 1938, only to abandon the pretense of influence-peddling for brute force when, along with the Soviet Red Army from the east, they invaded Poland from the west in 1939. During the Cold War, the Soviet Union and the United States turned Revolutionierungspolitik into an art form, striving to undermine one another’s allies and satellite states by all manner of subterfuge and subversion.

Today, it appears that a new round of the Cold War has emerged, though with a different ideological flavor, as the Kremlin promotes populist nationalism in Europe and the United States, even as Western leaders and democracy activists mobilize opposition against Russia and Putin-friendly regimes, such as Viktor Orban’s in Hungary — which then crack down on such activists as “foreign agents.” Revolutionierungspolitik has gone global.