Lenin's Rolls-Royce Held Up by a Moscow Gangster in 1919

One freezing Epiphany day in 1919, Vladimir Lenin, the leader of the Bolsheviks, was stopped on a remote Moscow road by armed men in uniform and robbed of his documents. The episode is recounted by historian Mark Galeotti in his book Vory: the law of crime, and it had earlier been told by the Russian essayist Vitaly Shentalinsky in 2006.

A checkpoint that was not one

Lenin had left the Kremlin in a black Rolls-Royce to visit his sick wife, Nadezhda Krupskaya. With him were his sister Maria and his bodyguard, Ivan Chabanov. Lenin is said to have owned nine Rolls-Royces at his estate in Gorki, and in 1921 he even had skis fitted to a 40/50 Silver Ghost for travel across snowy Russia.

On the road, a group of uniformed men signalled the car to halt. Chabanov was suspicious, but Lenin insisted they obey like any other comrade. When he lowered the window, he met a man of about 30 with a rough, cruel smile. "I am Lenin," he said. The reply, according to the account: "So what if you're Lenin? I'm 'the Purse', and I rule this city after dark."

The gangster who didn't know the ruler

"The Purse" was the underworld nickname of Yakov Kuznetsov, whom Shentalinsky names as Koshelkov. At 29 he was a Siberia-hardened criminal with at least ten convictions. He did not recognise Lenin; he only wanted a good vehicle for a robbery.

His gang forced the three out of the car, took several papers and the bodyguard's Browning pistol, and left them in the street in a snowstorm. Galeotti notes that by 1918 robberies and murders in Russia had risen between ten and fifteen times compared with before the war.

Then the gangsters read the documents and realised who they had stopped. They did not return the loot. According to Galeotti, they turned back to take Lenin hostage and demand a ransom. Chabanov, anticipating the move, had already led Lenin away from the main road and hidden him with his sister.

The anecdote is little more than a curiosity, but it shows how thin the line is between organised crime and the course of history.