The monarchy had already been toppled in the February Revolution by the time Lenin and company had left Switzerland in their "sealed" train (it really was not that hermetic of a carriage and the idea that the Germans were so afraid of Lenin that they locked him in was post-revolutionary myth perpetuated by the Bolsheviks). The problem for Germany and the rest of the Central Powers was that the Provisional Government had vowed to continue the war. This was a decision that had limited popularity among the various city soviets and the greater Russian population. The Germans had certainly envisioned weaponizing Russia's various dissidents even before the war when Wilhelm II spoke to the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Minister Leopold von Berchtold in 1913 that if war came to Russia he would unleash the Empire's many political exiles on the Romanovs. Wilhelm II certainly gave the plan his personal approval. The Austro-Hungarians did register some apprehensions about this plan and this reflected a growing sense of the vulnerability of the Habsburg monarchy. But the Austro-Hungarian state too saw the utility in Russia's emigres. When Poronin authorities detained Lenin on a sweep of suspected spies at the outbreak of war, the state intervened and allowed Lenin to travel to Zurich via Vienna because he was a potential source of discord for the Russian state.

Wilhelm II would later claim that he first knew about Lenin's arrival from the German newspapers, and while this may be another self-serving myth like the "sealed train," the story does underscore the somewhat marginal nature of the Bolsheviks in the wider world of Russian revolutionaries. The Bolsheviks were a very vocal group of intellectuals and revolutionaries, but this was a very crowded field in 1917. The Bolsheviks not only had to contend with established rivals like the Mensheviks and the populist Socialist Revolutionaries, but also new revolutionary formations like the workers' and soldiers' soviets. Soviet historiography, which often verged on hagiography, would emphasize that the Bolsheviks' ascendancy was the natural evolution for the Revolution, but this was far from clear during this time.