This statement is credited with turning the quorum into agreement accepting the German train route to St. Petersburg.

We can assume from the German perspective it would make sense, despite the known stated promises of the Bolshevik core to turn it's attention westward after securing power, that this band of second rate exiles would be a preferable regime they may exert influence and ultimately disrupt in their perennial eastern flank threat rather than the Romanov house dynasty with its 3 centuries of recognized monarchy behind it. The same house which not a century prior had defeated Napoleon and been the vanguard in taking Paris.

The irony and fatal mistake of course is that Lenin was right. He had accurately assessed that Europe was in fact "pregnant with revolution" and it would be Russia that would take Germany, and possibly the continent for itself but for America which had for a number of unprecedented reasons found it's place on the global stage following V day.

This brings us to the question of Stalin vs. the United States. History may say what it will about Stalin being little more than a thug who exploited the revolution, the default track of academic thinking across the West. But this view is dismissive of his intellectual commitment to fulfill the Leninist vision. A simple thug will sway with the winds of ease. A thug can be right or left. A thug need not choose. Stalin however did choose, and chose with the conviction of a true believer. The Leninist belief.

Chomsky, again among others following Western intellectual convention, was dismissive of Leninism. It was Lenin's defining characteristic of a professional, undemocratic revolutionary corps squarely at odds with the Marxist pure democratic socialist worker vision. But this must be the critique. Why, we ask, would one find fault with the losing power? If we aim to discredit the success of the ideology we oppose, what sense is it to discredit the mensheviks and the half dozen other losing factions? No, to discredit the ideology we must discredit those who won. The ones who proved it possible.

(http://www.autoadmit.com/thread.php?thread_id=5713415&forum_id=2Elisa#48863673)