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LENIN: HISTORY GREATEST SERVANT OF MONOPOLY CAPITALISM

(PART I: PARVUS)

UDC 94(47).084

LENIN: HISTORY GREATEST SERVANT OF MONOPOLY CAPITALISM

(PART I: PARVUS)

(Lea) Gabriela Gavrilov

Emerson College, Boston, Massachusetts (1996)

MA Journalism

Catholic University, Washington, D.C. (1985) +

University of Warsaw, Poland (1983 – 1984)

BA Political Science / Economics

ggavrilov100@yahoo.com

http://orcid.org/0009-0008-9246-9646

Edited translation from English by Microsoft Translation service

Аbstract. The author argues that the “leader of the world proletariat” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin was in fact the greatest agent of monopoly capitalism in history. The preparation of the revolution in Russia was done by Lenin in symbiosis with his German counterpart Israel Gelfand (best known under the pseudonym Parvus.) It was Parvus who recommended the German government to bet on the Bolshevik Party led by Lenin as the only political force capable of seizing power in Russia, leading Russia out of the world war on the side of the Entente and transferring Russia’s resources to the hands of German industrial and financial circles. It was Parvus who organized Lenin’s unhindered passage to Russia through the territory of the German Empire.

One of Lenin’s first acts as head of the Soviet government was to create concessions as a means of transferring Russian resources to the tycoons of Western capital. In the era of “war communism” (1918-1921), Lenin destroyed the Russian entrepreneurs proper, nationalizing all kinds of private, joint-stock and other enterprises and reorganizing them into state industrial syndicates, over which he gave control to Western bankers and capitalists. With the help of the monopoly of foreign trade, Lenin allowed the largest Western corporations to gain access to the Russian economy, devoid of internal competition and closed to other capitalists who were not part of the narrow circle of customers of the revolution. In the end, Lenin transformed Russia from a country with an open market economy into a totalitarian state with a state monopoly on all resources and types of business, whose economy was run by selected foreign corporations. This not only slowed down the development of Russia’s developing economy, but also limited the economic growth of its many neighbors and at the same time led to them entering into commercial relations with Western European and American firms that already dominated world trade.

This article is devoted directly to the destructive activities of Israel Gelfand (Parvus), who embodied the collective will of foreign financial, industrial and military-political circles that brought Lenin to power. Parvus hoped that as a sign of gratitude, Lenin would give him all the finances of Russia after the coup. Lenin acted in a truly Leninist way: he simply deceived him. Parvus received nothing.

Keywords: Lenin, Parvus, Gelfand, Kaiser’s Germany, imperialism, monopoly capitalism, the First World War, the Soviet monopoly of foreign trade.

Долларовая купюра крупным планом Контент, созданный искусственным интеллектом, может быть неверным.

“A lie told often enough becomes the truth” – V.I. Lenin

Israel Gelfand (Parvus)

and the coincidence of interests of German financiers

with the interests of Russian revolutionaries

In June 1983, when I was 19 years old, I went to Poland to study at the University of Warsaw as an American exchange student in my third year of university. My first impressions of the communist system—after a train from Frankfurt crossed the guarded, walled and barbed wire Polish border—were the endless golden rapeseed fields ploughed by plowed horses. It seemed to me that I had stepped back in time by at least 50 years. It was the socialist camp that we Americans have been taught for decades to pose the greatest threat to “freedom and democracy” on the planet. I thought that the justification for such poverty and technological backwardness was that the Soviet Union was allegedly devoting all its resources to the production of weapons, but it was more like a country with a Third World colonial economy than an industrial power threatening U.S. global domination.

По мере того, как я стала приживаться в социалистическом лагере, и я путешествовала из Вроцлава в Варшаву и Гданьск, я начала замечать, что все большие, дорогие или технически совершенные машины – западного производства. Для меня это было открытием, потому что на Западе нам неоднократно говорили, что экономика социалистических стран закрыта для западных капиталистов. In June 1983, when I was 19 years old, I went to Poland to study at the University of Warsaw as an American exchange student in my third year of university. My first impressions of the communist system—after a train from Frankfurt crossed the guarded, walled and barbed wire Polish border—were the endless golden rapeseed fields ploughed by plowed horses. It seemed to me that I had stepped back in time by at least 50 years. It was the socialist camp that we Americans have been taught for decades to pose the greatest threat to “freedom and democracy” on the planet. I thought that the justification for such poverty and technological backwardness was that the Soviet Union was allegedly devoting all its resources to the production of weapons, but it was more like a country with a Third World colonial economy than an industrial power threatening U.S. global domination.

All ground transport: locomotives, wagons, trams and buses were made in West Germany and Swedish. All the taxis were Mercedes, and the cars were FIAT (American/Italian). A large hotel in Warsaw was built by a German multinational construction company. Some of the first computers I saw at the Faculty of Mathematics at the University of Warsaw, and they were all IBM. Neon Orange Fanta from the Coca-Cola Deutschland Company was served at every party. They even had bags of Kellogg’s cornflakes in stores that had almost no other products. The bags didn’t have the brand name on them, but they were the same cornflakes I knew in the US.

The common denominator of all these Western firms doing business with the Polish government was that they were the biggest Western brands — the world’s most powerful companies. They enjoyed in Poland what they didn’t have in the U.S. or Western European markets — a monopoly. There was no internal competition. suffering from a shortage of goods. They didn’t have to advertise, coordinate and pay salespeople, hire transport, rent warehouses or shops, or people to manage them – as was the case in the West – all of this logistics were left to the “anti-capitalism” communist government.

My 13-month stay in socialist Poland forever changed my understanding of East-West relations, shifting the focus from political events to commercial deals, and led to a profound reassessment of Cold War history.

As noted in my first article in issue No 1 of 2025. scientific platform “XXI century”, at the turn of the XX century, Russia was the largest market in the world.[1] When the Trans-Siberian Railway was completed in 1905, Russia was steadily moving towards becoming the leading economic power in Europe, and perhaps in the world, due to its unique economic and geographical location. It was in the immediate vicinity of major economic subcontinents, with the exception of the United States, which was a lonely island on the other side of the globe[2] — and it looked promising. Already a serious competitor to U.S. oil, wheat, timber, gold, and many other resources, Russian businesses and banks spread to China, where they competed with (and won) coveted concession contracts that Western capitalists wanted for themselves.[3]

Moreover, the fortune of Tsar Nicholas II at the time of his abdication in February 1917 was estimated at 300 billion dollars.[4] The Russian imperial government was the richest in material resources and agriculture in the world, owning thousands of square miles of land rich in timber, minerals, and oil.

When Lenin’s Bolsheviks overthrew Kerensky’s Provisional Government, they instantly became the richest revolutionary regime in history. This fact alone should stimulate more journalistic and historical research than it has in the last century.

Such wealth and resources, combined with Russia’s uniquely favorable economic and geographical position, should have allowed the Bolsheviks to quickly overtake the leading European and American countries in terms of economic indicators, simply surpassing them in production and flooding the world market with Russian goods, reducing the prices of essential goods until the products of Western manufacturers would become uncompetitive, and Western firms would not be forced out of the market. Moreover, if Russian enterprises (many of which were foreign-owned) were nationalized and placed in the hands of Russian entrepreneurs (rather than the Soviet state), they could quickly grow into giants many times the size of European and American corporations, simply by exploiting Russia’s abundant resources and using the newly built Trans-Siberian Railway to trade with all its many neighbors.

Germany and the United States were aware of this fact.

Instead, Russia’s economic progress was abruptly interrupted just six weeks after the October Revolution, when the Supreme Council of National Economy (VSNKh) was established in December 1917 under the Council of People’s Commissars, which in turn was the supreme authority of the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs “as a provisional workers’ and peasants’ government.” revolutionary organ consisting of representatives of the new Soviet regime, including the most ardent enemy of capitalism, the “leader of the world proletariat” Vladimir Ilyich Lenin, it was decided to organize concessions[5] as a means of transferring Russian resources to foreign capitalists.[6] All local enterprises that belonged to Russian citizens (only local, not foreign entrepreneurs were considered “class enemies”) were subject to “confiscation, requisition, sequestration, forced syndication in various branches of industry and trade, and other measures in the field of production, distribution, and state finance.”[7]

But why do the Bolsheviks, the most verbose and hyperbolized of all anti-capitalist political parties, destroy and outlaw (on pain of death) all forms of domestic entrepreneurship, and then hand over Russia’s abundant resources to the elite of Western capital?

The answer is simple: the Soviet regime was not created to protect the proletariat, as it claimed, it was created to nationalize the Russian economy and turn it into a totalitarian state with a state monopoly on all resources and all kinds of enterprises under the control of German financial and industrial tycoons.

Parvus and I came up with this scheme and persuaded the German General Staff to help us overthrow the Provisional Government

Мультяшный человек в костюме, указывающий на шляпу Контент, созданный искусственным интеллектом, может быть неверным.

The German “September Program”[8]

Prior to the October Revolution of 1917, British, French, and Belgian capital depended on the preservation and stability of the Russian economy. In particular, Britain’s decision to convert its fleet from coal-fired to oil-powered in 1913 made Britain dependent on Russian oil to maintain its dominance of the world’s oceans and thus its global colonial possessions. While Germany was also deeply involved in the economy of its great neighbor, it understood that overthrowing the Russian monarchy and installing a pro-German regime was not only a way to capture and control Russia’s emerging markets, but would also cause fatal damage to the British and French tycoons with whom its corporations had to compete for Russian resources. Realizing the extent to which the involvement of the Entente countries in the Russian economy could be used to weaken their economies, German financial-industrial circles and military-political leaders developed a plan to do this – through regime change in Russia, which would lead to the nationalization of subsidiaries of their competitors operating in the Russian Empire.

The German plan to overthrow the Russian monarchy was part of a broader plan to destroy the economy of the Entente countries, so that German financial and political interests would not only gain control over the resources of Europe, but also, by destroying competitors, gain a commercial monopoly on Europe and Russia. The destruction of French mines and factories by the German army was one of the biggest sources of dispute over reparations at the end of the First World War. because Germany left behind a streak of destruction so total that French enterprises, and later the French economy, were literally reduced to dust. It was this idea that lay at the heart of Germany’s military policy – to destroy the economy of the Entente countries so that after the war the countries of Europe would be dependent on German financial and industrial tycoons who restored, fed, clothed and provided them with essential goods.[9] This plan would have been exposed after the defeat of Germany, but it remained secret, since the other capitalist powers considered it expedient to use the work of the German High Command in Russia in their own interests.

German efforts to destabilize the Russian Empire:

Parvus and the Bolsheviks

parvus izrail lazarevich

Israel Leizerovich Gelfand (1867-1924), pseudonym: “Parvus”

Germany’s attempts to overthrow the Russian monarchy and replace it with a regime willing to seize all assets, foreign and domestic, except Germany’s, were a clever way to neutralize Russia’s economic growth while causing irreparable damage to the economies of Britain and France. In 2017, journalist Wagener published an article in Deutsche Welle about Germany’s role in the Russian Revolution. “Kaiser Wilhelm II spent more than half a billion euros to weaken his cousin’s [Tsar Nicholas II] control over Russia’s economy.” Wagener drew attention to information that has remained veiled for more than a century, but is crucial to understanding not only the Russian Revolution and Germany’s involvement in it, but also the role that the United States assumed in the Soviet Union during and especially after World War I.

The German plan to overthrow the Romanov monarchy came from a former subject of the Russian Empire[10] , Israel Gelfand, known by the pseudonym “Parvus”. Parvus participated in the 1905 revolution with Trotsky, wrote for left-wing newspapers, and became a wealthy arms dealer during the Balkan Wars. By 1914, Gelfand was living in Constantinople (Istanbul), where he approached the German ambassador with a proposal to conclude an alliance of “Prussian bayonets and kulaks of Russian proletarians”[11], arguing that the interests of German corporations and Russian revolutionaries complement each other. According to Zeman and Scharlau, the authors of the book “The Merchant of the Revolution: Parvus-Gelfand. A Political Biography[12]“, archives seized from the German Foreign Office after Germany’s defeat in World War II, have uncovered a wealth of documents relating to Parvus, who “became a central figure in the conspiratorial ties between the [German] imperial government and the Russian Social Democratic Party, in particular the Lenin [Bolshevik] faction.” A long-standing statement[13] that Germany participated in the spread of the revolution in Russia is now confirmed by documentary evidence.[14]

The facts show that after the Provisional Government came to power, Lenin and his fellow Bolsheviks were not only provided with a train through the territory of Germany at war with Russia from Zurich to St. Petersburg, but also received financial assistance from the German High Command and from the Reich Chancellery in the Wilhelmstrasse [15]in order to carry out the “proletarian” revolution, seize power, remove the Russian army from the German-Austrian front and transfer the Russian economy to the the undivided power of the German financial and industrial oligarchs.

Israel Gelfand (Parvus)

Israel Leizerovich Gelfand was born in the Russian Empire in the town of[16] Berezino, Minsk Province, in 1867. He graduated from the gymnasium in Odessa. The widespread myth that his father Leizer Gelfand was a craftsman, almost a shoemaker, is a figment of fantasy: Israel itself wrote that he belonged to the bourgeois class.[17] Almost every high school student of the Jewish faith in those distant years in Russia considered it his first social duty to be in opposition to the tsarist regime. Gelfand joined the Narodnaya Volya circles. There is information that Israel was a member of the terrorist wing of the Narodnaya Volya. The first experience of this kind, however, did not satisfy Gelfand, and already in 1886 he found himself abroad. in Switzerland, gradually switching from the Hebrew name “Israel” to the European name “Alexander” and using the Russian surnames “Maskovich” and “Molotov”. In the same year, 1886, he visited Zurich in order to establish contact with a revolutionary group of emigrants from Russia called “Emancipation of Labor” (Plekhanov, Zasulich, Deutsch, Axelrod, Ignatov). However, Gelfand did not find an understanding with the leader of the group, G. V. Plekhanov, on the basis of the complete lack of a sense of Russian patriotism in the Jew Gelfand. Where could you buy your homeland cheaply?”[18] From that time on, he avoided the traditional centers of settlement of the Russian emigration (Geneva, Zurich, etc.) and settled in Basel, where in the autumn of 1888 he entered the University of Basel. In 1891, he defended his dissertation on the topic “Technical Organization of Labor (Cooperation and Division of Labor)”, based on the works of Marx, and in the same year, having moved to Saxony, he became a journalist for the Dresden newspaper of the social-democratic orientation Die Sachsische Arbeiterzeitung (“Saxon Workers’ Newspaper”). Gelfand quickly won the favor of the leading German Social Democrats Karl Kautsky, Viktor Adler and Clara Zetkin, and even had an affair with the young Rosa Luxemburg. In 1895-1896 he was already the editor of the newspaper Die Leipziger Volkszeitung (Leipzig People’s Newspaper), in 1896-1898 he was the editor of the former Die Sachsische Arbeiterzeitung. At first, he signed his articles with the pseudonym Helphand, which was a German transcription of his Hebrew surname Gelfand (Yiddish for “Elephant”). But in the summer of 1894, in an article by Gelfand published in Kautsky’s journal Die Neue Zeit (The New Era), the pseudonym “Parvus” appeared, derived from the Latin word Parvus, “Little Boy.” He was jokingly called so because he had a very large physique. According to some accounts, he was “a man with the body of an elephant and the head of Socrates.” It was with the pseudonym Parvus without any initials and without the name “Alexander”, which for some reason is attributed to this pseudonym, that Israel Gelfand began to sign his articles.

Parvus was distinguished by exceptional efficiency. In politics, he adhered to leftist views of the Marxist persuasion, hated the bourgeoisie, but at the same time he was overcome by a love of extreme luxury, a thirst for profit and a desire to get rich, “becoming richer than the richest capitalist.” . Morality and ethics did not exist for him. Parvus did not recognize any half-heartedness and compromises. The hostility of any half-heartedness throughout his life was tantamount to an aspiration for a revolution—a socialist, world revolution, bringing with it the final arrangement of a new world order, at the head of which he ultimately saw himself.

At the time of his death in 1924, he owned a villa in Wädenswil on Lake Zurich in Switzerland, and there was also a mansion in Denmark. And in Berlin, he lived in the most elite district of the city – Schwanenwerder (“Swan Island”). This island on Lake Wannsee in Berlin was the place of residence of the richest people of the German Empire. luxurious garden and had a huge staff of servants, whom he forced to wear costumes of the late XVIII century. The fashionability and significance of this mansion can be demonstrated by the following example. After the Nazis came to power, Joseph Goebbels moved into this mansion.

As for Parvus’s financial condition and his assets, it remains a mystery. After his death, no money, securities, or any documentation was found. Neither contemporaries nor later researchers were able to give at least an approximate estimate of its financial condition. Only a part of the assets that Parvus managed is known. These are several companies in different countries of the world that were engaged in export and import operations, often semi-legally. For example, during the war, one of his companies sold Ruhr coal from Germany to Denmark, and another bought bacon from the same country for the Germans who were experiencing the consequences of the naval blockade of the Entente. The third company traded with Russia through neutral Sweden under gray schemes. It is known that the revolutionary had offices in the Ottoman Empire. The merchant also owned a steamship company. In addition, Parvus owned several publishing houses and the Institute for the Study of the Causes and Consequences of the World War, which he founded in neutral Denmark. The businessman also financed several European newspapers of a social democratic orientation. But all this belonged to Parvus personally, or he was just a figurehead, formally managing other people’s assets, and to whom these assets really belonged, it has not yet been possible to find out.

Parvus himself gave himself the following exhaustive characterization: “By betraying my homeland – Russia, I betrayed the class from which I came – the bourgeoisie. At the same time, I moved away from the Russian intelligentsia.”[19]

In 1898, Parvus quarreled with the German Social Democrats. The most prominent Social Democrat, Reichstag deputy August Bebel, accused him of publishing vile libels against his fellow party members in order to increase the circulation of newspapers. Parvus was expelled from Saxony. He settled in Munich and decided to make peace with the Russian Social Democrats. The leaders of their radical wing, Lenin, Martov and Potresov, had just decided in 1900 to publish the newspaper Iskra abroad and secretly send it to Russia. [20] Parvus hospitably offered them his Munich apartment for this purpose, receiving in return a membership in the editorial office and the right to publish his own articles on the front page. There he met Leiba Bronstein, who later became famous under the fictitious name of Trotsky. In 1902, Parvus founded the firm Verlag für slawische und nordische Literatur (“Publishing House of Slavic and Northern Literature”) in Munich, registering it in the name of his companion Julian Marchlewski (after leaving In 1905, under the leadership of one Marchlevsky, the publishing house went bankrupt). In 1904, Parvus, together with Trotsky, began to develop the theory of permanent revolution.

After the announcement of an amnesty for political crimes in the Russian Empire on October 21 (November 3), 1905, the enemies of tsarism began to return in droves from emigration to Russia to organize a revolution. Parvus was one of the first to arrive, taking Trotsky’s new friend with him. Since October 1905, they were members of the Executive Committee of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, and Parvus was the author of its “Financial Manifesto”, which contained an appeal to the population of the Russian Empire to refuse to pay taxes and taxes, to withdraw deposits from the State Bank and savings banks, and to demand that the government conduct monetary transactions only in gold. According to Parvus, these measures would lead the tsarist government to financial bankruptcy. Along the way, Parvus, together with Trotsky, rented the out-of-the-way Russkaya Gazeta, quickly turning it into a super-popular publication with a circulation of 500 thousand. When on December 3 (16), 1905, the members of the Council were arrested for this Manifesto, for some reason Parvus himself was not arrested and headed the new composition of the Soviet. He did not prove himself as a leader, quarreled with members of the Council, left it and was soon also arrested. If Trotsky was sentenced by the court to eternal settlement in Siberia, then Parvus was only exiled to Turukhansk for three years. On the way, he escaped and returned to Germany, where he became a member of the Central Committee of the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD). In 1908, Parvus published Colonial Policy and the Collapse of the Capitalist System, in which he presented an analysis of modern imperialism.

In 1908, a loud scandal broke out: Maxim Gorky accused Parvus of embezzling funds from the German production of the play “The Lower Depths”. Parvus worked as Gorky’s impresario. The profits from the productions were to be distributed as follows: 20 percent of the total amount was received by Parvus, the rest was divided as follows: a quarter to Gorky, three quarters to the cash register of the Social Democratic Party. Parvus did not pay money either to the party treasury or to Gorky, appropriating 180 thousand marks in gold. The party trial of Parvus was headed by Bebel and Kautsky; as a result, he was expelled from both parties, the SPD and the RSDLP. Parvus did not appear in court, writing a letter that he had squandered all the money for a trip to Italy with the lady of the heart. It was no secret to anyone that this lady was Rosa Luxemburg. He did not return any money. He simply disappeared, and appeared in 1910 in Constantinople as an economic adviser to the Young Turk government. There he also wrote articles for the government magazine “Young Turkey”.

Probably, since 1911, Parvus was an agent of the German General Staff (according to some sources, also of Turkish intelligence).[21] By 1910, Parvus had started an arms trade in Constantinople and became a partner of the British arms firm Vickers and the notorious arms dealer Vasily Zaharoff.[22] The arms trade also made him a partner of the leading German arms concern, Krupp, and brought him significant profits during the Balkan Wars of 1912-1913. In 1913, Parvus came to Vienna, financed and edited the newspaper Pravda with Trotsky.

During the First World War, Parvus advocated the victory of Germany, called on the Russian Social Democrats to contribute to the defeat of Russia.

Parvus Memorandum

During the First Partition of Poland (1772), the Austrian Empire received the Belz and Russian voivodeships, from which the Austrians formed an administrative unit – the “Kingdom of Galicia and Lodomeria”, the name of which was a Latinized version of the historical name of the Old Russian Galician and Vladimir (Volodymyr-Volynsky) principalities, at one time occupied by the Poles and turned into the “Russian Voivodeship”. In 1775, Bukovina, inhabited by Russians, was transferred from the Moldavian Principality to Austria and was annexed to the “kingdom”. In the west, the “kingdom” was inhabited by Poles, in the east, the predominant population was Russians, who spoke various Western dialects of the Russian language.

With the outbreak of the First World War, in which Austria-Hungary entered against Russia, the Austro-Hungarian Empire faced two problems: the first of them was the presence in the border zone of a huge number of subjects of Russian nationality, the sympathies of most of whom in this war were on the side of Russia. To imprison and isolate Russians sympathetic to the Russian Empire, the first concentration camp in Europe was created on September 4, 1914. and a little later, the second, Terezín, through which many thousands of Russians and people simply suspected of sympathizing with Russia passed and died in inhuman conditions. But the genocide did not solve the problem completely. It was necessary to create conditions so that the people who remained at liberty under the oppression of the Austrians did not gravitate towards their homeland – Russia. In addition, there was a second problem. In the event of victories in the war, Austria-Hungary intended to occupy the south of Russia under an agreement with Germany, and the Austrians needed to create a powerful separatist underground in these still unoccupied territories with a homogeneous hostile Russian population. The Austrians decided to kill both problems with one blow. They declared Galicia and all of southern Russia to the east of it to be a country called “Ukraine”, and its entire population – not Russians, but some new, previously unknown nation – “Ukrainians”. The name was clearly invented by a person who is not familiar with the Russian language. In Russian, the common noun “Ukraine” is any outskirts: either cities, or villages, or the periphery of the country located near the ocean or the border with another state. What in English is called outskirts, suburb, periphery. And the word “Ukrainian” was generally a neologism, never used before in the Russian language. From various dialectal, foreign and simply invented words or vulgarisms, a dictionary for the language of the newly-appeared “nation” was urgently invented, however, the newly-minted “Ukrainians” could not understand each other in this newspeak, speaking among themselves in normal Russian.

After this epoch-making invention, on August 4, 1914, in Lemberg (as the capital of Galicia, Lviv, was called under the Austrians), the Austro-Hungarian government created the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine” (later the word “Union” was replaced by the new “Ukrainian” word “Spilka”). It consisted mainly of revolutionaries who fled from Russia after the suppression of the riots of 1905-1907 and simply bandits who justified their robberies and murders by “revolutionary activity”. Its goal was to tear away from Russia its southern territories within undefined borders, which were declared “Ukraine”, and to create a puppet “Ukrainian” state under the rule of the Austrian emperor. The Union received a lot of money from the Austro-Hungarian government to conduct propaganda among Russian prisoners of war in Austria and Germany and to infiltrate agents of influence on Russian territory. In connection with the offensive of Russian troops in Galicia in August-September 1914, the leadership of the Union fled to Vienna, and the patronage of the Union was taken over by the stronger Kaiser’s Germany. In Berlin, the central residence of the Union is located at Leipzigerstraße 131.

As is clearly established from the secret documents of the German Foreign Office, which fell into the hands of the Americans and the British after the Second World War, as well as from the documents of the Austro-Hungarian Foreign Office, Lenin at the very beginning of the war received 5,000 dollars from the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine to resume his newspaper Sotsial-Demokrat, which he published in Switzerland[23].

By September 1914, Germany entrusted Parvus with the leadership of the revolutionary groups of the fifth column in Russia, supported by Germany and Austria-Hungary. His mansion in Constantinople became a meeting place for social democratic conspirators against the Russian state[24]. The leader of the “Union for the Liberation of Ukraine” Melenevsky-Basok met with Parvus at the very beginning of the war in Constantinople. Parvus expressed his readiness to help the Union in every possible way. Melenevsky introduced Parvus to a certain Dr. Max Zimmer, a representative of the German and Austro-Hungarian diplomatic missions, who directed all the activities of the “Ukrainian” Union, and Parvus has since worked hand in hand with Dr. Zimmer. The son of a German industrialist, Zimmer was interested in creating a puppet “Ukraine” in southern Russia, which would bring the country closer to Germany and help expand his father’s business. Zimmer used Parvus’s previous revolutionary writings to incite an uprising and foment a movement for the “independence” of Ukraine.

On November 18, 1914, the Chief of the German General Staff, Erich von Falkenheim, informed Reich Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg that the failure of the offensive on the Marne had deprived Germany of the possibility of a decisive lightning military victory and that Germany was now facing the threat of collapse in a protracted war of attrition. The military commanders asked the chancellor to take measures to break the enemy by political means; namely, by knocking out of the war the largest military power, Russia, by means of an internal revolution.[25]

In early January 1915, Parvus asked Zimmer to arrange a meeting with the German ambassador in Constantinople, Baron Hans von Wangenheim, who was a well-known supporter of the creation of revolutionary fifth columns in enemy countries. On January 7, 1915, von Wangenheim received Parvus, who explained that “the interests of the German government fully coincide with the interests of the Russian revolutionaries. The Russian Social-Democrats can achieve their aim only by the complete abolition of tsarism. On the other hand, Germany will not be able to emerge victorious from this war unless it first provokes a revolution in Russia. But even after the revolution, Russia will pose a great danger to Germany if it is not dismembered into a number of independent states.”[26]

Parvus promised the ambassador that he could “create unity and organize an uprising on a broad basis.”[27] On January 8, von Wangenheim reported his conversation with Parvus in a telegram to the Foreign Office.[28] The ambassador stressed the “useful services” which “the well-known Russian socialist and publicist, Dr. Parvus,” had rendered since the beginning of the war, and that he was “definitely pro-German.” Von Wangenheim also conveyed Parvus’s request to submit his plans personally to the German Foreign Office.

On January 10, the State Secretary of the German Foreign Office, Gottlieb von Jagow, received Parvus in the Wilhelmstrasse.[29] The reception was attended by Dr. Max Zimmer and the author of the “September program”, Dr. Kurt Riezler. No records of this meeting have survived, but a few days later Parvus submitted a detailed memorandum to the German Foreign Minister about his plan to overthrow the Russian monarchy.[30] this note was called the “Dr. Gelfand Memorandum” or “Parvus Memorandum.”[31] This document is interesting primarily because it is the first surviving manual on the organization of a “color” revolution, compiled in written form. Here are the main theses of Parvus:

“- By spring (meaning the spring of 1916 – ed.) it is necessary to prepare a mass political strike in Russia under the slogan: freedom and peace. The center of the movement will be St. Petersburg, and in it – the Obukhov, Putilov and Baltic factories (these factories produced weapons, ammunition and military equipment up to warships and armored cars – ed.). The strike is to cover the St. Petersburg-Warsaw, Moscow-Warsaw railway communications and the South-Western Railway…

“This work can be carried out only under the leadership of Russian Social-Democracy. Its radical wing has already begun to act. But it is necessary that the moderate minority faction also join them. Until now, such unification has been most hindered by radicals. However, two weeks ago, their leader, Lenin, himself openly raised the question of unification with the minority…

“We should start campaigning right now. Through Bulgaria and Romania, it is possible to establish connections with Odessa, Nikolaev, Sevastopol, Rostov-on-Don, Batum and Baku.

– The prospects for the uprising of the Black Sea Fleet can be assessed only after the establishment of close contact with Sevastopol.

– In Baku and in the area of the oil fields, a strike can be organized relatively easily. If it comes to a strike, then we must try, as in 1905, to set fire to oil wells and storage facilities. Strikes are also possible in the coal mining area on the Donets. Conditions are especially favorable in the Urals. There, the Socialist Party of the Bolsheviks has many supporters. Political strikes of miners can be easily organized with a certain amount of money, since the population there is very poor.

– Particular attention should be paid to Siberia. In Europe, it is known only as a place of exile. But along the great Siberian highways, along the railways and rivers, there lives a strong peasantry, proud and independent, who would most of all like not to be disturbed by the central government.

At the same time, the general line of this matter must be strengthened within the Russian Socialist Parties by means of discussions in the press, in pamphlets, etc. Pamphlets in Russian can be printed in Switzerland.

-If… If the Russian army suffers any serious defeat, then the movement against the regime can quickly acquire unprecedented proportions. In any case, if all forces are brought into action in accordance with the plan outlined above, we can expect that in the spring it will come to a mass political strike.

– An important concomitant phenomenon of these processes, as in 1905, can be the peasant movement. The living conditions of peasants in Russia have not improved since then, but on the contrary, they have worsened. In the eyes of the Russian peasant, the whole question is about the land. Therefore, he will again begin to seize the landlords’ lands and threaten the landlords.

– The formation of an independent Ukraine will both look like liberation from the tsarist regime and as salvation from the chaos of the peasant turmoil.

-Finns… first of all, they can ensure communication between the Russian revolutionaries and St. Petersburg.

“If the revolutionary movement reaches a great scale, then even if the tsarist government retains power in St. Petersburg, a provisional government will be created, which will put on the agenda the question of the cessation of hostilities and the conclusion of peace.”[32]

In a special appendix to his original memorandum, Parvus formulated his program of eleven points as follows. The first point of the program read: “Financial support for the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social-Democratic Labor Party, which is fighting against the tsarist government by all means available to it. Its leaders are in Switzerland. Lenin’s group of experienced professional revolutionaries is the best guarantee of the success of the future “All-Russian Mass Strike”.

According to the testimony of Zeman and Scharlau, from the middle of March 1915, Parvus became the leading adviser to the German government on revolutionary affairs in Russia. He was entrusted with the organization of a united front of European socialism against the tsarist regime in Russia. foreign affairs the first million marks for these purposes. At his request, the money in foreign currency was transferred to Bucharest, Zurich and Copenhagen. In general, Parvus “calculated” that 20 million were needed to organize a revolution, but he did not dare to demand such an amount, and asked only for five. German diplomats, of course, did not believe in the overthrow of the dynasty in Russia, which was supposed to pave the way for socialism. But they were interested in increasing internal turmoil in Russia, which could force the tsar to conclude a separate peace, which the Germans needed bloodily from the nose, forced to fight on two, and after Italy entered the war on the side of the Entente in 1915, on three fronts. For Parvus, a separate peace between Germany and Russia would mean the complete collapse of his entire plan. The conclusion of peace would have given the tsarist government the opportunity to suppress the revolution, as it had been in 1906. For the same reason, Lenin was then a resolute opponent of the conclusion of any kind of peace.

After Parvus’s return to Germany, the German Social Democrats, even the SPD co-chairman Hugo Haase, who had made a speech in the Reichstag in justification of war loans, warned his comrades against any contact with Parvus. When Parvus came to his former “lady of the heart” Rosa Luxemburg, she did not let him speak, but immediately showed him the door. Clara Zetkin called him “a pimp of imperialism who sold himself to the German government.” – and all of them finally broke off relations with Parvus[33]. Among the Russian Social Democrats, he was not well received, which called into question his plan to unite all left-wing forces under his leadership.

Parvus’ plan for Russia:

transformation of the national economy into a corporatocracy[34]

Parvus devised a program to transform the national economy from open market competition, with the protection of local enterprises from powerful foreign firms, to a closed, state-sponsored monopoly dominated by foreign corporations. He called it “socialist,” but it would be more accurate to call it “corporatocracy.” The nationalization of the banks was to be the starting point. If the government controlled the money and capital markets, it could control the entire economy.

Quoting the German politician and head of Germany’s General Electric (AEG), Walter Rathenau, Parvus noted that 300 people controlled “the economic destiny of the [European] continent.” Since banks are under the control of the government, entrepreneurs who are not the elite will be deprived of access to critical business credit. None of Lenin’s “revolutionaries” pointed out that by destroying local businesses, they were destroying all competition to foreign commercial encroachments and open the Russian economy to the monopoly domination of the very foreign firms they publicly vilified. The nationalization of the means of production, as Parvus foresaw, would change “only the form of capitalist domination.”[35]

Lenin and Trotsky understood that nationalization was a way to rid the economy of domestic and individual foreign entrepreneurs. Russia’s industrial components (plants, factories, factories, mines, etc.) and the property of local firms were purged of entrepreneurs, grouped into state-controlled syndicates, and offered as concessions to foreign industrialists. These foreign firms then paid royalties to the “revolutionary” government, many of them owned shares in joint ventures and even sat on the boards of directors of trusts.[36] The only losers were the “masses,” whom they pushed into a devastating revolution, promising to finally gain control of their lives and the economy in which they lived. This plan became a key part of Lenin’s War Communism (1918–1921).

In May 1915, the German Imperial Treasury approved the allocation of another 2 million marks (about half a billion euros or $582 million in 2017) “to support revolutionary propaganda in Russia.”[37] Parvus went to Switzerland, where Russian Social Democratic leaders were living in poverty in exile. He settled in Zurich’s most luxurious hotel, the Bauer au Lac. At the end of May, Parvus went to a restaurant where Russian political émigrés usually dined. One of the Russians led Parvus to the table at which Lenin was sitting with his wife Krupskaya, his mistress Inessa Armand, and his friend Kasparov. After a brief conversation, Lenin and Krupskaya left the restaurant with Parvus and invited him to their place a modest apartment. Parvus explained that he was seeking Lenin’s cooperation in exchange for German funding. Lenin and Parvus did not come to any definite agreement at that time. It is possible that Lenin saw in Parvus some dangerous competitor. Lenin knew that if Parvus’s plan succeeded, he would eventually gain great influence in the Russian socialist organizations and, thanks to his financial resources and intellectual abilities, could outperform the other party leaders. On the other hand, it is believed that Lenin was simply careful not to tarnish his image by making a deal with a well-known German agent in public. What happened privately can only be guessed from subsequent events.

A few months later, Parvus moved to Copenhagen to live with his new German handler, Count Ulrich von Brockdorff-Rantzau, who served as German ambassador to Denmark. Parvus was authorized to work in a front organization for the recruitment and financing of Russian revolutionaries in Russia and abroad. Before his departure from Zurich, he instructed his friend Catherine Groman to inform the Russian émigrés that he wanted to assemble a group of researchers for a research institute: to study the causes and consequences of the World War. He was going to open this institute in Copenhagen. Parvus’s promise that the Institute’s employees would be able to travel to Copenhagen through Germany on legal passports aroused suspicion among many Russian émigrés – was the “Parvus Institute” an institution created with the money of the German government for propaganda in favor of the victory of Germany? Parvus managed to recruit only four Russian émigrés: Ekaterina Groman, Vladimir Perazich, Georgy Chudnovsky, and the former Social Democratic deputy of the Second State Duma, Arshak Zurabov. Later, Moisey Uritsky, who in 1917-18 played a prominent role in the Bolshevik Revolution, joined the Institute. is based on the money of the German government, and its task is to spread defeatist propaganda in the Allied countries, mainly in Russia. Parvus indignantly denied this. According to the documents of the German Foreign Office, now published in America and in England, it has been established that the Parvusov Institute was founded with the money of the German government and precisely for the purpose about which Alexinsky wrote.[38] On Lenin’s behalf, Lenin’s collaborator Jakub Furstenberg (alias Yakov Ganecki, alias Kuba) joined Parvus’s dummy “institute” as chief accountant. Furstenberg acted as an intermediary between Lenin and Parvus so that Lenin would avoid accusations of involvement in German financing. The German authorities granted Parvus trade licenses to set up an import-export business in Copenhagen[39], which started a profitable illegal trade between Germany and Russia through neutral Denmark. Between August 1915 and July 1916 alone, German-Russian trade through Scandinavia and other neutral countries amounted to 11.2 million rubles.[40]

A member of the Austro-Hungarian diplomatic mission in Stockholm summed up the matter: “During the war, Parvus and Fürstenberg, with the help of Germany, conducted export business through Scandinavia to Russia… This importation of German goods into Russia was carried out by the Parvus-Furstenberg enterprise regularly and in considerable quantities as follows: Parvus received from the Germans some goods, such as surgical instruments, medicines and chemicals needed in Russia, and then Fürstenberg, as his Russian agent, sent them to Russia. The value of these goods was not returned to Germany, but was used mainly for Leninist propaganda.[41]

After the nationalization of Russian banks in 1918, Jakub Furstenberg (aka Yakov Ganetsky) was appointed Deputy People’s Commissar of Finance and Governor of the People’s Bank of the RSFSR. In 1918-1919, he was in charge of Gokhran, located at the address of the former Moscow Loan Office, where jewelry and gold confiscated by the Bolsheviks from wealthy people were accumulated. In 1923-1930, he was one of the leaders and a member of the board of the People’s Commissariat for Foreign Trade of the USSR. a member of the Presidium of the Supreme Council of National Economy of the RSFSR. In July 1937, Jakub Hanecki was arrested by the NKVD on suspicion of espionage for Poland and Germany and sentenced to death. On November 26 of the same year, he was shot.

Parvus was given material support to create his own periodical, Die Glocke (The Bell), which “will be used only for the purpose of fomenting revolution in Russia, inducing the German workers to support their state, and creating stability and unity within the Reich.”[42]

On August 11, 1915, the Reich Chancellor reported to the Kaiser that “the pushing of the Muscovite Empire to the East by separating its western territories” was the main goal of Germany’s Eastern policy. Now, armed with business, a “research institute” and his own publication, Parvus allegedly began preparations for a mass political strike in Russia, which he scheduled for January 22, 1916, to coincide with the anniversary of “Bloody Sunday” in 1905. In other cities, in January 1916, workers’ strikes did take place. These strikes were spontaneous and did not lead to a revolution, contrary to the expectations and predictions of Parvus. The German Foreign Minister’s distrust of Parvus increased after that. He expressed a well-founded suspicion that the funds intended by the German government for the revolution in Russia were flowing into the pockets of Parvus himself[43].

Then Parvus proposed to lower the exchange rate of the Russian ruble lower than it had already fallen since the beginning of the world war, introducing counterfeit money into circulation.[44] He called for the issuance of sets of banknotes with the same serial number in order to create panic among the population and to damage Russia’s credit in foreign banks and firms. Together with a propaganda campaign in the Russian army aimed at weakening the determination and devotion of the men and women defending their country against German invasion, Russia would be further weakened. On December 29, 1915, the German government allocated another million rubles for propaganda, directed against the Russian army.[45]

In October 1916, Parvus founded the Kobenhavns Befragtnings-og Transport-Kompagniet freight company, in which Danish trade unions participated, as most of the cargo was to consist of Danish coal shipped to Germany, not caring that their coal would continue to power the large German arms factories Krupp, Rheinmetall, the German navy, and locomotives transporting troops and weapons throughout Europe. During 1917, Parvus’s company acquired a large number of berths and warehouses, which employed about 1000 people.[46] Through a shell company, Parvus made another fortune by buying copper, rubber, tin, and corn for Germany, while exporting German chemicals and equipment to Russia.[47] Part of the income was provided to Lenin.[48] Parvus also organized the smuggling of weapons and dynamite across the Finnish border to Russia.

*

The monarchy in Russia fell quite unexpectedly, without any visible prerequisites and completely out of accordance with the “program” outlined by Parvus. As early as January 9 (22), 1917, in Switzerland, Lenin uttered his famous phrase in German: “We, old people, may not live to see the decisive battles of this coming revolution,” [49]and a month later it had already taken place. This happened just on the eve of the large-scale offensive of Russian troops on the German-Austrian front planned for the spring of 1917. It had to be plucked. According to the major players from Wall Street and the London Stock Exchange, it was not only the Central Powers (and they were already doomed) that had to lose the war, but also Russia. In any case, here their goals coincided with the goals of Germany. St. Petersburg was literally flooded with spies and agents of influence from all the belligerent countries, as well as the “neutral” United States, the most interested party in this matter. For the coup d’état in Russia, it was not the Social Democrats who were used, but a completely different destructive force: the liberals and the deputies of the State Duma dancing to their tune, which, instead of a legislative body, was turned by foreign puppeteers into a real “fifth column” in the heart of the country.

The February riots of 1917 were a pitiful babble compared even with the December 1905 uprising in Moscow. Nicholas II had at his disposal an army of 7 million, a battalion of which would be enough to crush the rebels in two hours. Instead, driven by traitors from among the deputies and generals to the Pskov station, on March 2 (15), 1917, he signed an abdication in favor of his brother Mikhail and retroactively approved the composition of the “Provisional Government”. And the frightened Mikhail, the next day, cowardly fearing for his life, in the presence of a handful of deputies in the apartment of Prince Putyatin, refused to accept supreme power, leaving the decision on the form of government to a hypothetical “Constituent Assembly”.

However, the liberals were deceived in their expectations. Not yet having received real power, the Provisional Government practically lost it. Without waiting for the abdication of the tsar, right under the noses of the deputies in the Tauride Palace, like the devil from a snuffbox, a self-styled “Executive Committee” of the not even created “Soviet of Workers’ Deputies” appeared, which destroyed the Russian army with its Order No 1, distributed on the very first day in the amount of 9 million copies. According to the Order, in all political speeches, military units were now subordinate not to officers, but to their elected committees and the Soviet. All weapons were also transferred to the disposal and under the control of the soldiers’ committees.

After that, the Provisional Government, hand in hand with the Executive Committee, began to systematically destroy everything else in the country. With its very first declarations and decrees, the Provisional Government dug its own grave, declaring “a complete and immediate amnesty for all political and religious affairs, including terrorist attempts, military uprisings and agrarian disorders,” that is, giving all its most radical and dangerous political enemies the opportunity to return from imprisonment and emigration to their homeland.

A situation of complete anarchy was created in the country, and anyone could seize power.

On April 1, 1917, there was a long exchange of views between Parvus and Brockdorff-Rantzau. Within two or three months, Parvus predicted, the worst anarchy would come to Russia. German policy towards revolutionary Russia, said Parvus, could follow one of two paths. Germany could begin a broad occupation of Russian territories in order to break the centralized empire, or it could conclude a separate peace with the Provisional Government. For the implementation of the first option, Parvus recommended a strong military offensive on the Russian front, which should be undertaken in three months. Such an offensive, with anarchy in the country, would lead to the subjugation of Southern Russia by the German army and would render the rest of Russia defenseless. In this case, the German Government must be prepared to ruthlessly exploit its victory to the end: the disarmament of the Russian army, the destruction of its fortresses, the destruction of its fleet, the prohibition of the production of military implements and ammunition, and the extended occupation of Russia. If this did not happen, there was no doubt that the Russian Empire would quickly become powerful and dangerous to Germany again. In order to prepare the ground for such a radical solution of the Russian question, it is necessary “to support the extreme revolutionary movement in Russia, with the aim of strengthening anarchy there.” He was therefore inclined to see Germany give full support to the “extreme Left revolutionary movement” in Russia, that is, to Lenin and the Bolshevik Party.[50]

Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg instructed the German ambassador in Bern in April to establish contacts with Lenin and his Bolsheviks in Zurich in order to offer them transit through Germany to St. Petersburg.[51] The Bolsheviks, Parvus argued, would not only destroy the obsolete state structure, but also the entire Russian economic system, which would have to be rebuilt in the interests of German industry. Parvus’s support for Lenin and the Bolshevik Party as part of the German government’s plan to inflict a strategic defeat on Russia, dismantle Russian statehood, and reorganize the Russian economy in order to give German financial and industrial interests unchallenged control over the resources of Russia, turned Lenin from a miserable emigrant in a squalid rented apartment in Switzerland into a ruthless tyrant and bloody autocrat of the greatest country in the world.

In the spring of 1917, Parvus sent a telegram to Berlin via Brockdorff-Rantzau to the leaders of the German Party, advising them to bring back to Russia the most effective Russian revolutionaries from Europe: Lenin and Zinoviev, the two leading Bolsheviks, together with Karl Radek[52] and about forty other people waiting in Zurich. On April 2, 1917, Brockdorff-Rantzau sent a telegram to the German Foreign Office:

… It is very important that we now try to create as much chaos as possible in Russia. To this end, any obvious interference in the course of the Russian revolution must be avoided. In my opinion, we should gradually make every effort to deepen the differences between the moderate (Mensheviks) and extremist parties (the Bolsheviks), for it is in our interests to gain the upper hand between the latter (the Bolsheviks), since in that case a sharp change would be inevitable and would take forms that would inevitably shake the very existence of the Russian Empire. In all likelihood, in about three months, we could expect that the disintegration would reach a stage where we could break the power of the Russians by military action. If we were to launch a premature offensive now, we would only give the various centrifugal forces a pretext for consolidation, and perhaps even lead the army to unite in the struggle against Germany.[53]

Parvus was received at the German Foreign Office by State Secretary Zimmermann; The meeting received the highest secrecy rating. The conversation was not recorded, but after the meeting, the Foreign Office requested another grant of five million marks from the German Treasury for political purposes in Russia. This was the largest amount requested so far, and it was approved on April 3, 1917. A representative of the leading electrical engineering company in Germany, Simmens-Schuckert, Lenin’s agent, the Bolshevik V. V. Vorovsky (aka Orlovsky) accompanied Parvus to Copenhagen. Parvus was the main, if not the only, source of German money going to the Russian Bolshevik Party.[54]

With a letter testifying that he had full authority to negotiate on behalf of the German party leadership, Parvus was sent to meet with Lenin in Stockholm on April 13. The letter of the German government said that Parvus could promise all-round support to the Bolsheviks in the struggle for political power in Russia.[55]

After the October armed coup (which began to be called the October Socialist Revolution only ten years later by the Bolsheviks themselves), Parvus expected Lenin to invite him to manage Russian finances, but this did not happen. Karl Radek wrote: “When the news of the October Revolution came, he (Parvus – Ed.) On behalf of the Central Committee of German Social-Democracy, he came to Stockholm and addressed the Bolshevik representation abroad, proposing on behalf of the German government to conclude peace and to organize a general strike. In a personal conversation he asked that after the conclusion of peace he should be allowed by the Soviet Government to come to Petrograd; he was ready to appear before the court of the Russian workers and accept the sentence from their hands, he was convinced. that they would understand that he was not guided by any selfish interests in his policy, and would allow him to join the ranks of the Russian working class in order to work for the Russian revolution.”[56] But Lenin considered Parvus too compromised and did not give him permission to return to Russia.

Parvus made attempts to participate in the Russian Revolution from afar. According to Trotsky’s testimony: “After October, Parvus made an attempt to get closer to us; he even began to publish a newspaper in Russian somewhere in Scandinavia for this purpose, I think under the title “From Outside”… I remember how merrily we laughed at the clumsy attempt of a “former” man to take the Russian Revolution under his high hand. “We must instruct Pravda to whip him…” – with these words Lenin responded to Parvusov’s attempt, Ilyich fiddled with the newspaper from right to left and from left to right with disgusted movements of his hands. What kind of name is “From the Outside”, it is not even in Russian. We need to whip him in such a way that he forgets to think about meddling.”[57]

In response to accusations of political provocations for the sake of personal enrichment, a ban on entry into Russia and Lenin’s words “revolution cannot be made with dirty hands”, Parvus wrote a book “In the Struggle for Truth”.[58]

But the Bolsheviks had their own “Pravda” and no one began to read the justifications of the German spy and millionaire revolutionary.

Israel Gelfand died in Berlin in December 1924 at the age of 57 from a stroke, outliving his enemy Lenin by less than a year. After his death, there were no papers left and all his huge fortune disappeared. Such is the natural end of this active, intelligent, completely unprincipled and dishonest “former man” who took the pseudonym Parvus.

References

Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of December 5, 1917 “On the Supreme Council of the National Economy”.

Gavrilova Lea Gabriela. The October Revolution of 1917 in International Trade and Industrial Relations. Scientific Platform XXI Century, Issue 1, April 2025, www.episs.ru

Scharlau W.B., Zeman Z.A. (1964). Freibeuter der Revolution. Parvus–Helfand. Eine politische Biographie. Kln.

Scharlau W.B. and Zeman Z.A.B. (1965), The Merchant of the Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) 1867–1924, London/NY: Oxford University Press.

Simon Sebag Montefiore (2004), Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar, New York: Alfred A. Knopf.

Ted Morgan, “Reds”, Jan. 4, 2004, The New York Times.

Galkovsky, Dmitry, Berezovsky – between Azef and Parvus (Berezovsky – between Azef and Parvus) (2005).

Lenin V. I. PSS. 5th edition. 30 volumes. Ed. Political Literature, Moscow, 1973.

Schurer, Heinz (1959), “Alexander Helphand-Parvus — Russian Revolutionary and German Patriot”, Russian Review, 18(4).

  1. Zeman (1958), Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Ministry (Document No. 1), London: Oxford University Press.

Хельферих Циммерману, WK 11c sec., 12, 26 декабря 1915 года.

H. Grebing, So macht man Revolution, Politische Studien.

Fischer F. (1961), Griff nach der Weltmacht, Düsseldorf.

Grebing H. (1959), Osterreich-Ungarn und die ‘Ukrainische Aktion’ 1914—1918.

Radek, K. Parvus. Silhouettes: Political Portraits.

Sobolev G. L. Secret Ally. The Russian Revolution and Germany. St. Petersburg, 2009.

Trotsky L. D. K smerti Parvusa [On the death of Parvus]. Presumably, mid-December 1924 www.iskra-research.org

Parvus. Im Kampf um die Wahrheit. Berlin, 1918.

Shub D. “The Merchant of the Revolution”. Parvus and the German-Bolshevik Conspiracy // New Journal No 87. New York, 1967

  1. Gavrilova Liya Gabriela. The October Revolution of 1917 in international trade and industrial relations. Scientific Platform XXI Century, Issue 1, April 2025, pp. 48-89, www.episs.ru ↑

  2. The U.S. depended on commercial shipping, which at the time sailed the oceans at a maximum speed of 27 knots = 31 mph (49 km/h), to deliver surplus production to world markets. ↑

  3. In 1895, the Russo-Asiatic Bank won a contract for the construction and operation of the Chinese Eastern Railway in Manchuria. This angered a consortium of firms called the U.S.-China Development Co., headed by American railroad magnate E.H. Harriman, who lost the bid. (See G. Gavrilov, U.S.-Russian Commercial Relations 1763-1933, (2025), Chapter 5, The Free Face of Russian-American Relations: U.S. Commercial Plans in Manchuria and the Open Door Policy 1899-1904). ↑

  4. This is equivalent to $6.717 trillion in 2024. ↑

  5. Concessions are government contracts for the construction, supply and/or operation of a specific resource extraction enterprise, construction of a plant or infrastructure project, etc., granted to a private firm. ↑

  6. Simon Sebag Montefiore (2004), Stalin: Court of the Red Tsar, New York: Alfred A. Knopf. ↑

  7. Decree of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee and the Council of People’s Commissars of December 5, 1917 “On the Supreme Council of the National Economy”. ↑

  8. The “September Program” (in German: Septemberprogramm) is the name of the project of the Reich Chancellor of Germany Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg of September 9, 1914, in which military goals were formulated by German Empire at the beginning of the First World War. It says the following verbatim about Russia: “Questions… about the goals to be achieved in relation to Russia will be considered later.” It is not entirely clear why the author titled this chapter this way (editor’s note). ↑

  9. Ibidem. ↑

  10. Cm. Note. 2. ↑

  11. W.Scharlau, Z.Zeman. Merchant of Revolution: Alexander Helphand. — Oxford University Press, 1965. ↑

  12. Scharlau W.B., Zeman Z.A. Freibeuter der Revolution. Parvus–Helfand. Eine politische Biographie. Kln. 1964. ↑

  13. Winston Churchill alluded to Germany’s hand in “Lenin’s injection into Russia” in 1918, saying, “Lenin was sent to Russia by the Germans in the same way that you might send a vial containing a culture of typhus or cholera to be poured into the plumbing of a large city, and it worked with astonishing accuracy.” ↑

  14. Op. Cit. ↑

  15. Until 1945, the government (Reich Chancellery) of Germany was located in Berlin on Wilhelmstrasse. ↑

  16. Shtetl (Yiddish שטעטל, English Shtetl or Shtetel) are small towns that existed before World War II in Eastern Europe with a predominantly Ashkenazi Jewish population. This term is used in the context of the former Eastern European Jewish communities as limited islands among the surrounding non-Jewish population (ed.). ↑

  17. Parvus. In the fight for the truth. Berlin, 1918, p. 7. ↑

  18. Ibid. ↑

  19. Ibid. ↑

  20. Ted Morgan, “The Reds,” January 4, 2004, The New York Times. ↑

  21. Sobolev G. L. Secret Ally. The Russian Revolution and Germany. St. Petersburg, 2009. P. 116. ↑

  22. Galkovsky, Dmitry, Berezovsky – between Azef and Parvus (2005). ↑

  23. Shub D. “The Merchant of the Revolution”. Parvus and the German-Bolshevik Conspiracy // New Journal No 87. New York, 1967, p. 302. ↑

  24. Galkovsky, Dmitry, Berezovsky – between Azef and Parvus (2005). ↑

  25. Ibidem. ↑

  26. Ibidem. ↑

  27. Ibidem. ↑

  28. Zeman (1958), Documents from the Archives of the German Foreign Office (Document No 1), London: Oxford University Press. ↑

  29. Until 1945, it was recognized as the center of the German government, first of the Kingdom of Prussia and then of the united German Reich. ↑

  30. W. В. Scharlau, Z. A. Zeman. Buccaneers of the Revolution: Parvus Helphand. Eine politische Biographie. — Cologne, 1964, pp. 361-374. ↑

  31. Zeman and Scharlau, the merchant of the revolution. ↑

  32. This document is in the archives of the German Foreign Office: Auswartiges Amt, Weltkrieg, 11 sec. Band 5, A 8629. The memorandum is not dated, but registered in the journal of the Ministry with the date of March 9, 1915. Parvus–Helfand. Eine politische Biographie. Kln. 1964. S. 361–374. ↑

  33. Shub D. “The Merchant of the Revolution”. Parvus and the German-Bolshevik Conspiracy // New Journal No 87. New York, 1967, pp. 305-306. ↑

  34. The title of the chapter does not correspond to its content (editor’s note). ↑

  35. Zeman and Scharlau, the merchant of the revolution. ↑

  36. See my 11-page “Scheme of Foreign Participation in Soviet Industrial Trusts” at the end of Chapter 1, ” U.S.-Russian Commercial Relations 1763-1933: The Origins of Russophobia” (2025). ↑

  37. Ibidem. ↑

  38. Ibidem. ↑

  39. Ibidem. ↑

  40. Ibidem. ↑

  41. H. Grebing, How to Make Revolution, Political Studies, стр. 234. ↑

  42. F. Fischer (1961), Griff nach der Weltmacht, Düsseldorf, p. 238. ↑

  43. Shub D. “The Merchant of the Revolution”. Parvus and the German-Bolshevik Conspiracy // New Journal No 87. New York, 1967, p. 311. ↑

  44. Zeman and Scharlau, the merchant of the revolution. ↑

  45. Ibidem. ↑

  46. “Zeman and Scharlau, Merchant of the Revolution“; Helferich Zimmermann, WK 11c sec., 12, 26 December 1915. ↑

  47. Ibidem. ↑

  48. H. Grebing (1959), Austria-Hungary and the ‘Ukrainian Action’ 1914-1918, pp. 270-283. ↑

  49. PSS V. I. Lenina, 5th edition. 30 volumes. Ed. Political Literature, Moscow, 1973. P. 328. Written in German earlier than January 9 (22), 1917 First published on January 22, 1925 in the newspaper “Pravda” No18. Translated from German. ↑

  50. Ibidem. ↑

  51. Ibidem. ↑

  52. The author’s statement is rather doubtful. Radek was a subject of Austria-Hungary and upon arrival in Russia was subject to immediate arrest and internment. In addition, it is incredible that Parvus could have addressed the leaders of the German Social-Democracy with such a telegram at all. The leader of the German Social Democracy, Philipp Scheidemann, who supported the policy of the German government during the war, wrote in the first volume of his memoirs published in 1928: “I later learned that the trip of Lenin and his friends through Germany to Russia was organized by Dr. Gelfand-Parvus, who informed only a few people about it. ↑

  53. Zeman and Scharlau, the merchant of the revolution. ↑

  54. Ibidem. ↑

  55. Ibidem. ↑

  56. Radek, K. Parvus. Silhouettes: Political Portraits, p. 252. ↑

  57. Leon Trotsky. To the death of Parvus. Presumably, mid-December 1924 www.iskra-research.org ↑

  58. Parvus. In the fight for the truth. Berlin, 1918. ↑