The Rape Of Russia 7: Moving Towards The New World Order

Rothschild biographers record that men of influence and statesmen in almost every country of the world were in their pay, [1] and that most of the royalty of Europe was under their influence. [2] The Rothschilds as a collective dynasty in Germany, Austria, Britain, France and Italy, had amassed such wealth by the mid nineteenth century that nothing or no one was immune to the purchasing power of their coin. Though they kept tight control of their dynastic affairs through intermarriage within the family, they offered a facility for other men to pursue great political ambition and profit. Chosen men. They influenced appointments to high office, had almost daily communication with the great decision makers, [3] and through them, controlled politics from behind the curtain. The Rothschilds valued their anonymity and since they generally operated their businesses behind the scenes, their affairs have been heavily veiled in secrecy through the years. [4] Their traditional system of employing semi-autonomous agents across the world was unsurpassed, [5] but it was their power over banks, investment and finance which was truly was colossal. Their modus operandi was to rescue ailing banks or failing industrial conglomerates with large injections of cash, and thereafter use them as fronts for their own ends. Every banker identified in this chapter who undermined Czarist rule and financed and aided the Bolsheviks, can be closely linked to the Rothschilds: The Warburg and Disconto-Gesselschaft banks in Germany; Olof Aschberg and Nya Banken in Sweden, Kuhn, Loeb & Co., J.P. Morgan bank and Guaranty Trust on Wall Street, Morgan Grenfell in London. They were all complicit.

When the Warburg bank in Hamburg was about to collapse in 1857, the Rothschilds injected vast amounts of money into it. [6] From that point in time M.M. Warburg Bank and its partners operated effectively as Rothschild fronts. Their enormous financial clout enabled the bank to grow from a tiny concern with a single office and a handful of staff into one of the largest and most important banks in Germany. The Warburg brothers, who have featured heavily in every aspect of war loans and financing, acted as covert agents of Rothschild. Max, who was their leading banker in Germany, and reputedly head of the German espionage system during the war, [7] also played a major role in financing both Lenin and Trotsky and enabling the ‘sealed train’ journey across Germany. Fritz Warburg was in Stockholm during the war as coordinator of major financial transactions between Germany and the Bolsheviks, and according to British intelligence reports he also had close contact with the notorious Parvus. [8]

Paul Warburg in New York was the leading agent who fronted the drive to establish the Federal Reserve System for the Secret Elite. Paul was senior partner with Jacob Schiff in Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Bank which was effectively a Rothschild front. The Schiff and Rothschild forebears had actually lived in houses in the same building they shared in the Jewish ghetto in Frankfurt am Main, and Jacob Schiff was yet another Rothschild agent. The American authorities clearly believed that he and his powerful banking associates were  deeply implicated in the Russian revolution.

  

A file in the U.S. State Department, ‘Bolshevism and Judaism’, dated November 13, 1918, asserted that there could be no doubt that the ‘Jewish Firm’ Kuhn, Loeb & Company and its partners ‘started and engineered’ the revolution in Russia. The report added that Max Warburg had also financed Trotsky, and that Olof Aschberg and Nya Banken were involved. [9] These were key players whose detailed involvement we have already covered in previous blogs. [10]

Jacob Schiff, who had been promoting anti-Czarist activities in Russia since the Russo-Japanese War more than a decade earlier, paid for a large proportion of the pro-Bolshevik propaganda and bribes for the workers and soldiers in the Petrograd garrison in the run up to both the February and October, 1917, revolutions. Professor Antony Sutton believed that it was a mistake to call the Bolshevik Revolution a Jewish plot because gentiles like J.P. Morgan and William Boyce Thompson were also involved, [11] but Thompson was a loyal Morgan man and J.P. Morgan and the entire Morgan Empire were very firmly connected to Rothschild influence. [12]

Writing in 1974, Professor Sutton was clearly unaware that virtually the entire international banking cabal was linked through a complex chain that led back to the Rothschilds in London and Paris. For example, Olof Aschberg and his Nya Banken in Stockholm were directly linked to the Guaranty Trust in the United States. Guaranty Trust was closely associated with the J.P. Morgan circle, and that, in turn, was covertly under the influence of the Rothschild Empire. Aschberg and Nya Banken fed money to the Bolsheviks from these banks, and from the Warburg Bank in Germany which was likewise under Rothschild control. Mainstream historians relate that ‘Germany’ financed and facilitated Lenin’s takeover in 1917, but it was not the German government, it was German banking institutions which were ultimately controlled by the Rothschild dynasty.

Jacob Schiff, the Warburgs, the Rothschilds and other predominantly Jewish international bankers, undoubtedly harboured considerable hatred for the Czarist regime in Russia because of the persecution of their co-religionists, and justifiably so, but their reasons for bringing about the Bolshevik Revolution ran much deeper than religious persuasion. This was not about love for the Bolsheviks, nor concern for the victims of Czarism or the ordinary downtrodden Russian Jews. This was about business and future plans for control of the world. However it would be simplistic to label the revolution entirely as a Jewish plot. As we have clearly shown, the Secret Elite in the person of its most influential leader, Lord Alfred Milner, was complicit in supporting the Bolshevik uprising.

Before the new world order could be created, destruction of the old order was essential. They aimed to topple the Czarist Empire and bleed it dry. At the same time their friends and co-conspirators in Britain concentrated on demolishing the old order in Europe; the Ottoman Empire, the Austro-Hungarian Empire and, above all, the German Empire. Theirs was not a Christian, Church of England or Jewish plot; their religion was control and what had begun in Oxford as a mightily influential group of imperialists, determined to control a world built on their values, found it necessary to expand their power base.

The Secret Elites including the New York money power promoted revolution and communism for their own ends just as they promoted political Zionism for their own ends. They were but building blocks towards their globalist dream. In the same month as the Bolshevik revolution in Russia, the Balfour Declaration was signed in London. Co-incidence? A chance happening that no-one had foreseen? If you wonder why this fact has not been widely considered in history, ask yourself: who owns history? Answer: the Secret Elite; the men of immense power and wealth who have sponsored and published the versions of history of which they approve.

Louis Marshall, a leading American Zionist and legal representative of Kuhn, Loeb bank wrote in 1917 that ‘The Balfour Declaration, with its acceptance by the Powers, is an act of the highest diplomacy. It means both more and less than appears on the surface. Zionism is ‘but an incident of a far-reaching plan: it is merely a convenient peg on which to hang a powerful weapon.’  [13]

Professor Carroll Quigley was likewise very clear about this: ‘The powers of financial capitalism had a far-reaching plan, nothing less than to create a world system of financial control in private hands able to dominate the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. [14]

Bolshevism and Zionism were funded and supported by the Secret Elite as they embarked on their ‘far reaching plan’, their nightmare vision of a New World Order. And times were changing as 1917 became 1918. The downfall of Imperial European Empires was no mistake. It was the end product of the wasteful and debilitating world war which, most did not realise, had just months, not years to run. For sure, it had to be prolonged until Germany was crushed, exhausted, removed from the pinnacle of world trade and influence. That had always been the bottom line for the British elite. That was why they engineered the First World War. [15]

What has been uncovered is the early development of another alliance on a completely different sphere to international diplomacy as was understood by most politicians and the general public. The switch in accumulations of wealth predicated on the world war drained the prosperity of Europe and reallocated a great deal of international financial power in Wall Street. London was by no means finished, but as providers of investment capital, the role became more evenly shared between the trans-Atlantic money-powers than ever before. The determination of the Secret Elite to create a one-world English-based order took on a transatlantic hue, an Anglo-American Establishment was finding form. Banks which may be labelled American or British or German or Belgian had common roots though they competed in the world markets. But how was that going to express itself?

How, by the end of the war, could they refocus their control of politics, the press, and the universities, the key drivers of Professor Carroll Quigley’s original thesis? To find evidence of the change in emphasis and ownership we will ultimately have to scrutinise their activities, not just in Russia, but within the background agreements which attended the Treaty of Versailles. But we are running ahead of the narrative.

1. E.C. Knuth, The Empire of the City, p. 70.
2. Griffin, Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 233.
3. Gerry Docherty and Jim Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War, pp. 23-25.
4. Derek Wilson, Rothschild: The Wealth and Power of a Dynasty, pp. 98–9.
5. Knuth, Empire of the City, p. 68.
6. Niall Ferguson, House of Rothschild, p. 65.
7. Ron Chernow, The Warburgs, p. 12.
8. See Blog; Rape Of Russia 2: Strange Bedfellows for Socialist Revolutionaries, posted on 17/10/2012.
9. A.N. Field, All These Things, vol.1. http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/field_an/things_01.html
10. Spence, Hidden Agendas.
11. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 189.
12. Ibid.
13. Louis Marshall in a letter to Max Senior, dated New York, September 26, 1917. Quoted in B. Jensen, The Palestine Plot, https://www.scribd.com/document/16563284/Jensen-The-Palestine-Plot-Quote-History-of-Zionism-1987
14. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p. 324.
15. See:  Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, The Secret Origins of the First World War.

The Rape Of Russia 6: Bankers Flourish Through Russian Terror

The ‘Red Terror’ went into overdrive in August 1918 when Lenin was shot and seriously wounded. The attack occurred on the same day that Chairman of the Petrograd Cheka, M.S. Uritskii, was assassinated and accounts of who was directly responsible have been questioned and debated ever since. Vladimir Lenin had just finished a major speech to the workers at the Mikhelson factory in Moscow when three shots were fired at him through the crowd. Soviet historians and show trial records blamed Fania Kaplan, a Ukranian-Jewish revolutionary, but no-one actually saw her fire the gun. [1] Nor was she clearly associated with the socialist revolutionaries. The firearm was never found, but Fania was executed as an attempted assassin and counter-revolutionary. Like many an alleged assassin before and after the attempt on Lenin’s life, Fania was presumed guilty and removed permanently before evidence could be presented in court.

Other claimants implicated Robert Bruce-Lockhart, Milner’s personal agent at the heart of the revolution, and the British Consul General in Moscow, who was arrested in his flat and imprisoned in the Kremlin. Allegations about his involvement in a plot to kill Lenin were strengthened by his son, who later revealed in a 1967 letter to the foreign office in London that his father’s work with counter-revolutionaries at that time was far more extensive than was ever admitted. [2] What we do know is that the Bolsheviks agreed to exchange Lockhart and other Moscow staff for his London counterpart Maxim Litvinov [3] in October 1918. [4] Typically, the foreign office files on Lockhart remain largely secret one hundred years after these significant events. Sadly we still cannot be trusted with the truth.

But the recriminations and blood-letting reached horrendous levels. Anyone deemed to be a counter-revolutionary was at risk of summary execution. The numbers who were slaughtered have been estimated in the millions, but no one counted. The treatment of Russian citizens accused of any ‘crime’ by the Cheka was truly medieval. Hundreds of thousands of innocents suffered barbaric forms of torture, all of which was carried out with the full knowledge and support of Lenin and Trotsky.

The horrors of the infamous forced labor camps across Russia, as later exposed to an unsuspecting world by Alexander Solzhenitsyn in his masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, stemmed from his personal experience in the 1920s. [5] Millions died in mass famine or were shot in repeated massacres. All the while, the international bankers who had funded and enabled this savagery enjoyed their spoils.

Around the same time the Wilson administration sent 700,000 tons of food to the Soviet Union. It was not Christian charity. The U.S. Food Administration, which handled this giant operation, made handsome profits for the commercial enterprises that participated. It was, of course, headed by Herbert Hoover and directed by Lewis Lichtenstein Strauss, married to Alice Hanauer, daughter of one of the partners of Kuhn, Loeb & Company. Like the British ruling class, inter-family relationships inside banking elites were labyrinthine. International profiteers grew fat on Bolshevism. Standard Oil and General Electric supplied $37,000,000 worth of machinery to the new regime. Possibly three million slave labourers perished in the icy mines of Siberia digging ore for the British-registered Lena Goldfields, Ltd. Averell Harriman, the American railroad magnate, who became Ambassador to Russia in 1943, acquired a twenty year monopoly over all Soviet manganese production. [6]

The totalitarian power-brokers of Bolshevism acted in partnership with, and were beholden to, the international bankers. They robbed Russia of its gold and diamonds in return for bountiful supplies of weapons with which they controlled and slaughtered the masses. Ironically, weapons that had deliberately been denied the Czar in 1917 and could have ended the war that year, were traded freely after he abdicated. International legislation which had been constructed to prevent the transfer and sale of hundreds of tons of looted Russian gold bullion and coins was easily overcome. Much of it was sent to Stockholm where it was smelted down and reconstituted into bars set with the Swedish stamp. It became little more than a post-war reversion to the blockade avoidance schemes which prolonged the First World War. Stockholm enjoyed a gold-laundering boom on an unprecedented scale. ‘The Bolsheviks were in business.’ [7]

Desperate for weapons, they sold gold and diamonds on the international markets at knock-down prices to fund armaments to put down civil strife against their tyranny. The Russian Civil War is beyond the scope of this book, but suffice to say that two years after seizing power, the heavily-armed Bolsheviks emerged victorious. The cost was counted in millions of dead and wounded, in broken families and a subjugated people.

By 1920 they reigned supreme over a devastated and completely bankrupt country. The pre-war population of Petrograd had been reduced by four fifths, with the emaciated twenty per cent that remained barely surviving. Moscow suffered in like fashion. Trams and trolleys stood still; epidemic disease was rampant and the suffering people found little solace in the hospitals because the doctors and nurses were dying too. The policies of War Communism reduced the Russian people to nearly prehistoric conditions of scavenging to avoid widespread starvation. [8] Estimates of 60,000,000 Russians dying through starvation or execution in this grotesque experiment in social control were almost certainly conservative.

Although they did not interfere with the National City Bank of New York’s branch in Petrograd, the Bolsheviks opened the first International Bank of Foreign Commerce, the Ruskombank. It was not owned and run by the state as directed by Communist theory, but underpinned by a syndicate of private financiers. These included former czarist bankers and representatives of German, Swedish, British and American banks. Most of the foreign capital came from England, including the British government itself. The Director of the Foreign Division of the new Bolshevik bank was Max May, Vice President of Morgan’s Guaranty Trust. [9]  Olof Aschberg, the Swedish agent who had facilitated Trotsky’s return, and much else, was placed in charge. [10] Assured of financial and political backing from abroad, the Bolsheviks and their capitalist allies proceeded to carve up Russia.

On joining Ruskombank, Wall Street banker Max May stated that the United States would be greatly interested in exporting its products to Russia, taking into consideration the vast requirements of the country in all aspects of economic life. The bank was, according to May, ‘very important and would largely finance all lines of Russian industries’. The Bolsheviks issued a steady stream of non-competitive contracts to British and American businesses owned by the Secret Elite. Loans were paid in gold, including the Czarist government’s sizeable reserve which was shipped primarily to America and Britain. In 1920 alone, one gold shipment went to the U.S. through Stockholm valued at 39,000,000 Swedish kroner. Three shipments went directly to New York comprising 540 boxes of gold valued at 97,200,000 gold roubles. These were at 1920 values. The shipments were coordinated by Kuhn, Loeb & Company and deposited by Morgan’s Guaranty Trust. [11]

One of the greatest myths of contemporary history is that the Bolshevik Revolution was a popular uprising of the downtrodden masses against the hated Czars. The sheer weight of history has proven that a lie. Certainly, the planning, the leadership, and especially the finance came entirely from outside Russia, mostly from bankers in Germany, Britain, and the United States. Evidence of the role played by international bankers in both the February and October revolutions in Russia has been laid before you, and although it would appear that the Rothschilds placed no great part in them, G Edward Griffin believed that ‘The Rothschild formula played a major role in shaping these events.’ [12] Do not dismiss Griffin out of hand.

1. Semion Lyandres; The 1918 Attempt on the Life of Lenin, Slavonic Review, vol. 48. no.3 pp. 432-448.
2. http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/shared/bsp/hi/pdfs/18_03_11document.pdf
3. National Archives FO 370/ 2320, file 131.
4. The Times 18 October 1918, p.6
5. Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s masterwork, The Gulag Archipelago, was written between 1958-68 and was published in the West in 1973. Originally in three parts his expose of the Soviet Forced Labour system was drawn from eye witness accounts, primary documents and his own experience.
6. G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 293.
7. Sean McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, p. 136.
8. Ibid., pp. 138-139.
9. Anthony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution,  p. 63.
10. Ibid. p. 57.
11. U.S. State Dept., Decimal File, 861.51/815, 836, 837, October, 1920. Also Sutton, Revolution, pp. 159-60, 165.
12. G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 263.

The Rape Of Russia 5: Alternative Diplomacy Cements Wall Street Take-Over

Having successfully established Lenin and Trotsky, Wall Street’s chosen men, to lead the Bolshevik Revolution, William Thompson returned to the United States before Christmas 1917, leaving behind as head of the Red Cross mission, his second-in-command, Raymond Robins. Robins became the direct intermediary between the Bolsheviks and the American government, and was the only man whom Lenin was always willing to see. [1] He was an agent of the Secret Elite, a protégé of Edward Mandell House, and could list President Wilson as an enthusiastic friend. Woodrow Wilson had intervened to provide Trotsky with a passport to return to Russia to ‘carry forward’ the revolution and withheld American support for the crumbling provisional government, led by Alexander Kerensky. Wilson had expressed his personal enthusiasm for the Bolshevik Revolution and on 28 November 1917, ordered no interference from America. By that he meant no other interference than that which had Secret Elite approval. Woodrow Wilson’s administration sent 700,000 tons of food to Russia which not only saved the nascent Bolshevik regime from certain collapse, ‘but gave Lenin the power to consolidate his control’. [2]

The United States could have exerted its influence to help bring about a free Russia, but its decisions were controlled by the international bankers who would have accepted a centralised Czarist Russia or a centralised Marxist Russia, but not a decentralised free Russia. A corrupt system under the Czars was replaced by a corrupt system under the Bolsheviks. [3] Plus ca change. The political hue of government, any government, was irrelevant to the bankers, provided they controlled the politicians. And that control was considerably more straightforward when dictated through a centralised government in a highly organised state.

The British wing of the Anglo-American elites gave similar support. Lloyd George’s government nurtured unofficial relations with the Bolshevik regime, and concurrently close relations with the American Red Cross Mission, through Bruce Lockhart, a young Russian-speaking Scottish diplomat. Lockhart was chosen for the post, not by the Foreign Secretary or the Foreign Office, but personally by Secret Elite supremo, Alfred Milner. Bruce Lockhart later recounted that before his departure for Russia, the great man (Milner) talked to him almost every day and dined with him at Brooks’s gentlemen’s club in Westminster. Utterly devoted to Lord Milner, Lockhart noted that he (Milner) ‘believed in the highly organised state.’ [4] Milner’s young agent quickly became closely linked with Raymond Robins and the Wall Street/Red Cross mission in Petrograd.

Lockhart realised that Raymond Robins was already established as the intermediary between the Bolsheviks and the American Government. Although Robins knew no Russian and very little about Russia, he had set himself the task of persuading President Wilson to formally recognise the Soviet regime. His assistant, Michael Gumberg, supplied him with the necessary background information to justify this action. [5] Michael Gruzenberg, from Yanovich in Belarus, a man of many aliases, was the chief Bolshevik agent in Scandinavia. He worked closely with Parvus and Furstenberg, and was a ‘confidential adviser to the Chase National Bank in New York.’ This dual role was known to and accepted by both the Soviet and his American employers’. [6] When the Bolsheviks began to loot Russia in earnest, Gumberg took diamonds stitched into his brief-case for sale in the United States. [7] He was an international agent who ‘worked for Wall Street and the Bolsheviks’. [8] This joint role may appear a confusing impossibility today, but in 1917 that was exactly what he represented. Wall Street and Bolshevism.

Michael Gumberg was close to both highly privileged Secret Elite agents, Lockhart and Robins. Bruce Lockhart boasted that: ‘We had no difficulty in seeing the various Commissars. We were even allowed to be present at certain meetings of the Central Executive Committee.’ [9] Lockhart met Trotsky on a daily basis, was trusted with his private telephone number and could speak to him personally at any time. [10] Professor Antony Sutton stated that Alfred Milner had primed Lockhart for the Bolshevik takeover, which begged the question as to how Milner knew in advance that there was going to be such an upheaval, given that he had denied any knowledge when he returned to London from his earlier mission in St. Petersburg. [11] Milner briefed the young Scot on a person-to-person basis and sent him on his way with instructions to work ‘informally’ with the Soviets. [12]

Two agents, Robins from America and Lockhart from Britain, had been sent into Russia by the Secret Elite and operated close to Lenin and Trotsky, both of whom had also been sent to Russia by the Secret Elite, and were consequently admitted into the heart of the Bolshevik government. The Bolsheviks knew exactly who they were and whom they represented, and vice versa. Lockhart recounted a party he gave for embassy staff and other prominent officials in St Petersburg: ‘My chief guest was Robins. He arrived late having just come from Lenin. …During luncheon Robins spoke little, but afterwards … he made a moving appeal for Allied support of the Bolsheviks’. [13]

By this means, the official diplomatic representatives of the British and American governments were neutralised and effectively replaced by unofficial agents of the bankers sent to support the Bolsheviks. The reports from these unofficial ambassadors were in direct contrast to pleas for help addressed to the West from inside Russia. Protests about Lenin and Trotsky who had imposed the iron grip of a police state in Russia were ignored. [14] Many Russians had experienced hunger and hardship under Czarist rule, but many millions more would die after the revolution from hunger, by the bullet, or from exposure in the frozen hell of the Siberian arctic wastes. A starving, withering wasteland loomed on the horizon as Lenin and Trotsky allowed the gold and treasures of Russia to fill the vaults of the western bankers who had financed, promoted and protected them.

Whatever money flowed into Russia by way of payments from Wall Street, was used to crush dissent and finance the ‘Red Terror’. The Russian writer Maxim Gorky, nominated five times for the Nobel Prize in Literature, likened it to an experiment conducted on the tormented, half-starved Russian people. ‘They are cold-bloodedly sacrificing Russia in the name of their dream of worldwide and European revolution. And just as long as I can, I shall impress this upon the Russian proletarian: ‘Thou art being led to destruction! Thou art being used as material for an inhuman experiment!’ [15] How right Gorky was. The corrupt, autocratic system of the Czars had been replaced by a totalitarianism that was even more corrupt and evil. Having seized control from the Provisional Government, the Bolsheviks won less than a quarter of the votes in the first elections for the Constituent Assembly. Lacking popular support, they knew that the only means by which they could retain power was through a reign of terror. They made no attempt to justify their savagery, claiming that ‘the revolutionary class should attain its end by all methods at its disposal if necessary, by an armed rising: if required, by terrorism.’  [16]

And their dictatorship surpassed the worst nightmares of Czarism. Grigory Zinoviev, chillingly expressed what was to be done: ‘To overcome our enemies… we must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated’. [17] Ten million Russians were to be ‘annihilated’ to achieve that purpose. The Bolsheviks created the much feared police force, the Cheka, to conduct an utterly ruthless campaign of terror against all political dissent.

With Trotsky at the head of the Red Army, and his old friend Moisei Uritskii in charge of the Cheka, the voice of reason was choked into compliance. The Cheka crushed peasant revolts in various parts of the country after the Red Army emptied their grain stores without payment. Strikes by the proletariat were mercilessly suppressed. [18] Ironically, hundreds of striking workers at the Putilov factory from where the revolution originated, were executed without trial. In a nutshell, the Bolsheviks were utterly obsessed with ‘violence, dictatorship and coercion.’ [19] But the blood that was spilled in Russia meant nothing to the money-power in Wall Street. Profits flourished.

1. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, pp. 222-223.
2. George F. Kennan, Russia and the West under Lenin and Stalin, p. 180.
3. Sutton, Wall Street, p. 19.
4. Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 206.
5. Ibid., pp. 222-223.
6. Sutton, Wall Street p. 36.
7. Ibid., p. 115.
8. Ibid., p. 171.
9. Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 256.
10. Ibid., pp. 228-229.
11. See Blog: Russia in Revolution 5, Sealing the Czar’s Fate, posted on 10 October 2017.
12. Sutton, Wall Street, p. 94.
13. Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 224.
14. Sutton, Wall Street, p. 103.
15. Maxim Gorky, The New Life, April 1918.
16. Trotsky, Terrorism and Communism. https://www.marxists.org/archive/trotsky/1920/terrcomm/ch04.htm
17. George Leggett. The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police, p. 114.
18. Robert Conquest, Reflections on a Ravaged Century, p. 101.
19. Dimitri Volkogonov, Trotsky, p. 394.

The Rape Of Russia 4: The Rise of Dictatorship

The ‘Provisional Government’ in Petrograd lurched from one crisis to another. With continuing heavy military defeats and ever-rising death toll, Russian troops and civilians called for an end to the madness.  An All-Russian Peasant Congress, dominated by the socialist revolutionaries, was held in May in support of the provisional Government. A conference of Petrograd factory workers on the other hand, became the first representative body to support the Bolsheviks. It was a time of new beginnings and old grudges. The first All-Russian Congress of Soviets was held in June, with 822 vote-carrying delegates. 285 were Socialist Revolutionary Party, 248 Mensheviks and 105 Bolsheviks. The remaining 184 delegates belonged to various minority groups or had no party allegiance. Throughout the three week conference, Trotsky solidly supported the Bolsheviks. Congress, however, passed a vote of confidence in the Government, and rejected a Bolshevik resolution demanding ‘the transfer of all state power into the hands of the All-Russian Soviet of Workers, Soldiers and Peasants Deputies’. [1] Hamstrung and without any decisive power, the Provisional Government was open to attack from right and left. Lenin sensed a definitive opportunity.

Four days of menacing street demonstrations that began on 3 July in Petrograd were widely believed to have been instigated by Lenin in an attempt to seize power. Troubles mounted.  Prince Lvov resigned as premier and the Menshevik, Alexander Kerensky, took charge, promising the allies that Russia would remain committed to the war. Kerensky was scathing of Bolshevism and vice versa. He dubbed it ‘the socialism of poverty and hunger’, insisting that there could be no socialism without democracy. [2]

Trotsky, who had once sided with Kerensky, disagreed. He and around 4,000 fellow members of the Mezhrayonka, a faction holding an intermediate position between the ‘soft’ Mensheviks and the ‘hard’ Bolsheviks, sided with Lenin. Trotsky then chose to support the man he had previously attacked as a ‘despot’; a man whose political philosophy, he had claimed, ‘was based on lies and falsification’. It was Trotsky himself who foresaw that Lenin’s success would ‘lead to a dictatorship over the proletariat’ rather than ‘a victory of the proletariat’. And so it came to pass that Trotsky enabled his own prophecy. He was elected onto the Bolshevik central committee, polling a mere three votes less than Lenin himself. Strengthened by their political alliance, Lenin urged his Bolsheviks ‘to prepare for armed uprising’. Russia, he declared, was in the hands of a ‘dictatorship’. [3] The irony of his words remains awesome.

In August 1917, an attack on the Austrian army in Galicia failed to achieve any break through and the Provisional Government’s eight-month period provided no major reforms. Indeed it only served to ensure the systematic disintegration of the Russian army. [4] General Kornilov, commander-in-chief of the provisional government’s own forces, ordered his troops to march against it, but the military coup failed thanks to the Bolshevik influence on the troops. Kerensky’s standing was undermined while Lenin, Trotsky and the Bolshevik stock rose in popularity, winning majorities in the Petrograd and Moscow Soviets. By early October preparations were approved for an armed insurrection. Local garrisons ‘were bribed to remain neutral’ and the Petrograd Soviet created a military-revolutionary committee under Trotsky. Bolshevik military preparations gathered pace. What had been a fringe party in May was on the point of seizing power by October. [5]

In the early hours of 25 October 1917, (7 November, in the Gregorian calendar), armed Bolshevik forces occupied key-points in Petrograd, including the main telephone exchange, post office, train stations and power stations. At 2 am they calmly walked into the Winter Palace, the seat of government, proclaimed victory and declared a ‘People’s Republic’. Bolshevik propaganda films produced later depicted their men fighting their way bravely through the city streets and ‘storming’ the Winter Palace. It was all lies. Very few shots were fired all night. Prime Minister Kerensky fled, and within two days all provisional government ministers had been arrested. [6]

On 26 October 1917, Lenin signed a ‘Decree of Peace’ which proposed the immediate withdrawal of Russia from the World War. Agreement with Germany and the Central Powers on a ceasefire on the Eastern Front was reached on 21 November, and an armistice was signed between them on 4 December. On several occasions sporadic fighting flared up, but Russia was set to sign a peace treaty at Brest-Litovsk on 3 March 1918. Peace at home, however, was an illusion. The American correspondent Eugene Lyons [7] later summarised the consequences of the Bolshevik seizure of power: ‘Within a few months, most of the czarist practices the Leninists had condemned were revived, usually in more ominous forms: political prisoners, convictions without trial and without the formality of charges, savage persecutions of dissenting views, death penalties for more varieties of crimes than in any other modern nation, the suppression of all other parties’. [8]

Lenin dissolved the elected parliament and legislated through Sovnarkom, the Council of People’s Commissars. Theoretically it was an executive branch answerable to the Soviet, but most of the members were appointed by the Bolsheviks. [9] There were no mass demonstrations on the streets when the Constituent Assembly of elected representatives was thrown out, because ‘it was only later that the people realised that the Bolshevik ship of state was on a straight course towards totalitarian dictatorship.’ [10] When reality dawned, many were prepared to resist that dictatorship, and Russia faced the bloodiest civil war in history.

The looting of the country’s wealth by the Bolsheviks began in earnest. The first steps had been taken several months earlier when the Wall Street bankers used an American ‘Red Cross Mission’ as their ‘operational vehicle’. [11] Unwilling to use diplomatic channels, agents of the ‘money power’ and big business had been sent to Russia disguised as Red Cross officials on what purported to be a generous act of American humanitarianism to help the suffering Russian masses. The ‘Red Cross’ party mainly comprised financiers, lawyers and accountants from New York banks and investment houses. Only a few doctors were involved. The international banks had bribed the American Red Cross through large financial donations and literally bought the franchise to operate in its name. [12]

In 1917 the American Red Cross depended heavily for support from Wall Street, specifically the J.P. Morgan organisation. Morgan and his associated financial and business elites were determined to control Russia’s vast assets after the Bolsheviks seized power. Head of the Red Cross mission to Russia, William Boyce Thompson, may have lacked the know-how to bandage a wound, but he was a director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York and agent for J.P. Morgan’s British securities operation. [13] The genuine medical professionals originally attached to the mission were sent home within a few weeks. Thompson, however, retained fifteen businessmen and bankers from the New York financial elite who made up the bulk of the ‘Red Cross’ party. This was no mission of mercy. It might have been more accurately classified as a commercial or financial mission, but it also acted as a subversive political action group. [14]

Thompson, like Herbert Hoover, had made his fortune as a mining engineer before turning to finance and banking. He had visited Russia before the war, understood the value of its vast mineral wealth and fronted the Red Cross Mission to Russia as a vehicle for profiteering. He was interested in the potential Russian market and how this market could be influenced, diverted and captured for post-war exploitation by Wall Street. [15]

William Boyce Thompson, who was in Russia from July until November 1917, contributed $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks. His ‘generosity’ was criticised in America but the Washington Post reported that he made the financial contribution ‘in the belief that it will be money well spent for the future of Russia as well as the Allied cause’. [16] A sympathetic, controlled, press has always been a prerequisite for the Secret Elite cause. Wall Street banker, Thompson, developed a close friendship with Lenin and Trotsky. He used it to gain ‘profitable business concessions from the new government which returned their initial investment many times over’. [17] Members of the ‘Red Cross’ mission cared nothing for humanitarian relief or Bolshevism, socialism or communism. The only ‘ism’ they were interested in was capitalism, and how the Russian market could be influenced and manipulated for post-war exploitation. What does it tell us that Trotsky failed to mention the Red Cross mission or William Boyce Thompson or Jacob Schiff in his memoirs? When the Bolsheviks seized power, the Petrograd branch of the National City Bank of New York (of which Jacob Schiff was a director) was the only foreign bank they exempted from being nationalised. [18] Readers do not have to ask why.

1. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 89.
2. Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin, p. 131.
3. Ibid., p. 141.
4. Harold Whitmore Williams, The Spirit of the Russian Revolution, pp. 14-15.
5. Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 36.
6. Griffin, Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 286.
7. Eugene Lyons began his journalistic career in Russia in the 1920s as an enthusiastic supporter of the new order in Russian society, but in witnessing the outrageous excesses of Stalin’s terror, the American writer came to loathe the regime.
8. Eugene Lyons, Workers Paradise Lost, p. 29.
9. Sean McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, p. 54.
10. Dimitri Volkogonov, Trotsky, p. 95.
11. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 71.
12. Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 274.
13. Ibid., p. 275.
14. Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 80.
15. Ibid., 97.
16. Ibid., p. 83.
17. Ibid.
18. Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 283.
19. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 83.