Concluding Thoughts And A Challenge

So many questions remain unanswered. You will have your own. Do not give up on them. An issue which needs considerable examination is Woodrow Wilson’s “Fourteen Points.” With hindsight it ranks as one of the greatest mirage’s of all time, for it never was anything more than a clever deception, the lure which the Kaiser and his advisors swallowed. They made the devastating mistake of trusting the American government. What were they thinking? The Germans knew about Britain and France’s dependence on America, of the blatant lies which sank the Lusitania, and every other scandal, yet they were apparently willing to put their faith in Woodrow Wilson. Certainly the Americans had kept them fed through the abuses of the Belgian Relief program, and the Rockefeller/Rothschild axis ensured that their oil supply was not interrupted, but once the United States joined the war against Germany, surely the blinkers should have fallen?

But desperate times demanded desperate action. The promise of a just peace was too powerful for the Kaiser’s government to ignore. The German offensive from March to June 1918 is said to have pushed the allied armies on the Western Front closer to disaster than at any time since the first battle of the Marne in 1914 [1] but this last throw of Ludendorff’s dice was frustrated by “the enormous acceleration of the arrival of American troops.” [2] Like exhausted prize fighters who had fought to a standstill, the Allies and Germany stood in their corners feigning a readiness for the next round. But while Britain and France had almost limitless reserves on hand from America, Germany was truly spent. Wilson’s Fourteen Points appeared as the basis for a just and honourable settlement. It was a triumph of deceit over justice.

Truth is that Germany had sought a just peace many times since December 1914. The Allies simply did not want to know in 1915, 1916 and 1917. In fact, they did not want to know in 1918. There is ample evidence that preparations for war on the Western Front in 1919 and 1920 was discussed and anticipated by the British War Cabinet. The American presence changed every dynamic. Time was on the Allied side.

The failure of Woodrow Wilson’s Fourteen Points to gain international support sucked the last breath of hope from the German leaders. Wilson had no power to stop his proposals being picked apart at Versailles, and returned to America a sick and disillusioned man. He had fulfilled his mission for the Elites by revoking his election stance of 1916 and bring- ing America into the war. He had confused the German leadership with his “idealism” and upset his political enemies in America by proposing a League of Nations [3] which was nominally adopted in the eventual Treaty of Versailles. Though the troubled, one might say dysfunctional, history of the League of Nations extends beyond our timescale, its very proposal caused the U.S. Congress to twice reject the Versailles Peace Treaty. [4] A cross section of American Senators were so determined to have no truck with Wilson’s League of Nations that they declared the Treaty ‘dead to stay dead’. [5] These words might well have served as an epitaph for Wilson’s political career. Having surrendered a devastating stroke in October 1919, his candidacy for a third term in office was rejected by the Democratic Party.

What too of Russia? When one considers the sacrifices made by the Russian people in their war against Germany, their absence at Versailles ought to have caused some embarrassment. For three long years Russia had battled the German and Austrians, inflicting great losses but absorbing even more. Undoubtedly the Russian front was critical. Without it Paris would have fallen in August 1914. [6] The long-standing promise that Russia would annex Constantinople and the Straits once Germany was destroyed was effectively and conveniently annulled when the Bolshevik government made peace with Germany in 1918. Lloyd George raised the hitherto unasked question of Russian involvement in the peace process in January 1919, [7] but there was no coherent or consistent agreement from a divided Supreme Council. Alarming tales circulating in Paris of the barbaric Red Terror unleashed by the Bolsheviks, were dismissed as exaggeration by Lloyd George. [8] Indeed. The British prime minister was a master at dissembling. Basically he lied as and when necessary and his Memoirs are a masterclass in self-promotion. The all-embracing role of the British and American bankers was another factor which was not to be mentioned. What mattered in the end was that Constantinople remained outside Russian control and Russia no longer threatened Persia, India or a redrawn map of the Middle East.

History is not a just series of eras or neatly constructed timelines with-in which commentators try to explain events or construct their own given narrative. History lives and breathes and never stands still. It is our past and determines much of our future. Events, decisions and consequences ensure that it will always remain a fascinating basis through which we better understand where we currently are and how we got here. But the historical record is incomplete. It has been tampered with, remastered and abused by those with much to hide. Where there are gaps, suspect the motivation.

Do not fall prey to the subtle weasel words of those who throw their hands in the air and claim that our narrative cannot be entirely proved because the evidence is no longer available. We know how these people work. Their operative DNA is now so transparent that any knowledgeable person will dismiss their protestations on the volume of circumstantial evidence alone. But they hide behind the pejorative cry of “conspiracy theory,” a convenience which protects the guilty. Year by year, even as we worked on this book, acknowledgements have been quietly conceded about Edith Cavell’s spy ring, on the RMS Lusitania’s real cargo manifest, of the gross over-exaggerations of the Bryce Committee. Yet the great lies persist and are regurgitated in the mainstream media.

Our books cover a period between 1890-1919 because within that timescale a group of elite politicians, influential power-brokers, rich financiers, determined opinion-moulders and their academic entourage made a concerted move to create a new world order under their control. In 1890 it was driven by upper-class English values and British domination of world trade, politics and influence. By 1919 clearer bonds between the Anglo-American Establishment, and the exhausting, deliberately pro-longed war, had moved the new world order towards an Atlantic Alliance and the enduring ‘special relationship’ between Britain and the United States.

And we do not accept that 1918 should be recognised as the year in which the war ended. We have clearly demonstrated in previous blogs that the fighting stopped but the economic war continued. It is essential that everyone understands that even 1919 was not an end-point. There was no sense of “job done.” Indeed not. What happened in 1919 was just another stepping stone, a building block towards a new order in the world. National boundaries changed in many parts of Europe.

New territorial responsibilities (the talk was of Mandates) were allocated to the victors. New countries were shaped. Economic interests were, as ever, to the fore. Old disputes re-emerged around lucrative parts of the dismembered Ottoman Empire. Germany had been defeated, humiliated and abused, but Germany survived. The politicians who disgraced humanity by claiming that the world war had saved civilisation escaped the scrutiny of justice. They wrote their memoirs, accepted their rewards, and lived well on the profits that ensued. Above them, the controllers of real power did not break step. They simply marched unchallenged along their chosen route.

If you feel that you now have a keener sense of who these people were and are, engage in Quigley’s challenge. He stated that ‘the evidence of their existence is not hard to find, if one knows where to look.’ [9] They remain behind the scenes, influencing politicians and policy, buying public opinion, rewarding their own, falsifying media reports and protecting themselves from public scrutiny. History will continue to be controlled by them for as long as criticism can be ignored. You can shake this comfortable establishment set-up by continuing to question official versions and never allowing yourself to be easily satisfied with so-called truth.

Everything that we have described is a series of building blocks. The Secret Elite has metamorphosed into a much more modern phenomenon with the same objective – to be that new world order. The evidence of their existence is not hard to find.

1. Report of the Committee of Prime Ministers. Preliminary Draft. appended to the minutes for the Imperial War Cabinet 32B, 16 August 1918. p. 167.
2. Ibid.
3. The League of Nations was an international organization, created in 1920 as part of the Treaty of Versailles. Though first proposed by President Woodrow Wilson as part of his Fourteen Points for a just peace in Europe, Congress refused to endorse the proposal.
4. Firstly on 19 November 1919, then again on 19 March 1920.
5. New York Times, 20 March 1920.
6. Margaret Macmillan, Peacemakers, Six Months That Changed the World, p. 71.
7. FRUS, vol. 3 pp. 581-4.
8. National Archives, CAB 29/ 28.
9. Quigley, The Anglo-American Establishment, pp ix-x.

War Without End 5: Remorseless Misery

The acute misery which had been deliberately visited on Germany, Austria and Hungary was remorseless. British, French and Italian obstruction to all U.S. proposals which would have alleviated the crises in Berlin and Vienna appeared to be absolute. A breakthrough was apparently agreed on Christmas Eve, 1918, when the Americans thought that they had persuaded their Allies to relax the food blockade on the neutral and liberated countries. Furthermore the Inter-Allied Trade Council proposed to allow neutral countries to trade food to Germany in exchange for commodities which did not compete with Allied exports. On Christmas Day, Hoover announced to the world press that ‘it is our first move towards feeding Germany.’ He notified all of the nations involved and announced that the British blockade authorities had confirmed the decision. [1]  Unbeknown to him, or any of the American delegation in Europe, his breakthrough was blown apart by a consortium of Allied councils and executives which met in London some six days later on December 31. They reversed the original decision and re-imposed the full blockade. Hoover described it sarcastically as ‘a sudden joint meeting … to which no Americans were invited’. In fact they had not even been notified.

It was a stinging slap on the face for Hoover and another body-blow for the starving Germans. Not only had the London conspirators undermined his strategy, they had not even sufficient courage to tell him in person. Hoover’s first concern was the financial impact this would have. Money always was his first interest. The British were leading an economic revolt which would have caused an disastrous crash in the U.S. farming industries. The Grain Corporation alone had borrowed over $300,000,000 in the expectation of vast profits from sales to Europe. Hoover estimated that he had 700,000 tons of food en route to famine areas in Europe. Cold storage for perishable foodstuffs was already at bursting point.

At every opportunity Herbert Hoover used President Wilson to add covering letters to his dispatches, appeals and veiled threats to the allied food agencies. [2] The Americans were justifiably aggrieved. They had taken steps to increase agricultural production on a large scale, with guaranteed prices for their farmers in order to make vast post-war profits from all and sundry, including Germany. Such guarantees extended to the 1919 crop, which meant that the U.S. producers had to be protected from deliberate price-undercuts from the southern hemisphere. At one point over 1.2 billion pounds of fats and 100 million bushels of wheat were locked down in European storage. [3] Of even greater concern were perishable foods like dairy products and pork, and the tragic fact was that vast quantities of these foodstuffs were held up in Copenhagen, Amsterdam, Rotterdam and Antwerp while millions of Germans starved. [4]

Yet the British press were relentless in their denial of starvation in Germany. On 3 January 1919, a leading article in The Times dismissed the ‘German Hunger Bogy’ as spurious. What were people to think when the trusted Times reported, ‘You don’t see so many people with rolls of fat on them as you did five years ago, but you also see a healthier, harder and generally more fit population’. Such twisted, pathetic logic.

Even when, by mid-January 1919, it appeared that ‘the Big Four’ (Britain, France the United States and Italy) had agreed that Germany should be supplied with food and ‘if nothing else could be done’ pay in gold and export a limited amount of commodities,[5] the blockade remained in place. The Allied Blockade Committee refused to issue the necessary orders and the British navy stubbornly resisted any attempt by Hoover’s ships to enter German waters. The role of the admiralty in maintaining and enforcing the vicious throttling of a defeated Germany has been clearly understated. It wasn’t just that a watertight blockade was maintained; it was extended and remorselessly enforced. The admiralty ordered the cessation of all German fishing rights in the Baltic … an act of war, clothed in the name of the armistice. The German people were forbidden to even fish for their own food. The Berliner Tageblatt could not fathom why there were steamers from Scandinavia intended for Germany loaded with fish which perished in their holds ‘because the English had extended their hunger blockade’. [6] As we have shown time and again, had such a blockade been enforced in 1915 the war would have been over three years earlier.

Bitter voices were raised in the House of Commons demanding retribution at all costs. Commander Sir Edward Nicholl M.P., threw vastly inflated data into the equation, claiming that 23,737,080 tons of shipping had been sunk by German submarines, [7] and seventeen thousand men of the Mercantile Marine murdered ‘by order of Count Luxembourg’, with instructions to leave no trace behind! Nicholl claimed that the Merchant Seamen’s League had sworn that they would not trade with Germany or … sail with a German until reparation is made and compensation paid to those who have been left behind. [8] Exaggerations apart (Harold Temperley then a British official, estimated the total tonnage sunk at over 15,000,000 tons. Lloyd’s Register put the number at 13,233,672 tons), the hurt of war-loss reduced sensitivity towards the losers. While that is understandable, it is no reason to deny that the starving of Germany was deliberately maintained for ulterior motives.

The notion that the Armistice was signed and sealed in November 1918 is misleading. There were a number of armistice extensions because the process of prolonging the misery for Germany required an extensive period of implementation. The first armistice of 11 November was renewed on 13 December 1918, 16 January 1919 and on 16 February 1919, with Article 26 on the blockade of Germany still in force, it was renewed indefinitely. There was in fact no agreed peace, though the fighting had ended and Germany had surrendered her naval power.

While the blockade allowed the navy to distance itself from its consequences, the British army had to deal with the reality of hunger, starvation, poverty and misery on the streets of major German cities. The war office in London received reports from officers in Hamburg and Hanover [9] which described the physical deterioration of the population with alarming clarity. Shamefully, milk supplies around Hanover had dried up for children over six. [10] War continued to be waged against the innocent.

Even with his landslide election victory behind him, Lloyd George took no action to intervene until five months of misery had reduced the immune system of the German people to desperately low levels. Economic despair brought about political unrest, riots, protests and the rise of a new threat, Bolshevism. [11] Hunger and malnutrition were indeed breeding revolt. The risks to European stability merited a change of policy. The warnings sent to the war office began to underline a growing concern about the worth of the blockade. A report from fourteen ranking army officers, mainly captains with legal, business or financial backgrounds, detailed their conclusions on the critical state of Berlin, Munich, Hamburg, Hannover, Leipzig, Dresden, Magdeburg and Cassel. They stated that a disaster was imminent and ‘the policy of starvation (note the terminology … the policy of starvation) was not only senseless but harmful to ourselves…. and it would be folly to suppose that the ensuing disaster would be confined to Germany.’ [12]  Never mind the emaciated children, the fear of hunger, the sick and the dying … starvation had become a threat to stability across Europe. It was spreading disease and a new threat called Bolshevism had begun to seep out of a dysfunctional Russia. They had no notion that Bolshevism was being funded by the great international banks in Wall Street.

The War Cabinet was issued with a memorandum on these findings in February 1919 [13] by the recently appointed secretary of state for war, Winston Churchill. [14] The picture it painted was stark. Unemployment in Germany was rising at alarming rates, the cost of living had grown to dangerous levels and industry could not find a foothold because it was starved of raw materials. Malnutrition caused physical and mental inertia, with disease adding to the misery of the people. The concluding message could not have been clearer, ‘Revictualling Germany is really urgent because either famine or Bolshevism, or both will ensue before the next harvest.’ [15]

Though Britain had been struggling to import sufficient food for its population earlier in the year, by late 1918 Hoover’s fleet provided a steady inflow from America to Britain. Yet the onward distribution remained completely blocked. The War Cabinet meeting of 12 February 1919 noted that British ports were stocked ‘to their utmost capacity’, storage facilities taxed to their limit and meat supplies so strong that the civilian ration should be increased’. [16] Although consideration was given to British exports to neutral countries, the government was advised that the blockade be maintained. There was to be no swift relaxation…until, well, Herbert Hoover, the super-hero of his own legend, burst the bubble. Safe in the knowledge that he could not be contradicted, Herbert Hoover later awarded himself the pivotal role in ending the food blockade. The following story was penned by Hoover in his autobiographic American Epic 2 written in 1959.

On the evening of 7 March 1919, Herbert Hoover was summoned into Lloyd George’s presence in Paris where he found a distraught General Plumer, Commander of the British Army of Occupation in Germany. Plumer insisted that the rank and file of his men could no longer cope with the sight ‘of skinny and bloated children pawing over the offal from British cantonments’. He claimed that his soldiers were actually depriving themselves to feed these children and wanted to go home, adding that the country ‘was going Bolshevist.’ When asked by Lloyd George why he had not sent food to Germany, Hoover, in his own words, exploded in anger and detailed the obstructions put in his way. He ranted about ‘the three hundred million pounds of perishables, which would spoil in a few weeks, in continental ports or Belgium. He pointed to the vicious and senseless admiralty policy which prevented the Germans fishing in the Baltic, and the inhumane tactic of starving women and children after Germany had surrendered. Hoover apparently closed this rant with the warning that ‘the Allies would be reduced to nothing better with which to make peace with Germany than the Germans had had with Communist Russia.’ [17] Truth or romanticised self-indulgence? Who can say?

1. Hoover, American Epic 2, pp. 303-4.
2. FRUS vol 2. Papers Relating etc pp. 695-7.
3. Hoover, Memoirs, Vol 1. pp. 332.
4. Ibid., p. 333.
5. Ibid., p. 339.
6. Berliner Tageblatt, 13 December 1918, p. 2.
7. House of Commons Debate 02 April 1919 vol 114 cc1304-49.
8. Ibid., cc1311.
9. Reports by British Officers on the Economic Conditions Prevailing in Germany, December 1918-March 1919 , Cmd.52, HMSO 1919. ( Period 12 January-12 February 1919, in CAB/ 24/ 76)
10. Ibid., pp. 57-8.
11. Hoover, Memoirs, Vol. 1, pp. 340-1.
12. Reports by British Officers, Cmd.52, HMSO 1919. p. 84.
13. CAB/ 24/76/22
14. Winston Churchill was returned to high office on 9 January 1919 as Secretary of State for War.
15. CAB/ 24/76/22.
16. War Cabinet 531, p. 2. War Cabinet Minutes 12 February 1919. CAB /23/ 9/18.
17. Herbert Hoover, American Epic 2, pp. 337-8.

War Without End 1: The Illusion Of An Equitable Peace

Like magicians, Secret Elite historians created the illusion of war’s end in November 1918. It was over, that war to end all wars. Or so they would have us believe. Consequently, one hundred years later we have been successfully drawn into the myth that the First World War was fought between August 1914 and November 1918. Students are still taught that the First World War came to an end when an Armistice was signed in Marshal Foch’s railway carriage in the forest of Compiegne in Northern France on 11 November, 1918. Though the guns fell silent at 11 a.m. that day, and the historical strap-line that the First World War raged between 1914-1918 remains carved in stone, war against Germany continued well beyond that date. The brutal war to destroy her absolutely had been deliberately started in 1914 and unnecessarily prolonged beyond 1915 by the hidden powers in Britain backed by their American allies. Consequently, they had no moral qualms about continuing the disintegration of German society after the armistice had been signed. The instrument through which they acted was, ironically, the continuation of the tightly controlled blockade on German imports of food and other supplies essential to the civilian population. The very act that would have ended the war in 1915 was ruthlessly applied after the armistice had been signed and caused widespread starvation and death in Germany and Austria throughout 1919 and beyond. It might be some consolation if the establishment’s denial of this historical fact embraced a sense of guilt or embarrassment which clashed with the myth that the Allies continued the war to save civilisation. Not so. Such sentiments never found sway with Imperial Britain’s ruling class. Their tactic is not to apologise, but to ignore.

In Britain, 11 November 1918 is still celebrated as if it brought closure to the horrors of world war. The theatre of commemoration has marked the Armistice for its annual service of remembrance for those sacrificed in the First World War. In the summer of 1919, Prime Minister, Lloyd George, gave Sir Edwin Lutyens, who was already working with the Imperial War Graves Commission, two weeks to design a temporary memorial to serve as a ‘saluting base’ for the Peace Day Parade in London on 19 July. Lutyens’ simple design of an empty coffin on a high column surmounted by a laurel wreath was constructed in timber and plaster. But ordinary people grasped the appropriateness of the monument and on that day its base was covered in flowers brought by the mourning general public. For weeks after, there were enormous queues waiting to place their wreaths alongside all of the others, in salute to the men whose lives had been forfeited and would never come home. [1]

If the people grasped the appropriateness, politicians like Lloyd George grasped the opportunity to focus public attention on a memorial and deflect scrutiny from the truth about the war. On 11^th November 1920, King George V unveiled a permanent  stone memorial in Whitehall. Lutyens called it a “Cenotaph”, which broadly translated from ancient Greek as an “empty tomb”, built at the centre of government administration to honour those buried elsewhere. It was a masterstroke of lasting propaganda.

Remembrance Day services continue to be observed annually at war memorials in every village, town and city in Britain on the Sunday closest to that date. Remembrance is more than important. It is vital. But we must clarify what should be remembered. The great lie of November 11 is matched by the lies on those war memorials that Britain and her Empire fought in a bitter struggle to save the world from evil Germans; by the lies that millions of young men willingly laid down their lives or were horribly maimed for the greater ‘Glory of God’ and to secure and protect ‘freedom’ and ‘civilisation’. In reality, they were sacrificed; they were the unwitting victims who died for the benefit of the bankers and financiers, the secret cabals and power-mongers on both sides of the Atlantic. Remembrance is sullied by the triumphant militarism which attends these services led still by royalty, religious leaders and the political class. The subliminal message mocks Wilfred Owen’s anti-war poem, ‘Dulce et Decorum Est’. [2] The great lie is perpetuated; violence is seen as a means of resolving disputes while the horrors, realities and true causes of war remain buried deep.

Be assured, no matter the hypocrisy that surrounds Remembrance Day, war did not end with the Armistice. That is merely one of the many lies about WW1 which are still peddled as fact. Though fighting on the Western Front came to a standstill, the assault on German men, women and children continued unabated. Indeed, it became ever more extreme through a ruthless and cynical continuation of the blockade on all food supplies to Germany.

Hostilities on the Eastern Front between Germany and Bolshevik Russia had terminated unofficially in October 1917, and officially in March 1918 with the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk. By the latter months of 1918, the Allies had made some gains but the underlying stalemate on the Western Front continued its weary, debilitating waste. The Imperial War Cabinet in London, [3] critical of the recent performance of senior British commanders like General Haig, was still planning advances in 1919 and 1920. [4] They saw no immediate end to the struggle. Some thought a seven year war possible, but Germany had no reserves with which to continue. In the light of a growing number of exhausted and disgruntled troops and the fear of revolution in Germany, perhaps even the spread of Bolshevism, the Kaiser instructed Field Marshal Von Hindenburg to withdraw to a defensible line between Antwerp and the river Meuse. [5] Indeed, being fully aware of Woodrow Wilson’s address to Congress on 8 January 1918, [6] the German government believed that the American president would guarantee an honourable outcome. Wilson had stated: ‘It is our wish and purpose that the processes of peace, when they are begun, shall be absolutely open and they shall involve and permit henceforth no secret understandings of any kind. The day of conquest and aggrandisement is gone by … What we demand in this war … is that the world be made fit and safe … for every peace-loving nation which, like our own, wishes to live its own life, determine its own institutions, be assured of justice and fair dealing by the other peoples of the world as against force and selfish aggression.’ [7]

What followed were the famous Fourteen Points by which President Wilson defined the new world into which all would be peacefully transformed. These included an end to secret treaties, the absolute freedom of navigation on the high seas, free trade and the removal of economic barriers and absolute guarantees that nations would reduce their armaments to the bare necessities of self defence. The sovereignty of small nations and subservient colonies was to be determined through a balance of rightful claims and self-determination. Sympathy and support for Russia’s political development was expressed in a plea that she be welcomed into the ‘society of free nations’ and that Russia be given every assistance in determining her own future.

Belgium merited special consideration. Her sovereignty as a free nation was to be clearly asserted and Germany had to withdraw from Belgian territory to restore confidence in justice and international law. Alsace and Lorraine, former provinces of France which had been ceded to Germany after the Franco-Prussian war in 1871, were to be ‘freed’ and the invaded portions restored to France. Detailed readjustments to Italy’s borders, safeguards for the peoples of Austria-Hungary, territorial agreements for the Balkan states and the ‘Turkish portion of the Ottoman Empire’ and an independent Poland were all included in Wilson’s grand statement. Words like assurance, integrity, guarantees, autonomous development and rightful claims gave the Fourteen Points an implied sense of natural justice as did the final ambition of a ‘general association’ of nations for the purpose of affording mutual guarantees of political independence and territorial integrity to great and small states alike’. [8] The President appeared to have conjured a solution to the world’s problems. It was a mirage, not a miracle.

Based on the apparent altruism of Wilson’s statement to Congress nine months earlier, the recently appointed German chancellor, Prince Max von Baden sought an armistice. Baden had been selected by the Kaiser on September 30, 1918 in anticipation of agreeing an equitable peace. He had previously spoken out against the unrestricted use of submarine warfare and had a reputation for moderation, [9] which lent hope to the view that his appeal to President Wilson would carry some weight. Von Baden wrote directly to Woodrow Wilson accepting the programme set forth ‘in his message to Congress of January 8th as a basis for peace negotiations’, and requested an immediate armistice. [10]

Max von Baden’s telegraphed message was forwarded to the U.S. President on 5 October 1918, [11] as was a similar peace overture from Austria-Hungary, [12] but Wilson said he would not negotiate as long as the German army remained on foreign soil. [13] He stated that the good faith of any discussions would depend on the willingness of the Central Powers (Germany and Austria) to withdraw their forces everywhere from invaded territory, though the President did not stipulate a deadline. [14] What followed was totally devoid of good faith.

1. Ellen Leslie MA GradDipCons (AA) in blog: BUILDING STOREYS, posted on Sunday 11 November 2012.
2. Wilfred Owen, Dulce Et Decorum Est, is the best known English anti-war poem from the First World War. It essentially attacks the old lie that it is a great and glorious thing to die for one’s country. http://www.warpoetry.co.uk/owen1.html
3. The Imperial War Cabinet comprised the prime ministers of Britain, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Newfoundland and South Africa, represented by Jan Smutts.
4. Minutes of the Imperial War Cabinet, 32B, August 16 1918, CAB 23/44A/13.
5. Ex-Kaiser William II, My Memoirs: 1878-1918, pp. 268-9.
6. President Wilson’s Message to Congress, January 8, 1918; Records of the United States Senate; Record Group 46; Records of the United States Senate; National Archives.
7. https://www.ourdocuments.gov/doc.php?doc=62&page=transcript
8. There are many sources for the exact wording. The Yale Law School site at http://avalon.law.yale.edu/20th_century/wilson14.asp can be accessed at this address.
9. http://www.firstworldwar.com/bio/maxvonbaden.htm
10. Erste deutsche Note an Wilson – Friedensersuchen (The First German Note to Wilson – Request for Peace), in Erich Ludendorff, ed., Urkunden der Obersten Herresleitung über ihre Tätigkeit 1916/8 (Records of the Supreme Army Command on its Activities, 1916/18). Berlin: E.S. Mittler und Sohn, 1920, p. 535.)
11. C. Paul Vincent, The Politics of Hunger, p. 61.
12. David Lloyd George, War Memoirs, vol. 2, p. 1934.
13. The Times, 10 October 1918, p. 7.
14. Robert Lansing to Swiss Charge d’Affaires at Washington 8 October 1918.

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 3: Trotsky’s Secret Benefactors

When the Spanish passenger vessel Monserrat berthed in New York in January 1917, Trotsky was met on the rain-swept pier by Arthur Concors, superintendent and director of the Hebrew Sheltering and Immigrant Aid Society. Concors’s fellow board members, and luminaries of the American Jewish establishment, included its main financial backer, Jacob Schiff, of Kuhn, Loeb & Co. [1] Concors acted as a translator for Trotsky during an interview that had been arranged with the New York Times. Here it was claimed that Trotsky had been expelled from Europe for preaching peace and that he was a follower of the German socialist, Karl Marx. His religious convictions were accredited by a statement that Trotsky had represented Jewish newspapers Petrograd and Kiev. [2] What has never been explained is why an impoverished ‘undesirable alien’ was welcomed to America by an official of a Jewish organisation who had close links to the highest echelons of the Zionist movement in the United States. Indeed, much has been left unexplained.

Richard Spence, professor of History at Idaho University and recognised Russian expert, briefly recounted the involvement of William Wiseman, head of British Intelligence in the U.S., in relation to Trotsky’s short stay, but unfortunately the details were sparse. Wiseman was closely linked to Woodrow Wilson’s minder, Edward Mandell House and, after the war, was rewarded with a lucrative partnership in the Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Bank on Wall Street. Jacob Schiff, has been the focus of much attention in Trotsky’s funding, but Professor Spence urged caution in connecting him with Trotsky, stating that there was ‘no demonstrable direct link’. Such ‘demonstrable’ evidence may never be found, but Professor Spence was aware that men like Schiff were adept at concealing their intrigues. Jacob Schiff was openly supportive of the Russian Revolution and in a letter published in the New York Times on 17 March, he ‘thanked the Almighty that a great and good people had been freed from their autocratic Czarist shackles’. [3] Two days later he voiced his opinion that Russia would, before long, rank financially amongst the most favoured nations in the money markets of the world. [4] Interestingly, that same issue of the New York Times reported that there had been a rise in Russian exchange transactions in London 24 hours preceding the revolution. Ah, the Rothschilds, as ever, a day ahead of the rest of the world. It was explained away as mere coincidence.

Jacob Schiff held a deep rooted hatred of Czarist Russia because of its gross and frequent ill-treatment of Jews. He had willingly financed revolutionary propaganda during the Russo-Japanese War and before and during the First World War. [5]  The Jewish Communal Register of New York City 1917-1918 stated that ‘Mr. Schiff has always used his wealth and his influence in the best interests of his people. He financed the enemies of autocratic Russia and used his influence to keep Russia from the money market of the United States’. [6] Note the reference to ‘his people’. In 1910, Schiff was one of several Americans who campaigned to revoke a commercial treaty with the Russians over their mistreatment of Russian Jews. When the Czarist regime sought him out for loans he refused, and no one else at Kuhn, Loeb was permitted to underwrite Russian requests for finance. After the Czar’s abdication, Schiff dropped his opposition to the Russian government. His views on Zionism experienced a similar volte-face. Schiff initially opposed Zionism, believing it to be a secular, nationalistic perversion of the Jewish faith and incompatible with American citizenship. He funded agricultural projects in Palestine, however, and later favoured the notion of a cultural homeland for Jews in Palestine. [7]

Schiff encouraged and financed armed revolt against the Czar. He provided financial support for Jewish self-defence groups in Russia, including Bolshevik and other socialist revolutionaries. He was set on fomenting revolution in Russia. The America author, G. Edward Griffin, pondered the question of Schiff’s involvement and unequivocally stated that Schiff ‘was one of the principle backers of the Bolshevik revolution and personally financed Trotsky’s trip from New York to Russia’. [8] Years later, Jacob Schiff’s grandson admitted that his grandfather had given about $20 million for the triumph of communism in Russia. [9]

Professor Spence agreed that Schiff ‘had a track record of financing revolutionaries’, and was ‘pro-German’. [10] This latter observation somewhat lets his thesis down. The German born Schiff was not pro-German. He and his German born Warburg partners in Kuhn, Loeb bank on Wall Street, and his good friend (and their brother) Max Warburg in Germany, together with their close Rothschild links in France and London, were not operating a nationalist agenda, whether it be German, British or American, but an internationalist agenda. And that agenda was the domination of the political system of each country and the economy of the world as a whole. [11]

These international bankers of German-Jewish descent had little patriotic sympathy or support for Germany. They belonged to the secret cabal that deliberately caused the First World War in order to destroy Germany. The leading German financier, Max Warburg, was himself deeply implicated in that conspiracy. They were globalists, first and last, seeking control of the entire world. It is why the question of their support for political Zionism, and how that fitted into their agenda, is of critical importance when considering both the Bolshevik Revolution and the Balfour Declaration. The time-scale within which the Anglo-American global-elites power-base moved from London to New York, and the ever growing influence of political Zionism, has yet to be determined. If such issues are not to be addressed, the truth will remain buried. [12]

On 25 March, 1917, Trotsky, who had been living a very comfortable life-style with his family in New York for the previous eleven weeks, was issued with papers for his passage to Russia. The British consulate assured him that no obstacles would be placed in his way. ‘Everything was in good order’, according to Trotsky, [13] but who had the power to issue such high-level permits? The surprising answer is that it reached right to the top of government in Washington. Professor Antony Sutton revealed that ‘President Woodrow Wilson was the fairy godmother who provided Trotsky with a passport to return to Russia to carry forward the revolution’. The passport came with a Russian entry permit, a British transit visa [14] and $10,000 in cash. One first-class cabin and sixteen second class cabins were booked for Trotsky and his party of fellow revolutionaries on the S.S. Kristianiafjord, of the Norwegian-America Line. They departed New York for Oslo and the onward journey to Petrograd, but failed to anticipate trouble ahead. Everyone had. During a scheduled stop at Halifax, Nova Scotia, Canadian officials removed Trotsky and his entire entourage from the ship and incarcerated them in an internment camp. The Halifax officials had not been advised of Trotsky’s mission and naturally considered the men a danger to the Allied cause. A flurry of angry telegrams eventually descended upon Nova Scotia from both sides of the Atlantic. Trotsky and the others were  released to continue their journey to Russia.

A Canadian Intelligence officer, Lieutenant Colonel John Maclean, later wrote an article entitled, Why did we let Trotsky go? How Canada lost an Opportunity to Shorten the War. According to MacLean, Trotsky was released ‘at the request of the British Embassy in Washington… acting on the request of the U.S. State Department, who were acting for someone else.’  [15] MacLean did not elaborate on who that ‘someone else’ was. The Canadian officials were instructed to inform the press that Trotsky was an American citizen travelling on an American passport, and his release was specifically requested by the state department. Clearly, Trotsky had strong support at the highest levels of power in Britain and the U.S., and orders were issued that he must be given ‘every consideration’. [16] Trotsky and his entourage were duly released and allowed to continue their journey. This is not normal procedure.

Who was that ‘someone else’ that held such power and took unprecedented steps to release Trotsky from the cells in Nova Scotia and allow him to continue his journey to Russia? Canada, as a Dominion of the British Empire, would have obediently complied with any instruction from the British foreign office, and the man in charge just happened to be Lord Arthur Balfour, member of the inner circle of the Secret Elite and the very man who would sign the Balfour Declaration on their behalf.

Trotsky claimed that Pavel Miliukoff, foreign secretary in the post-revolutionary Russian government, had initially wanted him released, but two days later ‘withdrew his request and expressed the hope that our stay in Halifax would be prolonged.’ [17] That made sense because the provisional Russian government knew that Trotsky and Lenin refused to accept their legitimacy and posed a serious threat to their government if they returned to Russian soil. Miliukoff and Alexander Kerensky were determined to keep Russia in the war; Trotsky and Lenin were equally determined to sign a peace pact with Germany and end the slaughter. The British and American authorities were fully cognisant of the fact.

In early May, Trotsky and his party arrived at Christiania (now Oslo) in Norway, and made their way by rail to Russia. On 18 May 1917, they stepped off a train at the Finland terminal in Petrograd, just as Lenin had, one month earlier. Had it not been for Trotsky’s unexpected arrest in Nova Scotia, their arrival would have been perfectly synchronised.

The Secret Elite in London and the international bankers in the United States, with the connivance of their well-controlled governments, sent back the two men whom they knew would remove Russia from the war. Matters of great significance allowed them to adopt this change in foreign policy. They were well aware that a peace agreement between Russia and Germany would eventually release upwards of a million German troops from the Eastern Front, but there was a compensatory factor. The United States had just entered the war and the loss of Russian troops was more than recompensed by the fresh faced young Americans who would be sacrificed in due course. Official reports showed that had it not been for the Russian treaty with Germany, ‘the war would have been over a year earlier’ [18] because the combined allied strength would have been overwhelming. Millions of men died needlessly or suffer terrible wounds in 1918. The Secret Elite prolonged the war, again and again. Profits multiplied.

1. Richard B. Spence, Hidden Agendas; Spies, Lies and Intrigue surrounding Trotsky’s American visit of January-April 1917.
2. New York Times, 15 January, 1917
3. New York Times, 18 March, 1917.
4. New York Times, 20 March, 1917.
5. New York Times, 24 March, 1917.
6. The Jewish Communal Register of New York City, 1917-1918, p. 1019. https://archive.org/stream/jewishcommunalr00marggoog#page/n953/mode/2up/search/money+market+of+the+
7. E. Slater and R. Slater, Great Jewish Men, pp. 274-276.
8. G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 210.
9. Cholly Knickerbocker, New York Journal American. As quoted by Griffin, p. 265.
10. Spence, Hidden Agendas.
11. Carroll Quigley, Tragedy and Hope, p. 324.
12. The Austrian philosopher, Guenter Jaschke, wrote recently to co-author Jim Macgregor, ‘How can it happen that a minority of idiots, psychopaths and madmen rule the world, while the silent majority is paralysed?
13. Trotsky, My Life, p. 279.
14. Sutton, Wall Street and The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 25.
15. Ibid., pp. 32-33.
16. Ibid., pp. 33-34.
17. Trotsky, My Life, p. 284.
18. Sutton, Wall Street, p. 32.

The Rape Of Russia 2: Strange Bedfellows for Socialist Revolutionaries

Isolated in Zurich, Lenin was allegedly ‘stunned’ on hearing news of the Czar’s abdication. He immediately cabled his trusted lieutenant Grigory Zinoviev, the alias of Hirsch Apfelbaum, son of a Jewish-Ukranian dairy farmer. Zinoviev joined Lenin in Zurich and helped plan their return. Desperate to seize control of the revolution from the provisional government, but isolated in central Europe, their first task was to get back to Russia. Promptly. The best option was to travel by rail to Stockholm then on to Petrograd, but Germany stood in the way. Contacts were made, options considered and a strange deal agreed with the German government. Within days, Lenin was informed that he would soon be hearing from his old associate, Helphand-Parvus. [1]

Parvus, who assisted Trotsky in his voyage to the United States, played another significant role for the Secret Elite in spiriting Lenin safely across enemy territory and into Russia. An intriguing and mysterious individual, Parvus warrants our attention. Born in Belarus in 1867, his real name was Israel Lazarevich Gelfand. When he first met Lenin in Munich in 1900 he was a brilliant young journalist and Marxist theoretician who helped by printing the early issues of Iskra. In 1905 he was imprisoned with Trotsky and sentenced to three years exile in Siberia. Parvus mentored Trotsky on the theory of Permanent Revolution before they both escaped. He made his way to Germany and changed his name from Gelfand to Helphand, but became better known simply as Parvus.

Around 1908 Parvus moved to Constantinople where he remained for five years. He was associated with the Young Turks, produced propaganda journals, set himself up as grain importer and, more importantly, an arms merchant. Parvus became extremely rich, but his years in Constantinople were shrouded in mystery. His most important contact was Basil Zaharoff, the leading armaments salesman and agent of the Rothschilds and their mighty Vickers Armaments cartel. [2] Parvus earned a fortune selling arms for Zaharoff [3] and became deeply involved in the overthrow of the Czar.

Seventeen years after first meeting Lenin, Parvus was a grossly fat, bizarre paradox. He was both a flamboyant tycoon, displaying the worst of bourgeois vulgarity, and yet had a brilliant Marxist mind. The millionaire Marxist became a cartoon caricature ‘with an enormous car, a string of blondes, thick cigars and a passion for champagne, often a whole bottle for breakfast’. [4] Parvus viewed himself as kingmaker, the power behind the throne that Lenin would occupy. The association between the millionaire and Lenin horrified many socialists and revolutionaries, but Lenin claimed that he detested Parvus. Perhaps he did, but behind closed doors, they happily colluded in the rise of the bolshevik leader.

Parvus had been warmly greeted by Lenin in Berne in 1915, where they held a private meeting. Its detail remains clouded in mystery, yet proved to be extremely important in the history of the world. Without Parvus and his organisation, through which millions of gold marks were channeled to the Bolsheviks, Lenin could never have achieved supreme power. ‘It was a strangely remote association in the sense that neither had direct contact with the other and both adamantly denied its existence…’ [5] How convenient.

Parvus had spent considerable time in Germany since the early 1900s and was considered by many, including the German authorities themselves, to be a loyal German agent. Judging by his activities from the time he moved to Constantinople in 1908, there can be little doubt that he was a double agent working for the British, or, to be more precise, the Rothschilds. Parvus was an extremely important player for them because he could operate freely in Germany and liaise with other important Rothschild agents such as Max Warburg. The fortune he made in Constantinople with Zaharoff’s help gave him access to members of the German Foreign Ministry, under- secretary, Arthur Zimmermann in particular.

Parvus suggested that the Imperial Germans and the Russian Marxists had a common interest in the destruction of the Russian autocracy, and persuaded them to provide substantial funding to topple the Czar and bring about a separate peace with the Reich. It was unquestionably an attractive proposition. The Germans obliged. They had supported the revolutionary movement since the war began by feeding money to Russia through Parvus in order to ‘create the greatest possible degree of chaos in Russia’. On one day alone, 5 April 1917, the German Treasury paid more than 5,000,000 gold marks to Parvus for political purposes in Russia. [6] Incredibly, the Allies and their German foes were playing, and paying for, the same game in Russia, but for very different reasons. The Germans thought Parvus was working to their agenda, but the Secret Elite knew he was working to theirs. While German officials believed that they were using Parvus’s network as a means of putting pressure on the Czar to plea for a peace settlement, the British, supported by Ambassador Buchanan, urged him to sabotage any move towards a separate Russian-German peace. ’The task facing Parvus was greatly facilitated by the helpless naivety of his secret contact, Count Brockdorff-Rantzau, German ambassador in Copenhagen.’ [7]

The Secret Elite had decided to spirit Lenin and Trotsky into Russia as quickly as possible. This was Parvus’s masterstroke. [8] Immediately after the February Revolution he entered negotiations with the German authorities to provide a special train to transfer Lenin and his supporters safely through Germany from Switzerland. Interestingly, it was Arthur Zimmermann, by now the German Foreign Secretary, who made the initial contact by inviting Parvus to meet with him. Thereafter, Zimmermann personally supervised the arrangements. [9]

We have to question Zimmermann’s actions, both here and in later activities such as his infamous and ludicrous telegram that provided Woodrow Wilson with the perfect excuse to bring the United States into the war. Was Zimmermann, in collusion with Max Warburg and other Rothschild agents such as Zaharoff, acting in the interests of Bolshevism and Zionism rather than those of Germany? He was certainly sympathetic to the Zionist cause, protected Palestinian Jews when they were threatened by the Turkish authorities and mooted the idea of a joint Turkish-German declaration in favour of colonisation in March 1917. [10] Did he keep the Kaiser in the dark? Where did his true loyalty lie? Disagreements still rage over whether or not Zimmermann informed Wilhelm II about the arrangements for Lenin’s transfer. Author Michael Pearson claimed that the Kaiser and his Generals approved the move in advance, whereas Professor Antony Sutton maintained that they were not informed until Lenin was safely across the border into Russia. [11]

Lenin’s action could have been viewed as treason. He had, after all, accepted help from Russia’s sworn enemy who benefitted from his declared intention. On 9 April 1917, Lenin, together with Gregory Zinoviev, Karl Radek and other Bolsheviks and their wives, a party of thirty-two in total, boarded a Swiss train that took them from Berne to Zurich. On transferring to another train to carry them to the German border, they were subjected to abuse by a crowd of around 100 hostile Russians screaming “Spies” “Pigs” and “Traitors.”  [12] They then boarded a German train that was ‘sealed’ from the outside world. Over the next three days the now famous ‘sealed train’ took them via Frankfurt and Berlin to the small sea-side port of Sassnitz in North-East Germany, from where they boarded a Swedish ferry for Trelleborg. The following day they received a warm welcome on the quayside from one Jacob Furstenberg.

Furstenberg was the alias of Yakov Stanilavovich Ganetsky, an important player in Lenin’s return from exile and a key link between Parvus and Lenin in the transference of large sums of money from Germany. Furstenberg was the son of a wealthy Jewish family who owned a factory in the city, and had a range of contacts in the semi-criminal underworld. He ‘was seen even by Lenin’s close comrades as a sinister character’ [13] but considered by Lenin as a trusted friend.

Furstenberg was also Parvus’s ‘key right-hand man’, and president of a company he set up in Copenhagen during the war. The ‘company’ comprised an espionage ring and network of agents both inside and outside Russia, that sold Russian products to the Germans and vice versa. This war-profiteering comprised merchandise like chemicals, medicines, surgical instruments and much more. [14] Some of the money raised was used to finance Lenin’s propaganda from the first day of the revolution. [15] Lenin, the ‘pure socialist revolutionary’ and ‘man of the people’ was deeply involved with these despicable characters and benefited from the obscene profits made at the expense of men killed or horrendously maimed in the trenches. Furstenberg, indeed, was Lenin’s most trusted agent. [16] They formed their own personal axis of evil.

The revolutionary and the sinister war profiteer were strange bed-fellows. In theory, Furstenberg was everything that the Bolshevik leader abhorred. He prospered by dealing in basic necessities that were in short supply: medicines, drugs and dressings for the wounded; contraceptives for the troops. His blackmarket business methods were equally disreputable. Furstenberg was elegant, debonair and never without a flower in his buttonhole, a dandy for whom bolshevism seemed illogical. The two men had known each other since they met at the traumatic 1903 conference in London when Lenin split the party. [17] Furstenberg joined Lenin at Trelleborg, and he and the other Bolsheviks continued to Malmo for the night train on to Stockholm. Meanwhile, in the Wilhelmstrasse in Berlin, Arthur Zimmermann followed their progress ‘with close interest.’ [18]

Sweden had dominated the market in illicit trade between the Allies and Germany since the early months of the war, and at the heart of much of that business sat a Swedish banker and businessman, Olof Aschberg and his bank, Nya Banken. Furstenberg, was an associate of Aschberg’s [19] and much of the money sent from both the United States and Germany for the Bolsheviks, passed through Nya Banken. Aschberg’s London agent was the British Bank of North Commerce [20] whose chairman, Earl Grey, was linked to the inner-chambers of the Secret Elite in London. Another important Nya Banken connection was Max May, vice-president of J.P. Morgan’s Guaranty Trust of New York, also an associate of Olof Aschberg. [21] Much of the ‘German’ money transferred through Nya Banken to the Bolsheviks came via the Disconto-Gesellschaft bank in Frankfurt am Main. [22] When one realises that Disconto-Gesellschaft was part of the Rothschild Group [23] and J.P. Morgan was a front for the Rothschilds on Wall Street, the hidden hand of Rothschild becomes apparent, yet again. [24]

Max Warburg, one of the most powerful bankers in Germany, was the older brother of Paul Warburg, the major force in establishing America’s Federal Reserve System which helped Wall Street fund war in Europe. It is worth repeating that Max, himself a Rothschild agent and reputedly head of the German espionage system during the war, [25] was involved with Arthur Zimmermann in ensuring Lenin’s safe passage across Germany. Max Warburg was likewise involved in the safe passage of Trotsky to Russia. A U.S. State Department file, ‘Bolshevism and Judaism’, dated 13 November 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 Aschberg and Nya Banken were involved. [26] This tangled web makes little sense unless one understands just how closely all of these named bankers and banks were linked to each other, and to their common goal of international control.Lenin’s train arrived late on the evening of Easter Monday, 17 April 1917, at the Finland rail terminal in Petrograd. Both inside and outside the station, bands played “La Marseilles” and a large bouquet of flowers was thrust into Lenin’s hands as a guard of honour presented arms. [27] The Bolshevik leader immediately denounced members of the provisional Government, and issued a series of ten directives in what came to be known as the ‘April Theses’. He demanded the immediate withdrawal of Russia from the World War, and all political power placed in the hands of workers and soldiers’ soviets.

Vladimir Lenin undoubtedly benefitted from financial backing from Germany, mainly through the intrigues of men linked to the Rothschilds such as Parvus and Max Warburg, but what of Trotsky, so generously accommodated on his voyage from Barcelona to New York? Richard Spence, professor of history at the University of Idaho, has meticulously documented the network of connections between Trotsky and international bankers, [28] and his work is required reading for those who desire a deeper understanding of the Bolshevik Revolution. His grasp of the connections between the international bankers themselves or, their globalist aims, appears less firm. Spence quoted French Intelligence reports from Barcelona in 1917 which revealed that Trotsky’s benefactor was a Russian émigré, Ernst Bark, a resident of Madrid.

Bark masterminded Trotsky’s release from prison, his accommodation in Spanish hotels, and his first-class passage to America. He was the first cousin of Pyotor Bark, Minister of Finance in Russia from 1914. Inside these complex secret international machinations, Pyotor Bark employed Olof Aschberg as his financial agent. Having seen how Aschberg and his Nya Banken were closely linked with Parvus in facilitating Lenin’s return to Russia, it comes as no surprise that they were similarly involved in ensuring Trotsky’s return. Professor Spence concluded that Ernst Bark ‘was Parvus’s cat’s-paw in Spain’. [29] In an interesting aside, Pyotor Bark was arrested after the Bolshevik revolution but immediately released on higher orders. Thereafter he moved to England, became managing-director of the Anglo-International Bank in London and was awarded a knighthood. Here was a man whose powerful contacts included the higher echelons of British banking circles. [30]

What a strange concoction of armaments dealers, sinister profiteers and bankers whose background had nothing in common with the revolutionary forces set loose in Russia. The short lived Nya Bank (1912-1920) clearly acted as a conduit for funds from Germany to the Bolsheviks, and the convoluted connections between Nya, Morgan’s Guaranty Trust, the British Bank of North Commerce, the Rothschild-backed Disconto – Gesellchaft, Max Warburg and the Kuhn Loeb bank in New York and the Russian Minister of Finance, displayed financial interest that transcended normal politics. That Lenin and Trotsky should both owe their political re-emergence to such vested interests is, on the face of it, fundamentally wrong. These bankers and financiers were motivated by their own financial advantage, not the symbolic red flag. What was going on?

1. Pearson, The Sealed Train, p. 57.
2. See Blog, Munitions 8: The Strange and Unendearing Story of Basil Zaharoff, published originally on 22 July 2015..
3. Pearson, The Sealed Train, pp. 57- 8.
4. Ibid., pp. 58-59.
5. Ibid., p. 64.
6. Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, pp. 30-31.
7. Ibid., pp. 32-33.
8. Ibid. p. 33.
9. Pearson, The Sealed Train, p. 65.
10. Isaiah Friedman, The Question of Palestine: British-Jewish-Arab Relations, 1914-1918, p. 145.
11. Antony Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 40.
12. Pearson, The Sealed Train, p. 83.
13. Ibid., p. 49.
14. Pearson, The Sealed Train, p. 61.
15. Volkognov, Lenin, p. 115.
16. Ibid., p. 114.
17. Pearson, The Sealed Train, pp. 101-102.
18. Ibid., p. 83.
19. Sean McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, p. 225.
20. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, p. 57.
21. Ibid., p. 67.
22. McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, p. 59.
23. Niall Ferguson, The House of Rothschild, p. 384.
24. The convoluted and intricate means by which the Rothschilds and their associates on Wall Street funded the Bolsheviks are beyond the scope of this chapter, and we would point interested readers to the late Antony Sutton’s powerful book, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Professor Sutton revealed exactly how Guaranty Trust, American International Company and the Kuhn, Loeb bank of Jacob Schiff and Paul Warburg gave large sums of money not merely to Bolsheviks, but to the German espionage system.
25. A.N. Field, All These Things, vol.1. http://www.yamaguchy.com/library/field_an/things_01.htm
26. Sutton, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, pp. 186 -7.
27. Pearson, Sealed Train, p. 128.
28. Richard B. Spence, Hidden Agendas; Spies, Lies and Intrigue surrounding Trotsky’s American visit of January-April 1917.
29. Ibid.
30. Obituary. Sir Peter Bark, Bernard Pares The Slavonic and East European Review Vol. 16, No. 46 (Jul., 1937).

The Rape Of Russia 1: Out With The Old Order

The Russian Revolution began on 22 February, 1917 (O.S.) as a direct consequence of the actions of workers leaders at the massive Putilov armaments factories in Petrograd. Portrayed as a spontaneous and leaderless uprising of the downtrodden and oppressed proletariat, it was nothing of the sort. Workers’ leaders at the Putilov munitions works and other major industrial concerns in Petrograd, were bribed to stir up industrial and civil unrest.

At the Putilov factories they led some 30,000 workers out on strike after an angry and bitter tirade against the management over low wages. In the following days, workers at other factories across the city were similarly stirred to action, and encouraged to strike in support of the Putilov workforce. On 22 February, management at the great armaments works locked the factory gates. Were they were forewarned of possible sabotage? It was widely known that 23 February was International Women’s Day and that tens of thousands of women, many of whom were war widows or the wives of soldiers who had been badly wounded at the front, would march in protest against the war.

The Putilov workforce joined the women on the streets along with 90,000 other workers. Mass crowds paraded through the city protesting about food shortages, calling for an end to war and the overthrow of the monarchy. The following day numbers on the streets rapidly snowballed. Shop windows were smashed and hungry protestors helped themselves to bread. The Petrograd police shot several protestors, but were themselves, completely overwhelmed.

Just before Petrograd ‘spontaneously’ erupted, the British ambassador, Sir George Buchanan took himself out of town, ‘safely withdrawn from the scene of a tumult that he had contributed to kindle’. [1] It was an old ruse. Czar Nicholas II was some 500 miles away in Belarus in his role as Commander-in-Chief of the army. On 25 February, around thirty of the workers leaders met at the Petrograd Union of Workers Co-operative to set up a Soviet. On Sunday 26th, the Czar ordered a military crackdown. Forty, perhaps fifty, protestors were shot on the streets by troops from the city garrison, but there were increasing reports of desertion as disillusioned troops joined forces with the demonstrators.

The President of the Duma, Mikhail Rodzianko, sent urgent telegrams to the Czar. On 26 February, he warned of the seriousness of a situation which the government was incapable of suppressing: ‘The government is paralysed; the transport service has broken down; the food and fuel supplies are completely disorganised. Discontent is general and on the increase. There is wild shooting in the streets; troops are firing at each other. It is urgent that someone enjoying the confidence of the country be entrusted with the formation of a new government. There must be no delay. Hesitation is fatal.’ [2]

With exasperation bordering on despair, Rodzianko, raised the level of anxiety in a second telegram on 27th February: ‘The situation is growing worse. Measures should be taken immediately as tomorrow will be too late. The last hour has struck, when the fate of the country and dynasty is being decided. The government is powerless to stop the disorders. The troops of the garrison cannot be relied upon. The reserve battalions of the Guard regiments are in the grips of rebellion, their officers are being killed. Having joined the mobs and the revolt of the people, they are marching on the offices of the Ministry of the Interior and the Imperial Duma. Your Majesty, do not delay. Should the agitation reach the Army, Germany will triumph and the destruction of Russia along with the dynasty is inevitable.’ [3] Nicholas read the telegram, made a derogatory comment about Rodzianko, and remained at the Front … for three short days.

On 2 March 1917, (O.S.) Czar Nicholas II abdicated, initially in favour of his 13 year-old haemophiliac son, Alexei, but quickly changed his mind to favour his brother. Grand Duke Michael declined. He was a realist. Whatever the truth, Lenin was said to have known that Michael had been in favour of the February revolution and ‘had even worn a red ribbon in his buttonhole’. [4] The Czar caved in without any meaningful fight and Romanov rule came to an abrupt end after 300 years. Received history recounts that he abdicated because he had lost the loyalty of his army, but was this put to the test? Though he announced that he would stand down in the interests of the military, he privately recorded in his diary that: ‘All around is betrayal, cowardice and deceit!’ [5] He meekly surrendered the imperial throne, yet Rodzianko had clearly stated that the mob was marching on the Duma, not the Czar. He still commanded the army. Rodzianko warned that ‘should the agitation reach the army’ Germany would win the war. The army in the field stood loyal. So who had betrayed and deceived the last Czar?

What had been whispered in his ear? What role had Alfred Milner played in the Czar’s decision to abdicate? What warnings or indeed assurances had been given during his private meetings with Nicholas II just weeks earlier? As we have shown, the evidence points to Milner’s certain knowledge of what was about to take place before he had even departed Russia, although, once home, he tried to cover his complicity by making a clear statement to the contrary for public consumption. Had Nicholas been promised sanctuary in Britain, as he had previously been promised Constantinople?

 

On Nicholas II’s abdication, a provisional government was immediately cobbled together. Most of the chosen ministers were liberals from the previous Duma with a sound basis of support from the middle classes. They sought to establish a capitalist democracy similar to Britain and, most importantly, supported Russia’s continuation in the war until Germany was defeated. Of all their actions this was the key to support from Britain, America and the other Allies. News of the revolution and abdication was greeted in London with satisfaction by Prime Minister Lloyd George. [6] Across the Atlantic President Woodrow Wilson, spoke to Congress about ‘those marvellous and comforting events’ in Russia, where ‘autocracy’ had finally been struck down. [7] Did the Czar ever ponder that while he had talked about making peace with Germany he had been replaced with a government which promised to continue the war; the unpopular war; the debilitating war?

The speed with which the British government distanced itself from the Czar might be considered breathtaking, unless of course you are aware that the Secret Elite had sanctioned his removal. They were advised and updated by ambassador Sir George Buchanan and Sir John Hanbury-Williams [8] head of the British military mission to Russia. Both men represented the Secret Elite’s interests.

Buchanan was a foreign office fixture and Hanbury-Williams’s connection with Alfred Milner dated back to the Boer War where he served as Milner’s right-hand man and Military Aide de Camp. The British War Cabinet decided to present a resolution to parliament ‘sending paternal greetings to the Duma, heartfelt congratulations to the Russian people’ and praise for their ‘renewed steadfastness and vigour [in] the prosecution of the war against the autocratic militarism which threatens the liberty of Europe.’ [9] What? Was irony dead? For whose consumption was the notion that the Russian people, who had been subjugated to Czarist autocratic militarism for three centuries, wanted to continue the war against the alleged autocratic German militarism reputedly threatening Europe? These Secret Elite agents were shameless. They not only abandoned the Czar without hesitation, but instructed Hanbury-Williams to stay away from him or any member of the royal family so that Britain’s good relations with the Provisional government would be seen as more important.

Discussion on the Czar’s future concluded with the decision that ‘they were in doubt as to whether Great Britain was the right place for him to go.’ [10] He had been deeply unpopular in Britain before 1914, despised by the Jewish communities, the socialist and trades union organisations and fair minded liberals. Others questioned the advisability of the Czar seeking refuge in any neutral country where he could become the centre of intrigue, so the War Cabinet changed its mind within 24 hours. [11] In theory the Imperial Royal family might have found refuge in Britain. He never did. But consider what really mattered to the British Elite. The Czar was instantly abandoned and no more mention was made of promises like Constantinople, false or otherwise. Both were filed in the past tense. Gone.

Prince George Lvov, with whom Alfred Milner had spoken some weeks earlier, was named as the first post-imperial prime minister of the provisional government. Co-incidence? Hardly likely. Alexander Kerensky, a Menshevik, was appointed minister of war and navy. The new government, plagued with factional infighting and competition for authority, underwent several changes over the following months. The Bolsheviks had little influence on the seismic events of February/March 1917 or the new government. They were a tiny faction which had effectively been neutered by the enforced exile of their key leaders. The Mensheviks, if anything, fared worse. They ‘almost entirely disintegrated and became indistinguishable from other ‘progressives’, combining a patriotic attitude towards the war with a demand for ‘democratic’ reforms.’ [12] But the provisional government served its purpose for the interim period. The bankers and financiers from Wall Street circled above a fatally wounded Russian bear, salivating at the prospects of wondrous profits to come.

1. Guido Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 29.
2. http://www2.stetson.edu/~psteeves/classes/rodzianko.html
3. Ibid.
4. Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin, Life and Legacy, p. 106.
5. http://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/abdication-nicholas-ii-left-russia-without-tsar-first-time-300-years-180962503/
6. Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, p. 29.
7. Ibid.
8. National Archives FO telegram 514, dated 19 March 1915, and the reply FO telegram 514 dated 20 March 1917.
9. CAB/23/2 WC 100, 21 March 1917. p. 4.
10. Ibid., p. 5.
11. CAB 23/40/2, WC 101. 22 March,1917.
12. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 67.

Russia In Revolution 5: Sealing The Czar’s Fate

In a sense it was Gallipoli all over again. Hold the Russians fast to the war without allowing them to gain anything from their mammoth contribution. Until the United States entered the war and her troops were on the ground in Europe, Russian troops were valuable, but Russia could not be allowed to share the spoils when the ultimate victory had been secured. It was absolutely essential that the Czar be prevented from mounting a successful offensive in 1917. An Allied conference in St. Petersburg was hastily arranged, theoretically to discuss the proposed offensive, reach an agreement to supply vital armaments and boost local morale. Step forward Alfred Milner, undisputed master of the Secret Elite, to lead the British delegation. According to Cabinet papers, Milner was ‘authorised to give assurances on supplies to Russia if in his estimation the Russians could make good use of them’. [1] What power. Armament supplies to Russia were crucial to the proposed offensive, yet Milner was given personal authority to decide whether or not Britain would supply them. In his hands alone lay the power to determine whether the war would end in the summer/autumn of 1917 or continue beyond. If artillery was not provided, Russia’s summer offensive and consequent victory was a lost cause and the Czar’s fate sealed.

Alfred Milner and the British delegation sailed from Oban in Scotland on January 20, 1917. According to Bruce Lockhart, British Consul in Moscow, ‘Rarely in the history of great wars can so many important ministers and generals have left their respective countries on so useless an errand’. The British Mission was the largest with Lord Milner, his political advisers Lord Revelstoke (a banker) and George Clerk, together with his military advisers Sir Henry Wilson and five other generals. [2] The French sent one politician and two generals, the Italians a politician and a general. Why was there such a ridiculously heavy presence of generals in the British delegation? The role of General Sir Henry Wilson, who was closely linked to the secret cabal, was to give military approval to the final decision. Wilson hung on Milner’s every word and would never have contradicted him. In turn, few if any British generals would have dared contradict General Wilson. They had discussions with senior members of the Russian armed forces, but the Generals were said to be decidedly under-impressed. It was, apparently, ‘a useless errand’ just as the British consul had said, but in reality the real mission to block any Russian chance of gaining Constantinople worked perfectly.

Milner undertook the long, dangerous journey (Lord Kitchener had been killed on a similar voyage from Scotland to Russia in 1916) despite being advised not to go by a fellow member of the Secret Elite, Lord Esher. [3] On the day he arrived in Petrograd, and before he had even met or discussed the armaments proposal with the Russians, Milner made no attempt to conceal his doubt. From the very start he used ‘the inefficiency of the Russians’ as an excuse to turn down their request for artillery. [4] He held several meetings with the Czar, and held nothing back. Lord Milner warned Nicholas II that if Britain was to hand over her vital heavy guns, it was necessary for Russia to prove that her own supplies were exhausted and be absolutely assured that Russia could defeat Germany in the proposed military operations. Milner added bluntly that it had come to his notice from many independent, ‘well-informed sources’ that Russia had failed to fully exploit her manpower and her own vast resources.

Milner promised Nicholas II nothing. On 3 March 1917, he arrived back in London and informed the government of his decision: No guns for Russia. Three days later his formal report to the War Cabinet about the events that took place at the Allied Conference in Russia was dismissive. He felt that too many unnecessary people had attended, ironic, considering the size of the party which accompanied him, and too many personal and distracting agendas had been aired. In-fighting amongst the Russian military leaders was seriously debilitating. Milner claimed to have been shocked by the lack of training in modern weaponry which Russian soldiers had been given. Organisation, he deemed, ’chaotic’. He stated that the Russian government under the Czar was ‘hopeless’ and improvement unlikely, but in his view there was ‘a great deal of exaggeration about the talk of revolution’. [5] He specifically denied that an impending revolution was likely. Such an astonishing assertion requires further examination. Why, if the armed forces were in chaos, did he think that a revolution was unlikely?

Milner made a verbal report to a War Cabinet which included the prime ministers of Canada and New Zealand. All the Secret Elite political agents were present. No minute was taken [6] (a very unusual but convenient occurrence) and whatever was said, we will never know. His written memorandum for Cabinet (dated 13 March) that there would be no revolution, was signed 5 days after the uprising started. To imagine that the foreign office did not know this, or even that Milner could not have altered the wording of his report, is ridiculous. It was a calculated comment; one meant to deflect attention from his unreported discussions with other parties. Lord Alfred Milner knew exactly what was about to happen in Petrograd at that precise moment in time because the Secret Elite was instrumental in facilitating it.

Bruce Lockhart, the British Consul in Moscow, was shocked when told of Lord Milner’s conclusion that there would be no revolution. He suspected that the foreign office had prepared a false report, insisting that there was nothing in Milner’s attitude or discussions during his visit to indicate that he had any confidence in the Czar. [7] Nothing. Milner’s report had been concocted in conjunction with the Foreign Office to delude his contemporaries, and doubtless later historical researchers. In his War Memoirs, Prime Minister Lloyd George bemoaned the fact Milner and his entourage had not apparently grasped the immediate seriousness of the situation: ‘Having regard to the warnings which were blaring at them in every direction, it is incomprehensible that they should have been so deaf and blind.’ [8] Milner was neither blind nor deaf. As ever, he lived with the criticism which covered his actual purpose. He had always disregarded the screamers.

During his sojourn, Alfred Milner held a meeting with prince Lvov, a member of the Duma, at which the possibility of revolution ‘within three weeks’ was specifically discussed. [9] Lloyd George spouted what appeared to be criticism of Milner, but it was part and parcel of the ploy to conceal historical truth. Lloyd George was a political puppet of the Secret Elite, party to its agenda and a willing player. He had sold his soul to the international bankers for power and material riches many years before. [10] Almost three weeks to the day after Milner’s private discussions with Prince Lyoy, the so-called ‘spontaneous revolution’ took place in Petrograd. Czar Nicholas subsequently abdicated, and Lvov was installed as prime minister. Yet Milner apparently knew nothing?

Untangling the Secret Elite’s web of intrigue during the Russian mission is no simple matter. But be certain of one thing. Alfred Milner was not a man to waste his time, let alone risk U-Boat infested seas to journey to Russia in the depth of winter, unless it was a matter of the gravest importance. It was no coincidence that he was in Petrograd less than three weeks before the revolution exploded. He saw what was happening and he knew what was about to happen. The question of supplying Russia with artillery was most definitely not the reason for the visit. His presence at what was termed an Allied Conference was the perfect cover, for Milner had far more important business. Crucially, at that very time, Secret Elite agents were supplying monetary bribes to workers’ leaders at the giant Putilov factory and to soldiers of the local garrisons. The ground-work for imminent revolution was in motion while Milner was in Petrograd.

We know that he had private talks with the Czar, and it is not beyond the realms of possibility that Milner warned Nicholas II that British Intelligence had sound evidence that serious disorder was about to erupt in the capital; disorder which would present an immense threat to the Czar’s personal safety and that of his beloved children. The key objective of this Secret Elite exercise was to manipulate their own agents into power in Russia. Nicholas had served his purpose. Did Milner urge Nicholas to consider abdication with promises that he and his family would find a safe refuge in Britain? The speed with which the Czar abdicated and his lack of fight surprised many.

Milner’s involvement is not some far-fetched theory. He was accused in Parliament of making speeches in Russia which went unreported in Britain because of press censorship. The Irish Nationalist leader, John Dillon berated Milner for apparently supporting the Czar’s regime and spouting nonsense in Moscow denying the state of popular agitation in Russia. [11] When he returned to London, Milner was reported in The Times as saying that ‘it was quite wrong to suppose that there is in Russia any controversy about the waging of the war.’ [12] It was of course, nonsense, but such claims served to deflect attention from what was actually happening.

Two days later, the revolution began. In reply to questions in Parliament on 3 April 1917, Andrew Bonar Law, Chancellor of the Exchequer, and an associate of the secret cabal, stated: ‘I have seen statements emanating from our enemies that it was owing to Lord Milner that the Czar was overthrown.’ [13] What? Milner clearly made unreported speeches and met unreported persons. But what more did the Germans know? Where is the proof that Milner caused the overthrow of the Czar? Yet again we reach an impasse on Milner’s activities. Reports and records were afterwards removed, correspondence burned on his orders and any evidence of his detailed machinations destroyed. Whatever else, Alfred Milner was no innocent aboard. He knew what was going on because, like his Rothschild/Secret Elite friends, he had his finger on the pulse before the heart could beat.

If the received history of the First World War was true, why would he turn down the chance to offer Russia materiel support for its massive summer offensive; an offensive that would most likely have shattered the enemy forces on the Eastern Front and brought the war to successful conclusion? Why turn down lucrative bank loans to Russia for weapons, and the substantial profits for British armaments companies which manufactured those weapons? The answer was, as always, Constantinople. The Russians could never be allowed to take possession of Constantinople.

While the Czarist authorities there were doing their utmost to dampen the revolutionary flames, the Secret Elite were fanning them. In an article in the New York Times, the explorer, journalist and Russian expert, George Kennan, revealed that in early 1917 Jacob Schiff of Kuhn, Loeb Bank on Wall Street financed Russian revolutionaries through an organisation, the Society of the Friends of Russian Freedom. [14]  Indeed, Schiff had financed Russian revolutionaries from at least 1905.

The Czar had conferred with George Buchanan, British Ambassador in Petrograd, informing him that if the planned offensive could not proceed through lack of artillery supplies from Britain, he intended to sue for peace with Germany. Nicholas II had no inkling of the extent to which Britain was determined to prevent any dialogue between Russia and Germany. The British Ambassador in Russia himself was at the centre of a scheme to overthrow the Czar if he lost his stomach for war. To that end he had gathered ‘a coterie of wealthy bankers, liberal capitalists, conservative politicians, and disgruntled aristocrats.’ [15]

Empty threat or not, the Czar had discussed signing a peace treaty with Germany, and it was patently clear to the Secret Elite that he would have to go. During and immediately after Milner’s mission to Russia, many local observers, visitors and newsmen reported that British and American agents were everywhere, especially in Petrograd, providing money for insurrection. British agents were seen handing over 25-rouble notes to soldiers in the Pavloski regiment just a few hours before they mutinied against their officers and sided with the revolutionaries. [16] Subsequent publication of various memoirs and documents made it clear that this funding was provided by Milner and channelled through Sir George Buchanan. It was a repeat of the ploy that had worked so well for the cabal many times in the past. Round Table members [17] were once again operating on both sides of the conflict to weaken and topple a target-government. Czar Nicholas had every reason to believe that, since the British were Russia’s trusted allies, their officials would be the last on earth to conspire against him. Yet, the British Ambassador himself represented the hidden cabal which was financing the regime’s downfall. [18]

1. National Archives CAB 23/1 War Cabinet 37, 18 January 1917. P.3.
2. R.H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 162.
3. J. Lee Thompson, Forgotten Patriot, p. 335.
4. R.H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, p. 163.
5. CAB/ 24/3/36 Lord Milner’s Memorandum of 13 March, 1917 (G – 131).
6. CAB 23/2 War Cabinet 88.
7. R.H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, pp. 168-169.
8. Lloyd George, War Memoirs vol 1., p. 943.
9. R.H. Bruce Lockhart, Memoirs of a British Agent, pp. 164.
10. Docherty and Macgregor, Hidden History, pp. 161-163.
11. House of Commons Debate 27 March 1917 vol 92 cc295-318.
12. The Times, 6 March 1917, p. 6.
<13. House of Commons Debate 03 April 1917 vol 92 c1120.
14 New York Times, March 24, 1917.
15. Preparata, Conjuring Hitler, pp 28-29.
16. G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 274.
17. The Round Table was an influential think-tank pressure group which was built around Alfred Milner and his acolytes. Its prime aim was to spread his ideas of expanding the Empire to encompass the entire world.
18. G. Edward Griffin, The Creature from Jekyll Island, p. 274.

Russia In Revolution 4: Leaders-In-Waiting

Russia’s hopes for victory over Germany were dashed early. At Tannenberg and the First Battle of the Masurian Lakes, in 1914, the Czar lost two entire armies of over 250,000 troops. Although the Russian advance into East Prussia disrupted the German plan of attack and impacted on, or indeed prevented the fall of Paris on the Western Front, it also signalled the beginning of an unrelenting Russian retreat on the Eastern Front. By the middle of 1915 all of Russian Poland and Lithuania, and most of Latvia, were overrun by the German army. Fortunately for the Russians, their performance on the field of battle improved in 1916. The supply of rifles and artillery shells to the Eastern Front had been markedly improved, and in June 1916, Russia achieved significant victories over the Austrians and the Turks. However, the country’s political and economic problems were greatly exacerbated by the war. Many factors – including the militarisation of industry and crises in food supply – threatened disaster on the home front. [1] But where were the leaders of the revolution?

After war had been declared, all opposition was clamped down. In the early months of fighting, five Soviet Deputies and other members of the Duma who condemned the war, were arrested and exiled in Siberia. Pravda was suppressed and the central Bolshevik organisation in Russia was virtually broken by the authorities. Local bolshevik groups inside Russia continued surreptitious propaganda, but communications with Lenin and the central committee in Switzerland were intermittent and dangerous. Lenin was resident in Vienna when the war began, but moved to the comfort and safety of neutral Switzerland where he wrote, watched and waited. The Bolshevik movement was relatively quiescent because so many leading members were either exiled abroad or had been sent to Siberia.

Lenin’s small émigré cabal held a conference in Berne and called on all armies to turn their weapons ‘not against brothers and the hired slaves of other countries, but against the reactionary and Bourgeois governments of all countries’. [2] Communication with Russia was slow, but Lenin gained a growing impression that ‘an earthquake’ was approaching because of the hardships imposed by war and the strain of constant defeats.

Lenin resided in Switzerland for the first two years of war while Trotsky spent 1915-1916 across the border in France, repeatedly irritating the French authorities. He attended the international socialist conference in Zimmerwald, Switzerland, in September 2015 which called for an end to the war and wrote inflammatory articles for a small anti-militarist Menshevik journal Nashe Slovo (Our Word). In September 1916 a group of Russian soldiers from a transport ship at Marseilles rioted and stoned their colonel to death. When the riot was put down and the soldiers arrested, some were found to be in possession of Nashe Slovo which contained anti-war articles written by Trotsky. He claimed that the newspapers had been planted by French police to provide a reason to expel him from the country. On 30 October 1916, two gendarmes escorted him to the Spanish border from where Trotsky made his way to Madrid. On 9 November, after ten days of unrestricted freedom in that expansive city, Spanish detectives apparently tracked him down and arrested him as a ‘known anarchist’ and undesirable alien. [3]

Here begins a remarkable story, largely drawn from Leon Trotsky’s autobiography. [4] A mysterious benefactor arranged Trotsky’s release from jail in Madrid and his transfer, under police supervision, to the southern port of Cadiz. There he waited for another six weeks. On 24 November, Trotsky wrote a long and revealing letter to his comrade Moisei Uritskii in Copenhagen in which he confessed that when he arrived in Cadiz he had roughly 40 francs in his pocket. Somehow, the Trotsky–Uritskii letter fell into the hands of the British Secret Service. British intelligence, under the control of the admiralty’s Naval Intelligence Division (NID), headed by Admiral William Reginald ‘Blinker’ Hall [5] watched his every move. Hall played a central role for the Secret Elite inside the admiralty and amongst his dubious achievements he manoeuvred the Lusitania into the jaws of a German U-Boat off the south coast of Ireland in 1915 and monitored communications between the American embassy in London and Washington. [See Blog] But who was Moisei Uritskii?

A Russian lawyer, Uritskii was a member of the Jewish socialist party, the Labour Bund, and spent a period of time in exile. After the Bolsheviks seized power, Uritskii was installed as head of the Petrograd division of the feared Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka, and directly responsible for the torture and death of many innocents. In Copenhagen, Moisei Uritskii was closely associated with another revolutionary plotter, Alexander Israel Helphand-Parvus,’ [6] yet another very important player in Secret Elite intrigues. These connections cannot be explained by chance.

After a relaxing stay in Cadiz, Trotsky was taken to Barcelona to be ‘deported’ to New York. Why Barcelona? Cadiz was an equally important seaport with closer connections to New York. According to Trotsky, ‘I managed to get permission to go there to meet my family.’ [7] Trotsky’s second wife, Natalia, and their two sons were brought by ‘special arrangement’ from Paris to join him in Barcelona where they were taken on tourist trips by the detectives. From whom did he obtain special ‘permission’? This was not the normal sequence of events; first class prison cell, hotels in Cadiz and Barcelona, sightseeing with his detectives? The man was not being treated as an ‘undesirable alien’. He and his family were being pampered. At Barcelona, on Christmas Day 1916, they boarded the Spanish passenger ship, Monserrat to New York. Immigration Service archives relating to foreign nationals arriving at Ellis Island in 1916 indicated that the Trotsky family travelled first class to New York. Moreover, information collected by American immigration showed that the fares had been purchased for him not by him. [8] But by whom?

A fellow passenger, one of the very few with whom Trotsky engaged, was the light-heavyweight prize fighter, Arthur Cravan who had been defeated in a world title fight in Barcelona in front of a crowd of 30,000. The purpose behind Cravan’s journey is unknown, but the intriguing possibility has been raised that he was a British agent sent to glean as much information as he could from Trotsky. On arrival in New York he would have reported to Sir William Wiseman, head of British Intelligence in the United States. [9] There is the additional possibility that the tall, powerfully built, Cravan  served as Trotsky’s personal bodyguard. This is not as fanciful as it might first appear. He had clearly been exceptionally well protected by plain clothes police officers throughout his time in Spain. Trotsky’s expected arrival in the United States had been published in the American press at the very time anti-German propaganda and pro-war jingoism moved into overdrive. The international bankers who were to use him as one of their major pawns in their Russian intervention wanted no mishap to befall a key player before the game had even started.

Monserrat arrived in New York late at night on January 13, 1917. The passenger manifest prepared for the U.S. immigration authorities showed that Trotsky was carrying at least $500 (an equivalent of $10,000 today). His initial residence was given as the exclusive Astor Hotel, the favoured haunt of the banking and financial elites when in New York. The reservation had been made for him by persons as yet unknown. [10] Trotsky failed to record in his autobiography that he and his family stayed at the Astor, but related how he ‘rented’ an apartment in a ‘workers district’, paying three month’s rent in advance.

The apartment, on Vyse Avenue in the Bronx, had every convenience, including ‘a gas cooking range, bath, telephone, automatic service elevator and a chute for garbage.’ [11] There was even a concierge. Perhaps most astonishingly, the family used a chauffeured limousine. Trotsky, the ‘impoverished, undesirable’ revolutionary, had enjoyed a first-class cell in Madrid; stayed at upmarket hotels in Cadiz then Barcelona for six weeks; went on guided tours with his family; travelled first-class on a 13 day voyage to New York; stayed at a luxury hotel before renting an excellent apartment in New York and enjoyed stylish living standards and a chauffeur. How? In stark contrast to his immense good fortune, concurrent events in Russia precipitated disaster. While Trotsky luxuriated in New York, revolution exploded on the streets of St Petersburg. Odd that Trotsky and Lenin were comfortably moth-balled outwith the danger zone, leaders-in-waiting, supported and protected by un-named persons.

The Czar and military authorities recognised that civilian discontent was once again rampant throughout the country. They were likewise acutely aware ‘that gigantic forces were at work fomenting a revolutionary movement on an unprecedented scale.’ [12] In late December 1916 the highly controversial Russian faith healer, Grigori Rasputin, was brutally murdered. The Czarina had fallen completely under Rasputin’s influence in 1907 when she believed he had the power to save her haemophiliac son.

Other violent events presaged the ‘earthquake’ that Lenin had predicted but the Czar hoped to ward off revolution by victory in the field and the ultimate prize of Constantinople. Desperate to achieve this, Russia’s most able military leaders planned a great summer offensive in 1917 with upwards of 7,000,000 troops thrown onto the Eastern Front. They intended to breach the gates of Berlin, Vienna and Constantinople. Insufficient armaments, especially artillery, was a problem, but they were confident that Britain and America would supply these vital requirements. The Russians believed that ‘the very pressure of this colossal army, combined with a simultaneous offensive by the British and French on the Western Front, would beat Germany to her knees and lead to an overwhelming victory by September, 1917.’ [13]

Alarm bells rang in the hidden corridors of power. The secret cabal in London no longer had any need for a massive Russian offensive to win the war. They knew, from the earliest days of 1915, that victory was certain once supplies of food, oil, minerals, gun cotton and the wherewithal to produce munitions in Germany, were stopped. But the war had to be prolonged almost beyond endurance to crush Germany. That was at all times the primary objective. April 1917 saw America abandon her sham neutrality and enter the fray. Fresh blood from across the Atlantic would help replace the millions still being haemorrhaged on the Western Front. Russia had more or less served her purpose. The Americans were coming.

The Secret Elite had promised the Czar that Russia would be given Constantinople as a just reward for the Russian war effort, but were determined that it would never come to pass. Although the Allies had sacrificed a quarter of a million men on the Dardanelles and Gallipoli campaigns, as explained earlier, these were deliberately set to fail in order to keep Russia involved in the war but out of Constantinople. In 1915 such action was critically important. Two years on, circumstances had radically changed. The Secret Elite would certainly not allow Russia to take possession of the Ottoman capital in 1917 through a major offensive that might end the war. They intended to carve up the Ottoman Empire for themselves, and Russia would not be permitted to interfere.

Further steps had to be taken to ensure Russian failure. If that caused a consequent regime change, so be it. There was no love for the Romanovs in the foreign office. The Secret Elite had to ensure that a possible future rival for key parts of the Turkish Empire, the oil-rich sands of Persia or the vital trading routes to India was removed. Permanently.

1. Dr Jonathan Smele, Warned the Revolution in Russia, 1914-1921 in BBC History http://www.bbc.co.uk/history/worldwars/wwone/eastern_front_01.shtml
2. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 66.
3. Richard B. Spence, Hidden Agendas; Spies, Lies and Intrigue surrounding Trotsky’s American visit of January-April 1917. https://www.scribd.com/doc/124323217/HIDDEN-AGENDAS-SPIES-LIES-AND-INTRIGUE-SURROUNDING-TROTSKY-S-AMERICAN-VISIT-OF-JANUARY-APRIL-1917
4. Leon Trotsky, My Life, An Attempt at an Autobiography.
5. Ibid.
6. Ibid.
7. Trotsky, My Life, p. 267.
8. Richard B. Spence, Hidden Agendas; Spies, Lies and Intrigue surrounding Trotsky’s American visit of January-April 1917.
9. Ibid.
10. Ibid.
11. Ibid.
12. Boris L. Brasol, The World at the Crossroads, p. 58.
13. Ibid., pp. 62-64.