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).

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.

Revolution In Russia 2: The Struggle Within; Bolshevism or Menshevism?

Years prior to the Bolshevik seizure of power, Lenin and many other young revolutionaries who voiced their opposition to the backward Czarist regime were condemned to exile in Siberia. Among them was Leon Davidovitch Bronstein, alias Leon Trotsky, who was sentenced to four years in the frozen wilderness. Trotsky was a Marxist, like Lenin and knew him well, but he initially sided with a softer faction socialism rather than Lenin’s hard-line Bolsheviks. He later switched his allegiance to Lenin when both were financed by western bankers to seize power in October 1917. Thereafter, he became second in command of the Bolsheviks, founded the Red army, and was every bit as infamous as Lenin.

Trotsky was born in 1879 in a small rural village, Yankova, in southern Ukraine. His father, although illiterate, was a relatively wealthy farmer. Resourceful and acquisitive, Bronstein senior owned over 250 acres of land and became a substantial employer. Both of Trotsky’s parents were Jewish, but unlike his agrarian father, his mother was an educated and cultured city dweller from Odessa. Religious observance was of little importance to either, but they sent Leon to a beder, a Jewish school. [1]

In 1902 Trotsky escaped from exile in Siberia, leaving behind his wife Alexandra and their two young daughters. According to Trotsky, it was Alexandra who had insisted that he put his duty to revolution before family. [2] Trotsky blamed ‘fate’ for their separation, but his actions suggested unbridled pragmatism and ‘an urge to free himself from a burden in order to move on to higher things.’ [3] Soon after abandoning his wife and children in Siberia, he divorced Alexandra and married Natalia Sedova, daughter of a wealthy merchant.

In the early years of the century numerous other revolutionaries, who had either completed their exile or escaped from Siberia, left Russia for cities in Western Europe. Many thousands more made their way to New York where they formed a powerful revolutionary group in exile. Banned from St Petersburg, Lenin and a fellow activist, Julius Martov, settled in Munich in Germany where they promoted the Russian Social Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP). Lenin believed the party had to be run from outside Russia. The RSDLP called its journal Iskra (The “Spark”) believing that from that spark, the flame of revolution would spring: ‘The agents would distribute it, spread party propaganda through local cells and channel information to the Central Committee. The journal would help create a cohesive party that until then had consisted of a series of independent groups.’ [4] Lenin firmly believed Karl Marx’s dictum that capitalism would inevitably disintegrate in Russia and elsewhere because it carried within it the forces of its own destruction. Thereafter, power would be grasped by the workers, the men and women who had been exploited by capital. So the theory ran.

In late 1901, harassed by the Munich police, Lenin and the Iskra editors moved to Finsbury in London where they were joined for a time by Leon Trotsky. Arguments about the best means of instigating revolution in Russia and elsewhere led to ever increasing conflict, especially between Lenin and his friend and comrade, Julius Martov. Internal wrangling exploded at the 1903 party congress which began in Brussels in July, but was suspended after pressure by the Russian embassy led to fear of police persecution and forced the delegates to complete their business in London. It was ‘the first major conference that was truly representative of party delegates from Russia and all over Europe’. [5] The congress was attended by representatives of 25 recognised social-democratic organisations who had two votes each. For some reason each representative of the Jewish workers organisation, the Bund, had three votes ‘in virtue of the special status … accorded to it by the first congress.’ [6]

The congress was dominated by the Iskra group, but Lenin realized that he could not carry the party forward in the way he desired, so he deliberately split it. Consequently, the revolutionaries divided into ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ factions. Lenin wanted clear-cut, perfectly defined relationships within the party, and behind the scenes there was a struggle for the support of every individual delegate. Lenin tried to convince Trotsky that he should join the ‘hard’ faction, but he refused. [7]

The ‘hard’ faction was led by Lenin who proclaimed his followers to be the bolshinstvo, the ‘men in the majority’, and thereafter they became known as the Bolsheviks. Marxist intellectuals and those of a less intense ideology were attracted to the ‘soft’ faction while the hard Bolshevik group, although it had its share of intellectuals, was favoured more by provincial party workers and professional revolutionaries: “the bacteria of the revolution” as Lenin called them. Basically, the ‘softs’ favoured debate while the hard-line Bolsheviks were militants who considered themselves exclusively the champions of the Russian working class.

Lenin wanted a party he was able to control tightly, and did so through a team of highly disciplined secret workers employed in a semi-military fashion. It was his brainchild, his party, and above all it was his aim to make it the instrument for revolution and the overthrow of the monarchy, despite the knowledge that ‘it could not be achieved without countless victims.’ [8]

Julius Martov’s group, including Alexander Kerensky, was allegedly the minority (menshinstvo) in the RSDLP and became known as the Mensheviks. They favoured the establishment of a parliamentary form of government like the French Republic. At first Mensheviks sought to work within the system, believing that revolution in Russia would be started by the middle classes, not the proletariat. Although he flatly refused to join the Bolsheviks, Trotsky was never truly at home with the Mensheviks and aimed to occupy the middle ground. [9] He was an internationalist who believed in the abolition of all territorial borders. This, of course, sat well with the long-term globalist goal of dissolution of independent nation states and implementation of one world government so dear to the heart of the Secret Elite. When the Mensheviks ignored Trotsky’s call for reconciliation, he effectively distanced himself from the Bolsheviks. Though nominally still a Menshevik, he attended the Fifth Party Congress of the Bolsheviks in London in 1907 where he met Joseph Stalin. [10]

Lenin subscribed to the consensus view within the RSDLP that revolution should lead to a ‘constituent assembly’ elected by the whole people on the basis of ‘universal, equal and direct suffrage, and with secrecy of the ballot’, but it was the manner in which it could be brought which differentiated his stance from the ‘soft’ Mensheviks. He scoffed at their call for a peaceful democratic processes. ‘Without armed insurrection’ he thundered, ‘a constituent assembly is a phantom, a phrase, a lie, a Frankfort talking-shop’. [11] At the third all-Bolshevik congress in London in April 1905, Lenin gave a long speech on the need for an armed uprising and expressed outrage that the Mensheviks had invited the Social Democrats to take part in elections to the czarist parliament. He considered the slow process of parliamentary reform as blasphemy and his language towards the Mensheviks grew more extreme. That in turn made party reunification impossible. [12]

Julius Martov, encouraged by Trotsky, considered ending the divisions, but Lenin regarded reunification of the party as an opportunity for the Bolsheviks to swallow up the Mensheviks. In the end Martov, who wanted to retain democratic principles within the Party, rejected this compromise. In 1908 he wrote to his Menshevik comrade Pavel Axelrod: ‘I confess that more and more I think that even nominal involvement with this bandit gang is a mistake’. [13] It was this same Bolshevik ‘bandit gang’ that took control of Russia in October 1917 backed by the international bankers. In the final analysis, the difference between the two factions boiled down to the Bolsheviks’ concept of socialism on the basis of a dictatorship, and the Mensheviks’ on the basis of democracy’. [14] The split widened and deepened until it led to a formal separation after 1912. [15]

Lenin and Trotsky traded insults over the years. Trotsky’s deeply held belief lay in the democratic ‘Westernising’ principle, but Lenin considered him evasive, underhand, and ‘merely posing as a leftist’. Trotsky retorted that ‘the entire structure of Leninism is at present based on lies and falsification and carries within it the poisonous seeds of its own destruction.’ [16] According to Trotsky, Lenin had lost sight of the struggle for the emancipation of the working class and had become a despot who spoke of the victory of the proletariat when he really meant victory over the proletariat. [17] Trotsky was correct but his instinct was insufficiently strong to maintain the rift between them, especially, as we will shortly detail, wealthy outside influences drew them together.

1. Dmitri Volkogonov, Trotsky, The Eternal Revolutionary, pp. 2-3.
2. Leon Trotsky, My Life, p. 132.
3. Volkogonov, Trotsky, pp. 11-12.
4. Michael Pearson, The Sealed Train, Journey to Revolution, p. 26.
5. Ibid., p. 30.
6. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution 1917-1923, p. 26.
7. Trotsky, My Life, p. 160.
8. Dimitri Volkogonov, Lenin, Life and Legacy, p. xxxii.
9. Pearson, The Sealed Train, p. 31.
10. Volkcogonov, Trotsky, p. 47.
11. E. H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, p. 86.
12. Volkcogonov, Lenin, p. 84.
13. Volkogonov, Lenin, Life and Legacy, pp. 85-86.
14. Ibid.
15. E.H. Carr, The Bolshevik Revolution, p.26.
16. Volkogonov, Trotsky, pp. 30-31.
17. Pearson, The Sealed Train, p. 32.

Revolution In Russia 1: Understanding Influences

The First World War drained Russia, literally and metaphorically. By January 1917, after two-and-a-half years of mortal combat, six million young Russians had been killed, seriously wounded or lost in action for no territorial or strategic gain. The dream of winning Constantinople had become a nightmare of miserable defeat. Food shortages, hunger, anti-war agitation and civil unrest increased by the day across the Czar’s once-mighty Empire. On 22 February, 1917, 12,000 workers at the giant Putilov manufacturing plant in Petrograd [1] went on strike and were joined on the streets by thousands of demonstrators chanting ‘Down with the Czar’. Soldiers from the city garrison were sent out to arrest the ring-leaders and end the protest, but they refused to open fire on the angry crowds. The Czar abdicated almost immediately, allegedly because he believed that he had lost the support of his military. The event was bloodless apart from the death of several officers shot by their own men. Thus the first Russian Revolution, known as the ‘February Revolution’, ended 300 years of autocratic monarchical rule. A governing body was established in the Winter Palace in Petrograd by liberal deputies from the existing parliamentary body, the Duma, together with socialists and independents. Termed the ‘Provisional Government’, it kept Russia in the war against Germany and began formulating plans for democratic rule through an elected legislative assembly of the people. It was a beginning.

The seizure of power by Bolshevik revolutionaries on 25 October, 1917, [2] brought communism to Russia and major strife to the entire world for the greater part of the twentieth century. For readers not versed in modern Russian history it is important to note that the Bolshevik Revolution was very distinct from the revolution that had taken place eight months earlier.

During the night of October 24/25, a group of armed communists seized key areas of Petrograd, entered the Winter Palace and assumed control of the country. The coup was led by Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky, two extreme Marxist revolutionaries who had returned to Russia earlier that year from enforced exile. This was the ‘Bolshevik Revolution’, also known as the ‘October Revolution’. Lenin and Trotsky smothered the fledgling attempt at democratic governance, took Russia out of the war with Germany and installed a ruthless communist system that suppressed Russia for the next seventy-four years.

According to received history, the February Revolution was an entirely spontaneous uprising of the people. It was not. The Putilov strike, and the city garrison’s refusal to act against the strikers, was orchestrated from abroad by well-financed agents who had been stirring unrest among the workers and soldiers with propaganda and bribery. The October Revolution was also directly influenced by the same international bankers, with vast financial and logistical support which enabled Lenin and Trotsky to seize power. What is particularly relevant to the Secret Elite narrative is the evidence of their complicity from both sides of the Atlantic. Without external intervention, the Russian Revolutions would never have taken the ruinous direction which destroyed a nation’s hope for justice and democracy. As these blogs unfold over the next weeks please bear this in mind.

Russia had been ruled by the ‘divine right’ of Czars from the reign of Ivan the Terrible (1547-1584) until the abdication of Nicholas II in February 1917. The ruling Romanovs dynasty was one of the richest families in the world, on a par with the Rothschilds. They owned huge estates with elaborate palaces, yachts, a massive collection of diamonds (amounting to 25,300 carats), emeralds, sapphires and fifty-four of the priceless jewel-encrusted Faberge eggs. [3] In May 1917, the New York Times estimated the total wealth of the dynasty to be in the region of $9,000,000,000, [4] a breath-taking sum today let alone a century ago. A significant number of upper and middle class Russians (the bourgeoisie), included merchants, government officials, lawyers, doctors and army officers who enjoyed comfortable incomes and life styles. That said, urban factory workers (the proletariat) and rural agrarian workers (the peasants) comprised the vast majority of the population of 175 million in 1914. But the war haemorrhaged both youth and loyalty. The populace survived on the edge of poverty and hunger, but did not generally support revolutionaries. [5] If radical change was required, it would have to be manufactured.

Czar Alexander II had abolished serfdom in 1861 but opposed movements for political reform. Having survived several attempts on his life, he was eventually assassinated on the streets of St Petersburg in 1881 by members of a revolutionary group, ‘People’s Will’, led by a Jew, Vera Figner. Thereafter, the Jews in the Pale of Settlement [6] were subjected to a series of terrifying pogroms (religious-ethnic massacres). Over the following decades peasants rebelled over taxes which left them debt ridden and oppressed by hopelessness. Workers went on strike for better wages and working conditions. Students demanded civil liberties for all, and even the comfortable bourgeoisie began calling for representative government. Though this clamour for social change and greater equality was apparent across Europe, the Romanovs resisted challenges to their autocratic authority with bitter determination.

In 1897, in the midst of this social unrest, a 27 year-old Marxist lawyer and intellectual Russian radical, Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov, was arrested by Czarist secret police (the Okhrana) for subversive activities and sentenced to three years exile in Siberia. Ulyanov was treated lightly in comparison to his older brother, Alexander, who ten years earlier plotted to assassinate Czar Alexander III and was hanged for his troubles. Vladimir Ulyanov took the alias Lenin and would go on to become the most powerful man in Russia following the October Revolution.

Born in Simbirsk (renamed Ulyanovsk in his honour in 1924), a town on the Volga some 900 kilometres east of Moscow, Lenin’s father was an inspector of the provinces schools. His mother, the daughter of a baptised Jewish doctor, Alexander Blank, [7] bought the family a farm of some two hundred acres near Samara for 7,500 roubles. The fact that Lenin had Jewish forebears would have had absolutely no relevance were it not for the fact that many consider the Bolshevik Revolution to have been a Jewish plot. We have already explained how powerful individuals within the Secret Elite who supported Zionism were behind the Balfour Declaration of 2 November, 1917 which led eventually to the creation of the state of Israel. Within 72 hours of that declaration, the men who were financed and aided by these same individuals, seized control of Russia. It does not require a great leap of imagination to consider the possibility that these two seismic events in world history were connected in some way.

In March 1919, The Times reported, ‘One of the most curious features of the Bolshevist movement is the high percentage of non-Russia elements amongst its leaders. Of the 20 or 30 leaders who provide the central machinery of the Bolshevist movement, not less than 75 per cent are Jews …’ [8] Note that The Times differentiated between Russian and Jew, as if it were not possible to be both, while the Jewish Chronicle emphasised the importance of the Jewish influence on Bolshevism: ‘There is much in the fact of Bolshevism itself, in the fact that so many Jews are Bolsheviks, in the fact that the ideals of Bolshevism at many points are consonant with the finest ideals of Judaism’. [9] Another Jewish journal, American Hebrew, reported: ‘What Jewish idealism and Jewish discontent have so powerfully contributed to produce in Russia, the same historic qualities of the Jewish mind are tending to promote in other countries … The Bolshevik revolution in Russia was the work of Jewish brains, of Jewish dissatisfaction, of Jewish planning, whose goal is to create a new order in the world. What was performed in so excellent a way in Russia, thanks to Jewish brains, and because of Jewish dissatisfaction and by Jewish planning, shall also, through the same Jewish mental and physical forces, become a reality all over the world.’ [10] It is interesting to note that in 1920, just three years after the Balfour Declaration, Jewish journals were openly discussing the primacy of Jews in creating a new world order.

Rabbi Stephen Wise later commented on the Russian situation: ‘Some call it Marxism I call it Judaism.’ [11] Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, a victim of the communist regime who spent many years exiled in Siberia and was a later recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature, was emphatic that Jews were not involved in the first revolution: ‘The February Revolution was not made by the Jews for the Russians; it was certainly carried out by the Russians themselves … We were ourselves the authors of this shipwreck.’ [12] Solzhenitsyn, however, added: ‘In the course of the summer and autumn of 1917, the Zionist movement continued to gather strength in Russia: in September it had 300,000 adherents. Less known is that Orthodox Jewish organisations enjoyed great popularity in 1917, yielding only to the Zionists and surpassing the socialist parties.’ [13] He observed: ‘There are many Jewish authors who to this very day either deny the support of Jews for Bolshevism, or even reject it angrily, or else…only speak defensively about it… These Jewish renegades were for several years leaders at the centre of the Bolshevik Party, at the head of the Red Army (Trotsky), of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee, of the two capitals, of the Comintern …’ [14] Given the repression of the Jews in Russia, it is hardly surprising that they swelled the numbers of active revolutionaries during this period. They had suffered the horror of the pogroms. They had nursed a genuine resentment for Czarist repression. They were determined to change the world.

The relationship between Jews and revolutionaries was explained by Theodor Herzl, one of the fathers of the Zionist movement in a pamphlet, De Judenstat, addressed to the Rothschilds: ‘When we sink, we become a revolutionary proletariat, the subordinate officers of all revolutionary parties, and at the same time, when we rise, there rises also our terrible power of the purse’. [15] On Herzl’s death, his successor as president of the World Zionist Organisation was the Russian born David Wolfsohn. In his closing speech at the International Zionist Congress at The Hague in 1907, Wolfsohn pleaded for greater unity among the Jews and said that eventually ‘they must conquer the world’. [16] He did not expand on the role that Jewish Bolshevik revolutionaries might play in this Jewish global aspiration, but from his position it seems apparent that political Zionism and the future ‘homeland’ certainly would. [17] Wolfsohn’s successor as president of the Zionist organisation in 1911 was Otto Warburg, a noted scientist and relative of the Warburg banking family which features heavily in this book. Warburg later spoke of the ‘brilliant prospects of Palestine’ and how an extensive Jewish colonisation would ‘expand into neighbouring countries’. [18]

A report in 1919 from the British Secret Service revealed: ‘There is now definite evidence that Bolshevism is an international movement controlled by Jews; communications are passing between the leaders in America, France, Russia and England, with a view toward concerted action.’ [19] Hilaire Belloc, Anglo-French writer, philosopher and one time Liberal MP at Westminster, wrote: ‘As for anyone who does not know that the present revolutionary movement is Jewish in Russia, I can only say that he must be a man who is taken in by the suppression of our despicable Press. [20] Contemporary commentators failed to link the Balfour Declaration and the Russian Revolution in October/November 1917, despite their links to Zionism and the ‘concerted action’ from both sides of the Atlantic. It should not be seen as a criticism; it was a fact.

1. The Russian capital, St Petersburg, was renamed Petrograd at the beginning of WW1 to give it a less German sounding name. It reverted to St Petersburg on the fall of communism.
2. The date, October 25, 1917, was calculated by the old-style the Julian calendar then still used in Russia – The Gregorian calendar used elsewhere in Europe and the United States registered the date as November 7, 1917, thus the old style Julian calendar was 13 days behind the Gregorian.
3. Sean McMeekin, History’s Greatest Heist, The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks, p. xix.
4. New York Times, 12 May, 1917.
5. Peter Waldron, The End of Imperial Russia, 1855 – 1917, p. 22.
6. The Pale of Settlement was territory within the borders of czarist Russia wherein Jews were legally authorised to live. It included present day Belarus, Ukraine, Poland, Moldova and much of Latvia and Lithuania.
7. Dmitri Volkogonov, Lenin, Life and Legacy, p. 5.
8. The Times, 29 March, 1919.
9. Jewish Chronicle, 4 April, 1919.
10. American Hebrew, 20 September, 1920.
11. Rabbi Stephen Wise, The American Bulletin, 5 May, 1935.
12. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn Juifs et Russes pendant la periode soviétique, Volume 2, pp. 44–45.
13. Ibid., p. 54.
14. Ibid., p. 91.
15. https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_7cNJAAAAMAAJ
16. New York Times, September 17, 1914, David Wolfsohn obituary.
17. Zionism in Europe and America proved to be a comparatively slow-burning evolution. Between 1900 -1917 there was a serious divergence between Zionists who promoted a faith based assimilist belief, and the political Zionists who had one aim – a return to what they claimed as their former homeland in Palestine.
18. Jewish Telegraphic Agency, July 14, 1929. http://www.jta.org/1929/07/14/archive/german-zionists-celebrate-seventieth-birthday-of-otto-warburg
19. Scotland Yard, A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad, July 16, 1919.
20. Hilaire Belloc. G.K.’s Weekly, 4 February, 1937.