This story has been shrouded in mystery for almost a century. The secret was carefully concealed by the Bolsheviks, their German patrons, world banking circles. Only now it became known how much the cold planned sabotage, which was later nicknamed the "Great October Socialist Revolution", cost.

Historians assign a large role in the events of those days to the Bolshevik center, which was created by Lenin to ensure "normal conditions" for the leaders of the faction, publish propaganda newspapers and finance the work of ideologically correct schools in Russia and abroad.

In fact, the center was a robber common fund. The cash desk was replenished by attacks by Bolshevik combat squads and the collection of "donations" using blackmail and extortion. In parallel with this, part of the funding migrated from the pockets of the rich, to whom members of the party were carefully and unobtrusively assigned.

One of the richest merchants in Moscow was the manufacturing king Savva Morozov. Morozov's fabrics used about in greater demand than English ones, and were sold even abroad - in China and Persia. For his work, Savva Morozov received an astronomical salary - two hundred and fifty thousand rubles a year. On the love front, he also confidently won. And one day on his way - as it turned out, not by chance - the Bolshevik and the revolutionary Maria Andreeva met. She was familiar with Lenin, she was in a civil marriage with Gorky. The actress of the Moscow Art Theater and the most beautiful of all the artists of the Russian stage.

The novel was stormy and wasteful for Morozov. Andreeva managed to get several million rubles for the Bolsheviks, which is comparable to the budget of a small country. After Savva Morozov allegedly shot himself, his nephew Nikolai Schmit inherited his fortune. The young businessman immediately, like his uncle, found himself in the tenacious hands of the Bolsheviks. Krasin, Bauman, Shantser became his new friends. He employed several party members in his factory. They received a fairly large salary and instead of work they were preparing for the revolution.

Despite increased secrecy measures, in December 1905, Schmitt was arrested. He later died in prison under mysterious circumstances. The interest of the Bolsheviks switched to the sisters of the deceased revolutionary. They acted simply, but effectively: the faithful servants of the party, Viktor Taratuta and Nikolai Andrikanis, "beguiled" the amorous sisters and took them as wives. All Schmitt's inheritance - 280 thousand gold rubles - ended up in the party fund. Nadezhda Krupskaya later noted in her Memoirs: "At this time, the Bolsheviks received a solid material base."

Revolutionary Russia. Factory committee of the Vulkan plant in Petrograd, 1917. Reproduction of TASS Newsreels

The adherents of the revolution also had German patrons. Back in 1907, when the organizers of the Fifth Congress of the RSDLP had financial difficulties, 300 pounds for its holding was received from the Social Democratic Party of Germany. Donations came after. From December 1916 to February 1917, one thousand 117 rubles 50 kopecks were credited to the party's cash desk. This money allowed the Bolsheviks to conduct energetic propaganda and put the central organ of the party, the newspaper Pravda, on its feet. If in March 1917 the newspaper had only 8 thousand subscribers, then in April 17 daily newspapers were already published with a total circulation of 320 thousand copies and a total weekly circulation of one million 415 thousand units. By July, the number of newspapers had already exceeded 40, and the daily circulation reached 320,000 copies.

There is a formula that the revolution is conceived by wise men, carried out by fanatics, and scoundrels use its fruits. When all this is concentrated in one person, then his name is Alexander Parvus. Marxist theorist, revolutionary, businessman, "merchant of the revolution". The essence of his plan was simple: holding an all-Russian strike at arms factories under anti-war slogans, organizing uprisings and strikes, setting fire to oil fields, and agitating against tsarism.

German officials appreciated Parvus' subversive experience and quickly approved him for the position of chief consultant to the German government on Russia. Then he was allocated the first tranche - a million gold marks. And then new millions "for the revolution" in Russia followed. For the leadership of Kaiser Germany, this plan to destroy Russia from within was a godsend. The operation cost 20 million rubles.

Parvus' ideas are still relevant today. The current "opposition", as well as the "opposition" of the 1905 model, is financed from the same foreign source. Their goal has also not changed: to cause upheaval and destabilization at any cost.

In April 1921, the New York Times reported that Lenin's account in one of the Swiss banks received 75 million francs in 1920 alone, Trotsky had 11 million dollars and 90 million francs, Zinoviev and Dzerzhinsky - 80 million each.

The sources of funding for the Russian Revolution of 1917 and its main ideologues have occupied historians for many years. Interesting facts were made public in the 2000s, after some documents from the German and Soviet archives were declassified. Researchers of the biography of Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) have repeatedly noted that the leader of the world proletariat was not scrupulous in obtaining money to fan the “revolutionary fire”. Who benefited from inciting a civil war in Russia, how German and American bankers financed the Bolsheviks - read in our material.

Outside interest

One of the main reasons for the beginning of revolutionary unrest in Russia at the beginning of the 20th century was the country's participation in the First World War. The international armed conflict, which had no analogues at that time, was the result of intensified contradictions between the largest colonial powers that formed in the Entente (Great Britain, France, Russia) and the Triple Alliance (Germany, Austria-Hungary, Italy).

Conspiracy theorists also point out that British and American bankers and industrialists had their own interests in this war - the destruction of the old world order, the overthrow of monarchies, the collapse of the Russian, German and Ottoman empires and the capture of new markets.

However, attacks on the Russian autocracy from abroad were inflicted even before the global world conflict. In 1904, the Russo-Japanese War began, the money for which the Land of the Rising Sun was lent by American bankers - the Morgans, the Rockefellers. The Japanese in 1903-1904 themselves spent huge sums on various political provocations in Russia.

But even here the Americans could not do without: a colossal amount of 10 million dollars for those times was lent by the banking group of the American financier of Jewish origin Jacob Schiff. The future leaders of the revolution did not disdain this money, guided by the principle "the enemy of my enemy is my friend." In this case, the enemies were all those who opposed the reactionary forces in Russia.

Destructive processes

As a result of the war with the Japanese, the Russian Empire lost the struggle for dominance in the Far East and the Pacific. According to the terms of the Treaty of Portsmouth concluded in September 1905, Japan was given the Liaodong Peninsula along with a branch of the South Manchurian Railway, the southern part of Sakhalin Island. In addition, Korea was recognized as a sphere of influence of Japan, the Russians withdrew their troops from Manchuria.

Against the backdrop of the defeats of the Russian Empire on the battlefields, dissatisfaction with the foreign policy and social structure of the state was ripening in the country. Destructive processes within Russian society began at the end of the 19th century, but only at the beginning of the 20th century did they gain strength capable of crushing the empire, without whose approval until recently “not a single gun in Europe could fire”.

The dress rehearsal of the 1917 revolution took place in 1905 after the well-known events of January 9, which went down in history as Bloody Sunday - the execution by the imperial troops of a peaceful demonstration of workers led by the priest Gapon. Strikes and numerous speeches, unrest in the army and navy forced Nicholas II to establish the State Duma, which somewhat relieved the situation, but did not solve the problem at the root.

War has come

By 1914, the beginning of the First World War, the reactionary processes in Russia were already of a systemic nature - Bolshevik propaganda was unfolding throughout the country, numerous anti-monarchist newspapers were published, revolutionary leaflets were printed, strikes and rallies of workers acquired a massive character.

The global armed conflict, in which the Russian Empire was drawn into, made the already difficult existence of workers and peasants unbearable. In the first year of the war, the production and sale of consumer goods in the country fell by a quarter, in the second - by 40%, in the third - by more than half.

During the war years, it has more than halved, shoes and clothing have risen in price by 3-4 times during this time. By 1917, the diet of workers in factories and factories began to be called "hungry".

"Talents" and their fans

By February 1917, when the "popular masses" in the Russian Empire were finally ripe for the overthrow of the autocracy, Vladimir Lenin (Ulyanov), Leon Trotsky (Bronstein), Matvey Skobelev, Moses Uritsky and other leaders of the revolution had already lived abroad for many years. What kind of money did the ideologists of the "bright future" exist in a foreign land all this time, and not badly at that? And who sponsored the leaders of the smaller proletariat who remained in their homeland?

It is no secret that the radical Bolshevik wing of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) raised money to fight the bourgeois capitalists by far from always legal methods, or rather, often illegal ones. In addition to donations from altruists and provocateurs, such as the big industrialist Savva Morozov or Trotsky's uncle, the banker Abram Zhivotovsky, expropriations (or, as they were called, "exes"), that is, robberies, were common for the Bolsheviks. By the way, the future Soviet leader, Iosif Dzhugashvili, who went down in history under the name Stalin, took an active part in them.

Friends of the revolution

With the outbreak of the First World War, a new upsurge of the revolutionary movement in Russia begins, fueled, among other things, by money from abroad. This was helped by the family ties of the revolutionaries operating in Russia: Sverdlov had a banker brother in the United States, the uncle of Trotsky, who was hiding abroad, turned millions in Russia.

Israel Lazarevich Gelfand, better known as Alexander Parvus, played an important role in the development of the revolutionary movement. He was a native of the Russian Empire, had connections with influential financial and political circles in Germany, as well as with German and British intelligence. According to some reports, it was this man who was one of the first to pay attention to the Russian revolutionaries Lenin, Trotsky, Markov, Zasulich and others. In the early 1900s, he helped publish the Iskra newspaper.

Viktor Adler, one of the leaders of the Austrian Social Democracy, became another true "friend of the Russian revolutionaries". It was to him that in 1902 Lev Bronstein, who had escaped from Siberian exile, went, having left his wife with two small children in his homeland. Adler, who later saw in Trotsky a brilliant demagogue and provocateur, provided the guest from Russia with money and documents, thanks to which the future People's Commissar for Military and Naval Affairs of the RSFSR successfully reached London.

At that time, Lenin and Krupskaya lived there under the surname Richter. Trotsky conducts propaganda activities, speaks at meetings of social-democratic circles, and writes to Iskra. The sharp-tongued young journalist is sponsored by the party movement and wealthy "comrades-in-arms." A year later, Trotsky-Bronstein in Paris meets his future common-law wife, a native of Odessa, Natalya Sedova, who was also fond of Marxism.

In the spring of 1904, Trotsky was invited to visit his estate near Munich by Alexander Parvus. The banker not only introduces him to the circle of European supporters of Marxism, devotes him to the plans for the world revolution, but also develops with him the idea of ​​​​creating Soviets.

Parvus was also one of the first to predict the inevitability of the First World War for new sources of raw materials and markets. Trotsky, who by that time had become deputy chairman of the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers' Deputies, took part with Parvus in the revolutionary events of 1905 in Petrograd, which, to their chagrin, did not lead to the overthrow of the autocracy. Both were arrested (Trotsky was sentenced to eternal exile in Siberia) and both soon fled abroad.

After the events of 1905, Trotsky settled in Vienna, generously sponsored by his socialist friends, lived in grand style: he changed several luxurious apartments, became a member of the highest social democratic circles in Austria-Hungary and Germany. Another sponsor of Trotsky was the German theorist of Austro-Marxism, Rudolf Hilferding, with his support, Trotsky published the reactionary newspaper Pravda in Vienna.

Money doesn't smell

During the outbreak of the First World War, Lenin and Trotsky were in the territory of Austria-Hungary. They, as Russian subjects, were almost arrested, but Viktor Adler stood up for the leaders of the revolution. As a result, both left for neutral countries. Germany and the United States were preparing for war: in America, President Woodrow Wilson, close to the bigwigs of the financial world, came to power and the Federal Reserve System (FRS) was created, the former banker Max Warburg was put at the head of the German intelligence services. Under the control of the latter, Nia-Bank was established in Stockholm in 1912, which later financed the activities of the Bolsheviks.

After the failed revolution of 1905, for some time the revolutionary movement in Russia remained almost without "feeding" from abroad, and the paths of its main ideologists - Lenin and Trotsky - diverged. Significant sums began to arrive after Germany was bogged down in the war, and again largely thanks to Parvus. In the spring of 1915, he proposed to the German leadership a plan to incite revolution in the Russian Empire in order to force the Russians to withdraw from the war. The document described how to organize an anti-monarchist campaign in the press, conduct subversive agitation in the army and navy.

Parvus' plan

The key role in terms of overthrowing the autocracy in Russia was assigned to the Bolsheviks (although the final division in the RSDLP into Bolsheviks and Mensheviks took place only in the spring of 1917). Parvus urged "against the backdrop of a losing war" to direct the negative feelings of the Russian people against tsarism. He was also one of the first to offer support for separatist sentiments in Ukraine, stating that the formation of an independent Ukraine "can be seen both as a liberation from the tsarist regime and as a solution to the peasant question." The Parvus plan cost 20 million marks, of which the German government at the end of 1915 agreed to lend a million. It is not known how much of this money reached the Bolsheviks, since, as German intelligence reasonably believed, part of the money was pocketed by Parvus. Part of this money definitely reached the revolutionary cash desk and was spent for its intended purpose.

The well-known Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein, in an article published in 1921 in the newspaper Vorverts, claimed that Germany paid the Bolsheviks more than 50 million gold marks.

Dvuliky Ilyich

Kerensky claimed that Lenin's associates received a total of 80 million from the Kaiser's treasury. The funds were transferred, among other things, through Nia-Bank. Lenin himself did not deny that he took money from the Germans, but he never named specific amounts.

Nevertheless, in April 1917 the Bolsheviks were publishing 17 dailies with a total weekly circulation of 1.4 million. By July, the number of newspapers increased to 41, and circulation rose to 320,000 a day. And this is not counting the numerous leaflets, each circulation of which cost tens of thousands of rubles. At the same time, the Central Committee of the Party acquired a printing house for 260,000 rubles.

True, the Bolshevik Party also had other sources of income: in addition to the already mentioned robberies and robbery, as well as membership fees of the party members themselves (an average of 1-1.5 rubles per month), money came from a completely unexpected direction. So, General Denikin reported that the commander of the Southwestern Front, Gutor, opened a loan of 100,000 rubles to finance the Bolshevik press, and the commander of the Northern Front, Cheremisov, subsidized the publication of the newspaper Our Way from state money.

After the October Revolution of 1917, funding for the Bolsheviks through various channels continued.

Conspiracy theorists claim that the material support of the Russian revolutionaries was provided by structures of large financiers and bankers-masons like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. U.S. Secret Service documents dated December 1918 noted that large sums for Lenin and Trotsky went through Fed Vice President Paul Warburg. The leaders of the Fed asked for another million dollars from the Morgan financial group - for emergency support of the Soviet government.

In April 1921, the New York Times reported that Lenin's account in one of the Swiss banks received 75 million francs in 1920 alone, Trotsky had 11 million dollars and 90 million francs, Zinoviev and Dzerzhinsky - 80 million each. million francs (there are no documents confirming or refuting this information).

Tags: Lenin, revolution, money

Why did you decide to study the life of Vladimir Lenin and then write his biography?

— I started writing about Lenin after I had conducted a large-scale study of the structure of the Bolshevik Party in the period 1917-1923. Then I studied not only those who were members of the Central Committee, but also ordinary communists. Actually, I wanted to understand what kind of responsibility they bear for the terrible events that took place in Russia and other countries. For this, I needed an analysis of the political, economic and cultural background of the October Revolution of 1917.

In addition, I needed to identify the contribution of individual leaders, starting with the founder of the Soviet state, Vladimir Lenin. But in order to understand Lenin, it was clearly not enough to study the general facts.

Was it difficult to access the archives?

— When in the early 1980s I began to write my trilogy about the political life of Lenin, only those historians who were trusted in the USSR and considered their own could gain access to the Soviet archives. Everything changed in 1991: already in September of this year I arrived in Moscow. And it was then - after the August coup - that access to archival documents was opened.

For two years I studied these previously inaccessible treasures.

By the way, recently such studies have become much easier to obtain in the archives of the Hoover Institute for War, Revolution and Peace at Stanford University. There are no less documents about the USSR and Russia than in the Russian archives!

What struck you the most in Lenin's biography?

- Access to the main sources about the life and work of Lenin for many years was limited by the Soviet authorities. After his death, Lenin became a kind of icon. Both in the East and in the West, his image (whether positive or negative) was exploited in a political context. And when the archives were opened, it became possible to understand what Lenin was like in a purely human sense.

He was a bright man who was blinded by his own brightness. He had his own charm. And Lenin was impartial in his calculations. At the same time, he was overwhelmed by unbridled passions, including an obsession with Marxism. Finally, Lenin cheated on his long-suffering devoted wife.

He was a spoiled child and a dangerous genius rolled into one.

- What achievement of Lenin would you call the main one?

— Lenin contributed to the fact that Russia came out of the First World War, and then saved the country from German intervention. And he was able to achieve this, despite the active opposition within his party. Nevertheless, many lands that were part of the Russian Empire were occupied by Germany.

More importantly, it was Russia's withdrawal from the war that contributed to the fact that Germany almost won it. Such a scenario would have been fatal for Lenin, but this did not happen.

Thus, his greatest achievement set the stage for the worst of nightmares.

Still, one should not put Lenin on a pedestal. He would never have taken power if Russia in 1917 had not been in an acute phase of economic, political and military crisis.

What about foreign funding?

- Of course, the Bolsheviks received money from the German authorities, who wanted to weaken the Russian army and bring the "peace party" to power. Of course, this is not the only reason why Lenin came to power. But without German money at the beginning of 1917, Lenin would not have succeeded.

Would anything have come of it without Trotsky?

Lev was a strategist and tactician in the seizure of power in Petrograd in October 1917. He also persuaded Lenin to refuse to ally with other parties on the left. Trotsky was an important figure. But like many politicians who wrote about their activities, he exaggerated his own contribution to the cause of the revolution.

In my opinion, Trotsky is a wonderful example of an arrogant revolutionary politician who, along with Lenin, did not understand how dangerous dictatorship is.

Lenin was still lucky to die in his bed! But Trotsky in 1940 fell victim to the system that he himself helped build.

- And if you remember Joseph Stalin?

“Lenin always felt that Stalin could be used. In general, he appreciated Stalin's ability to rule, intimidate and destroy. Lenin's mistake was that he believed he could always keep Stalin under control. However, when Lenin began to experience health problems, Stalin stopped listening to him. Lenin felt like a father whom his own son decided not to know.

However, Russian and Western historians tend to exaggerate the importance of the contradictions that arose between Lenin and Stalin in 1922-1923.

This conflict is a very minor thing, especially in the light of the emerging Soviet system.

In general, Lenin and Stalin are in many ways the same field: they established a one-party system of government, mobilized society, created a manipulative statehood, committed judicial arbitrariness and stood at the head of militant atheism. Let's not idealize Lenin!

Can we then call the path that Lenin chose to build the state realistic?

- You must be joking! Is it possible to modernize the country and improve people's lives if the economy and society are quarantined?

Lenin did not secure Russia even in international relations. Yes, he kept the Communist International from making dangerous decisions, but this happened after the invasion of Poland in 1920, which turned into a real nightmare for Lenin himself and for the Red Army.

- How did the perception of Lenin's personality change?

- Once upon a time, his figure was considered quite controversial. Western communists admired him, his comrades-in-arms relied on him.

I think that now Lenin is not particularly popular. And the conclusion that Leninism is a disastrous way of organizing society, economy and politics is obvious.

Who will choose a dictatorship if there is a democracy?

There should be no doubt here: the democratic scenario of the development of events after the overthrow of the Romanovs in 1917 was not impossible. Although it is difficult to envy the position of Russia at that time ...

What did Lenin give to modern politics?

— He contributed to the invention of totalitarianism. He had predecessors in revolutionary France, and then followers from among the leaders of the world communist movement of the 20th century.

Despite his brilliant intellect (and perhaps because of it), he did not know what he was doing. Lenin looked at the world through a cloudy glass. And for this "myopia" and self-doubt, millions of people paid with their lives.

What is Lenin's legacy?

The communist past still leaves its mark on modern Russia, despite the fact that the communists themselves have long lost power in the country. The demolition of monuments to Lenin will not help - it is necessary to reform approaches and practices. And only then it will be possible to say that "deleninization" has occurred.

And Lenin's Mausoleum, standing on Red Square in his honor, is not only a defiant architectural object: it is a symbol of the Russian authorities' unwillingness to abandon the past, which brought pain not only to Russia, but also to other states.

This topic is still preferred by officials on both sides of the ocean - both in America and in the post-Soviet space. The fact that the nascent Soviet state, an opponent of any form of capitalism, received multimillion-dollar financial assistance for decades precisely from the "hardened" tycoons of Western business is hushed up today.

Perhaps precisely because America has never helped anyone out of altruistic considerations - at the same time, it has always had its own, "long-range" political interests.

Who were the Western financiers of the Russian revolution

It is reliably known that at one time the head of the prestigious American bank Kuhn, Loeb & Co. Yakov Schiff allocated 20 million dollars to support the Bolsheviks.

Brown Brothers Harriman financed the Soviets through its German subsidiary, the Guaranty Trust Company. According to the American economist and historian Anthony Sutton, “... William Averell Harriman (an American politician and diplomat, the son of the owner of the Union Pacific Railroad, invested in the Chiatura manganese concessions in the Caucasus during the NEP years) was the director of the Guaranty Trust Company, collaborated with the Soviet leadership ... ".

In 1933, US Congressman Lewis McFadden explicitly stated in his report to the US Congress: “The Federal Reserve Service, through the Chase Bank and the Guaranty Trust Company, financed the Soviet government. Take and look at the documents of Amtorg (commission agent for foreign trade operations between the USA and the USSR-CIS), Gostorg and the State Bank of the USSR, you will all be shocked to learn how much money America actually gave the Soviets!

Equal support for political antagonists

An American economist of British origin, author of the sensational book “Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution”, Anthony Sutton, in his unique study, cites the following facts of financing by Western structures of ideologically completely different and often opposing states: “They write in textbooks that the USSR and Nazi Germany were irreconcilable rivals. But in the 1920s, William Averell Harriman helped the Bolsheviks receive financial and political assistance from foreign states, participated in the creation of RUSCOMBANK (the first commercial bank in the USSR). Max May, vice-president of the Guaranty Trust Company, even became vice-president of RUSCOMBANK ... But it was Averell Harriman and his brother Roland who subsidized Hitler through the Union bank ... ".

Sutton argues that such a system of financing political antagonists allowed Wall Street bosses to control the sponsored states and, accordingly, to exert some kind of pressure on them if necessary. To see the consistency of such a financial policy, it is enough to take as an example the same Rockefeller dynasty and their allies - for more than a century they have been subsidizing both sides of any conflict.

Western capital saves the new government

Wall Street financiers had been firmly convinced since 1917 that the Bolsheviks had a real chance of holding on to the power they seized. Even when, in May 1918, when the Communists, in fact, controlled a small part of Russia and they were on the verge of losing the Civil War, the Bolsheviks received financial support not at all from their overseas communist brethren, but from Mobil's predecessor, the Vacuum Oil Company. , General Electric, the Federal Reserve, and the Baltimore and Ohio Railroad.

In fact, according to Western scholars, after the abdication of Nicholas II, the Bolsheviks themselves did not represent a real force capable of independently coming to power and subsequently holding it - they did not have sufficient support from the population of Russia. If not for the tangible help of influential people in Europe and the USA, Lenin and Trotsky would not have been able to turn the tide by November 1918 - Western financial capital played a decisive role in this.

The colony created by the Rockefellers in Russia, according to some reports, was supported by the Americans not only financially, but also technologically. The company of the most famous capitalists of that time, Standard Oil of New Jersey, bought our oil fields, the Rockefellers built the first refining furnace in the USSR and helped the Soviet Union enter the European fuel market.

In the 1920s, the Rockefeller Chase Bank founded the American-Russian Chamber of Commerce and Industry, which supported the export of Russian metals, and also sold Soviet bonds to the United States.

Senator Barry Goldwater claimed that the American bank Chase Manhattan financed the construction of a truck factory in Russia, capable of converting to the production of tanks and rocket launchers if necessary. There is evidence that our industry actively used American technology for the construction of the Kama Automobile Plant, which was subsequently adapted for military purposes.

Moreover, the Americans provided financial assistance to the Soviet Union even during the Vietnam War, knowing full well that the Soviet Union actively supported the Vietnamese Communists.

Buy everyone to establish the New Order

According to Western professor Gary Allen, no one has yet made a serious attempt to debunk the facts presented in Anthony Sutton's Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution and his other published studies on the same topic. The scientist believes that Sutton's opponents simply "have nothing to cover", however, "... the information machine can ignore his works. Which is exactly what is happening."

Anthony Sutton in his book finds a simple and at the same time very convincing explanation of the “Brownian” system of financing by Wall Street bigwigs “everyone and everything”: “The establishment wants to establish a New World Order. It cannot be done without control. That is why the bankers financed the Nazis, the Communists, and North Korea... The more artificial "conflicts", the more blood is shed, the easier it is to formally justify the need to create a One World Government, which is just around the corner"...

Where did Vladimir Ilyich get crazy money for party activities on the eve of the revolution and at its beginning? Over the past decades, interesting materials have been published on this topic, but so far much remains incomprehensible ...

Plots related to the theme "Lenin, money and revolution" are inexhaustible for the historian, and for the psychologist, and for the satirist. After all, the person who, after the complete victory of communism, called for making toilet bowls out of gold in public toilets, who never earned his living by hard work, did not live in poverty even in prison and in exile and, it seemed, did not know what money was, at the same time made a huge contribution to the theory of commodity-money relations.

What exactly? Not with their pamphlets and articles, of course, but with revolutionary practice. It was Lenin who, in 1919-1921, introduced in revolutionary Russia a cashless exchange of goods in kind between town and country. The result was a complete collapse of the economy, paralysis of agriculture, massive famine and - as a result - mass uprisings against the power of the RCP (b). It was then, shortly before his death, that Lenin finally understood the importance of money and began the NEP - a kind of "managed capitalism" under the control of the Communist Party.

But now we are not talking about these interesting stories in themselves, but about something else. About where Vladimir Ilyich got crazy money for party activities on the eve of the revolution and at its beginning. Over the past decades, interesting materials have been published on this topic, but so far much remains incomprehensible. For example, at the beginning of the 20th century, a mysterious well-wisher (individual or collective) gave money to the underground newspaper Iskra, encrypted in the documents of the RSDLP as "California gold mines." In the opinion of some researchers, we are talking about the support of radical Russian revolutionaries by American Jewish bankers, mostly immigrants from the Russian Empire, and their descendants, who hated the tsarist government for its official anti-Semitism. During the revolution of 1905-1907, the Bolsheviks were sponsored by American oil corporations in order to eliminate competitors from the world market (namely, the Nobel oil cartel from Baku). In those same years, by his own admission, the Bolsheviks were given money by the American banker Jacob Schiff. And also - the Syzran manufacturer Yermasov and the Moscow region merchant and industrialist Morozov. Then Schmit, the owner of a furniture factory in Moscow, became one of the financiers of the Bolshevik Party. Interestingly, both Savva Morozov and Nikolai Schmit eventually committed suicide, and a significant part of their inheritance went to the Bolsheviks. And, of course, quite large funds (hundreds of thousands of rubles of that time or tens of millions of hryvnias, according to the current purchasing power) were obtained as a result of the so-called exes, or, more simply, robberies of banks, post offices, and station cash desks. At the head of these actions were two characters with thieves' nicknames Kamo and Koba - that is, Ter-Petrosyan and Dzhugashvili.

However, hundreds of thousands and even millions of rubles invested in revolutionary activities could only shake the Russian Empire, despite all its weaknesses - the structure was too strong. But only in peacetime. With the outbreak of World War I, new financial and political opportunities opened up for the Bolsheviks, which they successfully took advantage of.

... On January 15, 1915, the German ambassador in Istanbul reported to Berlin about a meeting with a Russian citizen Alexander Gelfand (aka Parvus), an active participant in the revolution of 1905-1907 and the owner of a large trading company. Parvus introduced the German ambassador to the plan for the revolution in Russia. He was immediately invited to Berlin, where he met with influential members of the Cabinet of Ministers and advisers to Chancellor Bethmann-Hollweg. Parvus offered to give him a significant amount: firstly, for the development of the national movement in Finland and Ukraine; secondly, in support of the Bolsheviks, who preached the idea of ​​defeating the Russian Empire in an unjust war in order to overthrow the "power of the landowners and capitalists." Parvus' proposals were accepted; on the personal order of Kaiser Wilhelm, he was given two million marks as the first contribution to the "cause of the Russian revolution." Then there were the following cash infusions, and more than one. So, according to Parvus's receipt, on January 29 of the same 1915, he received a million rubles in Russian banknotes for the development of the revolutionary movement in Russia. The money came with German pedantry.

In Finland and Ukraine, the agents of Parvus (and the German General Staff) turned out to be figures of the second, if not the third row, so their influence on the processes of gaining independence by these countries turned out to be insignificant compared to the objective processes of nation-building in the Russian Empire. But with Lenin, Parvus-Gelfand did not miss. Parvus, according to him, told Lenin that a revolution during this period was possible only in Russia and only as a result of a German victory; in response, Lenin sent his trusted agent Furstenberg (Ganetsky) to work closely with Parvus, which continued until 1918. Another sum from Germany, not so significant, came to the Bolsheviks through the Swiss deputy Karl Moor, but here it was only about 35 thousand dollars. Money also flowed through the Nia bank in Stockholm; according to the order of the German Imperial Bank No. 2754, accounts of Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev and other Bolshevik leaders were opened in this bank. And order No. 7433 of March 2, 1917 provided for the payment of the "services" of Lenin, Zinoviev, Kollontai and others for public propaganda of peace in Russia, where tsarist power had just been overthrown.

Enormous sums of money were used effectively: the Bolsheviks had their own newspapers, distributed free of charge, in every county, in every city; tens of thousands of their professional agitators acted all over Russia; detachments of the Red Guard were formed quite openly. Of course, German gold was not enough here. Although the “poor” political emigrant Trotsky, who was returning from America to Russia in 1917, was seized 10 thousand dollars by customs in the city of Halifax (Canada), it is clear that he sent some considerable money from the banker Yakov Schiff to his like-minded people. The “expropriation of the expropriators” (in other words, the robbery of rich people and institutions), which began in the spring of 1917, provided even more funds. Has anyone wondered by what right the Bolsheviks occupied the house-palace of the ballerina Kshesinskaya and the Smolny Institute in Petrograd?

But in general, the Russian democratic revolution broke out in the early spring of 1917, unexpectedly for all political subjects within the empire and beyond its borders. It was a spontaneous process of true popular amateur performance both in Petrograd and on the national outskirts of the state. Suffice it to say that a month before the start of the revolution, the leader of the Bolsheviks, Lenin, who was in exile in Switzerland, publicly expressed doubt that the politicians of his generation (that is, 40-50-year-olds) would live to see the revolution in Russia. However, it was the radical Russian politicians who reorganized faster than others and turned out to be ready to "saddle" the revolution - using, as already mentioned, German support.

The Russian revolution was not an accident, it is even surprising that it did not start, say, a year earlier. All social, political and national problems in the Romanov Empire had already escalated to the limit, and this despite the fact that, from the formal economic side, industry was developing dynamically, stocks of weapons, ammunition and ammunition increased significantly. However, the extreme inefficiency of the central government and the corruption of the elite, inevitable in the conditions of autocracy, did their job. And then the purposeful disintegration of the army, the undermining of the rear, the sabotage of attempts to constructively resolve urgent problems, together with the incurable chauvinistic centralism of almost all Great Russian political forces, greatly aggravated the crisis.

During the 1917 campaign, the troops of the Entente were supposed to simultaneously go on a general offensive on all European fronts in the spring. But the Russian army turned out to be unprepared for the offensive, therefore, the April attacks of the Anglo-French troops in the Reims region were defeated, the losses in killed and wounded exceeded 100 thousand people. In July, Russian troops attempted to go on the offensive in the Lvov direction, however, as a result, they were forced to retreat from the territory of Galicia and Bukovina, and in the north they surrendered Riga almost without a fight. And finally, the battle near the village of Caporetto in October led to the catastrophe of the Italian army. 130,000 Italian soldiers were killed, 300,000 surrendered, and only English and French divisions urgently transferred from France in vehicles were able to stabilize the front and prevent Italy from leaving the war. And, finally, after the November coup in Petrograd, when the Bolsheviks and the Left SRs came to power, a truce was declared on the Eastern Front, first de facto, and then de jure, not only with Russia and Ukraine, but also with Romania.

In such changes on the Eastern Front, the funds allocated by Germany for subversive work in the rear of the Russian army played a significant role. “Military operations on the Eastern Front, prepared on a large scale and carried out with great success, were supported by significant subversive activities within Russia, which were carried out by the Ministry of Foreign Affairs. Our main goal in this activity was to further strengthen the nationalist and separatist sentiments and secure the support of the revolutionary elements. We are still continuing this activity and are finalizing an agreement with the political department of the General Staff in Berlin (Captain von Huelsen). Our joint work has yielded significant results. Without our continued support, the Bolshevik movement could never have achieved the scope and influence it now enjoys. Everything suggests that this movement will continue to grow in the future.” These are the words of the Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs of Germany, Richard von Kuhlmann, written by him on September 29, 1917, a month and a half before the Bolshevik coup in Petrograd.

Von Kuhlmann knew what he was writing about. After all, he was an active participant in all those events, a little later he led peace negotiations with Bolshevik Russia and the Ukrainian People's Republic in Berest in early 1918. A lot of money passed through his hands, tens of millions of marks; he had contacts with a number of the main characters of this historical drama.

“I have the honor to ask your Excellency to provide the amount of 15 million marks at the disposal of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs for political propaganda in Russia, referring this amount to paragraph 6, section II of the Emergency Budget. Depending on how events develop, I would like to discuss in advance the possibility of contacting Your Excellence again in the near future for the provision of additional funds, ”wrote von Kühlmann on November 9, 1917.

As you can see, as soon as a message was received about a coup in Petrograd, which would later be called the Great October Revolution, as Kaiser Germany allocates new funds for propaganda in Russia. These funds go, first of all, to support the Bolsheviks, who first disintegrated the army, and then took the Russian Republic out of the war, thus freeing millions of German soldiers for operations in the West. However, they still retain the image of disinterested revolutionaries, romantic Marxists. Until now, not only full-time, so to speak, adherents of the ideas of Marxism-Leninism, but also a certain number of non-party left intelligentsia are convinced that Vladimir Lenin and his like-minded people were sincere internationalists and highly moral fighters for the people's cause.

In general, an interesting situation is developing: there are secret documents of the Ministry of Foreign Affairs of Kaiser Germany published by Oxford University in 1958, where the telegrams of Richard von Kuhlmann were taken from and where you can find dozens of no less eloquent texts from the First World War, testifying to the huge financial and organizational assistance that German power was given to the Bolsheviks. Germany's goal was clear. Radical revolutionaries will undermine the combat potential of one of the main opponents of the central states, which included Germany, in the war - that is, the Russian Empire. Dozens of books have been published on the subject, containing other compelling evidence. But until now, not only communist historians, but also many researchers of the liberal trend deny historical self-evidence.

According to experts, Kaiser Germany spent no less than 382 million marks during the war on so-called peaceful propaganda. A colossal amount, like the money of that time.

And again, State Secretary of the Foreign Ministry Richard von Kuhlmann testifies.

“Only when the Bolsheviks began to receive from us a constant influx of funds through various channels and under various signs, they were able to put their main organ, Pravda, on their feet, conduct vigorous propaganda and significantly expand the narrow base of their party at the beginning.” (Berlin, December 3, 1917). And indeed: the number of party members a year after the overthrow of tsarism increased 100 times!

As for the position of Lenin himself, the head of the military intelligence of Germany during the First World War, Colonel Walter Nicolai, spoke of him in his memoirs: “... At that time, like anyone else, I did not know anything about Bolshevism, but I knew about Lenin it is only known that he lives in Switzerland as a political emigrant "Ulyanov", who provided my service with valuable information about the situation in tsarist Russia, against which he fought.

In other words, without constant help from the German side, the Bolsheviks would hardly have become one of the leading Russian parties in 1917. And this would mean a completely different course of events, probably much more anarchic, which would hardly lead to the establishment of any party dictatorship, much less a totalitarian regime. Most likely, another version of the collapse of the Russian Empire would have been realized, because the consequence of the First World War was precisely the destruction of empires. And the independence of Finland and Poland was a matter decided de facto already in the year 1916.

It is unlikely that the Russian Empire or even the Russian Republic would become an exception to the very process of the collapse of empires that began after the First World War. It is worth remembering that Britain had to grant independence to Ireland, that India moved by leaps and bounds towards its independence after the First World War, and so on. And do not forget that the collapse of the Russian Empire began with the beginning of the 1917 revolution. Actually, this revolution itself to some extent bore the imprint of the national liberation struggle, because the first against the autocracy at the beginning of 1917 in Petrograd was the Volynsky Life Guards Regiment.

The Bolsheviks were then a small and almost unknown party (four thousand members, mostly in exile and emigration) and had no influence on the overthrow of tsarism.

And after Lenin's government came to power, support continued. “Please use large sums, as we are extremely interested in the Bolsheviks holding out. Risler funds are at your disposal. If necessary, telegraph, how much more is needed. (Berlin, 18 May 1918). Von Kuhlmann, as always, calls a spade a spade when addressing the German Embassy in Moscow. The Bolsheviks really resisted and in the fall of 1918 threw huge funds from the treasury of the Russian Empire they seized into revolutionary propaganda in Germany in order to ignite the world revolution.

The situation mirrored itself. In Germany, in early November 1918, a revolution broke out. Money, weapons and qualified cadres of professional revolutionaries brought from Moscow played their role in its incitement. But the local communists failed to lead this revolution. Subjective and, most importantly, objective factors worked against them. The totalitarian regime in Germany was established only after 15 years. But that is another topic.

Meanwhile, in the democratic Weimar Republic, the well-known Social Democrat Eduard Bernstein published in 1921 in the central organ of his party, the Vorverts newspaper, an article "Dark History", in which he said that as early as December 1917 he had received an affirmative answer from "one competent face” to the question whether Germany gave money to Lenin.

According to him, more than 50 million gold marks were paid to the Bolsheviks alone. Then this amount was officially named during a meeting of the Reichstag Committee on Foreign Policy. In response to accusations of "slander" by the communist press, Bernstein offered to sue him, after which the campaign immediately ended.

But Germany really needed friendly relations with Soviet Russia, therefore, the discussion of this topic in the press was not resumed.

One of the main political opponents of the Bolshevik leader, Alexander Kerensky, based on his investigation of the Kaiser millions for Lenin, concluded that the total amount of money received by the Bolsheviks before they seized power and immediately after that to strengthen power was 80 million gold marks (by today's standards, we should talk about hundreds of millions, if not billions of hryvnias). Actually, Ulyanov-Lenin never hid this from the circle of his party colleagues: for example, in November 1918, at a meeting of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (the Bolshevik quasi-parliament), the communist leader said: “I am often accused of having made our revolution with German money; I do not deny this, but on the other hand, with Russian money, I will make the same revolution in Germany.

And he tried, not sparing tens of millions of gold rubles. But it did not work out: the German Social Democrats, unlike the Russians, understood where they were going, and organized the murder of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in time, and then the disarmament of the Red Guard and the physical destruction of its leaders. There was no other way out in that situation; perhaps if Kerensky had plucked up the courage and ordered to shoot Smolny with all its "red" inhabitants from cannons, the Kaiser's millions would not have helped.

This could have ended if it were not for the information from The New York Times of April 1921 that 75 million Swiss francs were credited to Lenin's account in one of the Swiss banks in 1920 alone. According to the newspaper, Trotsky's accounts were 11 million dollars and 90 million francs, Zinoviev's accounts were 80 million francs, Dzerzhinsky's "knight of the revolution" 80 million, Ganetsky-Fürstenberg's were 60 million francs and 10 million dollars. Lenin, in a secret note dated 04/24/1921 to the Chekist leaders Unshlikht and Bokiy, strongly demanded to find the source of the information leak. Not found.

Interestingly, this money was also supposed to be spent on the world revolution? Or is it a kind of “rollback” from the politicians and financiers of those states where the “red horses” did not go by the will of Lenin and Trotsky, although they could go? One can only hypothesize here. Because until now a significant array of Lenin's documents has not been declassified.

… More than 90 years have passed since those events. But the revolutionary romantics of the whole world continue to assert that the Bolsheviks were highly moral and fiery revolutionaries, patriots of Russia and supporters of the freedom of Ukraine. And until now, in the center of Kyiv, there is a monument to Lenin, which says that in an alliance of Russian and Ukrainian workers, a free Ukraine is possible, and without such an alliance, there can be no talk of it. And until now, flowers are brought to this monument to a person who received money from the German special services for “revolutionary” holidays. And until now, unfortunately, a significant part of Ukrainian society is not able to realize the big difference between the leaders of the October Revolution and the Ukrainian Revolution of 1917, which consisted in the fact that the Ukrainian revolution was really not financed by anyone from outside.