Sky
30th January 2008, 02:46
This scholarly article debunks the allegations that Lenin took money from the Germans:
Alfred Erich Senn, "The Myth of German Money during the First World War", Soviet Studies, Vol.XXVIII, No. 1, January 1976, pp.83-90
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-5859(197601)28%3A1%3C83%3ATMOGMD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W (http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-5859(197601)28%3A1%3C83%3ATMOGMD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W)
While Lenin inevitably came into contact with German agents, he knowingly had no provable operating connections with the German mission in Bern or with other German agents before March 1917.
The first name linked to Lenin was Gregory Alexinsky, who, in February 1915, lectured in Switzerland about the support which the Germans and Austrians were giving to Ukrainian and Georgian revolutionaries. Lenin's decision return to Russia through Germany in 1917 served to convince Alexinsky, a former Bolshevik who had opposed Lenin for some years, that the hand of the Germans reached far. In the summer of 1917, he worked with Albert Thomas in the latter's campaign to expose German-Bolshevik connections. In 1923, Alexinsky summarized his views, asserting that Leon Trotsky had been an Austrian agent; that Karl Radek and Christian Rakovsky had served as acolytes for Alexander Parvus-Helphand; and that Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, and Gregory Zinoviev cooperated with Parvus in Switzerland. Alexinsky printed a document reputedly from the archives of the Okhrana, reporting that Lenin stayed overnight at the German embassy in Bern on 28-29 December 1916.
In the 1950s, when the German Foreign Ministry archives were opened for Western use, Z. Zeman and Werner Hahlweg published documents concerning German efforts to bring revolution in Russia. The analysts now dug more deeply. Zeman noted: There is no evidence among the documents of the Foreign Ministry that Lenin, a circumspect man, was in direct contact with any of the official German agencies." Instead, there now developed a picture of go betweens: Alexander Keskula, Parvus-Helphand, Alexander Tsivin, and Carl Moor. That Tsivin, Parvus, Keksula, and Moor worked as German agents of one sort or another, is not to be denied. They certainly gave the Germans information about various emigres, including Lenin. Yet there is no evidence that they transmitted anything from the Germans to Lenin.
Parvus is probably the best known, and his relationship with Lenin seems clear. Scharlau and Zeman have produced an interesting biography, and have concluded that there was no cooperation between the two. It is clear, they declared, that "Lenin refused the German offer of aid." It is intriguing, I might add, how many authors attempt to demonstrate their expertise by insisting that Parvus met Lenin at the latter's apartment on Distelweg in Bern. The two men met in May 1915, while Lenin and Krupskaya had, in fact, moved from Distelweg in the middle of April. Their pious landlady there had objected to the cremation of the body of Krupskaya's mother, who had died in March. As corrobating evidence of Zeman and Scharlau's conclusion that Lenin's refusal to help Parvus forced the latter concentrate his efforts on Scandinavia, I would cite Parvus's bank account with the Swiss Kreditanstalt, which showed that he paid out a total of only 25,600 Swiss Francs in the period between his arrival in Switzerland in May 1915 and the February revolution in 1917. Parvus simply did little in Switzerland.
Another figure who can be easily disposed of is Alexander Tsivin. He was a Socialist Revolutionary who came to the German ambassador in Bern, Baron Gisbert von Romberg, with the endorsement of the Austrian Military attache. George Katkov referred to Tsivin as one of Romberg's "major informers on the Russian revolutionary movement", but then noted that he was "about to be dropped by his employers when the February Revolution occurred". Romberg's records showed that after Tsivin received some 100,000 francs in the winter of 1916-17 the Auswartiges Amt cut off his pay on the grounds that he had failed to produce anything really worthwile. To be sure, Romberg resumed payments after the February revolution, but Tsivin's record failed to improve. Tsivin was, in fact, an expensive failure, and there is no evidence to connect him with Lenin.
A more significant name has been that of Alexander Keskula, an Estonian who had at one time belonged to the Bolshevik party. A student in Switzerland in 1911, he contacted Romberg shortly after the outbreak of the war, and sold the ambassador on the idea of stirring up revolution among the nationalities of Russia. This was always his first concern: the fate of Estonia and other nations in tsarist Russia. He made clear to Romberg that he expected "no help for the nationlities" from the Russian socialists. Nevertheless, largely on the basis of Futrell's work, some historians have accepted the view that Keksula represented some sort of link between Romberg and Lenin. To be sure, Keksula set up his own network of agents and collaborators, and the network included contacts within the Bolshevik Party, but Keksula exerted no visible influence on Lenin, nor did he provide Romberg with any systematic information about the Bolsheviks. Keksula's man in Lenin's organization was Artur Zifeldt, also an Estonian, who joined the Bolshevik Party in Zurich only in 1915. Lenin reiled on him for certain contacts with Italians, although Zifeldt spoke no Italian. Zifeldt described himself as "a historian, an archaeologist, I study the history of the Ancient East and comparative mythology". He wrote a number of historical studies, but, by his own admission, "the greater part of them lie on my shelves." He had published only a few items on Estonian mythology and philology. Under the circumstances he probably went to work for Keksula with enthusiasm, and he most likely joined the Bolsheviks at Keksula's direction. Even so, we find that he attempted to extend his activities beyond just Bolshevik circles. In November 1915 he offered his services to Russian librarian R. Rubakin as a writer of popular books on the history of culture. Zifeldt also told Rubakin that, if hired, he would prefer to remain in Zurich "with which I am connected by 1001 threads". Lenin, it should be noted, was living in Bern at this time. A position in Rubakin's library would have brought with it wide contact among the Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland, but RUbakin refused to hire him. Although Zifeldt presumably informed Keskula on Lenin's activities, his correspondence with Rubakin would indicate that watching Lenin was not enough of a job for him; he was seeking a greater area of activity. For all of Keskula's exorbitant claims of having "discovered" Lenin, the evidence in the German archives is sparse. The major document consists of a report, written by Romberg in September 1915, announcing that Keskula had "succeeded in discovering the conditions on which the Russian revolutionaries would be prepared to conclude peace with us in the event of the revolution being successful." These so-called conditions prove upon examination to be only a summary of an article which Lenin then published in Sotsial-Democrat on 13 October 1915. Zifeldt had presumably provided Keskula with the material, but the document hardly deserved the top secret handling which the Germans gave it. In summary, Keskula seems to have been a master of name-dropping. He used his acquaintance with Lenin to impress Romberg, and in Scandinavia he used Lenin's name to penetrate the Bolsehvik organizations there. His actual contact with Lenin was minimal. Besides the celebrated report of September 1915 he gave the Germans relatively little of substance on Lenin, and he certainly did not deliver any significant sums ot the Bolshevik coffers.
Another figure for us to consider, albeit briefly, is Carl Moor, the veteran Swiss Social Democrat. While Moor knew many political emigres, and he aied them in variious ways, he apparently became a German agent in April 1917, after Lenin's departure from Switzerland. Therefore, he obviously could not have served as a link between Lenin and Romberg.
We have considerably more grounds for suspicion in considering the activities of Jacob Furstenburg-Hanecki, a Polish supporter of Lenin who also worked for Parvus in Scandinavia. Polish and Soviet historians insist that Hanecki's relationship to Parvus was strictly one of business. Dubious as this may seem, we have no hard and fast evidence to the contrary in the period before the February revolution. Hanecki's possible role in the transmission of German money in the summer of 1917 is another question, but one which goes beyond the bounds of this article.
A last intriguing figure to mention here is Benstion Dolin, a political emigre who was in the service of the Okhrana and who became a double agent by working with the Germans during the First World War. Since he on occasion used the cover name "Lenin", historians have occasionally been terribly confused in their reading documents. This is almost certainly at the heart of of Possony's assertions that members of hte German embassy in Bern remembered "Lenin visiting the embassy, and I suspect that this is the underlying misconception in Alexinsky's Okhrana report purporting to record a visit by "Lenin" to the embassy in December 1916. Apart from the confusion caused by his pseudonym, however, Dolin should play no part in this picture because his prime loyalty seems clearly to have been on the side of the Okhrana.
One must yet not that the Austrians indirectly aided Lenin in the first months of war through their support of the Union for hte Liberain of the Ukraine, just as the Germans, through Parvus, gave money to Russian emigre newspapers in Paris, "Golos" and "Nashe Slovo". From the beginning of 1915, howver, as the sources of this funding became more clear and more widely understood--and here Alexinsky played no small role--Lenin and the emigres in Paris rejected such support. In the words of Harold Shukman: Fundsd were plainly not flowing into Lenin's hands."
In conclusion, one has to be struck by the "Watergate" mentality which hangs over the question of German money both before and after the February revolutiion. There are those who pursue the problem enthusiastically as if thereby hoping to make the Bolshevik revolution dissapear. Others seem to fear the question for perhaps the same reason. Some say that it is settled, all the necessary facts are known. In reviewing the work of Scharlau and Zeman, Leo van Rossum warned against interpreting great social revolutions in conspiratorial terms. Whether the Bolsheviks took German money or not, the October revolution remains a historical fact that must be dealt with in relationship to an epoch, not as a conspiracy.
Alfred Erich Senn, "The Myth of German Money during the First World War", Soviet Studies, Vol.XXVIII, No. 1, January 1976, pp.83-90
http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-5859(197601)28%3A1%3C83%3ATMOGMD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W (http://links.jstor.org/sici?sici=0038-5859(197601)28%3A1%3C83%3ATMOGMD%3E2.0.CO%3B2-W)
While Lenin inevitably came into contact with German agents, he knowingly had no provable operating connections with the German mission in Bern or with other German agents before March 1917.
The first name linked to Lenin was Gregory Alexinsky, who, in February 1915, lectured in Switzerland about the support which the Germans and Austrians were giving to Ukrainian and Georgian revolutionaries. Lenin's decision return to Russia through Germany in 1917 served to convince Alexinsky, a former Bolshevik who had opposed Lenin for some years, that the hand of the Germans reached far. In the summer of 1917, he worked with Albert Thomas in the latter's campaign to expose German-Bolshevik connections. In 1923, Alexinsky summarized his views, asserting that Leon Trotsky had been an Austrian agent; that Karl Radek and Christian Rakovsky had served as acolytes for Alexander Parvus-Helphand; and that Lenin, Nikolai Bukharin, and Gregory Zinoviev cooperated with Parvus in Switzerland. Alexinsky printed a document reputedly from the archives of the Okhrana, reporting that Lenin stayed overnight at the German embassy in Bern on 28-29 December 1916.
In the 1950s, when the German Foreign Ministry archives were opened for Western use, Z. Zeman and Werner Hahlweg published documents concerning German efforts to bring revolution in Russia. The analysts now dug more deeply. Zeman noted: There is no evidence among the documents of the Foreign Ministry that Lenin, a circumspect man, was in direct contact with any of the official German agencies." Instead, there now developed a picture of go betweens: Alexander Keskula, Parvus-Helphand, Alexander Tsivin, and Carl Moor. That Tsivin, Parvus, Keksula, and Moor worked as German agents of one sort or another, is not to be denied. They certainly gave the Germans information about various emigres, including Lenin. Yet there is no evidence that they transmitted anything from the Germans to Lenin.
Parvus is probably the best known, and his relationship with Lenin seems clear. Scharlau and Zeman have produced an interesting biography, and have concluded that there was no cooperation between the two. It is clear, they declared, that "Lenin refused the German offer of aid." It is intriguing, I might add, how many authors attempt to demonstrate their expertise by insisting that Parvus met Lenin at the latter's apartment on Distelweg in Bern. The two men met in May 1915, while Lenin and Krupskaya had, in fact, moved from Distelweg in the middle of April. Their pious landlady there had objected to the cremation of the body of Krupskaya's mother, who had died in March. As corrobating evidence of Zeman and Scharlau's conclusion that Lenin's refusal to help Parvus forced the latter concentrate his efforts on Scandinavia, I would cite Parvus's bank account with the Swiss Kreditanstalt, which showed that he paid out a total of only 25,600 Swiss Francs in the period between his arrival in Switzerland in May 1915 and the February revolution in 1917. Parvus simply did little in Switzerland.
Another figure who can be easily disposed of is Alexander Tsivin. He was a Socialist Revolutionary who came to the German ambassador in Bern, Baron Gisbert von Romberg, with the endorsement of the Austrian Military attache. George Katkov referred to Tsivin as one of Romberg's "major informers on the Russian revolutionary movement", but then noted that he was "about to be dropped by his employers when the February Revolution occurred". Romberg's records showed that after Tsivin received some 100,000 francs in the winter of 1916-17 the Auswartiges Amt cut off his pay on the grounds that he had failed to produce anything really worthwile. To be sure, Romberg resumed payments after the February revolution, but Tsivin's record failed to improve. Tsivin was, in fact, an expensive failure, and there is no evidence to connect him with Lenin.
A more significant name has been that of Alexander Keskula, an Estonian who had at one time belonged to the Bolshevik party. A student in Switzerland in 1911, he contacted Romberg shortly after the outbreak of the war, and sold the ambassador on the idea of stirring up revolution among the nationalities of Russia. This was always his first concern: the fate of Estonia and other nations in tsarist Russia. He made clear to Romberg that he expected "no help for the nationlities" from the Russian socialists. Nevertheless, largely on the basis of Futrell's work, some historians have accepted the view that Keksula represented some sort of link between Romberg and Lenin. To be sure, Keksula set up his own network of agents and collaborators, and the network included contacts within the Bolshevik Party, but Keksula exerted no visible influence on Lenin, nor did he provide Romberg with any systematic information about the Bolsheviks. Keksula's man in Lenin's organization was Artur Zifeldt, also an Estonian, who joined the Bolshevik Party in Zurich only in 1915. Lenin reiled on him for certain contacts with Italians, although Zifeldt spoke no Italian. Zifeldt described himself as "a historian, an archaeologist, I study the history of the Ancient East and comparative mythology". He wrote a number of historical studies, but, by his own admission, "the greater part of them lie on my shelves." He had published only a few items on Estonian mythology and philology. Under the circumstances he probably went to work for Keksula with enthusiasm, and he most likely joined the Bolsheviks at Keksula's direction. Even so, we find that he attempted to extend his activities beyond just Bolshevik circles. In November 1915 he offered his services to Russian librarian R. Rubakin as a writer of popular books on the history of culture. Zifeldt also told Rubakin that, if hired, he would prefer to remain in Zurich "with which I am connected by 1001 threads". Lenin, it should be noted, was living in Bern at this time. A position in Rubakin's library would have brought with it wide contact among the Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland, but RUbakin refused to hire him. Although Zifeldt presumably informed Keskula on Lenin's activities, his correspondence with Rubakin would indicate that watching Lenin was not enough of a job for him; he was seeking a greater area of activity. For all of Keskula's exorbitant claims of having "discovered" Lenin, the evidence in the German archives is sparse. The major document consists of a report, written by Romberg in September 1915, announcing that Keskula had "succeeded in discovering the conditions on which the Russian revolutionaries would be prepared to conclude peace with us in the event of the revolution being successful." These so-called conditions prove upon examination to be only a summary of an article which Lenin then published in Sotsial-Democrat on 13 October 1915. Zifeldt had presumably provided Keskula with the material, but the document hardly deserved the top secret handling which the Germans gave it. In summary, Keskula seems to have been a master of name-dropping. He used his acquaintance with Lenin to impress Romberg, and in Scandinavia he used Lenin's name to penetrate the Bolsehvik organizations there. His actual contact with Lenin was minimal. Besides the celebrated report of September 1915 he gave the Germans relatively little of substance on Lenin, and he certainly did not deliver any significant sums ot the Bolshevik coffers.
Another figure for us to consider, albeit briefly, is Carl Moor, the veteran Swiss Social Democrat. While Moor knew many political emigres, and he aied them in variious ways, he apparently became a German agent in April 1917, after Lenin's departure from Switzerland. Therefore, he obviously could not have served as a link between Lenin and Romberg.
We have considerably more grounds for suspicion in considering the activities of Jacob Furstenburg-Hanecki, a Polish supporter of Lenin who also worked for Parvus in Scandinavia. Polish and Soviet historians insist that Hanecki's relationship to Parvus was strictly one of business. Dubious as this may seem, we have no hard and fast evidence to the contrary in the period before the February revolution. Hanecki's possible role in the transmission of German money in the summer of 1917 is another question, but one which goes beyond the bounds of this article.
A last intriguing figure to mention here is Benstion Dolin, a political emigre who was in the service of the Okhrana and who became a double agent by working with the Germans during the First World War. Since he on occasion used the cover name "Lenin", historians have occasionally been terribly confused in their reading documents. This is almost certainly at the heart of of Possony's assertions that members of hte German embassy in Bern remembered "Lenin visiting the embassy, and I suspect that this is the underlying misconception in Alexinsky's Okhrana report purporting to record a visit by "Lenin" to the embassy in December 1916. Apart from the confusion caused by his pseudonym, however, Dolin should play no part in this picture because his prime loyalty seems clearly to have been on the side of the Okhrana.
One must yet not that the Austrians indirectly aided Lenin in the first months of war through their support of the Union for hte Liberain of the Ukraine, just as the Germans, through Parvus, gave money to Russian emigre newspapers in Paris, "Golos" and "Nashe Slovo". From the beginning of 1915, howver, as the sources of this funding became more clear and more widely understood--and here Alexinsky played no small role--Lenin and the emigres in Paris rejected such support. In the words of Harold Shukman: Fundsd were plainly not flowing into Lenin's hands."
In conclusion, one has to be struck by the "Watergate" mentality which hangs over the question of German money both before and after the February revolutiion. There are those who pursue the problem enthusiastically as if thereby hoping to make the Bolshevik revolution dissapear. Others seem to fear the question for perhaps the same reason. Some say that it is settled, all the necessary facts are known. In reviewing the work of Scharlau and Zeman, Leo van Rossum warned against interpreting great social revolutions in conspiratorial terms. Whether the Bolsheviks took German money or not, the October revolution remains a historical fact that must be dealt with in relationship to an epoch, not as a conspiracy.