Illustrative Image
Written by Matthew Ehret
Doesn’t Putin respect Soviet Russian accomplishments including the sacrifices made to put down Hitler? How could Putin be a true anti-imperialist if he is an anti-revolutionary?
A scandal arose this week as President Putin took some time to denounce the Bolshevik Revolution at the Valdai Discussion Club saying:
“Just over a century ago, Russia objectively faced serious problems… Russia could have dealt with its problems gradually and in a civilised manner. But revolutionary shocks led to the collapse and disintegration of a great power… These examples from our history allow us to say that revolutions are not a way to settle a crisis but a way to aggravate it. No revolution was worth the damage it did to the human potential.”
How could a statesman so critical of the abuses of capitalism, and so masterful in combatting structures of modern imperialism, bemoan the Bolshevik revolution which gave rise to Soviet Russia? Doesn’t Putin respect Soviet Russian accomplishments including the sacrifices made to put down Hitler? How could Putin be a true anti-imperialist if he is an anti-revolutionary?
To do my part in resolving this paradox, let me begin by saying: it isn’t a paradox.
The fact is that Vladimir Putin is both an anti-imperialist, and also a revolutionary, just not in the way you might imagine. To understand what I mean, a certain lesson into recent history is in order.
Aborting a System of Win-Win Cooperation
The sad fact is that neither the Bolsheviks nor Mensheviks which emerged onto the stage of history at the turn of the 20th century were organically arising “peoples’ movements”.
Upon deeper analysis conducted by historians like Anthony Sutton, Kerry Bolton, and Robert Cowley, both organizations which eventually merged into a singular force, enjoyed vast financial patronage of western imperial powerhouses such as Paul Warburg, Jacob Schiff (head of Kuhn, Loeb & co.) and even Lord Alfred Milner- head of the newly formed Round Table Movement.
These characters bankrolled much of the Bolshevik movement as early as 1905 in order to destroy a truly revolutionary process that was spreading across much of the world in the wake of the Civil War.
One of the leading champions of this revolutionary process was Lincoln’s former bodyguard and the first Governor of Colorado William Gilpin. Governor Gilpin envisioned a world of sovereign nation states united by rail lines stretching through the Bering Strait and bringing all the continents and cultures into harmonious co-existence. In his famous 1890 ‘Cosmopolitan Railway’ Gilpin stated:
“The cosmopolitan railway will make the whole world one community. It will reduce the separate nations to families of our great nation… From extended intercommunication will arise a wider intercourse of human ideas and as the result, logical and philosophical reciprocities, which will become the germs for innumerable new developments; for in the track of intercommunication, enterprise and invention invariably follow and whatever facilitates one stimulates every other agency of progress.”
Describing the obvious brotherhood of Russia and the USA in spearheading this project, Gilpin wrote:
“It is a simple and plain proposition, that Russia and the United States, each having broad, uninhabited areas and limitless undeveloped resources, would by the expenditure of two or three hundred millions apiece for a highway of the nations through their now waste places, add a hundred fold to their wealth and power and influence. Nations which can spend in war their thousands of lives- the lives of the best and bravest of their sons and citizens- can surely afford a little of their surplus wealth and energy for such a work as this.” [p.35]
The American System Goes Global
Gilpin was not alone in this vision.
In fact, he represented a network of statesmen spread all across the globe who recognized that the only way to break out of the endless cycle of wars, usury and corruption which the Hobbesian structures of the British Empire maintained globally was through the adoption of an anti-Free Trade system known as “The American System of Political Economy”. This was a very different concept of “America” than the Pax Americana which has run roughshod over the world since WWII.
In Russia, this process found its champion in the figure of Sergei Witte (Finance Minister and Minister of Transportation from 1892-1903) who led a faction of the Russian intelligentsia in a struggle for progress and cooperation both internally and with allied nations against powerful forces committed to feudalism both within the Russian oligarchy and externally. The regressive forces which Witte had to contend with included powerful reactionary traditionalist forces who yearned for the good old days before Czar Alexander II freed the serfs and on the other extreme, the emergence of vast clusters of anarchist movements threatening to burn down the state in a replication of the Jacobin frenzy of the French revolution.
As Martin Sieff has demonstrated through his many writings on Prince Kropotkin, many of these anarchist networks enjoyed the patronage of powerful forces that cared little for the plight of the working class.
The international spread of the American System between 1876-1905 took the form of large-scale industrialisation and railroads. The funding mechanism was located in a practice that has fallen out of favor in the west (although has made a powerful comeback in China in recent years) called ‘dirigisme’- the emission of productive credit from state banks.
It was Witte who had spearheaded the Trans Siberian railway’s construction between 1890-1905 with plans to extend rail lines to China and beyond utilizing state directed capital and a blend of private enterprise. A fuller exposition of Witte’s fight will be unveiled in the next installment.
The British Empire which always relied on keeping nations divided, underdeveloped and dependent on the use of maritime shipping was not amused.
By controlling the international maritime choke points, the tiny island was able to exert its influence across the globe. Through the vigorous enforcement of laissez-faire doctrines of free trade, nations were blocked from protecting themselves from the financial warfare launched by the city of London against victim states (speculative volatility, usury, cheap dumping, cash cropping and drug running). Anyone wishing to engage in long term planning in the building up of the land-based transport corridors via rail, roads and industry would be easily sabotaged if the British System were shaping their world.
The international movement to break this system of evil was the only real revolutionary process animating the world during this time.
The Bolshevik Counter-Revolution: An Anglo-American Fraud
In 1905, Wall Street financier Jacob Schiff had given $200 million to the Japanese to assist their victory against the Russians during the 1904-05 Russo Japanese war. This generosity ultimately earned the banker the Medal of the Rising Sun in the in the Meiji Palace in 1907.
After crippling the Russian state and military (it’s navy was wiped out during the war), Schiff turned his attention to financing revolutionary activities within Russia itself. How money was spent by Schiff was difficult to say until 1949, when Schiff’s grandson John Schiff bragged to the New York Journal that his grandfather had given $20 million “for the triumph of communism in Russia.”
American journalist, and Schiff asset George Kennan played an instrumental role as perception manager of the revolution and bragged that he had converted 52,000 Russian soldiers imprisoned in Japan into Bolshevik revolutionaries. A March 24, 1917 interview recorded in the New York Times celebrating the revolution read:
“Mr. Kennan told of the work of the Friends of Russian Freedom in the revolution. He said that during the Russian-Japanese war he was in Tokyo, and that he was permitted to make visits among the 12,000 Russian prisoners in Japanese hands at the end of the first year of the war. He had conceived the idea of putting revolutionary propaganda into the hands of the Russian army.
The Japanese authorities favoured it and gave him permission. After which he sent to America for all the Russian revolutionary literature to be had…
‘The movement was financed by a New York banker you all know and love,’ he said, referring to Mr Schiff, ‘and soon we received a ton and a half of Russian revolutionary propaganda. At the end of the war 50,000 Russian officers and men went back to their country ardent revolutionists. The Friends of Russian Freedom had sowed 50,000 seeds of liberty in 100 Russian regiments. I do not know how many of these officers and men were in the Petrograd fortress last week, but we do know what part the army took in the revolution.’ “
Schiff himself jubilantly stated to the New York Times, March 18, 1917:
“May I through your columns give expression to my joy that the Russian nation, a great and good people, have at last effected their deliverance from centuries of autocratic oppression and through an almost bloodless revolution have now come into their own. Praised be God on high!”
Historian Kerry Bolton wrote of New York Federal Reserve director William Boyce Thompson who had been installed as head of the American Red Cross during the 1917 revolution and was largely recognized as the true U.S. ambassador to the government, saying:
“Thompson set himself up in royal manner in Petrograd reporting directly to Pres. Wilson and bypassing U.S. Ambassador Francis. Thompson provided funds from his own money, first to the Social Revolutionaries, to whom he gave one million rubles, and shortly after $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks to spread their propaganda to Germany and Austria.”
Writing in 1962, historian Arsene de Goulevitch who experienced the events of 1917 firsthand wrote:
“In private interviews, I have been told that over 21 million rubles were spent by Lord Alfred Milner in financing the Russian Revolution… The financier just mentioned was by no means alone among the British to support the Russian revolution with large financial donations.” (1)
According to his own accounts, during the four months Leon Trotsky spent in New York in 1917, much of it was spent hobnobbing with the upper crust of Wall Street and being driven around in limousines (2).
Leon Trotsky’s Immortal Treachery
Leon Trotsky, who Lord Milner, Schiff, Paul Warburg etc always intended to be the leader of the movement that would take control over the dead bodies of the Romanovs, was fortunately ousted by the saner forces around Joseph Stalin in 1927.
As historian Grover Furr masterfully documents using recently declassified material, testimonies and other evidence from archives in the USA and Russia, Leon Trotsky made several attempts to return to power in Russia after his expulsion. He didn’t do this alone however, but largely with the help of fascist forces in Britain, Japan, Ukraine, and Germany all the way until the moment he met his untimely end in 1940. This will be the subject of a future review of Grover Furr’s work (3).
For all of Lenin’s many problems, he differed from Trotsky on two interconnected points of 1) a general belief in voluntarism and 2) a rejection of the theory of permanent revolution.
Where Lenin believed that productive labor could be channeled towards the improvement of productive forces of society, Trotsky believed that any such effort at peaceful productive improvement would lead only to decadence. Permanent revolution was thus needed to keep workers from falling into sloth amidst the eternal striving for global class struggle. In 1914, a frustrated Lenin spoke of Trotsky’s fetish saying: “he [Trotsky] deserted the Mensheviks and occupied a vacillating position, now co-operating with Martynov (the economist), now proclaiming his absurdly Left ‘permanent revolution’ theory.”
Another point of conflict between Lenin on the one side and Trotsky on the other centered on whether or not Russia should continue to participate in WWI.
Where Lenin wanted to bring Russia out of the insane conflict in the first moments of their coup in 1917, Trotsky and his close ally Bukharin demanded that Russia stay in the war with the aim of converting it into a total pan European (and ultimately global) revolution. Trotsky’s commitment to global socialist revolution vs Stalin’s commitment to “socialism in one country” was at the heart of an unbridgeable divide between the two revolutionaries throughout the years.
Parvus and the Pan-European Union
Trotsky’s close association with Alexander Israel Helphand (aka: Parvus) throughout the revolution of 1905 and beyond is also suspicious and should be considered in the context of a much broader imperial geopolitical strategy.
Parvus’ association with the Pan-European Union founded by Count Richard von Coudenhove-Kalergi in 1923 is another relevant anomaly that takes us into the deeper power structures lurking below the surface waves of history (4).
Other members of Coudenhove-Kalergi’s institution included likes of Benito Mussolini, Walter Lippman, Nazi finance minister Hjalmar Schacht and Nazi geopolitician Karl Haushofer, while financiers Max Warburg, Louis de Rothschild openly bankrolled the organization.
In 1932, Kalergi delivered a speech celebrating the great restoration of order that would emerge in the unified pan-European effort to put down Bolshevik anarchism saying: “This eternal war can end only with the constitution of a world republic…. The only way left to save the peace seems to be a politic of peaceful strength, on the model of the Roman Empire, that succeeded in having the longest period of peace in the west thanks to the supremacy of his legions.”
This group played a much greater role in history than many realize and set the stage for the European Union. Parvus’ close association with Vladimir Jabotinsky set the stage for the most fascist elements of Zionism to emerge in the wake of WWII, and Parvus’ work as propagandist and arms dealer for the leadership of the Young Turk movement (deployed to set a weakened Ottoman Empire on fire and provoke what became the Balkan Wars of 1912-13) can still be felt across the Turkish world to this day.
It is also noteworthy that none other than Otto von Hapsburg himself had run this organization for over 30 years and also created a sister organization called Dignitae Humanae Institute to ‘united the right of the world” under a gnostic Catholic veneer with a Clash of Civilizations rebranding for the alt right. As the ultra-liberalized dissolution of society proceeds expectedly apace under the moral mush of LBGTXYZ gobbledygook, pagan Gaia worship, and critical race theory, it is obvious that a knee jerk leap into radical conservativism will accelerate. Hence, a net has been cast to catch conservative fish.
Located in an 800 year old monastery in Trisulti, Otto Hapsburg’s organization has found a useful frontman in the form of a Jesuitical fascist right-wing priest of the American alt-right by the name of… Steve Bannon. (5)
Trotskyites Mutate into Neocons
I say this here and now just to draw a parallel in the reader’s mind to the strange transmogrification which leading Trotskyists took in the USA once their leader’s life was snuffed out in 1940. Trotsky’s body wasn’t even cold before such devotees as James Burnham, Max Schachtman, Albert Wohlsetter and Irving Kristol abandoned Trotskyite socialism and adopted a new rabidly right-wing paradigm, which came to be known as ‘neo-conservativism’.
This poisonous movement grew quickly throughout the Cold War and took over the USA over the dead bodies of JFK and his brother while unleashing a new global dis-order ‘clash of civilizations’ each-against-all logic onto the globe under the watch of the Trilateral Commission of Kissinger, Brzezinski and David Rockefeller.
I think we can intimate what Trotsky ultimately saw as the final destination for his aims of a global revolution of the masses, and willingness to collaborate with Nazis to achieve his ends by considering the writings of former Trotskyite James Burnham.
As Cynthia Chung pointed out in her recent article on the topic, Burnham, (Trotsky’s former personal assistant and a man known to many as the father of the neocons), saw the resolution to the Manichean problem of class struggle and Cold War in a one world fascist government. Right before Trotsky’s 1940 death, Burnham wrote an essay renouncing Dialectic Materialism in favor of the superior philosophy of Bertrand Russell as outlined in the 1913 Principia Scientifica, and hence his rebirth as a neocon was ensured (6).
The question now sits before us: Was Burnham’s conversion to Russell’s worldview inconsistent with the actual goals and mission of Leon Trotsky?
It is too often forgotten that Leon Trotsky, acting as chairman Of the technical and scientific board of industry, quite literally controlled all science policy of Russia from 1924-25. During this time, he wrote a 1924 pamphlet outlining his pro-eugenics vision of the future global order that would be brought into existence through the forces of Darwinian natural selection saying:
“The human species will once more enter into a state of radical transformation, and in his own hands, will become an object of the most complicated methods of artificial selection and mass psycho-physical training. This is entirely in accord with evolution… man will make his purpose to master his own feelings, to raise his instincts to a higher consciousness… to create a higher social biological type, or if you please, a superman.”
Whether we consider Trotsky’s relentless efforts to integrate Darwinism with Marxist Dialectic Materialism or the Neoconservative commitment to a Darwinian survival of the fittest ethic merged with a gnostic Christian end times doctrine, the effects are largely identical: Global chaos with a supposed point of rapture/synthesis to resolve the chaos of the material world. Getting to this destination, whereby a new order and new Nietzschean human being were to emerge, simply required a cleansing experience.
In this sense, Trotsky could be compared to a Russian version of his contemporary Jesuit Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. Where Chardin was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory of natural selection into Christianity, Trotsky was tasked with merging Darwin’s theory into the state religion of Marxist dialectic materialism in Russia. The end result in either case was identical.
The Frankfurt School Global Revolution
That cleansing experience would take the form of ritualistic climax of purgative violence which would usher in a state of total despair and thus a new scientific priesthood managing the slaves of the other under a renewed form of technocratic feudalism. But how would society be brought to such a state of despair such that the masses would clamor for a new age to be imposed upon them in the form of a one world technocratic government?
When Christianity, nationalism, and respect for family values still governed society, such a state of nihilistic despair requisite to achieve this breaking point was more than a little difficult to achieve.
Here the role of Trotsky’s associates Georg Lukacs, and Willi Munzenberg play an important role.
Both men were not only radical Bolsheviks but also founders of a new organization founded in 1923 known as the Institute for Social research founded in Frankfurt Germany, otherwise known as “The Frankfurt School”.
This group and their role in steering mass education, and culture over the ensuing century will be the topic of a future report.
Post-Script: A Final Word from Putin
In the midst of Putin’s Valdai Club speech, the Russian leader (who is a revolutionary although he is certainly no Marxist-Leninist) called out the social engineers masquerading as revolutionaries and social reformers today driving a parallel to the destructive ideology of the Bolsheviks of 1917:
“The advocates of so-called ‘social progress’ believe they are introducing humanity to some kind of a new and better consciousness. Godspeed, hoist the flags as we say, go right ahead. The only thing that I want to say now is that their prescriptions are not new at all. It may come as a surprise to some people, but Russia has been there already. After the 1917 revolution, the Bolsheviks, relying on the dogmas of Marx and Engels, also said that they would change existing ways and customs and not just political and economic ones, but the very notion of human morality and the foundations of a healthy society. The destruction of age-old values, religion and relations between people, up to and including the total rejection of family (we had that, too), encouragement to inform on loved ones – all this was proclaimed progress and, by the way, was widely supported around the world back then and was quite fashionable, same as today. By the way, the Bolsheviks were absolutely intolerant of opinions other than theirs.”
In the next article, we will explore the fight of Sergei Witte, Dimitry Mendeleyev and compare their vision for a world of win-win cooperation against the perversion of science and culture envisioned by Trotsky and his international imperial co-thinkers.
The author recently delivered a lecture on this topic which can be viewed here:
Notes
(1) Czarism and Revolution, published by Omni Publications in Hawthorne, 1962 French edition, pp. 224, 230)
(2) Leon Trotsky: My Life, New York publisher: Scribner’s, 1930, p. 277
(3) One of the best and more recent among Furr’s pioneering writing on this topic can be found in his New Evidence of Trotsky’s Conspiracy, Erythos Press, 2020. Furr’s website is also an invaluable resource.
(4) Parvus’s association with the Pan European Union and broader fascist operations across Turkey and the Middle East is laid out in Jeffrey Steinberg’s 2005 report “Cheney Revives Parvus’ Permanent War Madness”
(5) This fact gives new meaning to Bannon’s self-characterization as a Leninist. In an August 22, 2016 Daily Beast article, journalist Ronald Radosh described a conversation he had with Bannon two years earlier saying “we had a long talk about his approach to politics. He never called himself a “populist” or an “American nationalist,” as so many think of him today. “I’m a Leninist,” Bannon proudly proclaimed. Shocked, I asked him what he meant.
“Lenin,” he answered, “wanted to destroy the state, and that’s my goal too. I want to bring everything crashing down, and destroy all of today’s establishment.”
(6) In his Feb 1940 ‘Science and Style’, Burnham wrote: “Do you wish me to prepare a reading list, Comrade Trotsky? It would be long, ranging from the work of the brilliant mathematicians and logicians of the middle of the last century to one climax in the monumental Principia Mathematica of Russell and Whitehead (the historic turning point in modern logic), and then spreading out in many directions – one of the most fruitful represented by the scientists, mathematicians and logicians now cooperating in the new Encyclopedia of Unified Science.”
“the Russian revolution derived from the spontaneity of the Russian people”. Lenin “amerikans have lost the capacity for spontaneous feeling”. Erich Fromm
A little learning is a dangerous thing; Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring: There shallow draughts intoxicate the brain, And drinking largely sobers us again.
The writer is out of his depth. So while making some valid points he ends up talking nonsense. Trotsky was, and is, a very prominant figure, but he was never as important as he is portrayed. Parvus did work for the German state, but he didn’t achieve.much. Milner was important but you need to know a lot more about British politics to understand his influence. For example he pushed for negotiations with Germany because he was terrified of the war leading to revolution. This does not sit well with his supposed support for Trotsky.
Putin is smart and has wisdom!! which very few other politician or strategist or whatever has. period.
Putin is a very confused man. His communist upbringing and ideology sharply contradict the needs and expectations of the post-Soviet Russian society. Just as the Communist revolution had been an oddity at the time so is the Russian oligarchy in today’s world. Obviously, for the things to change we’ll have to wait until the last communist is gone. By then Russia will be ripe for another revolution, however. And so on…
an idiot amerikan obviously
“Putin’s great innovation was that he did not like the patrimonial relations created by Yeltsin. he reduced the wealth of the oligarchs by half and redistributed to social programs that benefited the people”. Istvan Selzsheni (New Left Review: 2015) USA enjoys the greatest wealth/income disparities of all nations excepting a few African, 2 latin American nations—gini-coeffecient Russia:universal health, state paid mandatory maternity/parental leave–40 days, state paid university for those that qualify (58% Russians univ grads). 89% Russians own their residence
Great article, one of your best Matthew.
No wonder the actions of the bolsheviks are hidden in the west, the same playbook is being applied 100 years later!
It is rather sad to hear neo stalinist claptrap such as this in 2021. These discredited ideas are historical anachronisms. The author makes one absurd assertion after another. The idea that Putin, who represents the interests of the oligarchs, is some kind of revolutionary is utter nonsense. Trade unions and communists/socialists face numerous obstacles including state persecution in present day Russia. Matthew Ehret’s attempt to rewrite the history of the Russian Revolution has been done to death by much more talented writers than himself.
Utter rubbish. Putin is no Anti-Capitalist. He is Anti-Communist but unlike a Neo liberal he is a Neo Conservative. He hates Soviet System, Bolsheviks, Lenin or Stalin. He wants to erase Soviet history. Trotsky was a traitor to the people but saying the Russian revolution was funded by Wall street is a plain BS.