Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution: Chapter 2

And now for you all who are waiting breathlessly from another installment of our odyssey into treason, corruption, and assorted hi-jinks by the the most wealthy Americans of the progressive era, I'm pleased to present Chapter 2, which I've worked really hard to whittle down so your head doesn't explode. If you want to read this chapter in its entirety, click here.

 TROTSKY LEAVES NEW YORK TO COMPLETE THE REVOLUTION

You will have a revolution, a terrible revolution. What course it takes will depend much on what Mr. Rockefeller tells Mr. Hague to do. Mr. Rockefeller is a symbol of the American ruling class and Mr. Hague is a symbol of its political tools.

Leon Trotsky, in New York Times, December 13, 1938. (Hague was a New Jersey politician)

I bet most of you didn't know that Leon Trotsky lived in America for a while before returning to Russia to promote the Communist utopia. In 1916, he was expelled from France for political reasons and was tossed into Spain. The Spanish shipped him and is family to New York in January of 1917.

Leon Trotsky did not just survive in New York City, he lived in style, as Dr. Sutton relates here:

How did Trotsky, who knew only German and Russian, survive in capitalist America? According to his autobiography, My Life, "My only profession in New York was that of a revolutionary socialist." In other words, Trotsky wrote occasional articles for Novy Mir, the New York Russian socialist journal. Yet we know that the Trotsky family apartment in New York had a refrigerator and a telephone, and, according to Trotsky, that the family occasionally traveled in a chauffeured limousine. This mode of living puzzled the two young Trotsky boys. When they went into a tearoom, the boys would anxiously demand of their mother, "Why doesn't the chauffeur come in?"¹ The stylish living standard is also at odds with Trotsky's reported income. The only funds that Trotsky admits receiving in 1916 and 1917 are $310, and, said Trotsky, "I distributed the $310 among five emigrants who were returning to Russia." Yet Trotsky had paid for a first-class cell in Spain, the Trotsky family had traveled across Europe to the United States, they had acquired an excellent apartment in New York — paying rent three months in advance — and they had use of a chauffeured limousine. All this on the earnings of an impoverished revolutionary for a few articles for the low-circulation Russian-language newspaper Nashe Slovo in Paris and Novy Mir in New York!

Joseph Nedava estimates Trotsky's 1917 income at $12.00 per week, "supplemented by some lecture fees."² Trotsky was in New York in 1917 for three months, from January to March, so that makes $144.00 in income from Novy Mir and, say, another $100.00 in lecture fees, for a total of $244.00. Of this $244.00 Trotsky was able to give away $310.00 to his friends, pay for the New York apartment, provide for his family — and find the $10,000 that was taken from him in April 1917 by Canadian authorities in Halifax. Trotsky claims that those who said he had other sources of income are "slanderers" spreading "stupid calumnies" and "lies," but unless Trotsky was playing the horses at the Jamaica racetrack, it can't be done. Obviously Trotsky had an unreported source of income.

What was that source? In The Road to Safety, author Arthur Willert says Trotsky earned a living by working as an electrician for Fox Film Studios. Other writers have cited other occupations, but there is no evidence that Trotsky occupied himself for remuneration otherwise than by writing and speaking.

This should send up everyone's red flags. When Mr. Trotsky left NYC in 1917 to go to Petrograd to help with the Red Revolution, he left with $10,000. Where did he get such a large sum, especially in 1917 dollars? This sent up a red flag with the Canadians as he was shipping out of Halifax. We will learn more about Mr. Trotsky and his connections as our conductor on this "follow the money train", Dr. Antony Sutton digs up some documents for us: 

Most investigation has centered on the verifiable fact that when Trotsky left New York in 1917 for Petrograd, to organize the Bolshevik phase of the revolution, he left with $10,000. In 1919 the U.S. Senate Overman Committee investigated Bolshevik propaganda and German money in the United States and incidentally touched on the source of Trotsky's $10,000. Examination of Colonel Hurban, Washington attaché to the Czech legation, by the Overman Committee yielded the following:

COL. HURBAN: Trotsky, perhaps, took money from Germany, but Trotsky will deny it. Lenin would not deny it. Miliukov proved that he got $10,000 from some Germans while he was in America. Miliukov had the proof, but he denied it. Trotsky did, although Miliukov had the proof.

SENATOR OVERMAN: It was charged that Trotsky got $10,000 here.

COL. HURBAN: I do not remember how much it was, but I know it was a question between him and Miliukov.

SENATOR OVERMAN: Miliukov proved it, did he? 

COL. HURBAN: Yes, sir.

SENATOR OVERMAN: Do you know where he got it from?

COL. HURBAN: I remember it was $10,000; but it is no matter. I will speak about their propaganda. The German Government knew Russia better than anybody, and they knew that with the help of those people they could destroy the Russian army.

(At 5:45 o'clock p.m. the subcommittee adjourned until tomorrow, Wednesday, February 19, at 10:30 o'clock a.m.)³

It is quite remarkable that the committee adjourned abruptly before the source of Trotsky's funds could be placed into the Senate record. When questioning resumed the next day, Trotsky and his $10,000 were no longer of interest to the Overman Committee. We shall later develop evidence concerning the financing of German and revolutionary activities in the United States by New York financial houses; the origins of Trotsky's $10,000 will then come into focus.

Change the subject, nothing to see here. Moving along...But wait- the $10,000 dollars was mentioned elsewhere:

An amount of $10,000 of German origin is also mentioned in the official British telegram to Canadian naval authorities in Halifax, who requested that Trotsky and party en route to the revolution be taken off the S.S. Kristianiafjord (see page 28). We also learn from a British Directorate of Intelligence report⁴ that Gregory Weinstein, who in 1919 was to become a prominent member of the Soviet Bureau in New York, collected funds for Trotsky in New York. These funds originated in Germany and were channeled through the Volks-zeitung, a German daily newspaper in New York and subsidized by the German government.

While Trotsky's funds are officially reported as German, Trotsky was actively engaged in American politics immediately prior to leaving New York for Russia and the revolution. On March 5, 1917, American newspapers headlined the increasing possibility of war with Germany; the same evening Trotsky proposed a resolution at the meeting of the New York County Socialist Party "pledging Socialists to encourage strikes and resist recruiting in the event of war with Germany."⁵ Leon Trotsky was called by the New York Times "an exiled Russian revolutionist." Louis C. Fraina, who cosponsored the Trotsky resolution, later — under an alias — wrote an uncritical book on the Morgan financial empire entitled House of Morgan.⁶ The Trotsky-Fraina proposal was opposed by the Morris Hillquit faction, and the Socialist Party subsequently voted opposition to the resolution.⁷

More than a week later, on March 16, at the time of the deposition of the tsar, Leon Trotsky was interviewed in the offices of Novy Mir.. The interview contained a prophetic statement on the Russian revolution:

"... the committee which has taken the place of the deposed Ministry in Russia did not represent the interests or the aims of the revolutionists, that it would probably be shortlived and step down in favor of men who would be more sure to carry forward the democratization of Russia."⁸

The "men who would be more sure to carry forward the democratization of Russia," that is, the Mensheviks and the Bolsheviks, were then in exile abroad and needed first to return to Russia.

I'm leaving a lot of stuff from the book in this post so you all don't get confused when some these players names are brought up again. Make note of these men who will "carry forward the democratization of Russia".   Chances are you already know their names.

Glenn Beck has been telling you for a while that Woodrow Wilson was bad, here's another reason in case your making a list or something of all the ways that Dr. Wilson ruined our country by his own admission:

WOODROW WILSON AND A PASSPORT FOR TROTSKY

President Woodrow Wilson was the fairy godmother who provided Trotsky with a passport to return to Russia to "carry forward" the revolution. This American passport was accompanied by a Russian entry permit and a British transit visa. Jennings C. Wise, in Woodrow Wilson: Disciple of Revolution, makes the pertinent comment, "Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson, despite the efforts of the British police, made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport."

President Wilson facilitated Trotsky's passage to Russia at the same time careful State Department bureaucrats, concerned about such revolutionaries entering Russia, were unilaterally attempting to tighten up passport procedures. The Stockholm legation cabled the State Department on June 13, 1917, just after Trotsky crossed the Finnish-Russian border, "Legation confidentially informed Russian, English and French passport offices at Russian frontier, Tornea, considerably worried by passage of suspicious persons bearing American passports."⁹

To this cable the State Department replied, on the same day, "Department is exercising special care in issuance of passports for Russia"; the department also authorized expenditures by the legation to establish a passport-control office in Stockholm and to hire an "absolutely dependable American citizen" for employment on control work.¹⁰ But the bird had flown the coop. Menshevik Trotsky with Lenin's Bolsheviks were already in Russia preparing to "carry forward" the revolution. The passport net erected caught only more legitimate birds. For example, on June 26, 1917, Herman Bernstein, a reputable New York newspaperman on his way to Petrograd to represent the New York Herald, was held at the border and refused entry to Russia. Somewhat tardily, in mid-August 1917 the Russian embassy in Washington requested the State Department (and State agreed) to "prevent the entry into Russia of criminals and anarchists... numbers of whom have already gone to Russia."¹¹

Isn't that convenient?

 Consequently, by virtue of preferential treatment for Trotsky, when the S.S. Kristianiafjord left New York on March 26, 1917, Trotsky was aboard and holding a U.S. passport — and in company with other Trotskyite revolutionaries, Wall Street financiers, American Communists, and other interesting persons, few of whom had embarked for legitimate business. This mixed bag of passengers has been described by Lincoln Steffens, the American Communist:

The passenger list was long and mysterious. Trotsky was in the steerage with a group of revolutionaries; there was a Japanese revolutionist in my cabin. There were a lot of Dutch hurrying home from Java, the only innocent people aboard. The rest were war messengers, two from Wall Street to Germany....¹²

Notably, Lincoln Steffens was on board en route to Russia at the specific invitation of Charles Richard Crane, a backer and a former chairman of the Democratic Party's finance committee. Charles Crane, vice president of the Crane Company, had organized the Westinghouse Company in Russia, was a member of the Root mission to Russia, and had made no fewer than twenty-three visits to Russia between 1890 and 1930. Richard Crane, his son, was confidential assistant to then Secretary of State Robert Lansing. According to the former ambassador to Germany William Dodd, Crane "did much to bring on the Kerensky revolution which gave way to Communism."¹³ And so Steffens' comments in his diary about conversations aboard the S.S. Kristianiafjord are highly pertinent:" . . . all agree that the revolution is in its first phase only, that it must grow. Crane and Russian radicals on the ship think we shall be in Petrograd for the re-revolution.¹⁴

For those uninitiated to this period of Russian history, the Kerensky revolution is distinguished from the Bolshevik Revolution. The Kerensky revolt happened in February, whereas the more bloody Bolshevik Revolution occurred in "Red October." This is what Steffans referred to as the re-revolution. It was in April of 1917 that Trotsky was held up by Canadian authorities.

The State Department was used to cable reports on the Russian situation to the older Mr. Crane. I'm sure this service was available to any private businessman wanting to break into the Russian market. (eye-roll)

Because of that $10K that Trotsky had on him of German origin, he was taken off his Russian-bound boat in Halifax and interred with his family as a German POW. (Trotsky was reported to speak better German than Russian.) Two New Yorkers, N. Aleinikoff and Arthur Wolf, send telegrams to the Deputy Canadian Postmaster General, a man named R.M. Coulter. These telegrams were charged to the Canadian Post Office and were not privately paid for. (suspicious) The nature of these wires were to vouch for Mr. Trotsky and to ask Mr. Coulter to investigate Trotsky's interment and "as  champion of freedom you will intercede on their behalf".  Coulter replied that they, Trotsky and his compatriots, were not who they represented themselves to be, and that they were being held under Imperial (British) authority, not Canadian. Coulter then writes to a Major Gwatkin of the Department of Militia and Defense in Ottawa a positive character reference along with copies of the New Yorker's telegrams. Turns out that Aleinikoff was super big buds with Trotsky and the other Russian socialists the was interred with. Gwatkin stands up for Trotsky and he, his family, and traveling companions are released to go onto Russia.

Pretty weird, huh?

You're not the only one who thought so, Lt. Col. John Bayne MacLean  of MacLean Publishing also thought this incident to be quite strange. He wrote an article in his own magazine, MacLean's, "Why Did We Let Trotsky Go? How Canada Lost an Opportunity to Shorten the War."

MacLean's opening argument is that "some Canadian politicians or officials were chiefly responsible for the prolongation of the war [World War I], for the great loss of life, the wounds and sufferings of the winter of 1917 and the great drives of 1918."

Further, states MacLean, these persons were (in 1919)doing everything possible to prevent Parliament and the Canadian people from getting the related facts. Official reports, including those of Sir Douglas Haig, demonstrate that but for the Russian break in 1917 the war would have been over a year earlier, and that "the man chiefly responsible for the defection of Russia was Trotsky... acting under German instructions."

Who was Trotsky? According to MacLean, Trotsky was not Russian, but German. Odd as this assertion may appear it does coincide with other scraps of intelligence information: to wit, that Trotsky spoke better German than Russian, and that he was the Russian executive of the German "Black Bond." According to MacLean, Trotsky in August 1914 had been "ostentatiously" expelled from Berlin;²⁰ he finally arrived in the United States where he organized Russian revolutionaries, as well as revolutionaries in Western Canada, who "were largely Germans and Austrians traveling as Russians." MacLean continues:

Originally the British found through Russian associates that Kerensky,²¹ Lenin and some lesser leaders were practically in German pay as early as 1915 and they uncovered in 1916 the connections with Trotsky then living in New York. From that time he was closely watched by... the Bomb Squad. In the early part of 1916 a German official sailed for New York. British Intelligence officials accompanied him. He was held up at Halifax; but on their instruction he was passed on with profuse apologies for the necessary delay. After much manoeuvering he arrived in a dirty little newspaper office in the slums and there found Trotsky, to whom he bore important instructions. From June 1916, until they passed him on [to] the British, the N.Y. Bomb Squad never lost touch with Trotsky. They discovered that his real name was Braunstein and that he was a German, not a Russian.²²

Again, according to MacLean, Trotsky's money came "from German sources in New York." Also:

generally the explanation given is that the release was done at the request of Kerensky but months before this British officers and one Canadian serving in Russia, who could speak the Russian language, reported to London and Washington that Kerensky was in German service.²³

The $10,000 Trotsky fund in New York was from German sources, and a recently declassified document in the U.S. State Department files reads as follows:

March 9, 1918 to: American Consul, Vladivostok from Polk, Acting Secretary of State, Washington D.C.

For your confidential information and prompt attention: Following is substance of message of January twelfth from Von Schanz of German Imperial Bank to Trotsky, quote Consent imperial bank to appropriation from credit general staff of five million roubles for sending assistant chief naval commissioner Kudrisheff to Far East.

This message suggests some liaison between Trotsky and the Germans in January 1918, a time when Trotsky was proposing an alliance with the West. The State Department does not give the provenance of the telegram, only that it originated with the War College Staff. The State Department did treat the message as authentic and acted on the basis of assumed authenticity. It is consistent with the general theme of Colonel MacLean's article.

TROTSKY'S INTENTIONS AND OBJECTIVES

Consequently, we can derive the following sequence of events: Trotsky traveled from New York to Petrograd on a passport supplied by the intervention of Woodrow Wilson, and with the declared intention to "carry forward" the revolution. The British government was the immediate source of Trotsky's release from Canadian custody in April 1917, but there may well have been "pressures." Lincoln Steffens, an American Communist, acted as a link between Wilson and Charles R. Crane and between Crane and Trotsky. Further, while Crane had no official position, his son Richard was confidential assistant to Secretary of State Robert Lansing, and Crane senior was provided with prompt and detailed reports on the progress of the Bolshevik Revolution. Moreover, Ambassador William Dodd (U.S. ambassador to Germany in the Hitler era) said that Crane had an active role in the Kerensky phase of the revolution; the Steffens letters confirm that Crane saw the Kerensky phase as only one step in a continuing revolution.

The interesting point, however, is not so much the communication among dissimilar persons like Crane, Steffens, Trotsky, and Woodrow Wilson as the existence of at least a measure of agreement on the procedure to be followed — that is, the Provisional Government was seen as "provisional," and the "re-revolution" was to follow.

On the other side of the coin, interpretation of Trotsky's intentions should be cautious: he was adept at double games. Official documentation clearly demonstrates contradictory actions. For example, the Division of Far Eastern Affairs in the U.S. State Department received on March 23, 1918, two reports stemming from Trotsky; one is inconsistent with the other. One report, dated March 20 and from Moscow, originated in the Russian newspaper Russkoe Slovo. The report cited an interview with Trotsky in which he stated that any alliance with the United States was impossible:

The Russia of the Soviet cannot align itself... with capitalistic America for this would be a betrayal It is possible that Americans seek such an rapprochement with us, driven by its antagonism towards Japan, but in any case there can be no question of an alliance by us of any nature with a bourgeoisie nation.²⁴

The other report, also originating in Moscow, is a message dated March 17, 1918, three days earlier, and from Ambassador Francis: "Trotsky requests five American officers as inspectors of army being organized for defense also requests railroad operating men and equipment."²⁵

This request to the U.S. is of course inconsistent with rejection of an "alliance."

Before we leave Trotsky some mention should be made of the Stalinist show trials of the 1930s and, in particular, the 1938 accusations and trial of the "Anti-Soviet bloc of rightists and Trotskyites." These forced parodies of the judicial process, almost unanimously rejected in the West, may throw light on Trotsky's intentions.

The crux of the Stalinist accusation was that Trotskyites were paid agents of international capitalism. K. G. Rakovsky, one of the 1938 defendants, said, or was induced to say, "We were the vanguard of foreign aggression, of international fascism, and not only in the USSR but also in Spain, China, throughout the world." The summation of the "court" contains the statement, "There is not a single man in the world who brought so much sorrow and misfortune to people as Trotsky. He is the vilest agent of fascism .... "²⁶

Now while this may be no more than verbal insults routinely traded among the international Communists of the 1930s and 40s, it is also notable that the threads behind the self-accusation are consistent with the evidence in this chapter. And further, as we shall see later, Trotsky was able to generate support among international capitalists, who, incidentally, were also supporters of Mussolini and Hitler.²⁷

So long as we see all international revolutionaries and all international capitalists as implacable enemies of one another, then we miss a crucial point — that there has indeed been some operational cooperation between international capitalists, including fascists. And there is no a priori reason why we should reject Trotsky as a part of this alliance.

Colonel MacLean's observations that Trotsky had "strong underground influence" and that his "power was so great that orders were issued that he must be given every consideration" are not at all inconsistent with the Coulter-Gwatkin intervention in Trotsky's behalf; or, for that matter, with those later occurrences, the Stalinist accusations in the Trotskyite show trials of the 1930s.  On the other hand, the only known direct link between Trotsky and international banking is through his cousin Abram Givatovzo, who was a private banker in Kiev before the Russian Revolution and in Stockholm after the revolution. While Givatovzo professed antibolshevism, he was in fact acting in behalf of the Soviets in 1918 in currency transactions.²⁸

Is it possible an international web (:an be spun from these events? First there's Trotsky, a Russian internationalist revolutionary with German connections who sparks assistance from two supposed supporters of Prince Lvov's government in Russia (Aleinikoff and Wolf, Russians resident in New York). These two ignite the action of a liberal Canadian deputy postmaster general, who in turn intercedes with a prominent British Army major general on the Canadian military staff. These are all verifiable links.

In brief, allegiances may not always be what they are called, or appear. We can, however, surmise that Trotsky, Aleinikoff, Wolf, Coulter, and Gwatkin in acting for a common limited objective also had some common higher goal than national allegiance or political label. To emphasize, there is no absolute proof that this is so. It is, at the moment, only a logical supposition from the facts. A loyalty higher than that forged by a common immediate goal need have been no more than that of friendship, although that strains the imagination when we ponder such a polyglot combination. It may also have been promoted by other motives. The picture is yet incomplete.

 When you look at Barack Obama's close links with Wall Street, despite the fact he supposedly raised and surrounded by communists/socialists/Marxists his whole life, it really makes you reevaluate your paradigms.  So for all conservatives who will defend Wall Street as the emblem of free markets, do you find this information disturbing? Do you find the interlock between Wall Street executives and government regulatory agencies consistent with free market economics. How do you explain the large Fortune 500 corporations hold on their markets through the force of government? As we explore further the connections between early Wall Street and Communist Russia, we will see that not everyone is who they claim to be.

Check out the footnotes on this book - pretty thorough, huh?

Footnotes:

¹Leon Trotsky, My Life (New York: Scribner's, 1930), chap. 22.

²Joseph Nedava, Trotsky and the Jews (Philadelphia: Jewish Publication Society of America, 1972), p. 163.

³United States, Senate, Brewing and Liquor Interests and German and Bolshevik Propaganda (Subcommittee on the Judiciary), 65th Cong., 1919.

⁴Special Report No. 5, The Russian Soviet Bureau in the United States, July 14, 1919, Scotland House, London S.W.I. Copy in U.S. State Dept. Decimal File, 316-23-1145.

⁵New York Times, March 5, 1917.

⁶Lewis Corey, House of Morgan: A Social Biography of the Masters of Money (New York: G. W. Watt, 1930).

⁷Morris Hillquit. (formerly Hillkowitz) had been defense attorney for Johann Most, alter the assassination of President McKinley, and in 1917 was a leader of the New York Socialist Party. In the 1920s Hillquit established himself in the New York banking world by becoming a director of, and attorney for, the International Union Bank. Under President Franklin D. Roosevelt, Hillquit helped draw up the NRA codes for the garment industry.

⁸New York Times, March 16, 1917.

⁹U.S. State Dept. Decimal File, 316-85-1002. 

¹⁰Ibid.

¹¹Ibid., 861.111/315.

¹²Lincoln Steffens, Autobiography (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1931), p. 764. Steffens was the "go-between" for Crane and Woodrow Wilson.

¹³William Edward Dodd, Ambassador Dodd's Diary, 1933-1938 (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), pp. 42-43.

¹⁴Lincoln Steffens, The Letters of Lincoln Steffens (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1941), p. 396.

¹⁵U.S. State Dept. Decimal File, 861.00/1026.

¹⁶This section is based on Canadian government records.

¹⁷Gwatkin's memoramada in the Canadian government files are not signed, but initialed with a cryptic mark or symbol. The mark has been identified as Gwatkin's because one Gwatkin letter (that o[ April 21) with that cryptic mark was acknowledged.

¹⁸H.J. Morgan, Canadian Men and Women of the Times, 1912, 2 vols. (Toronto: W. Briggs, 1898-1912).

¹⁹June 1919, pp. 66a-666. Toronto Public Library has a copy; the issue of MacLean's in which Colonel MacLean's article appeared is not easy to find and a frill summary is provided below.

²⁰See also Trotsky, My Life, p. 236.

²¹See Appendix 3.

²²According to his own account, Trotsky did not arrive in the U.S. until January 1917. Trotsky's real name was Bronstein; he invented the name "Trotsky." "Bronstein" is German and "Trotsky" is Polish rather than Russian. His first name is usually given as "Leon"; however, Trotsky's first book, which was published in Geneva, has the initial "N," not "L."

²³See Appendix 3; this document was obtained in 1971 from the British Foreign Office but apparently was known to MacLean.

²⁴U.S. State Dept. Decimal File, 861.00/1351.

²⁵U.S. State Dept. Decimal File, 861.00/1341.

²⁶Report of Court Proceedings in the Case of the Anti-Soviet "Bloc of Rightists and Trotskyites" Heard Before the Military Collegium of the Supreme Court of the USSR (Moscow: People's Commissariat of Justice of the USSR, 1938), p. 293.

²⁷See p. 174. Thomas Lamont of the Morgans was an early supporter of Mussolini.

²⁸See p. 122.

Antony Sutton's book, Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution is provided by Reformed-theology.org, with Mr. Sutton's permission.