LETTERS
On Lenin and Solzenitsyn Editors: Boris Souvarine (Dissent, Summer 1977) twists Solzhenitsyn's somewhat mythological Lenin in Zurich into a springboard for a peculiarly lopsided account of the...
...The decision was natural enough: every government at war tries to encourage domestic difficulties within the enemy country...
...His wife (Galina Constantinovna, if memory serves me after a half-century) gave me hospitality when I was expelled from the Party and driven from my lodgings in 1924...
...Trotsky wanted to camouflage the putsch by presenting it as a function of the Soviet...
...Hence his mistaken line of reasoning...
...He tried in vain to go via France and England...
...The German document signed by Captain Hillsen (No...
...With all the respect owed this peerless historian, I think that his error on this particular point is of the same order as Sukhanov's...
...Just think of it: ten centimes for the social revolution...
...The letter, which was recovered long after Lenin's death, appeared only in 1930 in Lenin's Collected Works, Vol...
...six months from now we will either be ministers or we will be hanged") therefore struck me as incongruous even in a novel, and there is nothing in it to feed a base quarrel...
...Shliapnikov was an upright man, a self-reliant spirit...
...He refrained from doing so, but kept the question in mind for the future...
...1 helped Sukhanov when, together with Volski, he founded the Vie ctconomique des Soviets, in Paris...
...But there is a still weightier aspect to all this...
...Eduard Bernstein's articles were known initially in France only through unreliable press resumds...
...The unnecessarily irascible letter that takes issue with me is scarcely persuasive when it taxes me with not having read everything or quoted everything...
...The peak of the absurd is reached and overtopped in insisting that he was, for the German documents indicate that the most sizable remittances were sent after the October coup...
...It is impossible to doubt his statement...
...rat Social (Paris, Vol...
...Every fair-minded reader can verify that it is Sir Lewis Namier (Avenues of History, London, 1952) whom I quoted...
...My reply to Mr...
...It would be naive to expect such help for nothing" (p...
...Certainly, he did dispose of funds for propaganda, as did all his counterparts in other countries...
...He said to us, in the course of a rambling conversation, In la Guerre Sociale and in I' Humanite, I've often read the lists of contributors and come across such remarks as: "For the social revolution, 10 centimes...
...The comparison would be interesting...
...The German General Staff merely approved the Wilhelmstrasse's proposal that a few hundred Russians (of all political colorations, not Bolsheviks only) be permitted to pass through Germany...
...There is surely an element of high comedy in Souvarine's "dismissal" of von Kuhlmann as a plain "liar" when juxtaposed to his incredible acceptance of the institutionalized mendacity of the Bolsheviks, including Radek—Radek...
...At home, the workers contribute one day's pay every week or every month to their newspaper...
...I am quoting from memory, of course, but the recollection is accurate...
...The available documentation shows that at first Lenin did not want to travel via Germany...
...The most remarkable piece of evidence for the German subsidy is something intangible—the titanic fact of Lenin's flight...
...In other words, the payment of I million in late 1915—the only such payment, and the fate of which no one knows—was unique...
...Translated by ADRIENNE FOULKE 116...
...19 in Zeman) mentions 300 to 400 Russians who were to be transported...
...I was able to read the articles in full only later and, in English, in David Shub's book on Lenin...
...This comes out in his final piece of chicanery: in his starry-eyed description of the atmosphere in Petrograd around October 1917 he shows that the Bolsheviks did, after all, represent genuine opinion while functioning within the democratic arena of the Soviet: one could call oneself a "Bolshevik" while meaning no more than disgust with the war...
...I have said, and I repeat...
...I was, I admit, very surprised by Souvarine's disingenuous account of all this...
...Solzhenitsyn has read the German documents well and has well understood that they are not compromising for Lenin...
...Trotsky devoted two chapters (one in My Life, one in his History of the Russian Revolution) to an overwrought denunciation of the story of the German subsidy as the "vilest slander in history...
...In a secret letter to Kamenev, in which he asked Kamenev to publish his manuscript on the state, he wrote: "Between us, if they kill me ...' (oukokochat...
...He expressed his opinion with persuasive, straightforward indignation and revulsion...
...327) to "every insinuation about German gold" as a "calumny pure and simple—until April 1917...
...Trotsky was, of course, chairman of the Soviet, a priceless vantage point...
...It was precisely here that Helphand's business network played a primordial role: he owned not merely a coal-mining company, but a freight company registered in Copenhagen: with German funds he bought countless items, shipped them to Scandinavia, and from there to Russia via Lenin's agents Radek and Fturstenberg (Hanecki...
...In 1921, he was much younger, yet he would no doubt have checked such hearsay...
...Solzhenitsyn has rightly noted that after January 22, 1916 the Wilhelmstrasse "paid Parvus not a pfennig" [p...
...Since the Bolsheviks were not to have any "enemies on the Left" for a decade or so, the parvenu dictators could claim and secure the support of the bulk of the population, e.g., of the peasants, too, until the Civil War was won and the swiftly consolidated apparatus could put the whole population through the mangling machine of the crash collectivization and industrialization programs that still constitute the fabric of life in the Soviet Union...
...The Russian "people...
...Carmichael accuses me of having called von Kuhlmann a liar...
...But Souvarine...
...In the words of the French adage: "Don't insult him who tries...
...Souvarine's remark that I "deduced" the German subsidy from the "sealed train" is, I should think, deliberately fraudulent...
...It is unnecessary to invent an imaginary connivance between Ludendorff and Lenin...
...For this mythology the figure of Helphand is ideal, indeed, indispensable—he was a caricature of all the required factors...
...The money seems to have been intended for separatist movements (one of Parvus's fixed ideas, by the way...
...When other Soviet citizens were questioned by 'In English in the original text...
...Thus Souvarine, in saying I "tried to involve" Trotsky in the German subsidy, not merely falsifies what I wrote in Encounter, he succumbs to an unaccountable flash of foolishness...
...I think Lenin's refusal to accept a trial, together with his eliminating himself from the putsch, is an overwhelming argument for the factuality of the German subsidy...
...7. No...
...Souvarine admits Lenin was "no paragon of morality...
...The notion that the Bolsheviks were given vast sums in actual banknotes is, of course, so silly that it is easy to sneer the fact itself out of existence...
...But that is not all...
...Furthermore, an appendix to the Treaty of BreastLitovsk later stipulated that Russia pay Germany a war indemnity of up to 300 million gold rubles...
...Having devoted 15 pages in Contrat Social (Vol...
...JOEL CARMICHAEL New York City 112 Boris Souvarine Replies: My article on Lenin in Zurich (originally in Est et Quest, Paris, April 1976) was somewhat abridged in Dissent (Summer 1977) with my consent...
...He was simply a shtetl Jew who became the only Marxist multimillionaire...
...8. Later, the outline of this letter—or rather, a laconic aidememoire— was found and published, in 1933, also in the Collected Works (No...
...Carmichael's diatribe may allude to some passages that were omitted in the shortened English-language version...
...This decision alone explodes the legend of German gold accepted by the Bolsheviks...
...Above all, it is important to be familiar with Lenin's secret letter to his Stockholm office, written from his hiding place between August 27-30, 1917, when he was expecting the worst...
...Martov, Axelrod, Riazanov, Lunacharsky, Bobrov, Angelica Balabanoff, and many others made the same trip as Lenin in a similar railway car (not sealed), for all that the fact thwarts a blind Leninophobia...
...The role attributed to Ludendorff is quite simply comical...
...Only on March 30th, when he learned that Chernov had been refused permission by the British authorities, did he decide to carry out Martov's idea...
...Radek's quip is perfectly natural, indeed, banal—and Souvarine brings up passport formalities...
...And as to such funds, generally they are money down the drain, for they have never brought one historic event to pass...
...My review did justice to the authors as the first biographers of Parvus, but it also pointed out manifold errors, contradictions, misleading statements, as well as inadmissable insinuations...
...Sukhanov—quoted approvingly by Trotsky and by Souvarine, when it suits them—shows most circumstantially that any possibility of lynch law was "absurd, in the summer of 1917...
...To him it seemed suspect, for, he believed, Lenin was in no danger...
...My task was not to refute everything that touches indirectly on the same subject...
...Petersburg in their "sealed railway car" (which was not sealed), they were exonerated by the Soviet, which was composed of a large majority of "patriotic" Socialists...
...Like Hanecki, Radek was an Austrian subject and could not enter Russia: under the Provisional Government, you did not enter Russia the way you walk into a cafe...
...Parvus surely pocketed the money...
...Such nonsense discredits even gossips...
...This is an incontrovertible matter of fact...
...Fair-minded readers who wish to know more will be interested to read the articles of Professor Alfred Senn on "The Myth of German Money During the First World War" and "New Documents on Lenin's Departure" (references previously supplied...
...Amicus Plato, sed magis amica veritas...
...But how could ordinary records have been kept in this very dangerous relationship...
...2) The German documents published by Hahlweg and by Zeman mention I million marks—only one—which Parvus claims he sent to Petrograd...
...Let us not forget that when the travelers arrived in St...
...He is forced into this extravagant language because he must explain Lenin's flight from Petrograd in July 1917, in the aftermath of what seems to have been an abortive insurrection accompanied by the fragmentary disclosure of the German connection...
...Whatever the meaning of legitimacy, it was lost once and for all by the dissolution of the Constituent Assembly and by the conduct of the dictatorship ever since...
...330...
...This said, I contend that he is in error about Lenin's flight in July on the following grounds: Sukhanov reasoned as a distinguished St...
...Surely it suffices to consult correspondence of the period...
...And my analysis of the Merchant, entitled "L'or et le wagon," in Con...
...Souvarine has found it easy to exploit these on behalf of a different polemic...
...But the point of the anecdote, after all, is to illustrate the ardor of all Marxists at the time: a great state had fallen to the forces of socialism, as it seemed—who knew what the future held...
...Trotsky must disprove the commonsense reaction— especially among old-fashioned Marxists—that Lenin should really have stayed on in order to clear himself: to do this Trotsky must persuade his readers that the "Right wing" hated Lenin so much that they would have stopped at nothing, hence Lenin's flight was natural...
...Avowed Party revenues could not have covered a fraction of this...
...It must be added that Kuhlmann does not altogether lie except when he credits himself with a role in the October coup...
...The Nikitin documents have to do with business affairs of Parvus, Hanecki & Co...
...This is all detailed in Leonard Schapiro's history of the Soviet Communist party...
...The same documents and testimony refute also the "sealed train" that, according to the article in Encounter, was offered by Ludendorff (sic) to Lenin alone...
...This Sukhanov could not know...
...These French...
...There was enough to do in dealing with the German documents and the book of Zeman and Scharlau about Parvus —The Merchant of Revolution—which was Solzhenitsyn's principal source...
...However, I have read Bernstein and Sukhanov and Leonard Schapiro, who are deserving of comment...
...He was among those who resolutely opposed Lenin after the October coup...
...At no point does he accept the doctored version of "German gold" paid out to Lenin up until the departure of the "sealed carriage" that was not sealed—i.e., up until April 1917...
...I suppose he means Lenin was a liar as well as, at the least, an architect of massacre, of course in the service of the Cause...
...To illustrate the point, may I be permitted a personal recollection of Lenin's making fun of French Socialists...
...Ten centimes for the social revolution...
...Two major statements he makes suffice to prove this: (1) the (pseudo-) sealed railway car becomes a "parlor car...
...Radek was able to enter the country only after the October coup, which in March was unforeseeable...
...I am replying here to a polemic that entirely disregards the facts, arguments, proofs, quotations, and references that abound in my article...
...The proposal dates from March 19, 1917...
...One has to know how that milieu functioned: the question was debated secretly by the Central Committee of the Party...
...The Encounter article sought support not in the available evidence but in the cogitations of two eminent, trustworthy personages who merit our full consideration...
...The difficulty is that my accuser shows little concern for the meaning of words, and that what he terms "source" is mere hypothesis or echo or deduction...
...From Solzhenitsyn's point of view, and of course from his own, he had not a drop of "Russian" blood...
...No doubt his homework was geared to his fundamental views...
...The idea haunted him...
...In September he contemplated seizing power...
...Not for anything in the world...
...Parvus is obviously lying, for private letters of Lenin and statements of Zinoviev, Bukharin, and Molotov make it clear that at that time the Bolshevik committee in Petrograd was almost nonexistent...
...The rumors aroused by their business dealings induced the Central Committee of the Party to deprive Hanecki of his position in Stockholm, to Lenin's great displeasure...
...It is the error of a British intellectual who transposes conditions obtaining in England to the Russia of 1917: he cannot conceive how the Bolsheviks were able to publish 41 periodicals without outside help...
...Hah, hah, hah...
...It's one of the answers to the sempiternal question: Where does the money come from...
...No doubt he believes that this calls for money to pay for offices, business staff, salaried editorial personnel, plus paper and printing costs...
...What I have challenged about Solzhenitsyn's book is the use he made in it of the Merchant, which is a work filled with equivocations, unfounded insinuations, and risky deductions...
...Gorki also was accused of receiving German money...
...Yet according to the article in Encounter...
...However, addressing the readers of Dissent, I wish to defend the memory of my friend Shlyapnikov, who has been gratuitously insulted with deliberate lack of scruple ["sans-scrupule conscient...
...Lenin changed his mind when he came to consider the Provisional Government incapable of ending the war...
...We know from several unchallengeable sources that when Lenin returned to Russia, he was convinced he would be arrested en route, then sure he would be imprisoned on arrival...
...The reference to Leonard Schapiro deserves, of course, a comment...
...He invested his opponents with his own terrorist's turn of mind...
...Schapiro's reflections...
...Since Lenin, throbbing with euphoria, thought the inevitable upheaval of the German proletariat would safeguard the Bolshevik sortie, he wanted the Bolsheviks to proclaim their seizure of power as Bolshevik...
...Solzhenitsyn has understood perfectly well, on the other hand, that it would have been impossible for Lenin to accept German subsidies: it would have meant giving up his freedom to choose his own direction and to maneuver, subordinating that freedom to silent partners...
...Facts are stubborn things...
...He did not put himself inside Lenin's skin when Lenin was obsessed by "implacable" civil war...
...not to Lenin...
...Of having some accounts to render...
...With a huge head, heavy torso, and spindly legs, Helphand lived in a sea of champagne, large-scale business deals, and luscious blondes...
...He dismisses Radek's remark to Lenin in April 1917: "In six months we'll be either ministers or hanged...
...Souvarine tucks all this away in his Postscript, detaches it from Helphand, and at the same time refers to bookkeeping records as though it were all a matter of conventional commercial transactions...
...111 How could Lenin, aflame at the prospect of seizing power in a vast country as a preamble to the triumph of the World Revolution, abdicate his leadership at the crucial moment...
...Now, however, reliable documents and testimony are available, and in my article I quoted them...
...Lenin's flight did not follow from his own wishes...
...I) The railway car was a second-and third-class coach, and the travelers paid for their tickets...
...The success of the Bolshevik press is explained simply by its out-and-out pacifist propaganda in a country that could continue the war no longer...
...Also, Riezler's book is not found among Solzhenitsyn's sources...
...Souvarine attacks the plausibility of this like a rationalist ideologue: how could the Germans support "the confiscation of private property...
...Later, he inspired the "workers' opposition" with courage and got himself read out of the Party, as a result of which he fell into the clutches of the GPU...
...This piece of—for a Marxist— silliness tells us a lot about Souvarine...
...Lenin was in Zurich...
...It was not I who "revealed" the German financing of the Bolshevik regime after the putsch: among other sources I mentioned Kurt Riezler, counselor of the Stockholm German Embassy, who in his memoir refers matter-of-factly to the allocation in July 1918 of 40 million gold marks between the Bolsheviks and some moderate monarchists...
...His authority explodes here in a puff of duplicity...
...4, December 1968...
...Abdicate it, moreover, to someone whom he and other Bolsheviks had been denouncing for a decade, a man detested by one and all...
...As were my comrades and I in France, in the same circumstances...
...Later, during the troubles, he expected he would be shot, and still later, that he would be assassinated...
...4, December 1968) to an analysis of the Parvus biography, I am not inclined to begin anew...
...and (2) Lenin allegedly received more than 50 million gold marks...
...It is permissible to disagree with a respectworthy person on a specific point...
...Has Mr...
...The devotion of the militants, in particular the typographers, made all kinds of improvisations possible...
...Not only does he refer, rather comically, to Helphand as a "RussoGerman," but he is baffled by Solzhenitsyn's obsession with Lenin's ancestry...
...He could have got this only from a memoir by someone like Shlyapttikov, a cementheaded acolyte who may have believed everything Lenin told him...
...One can even go so far as to say that these few lines should dispense with having to read the kilos of material about "German gold...
...Lenin, remote from the scene of action, was forced to swallow Trotsky's initiative, including his version of the putsch...
...it marks the conclusion of Lenin in Zurich...
...He follows this low-key summation with a curious point: Lenin was nevertheless very careful "not to let himself fall into disrepute with the Russian people whom he aspired to...
...Petersburg intellectual, who was incapable of conceiving that one could inflict harm on a prisoner...
...My sister was his collaborator...
...Alexander Shlyapnikov, who supervised the Bolshevik organization on Lenin's behalf, has emphatically denied the suspicions that the Bolsheviks cooperated with Helphand at this point of the war...
...Only Shliapnikov managed sometimes to make fleeting contact from Stockholm...
...Is it going too far to say that these few lines cancel out all the implications, the equivocations, the malicious allusions in the work, which influenced Solzhenitsyn, some of them involving various minor characters who were mixed up in the money affairs but were no part of Lenin's life...
...As to the verbiage about Trotsky, which is as obscure as it is wanting in substance, I will confine myself to a single categorical denial: in 1921, I had a conversation with Trotsky about the "German gold...
...If the evidence of the German subsidy is all worthless, why does he weasel about so much in bypassing it...
...Hah...
...The effrontery of this is all the more astonishing since it is precisely Lenin's penury until then that indicates the starting point of the subsidy...
...And further on: "Let myself be tied to someone else's policy...
...On this point, a fresh dispute from my disputant who disputes everything and nothing...
...here is the wherewithal "to make hens laugh" (a Russian saying...
...The tone of this lopsidedness is set by his throwaway reference (p...
...I have said again and again that "money is not the measure of all things...
...VIII, No...
...Stalin was of the opinion...
...But there were financial contributions from well-to-do philo-Socialist, pacifist bourgeois who gave generously even if they were not Morozovs...
...As though they were thinking of anything but the immobilization of the Eastern front...
...What, after all, is he defending...
...In any event, I million is not "more than 50 [million...
...176...
...Nor does Souvarine refer to the 41 Bolshevik periodicals published by August 1917: these came out at the rate of more than 300,000 a day and were often distributed gratis...
...I mentioned Encounter only briefly among several references to texts that attest to the steadfast survival of legends about the sealed railway car and German gold, the one factually correct passage in the London magazine having to do with Lydia Dan, Martov's sister...
...A short passage touches on the matter of money: it is decisive...
...I am no longer in a physical condition that permits me to compare the two texts, for I am too old and half-blind...
...And the memory of this martyr I preserve in all affection...
...He is saying something basic: the Russian people—simpleminded, holy—has been duped by aliens, i.e., Jews and Germans...
...185...
...In any case, there is no question of Lenin's having been involved...
...Souvarine does not even mention the two articles written by Eduard Bernstein—never accused of corruption or stupidity—in January 1921 in the official organ of the German (Social Democratic) government...
...There German subsidy invalidates the "legitimacy" of the Bolshevik putsch—but not by much...
...Solzhenitsyn is so intent on establishing the links between the Jew Helphand and the German General Staff that he disregards the true point— the dimensions of the German connection...
...Perhaps his deceitfulness, like Trotsky's, should also be construed as evidence for the German subsidy...
...It benefited primarily intermediaries and parasites...
...Berlin subventioned the Bolsheviks right up to the end of the war...
...He may belittle the evidential value of the numerous sources I mention—in fact he simply omits them all—but how can he say I "made a blinding deduction from a luminous premise...
...Roy Medvedev tells us, that Lenin should place himself in the hands of the courts in order to vindicate himself...
...I would ask Dissent to indicate such passages, if any, in footnotes...
...To deal with them by pretermission so as to take cognizance only of Lenin is "star-worshipping;'* not historical criticism...
...Proofs of this exist...
...Sukhanov was my friend...
...However that may be, in the Introduction [to the Merchant], there is an embarrassed passage that completely clears Lenin in connection with "German gold...
...And fearing from certain allusions that in the book to follow the author might venture so far as to permit himself to be influenced by the false "Creel-Sisson" documents and by the genuine Nikitin documents (supplied by the very incompetent 115 French espionage service) when no doubt I would no longer be in a condition to comment on them, rightly or wrongly I spoke out in the hope of sparing the great writer's being misled...
...At the same time Souvarine seems incapable of grasping Solzhenitsyn's true interest...
...But that's the whole point...
...lead toward social revolution...
...Solzhenitsyn writes: "Should he ask what price the Russian Revolution would have to pay for German help...
...As for Lenin, in March he was still in agreement with Plekhanov and Martov in thinking that the imminent Russian revolution must be a "bourgeois revolution," whereas Trotsky, the theoretician of the "permanent revolution," thought otherwise...
...The Bolsheviks took advantage of just that state of mind—which of course they shared—and, because they could not remotely represent the real interests of the people, installed the most ferocious apparatus of repression in history...
...It is not I who "brings up passport formalities" in connection with Radek...
...Since the Bolsheviks collided with the interests of the whole population—except the handfuls of idealists and the crowds of careerists—they were in essence wholly illegitimate—unless, of course, one believes in their mission...
...And may they not overlook the inexpressible "Marxism," which is as out of place as hairs in the soup...
...Then everything became clear...
...Beforehand I had been mesmerized by the 50-year-old discussion in which Lenin's revolutionary integrity played the principal role...
...So they were not intended for Lenin or for the Bolsheviks, who had seized *In English in the original French text of this letter...
...Isaac Deutscher makes a particularly comic attempt to reconcile these two ideas...
...What's more: the Sixth Party Congress, no more no less, had to confirm the Central Committee's decision...
...His life was devoted entirely to the cause of the workers, and it ended in unspeakable sufferings...
...Because I had then—and have still—the highest opinion of their author, the articles perplexed me at the time in that they contradicted all the unquestionable, given facts...
...There was a swarm of more or less short-lived news sheets, which had no German money...
...Sukhanov had no understanding of this terrorist mentality...
...It is for them to appreciate no less the unseemly letter that has called forth mine, and to decide to whom are to be applied such choice terms as "effrontery," `fraudulent," "duplicity," "priggishness," `falsifies," `foolishness," "chicanery," "disingenuous," "deceitfulness," and other civilities of an uncommonly elevated mind, not to mention the letter's tone—which, as the French say, makes the message...
...First, Sukhanov: he could not explain to his own satisfaction why Lenin went into hiding after the July 1917 riot...
...The fictitious remark Radek made to Lenin in March (Solzhenitsyn, p. 266...
...No more than any other non-Socialist at the time did he even know Lenin's name...
...This date is not mine...
...The car was coupled to an ordinary train in Zingen...
...French delegates who were disturbed by press campaigns at the time, they were astonished, especially that one could still pay any attention to such an old "calumny...
...1 would like to suggest also the serious, circumspect review of the Merchant by Leo van Rossum, in the publication of the Institute of Social History in Amsterdam, which I happened upon only very recently...
...160...
...113 public bank deposits, nationalized the banks, cleaned out the state coffers, nationalized the Mint, and taken possession of the plates for printing banknotes—in a word, they had at their disposal more money than one would know what to do with...
...A magazine article is not a doctoral thesis, and mine dealt with Lenin in Zurich, which implies certain limits...
...He never names Lenin...
...In consequence, some arguments and references were sacrificed...
...To whom...
...Schapiro tallied the publications of the Mensheviks and the Revolutionary Socialists and analogous groups...
...see Northern Underground, Michael Futtrel, London, 1963...
...Trotsky did not merely stage-manage the putsch, he defined it as it were constitutionally...
...Bernstein's material is not a primary source or document but the echo of the gossip of unscrupulous bureaucrats...
...The frontier was guarded by French and British officers, there in their capacity as allies, as well as by Russian police...
...The initiative to cross Germany came not from Ludendorff, not from Parvus, not from Lenin, but from Martov—a man who was above reproach—and this has been proved to the hilt...
...Surely, I imagine, his youthful ardor...
...In this respect Souvarine seems to typify a category—all those who, while appalled by the monstrosity brought about by the rosy dreams of their youth, nevertheless balk at abandoning those dreams...
...The very name of the Soviet Union keeps the fiction alive...
...This is the core of the Bolshevik putsch: it explains Trotsky's cardinal function...
...Bernstein sets down a specific figure—"more than 50 million gold marks...
...This is surely of a piece with Souvarine's pious priggishness in saying that as soon as Lenin "got a whiff of Parvus's views he sent him packing" (p...
...No such thing in the revolutionary storm of 1917...
...And on page 181, there is another passage that deserves to be quoted once more: The Bolshevik groups in Russia took no part in Helphand's [Parvus's] activities...
...To my mind the factual data add up to a lot...
...Hah, Hah, Hah...
...127 of the paper): it appears in the collection Untimely Thoughts...
...In an article dealing with Solzhenitsyn's book, and in particular with his sources, I did not have to discuss Mr...
...The gaps are accounted for by the obvious necessary secrecy: this applied to both Lenin and Helphand...
...Souvarine is particularly harsh on Solzhenitsyn's blunders...
...There is nothing to quibble about...
...Also My Life as a Rebel, by Angelica Balabanoff, who also traveled to Russia in a "sealed" (unsealed) train...
...Ens...
...The letter now appears in Lenin's Complete Works, Vol...
...In retrospect, I do regret not 114 having been more critical, for this book led Solzhenitsyn into error on many scores...
...Once in power, the Bolsheviks could exploit the camouflage of the Soviet very effectively...
...It cannot interest a prejudiced fanatic, but readers in good faith will appreciate it...
...there is no other plausible explanation...
...I questioned the inadequacy of his sources regarding Zimmerwald no less than on the Russian Revolution of 1905...
...Their cooperation depended on Lenin's consent, and their leader had never given this...
...The other German documents that mention transfers of funds—never of 50 million marks—indicate they were for "revolutionary propaganda," a term used in the vaguest sense...
...His quotation from Pierre Pascal makes much of the absence of Marxism "either among the people or the poets or the October decrees...
...It is the psychological factors, however, that seem to me to complement the objective indications in a way that is even more convincing...
...On Lenin and Solzenitsyn Editors: Boris Souvarine (Dissent, Summer 1977) twists Solzhenitsyn's somewhat mythological Lenin in Zurich into a springboard for a peculiarly lopsided account of the evidence for the German subsidy to the Bolsheviks in 1917-18...
...he was not "cementheaded,"* but was endowed with critical intelligence, a person of intellectual and moral integrity...
...Then what was he afraid of...
...Yet on the face of it, his version is nonsense...
...It was this staggering sum—the equivalent in today's currency of more than $800 million—that made me look into the question for both my Encounter articles and my Trotsky...
...This last involved high treason in wartime: all the Bolsheviks were in mortal peril...
...Of interest in this connection is the response of Maxim Gorki to Pravda's slanderous charges about the source of funds for Novaia Jizn (No...
...The majority decided otherwise...
...it was not written to serve the ends of controversialists 60 years later...
...Anyone who read my Encounter articles will see that I was linking the train and the subsidy only in order to highlight a possible Marxist defense of the latter: if Lenin accepted the train for the Cause, why not the subsidy...
...My whole explanation of Trotsky's brief eminence in the Bolshevik party is based on his not having been involved: that was just what made him indispensable...
...Anyway, the Bolshevik underground organization was so weakened by the war that it was hardly in a position to take effective action...
...The transfer of funds highlights the key role played by Alexander Helphand (Parvus...
...So it is useless to add others, for they would meet the same fate...
...Yet Solshenitsyn's preoccupation is the very axis of his mythology...
...With all my regard for Bernstein, I concluded that he had reported idle talk...
...In those days, the Revolutionary Socialist party held center stage...
Vol. 25 • January 1978 • No. 1
