Talk:Alexander Parvus

old Anti-Lenin lies
The author of this article claims that Lenin was a paid German agent. These are old anti-bolshevik lies that history has proved wrong. I have already removed the part that said that Lenin received gold by the German Emperor. But this article needs a serious look over and rewriting. Bronks 12 November, 2005.

Not only that he was a paid German agent, but the october revolt was heavily supported by the german POVs released from detention, and reorganized and armed by the german army. AbuAmir 19:56, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Leninist apologists need not rewrite history
Lenin's sponsorship by the German government has already been clearly established by archival documents in Germany that describe in detail the transfer of funds. I'm willing to throw this evidence on the table, those who care to go to Germany and get copies themselves may do so. 69.117.30.32
 * If you care to add provable information about the topic then you can acquire copies of the documents before you add it. ^_^ Solidusspriggan 10:19, 10 December 2005 (UTC)

FROM: The History of the Russian Revolution
Here is part of a speach held by Leon Trotsky in the summer of 1917 when the Bolsheviks were beeing accussed of beeing "German Agents".

"Speaking on the 17th [July] at a joint session of the two Executive Committees, Trotsky said: An intolerable atmosphere has been created, in which you as well as we are choking. They are throwing dirty accusations at Lenin and Zinoviev. (Voice: ’That is true.’ Uproar. Trotsky continues.) . . Lenin has fought thirty years for the revolution. I have fought twenty years against the oppression of the people. And we cannot but cherish a hatred for German militarism. . . . I have been sentenced by a German court to eight months’ imprisonment for my struggle against German militarism. . . . This everybody knows. Let nobody in this hall say that we are hirelings of Germany. . . (Applause)" Bronks

Nice sources..
Leon Trotsky is hardly a neutral source for such information, lol!

It is a fact that the Russian provisional government's military intelligence agency had acquired information on Lenin's sponsorship, and that Vladimir Lenin was hiding in Finland because there was a warrant for his arrest as a German agent.

If you think about it, there were MANY Bolsheviks whom were quite freely working in the Petrograd Soviet at the time, so this cannot be explained as a Menshevik/SR anti-Bolshevik plot. As a matter of fact at the time of Lenin's indictment, the Bolsheviks were largely in control of the military arm of the Soviet, and Kerenski needed their help in apprehending Kornilov. The Russian provisional government's indictment against Lenin is quite well known, it has with it all the documents necessary. I'm not going to spend the time to retype it all into the Wikipedia.

To me, questioning Lenin's German sponsorship is like questioning if the Holocaust happened.

Germany/Russia/Great Britain
Here is a simple generic scheme I suggest, that I think would be helpful in looking at this controversial issue:

Russia collapsed before the end of the WWI. Germany lost the war. The winner was Great Britain (and one may say the United States). Although England was an ally with Russia before its collapse, but winning the world war with Russia might imply a hegemony of the Russian Empire in the world. This was not in the interests of England which was in fact the hegemon at the time. So, a revolution in Russia could be as attractive and beneficial for England as it was for Russia's enemy - Germany. In this respect, financing the revolution in Russia was not only in the interests of Germany but also GB. Eventually, this is what happened if we look at the result: Germany lost the war and Russia collapsed(basically lost too) which helped England keeping its position as a hegemon. One may argue that the US became the leading power after WWI but I would put this aside for a separate discussion.

Helphand is considered the father of the revolution: the intellect and the financial resource of it. Should we really believe that he was a German agent? Well, in my opinion, he could have been a German agent as he could have been an agent for British Intelligence. There are facts nowadays supporting the view that he was indeed working for the German Government, and one can also find sources where he is referred to as an agent of the Intelligence Service of Britain. Does this make sense? I think it does. What happened to Parvus after the end of the War? Did he live a life (until his death in 1924) of someone that worked for a loser (Germany)? Does not look like it, rather, he lived a luxurious life in Europe - did the job, now deserves a good vacation.

Also, one needs to look at the overall activities of the Germans and British in Russia before, during and after the revolution. Key moments are: who played a role in creating the Cheka? Who financed bolshevik's activities? And let's not forget that again and again the winner in the game was the GB.

Vahan Senekerimyan 03:58, 21 June 2006 (UTC)

So GB created KGB? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 141.226.218.48 (talk) 12:46, 24 September 2016 (UTC)

Influence on Trotsky?
The article on Leon Trotsky says that his theory of Permanent Revolution was developed with advice from Parvus. Some literature from Lyndon LaRouche (which infests my college campus these days) says this as well, putting him and Trostky close together in their global conspiracy of evil. So I came here from the Trotsky article to see how much there was to that. And there's nothing! Even if it's complete BS that Parvus contributed to Trotskyism, still a debunking would be nice. Do those of you that know know about Parvus have anything to say about this? Thanks if you can! --Toby Bartels 21:04, 28 May 2006 (UTC)

Extraordinary allegations require extraordinary sources
Some very serious allegations are made in the article. Requesting reputable & verifiable sources, please. ←Humus sapiens ну? 02:04, 19 August 2006 (UTC)

Further documentary sources
I looked into this history some years ago in quite a bit of depth. The most detailed secondary source is, as stated, Freibeuter der Revolution. Parvus-Helphand. Eine politische Biographie by Winfried Scharlau and Zbynek A. Zeman. It should be noted that this book was translated into English and published in London in 1965 as The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (parvus), 1867-1924 (London, 1965). In my opinion, the article is generally faithful to the treatment in the Scharlau-Zeman work.

The key question is whether Lenin was a German agent. The evidence here is equivocal. The Germans took care to protect the secrecy of their undercover activities. German archives have not provided evidence clearly delineating the scope of Lenin's involvement. Indeed, some of the most incriminating material released during World War I was clever propaganda and later research demonstrated it to be a forgery.

There is, however, quite a bit of circumstantial evidence showing that Lenin willingly used German money after his return to Russia on April 3, 1917 [Old Style]. It is well documented that Lenin accepted extraordinary German help in getting to Russia. The German High Command orchestrated Lenin’s trip back in a special ‘sealed train’ that crossed wartime Germany with the highest priority. Lenin and his small entourage departed the Bern, Switzerland train station a little after 3 p.m. on Monday, March 27, 1917 [O.S.]. At the German border the group was placed in a specially guarded car separated from all the other passengers on the train. This "sealed train" traversed the length of wartime Germany for the next four days. It was accorded such high traffic priority that it delayed the train of the Imperial Crown Prince for two hours. The Kaiser himself followed the train's progress, and the High Command informed the agents arranging Lenin's transport that the army was prepared to get the party into Russia through German lines if Swedish opposition made that necessary. [The best work on this trip is Werner Hahlweg’s Lenins Rückkehr nach Russland 1917 (Leiden, 1957); the best work in English is The Sealed Train by Michael Pearson (New York, 1975)] On Thursday, the train reached the Baltic port of Sassnitz, and Lenin wired his close associate, Jacob Fürstenberg, that the group would be arriving at Trelleborg, Sweden at 6 p.m. that evening. Fürstenberg was waiting at Trelleborg when the ferry docked. Fürstenberg served as managing director for one of Gelfand's companies in Stockholm which shipped German chemicals and medical supplies into Russia. Lenin and the group proceeded to Stockholm where he spent the following day with prominent local socialists. Lenin appealed to them for financial support and approval of his controversial trip through Germany.

Gelfand tried to arrange a meeting with Lenin that day in Stockholm, but Lenin instead sent his deputy, Karl Radek. The meeting lasted almost all day, and important agreements seem to have been reached regarding future German funding of Bolshevik activities in Russia. After the meeting, Gelfand immediately left Stockholm and went to Berlin for a confidential meeting with the German Foreign Secretary Arthur Zimmermann. Gelfand then quickly returned to Stockholm and used several trading companies to funnel substantial amounts of money to the Bolsheviks in Russia.

The exact amount the Germans sent to the Bolsheviks is disputed, but it is clear that the Germans felt they received full value for the money they spent in Russia. On September 29, 1917, Zimmermann's successor, Richard von Kühlmann, candidly assessed this support:

Our first interest, in these activities, was to further nationalist and separatist endeavors as far as possible and to give strong support to the revolutionary elements. We have now been engaged in these activities for some time, and in complete agreement with the Political Section of the General Staff in Berlin (Capt. von Hülsen). Our work together has shown tangible results. The Bolshevik movement could never have attained the scale or the influence which it has today without our continual support. [quoted in Z. A. B. Zeman, Germany and the Revolution in Russia 1915-1918 (London, 1958), p. 70. ]

Clearly, the Germans thought they were using Lenin to undermine the Russian provisional government and gain an early termination to hostilities on the Eastern Front. Shortly after Lenin’s arrival at the Finland Station in Petrograd, a German agent in Stockholm telegraphed Berlin: "Lenin's entry into Russia successful.  He is working exactly as we would wish" [quoted in Zeman, p. 51]. In Sir Winston Churchill's memorable phrase, the German government employed with the sealed train, "the most grisly of all weapons," transporting Lenin like "a plague bacillus" back to Russia. [Sir Winston Churchill, The World Crisis: The Aftermath (London, 1929), p. 73.]

In my view, Lenin was not a German agent in the conventional sense. Lenin hated the German Kaiser almost as much as the Russian government. The Germans thought they were using Lenin, and he thought he was using them to advance the revolution. More to the point, he desperately needed the German money. Gelfand on the other hand was an agent in a true mercenary sense. He played one side off against the other to maximize the real return to his various profit-making ventures. Lenin knew this and took great pains to distance himself from Gelfand while commissioning his close associate Fürstenberg to continue working with Gelfand in Stockholm to insure a steady stream of funds. —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Toroid (talk • contribs) 05:13, 29 October 2006 (UTC)

What happened to Parvus after the collapse of the Kaiser's Germany? One would expect the agent of Kaiser to be executed among with many others? Vahan Senekerimyan 07:58, 12 November 2006 (UTC)

Guilty as Charged
Good job, Toroid!! You should complete the job and get the article corrected, or at least insert some badly needed citations. From what I read elsewhere you got it everything right. Dr Gelfand or Helphand looked indeed self-serving and mercenary. There's an interesting movie, "Lenin: The Train" based on Michael Pearson's book "Lenin's Mistress". And now there are more independent sources to confirm the facts. Looks like yes, Gelfand did what he did out of greed; yes, Lenin took advantage of the Germans's desire to get rid of Russia and Gelfand's greed and yes, the final irony, germans helped get communism on its feet. Served them right, I think...

I was going to do some research in the matter but Mr. Toroid got it all done and quite nicely so. Kudos.

And oh yes, it's surprising that this so-long-ago piece of history sparks such a spirited debate almost 100 years after the facts.

Cheeri-o, amigos... Made with recycled electrons and HTML by N. Macchiavelli 03:42, 1 December 2006 (UTC)
 * It's an intriguing chicken race really. Lenin and Wilhelm II (and,other leading Germans, especially Arthur Zimmermann) agreed to play undercover and each side gambled on that the other side would be annihilated before he could use his advantage to the full. Lenin won, bujt only after suffering a peace and a post-peace invasion by the Germans which, both of them, were much harsher than he had ever thought it would be. Too bad Zimmermann didn't write his memoirs! /Strausszek (talk) 08:03, 1 August 2009 (UTC)

Reliable source?
In the section "Maxim Gorky's affair" what is the reliable source WP:RS for the last sentence, especially the claim about "debauchery"? If a reliable source can not be found, then the sentence should be deleted.
 * if a reliable source is not found, then I'm going to delete the sentence. While I'm at it, I'll have to review the rest of the article for similar problems. Watchdog07

Watchdog07

Source on "Maxim Gorky's Affair"?
The section on "Maxim Gorky's Affair" needs a reliable source WP:RS. What was the source used by the editor who wrote this section?

Watchdog07

Luxemburg and Parvus/Parvus and Trotsky
The article says that Rosa Luxemburg visited Parvus in jail after he had been arrested in 1905. Is there a citation for this? Luxemburg herself was arrested and held in Warsaw in the aftermath of the revolution. Parvus was active in St Petersburg and I presume he was arrested there. If I recall correctly Trotsky was held in Moscow after he had been arrested wioth the rest of the Petersburg Soviet. Was Parvus arrested on the same occasion? - I don't think he was a member of the soviet, although he did publish a newspaper together with Trotsky. --Mia-etol (talk) 20:09, 29 April 2008 (UTC)

Extraordinary allegations require extraordinary sources
it is said in here that Trotsky is not an objective source, but in the actual version is sourced Luddendorff, for example, who also, in the same book states that bolsheviks recieved money from a jewish man called "Solmsen". is this a reliable source, then?--190.249.0.201 (talk) 00:11, 16 August 2009 (UTC)

Memoirs
Despite his failure to help the new Weimar Republic regime he was well provided for, living in a well appointed 32-room mansion in Berlin's Swan Isle. He later published his memoirs from this residence

Parvus is a very interesting and obscure character in history. I was wondering if anybody knew anything about this so-called memoir of his?

Rewrite Needed
I think we need to separate what is universally agreed about Parvus and the swirling mass of allegations around him. That is not to say the allegations shouldn't be aired - obviously they are an important part of Parvus's story - but the article does not give a clear indication of what is not contested, e.g. the influence on Trotsky mentioned above.--Jack Upland (talk) 10:46, 28 July 2010 (UTC)

I think we need to separate what is universally agreed about Parvus and the swirling mass of allegations around him. That is not to say the allegations shouldn't be aired - obviously they are an important part of Parvus's story - but the article does not give a clear indication of what is not contested, e.g. the influence on Trotsky mentioned above.--Jack Upland (talk) 10:46, 28 July 2010 (UTC) - I have just finished reading the only extant full biography of Parvus by Zeman and Scharlau. I am sorry to say that the author(s) of this wikipedia entry have produced not just an inaccurate but also a positively misleading piece of work. Not only is the truth about the gigantic operation of the German financing of Lenin through Parvus totally effaced and portrayed as if it were a matter of slanderous rumours to be cleared up, when the truth is that it is one of the best documented and conclusively proven facts of WWI history, but also the views of the biographers of Parvus with regard to this issue are distorted beyond recognition. Although they spend whole chapters detailing precisely how this operation was set up and run, the author of this entry has the temerity to appeal to them in order to support his unhistorical, biased and misleading thesis that such collaboration did not take place and that Lenin refused German money. This of course is NOT what the biographers of Parvus say. What they do say is that Lenin was putting up a show of criticising Parvus as a " socialist chauvinist" at the same time that he had placed his trusted Hanecki ( whom he subsequently made head of the Soviet Central Bank ) as his representative within Parvus' Stockholm business to oversee the operation of the transfer of German funds to a Siberian bank account to which he (Lenin), among others, had full access - a fact also independently proven by evidence brought to light by many other researchers such as David Schub ( Politischeskeie Deyateli Rosii, New York, 1969, pp.213-27 ). Of course there is an ocean of evidence proving the exact same thing on the side of the mass of German documents pertaining to this case, as to a certain point the above discussion has revealed. I am therefore astounded that this entry has not been thoroughly rewritten yet. The text as it stands is a shameful piece of biased, unscholarly misinformation. 79.167.16.75 (talk) 11:44, 17 October 2011 (UTC) PROSPERO


 * Indeed, if the article is read against Pearson's The Sealed Train - probably the best scholarly account in English of Lenin's return to Russia and his efforts to gain a footing for his party there after he returned; they had been a very small and disorganized bunch at home from about 1910 to the spring of 1917 - or Hans Björkegren's Ryska Posten ("Russian Mail", Stockholm, 1985, in Swedish) which examines Scandinavia as a critical base region for the Russian revolutionaries in exile, again reviews the Parvus/Lenin/Berlin connection and, inter alia, produces interesting clues indicating that Lenin and Parvus may have met in Stockholm on the day Lenin was passing through on his way home, and may have had a top secret meeting there at a hotel discussing their cooperation - this WP article stands out as part fabrication, part weasel-wordy evasion and misrepresentation of what historians have had to say about Lenin and Helphand/Parvus. 83.254.154.164 (talk) 12:15, 13 August 2015 (UTC)

Opening paragraph - mocking names
Can someone edit the first paragraph to be this guy's actual names? — Preceding unsigned comment added by 146.198.153.178 (talk) 01:20, 14 March 2021 (UTC)