Alexander Parvus
Aleksandr Lvovich Parvus (Алекса́ндр Льво́вич Па́рвус, born Izráil Lázarevich Guélfand, also transcribed as Helphand; in Russian, Изра́иль Ла́за ревич Ге́льфанд), better known by his pseudonym Aleksandr Parvus (Belarus, September 8, 1867 - Berlin, December 12, 1924) was a socialist of Russian Jewish origin, who settled in Germany, where he achieved distinction as an economist and Marxist writer.
Youth
Son of middle-class Jewish parents, he was born in Berezino, Minsk province, in 1867. He spent his youth in Odessa, where he would begin to establish contacts in various revolutionary circles. Like other revolutionaries of the time, he was influenced by the Russian populist movement (naródnik) and learned a trade to "be closer to the people." He made several trips to Western Europe to establish contact with emigrated Russian revolutionaries.
Exile in Switzerland and Germany
At the age of 19, in 1887, he settled in Basel to study at its university. He soon devoted himself to journalism in support of the German Social Democratic Party, which grew spectacularly in the 1890s. He later left to Zurich, where he would continue his studies, achieving the title of doctor of philosophy in 1891. After having embraced Marxism, he moved to Germany joining the Social Democratic Party, in which he maintained a close collaboration with Rosa Luxemburg, whom he had known as student during his residence in Switzerland. He belonged to the most leftist current of the party and was firmly opposed to revisionism. He unleashed his harsh attacks on this current in a series of articles in 1898 and began the dispute with Eduard Bernstein that divided the party. party until 1914. He wrote in the prestigious Die Neue Zeit (The New Times), the most important socialist newspaper of the time, edited by Karl Kautsky, in addition to telling with his own publication Aus der Weltpolitik (Of World Politics). In the latter he predicted in 1895 the war between Russia and Japan and the subsequent revolution. He did not abandon, However, his contacts with the Russian revolutionaries, although he stayed away from the disputes between their different currents. In German social democracy he was considered an original writer who contributed new ideas to the party, such as the use of large strikes as a political instrument of the proletariat.
If in 1893 he had been expelled from Prussia, in 1898 he was expelled from Saxony, but not before succeeding him at the head of the Dresden social democratic newspaper Rosa Luxemburg, which was her first contact with journalistic activity in Germany. After his expulsion he traveled to Russia with a false passport to learn about the famine in the Volga.
On his return from Russia he settled in Munich in 1900, from where he continued his attacks on the revisionists. The harshness of his articles was poorly received in some party circles, which considered them extremist. Unsure of his situation in The party, due to the hostility generated by its attitude towards the revisionists, decided to found his own newspaper in 1902, thanks to the fruitful experience obtained in Dresden. To obtain the necessary funds, he founded a publishing house that began to publish works by Russian authors, who They did not yet have copyrights since Russia had not signed the Berne Convention. The publishing house, which closed in 1906 because its owners were involved in the Russian revolution of 1905, failed in its objective of obtaining money for the new socialist newspaper. He also came into conflict with the famous Russian writer Gorky, due to non-compliance with the agreed payments for the publication of his works.
In Europe he was a reference for the Russian socialist exiles, for whom he represented the role of guide in the political world of Western Europe.
In 1900, Parvus would meet Vladimir Lenin in Munich for the first time. The personal relationship between the two was friendly and there was a certain mutual admiration for their respective works; Parvus suggested that he produce his new publication, Iskra, there. He contributed various articles to Iskra, often in intermittent series, which frequently appeared on the publication's cover., in deference to the editors, who appreciated his knowledge and judgment. He was considered one of the sharpest political minds of the time.
He tried in vain to reconcile the economistic current with that led by the editors of Iskra and, later, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks, after briefly supporting the former. His prestige made him Although his attempts at reconciliation failed, his criticism of the two currents was received with unusual respect. On the eve of the 1905 revolution, he welcomed Trotsky into his home in Munich, with whom he devised the theory of permanent revolution.. Certain ideas of the veteran Parvus influenced the young Trotsky, such as the obsolescence of nation-states.
The revolution of 1905
During the Russo-Japanese War, Parvus correctly calculated through an article published in the socialist press that Russia would lose, and that this would lead to riots and revolution. This success and the novel theory that the failures of a foreign war could serve to provoke revolts within the country, would increase Parvus' prestige in the eyes of his German comrades. At the beginning of 1905, he wrote the prologue to Trotsky's pamphlet on the revolution in which he predicted the seizure of power by the social democrats, a point of view that then only found support from Trotsky himself.
Parvus arrived in Saint Petersburg in October 1905 with false Austro-Hungarian documentation. Together with Trotsky, he published Nachalo (El Comienzo), a newspaper in which they defended the theory of permanent revolution. In December of that year, Parvus wrote a provocative article in favor of of the Saint Petersburg Soviet called The Financial Manifesto, maintaining that the Russian economy was on the verge of collapse. The panic generated, which prompted citizens to withdraw their savings from banks, affected the economy and angered Prime Minister Sergei Witte, but did not cause a financial catastrophe. He was arrested in early 1906, accused of destabilizing the economy and participating in anti-government activities during the 1905 Revolution, along with other revolutionaries such as Lev Trotsky).
He was elected president of the second Saint Petersburg Soviet, which emerged during the revolution, although he proved to be an ineffective revolutionary leader, unlike Trotsky. In prison he would continue his revolutionary activities, and would be visited by Rosa Luxemburg, recently released from prison. Warsaw prison. Sentenced to three years of exile in Siberia, Parvus escaped in late 1906 and fled to Germany, where the following year he published a book about his experiences titled In the Russian Bastille during the Revolution. Upon his return to Germany he found himself completely ruined and had to live underground.
Trotsky also returned to Germany after fleeing Russia in the summer of 1907, managing to publish his History of the Russian Revolution, thanks to Parvus.
During his stay in Germany, Parvus entered into a deal with the Russian writer Maksim Gorky to produce his work The Underworld. Under this agreement, most of the profits from the play would go to the Russian Social Democratic Party (and about 25% to Gorky himself). Parvus could not bear the expenses (despite the fact that the play was performed more than 500 times). Gorky threatened to go to trial, but Rosa Luxemburg convinced him to keep the dispute within the party's own arbitration tribunal. Finally, Parvus returned the money to Gorky, but his reputation in party circles would be damaged, aggravated by the suspicion with which his desire for luxury and waste, and his taste for debauchery, was received.
Journalist in the Balkans
Dissatisfied with the political environment in Germany after having experienced the revolution in Russia, he moved first to Vienna and, in 1910, he moved to Constantinople, where he would remain for five years. There he created an arms trading company that would make huge profits during the Balkan Wars.
Parvus initially dedicated himself to journalism, convinced that the next great European crisis would arise precisely in the Balkans. He first wrote about the Young Turks for the German press, and later began writing in La Jeune Turquie (Young Turkey), official newspaper of the new Turkish government in which it analyzed the impact of the new phenomenon of Western European imperialism on the Ottoman Empire. Little by little, journalism was giving way to business and economic prosperity: Parvus became a business advisor to Russian and Armenian merchants.
The world war
The outbreak of the First World War brought Parvus, thanks to his great business skill and the influence he had achieved in the power circles of the Ottoman Empire. He became a key figure in the economic mobilization of the empire, made necessary by the world conflict. His political position also changed abruptly: the Russian revolutionary suddenly became the representative par excellence of the German cause in the Ottoman Empire. He defended German social democratic support for the war because he considered that the revolution needed the country's victory with the most developed socialist movement, which at that time was Germany. This attitude, which was not shared by either the Russian revolutionaries or those emigrants integrated into the German socialist movement, caused their ties with them to be broken. Russian socialists who supported the Allies, became the paradigm of the traitor.
He expressed his support for Germany in a publication by a Ukrainian organization sponsored by Austria-Hungary and in January 1915 he pleaded in vain with the Bulgarian socialists for his country to join the Central Empires to further the revolutionary cause. His attempts to achieve the same in Romania the same month failed again, but allowed him to clandestinely send money to the Romanian socialists in 1915 and 1916. Germany financed the revolutionary socialists of the countries with which it was at war, because their activities subversives weakened their military power.
During his stay in Turkey, Parvus became friends with the German ambassador Von Wagenheim, to whom he offered a plan: to dismember Tsarist Russia, promoting a revolution financed by the German government. At that time Germany had to attend to two fronts, the western one against France and England, and the eastern one against Russia, seriously compromising its chances of being victorious in the war. Von Wagenheim sent him to Berlin, where he would arrive on March 6, 1915, presenting to the highest level of the German government his 20-page plan, titled Preparation for massive political strikes in Russia. That same month, Berlin, impressed by Parvus' plan, granted him travel facilities, two million marks to carry out propaganda in Russia, which were later increased by another five million in July. The destination of these amounts is unknown. German support was, however, hesitant: financial support was added to the rejection of some of the measures advocated by Parvus, such as the attack on the ruble.
The plan recommended promoting the division of the Russian population by financing the Bolshevik faction of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, encouraging ethnic separatism in several regions, and supporting several writers whose criticism of tsarism was still active during the war.
Parvus opted for Lenin and the Bolsheviks, not only because of their radical ideas but because it was the only Russian political sector that could accept German sponsorship in the war against Russia, because it was frontally opposed to it. Meetings with Russian revolutionaries in Switzerland in late spring, however, proved fruitless. Trotsky publicly broke with Parvus, and Lenin denounced Parvus for his pro-German stance as the new "German Plekhanov", who had shortly before abandoned internationalism to adopt a defencist stance, favorable to war. Despite political criticism of Parvus, Trotsky and the Bolsheviks did not consider him a German agent.
Finally, both met in Zurich and agreed to collaborate, although over time Lenin would become increasingly suspicious of him and would avoid contact whenever possible.
Returning to Germany in the spring of 1915, Parvus continued his activities on behalf of Germany while still considering himself a revolutionary and maintaining contacts with socialists and syndicalists in different countries. Between mid-1915 and mid-1917, he operated from Denmark, where it maintained close relations with local unions and had the support of the German ambassador, Count Von Brockdorff-Rantzau. The Parvus financial network was organized through certain operations in Copenhagen, establishing different intermediate stages for German money through of false transactions between entities and shell companies. The most important of these was the Institute for the Study of the Social Consequences of War, which Parvus located in Denmark.
Parvus proposed Nikolai Bukharin to direct the German support operation for the Bolsheviks, but Lenin, who did not believe in the latter's ability to keep secrets (Trotsky gave him the nickname Gossip Nick). i>), he pressed for the appointment of a man he trusted, the Bolshevik Jacob Ganetski. The activities of the messengers were organized by the Bolshevik Moisei Uritsky, who later became the head of the Cheka of the Petrograd Soviet. Suspicions of weapons smuggling on Ganetski shed unwanted attention on him, so he was sent out of Denmark. Parvus's relations with Lenin became increasingly difficult, and Parvus would begin to look for other avenues of action.
Rich and a German citizen for his services to the empire, he finally began editing his own newspaper, Die Glocke (The Bell) in August 1915. In Socialists who had belonged to the most leftist current of the party and who then defended the cause of the central empires (Germany and the Austro-Hungarian Empire) collaborated in the newspaper. In addition, during the war he became an advisor to the two main leaders of the German Social Democratic Party.: Friedrich Ebert and Philipp Scheidemann.
He made payments to Russian contacts in March, July and December 1915 and promoted the outbreak of a revolution on January 9, 1916, the anniversary of Bloody Sunday, but his plans failed. This failure cut off German funding for his plans. subversive.
Parvus's reputation within the German Foreign Ministry was called into question when, in the winter of 1916, a financial catastrophe occurred, planned to provoke a general uprising in St. Petersburg (similar to the provocation against the Russian banks of 1905).. As a result, funding for his activities was frozen. Parvus sought support from the German Navy, working briefly as an advisor. He managed to prevent Russian Admiral Kolchak from carrying out an offensive on the Turkish-German fleet in the Bosphorus and Dardanelles by sabotaging his largest warship. This achievement allowed him to regain credibility among the Germans.
The Russian Revolution of 1917
When the February Revolution broke out in Russia, the Provisional Government would confirm its commitment to the Allied powers of Western Europe and refused to sign a separate armistice with Germany. This caused the German ministry to once again rely on Parvus to finance Lenin and the Bolsheviks.
In April 1917, in a plan devised by Parvus, the German government offered Lenin and a group of thirty of his collaborators also exiled, to return to Russia from Switzerland through Germany on a sealed train under the supervision of the Swiss socialist. Fritz Platten, then continuing through Sweden and Finland until reaching Petrograd. Von Brockdorff-Rantzau recommended to his superiors at the Foreign Ministry that Parvus be used to establish good relations with the Russian left; the ministry accepted the proposal and sent Parvus to Stockholm in May, where a socialist conference was to be held that was to lead to the end of the world conflict. Attempts at an alliance between the pro-government German Social Democrats and the Bolsheviks failed; Lenin refused to meet with Parvus when he arrived in Stockholm on his way to Petrograd.
Lenin's opposition to the Stockholm conference left Parvus alone to deal with Mensheviks and Socialist Revolutionaries, hostile to the Central Empires. Parvus wanted to meet with Lenin during his planned stop in Stockholm, but Lenin instead sent his partners Jacob Ganetski and Karl Radek.
Eduard Bernstein calculated that the total amount given by the Germans to the Bolsheviks in 1917 and 1918 amounted to about 50 million gold marks.
Parvus' operations featured prominently in the accusations against Lenin published by the Russian Provisional Government during the July Days. According to the Kerensky government, Parvus' money reached Lenin through a series of intermediaries. The accusations were never proven, but they led the Menshevik government to persecute and imprison several leaders of the Bolshevik party. For his part, Parvus denied having financed the Bolsheviks while defending his positions, convinced of his upcoming political victory.
Convinced of having a relevant future after the October Revolution with the German-Russian peace talks, Parvus tried to move to Russia. He managed to be sent to Stockholm, where the only foreign representatives of the new Government. Congratulating the Bolsheviks on their political victory and maintaining that the German proletariat could force Berlin to grant a peace favorable to the new Russian Government by threatening a strike, Parvus believed that he could get peace negotiated between the parties. socialists of the two nations, an idea that the German Government rejected. Parvus asked Lenin for permission to go to the new Soviet Russia and play an active role in it - he even offered to be tried by a revolutionary tribunal for his activities. Lenin denied it, claiming in response that "The revolution cannot be done with dirty hands."
This definitively ruined Parvus' relations with Lenin and, from praising the Bolsheviks, he immediately became a bitter critic of the Soviet regime. Contacts with Rosa Luxemburg and other German socialists were also clouded. His political activity declined, despite being President Friedrich Ebert's top advisor, and he retired shortly thereafter to a German island where he would live in a 32-room mansion. He would later publish his memoirs.
He died in Germany, in December 1924. His body was cremated and buried in a Berlin cemetery.