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AND THE
BOLSHEVIK
REVOLUTION
By
Antony C. Sutton
WALL STREET
PREFACE
Since the early 1920s, numerous pamphlets and articles, even a few books, have
sought to forge a link between "international bankers" and "Bolshevik
revolutionaries." Rarely have these attempts been supported by hard evidence, and
never have such attempts been argued within the framework of a scientific
methodology. Indeed, some of the "evidence" used in these efforts has been
fraudulent, some has been irrelevant, much cannot be checked. Examination of the
topic by academic writers has been studiously avoided; probably because the
hypothesis offends the neat dichotomy of capitalists versus Communists (and
everyone knows, of course, that these are bitter enemies). Moreover, because a great
deal that has been written borders on the absurd, a sound academic reputation could
easily be wrecked on the shoals of ridicule. Reason enough to avoid the topic.
Fortunately, the State Department Decimal File, particularly the 861.00 section,
contains extensive documentation on the hypothesized link. When the evidence in
these official papers is merged with nonofficial evidence from biographies, personal
papers, and conventional histories, a truly fascinating story emerges.
We find there was a link between some New York international bankers and many
revolutionaries, including Bolsheviks. These banking gentlemen Ï who are here
identified Ï had a financial stake in, and were rooting for, the success of the
Bolshevik Revolution.
Who, why Ï and for how much Ï is the story in this book.
Antony C. Sutton
March 1974
Chapter I
THE ACTORS ON THE REVOLUTIONARY STAGE
Dear Mr. President:
I am in sympathy with the Soviet form of government as that best suited for the
Russian people...
Letter to President Woodrow Wilson (October 17, 1918) from William Lawrence
Saunders, chairman, Ingersoll-Rand Corp.; director, American International Corp.;
and deputy chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York
The frontispiece in this book was drawn by cartoonist Robert Minor in 1911 for the St.
Louis Post-Dispatch. Minor was a talented artist and writer who doubled as a
Bolshevik revolutionary, got himself arrested in Russia in 1915 for alleged subversion,
and was later bank-rolled by prominent Wall Street financiers. Minor's cartoon
portrays a bearded, beaming Karl Marx standing in Wall Street with Socialism tucked
under his arm and accepting the congratulations of financial luminaries J.P. Morgan,
Morgan partner George W. Perkins, a smug John D. Rockefeller, John D. Ryan of
National City Bank, and Teddy Roosevelt Ï prominently identified by his famous
teeth Ï in the background. Wall Street is decorated by Red flags. The cheering crowd
and the airborne hats suggest that Karl Marx must have been a fairly popular sort of
fellow in the New York financial district.
Was Robert Minor dreaming? On the contrary, we shall see that Minor was on firm
ground in depicting an enthusiastic alliance of Wall Street and Marxist socialism. The
characters in Minor's cartoon Ï Karl Marx (symbolizing the future revolutionaries
Lenin and Trotsky), J. P. Morgan, John D. Rockefeller Ï and indeed Robert Minor
himself, are also prominent characters in this book.
The contradictions suggested by Minor's cartoon have been brushed under the rug of
history because they do not fit the accepted conceptual spectrum of political left and
political right. Bolsheviks are at the left end of the political spectrum and Wall Street
financiers are at the right end; therefore, we implicitly reason, the two groups have
nothing in common and any alliance between the two is absurd. Factors contrary to
this neat conceptual arrangement are usually rejected as bizarre observations or
unfortunate errors. Modern history possesses such a built-in duality and certainly if
too many uncomfortable facts have been rejected and brushed under the rug, it is an
inaccurate history.
On the other hand, it may be observed that both the extreme right and the extreme left
of the conventional political spectrum are absolutely collectivist. The national
socialist (for example, the fascist) and the international socialist (for example, the
Communist) both recommend totalitarian politico-economic systems based on naked,
unfettered political power and individual coercion. Both systems require monopoly
control of society. While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J.
P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of
Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly
was to "go political" and make society go to work for the monopolists Ï under the
name of the public good and the public interest. This strategy was detailed in 1906 by
Frederick C. Howe in his Confessions of a Monopolist.
1
Howe, by the way, is also a
figure in the story of the Bolshevik Revolution.
Therefore, an alternative conceptual packaging of political ideas and politico-
economic systems would be that of ranking the degree of individual freedom versus
the degree of centralized political control. Under such an ordering the corporate
welfare state and socialism are at the same end of the spectrum. Hence we see that
attempts at monopoly control of society can have different labels while owning
common features.
Consequently, one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that
all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists and socialists.
This erroneous idea originated with Karl Marx and was undoubtedly useful to his
purposes. In fact, the idea is nonsense. There has been a continuing, albeit concealed,
alliance between international political capitalists and international revolutionary
socialists Ï to their mutual benefit. This alliance has gone unobserved largely
because historians Ï with a few notable exceptions Ï have an unconscious Marxian
bias and are thus locked into the impossibility of any such alliance existing. The open-
minded reader should bear two clues in mind: monopoly capitalists are the bitter
enemies of laissez-faire entrepreneurs; and, given the weaknesses of socialist central
planning, the totalitarian socialist state is a perfect captive market for monopoly
capitalists, if an alliance can be made with the socialist powerbrokers. Suppose Ï and
it is only hypothesis at this point Ï that American monopoly capitalists were able to
reduce a planned socialist Russia to the status of a captive technical colony? Would
not this be the logical twentieth-century internationalist extension of the Morgan
railroad monopolies and the Rockefeller petroleum trust of the late nineteenth century?
Apart from Gabriel Kolko, Murray Rothbard, and the revisionists, historians have not
been alert for such a combination of events. Historical reporting, with rare exceptions,
has been forced into a dichotomy of capitalists versus socialists. George Kennan's
monumental and readable study of the Russian Revolution consistently maintains this
fiction of a Wall Street-Bolshevik dichotomy.
2
Russia Leaves the War has a single
incidental reference to the J.P. Morgan firm and no reference at all to Guaranty Trust
Company. Yet both organizations are prominently mentioned in the State Department
files, to which frequent reference is made in this book, and both are part of the core of
the evidence presented here. Neither self-admitted "Bolshevik banker" Olof Aschberg
nor Nya Banken in Stockholm is mentioned in Kennan yet both were central to
Bolshevik funding. Moreover, in minor yet crucial circumstances, at least crucial for
our argument, Kennan is factually in error. For example, Kennan cites Federal
Reserve Bank director William Boyce Thompson as leaving Russia on November 27,
1917. This departure date would make it physically impossible for Thompson to be in
Petrograd on December 2, 1917, to transmit a cable request for $1 million to Morgan
in New York. Thompson in fact left Petrograd on December 4, 1918, two days after
sending the cable to New York. Then again, Kennan states that on November 30,
1917, Trotsky delivered a speech before the Petrograd Soviet in which he observed,
"Today I had here in the Smolny Institute two Americans closely connected with
American Capitalist elements "According to Kennan, it "is difficult to imagine" who
these two Americans "could have been, if not Robins and Gumberg." But in [act
Alexander Gumberg was Russian, not American. Further, as Thompson was still in
Russia on November 30, 1917, then the two Americans who visited Trotsky were
more than likely Raymond Robins, a mining promoter turned do-gooder, and
Thompson, of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.
The Bolshevization of Wall Street was known among well informed circles as early as
1919. The financial journalist Barron recorded a conversation with oil magnate E. H.
Doheny in 1919 and specifically named three prominent financiers, William Boyce
Thompson, Thomas Lamont and Charles R. Crane:
Aboard S.S. Aquitania, Friday Evening, February 1, 1919.
Spent the evening with the Dohenys in their suite. Mr. Doheny said: If you believe in
democracy you cannot believe in Socialism. Socialism is the poison that destroys
democracy. Democracy means opportunity for all. Socialism holds out the hope that a
man can quit work and be better off. Bolshevism is the true fruit of socialism and if
you will read the interesting testimony before the Senate Committee about the middle
of January that showed up all these pacifists and peace-makers as German
sympathizers, Socialists, and Bolsheviks, you will see that a majority of the college
professors in the United States are teaching socialism and Bolshevism and that fifty-
two college professors were on so-called peace committees in 1914. President Eliot of
Harvard is teaching Bolshevism. The worst Bolshevists in the United States are not
only college professors, of whom President Wilson is one, but capitalists and the
wives of capitalists and neither seem to know what they are talking about. William
Boyce Thompson is teaching Bolshevism and he may yet convert Lamont of J.P.
Morgan & Company. Vanderlip is a Bolshevist, so is Charles R. Crane. Many women
are joining the movement and neither they, nor their husbands, know what it is, or
what it leads to. Henry Ford is another and so are most of those one hundred
historians Wilson took abroad with him in the foolish idea that history can teach youth
proper demarcations of races, peoples, and nations geographically.
3
In brief, this is a story of the Bolshevik Revolution and its aftermath, but a story that
departs from the usual conceptual straitjacket approach of capitalists versus
Communists. Our story postulates a partnership between international monopoly
capitalism and international revolutionary socialism for their mutual benefit. The final
human cost of this alliance has fallen upon the shoulders of the individual Russian and
the individual American. Entrepreneurship has been brought into disrepute and the
world has been propelled toward inefficient socialist planning as a result of these
monopoly maneuverings in the world of politics and revolution.
This is also a story reflecting the betrayal of the Russian Revolution. The tsars and
their corrupt political system were ejected only to be replaced by the new
powerbrokers of another corrupt political system. Where the United States could have
exerted its dominant influence to bring about a free Russia it truckled to the ambitions
of a few Wall Street financiers who, for their own purposes, could accept a centralized
tsarist Russia or a centralized Marxist Russia but not a decentralized free Russia. And
the reasons for these assertions will unfold as we develop the underlying and, so far,
untold history of the Russian Revolution and its aftermath.
4
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