German Intrigues¶
Core Argument¶
German Intrigues
This chapter mounts a sustained polemic against the calumny, revived by the historian Volkogonov and others, that Lenin and the Bolsheviks were funded by German imperialist gold during the First World War. The core argument is that the Bolsheviks, under Lenin’s unambiguous leadership, maintained a principled refusal to accept any entanglement with either imperialist camp, despite desperate financial need and direct German overtures. The charge is traced to its origins: fabricated by the tsarist secret police, amplified by the Provisional Government during the July 1917 witch-hunt, and later recycled by émigré reactionaries motivated by spite. Volkogonov’s claim to have uncovered “hitherto unobtainable documents” is exposed as hollow; his key sources are Melgunov’s 1940 Paris exile polemic and the testimony of Kerensky, the very architect of the original slander campaign. The “coded letters” he cites as proof are, the chapter notes, indecipherable even to him, and their existence proves nothing beyond the routine secrecy of underground work.
The chapter draws heavily on Lenin’s own published refutations and on Trotsky’s History of the Russian Revolution to dismantle the case. Lenin’s 1915 article At the Uttermost Limit is quoted at length, in which he excoriates Parvus—the key intermediary in the slander—as a renegade, a “German Plekhanov,” and a “cesspool of German chauvinism.” The Bolsheviks publicly denounced Parvus, refused him entry to meetings, and warned against any association with him. The chapter also deploys Shlyapnikov’s memoirs to devastating effect. As the Bolshevik representative in Stockholm, Shlyapnikov records that the German secret service was indeed active in Sweden and attempted to bribe Russian revolutionaries; he responded by delivering a speech to the Swedish Social Democratic congress denouncing the German party’s betrayal and declaring that the Russian proletariat would win victory “without doing deals with any government whatsoever.” His speech provoked a near-split in the Swedish party. Crucially, Shlyapnikov’s memoirs are filled with laments about the party’s chronic lack of funds—a mere 500 roubles a month would have transformed their work—proving that no German gold was flowing to them.
The polemic is sharp and contemptuous. Volkogonov’s “mountain has laboured, and borne, not even a mouse, but a squeak.” The chapter’s broader theoretical point is that revolutionaries must exploit contradictions between imperialist powers without becoming dependent on them—a position Lenin upheld in practice. The slander is not merely false but “extremely stupid,” flying in the face of all known facts about Bolshevik political conduct during and after the war.