The International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies (IFIMES)[1] from Ljubljana, Slovenia, regularly analyzes developments in the Middle East, the Balkans, and around the world. In a recent analysis, Lorenzo Somigli, a columnist specialized in EU and Euro-MED energy and geopolitics, delves into the historical impact of Alexander Israel Helphand, also known as Parvus. In his article titled “The Essence of Today in Yesterday's Facts 1924-2024: Parvus A Hundred Years Later,” Somigli examines Parvus's significant contributions in laying the ideological and material groundwork that facilitated the success of the communist revolution.
The more I delve into “Parvus'” figure, the more I get deeper into the well of the problems which constitute the rear of the contradictions, which today burst out again with so much virulence. One cannot understand the war in Ukraine without understanding the Russian Revolution first; nobody can acquaint oneself with this war, once again in Europe – against Europe – if the multi-secular attempt of dismembering Russia by detaching Finland and Ukraine (as foreseen in Parvus' Memorandum; there is, today, a blatant similitude with 1939) from it, is not grasped. Likewise, incomprehensible are bound to remain the Middle Eastern and the Balkan puzzles, theatres of open conflicts or new tension, if one does not catch the intimate and deep essence of First World War and the actions of prominent men who, like Parvus, worked along the Rimland borders, the Middle Earth and gate to controlling the world. It is precisely the critical Rimland fault that is on fire again, today as then: the ongoing clash for world hegemony, and close to its peak, will outline future world structures. However, one does not understand the framework that is so rapidly decomposing and the trajectories of its decomposition without understanding Parvus. It is natural, therefore, that the more I try to enter his gigantic head – like Behemoth – as a brilliant theorist and manager capable of combining, perhaps better and before many others, commerce and politics, business and revolution, the more I am convinced that we must pay him another recognition and a very different role compared to those reserved for him up to now. In short, the more I delve into this semi-known and semi-censored history of a century ago, the clearer the frantic contemporaneity becomes.
This work comes to light after consulting different available sources from various origins, seeking to retrace all phases of an extraordinary life: contemporary sources and more up-to-date reconstructions; academic-level analysis and even TV series for the public; sources in German, Turkish, Russian and Danish, his multiple motherlands. Among these, it is imperative to mention the complete works of Pietro Zveteremich – he is the one who translated Doctor Zhivago, giving no little contribution to cast a dark shadow on the Moscow regime –, that is to say, Il grande Parvus (1988); Scacco allo zar (2012) from the current Minister of Culture, Gennaro Sangiuliano; a cursed book “forbidden in Italy from Mussolini” and burnt “on Lepzig's public square, by the hand of the hangman, according to the Nazi ritual”, as is Coup d'État: The Technique of Revolution by Curt Erich Suckert, he, too, with the alias of Curzio Malaparte, which proofed itself to be particularly useful in that the Italian writer could interrogate direct sources and consequently give a more vivid reconstruction of the facts. I do not forget, either the Turkish series Payitaht: Abdulhamid (2017-2021), centred on the 34th Sultan and appeared in a neo-Ottoman atmosphere, as well as the German one, Ein Mann namens Parvus (1984) which, like Zveteremich’s book, has a clearly preparatory function in view of the fatal 1989. Understanding Parvus is very significative, as well as grasping why he is not talking about, why it was used to talk about him in a certain way or was given a partial and distorted image and, finally, when it was finally decided to do so. Can such a great man be so marginal?
This, in the last analysis, is the attempt to furnish a picture as truthful and, above all, systematically, as possible, sine ira et studio, on him who laid the ideological and material groundwork for the success of communist revolution, carrying out a precise design of space revision. It is not an oriented textbook, neither in a way nor in the other, it is not a charade-like reading of this great character, a simplification. A hundred years after “Parvus'”, or, even better, “Unus'” (his first call sign) death, he deserves a unique place in history. The essence of today lies in yesterday's facts.
99 Jahre Krieg Ließen keinen Platz für Sieger
Nena (1983)
His magnetic gaze, caught in the few photos that reached us, is unforgettable, as is indelible his imprint on history. Izrail’ Lazarevič Gel’fand, Helphand in the German speaking, aka “Parvus”, born in then-Russian territory from a Jewish family who survived a pogrom, convincingly spent his entire life to overthrow the Romanov autocracy, while at the same time accelerating the collapse of other empires and the great reshuffling of peoples, maps, borders and ethnicities, root of most contradictions. Many different bloodlines converged in “Unus”, destined to change many places precisely because – with him and after him – there would be no more homelands and the ones still existing would either dissolve into others or disappear definitively. He was a man ready to change its identity, therefore, to annihilate himself, because a new humanity would arise which would no longer recognize itself in the close ties of the past.
However, though he was a unique man, already a few times after his passing away in Berlin in December 1924, he was removed from the great history arena, almost scientifically, as if to hide the contribution of an essential but awkward man, both for his genius – not only for the “permanent revolution” – and his resolute proactivity. We can even push ourselves as far as recognize that, precisely because his contribution to certain developments of history is clear, there was an attempt to erase him, when not mentioning him incidentally, and leaving all credits to the true face of Revolution: “Lenin”.
For the very reason that he practiced the aim, in a dirty way that has little to do with idealist revolutionaries, people pretend that “Parvus” never existed or, which is even worse, he is revived only when needed, as if trying to say fragmentarily and incidentally something that is better not to say. It is recalled, for example, the notorious episode of the train which brings off a still wavering “Lenin” from the calm Switzerland to carry him to an already busted Russia and this “behemotic” character, provided with “paws-columns” – these expressions are taken from a Solzhenitsyn who clearly assimilated the essence of the Earth-Sea confrontation and moved it onto this story – appears again, giving to the Revolution the leadership that would have led it to victory; all the background, from the lucidity of Iskra to the 1905 Soviet, disappears, is hidden, is unwilling to be told. Of course, Helphand himself, as in a shadow play, before of the great plan, tried to shorten himself, hiding behind the man-symbol. Never as in “Parvus'” case is clear that history, as told, is functional to a narrative fabricating a truth for a given aim. Precisely for this, grasping him is preconditional to understand contemporaneity and the acceleration of history's dynamics.
According to what said up to now, it is not surprising that at the onset of the 1980s the “great Parvus” could – and had to – be revived; preceding productions, as in the case of the rather noteworthy The Merchant of Revolution (1965) by Zeman and Scharlau, was mostly led back in the historical and academical field, without even getting closer to the public. Times of glasnost’, which prepared the world to come, its fragile dreams and illusions. Time of admitting the truth or, at least, remove something untold about what happened, so that it could be possible to grasp the essence of nowadays in yesterday's facts. Here, then, the unknown enormous “Parvus” appears on the mass media par excellence, the television, and not in a random country but in his adopted homeland, the Germany still cut off by the long effect of the two lost Punic wars. It's 1984: a year earlier 99 Luftballons, the no-war song which will achieve a world-class success, was released; an elderly man still would not find out again the beautiful Potsdamer Platz of his childhood, like in Wings of Desire, and in West Germany is providentially broadcasted the black-and-white TV movie Ein Mann namens Parvus and it is no less than a very talented Gunter Lamprecht, aka Franz Biberkopf in the famous series Berlin Alexanderplatz directed by Rainer Fassbinder, who will interpret the unknown “Parvus”; a series that deliberately lingers on his luxurious lifestyle and his love for the pleasures of the world. A few years later the best-known one (for the Italian public) Lenin…the Train was released: the director is Damiano Damiani, the same one of A Bullet for the General and The Day of the Owl, with Krishna Pandit Bahnji alias Sir Ben Kingsley in “Lenin”'s appearance and – another weighty name – Timothy West as “Parvus”.
In a political environment who saw the rediscovery of Sultan Abdul Hamid, who leveraged Pan-Islamism to hold together an empire nearing its dissolution under the blows of foreign powers and their agents, the series Payitaht: Abdulhamid appears in Türkiye in 2017, none other than on public channel TRT. Parvus Efendi is interpreted by Kevork Malikyan, an actor with a noteworthy experience: he was born in an Armenian family who experienced the griefs of 1915, a not insignificant detail to enter the mammoth mind of a “Parvus” who survived a Tsarist pogrom, a fact that undoubtedly fostered his hostility to the Romanov autocracy, he managed to reach international stages from Istanbul. The series has the merit of highlighting the work of foreign powers which aimed at dissolving that great multi-ethnic empire not free from contradictions and original forms of coexistence, reducing Türkiye to Anatolia alone and supplanting the primacy of religion with the secular and republican values personified by the Young Turks, the first ethno-nationalist movement, leaders of the first march of the 20th century in 1909. They are destined to set an example: many people will pass through Constantinople, “Parvus” is not there by chance but because it is a laboratory, a perfect incubator crossed by the critical Rimland fault.
It is a bloody and arduous phase: while an empire is multi-ethnic by nature and finds in the emperor or sultan – the Ottomans have not forgotten Byzantium – a unifying figure for all its components, who exercises an earthly mandate by divine will, a nation must be organic and pure in blood and identity, restricted in boundaries; no otherworldly inspiration but a “pact” between citizens and a State called to efficiently carry out certain tasks. Here, therefore, lies a long trail of blood, including massacres and expulsions (above all after the failure of Eleutherios Venizelos' offensive, the Sakarya victory and the end of British support of the “Megali Idea”) who would destroy forever the centuries-old coexistence on the coasts of Ak Deniz, the Ottomans' Mediterranean Sea. Türkiye will enter a long hibernation from which it will begin to free itself only from the beginning of the 1980s, with Necmettin Erbakan's insight – indispensable his contribution to Erdoğan's thought –, which will operate to restore the political ties with the German magnet, strengthening the relations between the two productive systems, and relaunch the Pan-Islamic projection by linking the Turkish massif with the other countries of the umma, using infrastructures and frameworks of cooperation like the Development-8.
In order to more surely overthrow Capitalism, we must become Capitalists ourselves.
Parvus, quoted from: Solzhenitsyn, Lenin in Zurich (1975)
The abovementioned Turkish sojourn is pivotal in Helphand's life, in a certain sense it is a pathfinder to the future developments, marks the definite shifting to a managing-political role. Parvus Efendi, in the Turkish style, as soon as the 1905 revolutionary experiment, of which he was protagonist, failed, flees, after avoiding Siberia, first to Germany, then in a Wien which senses the first shocks; then, he arrives and stays for many years precisely in Constantinople. He works there as a correspondant, writing also for the Kievskaja Misl' Daily, the most popular newspaper in Southern Russia. Then he becomes editor-in-chief of the still active Türk Yurdu newspaper, belonging to Yusuf Akçura (1876-1935), of Tatarian descent as he was born in the exact same location as “Lenin”, and eventually counsellor of the Young Turks for economic issues, precisely thanks to his illuminating essays on this argument. “Parvus” himself left written:
«In 1910 I decided to go to Constantinople to get to know the Turkish Revolution up close and study the diplomatic plots precisely at the central point where the Gordian knot is intertwined».
In this period, he divides his time between publishing, political relations and business along the Constantinople-Berlin axis passing through the Balkans, without forgetting Romania and Bulgaria, with a favourable eye towards “his” Odesa, the cosmopolitan city where with family took shelter when he was very young. Türkiye under the Young Turks, a secular and nationalist movement, certainly influenced by Freemasonry and in particular by the Macedonia Risorta (“Resurrected Macedonia”) Lodge, created in the centenary of the French Revolution in opposition to the reactionary Abdul Hamid II, then forced to come to terms with them (the phases of revolution are always the same: crisis of royal finances, convocation of the States General, abdication or even killing of the sovereign), proves to be the ideal terrain for “Parvus”. Of course, though the program was very ambitious, the early years of Young Turks' government are characterized, after the conquering of Libya by the “Great Proletarian”, by the secession of Bosnia-Hercegovina and Bulgaria, but also an “authoritarian” putsch attempt quelled by Mahmud Shevket Pasha, without forgetting the complex financial situation, exacerbated by the “capitulations” the decadent empire had to pay to foreign powers; “Parvus”, as a smart economist, suggests the need to introduce normal commercial treaties.
It is known that “Parvus”, at the beginning, lives in the Older City, overlooking the Marmara Sea, between old wooden hovels and makeshift meals. Precisely in Pera he gets in touch with first-rank emissaries of the Reich, favouring also Türkiye's industrialization thanks to the entrances with the big German capital, and on the ruins of the Sublime Porte he will lay the fundamentals of a boundless commercial empire. «I indicated to the Young Turks – Parvus Efendi wrote again a few years later – not to separate themselves from the masses, that only a democracy that is based on the interests of the people can lend new strength to the state; step by step I showed them how their power was losing its roots and the state was being weakened... while the bourgeois press around the world extolled them as brilliant statesmen. In the Balkan war everything collapsed. Türkiye was doomed. » And, with the lucidity unique to him, he reconstructs: «It became prey of the Entente and followed his destiny. Only the World War changed the situation».
It will be precisely the influent Parvus Efendi who will push for entering war not by the Entente's side, but the Central Empires', marking the closure of the Straits which, consequently, provoked Russia's slow stifling. In effect, if the geopolitical weight and the stifling effect on the former Tsarist ally is not grasped, one cannot understand the reasons behind the pretty Churchillian move of occupying the Gallipoli peninsula. On March 18, 1815, after the effective bombing of the strongholds, the Turkish are exhausted but, at a given point, Admiral John de Robeck, incredibly, in the most favourable moment, changes his mind and does not deal the blow. These moves are unintelligible without grasping Churchill's Luciferian genius; he is, after all, the heir of John Churchill Duke of Marlborough who, heading English (and, of course, Dutch) troops, emerges victorious in the decisive Battle of Blenheim on Danube against Louis XIV's French troops. «(…) Among the characters appeared in the last centuries, he was – Voltaire wrote in his The Age of Louis XIV –, the most fatal to France's greatness». Blood doesn't lie; it is also true that Churchill had ancestors in the Guicciardini and Strozzi families, too, protagonists of already-capitalist Florence who discovered the alchemy to create money from nothing. As John fought France, the first European power of the time, so Winston fought Germany. To the joy of his Majesty.
As far as Young Turks' little Türkiye is concerned, industrialization would require long time and peace, two conditions which did not realize. The dismembering of the four great empires brought the Anglo-Saxon powers not only to conquering strategical points (Weihaiwei, Bahrain, Cyprus, etc.), but extending their influence to all the “great Inner Crescent” identified by Mackinder.
The already-mentioned post-1905 represent a turning point for the revolutionary cause. The struggle must make a qualitative bound and huge resources are needed; meanwhile, a new revolutionary élite must replace the old guard who exhausted its momentum. “Parvus” comes to the idea that revolution will not be immediate, but the war's offspring is necessary. The Russo-Japanese War, before the first great revolution, brought about, in fact, a fire-and-fury cycle, as was foreseen by Luigi Barzini, the only European correspondent following, on behalf of the Corriere della Sera, the war events, giving detailed reports on an already massive confrontation like Mukden; Parvus himself saw in it “the bloody dawn of great evenements” (in Porth Arthur's trenches there are already 600,000 men: it is stellungskrieg from the beginning). The Balkan war, in the heart of Europe, are the definitive alarm bell. The moment is pregnant, the opportunity is clear, the Romanov autocracy is no longer able to slow down a Russian society headed towards modernity and capitalism that Parvus had already grasped in the signs and insurance companies of the port of Odesa. «Ships from Liverpool, Marseille, New York, Buenos Aires, Trieste, Amsterdam and Barcelona – Zveteremich wrote – proved that the coordinates of the future did not intertwine starting from the backwardness of Russian Tsarism, but from that development that appeared at the gates of its empire». The Party must evolve: a “new-type revolutionary” must arise; the reference to the new type of Cromwellian army is not accidental. A new cause always requires a new way of fighting.
«(…) That summer, Hanecki – it is written in Solzhenitsyn's Lenin in Zurich – won over Lenin on a project: to create his own commercial enterprise in Europe or to become partners in an already active trust - and to transfer the amount of the profits to the party with guaranteed monthly payments. (…) The idea was not Kuba's, it came from the monstrously brilliant mind of Parvus, Kuba received letters from him from Constantinople. (…) He is right in writing: in order to more surely overthrow capitalism, we must become capitalists ourselves». The one suggested by “Parvus” comes out to be, in fact, a far less risky method to recollect funds than though-conspicuous bank robberies and more stable compared to donations by “patrons of the Revolution” or inheritances gained with sophisticated but extremely hard plotting. Dr. Helphand's, aka Parvus, fertile mind, found the solution to put on a concrete track this group of revolutionary exiles fled to Switzerland and far away from the operational theatres: to conceal business and revolution. The project will shape itself during the war that “Parvus” himself foresaw with his usual acumen, precisely during his stay in Copenhagen, as an import-export enterprise with a marked predilection for Russia. Capitalism was already political.
The Bolshevik coup technique creator is Trotskij.
Malaparte (1931)
How could a shapeless mass overthrow the power? It cannot. Russian Revolution was not, as the Cromwell or the French ones, a spontaneous popular movement: it was, first of all, a coup, lethal because surgical, led by a small élite of professional revolutionaries who, besides counting on massive fundings as mentioned above, had perfect conscience of the technique to take over the power by taking by surprise the ruling one, starting from the main points not of an immense territory as “All Russia”, but of a modern and European capital such as Petrograd back then: an interconnected urban massif, with stations, telegraph, post offices, bridges, industries, theatres, unions. Services on which modern life depends or places where the masses gather. All sensitive points to attack.
In tracing back, the revolutionary epics of those unforgettable days, which bring to the realization of the “socialists' great heresy”, Russian poet – pretty Futurist – Vladimir Mayakovski conveys the exploits of an indomitable mass, contemptuous of danger, unstoppably throwing itself beyond the wall of bullets: «This is the first day of the workers' deluge». The masses were of course involved but as an appearance, after the “technical coup” led by “Trotsky”, who is keen on taking over all the main points for a modern society, as perfectly recollected Curt Erich Suckert, the true name of the always controversial Malaparte, the Pratese genius who wrote Those Cursed Tuscans.
In Scacco allo zar (“Check the Tsar”), a rare book though published in 2012, the current Minister of Culture as well as former TG2 director, Gennaro Sangiuliano, reconstructed the years spent by “Lenin” in Capri, who was then destination for high-class European tourism, mainly Anglo-Saxon and Whilelminian, with whom professional revolutionaries had no trouble in mixing themselves with. The Krupp scandal did not trouble too much that Mediterranean stillness. «(…) Historians – ha scritto Gennaro Sangiuliano – agree in deeming that, for a long time, the Bolshevik Party did not have more than 24,000 members, so little compared to the immense Russia's geographical size. But that minority, as much elitist as determined, would win». In addition to being determined, that minority was made up of elite elements perfectly knowledgeable about modern subversive techniques and well replenished with the part of incomes that “Parvus” raked in.
Malaparte's reconstruction is particularly lucid and truthful. The decisive hour looms. The crowd in the capital is ready, waits, but it is shapeless, incapable of autonomous action. «Enormous crowds of deserters, who at the first sign of the February Revolution abandoned the trenches, spilling over the capital, have been camping out for six months in the streets and squares, ragged, dirty, miserable, drunk and hungry, timid and ferocious, ready for a riot and on the run, with a heart burning with the thirst for revenge and peace. » Precisely like this he describes, with his unmistakable style, the future Leningrad. «The crowd sways, crashes into the walls, retreats as if to gain momentum, rolls forward with wild screams, breaks like a foamy wave on the throng of carts»: they are the ambiguous moods of the masses of a capital in a society that is more massive than the “autocrat's eagle” can calculate. And that chaos, “Trotsky” calculates, is even worth more than a general strike.
The only shortcoming in Malaparte's book, if ever, is not mentioning Parvus. Precisely him had pointed out, in his March 9, 1915, Memorandum, the general strike as the signal for the outbreak of the Revolution. «By springtime a mass political strike has to be prepared in Russia – he wrote, insisting on the importance of the strike to block the vital ganglia of modern state – under the slogan: freedom and peace. » «The center of the movement – he correctly realized – will be Peterburg; here it will start from the Obuchov, Putilov and Baltic establishments. The strike must include the Peterburg-Warsaw, Moscow-Warsaw railway junctures and the southwestern railway. » Then, he adds: «In view of a generalization, railway bridges will be possibly blasted off, as it happened also during the 1904-1905 strike movement. » It is of interest noticing not only how “Parvus'” programme, fruit of his knowledge of the country's economic life and not without a particular geopolitical breath, certainly due to his 1899 travel, too, coincide in various points with “Trotsky”'s technical coup. However, precisely as it was a technical one, “Parvus” suggests even to schedule it. It will not be neither in 1915 nor in 1916. “Parvus”, in the meantime, makes money.
Brief, the director of the operation is not “Lenin”, but “Trotsky”, because he proves he had grasped the essence of a modern state and its fragilities. A mass is not needed, that Petrograd drifted crowd is unnecessary; what is needed are the best elements from workshops and construction sites, like a silent and efficient machine. «Lenin – still “Malaparte” writes, incredibly without mentioning “Parvus” – is the strategist, the ideologue, the animator, the “homo ex machina” of the revolution: but the creator of the Bolshevik coup technique is Trotsky. » Malaparte maybe stretches a bit too much his thesis, going as far as stating that “Trotsky”'s coup would have equally taken place also in absence of Kerenski and even «had Lenin remained in Switzerland. »
However, and this is true, the shock body is an elite one, numbering a thousand of elements chosen «among Putilov and Vyborg workshops' workers, the Baltic Fleet sailors and the Latvian regiments' soldiers. » Under the command of Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko (1883-1938), Ukrainian-born and hostile, since his teens, to the “militarist clique”, the coup plotters stage “invisible drills” in the city, a technique destined to set an example.
It must be said, the Pratese author recognizes, that Kerenski takes all the necessary precautions, but they are police techniques that are of no use against a modern insurrectional technique. Meanwhile the elite collects maps and information on the buildings, systems, sewerage system, telegraph lines, the geography of the capital and its visible and underground networks. There is no need to attack the Taurid Palace, the Maria Palace or the Winter Palace. It is more important to strike in the right places: the vital centres and nodes of the technical organization of a modern state, from aqueducts to gasometers.
At the right moment, on October 24th, in broad daylight, they deal the fatal blow and the Mayakovski’s “Millenary Before”, which seemed unbreakable, ends. The telegraph power plant and the bridges over the Neva fall into the hands of Bronstein known as “Trotsky”, once a friend of “Parvus” himself, Dybenko's sailors take control of the power plants, gasometers and railway stations. Quickly done, at 6 PM it's all over.
Russia, chopped off in its territories (Finland gets away, Ukraine becomes independent) according to the guidelines dictated by “Parvus'” memorandum, once the purifying rite of killing the absolute monarch has been completed, as already happened before in England and France with the two bourgeois and Gnostic revolutions, will never go back and history will change its course forever.
“Parvus is maybe monstruous (…). But his colourless and watery eyes are irresistibly smart, and Lenin knows well how to value this.”
Solzhenitsyn (1975)
One hundred years ago, in the month of January, “Lenin”, absolute protagonist of this story and symbol man of the Revolution, died, and in the same exact year, on December 12, 1924, a few months later, “Parvus”, shadow-man behind the Revolution, passed away. There will not be the Russian poet foreseeing that «For all ages Lenin's heart will boil in the chest of the Revolution»: newspapers will liquidate this awkward and genial main character with a few words; his comrades-in-arms, after an ordinary funeral, will be keen on pretending to forget. This notwithstanding, as it has already been written, “Parvus” left an indelible track on history. Maybe he himself, as in a shadow play, wanted so.
If there is a fact marking the history of the 20th century, and not only, that is the Russian Revolution. That fact, so extraordinary, was the acme of a historical process filled of consequences and repercussions which extend themselves up to nowadays, with shocks that forcefully resurface from the depths and shake the architrave of world relations. Great breakaway with the past, for someone; beginning of the end of traditional values, for some others. A breakover between yesterday's archaic world and an age perceived as less remote. One must always take account with the Revolution which, beyond the already-mentioned “Trotsky”, the man who was able to put into practice a modern technique to take power, has among its fathers “Lenin”, the cover-man, and his shadowy yet mammoth Izrail Lazarevich Gelfand or, in a more Prussian style, Helphand, known as “Unus” and better as “Parvus”. A prism of man.
So much different “Lenin” and “Parvus”, as much as closely linked with each other, even in the end of life. Parvus dies in Berlin on December 12, 1924, maybe alone, defeated and disheartened, surely far away from a city upon which dark shadows linger. Whilst Chancelor Bauer had saved, a few years later, the Weimar Republic by using, as Curzio Malaparte recollects, «a fundamental principle of Marxism in defense of a burgeois state», that is to say, mass strike, to quell the Meldegänger Hitler's Putsch, which boasts, among its top-rank supporters, none less than the Liège hero Erich Ludendorff, in Munich – NSDAP's membership exceeds 50,000 in 1922 – the intervention by the army, the Reichswehr, is needed: an evident proof of involution which does not foresees anything good, though, for the sake of a thorough analysis, it must be said that both the President of the Republic, Ebert, both the Reichswehr leader, do not show the slightest flinching before the Bavarian “catilinarians”. In this environment, “Parvus” goes off stage, in his villa, quietly. Later it will be inhabited by Goebbels, close to Gregor Strasser's Prussian, socialist-like faction, not hostile to Russia, though the latter converted to Communism, in opposition to the Munich one, true cradle of the entire German nationalism.
On German press some essays appear. «Dr. Helphand, aka Parvus, Died». The Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung adds that the “notorious Social-Democrat” died from an ictus and concedes itself a glimpse in his exploits: «(…) Fights against Russia's Tsarist system. At the outbreak of the 1905 Revolution, comes back to Russia, where he becomes leader of the Workers Council in Peterburg, later he is in Turkey, where he works as a writer». Not certainly and not only as “writer”, as we saw previously. «Recently – the Deutsche Tageszeitung reports on the last days of 1924 – a case was opened about the inheritance of the Schwanderwerder lord, the great merchant Parvus died some weeks ago». It is not difficult to see through an echo of Nazi propaganda, who found in “Parvus” the icon of the wandering Jew, the “merchant of the Revolution”, linked to the “Jewish-Communist” clique, profiteer of the misfortune that befell the German people:
«Helphand, who started his career as a writer and get along with war furniture, was considered one of the richest men in Germany after the war and during the inflation period».
Despite the opaque “Parvus”' earnings, inflation is induced by the Franco-Belgian occupation of the Ruhr which forces the Weimar government to import basic necessities; with inflation the State breathes, and industrialists invest more easily but entire social classes disappear such as the small nobility and the middle bourgeoisie, cornerstones of the late Reich. Back to “Parvus”, beyond the «magnificent property near Berlin – the essays confirms – he had other big ownerships in Denmark and other countries».
Behemoth in his body, “Parvus” is a wriggling sea serpent in the mindset. Entirely European in his customs, he proves to be as tough as a Russian mujik in facing deprivations, as in the first European phase or at the beginning in that of Constantinople, and uncertainties, even the Peter and Paul Fortress and Siberia. Glutton, impeccable in appearance, very refined. From the name he chose he must also have been self-mocking. Cosmopolitan or wandering man, he embraces European culture and customs by choice, making a clear cut-off with his Tatar, Russian and Jewish origins; as it mixes with the variety of Istanbul, between the old city on the Sea of Marmara and the European Pera, so he finds no difficulty in moving around the Northern Underground and even among Wilhelmine Germany's strict ministries. Without a homeland, he wanders easily. Conqueror of hearts and minds, he is magnetic, convincing in negotiations: he manages to overcome the extreme distrust of the new Cromwell and to bring the upper echelons of the Reich to his side. Man without land, new Ahasuerus, his identity often changes. Only after long and costly vicissitudes does he become a German citizen.
One of the greatest merits of the already-mentioned Lenin in Zurich lies in that it furnishes a charming portrait of “Parvus” and, for this, too, truthful. «He was undeniably – you can read at p. 131 – a big character, he had become one of the most important publicists of German social democracy. (…) He wrote brilliant Marxist articles that aroused the enthusiasm of Bebel, Kautsky, Liebknecht, Rosa and Lenin and the young Trotsky hung on his lips. (…) He saw far and clearly: he was the first, still in the 19th century, to start the fight for the eight-hour working day, to preach the general strike as a fundamental weapon of proletarian struggles, but as soon as his proposals found partisans who transformed into real movements, he gave up on organizing them and broke away from them: on his way he only knew how to be the first and only». One and only, “Unus”.
The affinities between “Parvus” and “Lenin” are not very much. “Lenin” was born in Simbirsk (present Uljanovsk), name of Tatar origin, near the middle course of the Volga river, in an Asian land often crossed by independence impulses compared to the tsarist game. He experiences constant migraines which worsen during a stay in Switzerland. He too is destined to remain imprinted for a long time by dint of the “sharp look of his slitted eyes” or the “malicious crease of his eyebrows and moustache”. The origins of the future man-symbol of the Revolution, however, are not precisely telluric. His mother is Mariya Alexandrovna Blank, coming from a rich and cultured Lutheran family from Lübeck, formerly the heart of the Hanseatic League. It was Catherine the Great who allowed the creation of German peasant colonies along the Volga, the “mother river” with “deep and wide” flow, as recollected by the song made famous by Mily Balakirev and dedicated to the burlaks, the poor Volga boatmen visible also in Ilya Repin's famous picture; these Germans – Zveteremich reconstructs in Il grande Parvus – did not take long to absorb the Mir system. The cursus honorum of Lenin's father, on the other hand, is charming: teacher of math and physics, he was first appointed inspector, then headmaster of all schools in the region. In short, Vladimir Ulyanov better known as Lenin did not have working-class blood.
A step backwards. In 1899, “Parvus”, accompanied by Doctor Carl Lehman, visited Russia to study the consequences of the famine, including some illnesses such as scurvy and flu, but to weave the revolutionary web. Among the various stages in the tellurocratic Russian corpus there is also Lenin's birthplace. «(…) The two – it is written in Il grande Parvus – boarded a steamer coming from Astrachan on the Caspian Sea for Simbirsk. And the view of the “immense surface of the river and the majestic current over which the rays of the setting sun play” led Parvus to some considerations: “There is a double Russia: the Russia of the great communication roads and the Russia of the kingdom of the roadless land of the farmers. (...) In the lands behind the hills, however, there are miserable homes that have not changed their shape for centuries, archaic tools, forms of life and customs from times long gone, misery, poverty, backwardness, incivility. Here Europe; there, Asia.» This journey is destined to leave a trace in Helphand, proving that to understand one has to be there.
It is not secondary to recollect that precisely in those territories of the so-called deep Russia, the Russian Heartland par excellence, back then backward lands, Generalissimos Joseph Stalin focuses his action. He, too, a son of the empire's periphery, he known very well that, after the fleet's dismantlement, a Germany won but not subjugated, on the contrary, reinforced in his productive apparate also thanks to American investments (confront Le finanze occulte del Führer by Simone Barcelli), would have shifted its dynamism towards the Russian Heartland rather than seas or “peripherical” scenarios, such as the Mediterranean, key to a rapid victory. Such is the geo-political essence of the Mein Kampf, written in the crucial year 1924 in Landsberg am Lech and published in 1925, in which, for the first time, came to be dissected the concept of a Lebensraum all – of course – leaning towards the East. There is nothing to be surprised about the enormous sacrifice suffered by the glorious Russian people for the defence of Stalingrad, the keystone for the control of the Volga, the heroism in Pavlov's House or in the all-out defence of the Tractor Factory – legendary battles beyond history – or, finally, feats such as crossing the “mother Volga”. This should call for greater prudence in relations with Russia and temper certain easy militaristic enthusiasms.
Last, it is interesting how Zveteremich concludes the report of this three-months-long journey:
«Passing through Minsk, the capital of the region where he was born and had spent the first years of his childhood, perhaps only a more intellectual than sentimental curiosity pushed him to peer more carefully from the train windows at the station, teeming with a crowd in which they stood out for their dress and their physiognomy groups of derelict Jews, a world that he had also denied because he was convinced, like Axelrod, like Luxembourg, Martov, Ryazanov, and then Trotsky and the others, that in an elsewhere not only and not so much geographical as their salvation was found through culture and challenge to the future; he looked at the villages to see the changes, already knowing that there too the difficult double struggle against the theocratic kahal on the one hand and the autocratic tsarist repression on the other had made immense progress: the Bund (a movement for the unification of the workers Jews in the Russian Empire, ed.), cultural and political emancipation was growing, young Russian and Polish Jews discovered Marxism».
There are those who maintain that the Revolution led to a replacement of the Baltic-German ruling class with a Jewish elite of Marxist ideas.
Capitalism is the heart of modernity and, in a certain sense, Marxism, which can only arise in a system of capitalism, is a vein of modernity. The triumph of capitalism is rooted in the success of the first bourgeois revolution, that of the Lord Protector, a figure in whom “Trotsky” sees a forerunner of “Lenin”. «In the mid-19th century, bourgeois revolution – the author of the technical coup writes in History of the Russian Revolution – had developed in England within the framework of a religious reform. The struggle for the right to pray according to a certain holy book was identified with the struggle against the king, against the aristocracy, against the principles of the Church and against Rome. (...) The English Revolution of the 17th century, precisely because a great revolution that shook the country from top to bottom, provides a clear example of the alternation of the dualism of powers with the violent transitions from one side to the other. At the beginning, the real power based on the privileged classes or on the upper layers of these classes – aristocrats and bishops – is opposed by the bourgeoisie and the layers of rural lords closest to it». Bronstein aka “Trotsky”, an exile at the moment he writes, comes then to the core of the issue:
«The government of the bourgeoisie is the Presbyterian Parliament which relies on London's City. The prolonged struggle between the two regimes resulted in an open civil war. Two centres, London and Oxford, constitute their armies, the dualism of powers takes on a territorial form, although, as always, in a civil war, the territorial delimitations are extremely unstable. Parliament has the upper hand. The king, taken prisoner, awaits his fate».
In this passage there is everything: the conflict between the king, the summit of the feudal system based on self-consumption, and Parliament, which is the den of the appetites of the new ruling class, the dualism between the aristocratic Oxford and the liberal and Presbyterian City – always a minority – of London.
In any case, it is reductive to consider Capitalism a pure English or Dutch invention of the seventeenth century. It was the outcome of a long process of opening up the yesterday world towards today's one, which was possible thanks to the opening-up of the “large spaces”. The animal spirits of capitalism were already champing at the bit in the fourteenth century, Dante saw in it “gente nova” – a new class – and “sùbiti guadagni” (“immediate gainings”); free commercial unions prospered, offering a different and alternative model compared to the already-surging centralized states. Modern age blossomed in Bruges' warehouse and in Datini's letters of exchange. Here why Father Dante left written: «If evil greed would summon you elsewhere / be men, and not like sheep gone mad, so that / the Jew who lives among you not deride you! »
In recollecting the transformations in the English countryside due to the influx of capital from the sea, built with plunder or trade, and the penetration of a mercantilist spirit not yet defined but already strong, Christopher Hill recalls:
«(…) In the Middle Ages, large landholdings had given the possibility, with the surplus of agricultural production, to maintain a good number of dependents who, on occasion, became soldiers and thus formed the basis of the political power of the feudal owners. (…) Landowners came to view their property from a new point of view, namely as a source of money profit, an elastic profit that could be increased. (…) Feudal society was dominated by custom and tradition. In it the power of money had been relatively unimportant.»
Cromwell's victory was sanctioned by the beheading of the “Francophile and absolutist” sovereign, its culmination being in the Navigation Act of 1651. The dominion of the seas did not arise with the seventeenth century but was the outcome on the one hand of the primacy of the bourgeoisie which was consolidated with the revolution of 1640 and on the other of geopolitical intuitions such as the Treaty with Portugal of 1373 which at the time was a containment function with respect to France. Thalassocracy required a long incubation.
An obligatory step when it comes to Parvus is that relating to his contribution in terms of ideas, no less decisive than the purely financial one. The relevance of the mass strike as the first ring of the revolutionary wave or even the theory of “permanent revolution”, which many will later claim as their own, are just some of his ideas that become part of the manual of the good revolutionary. Stalin himself recognizes this, to burn bridges with the old course:
«It is not true that the theory of “permanent revolution,” which Radek bashfully refrains from mentioning, was advanced in 1905 by Rosa Luxemburg and Trotsky. This theory was advanced by Parvus and Trotsky. »
In the already-mentioned Coup d'État: The Technique of Revolution, Curzio Malaparte defines, on the contrary, mass strike as «the fundamental rule of Communist tactique».
As in the political field, he excels also in the economical theory's one. Already at the beginning of the 20th century he envisages a European economic union who could be able to get in the way between the United States and, above all, Russia. È anche l’antesignano di una saldatura che prosegue tutt’oggi tra internazionale socialcomunista e finanza, tra politica e capitale.
However, Parvus pays a particular attention to the relationships between his two homelands, Germany and Russia: despite ideological differences, Weimar's Germany and socialist Russia experiment with increasingly structural forms of cooperation, in the economic and military fields. After all, these are two defeated nations, expelled from the international order, were forced to cooperate. For this reason, in 1921 they stipulated a commercial agreement followed by secret agreements between the armies which allowed them to develop weapons prohibited by the Treaty of Versailles. The culmination is in the Treaty of Rapallo of 1922, conceived by Radek and carried out by Rathenau (later killed), with which the two powers renounce any claims and establish diplomatic relations.
Eventually, it is worthy noticing how, during a certain period, the shadow man of the Revolution and the writer who followed all the phases of the Revolution became linked to each other. The party is always in need of funds and the genius of “Parvus” gives birth to a publishing house with the dual purpose: to protect the rights of Russian authors abroad, given that Russia was not a member of the Berne Convention on copyright of 1886, and raise funds. The two met at the Sevastopol train station, in a complex moment for Gorky, who was being followed by the tsarist authorities, and concluded an agreement for the publication of the latter's translated works. The agreement provides that Parvus retains approximately 20% of the profit on sales, the remaining part divided between Gorky (25%) and the party (75%). Again, in the aforementioned, and almost unknown, Scacco allo zar, Sangiuliano reconstructs the Russian writer's lengthy stay in Capri.
Many reflections emerge from this story which is now more necessary than ever before to rediscover and understand in depth. The Russian Revolution is an inexhaustible source. First, the Revolution marks the triumph of the new over the old, of movement over stasis, it is a perpetual motion that is fuelled because, taking up a famous passage from The Prince, «one mutation leaves the basis for the construction of the other». The Revolution is in fact “permanent” and indefatigable. In more geo-political terms biblical, the Russian Revolution marks the defeat of Earth by the «coiling, writhing serpent» (Isaiah 27:1). Only that earthquake within Tsarist Russia opened the way to that primacy of the Anglo-Saxon powers which continues, undermined, to this day, in the light of a new clash for world hegemony. Second point: Russia is, today as then, the center of the world, the heart of the earth, the Heartland, due to its geographical location and boundless natural resources; the upheavals that occur there necessarily have a global character. On the convulsive limes (translatable as “border land” or, to preserve the extreme significance of the term, into “mark”) of Ukraine, as yesterday as today, a piece of the war for world hegemony is being fought, once again between Earth and Sea. The heroes of this story have, in fact, as previously reconstructed, worked hard to destroy a large multi-ethnic empire, fuelling the secession of Finland and the Ukraine. The centrality of Russia and the centrality in history of what happens in Russia are not in question. Third, war is a great business opportunity for those who know how to take advantage of it: orders can be obtained with the powers involved. “Parvus” manages arms and coal trafficking with relative tranquillity and amasses wealth for himself and also for the party.
It is therefore natural to state another truth: business and politics, or, even better, big capital and revolutionary ideas can do a lot together. Radical ideas – “Parvus” taught –, which emerge with the Modern Age beginning with the English Revolution's levellers and diggers, had to ride the “animal spirits” of Capitalism to achieve definitive triumph. This happens still today: political Capitalism, which was extensively treated in the essay Il potere nel nostro tempo for the Artverkaro Edizioni, is keen on restructuration society by absorbing and taking over the progressive instances. Here, then, society comes to be formatted according to the double G of Gender & Green. Fifth lesson: by understanding how to technically take power, how to wage revolution, one can understand also how to defend the established order. In the same way, the society of the time was a mass society, in a phase of development of the forces of capitalism, a society of people who used to meet each other; today's society is a profoundly different one: collectivist and participation tools have liquefied. In sixth place, no less interesting, is the transformation of the revolution into its opposite, as demonstrated by the parable of “Lenin” who must overturn some principles of Marxism to preserve it. Finally, to carry out the Revolution, both a perfect knowledge of the place is needed – what “Parvus” acquired on his journey in 1899 –, with an attached conspiratorial network, and fertile ground: the war for world hegemony opens a space for incredible upheavals.
Concluding, to make revolution, revolutionaries are needed: heroes, men with intellect and physical gifts beyond man who know how to give themselves for an idea and see beyond; However, these very capable pure spirits, these idealists, could do nothing without financiers with broad shoulders, magnetic eyes, liberal habits and overflowing wallets. To make revolution it is not enough to invoke it or incite the social network people. To every “Lenin” his “Parvus”, even if, as mentioned before, society is no longer a mass one but is in liquefaction, in decommissioning, and there are no collective spaces or dangers of gatherings nowadays. Who are, today, the men capable of grasping the spirit behind the movement of history? Or, better yet, who, including the evolution of society, can do this?
Before finishing, there is one last truth to underline. Unus-Parvus was unique but was not the only one working on the Rimland fault. Think of the enigmatic Ignatius Timothy Trebitsch-Lincoln (1879-1943) who will have an essential role in the radical right-wing circles in liberal and “enlightened” Munich, the perfect incubator for the future Führer, or the founder of the Thule Society, the occultist and freemason Rudolf Glauer, better known as Rudolf von Sebottendorff (1875-1945), also divided between Germany and Türkiye, where he certainly came into contact with Sufism and Gnosis, or also Israel Epstein (1915-2005), born in Poland, who fled to China where he founded China Today. There is no doubt that today, as back then, many new “Parvuses” are working, maybe not with the Only Parvus' same genius, but certainly with similar aims.
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Hill, Cristopher. “Saggi sulla rivoluzione inglese”. Milan: Feltrinelli, 1971.
Majakovskij, Vladimir. “Ode alla Rivoluzione. Poesie 1917 – 1923”. Florence: Passigli Poesia, 2012.
Sangiuliano, Gennaro. “Scacco allo Zar. 1908-1910: Lenin a Capri, genesi della Rivoluzione”. Milan: Mondadori, 2012.
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Zeman, Zbynek; Scharlau, Winfried. “The Merchant of Revolution: the life of Alexander Israel Helphand Parvus, 1867-1924”. London: Oxford University Press, 1965.
Zveteremich, Pietro. “Il grande Parvus”. Milan: Garzanti, 1988.
About the author:
Lorenzo Somigli is an Italian strategist and researcher specializing in geo-economics, primarily energy and (new global) transport corridors. He regularly works with IFIMES (research and policy briefs), and has published variety of articles with the International Association of Constitutional Law, and Transatlantic Policy Quarterly. Somigli also served as a rapporteur in Lebanon and Turkey in 2021. In Italy, Lorenzo has been with Parliamentary services since 2021. Sporadically, he does a media analysis in culture and art.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect the official position of IFIMES.
Ljubljana/Rome, 19 July 2024
[1] IFIMES - International Institute for Middle East and Balkan Studies, based in Ljubljana, Slovenia, has a special consultative status with the United Nations Economic and Social Council ECOSOC/UN in New York since 2018, and it is the publisher of the international scientific journal "European Perspectives."0
