The Russian Revolution полностью

One of the most secretive and yet critical aspects of Bolshevik history before the 1917 Revolution concerns party finances. All political organizations require money, but the Bolsheviks’ insistence that every member work full-time for the party made on them exceptionally heavy financial demands, for it meant that their cadres, unlike the Mensheviks, who were self-supporting, relied on subsidies from the party’s treasury. Lenin also needed money to outmaneuver his Menshevik rivals, who usually had a larger following. The Bolsheviks secured this money in various ways, some conventional, others highly unconventional.

One source was wealthy sympathizers, such as the eccentric millionaire industrialist Savva Morozov, who contributed 2,000 rubles a month to the Bolshevik treasury. After he committed suicide on the French Riviera, another 60,000 rubles from his estate was transferred to the Bolsheviks by Maxim Gorky’s wife, who served as trustee of Morozov’s life insurance policy.⁹² There were other donors, among them Gorky, an agronomist named A. I. Eramasov, Alexander Tsiurupa, who managed landed estates in Ufa province (in 1918 he would become Lenin’s Commissar of Supply), Alexandra Kalmykova, the widow of a senator and an intimate friend of Struve’s, the actress V. F. Komissarzhevskaia, and still others, whose identities remain unknown to this day.⁹³ Such patrons out of snobbery subsidized a cause that was fundamentally inimical to their interests: at this time, writes Leonid Krasin, Lenin’s close associate, “it was regarded a sign of bon ton in more or less radical or liberal circles to contribute money to revolutionary parties, and among those who quite regularly paid dues of from 5 to 25 rubles were not only prominent attorneys, engineers, and physicians but also directors of banks and officials of government institutions.”⁹⁴ The management of the Bolshevik treasury, operated independently of the common Social-Democratic one, was in the hands of a three-man Bolshevik “Center,” formed in 1905, consisting of Lenin, Krasin, and A. A. Bogdanov. Its very existence was kept secret from the Bolshevik rank and file.

But contributions from repentant “bourgeois” proved insufficient and in early 1906 the Bolsheviks resorted to less savory means, the idea of which seems to have been inspired by the People’s Will and the SR Maximalists. A great deal of Bolshevik funding henceforth derived from criminal activity, notably holdups, euphemistically known as “expropriations.” In daring raids, they robbed post offices, railroad stations, trains, and banks. In a notorious robbery of the State Bank in Tiflis (June 1907), they stole 250,000 rubles, a good part of it in 500-ruble notes whose serial numbers had been registered. The proceeds of this loot were transferred to the Bolshevik treasury. Subsequently, several individuals who attempted to exchange the stolen 500-ruble notes in Europe were arrested—all (among them the future Soviet Minister of Foreign Affairs, Maxim Litvinov) proved to be Bolsheviks.⁹⁵ Stalin, who supervised this operation, and other participants were expelled from the Social-Democratic Party.⁹⁶ Ignoring the resolution of the 1907 party congresses condemning such activities, the Bolsheviks continued to commit robberies, sometimes in cooperation with the SRs. In this manner they acquired large sums, which gave them considerable advantages over the perennially cash-poor Mensheviks.⁹⁷ According to Martov, the proceeds of such crimes enabled the Bolsheviks to send their St. Petersburg and Moscow organizations, respectively, 1,000 and 500 rubles a month, at a time when the legitimate SD treasury’s monthly earnings from membership dues did not exceed 100 rubles. As soon as the flow of these funds dried up, which happened in 1910 when the Bolsheviks had to give up their moneys to three German Social-Democrats acting as trustees, their Russian “committees” vanished into thin air.⁹⁸

The overall direction of these secret operations was in the hands of Lenin, but the principal field commander and treasurer was Krasin, the head of the so-called Technical Group.⁹⁹ An engineer by profession, Krasin led a a double life: outwardly a respectable businessman (he worked for Morozov as well as the German firms AEG and Siemens-Schuckert), in his free time he ran the Bolshevik underground.* He operated a secret laboratory to assemble bombs, one of which was used in the Tiflis robbery.¹⁰⁰ In Berlin he also ran a counterfeit operation which turned out three-ruble notes. He engaged in gunrunning—sometimes from purely commercial motives, to make money for the Bolshevik treasury. On occasion, the Technical Group made deals with ordinary criminals—for instance, the notorious Lbov gang operating in the Urals, to whom it sold weapons worth hundreds of thousands of dollars.¹⁰¹ Inevitably, such activities attracted into Bolshevik ranks shady elements for whom the “cause” served as a pretext for a life of crime.