The thrust of Lenin’s program was that the socialists were to strive not to end the fighting but to exploit it for their own purposes: “The slogan of ‘peace’ is incorrect at this moment,” he wrote in October 1914. “This is a slogan of philistines and priests. The proletarian slogan must be: civil war.”125 Lenin would remain faithful to this formulation throughout the war. It was much safer for him to uphold it in neutral Switzerland, of course, than it was for his followers in belligerent Russia.
Aware of Lenin’s war program, the Germans were eager to use him for their own purposes: after all, Lenin’s call for the defeat of the tsarist armies was tantamount to an endorsement of a German victory. Their main intermediary was Parvus, one of the leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet in 1905, the originator of the theory of “uninterrupted revolution,” and more recently a collaborator with the Union for the Liberation of the Ukraine. Parvus had one of the most impressive intellects in the Russian revolutionary movement as well as one of the most corrupt personalities. After the failure of the 1905 Revolution, he concluded that a successful revolution in Russia required the assistance of German armies: they alone were capable of destroying tsarism.* He placed himself at the disposal of the German Government, using his political connections to amass a sizable fortune. At the outbreak of the war he resided in Constantinople. He contacted the German Ambassador there and outlined to him the case for using Russian revolutionaries to promote German interests. His argument was that the Russian radicals could achieve their objective only if tsarism were destroyed and the Russian Empire broken up: since this objective happened also to suit Germany, “the interests of the German Government were … identical with those of the Russian revolutionaries.” He asked for money and authorization to communicate with Russian left-wing émigrés.126 With the encouragement of Berlin, in May 1915 he contacted Lenin in Zurich: familiar with Russian émigré politics, he knew that Lenin was the key figure on the left and that if he won him over the rest of the Russian anti-war left would fall in line.127 For the time being, the plan failed. It was not that Lenin objected to dealing with the Germans or felt qualms about taking money from them—he just would not negotiate with a traitor to the socialist cause, a renegade and “socialist chauvinist.” Parvus’s biographers suggest that in addition to personal dislike of Parvus, Lenin may also have feared that if he struck a deal with him, Parvus “would eventually acquire control of Russian socialist organizations, and, with his financial resources and his intellectual ability, be able to outmaneuver all the other party leaders.”128 Lenin never publicly referred to this encounter.
Although he rejected Parvus’s overtures, Lenin did maintain political and financial contacts with the German Government through an Estonian, Alexander Kesküla.* In 1905–07 Kesküla had been a leading Bolshevik in Estonia. Later, he turned into an ardent Estonian nationalist, determined to gain independence for his homeland. Convinced, like Parvus, that the destruction of tsarist Russia could be accomplished only by the German army, at the outbreak of the war he placed himself at the disposal of the German Government, joining its intelligence services. With German subsidies, he operated out of Switzerland and Sweden to secure from Russian émigrés information on internal conditions in Russia and to smuggle Bolshevik anti-war literature into that country. In October 1914, he met with Lenin.† in whom he was interested as an enemy of the tsarist regime and a potential liberator of Estonia. Many years later, Kesküla claimed that he did not finance the Bolsheviks directly, contributing instead, indirectly, to their treasury and subsidizing their publications. These were important sources of support for the impoverished Bolshevik Party in any event, but he may have paid Lenin direct subsidies as well.
