The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus) 1867-1924

326 Pages·1965·71.02 MB·English

by  Z. A. B. Zeman

THE MERCHANT OF REVOLUTION
Alexander Helphand. Drawing by Walter Bondy
THE
MERCHANT OF REVOLUTION
The Life of
Alexander Israel Helphand (Parvus)
1867-1924
Z. A. B. ZEMAN and W. B. SCHARLAU
London
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
New York Toronto
1965
Oxford University Press, Amen House, London E.C.4
GLASGOW NEW YORK TORONTO MELBOURNE WELLINGTON
CAPE TOWN SALISBURY NAIROBI IBADAN ACCRA
KUALA LUMPUR HONG KONG
© Z. A. B. ZEMAN and W. B. SCHARLAU 1965
Printed in Great Britain
by W. & J. Mackay & Co Ltd,
Chatham, Kent
For F. W. Deakin and E. Lehnartz
Contents
Introduction: The Nature of the Enigma 1
1. Disengagement from Russia 5
2. The Great Fortune 26
3. The Schwabing Headquarters 50
4. St. Petersburg, 1905 75
5. Strategist without an Army 101
6. An Interlude in Constantinople 125
7. Between the Socialists and the Diplomats 145
8. Not by Money Alone 170
9. Business and Politics 192
10. Revolution in Russia 206
11. Dirty Hands 235
12. Schwanenwerder 260
Epilogue 276
Bibliography 282
Index, 291
List of Illustrations
Alexander Helphand. Drawing by Walter Frontispiece
Bondy
I Karl Kautsky, 1905 facing page 68
II Helphand, Trotsky, and Lev Deutsch in the Saints
Peter and Paul Fortress, 1906 69
III Helphand and Deutsch on the way to exile in Siberia,
1906 84
IV Rosa Luxemburg 85
V a Christo Rakovsky 132
b Karl Radek, 1924
VI Rosa Luxemburg and Helphand 133
VII Lenin and his sister 148
VIII Konrad Haenisch 149
IX Brockdorff-Rantzau 212
X Theobald von Bethmann-Hollweg, Gottlieb von
Jagow, and Karl Helfferich, 1915 213
XI Richard von Kuhlmann and Count Czernin, 1917 228
XII Philipp Scheidemann speaking outside the Reichstag,
1919 229
Preface
This study has grown out of an association of the joint authors
with St. Antony's College, Oxford. They have both enjoyed, at different
times, the hospitality of the College, and they have benefited from its
stimulating international character. The authors are no less indebted
to the Deutsche Akademische Austauschdienst in Bad Godesberg which
financed, jointly with the College, a two-year scholarship in Oxford.
The Warden of the College and Professor Dr. E. Lehnartz, the President
of the Austauschdienst, have been most understanding and helpful
while the work on this book was in progress, and to them the book is
dedicated.
The authors would also like to thank the Carnegie Trust for the
Universities of Scotland, the Court of St. Andrews University, and the
Landesregierung in Nordhein-Westfalen. Their generous grants made
research in a number of European archives possible.
It is difficult to indicate the gratitude the authors feel towards Pro-
fessor Dr. Werner Hahlweg of Minister University, and to Dr. George
Katkov of Oxford University, who supervised, with great patience, the
two theses in which preliminary explorations were made. In addition,
the authors have benefited by the advice and help of many scholars,
and they should especially like to mention Professor Sir Isaiah Berlin,
Mr. David Footman, Dr. Michael Futtrell, Professor Dr. Heinz Goll-
witzer, Mr. James Joll, Mr. Peter Nettl, Dr. Eberhart Pikart, and
Professor Leonard Schapiro. The authors have also received valuable
information from Helphand's friends and contemporaries, in particular
from Frau Martha Jackh of New York, Dr. Moritz Bonn of London,
Herr Arno Scholz of Berlin, Herr Bruno Schönlank, jun., of Zürich,
and Mr. Satvet Lutfi Tozan, O.B.E., of Istanbul.
This biography, a joint work of a German and a British historian,
appeared in Germany last year. This edition can, however, be regarded
as a separate book rather than as a literal translation of the German
version.
January 1965 W. B. SCHARLAU Z. A. B. ZEMAN
Hamburg. St. Andrews,
Scotland.
Introduction:
The Nature of the Enigma
About eight miles due west from the centre of Berlin,
the River Havel broadens into the Wannsee: Schwanenwerder is
the smaller of two islands on the lake. In the nineteenth century
it provided building-sites for the houses of some of the richest
Berlin families; the cooks and butlers were still attending to the
needs of their employers between the two wars. A few large
residences now remain; their private landing-stages are deserted.
From time to time the desolate, shuttered peace of the island is
disturbed by a boatload of tourists who come to inspect the
ruined house that used to belong to Josef Goebbels. But twelve
years before Hitler's Minister of Propaganda acquired his
Schwanenwerder estate, a man who had been one of the first tar-
gets of Nazi vituperation had died there. His name was Alexander
Israel Helphand: he died at the sumptuous house on 12 Decem-
ber 1924.
His obituaries lightly glossed over a life of extraordinary
eventfulness. Konrad Haenisch, then Minister of Culture in
Prussia, eulogized Parvus—he was better known under this
pseudonym in socialist circles—as the 'ablest head of the Second
International'.1 The liberal Berliner Tageblatt regarded him as a
'knowledgeable man in a class of his own' who, 'without being in
the foreground, exercised a considerable influence'.2 The con-
servative Kreuzzeitung, on the other hand, saw Helphand as a
man 'completely without character, a morally empty type of a
political and business crook'. The obituary in a communist
magazine, by an erstwhile friend of Helphand, discerned a sharp
break in the life of the deceased man. Before the First World War,
Helphand had been an original thinker, an influential socialist
and revolutionary. But then he sold out; after August 1914 he
1 Parvus, Ein Blatt der Erinnerung, Berlin, 1925, p. 5. 2 13 December 1924.
2 The Merchant of Revolution
became a traitor to the working class, a German chauvinist, a
corrupt war profiteer.3 Karl Radek, the leading Soviet publicist,
took the same line on Helphand in Pravda, where Radek also
described him as a 'traitor', while pointing out that he had been
'one of the foremost of the revolutionary writers in the era of the
Second International'.4
After his death, Helphand's striking personality and the unique
role he had played in the history of Russia and Germany in the
first two decades of the century sank farther and farther into
oblivion. Admittedly, the restless, uncertain years of the Weimar
Republic that gave way to Hitler's dictatorship and the holocaust
of another war, as well as the conditions that obtained in the
Soviet Union between the wars, were not conducive to dispas-
sionate inquiry into so recent a past. And then, there was some-
thing in Helphand's activities that discouraged remembrance and
prevented inquiry.
The German Socialists intermittently remembered him as a
leading Marxist theorist and a brilliant journalist; historians who
concerned themselves with Germany's eastern policy in the First
World War, knew that Helphand had had connexions with
the Imperial German Government, and that he had advised the
Foreign Ministry. It also emerged that he had taken part in the
support, by the government in Berlin, of the revolutionary
movement in Russia, and that he had played some role in con-
nexion with Lenin's famous 'sealed train' journey across Germany
in April 1917. Nevertheless, the politicians and soldiers who knew
the facts preferred to surround the relations between the govern-
ment and the revolutionary movement in Russia with a conspiracy
of silence.
The memoirs of Bethmann-Hollweg, of Helfferich, Nadolny,
Ludendorff, and Kuhlmann made not a single reference to the
name of Helphand. It was given certain prominence when he
became one of the principal whipping-tops of Nazi propaganda.
As a rich Jew and a Marxist revolutionary, he presented the ideal
target for men like Alfred Rosenberg and Josef Goebbels, who
included him among the ranks of the 'November criminals'—the
3 Clara Zetkin, in Die Kommunistische Internationale, No. I, January 1925.
4 14 December 1924.