HAIFA, Israel — Jews have been criticized many times – by the left for being capitalists, by the right for being socialists. Only once in history has a Jew been both a socialist and a capitalist. It was Alexander Parvus.
In Latin, “parvus” is small, the pseudonym under which Israel Gelfand began to publish in the social democratic press. Jews have been accused on the right of being revolutionaries and on the left of being agents of foreign governments. But only in one case could one and the same person – Parvus – be accused of this, not without merit. The German and Russian Social-Democrats were at enmity on all questions of the theory and practice of the revolutionary cause. In one thing they were at one in condemning Parvus. Theorist of Marxism, arms dealer, theatrical impresario, organizer of strikes in Russia, German agent, doctor of economics and finance, publicist, member of the Russian and German Social-Democratic parties, financial adviser to the Young Turks, political schemer, Parvus loved and hated life. He loved the sweet life and hated the life of the oppressed workers and capitalists responsible for their suffering. Parvus was loved and hated. He was loved by revolutionaries and women – he had two wives and many mistresses (including the revolutionary Rosa Luxemburg). He was hated by revolutionaries and women – among them Rosa Luxemburg.
Parvus was born into the family of a Jewish craftsman in the town of Berezino, Minsk province, on September 8, 1867. At the age of 14, he survived a pogrom in Odessa, which lasted from May 3 to 5, 1881 and was the largest Jewish pogrom in the 19th century. After a new pogrom in Odessa in 1886, Parvus left Russia. From his childhood he hated the country of pogroms and sought citizenship of different countries: “I am looking for a state where a man can get his fatherland cheaply,” he wrote to Wilhelm Liebknecht. He got his fatherland Germany for a lot of money after 25 years of living there.
In 1887 Parvus arrived in Switzerland, where in 1891 he became a doctor of “economics and finance” at the University of Basel. After graduation, he worked for banks in Switzerland and Germany and became a Marxist under the influence of Russian revolutionaries George Plekhanov, Pavel Axelrod, Lev Deich, and Vera Zasulich. He soon moved to Germany and joined the German Social Democratic Party, where he met and became friendly with Karl Kautsky, Clara Zetkin, Victor Adler, and Rosa Luxemburg.
In his book “The World Market and the Agricultural Crisis” (1897) Parvus argued that the whole world is economically one organism, and that the economies of individual countries are more dependent on the world market, which determines the policies of states. Thus, at the end of the nineteenth century he discovered globalization. In 1900, Parvus met Lenin in Munich. At first there was mutual respect and admiration. In a review of Parvus’s book, Lenin called the author “a talented German publicist.”
Respect, however, was replaced by contempt; sympathy was replaced by hostility. Lenin saw Parvus as a man hostile to him in spirit. He asserted and embodied the omnipotence of money and its domination over ideas. According to Lenin, revolutionary ideas were stronger than money. Parvus’s position seemed more Marxist than Lenin’s, for being, according to Marx, determines consciousness, but Lenin rebelled against the power of capital over revolutionary ideas. Alienation turned into hatred, although thanks to Parvus’s efforts, the Germans did Lenin a tremendous favor by allowing him and 40 comrades-in-arms through Germany into Russia in the heat of war in March 1917 to carry out the revolution.
Parvus was not a typical Marxist theorist. He was a man of action, which was the Russian revolution. He dreamed of making it and wanted to make money out of it. Parvus was an enterprising man with tremendous energy, tremendous imagination, and a prophetic gift. In publications in 1905, Parvus predicted that Russia would lose the Russo-Japanese War. When this defeat occurred, Parvus’s prestige among German socialists grew. German intelligence noticed and praised his successful prediction. He stated before all socialists that the major industrial countries were heading for world war, hence the world revolution was coming. In 1921 he uttered prophetic words to the Entente countries: “If you destroy Germany, you will turn the German people into the organizers of World War II.”
Parvus was not only a theorist of revolution, but also its practitioner. Predicting the globalization in the economy, he extended it to politics: the revolution is a chain reaction of national revolutions. At the beginning of the First Russian Revolution in 1905, he arrived in Russia with a false Austro-Hungarian passport. He was the creator of “Soviet power:” He created the St. Petersburg Soviet of Workers’ Deputies. After the revolution’s defeat, Parvus was sentenced to three years in exile in Siberia. After getting his escort drunk, he fled to Italy and then to Germany.
Parvus arrived in Turkey shortly after the successful coup of the Young Turks as an economic columnist for their newspaper, Turkish Homeland. He began as a journalist, but became a businessman under the influence of a Sephardic Jew, a native of Thessaloniki, the owner of this newspaper, Emmanuel Carasso, a grain merchant and one of the founders and financiers of the Young Turks movement. Karasso provided food supplies to the Ottoman Empire and supplied the Turkish army with arms during World War I. Parvus became a new kind of revolutionary – he became a businessman, organizer, financier and importer of the Russian Revolution. By 1912 he had become a rich man, co-owner of a number of banks and financial companies.
At the beginning of World War I, Parvus argued for German victory, as this should lead first to a revolution in Russia and then to a world “permanent revolution”. He urged the Russian socialists to contribute to the defeat of Russia in the “interests of European democracy”. He had the idea of overthrowing tsarism by the combined efforts of German troops and Russian revolutionaries.
On November 7, 1917, the Bolsheviks seized power in Russia. They set up a new government, which declared peace to be an absolute priority. On November 9, the German treasury gave them 15 million marks. In total, the Germans spent about 100 million gold marks on the revolution in Russia. The Germans gave this money to keep the Bolsheviks in power, to preserve the gains of the Brest Treaty. The colossal German investment in the Bolshevik revolution fully justified itself. The Germans returned their money handsomely. Indeed, Lenin concluded the peace treaty at Brest, under which he gave Germany part of Russia – the Polish, Ukrainian, Belorussian and Baltic provinces, the Grand Duchy of Finland, in the Caucasus the Kars region and the district of Batum, and supplied Germany with huge amounts of grain, coal and oil. Russia paid 6 billion marks of reparation, plus compensation for the losses incurred by Germany during the revolution – 500 million gold rubles, equal to 450 tons of gold.
Parvus worked for the good of the German Empire and the Russian Revolution. However, with the disappearance of the Second Reich, he lost income from the imperial treasury. Power in Russia was seized by the Bolshevik Party, whose victory Parvus brought closer with its despised capitalist methods. Marx’s successors disavowed Parvus, for his success contradicted Marxism, according to which the socialist revolution was neither bought nor sold. Lenin, Zinoviev, and other Bolshevik leaders alienated themselves from the Germans not only to avoid being labeled traitors to the fatherland because of the German government’s organized move of them from Switzerland to Russia through German territory during World War I. They were afraid of another exposure – of achieving the victory of advanced socialism with the money of backward capitalism.
Alexander Solzhenitsyn described Parvus as a creature of Satan, “the demon of the storm. Parvus suited the role of the predatory devil, the “Elder of Zion,” which the German right-wing attributed to influential and wealthy Jews. Although Parvus was Jewish and grew up in Odessa, where there were many Jewish socialists who later joined the Bund, he had no contact with Jewish socialist cells. Solzhenitsyn in his book “Two hundred years together” unreasonably attributed to Parvus the aspiration to realize the Jewish goals: “Parvus has put forward, always defended, instilled in the young thesis (and took it as his mission for life): the liberation of the Jews in Russia can only be realized by overthrowing the Tsarist regime.” Parvus left no evidence of intent to liberate the Jews in Russia. He only wanted to free one Jew from Czarist Russia — himself.
Parvus died of a heart attack on December 12, 1924, despised and rejected by German and Russian socialists. He had time to learn of the murder of his former lover Rosa Luxemburg, the victim of a failed attempt at socialist revolution in Germany. He witnessed the terrible anti-Semitism in a defeated Germany in which Jews were blamed for the outbreak of World War I and blamed for its defeat. He caught the rampant antisemitism from which he fled Russia. Having escaped the pogroms in Odessa, he saw the pogroms in Berlin. In Germany he encountered a racist campaign which reminded him of the pogroms in Russia, but which was even more frightening and hopeless for Jews, who could change their religion, abandon their religious beliefs in favor of an atheist religion, but could not change their Jewish blood. He, the patriot of imperial Germany, had no place in republican Germany. He, the inventor of the Soviets and one of the engines of the revolution in Russia, had no place in it, for his accomplices needed no living reminder of their double game, incompatible with the “high morality of the builders of socialism.” He caught the defeat of the Berlin and Munich revolutions in 1918 and 1919 and realized that his theory of “permanent revolution” had failed. The creator of the Russian Revolution failed in life.
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Alex Gordon is a native of Kiev, Ukraine, and graduate of the Kiev State University and Haifa Technion (Doctor of Science, 1984). Immigrated to Israel in 1979. Full Professor (Emeritus) of Physics in the Faculty of Natural Sciences at the University of Haifa and at Oranim, the Academic College of Education. Author of 9 books and about 600 articles in paper and online, was published in 79 journals in 14 countries in Russian, Hebrew, English, French, and German.