From the book “The staged fall of the USSR and its true relationship with China” by Alexander Benesch
Full reset: Destroy Russia, then rebuild
Winston Churchill was absolutely correct when he told the British Parliament in 1949 that the “strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race”.
So why wasn’t Bolshevism destroyed early or at least contained to a large degree with the help of the US and Britain? All the usual answers for the different target audiences disappoint:
- Regular academics have simply repeated lame excuses.
- The leftists avoid this crucial question or answer that their messiah Lenin was just too clever and popular to be contained.
- The rightwing gives us the usual speech about the lack of christianity and traditional values.
- The extreme rightwing preaches the “Elders of Zion” were behind it all and made Britain and the US support the Communists.
The real answer is that Bolshevism and the Russian civil war between the “Whites” and the “Reds” were supposed to destroy the slavic aristocracy once and for all before they became a massive threat. The so-called Whites were cold, cruel and ambitious. If they got rid of the Romanovs and forged new alliances with the French, some German and Baltic territories, China and Mongolia in the future, the consequences would be potentially catastrophic for the British and the Americans. And who could tell how many average people would suffer as peasants under the slavic aristocrats and die as soldiers?
Ultimately the psychopathic Vladimir Lenin became Russia’s “red” dictator. However, if Bolshevism had been strangled at birth, it could have been the “white” Alexander Kolchak.
He as the “Supreme Ruler” was responsible for the “White Terror”, alongside generals and warlords such as Grigory Semyonov and Roman von Ungern-Sternberg. Many of these characters were not even from traditional “Rurikid” lineages.
Semyonov was a half-Mongol and so much under influence from Japanese intelligence that the British eventually stopped paying him. Japan had 72,000 troops in Siberia and wanted to keep him around as some sort of puppet. U.S. Army intelligence estimated that he was responsible for executing 30,000 people in one year.
Image: Ataman Semyonov with the representatives of the American expedition to the Russian Civil War. Semyonov (left) and General Graves (right)
Nikolai Robert Maximilian Freiherr von Ungern-Sternberg had a Baltic German background, claimed to be from the lineage of Genghis Khan and aimed to restore Imperial Russia as well as the Mongol empire.
Tsarist Russia was a backwards failing empire which maintained medieval style serfdom until 1861 while the Western powers had successfully experimented with a more or less controlled “enlightenment” so that more citizens could learn valuable skills in schools and work in the industrial sector. When the US started its colossal industrialization drive in the 1870s and the British Empire was at the height of its power, Russia was a dumpster fire.
Power in tsarist Russia had to be shared between the Romanovs and the regular Slavic aristocrats who didn’t want to switch to a half-monarchy like Britain or a full republic like the US. The Romanovs were from the German Houses of Hessen and Schleswig-Holstein, sub-lineages of the super-cluster of Welfs, Wettins and Reginars, same as the monarchies in Britain, Denmark and other places.
Certainly the option was on the table for the supercluster to lend more than a hand to the Romanovs to smash the leftist rebellions in Russia. But stabilizing the tsar would have meant stabilizing the hated Slavic aristocrats as well. And those were always seeking ways of ridding themselves of these tsarist “Germans” who were not real Russians or “Rurikids”. If those Slavs were secretly supporting communists and anarchists, intending to stir up chaos and then have a Slavic-aristocratic coup to “restore order”, the rule of the Romanovs would come to an end.
The most logical option for the supercluster would have been to light Russia on fire, burn the place down and start over: First Russia needed to exhaust itself against Germany in World War I. The Russian Slavic aristocrats were compelled to spend their soldiers and resources. And then a massive civil war pitched the “Whites” (members of the old system) against the “Reds” (communists).
No other option than torching Russia must have been attractive to the Houses of Hannover, Schleswig-Holstein and Hessen. Russia could always be rebuilt later at a certain pace. There was no grand industry there anyway. The only damage would be in human lives, and at that stage in history, industry counted a lot more than the number of people. Britain certainly knew how to damage a foreign country: India was converted from a production powerhouse into a mess. China’s old imperial dynasties had been pitched against each other. Why not do something similar in Russia?
But in this hypothetical scenario the question remains if the Romanovs were in on the plan or not. It could have worked both ways. Britain had entered into an agreement with France and Russia against Germany before WWI. The Russians loaned all the money they could get from the West, built railways, artillery shells and scaled the military up to 1.5 million men. The Germans knew they were in a weak alliance with Austria.
If there was indeed a plan by Houses of Hannover, Schleswig-Holstein and Hessen (Welfs, Reginars and Wettins) to cause a civil war right after WWI in Russia this plan would have been kept among a very small circle and that may even have excluded the Romanovs. The danger would be catastrophic if a Romanov was caught and spilled the beans under interrogation.
The tsars had used their spy networks, including the Ochrana, to successfully infiltrate the socialist movements. The Ochrana may be the service we have files about, but it is unlikely to be the only service that existed and mattered.
We must consider the possibility that the tsars could have envisioned, among other options, to have a transformation in Russia which would wipe out the Slavic aristocracy and have a continuation of tsarist rule with a controlled socialist dictatorship underneath.
The British nobility developed their own brand of socialism through the Fabian Society and the London School of Economics. The era of classic colonial rule was coming to an end and we can gather from the imperialist authors of the initial Fabians that imperialism and serfdom were supposed to get a new leftwing image.
It is possible that the nobility miscalculated, got spied on by the communists, and ended up in a situation where it felt the need to have a “working relationship” with the communists in order to stay relevant and avoid total decline. It is also conceivable that the tsars and the British throne had full control over the communist movements in Russia the whole time. Controlling the Bolsheviks was neither complicated nor expensive.
Watching Russia burn to the ground
The US State Department began to finance anti-Bolshevik forces in November 1917 at the latest. The Americans laundered money through the British and French to send the American Expeditionary Force to Russia in Operation Archangel. The stated goal was to protect military stockpiles in Arkhangelsk in the North of Russia, fight the Bolshevik army and re-ignite the Eastern front against Germany.
For this the Unted States sent a measly 5000 soldiers to one area and several thousands more to Vladivostok.
A total of 170 British troops arrived on 4 March 1918, the day after the signing of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk between Germany and the Bolshevik government. By early fall, British forces in the Murmansk region were about 6.000 strong. The Americans had arrived as well by then. The Allied troops were mainly inactive in the winter of 1918, building blockhouses.
In the Battle of Tulgas 1000 communist troops attacked the Allied defense line and were repelled. Some in the British leadership throught that the only way to achieve success in ejecting the Bolsheviks from power was by raising, training and equipping a large White Russian Army.
Public recruiting began at home in Britain for the newly created ‘North Russian Relief Force’, a voluntary force which had the claimed sole purpose of defending the existing British positions in Russia. By the end of April 3,500 men had enlisted, and they were then sent to North Russia.
Over the course of 1919 most of the allied troops were sent home. Some of the White Russian forces switched sides to the communists. It seems the Americans and the British “forgot” to bring some money to buy the Whites’ loyalty.
The Allies just went home and watched the Russian Civil War unfold which claimed the lives of roughly 8 million people and cemented the rule of the Bolsheviks. The White Russian Northern Army was left to face the Red Army alone. Poorly disciplined, they were no match for the Red Army, and quickly collapsed when the Bolsheviks launched a counter-offensive in December 1919.
By the end of WWI, four million men had served in the United States Army, with an additional 800,000 in other military service branches. By the end of 1918, the British Army had reached its maximum strength of 3.820.000 men and could field over 70 divisions.
All of this to squash Germany. But to save Russia from Soviet Communism, both the US and Britain were willing to deploy only a few soldiers each. A lot of money was spent in the war against Germany but for some strange reason there was a failure to pay the White Russians adequately against the Reds. Ultimately 83% of all Red Army divisional and corps commanders were ex-Tsarist soldiers.
Then there is the question of the Western supplies sent to the Whites. It was never enough and it often ended up in the hands of the Reds, which is not surprising given the massive intelligence failures and Operation “Trust”.
The argument of pragmatism
The British prime minister, David Lloyd George, became unwilling to fund the Whites. He declared Iudenich to be a ‘notorious reactionary’. The British foreign secretary, Lord Curzon, later advised the Finns not to support Iudenich. The president of the United States, Woodrow Wilson, was also suspicious of Russian reactionaries such as Admiral Kolchak. Both Lloyd George and Curzon were fearful of creating a strong Russia which could threaten British imperial possessions in Asia.
In November 1919 Lloyd George declared in a speech to Parliament that a White victory would not be in the British interest, and from this point on the British stopped supplying arms and began negotiations with the Bolsheviks. After Lloyd George’s speech to the House of Commons, British observers with Denikin’s forces reported that morale collapsed. The Whites failed to convince the allies to supply them with the necessary numbers of troops or weapons. Moreover, they proved incapable of making effective use of the 850,000 rifles supplied by the allies. Kolchak’s army had a supply line of 4,000 miles with a single-track railway that suffered badly from a lack of control: Left-wing rail workers diverted whole trainloads to the Reds.
Four out of five of the peasants conscripted into Kolchak’s White army deserted. Many simply transferred to the Reds. Th situation became so asymmetrical that the Red army ballooned to several million fighters while the Whites never came close to one million.
We can tell from the limited campaign what had been possible with a real effort. But that would have meant empowering the “Whites” who were not from the Houses of Hessen and Schleswig-Holstein. Some very powerful circles must have made the very specific decision to let Russia burn to the ground, watch the Civil War unfold and watch the Whites die or flee. Even during the 1920s and 1930s, when it was totally clear to everyone the Soviets were psychopaths hellbent on creating a monster army, Britain and the US did not seek to intervene but instead kept selling whole factories to the USSR. In 1949, Churchill stated to the British Parliament:
I think the day will come when it will be recognized without doubt, not only on one side of the House, but throughout the civilized world, that the strangling of Bolshevism at its birth would have been an untold blessing to the human race.
In a further speech at the National Press Club, Washington D.C., in June 1954, Churchill lamented:
If I had been properly supported in 1919, I think we might have strangled Bolshevism in its cradle, but everybody turned up their hands and said, “How shocking!”
What are the excuses? Mainline historians will hide behind pragmatist thinking: WWI was finally over and nobody was thrilled to continue the fighting. Influential people hoped that Socialism would be nice and work out. There were communist spies in the West, influencing people’s opinions. The politicians worried about the next elections. The politicians were stupid. None of these excuses work.
Anti-communist intelligence historians will just say that communist intelligence was capable of miracles, running in god-mode persistently while the US and Britain were mediocre in this regard. The Soviets came up with the idea of infiltrating the Whites and create the “Trust”, a fake anticommunist organization. This excuse does not work either. The Western intelligence effort to help the Whites was just as designed to fail as the military campaign in Northern Russia. The conspiracy authors will of course say that Britain and the United States were under control of the jewish world conspiracy, and therefore paved the way for the USSR.
Russia owed Britain a staggering 600 million pounds. But the communists simply stated the debt has been paid in blood and the war only happened because of international capitalism anyway.
The Conservatives in Britain rightfully argued that Bolshevism was dangerous and could ultimately spread to British soil. The Russian revolutionaries stood in opposition to all that the Conservatives held sacred: Property, religion, tradition, class. Churchill called the Bolsheviks “ferocious baboons”. They were leading
“a war against civilized society which can never end. They seek as the first condition of their being the overthrow and destruction of all existing institutions and of every State and Government now standing in the world.”
The United States was happily selling more and more technology to the USSR. If normal people questioned this, the answer was: Well, maybe the USSR will work out and we can make profits. If a rightwinger questioned this, the answer was: The jewish Rothschild conspiracy is very powerful in the US and behind these sales. Leftwingers obviously didn’t question these sales at all.
A strong argument used was cost: WWI had cost 9 billion pounds; and despite the dramatic rise in the tax rate, only 28 percent of the cost had been paid through taxation. The remaining 7.2 billion pound deficit had been covered by heavy borrowing from London banks and the issuance of war bonds. It was cheaper to watch Russia burn to the ground. Lord Milner however claimed, in his letter to The Times, that a sudden withdrawal from Russia would result in the unimpeded spread of Bolshevism. If this occurred, the consequences “would assuredly involve a far greater strain on the resources of the British Empire then our present commitments”.
Britain had also acquired extensive mandated areas in the Middle East which proved to be expensive dependents. The other members of the Empire, the Dominions, had grown more independent during the war.
The citizens were concerned with reconstruction, jobs, taxes and the building of new houses. Straining the budgets even further would alienate the people and drive them towards Bolshevism, a report declared. Almost every family had lost someone in the war, others were traumatized upon their return or disabled. The slogan became “Russian self-determination”. Let them decide their own fate. Which meant: Let Russia burn to the ground.
The Americans didn’t have the same financial problems as the British. They surely could have decided to intervene in Russia, at least to create a situation where Russia breaks apart into several pieces that do not like each other. It wasn’t a question of going all in or nothing. Not only did the Americans fail to play it safe, but they sold the most technology to the USSR by far. The common explanations of American capitalist greed, lack of foreign intelligence experience, stupidity, politics and Soviet espionage influence are not good enough.
In 1919 Churchill heard a report from the French General and Army Chief of Staff Henri Alby that the Red Army could be easily defeated by inferior numbers of Allied troops. Balfour was having none of it. He set the tone for the discussion by stating:
“All would agree that for military and political reasons it was impossible to contemplate any great military operation in Russia with a conscript army.”
Contradictory to Henri Alby’s estimates, Churchill was supplied with numbers concerning the costs of intervention. The figures were frightening. It would cost 73 million pounds to conduct “very insignificant operations” for the next six months in the Archangel-Murmansk theater alone. The French premier was staggered by the figures and believed they were accurate.
Reilly and the disastrous intelligence bungling
It speaks volumes already how Britain and the US abandoned the White Russians militarily. Did they also betray the Whites on the intelligence front? While we have much literature on intelligence failures, there is virtually no analysis whether the Brits and Americans deliberately sabotaged the Whites by handing intelligence to the Reds or not sharing crucial intelligence with the whites. Experts on Soviet intelligence usually just point at the sophisticated “Trust operation” which posed as white but was really red. The communists somehow had acquired a very high degree of spycraft, whereas the Anglos were no match. Conventional historians idiotically insist Britain had been running its massive global empire without a real, proper foreign intelligence service and only improvised one amateurishly overnight in the early 20th century. Likewise, the Unites States supposedly never bothered to create a real foreign intelligence service before the OSS. In reality, intelligence before the 20th century was off the books, handled by elite families, mostly aristocrats, not subject to parliamentary scrutiny. No official headquarters, no official budget and no files accessible to the public.
After the Revolution and the Civil War the British aristocrats played dumb. The tsar and his immediate family had vanished, instead of having him exfiltrated to safe British or Scottish or Danish territory. Sure, the British population was happy that it didn’t have to partake in another major war right after WWI. But the entire country of Russia falling under communism? This just didn’t sound right at all. So a hefty bit of political marketing was necessary. The people were told the government had attempted heroic, dashing effort to assassinate Lenin and Trotzky and smash the Bolsheviks in a coup. The suave secret agent chosen for the mission was Sidney Reilly, a spy for the ages. The problem was Reilly was the fictitious name given to dangerous criminal who played all sides to enrich himself.
First, the Russian-born “Reilly” was employed by Scotland Yard’s Special Branch and later by the Foreign Section of the British Secret Service Bureau, the precursor to the modern British Secret Intelligence Service (MI6/SIS). He ultimately disappeared in the chaos in Russia in the mid-1920s and we are supposed to believe he fell for the Soviet deception operation “Trust”, a fake anticommunist organization, was arrested and killed. Almost, the story goes, did he pull off an assassination of Lenin and a coup against the Bolsheviks.
In 1932 the journalist Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart, who had also served as a secret agent and as British Consul-General in Russia, was allowed to publish the book “Memoirs of a British Agent” which turned into a bestseller. Newspapers dubbed Reilly “the greatest spy in history” and his legend became that of “the dominating figure in the mythology of modern British espionage.” This fiction is what the audiences were meant to believe.
DeWitt Clinton Poole, an American Consular an intelligence official in Russia, in contact with the anti-Bolsheviks, was convinced that Reilly was a traitor. U.S. Secretary of state Robert Lansing allegedly initiated the plot involving Reilly, the assassination plan against Lenin and the attempted coup.
Who was Reilly, the man entrusted with “strangling Bolshevism in its infant state”? Nobody could even really figure out who Reilly really was, where he was born and who his parents were. According to reports of the tsarist intelligence service Okhrana, Reilly was arrested in 1892 for political activities and for being the courier for a revolutionary group known as the “Friends of Enlightenment”. He escaped judicial punishment, and he later was friends with Okhrana agents such as Alexander Grammatikov, and these details indicate that he was a police informant even at this young age. That would mean he betrayed other people for money. He then travelled abroad and may have robbed and murdered a duo of anarchists near Paris who were carrying substantial funds.
Under the name Rosenblum he became a paid informant in London for the émigré intelligence network of William Melville, superintendent of Scotland Yard’s Special Branch. It seems as if he poisoned the husband of his lover Margaret Thomas so she could inherit 800.000 pounds. According to a description, it is likely he temporarily assumed the identity of a doctor and filled out a death certificate for natural causes. With the help of Melville he received the new identity of “Sidney George Reilly”. We cannot rule out that Scotland Yard knew about the murder and used this to control Reilly who was expected to embark on a dangerous spy mission to Russia. After all, he was now a rich man. Why else would he risk his own life? It seems as if he used the first opportunity in Russia to sell secrets to the Japanese to enrich himself. Historians disagree about virtually everything that concerned Reilly’s further spy career. Probably Reilly failed at most assignments and simply invented heroic tales. He was ultimately sworn in by Mansfield Cumming at the British Secret Intelligence Service and returned to Russia where he met his old companion of the Okhrana Alexander Grammatikov and was able to obtain travel permits as a Soviet Cheka agent and hand over SIS money to anti-communist groups. The anti-communist circles were already infiltrated by the Cheka and the service had furthermore gained access to the British diplomatic codes.
Eventually it was not Reilly and his allies who took the chance to take out Lenin, but Fanya Kaplan, a member of the Socialist Revolutionary Party. She fired three shots with a Browning pistol. One bullet narrowly missed Lenin’s heart and penetrated his lung, while the other bullet lodged in his neck near the jugular vein. The “Red Terror” campaign followed, including a raid of the British consulate in Petrograd. Lockhart got off easy, unlike many others, while Reilly escaped.
The SIS sent Reilly back to the South of Russia soon after under a new false identity. He reported that the Whites even lacked the necessary money for printing propaganda and other purposes. In September 1925 in Paris, Reilly met Alexander Grammatikov, White Russian General Alexander Kutepov, counter-espionage expert Vladimir Burtsev, and Commander Ernest Boyce from British Intelligence. This assembly discussed how they could make contact with a supposedly pro-Monarchist, anti-Bolshevik organisation known as “The Trust” in Moscow, which was fake.
It is claimed that after Reilly crossed the Finnish border, the Soviets captured and interrogated him at Lubyanka Prison. The Soviets publicly said they executed him.
Some officials in Whitehall and the Secret Service trusted neither Reilly nor the Russian “Trust”. In the year after Reilly’s disappearance the Trust was publicly exposed. The Soviet dossier on his interrogation mentions that he had used the cover name “Sidney Berns” in the United States. When the Soviet military intelligence officer Walter Krivitsky defected to the West he told the Americans they had been penetrated through a man named Sidney Berns.
Even Sir Robert Hamilton Bruce Lockhart started to turn against Reilly in public.
Authors see in Reilly what they want to see. A brave spy who got fooled by smarter, Soviet spies. The man who almost destroyed the Bolsheviks on behalf of the British Empire and the United States. Or a traitor who sabotaged the Whites and was greeted laughingly by his comrades afterwards. Yet the British leadership ultimately had the power to decide the fate of the Whites. It would have been easy to sabotage these operations and create excuses to provide plausible deniability. Inquiring people are supposed to loose themselves in the maze of spies, double-agents and moles.
The missing Romanovs
According to the usual historiography, the members of the Tsar’s family were murdered on the night of July 16th to 17th, 1918 by a commando from the Soviet state security service Cheka in the basement of the Ipatiev House near Yekaterinburg, the bodies were partially destroyed and buried.
Lenin is said to have decided on the death of the Tsar’s family which makes no sense at all. It would have been cheap and effective to kidnap them, interrogate the tsar for incriminating information about the whole House of Hessen, make him write a series of confessions of seeing the errors of the old system, embracing socialism, and make photographs and film recordings for potential future use. They could always decide at a later point to keep all that material hidden. Another option was to publicly use him as a kind of advisor and blesser of the Socialist system. We know that the exiled Romanovs were toying with a similar idea and in today’s Russia National-Bolshevism is all the rage; a combination of left and right ideologies to create sympathies internationally.
Another possibility is that the tsar and his family members were sold for ransom money and new trade contracts to Britain, Scotland or Denmark with new identities. If the news had become public that the tsar was alive and well in exile, this would have complicated everything. The tsar would have been a valuable bargaining chip, just like captured spies are regularly traded for other captured spies between countries hostile to each other.
An announcement in the local newspaper by Bolshevik War Commissar Filipp Goloshchyokin, in overall charge of the family’s incarceration in Yekaterinburg, said:
All those under arrest will be held as hostages, and the slightest attempt at counter-revolutionary action in the town will result in the summary execution of the hostages.
Goloshchyokin later played a deadly role in the Sovietization of Kazakhstan, leading to the Kazakh famine of 1932–1933, in which 1.5 million people died. He was ultimately killed during a purge. Lenin was said to have planned to put the former emperor on trial in a grand public spectacle, with Leon Trotsky acting as Chief Prosecutor. Somehow, he and his colleagues decided against it. The Cheka agent Yakov Yurovsky, directly responsible for the captured tsar, insists he had gotten the order for execution but here is no way to verify this.
The story goes that the engine of a truck in the courtyard of the Ipatiev House was revved up to drown out the noises of the murders. The tsar’s family was lured into the cellar, the death sentence was briefly read out and the men opened fire, requiring several volleys. One of the guards, Alexei Kabanov, told the killers to cease fire and to use their bayonets and gun butts, to minimize the noise. None of this makes sense. Why hadn’t the Cheka simply used poison and blown up the bodies with dynamite? No shooting would have been involved and the bodies would have turned to tiny droplets. Why weren’t the Romanovs transported to safer territory? Or driven to the gigantic woods nearby, shot and buried?
At a telegraph office in Ekaterinburg on the 18th of July Thomas Preston, a diplomat at the British Consulate, attempted to cable to Sir Arthur Balfour in London:
“The Tsar Nicholas the Second was shot last night.”
On the 19th of July, Goloshchyokin announced at the Opera House on Glavny Prospekt that “Nicholas the Bloody” had been shot and his family taken to a secure location. The alleged murderers took no photos, made no film recordings, there was no confession that the tsar had to write, no show trial, nothing, we are supposed to believe. It was only many decades later, after the end of the Soviet Union, that Russian, British and American scientists presented DNA “evidence” based on bone remains from a forest find, but this could easily have been manipulated. The Bolsheviks said nothing concrete about the whereabouts of the Romanovs until 1926 and then spoke of a probable assassination.
Sokolov’s investigation
The alleged murder of Tsar Nicholas II and his immediate relatives is considered solved by historians, but this view does not meet modern standards of criminology; in any case, historians have never seriously researched in any other direction. We are expected to rely almost exclusively of descriptions by Soviet sources.
White Army soldiers were able to occupy the Ipatiev House and collect evidence roughly eight days after the alleged murder of the tsars. The investigations lasted several months and didn’t really produce any results. Nikolai Alexeyevich Sokolov joined the investigation later on and it was only a year later that Sokolov was able to begin to systematically evaluate the material. Sokolov didn’t have much time because the Reds were approaching again.
His preliminary report was published in 1925. Until 1989, it was the only accepted historical account of the murders. It prompted the Soviets to issue a government-approved textbook in 1926 that largely plagiarized Sokolov’s work, admitting that the empress and her children had been murdered with the Tsar. Sokolov’s report was banned in the USSR.
The collected witness statements are near worthless A priest named Storozhev said he was summoned more than once to the house to perform services. Why on earth would the Cheka do this if the orders were for strict secrecy? Two women were also allowed into the house and a few more claimed to have seen the imperial family. They could not tell the real family from decoys.
“Comrade” Andrei Strekotin claimed the Romanovs were murdered. Neighbors heard some shots. Others saw a truck transporting things. At the least, the Romanovs could haven been silently poisoned, stripped of all belongings and transported away, to be hacked up or blown up with dynamite. All of this would have been remarkable easy. Instead, the Cheka left a building behind with bullet holes, removed segments of the walls, and scattered personal belongings of the Romanovs nearby, while expecting the Whites to approach. The Cheka made absolutely sure the priest and neighbors were aware of the Romanov’s presence. Much was left for Sokolov to find. Enough so the impression could be made the imperial family was dead but nowhere near sufficient to conform the murders.
Guards employed by the Cheka gave statements. Mostly Kleshchev and Deryabin spoke, “supplemening each other’s words.” Lesnikov and Brusyanin claimed they had seen this themselves.
Why would the Cheka make an effort of secrecy but leave not only many physical traces, but involve guards who then told Sokolov they had observed the killings against their orders? Most of the guards, it is claimed, remained at their posts. The leaders left behind an encrypted telegrams which were promptly deciphered by Sokolov’s helpers. Soviet official Sverdlov soon had newspapers print an admission that the tsar had been murdered. So which was it? A secret act or just announcing it? The White official Milyukov testified about a telegram from King George of England to the tsar.
It contained no concrete proposal with respect to the tsar’s fate. […] It was delivered to me as minister of foreign affairs.
Since this was an official communication addressed to Nicholas who was no longer tsar, Milyukov simply returned it to the British ambassador Buchanan. Milyukov was convinced that the former tsar and his family should go abroad. Buchanan talked to his government which then stated “its readiness to receive the imperial family in England” and “a cruiser would come” to remove them. Milyukov was convinced this message had reached Nicholas. All seemed like a no-brainer.
The cruiser, however, did not come and there was no departure. There was some hitch, so to speak. I spoke a second time with Buchanan about this question and he told me that the government of England was no longer “insisting” on the imperial family’s departure for England.
The insisting was done by the Russian Provisional Government, not by England. Kerensky’s testimony is quoted in the Sokolov report: British ambassador Buchanan presented the answer that
…the government of England does not consider it possible to extend its hospitality to the former tsar while the war continues.”
The Provisional Russian government was so disturbed by this answer they convened a completely secret session without a written protocol. They used a former envoy to talk political figures in France to help save the imperial family. The French refused to become active. Sokolov even states the British government refused to pay him to bring the collected materials and the reports, including “relics of the imperial family” to Europe. It was a French general, a Russian merchant and a peasant who managed to pay Sokolov and “save the investigation”.
Sokolov writes that the Provisional Russian government had told the world the tsar was a traitor; that he had been “preparing a separate peace with the enemy [Germany] to save his own personal and dynastic interests, i.e. a catastrophe for the Allies.”
Prince Lvov had the movements of the tsar restricted and then arrested him. The British and other governments in Europe were quite willing to save and host many Romanovs who could always claim themselves emperors in exile. So why the cold response from the British regarding Nicholas?
Maria Feodorovna was safe in Denmark with her many aristocratic relatives. Sokolov’s assistant Paul Bulygin says the plan was to bring the materials to her and to start processing it. She bizarrely ordered Sokolov to stay away from Denmark and gave him the equivalent of 1000 British pounds which would be 56.000 pounds today. Not exactly a whole lot of money to process multiple suitcases and a shipping crate full of documents, photos and samples about the most important murder case in the world. The potential blood samples were given a laboratory treatment. The tsar’s cousin, Grand Duke Nicholas Nicholayevich refused to accept the records. Sokolov and his assistant simply kept them in their shared apartment. Seven volumes were stolen by communists in Berlin and probably sent to Moscow. The assistant published his own report much later as a simplified version of Sokolov’s and a few other people published further reports.
In 1921 Paul Bykov, a Soviet, came out with a book which essentially plagiarized the information contained in the works of the anti-soviet authors. The book “The Sokolov investigation of the alleged murder of the Russian Imperial Family” contains a lot of commentary that is describing the work of the “White investigators” as chaotic and bungling.
The principal accounts – those of Sokolov, Dieterichs and Wilton – clearly indicate that the Bolsheviks were making a sustained effort to deceive the White investigators, and throw them off the track. Many kinds of false evidence were planted, and many of the witnesses, known to be members of the Bolshevik party, were obviously lying. It was at least difficult to determine which of this evidence, if any, was real or truthful, and which was false. The Bolsheviks, in other words, may have been attempting to conceal murder, or they may have been attempting to conceal an escape or release.
Seven months after the capture of Yekaterinburg by the Whites Sokolov had been appointed as investigator. Before him, others had already worked on the case.
Some of them reached the conclusion that all or part of the imperial family had been spared.
General Dieterichs explained how the white garrison commander immediately selected people like the court investigator Nametkin who quickly fell out of favor because he seemed to make the case more obscure. Sokolov even misrepresented the work of the earlier investigators to make himself appear more important. According to him, the court investigator had only spent only 90 minutes at the mine shaft. In reality, the shafts were flooded and had to be drained. The assistant public prosecutor Magnitsky assembled a variety of qualified people to search the mines and the surrounding area. They probably had dogs available. But no bodies were found. Even military counter-espionage people were added to the investigation, but this did not produce results either as the agents lost themselves in the wilderness of mirrors. They considered that the tsar had been evacuated by agents on behalf of the German Kaiser Wilhelm who was a cousin of the tsar.
Later, according to General Dieterichs, the assumption of the division staff was that the tsar and his family were evacuated by the Bolsheviks. The investigation was largely a waste of time even before Sokolov came along.
The author of “The Sokolov investigation of the alleged murder of the Russian Imperial Family” states:
“The evidence of murder is not conclusive.”
It amounted to charred remains and hearsay. The Ipatiev House could have been previously used as a place to torture and execute people in the basement, leaving traces of blood and bullet holes. There are even completely contradictory statements from investigators about the number of bullet holes.
Other presumed Romanov victims at Alapayevsk were believed to have been thrown into a mineshaft. Sokolov and Dieterichs both believe that the Bolsheviks had killed a peasant and put the body next to the scene to create the impression he had been a White soldier and that the Red and the Whites had a shootout. If the Reds were capable of this, why shouldn’t they create more fabrications? The disfigured bodies retrieved were identified later by the Whites as Romanovs using the identifying documents they found. This means we don’t know at all whether the bodies were Romanovs.
The small scattered belongings of the tsar and his family that were found near the Ipatiev House are in no way evidence of murder. If the decision had been made to smuggle them out, they would have likely been stripped of identifying items. Many objects were found, which does not look like a real coverup by the Bolsheviks, but rather false leads. The giant forests of Siberia and the Ural Mountains were available to properly dispose of bodies. The Bolsheviks even left a quote on the wall at the Ipatiev House from Heine:
“Belshazzar was that very night seized by his slaves and killed outright.”
The Reds who allegedly destroyed the bodies went to a local communist club and bragged loudly so people would hear it. The hearsay from people questioned by the investigators was completely contradictory. But what about the decrypted telegrams mentioned by Sokolov? The one to Sverdlov makes little sense. The translation says
“Entire family suffered same fate as head. Officially family will perish in evacuation.”
What does that mean? Why not cable “The head and the family are dead” instead? And does the rest of the message mean the “perishing” of the family “in evacuation” will be the “official” fake cover story? The translation into English may be flawed due to local Russian dialects. The captured tsar had a high value for the Bolsheviks and they could have simply sold him to the Brits or the ruling aristocracy of Denmark for ransom money. There was weird speculation by some investigators that he was handed to his German cousin, who was living in the Netherlands and had been his mortal enemy in WWI. Britain had had an alliance with Russia.
General Dieterichs was certainly interested in rumors about the German Kaiser making an offer of asylum to the tsarina and the grand duchess, at the urgence of the tsarina’s brother, the Grand Duke Ernest Louis of Hesse-Darmstadt. The offer, so the rumor goes, was rejected. Why would the Kaiser even make the offer when it was not the Hohenzollerns who really wanted the Romanovs, but the House of Hessen? Ernest Louis and his sisters were mostly raised by their grandmother Queen Victoria in England. At Ernest’s wedding, his younger sister Alix became engaged to the later Russian Tsar Nicholas II.
Queen Victoria stayed informed about Ernest in later years with the help of the British diplomat Sir George William Buchanan (member of the Privy Council), the man who had to tell the Russian Provisional Government that Britain was not interested in evacuating the tsar and bringing him to England.
Fashioning new cover identities for the tsar and his family and changing their appearance was easy. In the unlikely case this ever got exposed the Bolsheviks could simply say they had never been able to fully verify the deaths. The local Cheka must have lost them or something and lied to their superiors, and the White investigators simply erred. Only after the White investigators assumed the tsar and the others were dead, did the Soviets make official statements about an execution carried out by the local Cheka.
We know that many Romanovs were simply evacuated and carried off by British cruisers or left by other means and were welcomed in different European countries.
But nobody really wanted the impression that the tsar was alive. The Bolsheviks certainly did not want to admit publicly they spared the despot and sold him to his relatives. Many people back then did not understand properly the serious differences between the family of the fallen German Kaiser, the Hohenzollerns, and the House of Hessen. To many, all of them were simply German, even though the Hohenzollerns were never really liked by the Welfs, Wettins and Reginars. The Hohenzollerns had fought the tsar in WWI and wouldn’t want to be publicly associated with him. Their only motive for saving him was to enforce the unwritten rules that monarchs should not be executed. The Kaiser himself was blamed for the outbreak of WWI even though he was not the driving force behind it, because France had simply formed an alliance with the Brits and the Russians. If tsar Nicholas was executed by the Bolsheviks, the Kaiser’s head could be next. Britain’s King George V, who feared revolutionary trends in Britain and the stability of his own throne, persuaded the Lloyd George government to rescind the offer that had been made to provide sanctuary for the Imperial Family. King George would have preferred that the tsar disappears, but doesn’t really die. The Provisional Russian government didn’t want Nicholas to die and see the satisfaction of the Bolsheviks, but also preferred he disappears.
Much of the tsar’s wealth had been in real estate and mining, which was ultimately taken over by the Bolsheviks. Other assets were eaten up by the WWI effort. The remaining fortune became shrouded in myth because no one could really pinpoint caches of gold, secret bank accounts in Britain or the Netherlands, as well as stocks in London, handled by intermediaries. Britain was quick to establish trade relations with the USSR and this may have been part of a secret agreement. The Bolsheviks could have stashed away Nicholas, his family, four Grand Dukes and their families, releasing them one by one while Britain was implementing the promised trade relations. It was also possible to transfer ownership of some Romanov stocks and bank accounts in London to intermediaries of the Bolsheviks.
If the murders had taken place, the Soviet government would have possessed all relevant details and the logical step after Sokolov’s published report would have been to retrieve the bodies of the imperial family, because there was the danger of dissidents finding them and creating an international public outrage. If remains were to be smuggled outside of the USSR, the anti-communists could turn them into relics. It has been claimed that two Soviet citizens knew Sokolov’s report and managed to find the remains in 1979. At the end-stage of the USSR in 1989 one of these adventurists published his accord and two years later an exhumation took place.
In 1977 the Ipatiev house where the tsar allegedly died was ordered to be demolished because, according to Soviet logic, it was not sufficiently historically significant. That prohibited post-USSR researchers later from obtaining samples and testing them with new technology.
The men who allegedly carried out the murders ended up dead themselves. Stepan Vaganov, Ermakov’s close associate, was attacked and killed by peasants in late 1918 for his participation in local acts of brutal repression by the Cheka. Pavel Medvedev, head of the Ipatiev House guard and one of the key figures in the murders, was captured by the White Army in Perm in February 1919. During his interrogation he denied taking part in the murders and died in prison of typhus. Alexandre Beloborodov and his deputy, Boris Didkovsky, were both killed in 1938 during the Great Purge. Filipp Goloshchyokin was shot in October 1941 in an NKVD prison and consigned to an unmarked grave.
The leader Yurovsky lived until the age of 60 and was rewarded. But his accounts are contradictory. His son, Alexander Yurovsky apparently handed over his father’s memoirs to Avdonin and Ryabov in 1978, the two self-styled investigators who claimed to have found the remains of the tsar and his family one year later. Lenin made sure to leave no real paper trail. Only hints have survived that indicate that Lenin wanted to move “the baggage” further so to not destroy it. On the 16th of July, the editors of Danish newspaper Nationaltidende queried Lenin to “kindly wire facts” in regards to a rumor that Nicholas II “has been murdered”. He responded:
“Rumor not true. Ex-tsar safe. All rumors are only lies of capitalist press.”
Sverdlov granted permission for the local paper in Yekaterinburg to publish the “Execution of Nicholas, the Bloody Crowned Murderer – Shot without Bourgeois Formalities but in Accordance with our new democratic principles”, along with the coda that “the wife and son of Nicholas Romanov have been sent to a safe place”.
An official announcement appeared in the national press, two days later. It reported that the monarch had been executed on the order of Uralispolkom under pressure posed by the approach of the Czechoslovaks.
No official document has been found of either Lenin or Sverdlov giving the order. In 2007 the official Russian investigation concluded there is no reliable evidence that Lenin and Sverdlov had made the decision. This gave the Putin dictatorship a clever excuse: The local Cheka guys did it. That way Putin could placate the leftists globally as well as signal the rightwingers that the jewish-communist world conspiracy was responsible and Putin has made peace with the imperial Romanov history of Russia.
In 1993, the report of Yakov Yurovsky from 1922 was published, in which it is explained that units of the Czechoslovak Legion were approaching Yekaterinburg, so time was of the essence. To prevent the tsar from falling into the hands of the Czech, he was murdered.
On 15 August 2000, the Russian Orthodox Church announced the canonization of the Romanov family for their “humbleness, patience and meekness”. However, reflecting the intense debate preceding the issue, the bishops did not proclaim the Romanovs as martyrs, but passion bearers instead. As I will explain in detail in further chapters of this book, the Soviets had infiltrated the émigré circles from the first moment and turned the anticommunist international movement into radical adherents of classic conspiracy mythology. It was always planned to publicly ditch communism and promptly in 1991 the exhumation was done of the supposed remains of the tsar. One year after Putin took office the Orthodox church (run by his intelligence service) glorified the Romanovs. Putin hinted many times in public that a satanic Western or international conspiracy had destroyed the rule of the Romanovs and enforced communism in Russia.
The very successful American conspiracy influencer Alex Jones explained to his audience in 2024 that the Rothschild conspiracy had sent jews to Russia to create the communist regime but Putin finally managed to free his people from that conspiracy.
On 1 October 2008, the Supreme Court of the Russian Federation ruled that Nicholas II and his family were victims of political repression and rehabilitated them. A sizeable portion of Russian citizens still does not like the Romanovs and that explains the official reservations.
Journalist Anna Reid says Putin is the real inheritor of the White Russian legacy. He shares the same vaulting imperial mindset and addiction to violence. Like the Whites, he is contemptuous of Ukrainians and other non-Russian peoples. In 2005 Putin arranged for Denikin’s remains to be taken from the US and reburied in a Moscow monastery.
The supposed tsar’s body
Two men named Avdonin and Ryabov came across a photo of the vicinity of the crime scene in Sokolov’s book, finally visited the site in 1979 and spontaneously found the bodies. They claimed they did what hordes of highly motivated investigators couldn’t do decades earlier
They say they took three skulls with them and put them back a year later. In 1989, towards the end of the Soviet Union, Ryabov published his find, and two years later the exhumation took place. Avdonin, a geologist by trade in the Soviet years, was personally interested in local history and folklore. in 1976, he met Soviet writer and filmmaker Geli Ryabov. The excavation in 1991 was done crudely with bulldozers, not archaeological equipment.
Russian, British and American forensic experts agreed that the Romanovs’ remains had been found. The DNA tests were carried out by the Russian Dr. Pavel Ivanow and Dr. Peter Gill from the Forensic Science Service (FSS) in the UK. Generously, Prince Philip Mountbatten, husband of Queen Elizabeth II of Great Britain and a close relative of the Tsars, donated a blood sample for comparison. This was cross-checked by Dr. Erica Hagelberg from the University of Cambridge. This means that the investigations were carried out by researchers from countries with an interest in declaring the tsars dead. The DNA had already been largely destroyed and the remains had been in the custody of the Russian state, where someone could easily have contaminated them. If there was any usable DNA left, the existing fragments could artificially be copied and multiplied using a method such as PCR. Contamination would therefore be easy. In 2004, scientists from the United States criticized the findings of the British Forensic Science Service and suggested that the bone remains had been accidentally or intentionally contaminated.
AFDIL was used for the tests because Peter Sarandinaki from the “Scientific Expedition to Account for the Romanov Children” (S.E.A.R.C.H.) foundation was able to persuade the Russian government to do so. An old shirt of the Tsar’s with traces of blood that he wore during an assassination attempt in Japan is said to have suddenly appeared in a museum. According to other reports, it was a scarf or a handkerchief. As if by a miracle, it was not thrown away but kept and a DNA sample could even have been obtained from it, even though the material and blood had been exposed to sunlight and oxygen for almost 100 years. The scientist Rogaev was thrilled.
All individual bodies were identified using the PCR method and compared with the blood stain on the shirt or cloth. The Japanese scientist Tatsuo Nagai doubted the test results as early as 1997 and in 1999 compared hair samples from Georgii Romanov with the gene sequence that Dr. Peter Gill from the Forensic Science Service (FSS) in Great Britain presented. There was no match. The criticized researchers responded that the hair sample was contaminated, without admitting that the Russians may have deliberately contaminated the alleged Romanov body remains.
Then there was an examination by Dr. Alec Knight at Stanford University, which was cross-checked by other scientists and published in the journal Annals of Human Biology. Knight criticized Dr.’s use of the PCR method. DNA from bones that lay at a shallow depth underground for over 70 years in an area where it gets quite warm in summer must have decayed to such an extent that it is difficult to find pieces longer than 250 base pairs. So if a sequences of 1223 base pairs were detected in all nine corpses, it could only be a contamination. Dr. Knight and his team also examined the DNA from a finger of Elizabeth, the sister of Tsar Nicholas’ wife Alexandra.
https://news.stanford.edu/news/2004/march3/romanov-33.html
Peter de Knijff, head of the forensic DNA research laboratory at Leiden University Medical Center in Holland, agreed that Gill and Iwanow’s original studies were not entirely convincing. Ivanov also refused to let others take a look at the blood-stained handkerchief or shirt that the Tsar had allegedly used to dab a wound in Japan. Ivanov kept the details of this alleged 100-year-old blood sample to himself and claimed that after his examination the DNA had now finally decayed. The lawyer Daryl Litwin spoke with an expert on Russian history at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University who recommended a reevaluation of the Romanov case.
So if we don’t have a convincing DNA analysis, the bodies are not convincing, and without bodies it is not proven by criminalistic standards that the Tsar’s family was even murdered at all. Nowadays, if a prosecutor wants to charge a person with murder, but no body has turned up, then the prosecutor has a very bad hand.
It is important to remember the magnitude of this matter: Our conventional 20th-century understanding of history is based on a ridiculous DNA analysis of ancient bones that were in the care of the Russian state and were probably deliberately contaminated. If we consider the possibility that the Tsar’s family had fled, then they would most likely have gone into hiding with relatives in Britain or Denmark.
Russian authorities and the state-controlled Orthodox Church launched a ridiculous investigation in 2015 into whether the tsars died in a Jewish-Satanic ritual murder. These cheap and cheesy conspiracy tales are not only intended to distract from real new investigations, but also to keep alive the age-old myth that the revolution was the work of satanic Illuminati Jews.
http://www.exploreforensics.co.uk/romanovs-forensic-identification-tsars-grave.html
https://www.livescience.com/7693-case-closed-murders-russian-czars-family.html
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3205009
http://www.searchfoundationinc.org/
The aristocrats infiltrated socialism early
Tsar Nicholas was part of the Hesse-Darmstadt, Hesse-Kassel families as well as related to the Danish royal family, the British royal family and he was even a third-degree nephew of the German Emperor Wilhelm II. He married his cousin Alix of Hesse-Darmstadt, granddaughter of the British queen Victoria in a big wedding.
Tsarist intelligence had indeed infiltrated terrorist circles, factory worker strike movements, the peasant class, and merchant circles.
The First World War ultimately saw the Tsar deploying 4 million men, but they did not have nearly enough rifles and ammunition. British aid kept Russia in the war. Every Russian soldier lost was another solider which the regular Slavic aristocracy could never deploy again domestically to change the leadership and power structure of Russia.
Influential staff members of tsar Nicholas were of course from the British orbit. Men from the environment of the British elite University of Oxford and the secret service SIS/MI6. The Russian nobleman Felix Yusupov, who had married into the Romanov clan, had been accepted into the Bullingdon Club student organization while studying at Oxford, where future British kings, British nobles, future political stars and businessmen mingled. Yusupov took part in the plot to kill Rasputin, who had used his considerable influence to stir up sentiment against Russia’s involvement in the First World War. If Russia had withdrawn from the war, the Germans would no longer have been in the grip of a two-front war and could have deployed virtually all their troops against Britain, France and the USA. The Briton Samuel Hoare, 1st Viscount Templewood, had also been in the Bullingdon Club in Oxford, learned Russian as a military officer and was recruited by the secret service chief Mansfield Cumming (SIS/MI6) to maintain connections with the Russian secret service in St. Petersburg. Hoare’s career later extended into the Second World War. Captain Stephen Alley, an SIS/MI6 agent most likely involved in the assassination attempt on Rasputin, had grown up in a Yusupov family home. The SIS/MI6 agent John Scale served in the propaganda department “Anglo-Russian Commission” in St. Petersburg, which was also involved in British supplies for the Russian military. Oswald Rayner had studied at Oxford, where he became friends with Yusupov and eventually joined the SIS. Rayner is said to be the only man with a gun at the scene of Rasputin’s murder. Another acquaintance of Yusupov was the Briton Albert Stopford, who had connections to Queen Victoria, King Edward VII and King George V. Stopford spied for the British War Office.
Socialist ideas had gained traction in previous generations when roughly 90% of the population were serfs, mostly farmers with only rudimentary legal protection. The simple plan envisioned toppling the aristocrats, ending the influence of the church, redistributing the land and the assets, and then making private ownership illegal. No socialist ever had a clear idea of how a socialist system would actually work in practice. Furthermore the socialist activists and revolutionaries did not have any meaningful legal protection against searches and seizures, torture and pressure against family members. This made it relatively easy for the police to infiltrate the leftist movement in different countries. In German Prussia for example, the ruling aristocracy intended to control “Social Democrats” and slowly improve the working conditions and wages, without risking insurgencies. France was hoping to placate the workers and farmers as well. Britain thought socialism was a tool to destabilize France and Germany. And that it how the aristocracy got itself into this dangerous game. It was a much bigger risk than running operations under the cover of the far less radical “enlightenment” ideas. Germany was still saturated with old aristocratic spy networks of the supercluster of Welfs, Wettins and Reginars. The “League of Communists” tried to push for revolution through actions and publications, including participation in civil war-like struggles in various failed uprising attempts. On the European mainland, turmoil was raging everywhere. There was relative calm in Britain.
For the supercluster the infiltration of socialist circles was more than just protecting themselves from the radicals and causing trouble for competing empires. British capitalism was to remain an elitist affair for the benefit of a tight circle. Most people would be losers in this system and certain socialist policies controlled from above could be a new form of serfdom that is not called serfdom. A bureaucratic system where you have to work under dictated conditions and you have no real way to escape.
Marx, the informant
Thanks to his father’s connections, Karl Marx married the aristocrat Jenny von Westphalen. Her ancestors included high-ranking officials from Prussia who, for example, headed the Ministry of the Interior and were therefore responsible for espionage against revolutionary groups. In 1751, Philipp von Westphalia became secretary to the Prussian lieutenant general and freemason Ferdinand von Braunschweig, the brother-in-law of the Prussian king and freemason Friedlich II. Ferdinand was also a member of the Illuminati Order, which also included people like Landgrave Karl of Hesse-Kassel. Ferdinand of Braunschweig was in command of the allied troops of England, Hanover (the origin of the British royal dynasty) and Prussia. Philip of Westphalia also took on an important military function and the British King George III. from the House of Hanover gave him a title. Philip married a noblewoman with Scottish ancestry. His son was Ludwig von Westphalen. His son Ferdinand Otto, in turn, became Prussian Interior Minister and was therefore responsible for espionage against revolutionary groups. Ludwig’s daughter Jenny eventually married Karl Marx. The Marx-friendly historians try to make it seem as if there were tensions between Jenny and her family, even though the facts show more normal family relationships.
Of all people, Ludwig von Westphalen suggested Saint Simon’s ideas of socialism to Marx, and Marx later dedicated his doctoral thesis to Ludwig. Had Ludwig really set the young Marx on the path to socialism? At the very least he recruited Marx as an informant. Marx and Edgar von Westphalen, Jenny’s brother, already knew each other at the high school in Trier, and there is evidence that students back then spied on their teachers and reported suspicious left-wing revolutionary or other tendencies. Marx was a destroyer; he infiltrated organisations, then caused arguments, chaos and legally sensitive provocations and somehow always got away with it unscathed.
Some comrades accused Marx of preaching eternal waiting for revolution and salvation. Others accused him of initiating provocations at an inopportune time and thus causing problems for socialist groups. Marx begged his friends like Engels for money, who established contact with Robert Owen, a British entrepreneur and early socialist is considered the founder of the cooperative system. Its factory became a model company that was also visited by princes, politicians, Tsar Nicholas I and the Austrian princes Johann and Maximilian. Owen even gave speeches to the US Congress.
Marx and Engels took over the “League of the Righteous” and turned it into the “League of Communists,” from which the Socialist International eventually grew. Marx completed his Communist Manifesto and “Capital”.
Marx took control of the so-called “First International”. He died in London on March 14, 1883 at the age of 64. Royal Society members attended the funeral.
The Lenins and Stalin
Alexander Ulyanov is the little-known brother of the world-famous communist revolutionary and dictator Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov). The father of the two was ennobled in the Tsarist Empire. Alexander Ulyanov is said to have joined terrorist circles to attack Tsar Alexander III. By chance, the terrorist group was taken out of circulation by the police in time, which meant execution for Ulyanov. We have a few letters from fellow prisoners, stenographic notes from the court proceedings and a few prison files. He would have been taken by boat to the remote and tiny Schlisselburg fortress to be hanged there with his co-conspirators. The Russian Interior Minister Dmitry Tolstoy was even there in person, as he was formally in charge of the police and the domestic secret service. If the terrorists had been betrayed by spies, perhaps even within their own ranks, they would have been Tolstoy’s spies. Afterwards, he and the senior guard wrote separate reports on the execution. What is striking is that, according to the guard, all prisoners sentenced to death refused to kiss the Christian cross before being hanged. Tolstoy’s report states that only one refused the kiss. How does this discrepancy come about? Had either of them remembered wrong? Or even both? Was there a deliberate lie in one or both of the reports to give the impression that the condemned had rejected Christianity to the end or had accepted it at the last moment? Was perhaps one of the convicts an informant for Tolstoy and allowed to survive? Was this Alexander Ulyanov? After all, Alexander was the one who wanted to convince the terrorist group to delay the bomb attack against the Tsar. Shevyrev and the others, however, wanted to get started faster. The group was a militant faction of the Narodnaya Volya. The tsar’s secret services first became suspicious when monitoring letters and, during subsequent observations, observed a kind of practice run for the planned attack. The bomb maker was Ulyanov, but his manufactured explosives did not detonate during the arrest of a co-conspirator who had used them to try to escape the police. In order to be able to set up a bomb workshop at all, the help of several women who were considered less suspicious was called upon. Ulyanov used his cousin Anna’s cover address for a secret telegram about the progress of the assassination planning and she ended up in prison alongside a number of others involved.
The Narodnaya networks were targeted and destroyed by the authorities. Ironically, one of the leaders named Sergei Degaev turned out to be an informant for the Okhrana secret service. Lieutenant Colonel Georgy Sudeykin was head of the secret police in St. Petersburg and was responsible for all agents and informants in the capital. Later he was given an even higher position, which was created especially for him. He was hunting the Narodnaya Volya and it was constantly trying to kill him. To protect himself, he constantly changed premises and used different identification documents and uniforms for his cover identities. He placed an emphasis on subversion methods and provocateurs to reinforce the paranoia that any terrorist could be a secret informer. According to his expertise, revolutionaries could be divided into two categories: The corrupt pigs and the naive idiots. They could be influenced accordingly by either money and threats, or appeals to certain ideals. For financial reasons and because of a threat, Sergei Degaev began to provide information to the Tsar’s secret service Okhrana. According to researcher Ovchenko, this informant activity began in 1882, after Degaev’s wife was arrested by Colonel Sudeykin. Degaev’s information led to the arrest of Narodnaya leader Vera Figner and several other arrests. Colonel Sudeykin is said to have made a suggestion to Degaev that Degaev have Colonel Sudeykin’s superiors murdered so that Sudeykin can continue to rise in the state apparatus. In return, the Okhrana secret service would kill Degaev’s competitors on the Narodnaya. It is no longer possible to reconstruct whether this suggestion was meant seriously. The Narodnaya eventually found out that Degaev was a traitor and gave him the choice of either dying or killing the colonel. He chose the latter option and then fled to the USA, where he became a prominent mathematician under the false name Alexander Pell and founded an engineering institute at the University of South Dakota. Even the smallest mistakes made by a single person could be fatal. The revolutionary German Lopatin was arrested with a list of members of radical activists and hundreds of arrests followed.
Alexander Uljanov regularly whispered with his father on long walks where no one could hear them, which the youngest son found strange. The father’s job was to manage and improve schools, which were often of very poor standards. He was even awarded a title of nobility for his services, which raises the suspicion that his work also had to do with a surveillance program to closely monitor the moods of the students. The price of improved education was arguably increased levels of surveillance. Alexander Ulyanov could have completed his biology studies and then certainly find a privileged job through his father’s connections. It could have benefited his career overall to spy on his fellow students. Ironically, the biology student group later became a terrorist cell. Many students were already interested in new, radical literature and ideas for a new social order, but very few wanted to take the risk of taking actions and getting into trouble with secret services and the police. There were activists who made a particularly loud noise and turned out to be mentally disturbed. Experts in court said that Ulyanov’s group’s bombs were of poor quality and did not work. Although bomb construction presents a certain challenge, one would have expected that explosive devices would be tested in advance so as not to ruin the entire operation. Was Ulyanov an informant and did he deliberately build explosive devices that didn’t work?
There were purges at military academies and military circles in general. A certain Osipanov was allowed to study at a university despite his activist past. Radical student circles regularly carried out provocative actions (especially demonstrations) to encourage the authorities to take reprisals so that more discontent could arise and new people could be recruited as activists. The police, in turn, pursued tactics that gave the activists more support. At a large demonstration in 1886, the police initially held back and thereby attracted more students, which was then followed by extensive humiliation of the demonstrators: 1,000 people had to stand in the rain for hours and were blocked. Alexander Ulyanov and the members of his terrorist cell were all obvious targets for the authorities and the assassination attempts against the Tsar could hardly be hidden. Even the students knew that a major action was coming and later wrote about the whispers in their memoirs. The authorities erected a wall of silence around Ulyanov’s trial and those sentenced to death were driven to a small fortress on a tiny island, where the senior police officer and the Russian Interior Minister gave different reports afterwards. If Ulyanov was an informant, or one of his co-conspirators, then that informant would have been separated from the other convicts on the island fortress and given a new identity. Wearing a police uniform, he would be smuggled from the island fortress back to the mainland and given new identification documents. Ulyanov’s noble father had died a year earlier. We will probably never really find out how thoroughly the Narodnaya Volya was infiltrated by the secret services. The Russian Socialist Revolutionary Party (PSR) was one of the successor groups. The Narodnaya leader Sophia Perovskaya (1853–1881) was born in St. Petersburg and had a family connection to Tsarina Elizabeth. Vera Figner (1852–1942) also came from the nobility and survived the time of the “Great Terror” under the Soviets. There were estimated to be only 500 core members and around 1,700 additional followers. There was a successful assassination attempt on Tsar Alexander II in 1881. The ideas of the Narodnaya are based on Alexander Herzen (1812-1870), Pyotr Lavrov (1823-1900) and Mikhail Bakunin (1814-1876).
Vladimir
When Alexander Ulyanov had already been executed (or his death had been faked), his brother Vladimir (later world-famous as Soviet leader Lenin) continued to work on graduating from school with honors for outstanding achievements and then began studying law at the University of Kazan. There he took part in a demonstration, was expelled from school and banished home, where he read radical literature. Because of his mother’s influence, he was allowed to return to Kazan, where he promptly joined a radical group and continually sought new contacts. A Russian translation of Marx’s Communist Manifesto is said to have come from him. Somehow, despite his activities, Vladimir remained untouched and graduated with honors in law from the University of St. Petersburg, and was allowed to work in the field for years. Magically, he was able to expand his radical activities and even expand into Europe without being caught by the Russian secret service, or by the secret services in Berlin, Paris and Geneva. When he returned to Russia, his pockets and suitcases were full of forbidden literature, which he distributed in various cities. His first arrest, a charge of sedition and a sentence of three years of exile in Siberia under lenient conditions took place in St. Petersburg. For socialist circles he was no more than one of many activists, but exile gave him a little more status and he was able to continue networking there. Afterwards he traveled to Switzerland, then to Munich and finally London. On paper, he had no relevant skills at all, apart from Tsarist Russian law, which for a revolutionary would only have had the benefit of knowing exactly what was forbidden and what was not. He had never had any military experience, had never formally undergone any real intelligence training, had never worked in the administration of citizens and state affairs, and certainly never run a company. He returned to Russia, then went back to Finland, Switzerland and Paris. One might think that a successful revolutionary is a man who simply travels from one city to the next, writing pamphlets and participating in party intrigues. For a long time he did not notice that his right-hand man, Roman Malinovsky, was a spy for the Russian secret service Okhrana. Maybe a little research would have provided information in time that Malinovsky had been in prison for several robberies and a rape and then enrolled in the military using a cousin’s passport. As a soldier in the regiment, he became an informant for the Okhrana. Whether Lenin, his brother and father were also agents is an extremely interesting question that ordinary historians avoid. The Tsarist police kept Lenin under close observation from 1900 to 1917.
Because the German government allowed 32 Russian citizens to travel through its territory in a wagon, including Lenin and his wife, suspicions arose at times that Lenin might be a German agent. Contrary to myth, the wagon was not really “sealed”.
https://www.nytimes.com/2017/06/19/opinion/was-lenin-a-german-agent.html
The German Empire, formally under the control of the Prussian Hohenzollerns, financed the Bolsheviks in the hope of bringing calm to the Eastern Front. When he arrived in Russia, Lenin’s revolutionary plans initially failed. He went to Helsinki in Finland and hid in several safe houses. He traveled back to Russia for the October Revolution and there the Bolsheviks had created the Military Revolutionary Committee, a fighting force that established the new socialist government, the Council of People’s Commissars (Sovnarkom). Trotsky had previously been in New York and got his hands on $10,000 there. Olof Aschberg, founder and majority owner of the Swedish cooperative bank AB Nya Banken, diligently helped finance the communist revolution. He had excellent relations with the last finance minister of the Russian Empire, Pyotr Lvowitsch Bark, who, with the help of, among others, Great Britain and the USA, financed Russia’s military activities against Germany in the First World War. Bark fled to London to a luxury villa, changed his first name to Peter and was promptly paid out an amount of 16,500 pounds sterling by Barings Bank on behalf of the British central bank “Bank of England”.
Over time, Lenin and his comrades had formally become the rulers of Russian territory through a brutal military struggle, but industry was virtually at a standstill, meaning the new socialist state had no significant revenue and limited diplomatic recognition from foreign countries. Where should new equipment be purchased to produce oil and manganese on a significant scale again? A number of Americans came to the rescue, based in the Equitable Building at 120 Broadway in New York’s financial district. Over time, the brand new high-rise has had as tenants top corporations such as General Electric, DuPont, Aluminum Company of New York, railway companies, as well as banks such as Barclays and the New York Federal Reserve. Exactly what the Soviets desperately needed.
https://www.rbcc.com/about/history
The Anglo-Soviet Trade Agreement was an agreement signed on March 16, 1921 to facilitate trade between the United Kingdom and the Russian Soviet Republic. It was signed by Robert Horne, the British Chancellor of the Exchequer, and Leonid Krasin, the Russian Commissioner for Foreign Trade. Robert Stevenson Horne, 1st Viscount Horne of Slamannan, sat on the Privy Council and was King’s Counsel.
Stalin
Josef Stalin (actually Dzhugashvili) came from a humble Georgian background and tried his hand at being a communist revolutionary after completing his education at a church school and was constantly caught and imprisoned by the police. Somehow he managed to achieve an elevated status within the important communist circles, despite not being able to contribute anything special. He was not a good speaker, a good writer or theorist, he had no military skills and no money. He wasn’t there at important events, just somewhere else or in prison. Many of the comrades warned against him and distrusted him. But somehow he remained surprisingly relevant and, after the revolution, found himself in a position to continually expand his position until he achieved totalitarian rule.
Robert C. Tucker, with his degrees from Harvard University, was at least recognizing Stalin’s dangerous psychological disorders as important factors and even discussing some covert operations, including the assassination of Stalin’s rival Sergey Kirov. However, Tucker doesn’t want to or can’t really penetrate the secret service realm. Stalin had been arrested so many times that it would have been extremely easy for the authorities to recruit him up as an informant, and what’s more, he regularly traveled thousands of kilometers without clean papers and passed through various checkpoints as a wanted man. Nothing could harm him. Not even escaping through ice and snow over hundreds of kilometers. Instead of looking at the matter from the perspective of an intelligence officer, Tucker remains the ordinary historian and states, that we don’t have the perfect paper files that explicitly say that Stalin worked for the authorities. Edward Smith’s 1967 book “The young Stalin: The early years of an elusive revolutionary” remains the only serious study of Stalin’s possible spy activities, and Smith himself had worked as an intelligence handler in the USSR. He shows that the probability of Stalin being an agent tends towards 100%.
Historian Tucker writes that the socialist groups initially planned to build socialism under tsarist rule and disempower only the ordinary Slavic Russian nobility. The plan was later modified so that in the future there would be a committee of socialists at the head of the state. It would have been a great thing for the Romanovs to use their secret services to build a massive socialist underground movement and then use this to disempower the ordinary nobility. Smith’s book is a linear narrative that boils down to the essentials and is as one would expect from an intelligence officer.
Author Edward Ellis Smith was a historian, writer, foreign service officer and CIA agent. After graduating from West Virginia University in 1939, he was sent to Germany to serve in World War II. After the war ended, he was selected to attend the Naval Language School, where he learned to speak Russian fluently. From 1946 to 1947 he attended the Strategic Intelligence School at the Pentagon and the Counter Intelligence School at Camp Holabird. After graduating, Smith began work at the American Embassy in Moscow, serving as deputy military and economic attaché. In 1950, he was appointed by the U.S. Army Intelligence Department as a department head investigating the economic and political department of the Soviet Union and analyzing policies in Soviet affairs. He resigned towards the end of 1953 to become a CIA intelligence officer and served various missions throughout Moscow.
Stalin’s life up to the 1917 revolution was retroactively romanticized and stylized by the Soviet state as the heroic story of a true revolutionary, but viewed soberly it is very nebulous and was further clouded by false information and a reserve that was unusual for him. He was completely silent about his family members. In 1801, the Russian Tsar Alexander I annexed the eastern part of Georgia, deposed the Georgian royal family and replaced them with Russian officials. The administrative bureaucrats and church leaders were also replaced and a system of spies and informants was installed. Of course, resistance movements against Russian rule emerged, and these movements were often strongly influenced by socialist ideas. It wasn’t particularly difficult to infiltrate and contain the movements. In March 1897, Noi Zhordania moved to London with the socialist journalist Prince Varlam Cherkesishvili, read literature from around the world at the British Museum and later that year returned to Georgia and founded the magazine Sotsial Democratia. Josef Stalin grew up in lousy Georgian conditions: His parents were farmers and his grandparents were serfs. The father was known as a drunkard and a thug. Young Joseph was considered callous towards living beings and a control freak. The usual mix of psychopathy and narcissism with a touch of paranoia. As a good student, he got access to the higher theological school in Tbilisi with a kind of scholarship, where he came into contact with socialist literature and founded forbidden cliques that he wanted to have absolute control over. He himself was caught by his teachers countless times, denounced his fellow students and was perhaps already turned into an informant. Despite his rebellious activities, he got the best grades and was further encouraged by his teachers. The school administration and the police made no arrests. Even historian Tucker says the school’s methods seemed tailor-made to produce revolutionaries rather than theologians. When the Red Army invaded Georgia in 1921, the files were confiscated on Stalin’s orders.
Stalin became more and more an activist instead of having a normal, regular job, and networked with other activists who had an illegal printing business. Mesame Dasi was the first social democratic party in the Caucasus and they thought little of Stalin there and sent him away in 1901. There are almost no sources about his life for the period of around 12 months after he left the theological school. There are police files showing that his political activities became increasingly noticeable. It is estimated that at least one or two secret service agents or informants were involved in each group of revolutionaries. Senior officers were in charge of a city or provincial region and had to identify and infiltrate radical networks within that territory. Neatly drafted reports were sent to headquarters in St. Petersburg. Most of the time, the people spied on were just frustrated, penniless activists who exchanged Marxist literature and held discussions in small circles with like-minded people. Some operations were strictly isolated and files were not kept on every informant so that important information could not fall into the wrong hands. These secret service structures were not cheap, but the tsar had hundreds of billions at his disposal. If a left-wing revolutionary was recruited by the secret service as a spy, his cover and credibility in the scene could be improved by occasionally being arrested and exiled. The spy was trained in the basics and of course paid for his services. It is entirely conceivable that the penniless Stalin received an early offer from the police in Tbilisi to spy on left-wing circles. He is said to have had a job at the Tbilisi Geophysical Observatory, where revolutionaries were gathering. He soon seemed to want to set up an illegal printing press, which would have given him prominence, and encouraged other people to stage strikes. The Tiflis Okhrana arrested virtually all major Social Democrats on the night of March 21-22, 1901, but Stalin remained at large. During a search of the observatory, no incriminating literature was found in his room. He was present at a strike in Tbilisi in 1901, in which 2,000 demonstrators fought with police and soldiers. Decades later, Soviet authors gave a distorted account, declaring Stalin the leader or organizer of this strike. The day was a serious failure for the left-wing demonstrators, but a success for the authorities. Stalin’s reputation among the leftists in Tbilisi had become rather bad and he moved to the Georgian port city of Batumi, where the oil was shipped that was produced in the important oil fields of Baku in Azerbaijan with the participation of the Dutch aristocratic company Royal Dutch Shell Rothschild clan and the Nobel family. Stalin had a portable printing press in his luggage, which caused horror among the local socialists because the transport must have made a suspicious impression on observers. The local socialists tried to improve the conditions for the workers with a moderate course, but Stalin, whose bad reputation had preceded him from Tiflis to Batumi, was prepared for riots and called for provocative actions. He was behind a demonstration in which all 300 participants were arrested, while he himself somehow remained unmolested. The Georgian socialist leader Noe Zhordania wrote afterwards that Stalin had only intrigue and ambition to offer, but no real leadership qualities, no skills as a writer. On April 5, 1902, Stalin was arrested for the first time by the Okhrana. If he had previously been a spy, the arrest would have re-established his shattered credibility in left-wing circles. If he wasn’t a spy before, it would have been an opportunity to recruit him as a spy. Without a proper trial, he was sentenced to a lenient prison sentence and exile, although he was able to use this entire time undisturbed to continue managing left-wing networks from prison. The famous Trotsky later wondered why the Okhrana handled Stalin’s case without the usual prosecutorial and court procedures and why the files on all his arrests were not made public. There are different and contradictory statements about the time when he fled Siberia and returned, as well as the circumstances. Despite suffering from tuberculosis, he marched through the freezing cold and was then looked after by people in a forest hut, and then traveled thousands of kilometers home as a wanted man without being picked up at the 29 police checkpoints on the railway network, and without that some socialist remembered afterwards that he had helped Stalin along the way. It is quite likely that Stalin was not actually in Siberia. Why should he even return to Batumi and Tbilisi, where the socialists suspected him and where he was known to the police? His activities in 1904 and 1905 are nebulous. He was arrested a second time by the Okhrana according to a top secret memo from the police special branch.
Somehow he was able to escape again and take part in the Bolshevik conference abroad, where he met Lenin. Otherwise, there were a number of pamphlets for which he was listed as an author, but nothing else that significantly improved his profile and justified his high status among the Bolsheviks. He was able to take the train unmolested to Stockholm for the big conference, where several of the 112 participants were Ochrana agents. Lenin considered Okhrana agent Jacob Zhitomirsky a friend and great revolutionary. Stalin traveled an estimated 23,000 miles without being stopped, even though there had been an arrest warrant for him since 1905. Stalin went to Baku in 1907, where Azerbaijan’s oil industry was located. A year later he was arrested again and ended up in exile. The year 1909 is also a mystery in his life. He managed to escape again and traveled over 1,000 kilometers to St. Petersburg and then to Moscow. In 1911 the police are said to have stopped hunting for him because the term of his exile sentence would have expired anyway. But there was another arrest and another exile in Vologda. Confirmed Okhrana spy Roman Malinovsky, Lenin’s closest confidant, was regularly arrested by the police to bolster his reputation. He seemed to encourage Lenin to appoint Stalin, of all people, as a member of the inner party circle “Central Committee”. He promptly managed to escape from exile in Vologda and travel to St. Petersburg to work for the Central Committee. Boris Nicolaevsky suspected Stalin. Lenin made another Okhrana agent named Miron Chernomazov editor-in-chief of the newspaper Pravda. After Stalin’s short trip to Baku, the Okhrana arrested a number of his comrades. Then there was another arrest, another exile in Siberia and another escape. The socialists in Russia were strongly divided and in some cases even downright enemies; The Social Democratic Russian Workers’ Party (RSDLP) was already divided into the so-called Bolsheviks under Lenin and the Mensheviks. The foundation was the teachings of Karl Marx, who himself was highly suspected of having been an informant for the authorities. Soon after, the RSDLP split and the Bolsheviks founded a new party, which was later called the Russian Communist Party. Stalin ended up in exile again, where he remained until the outbreak of the October Revolution in 1917. Almost every revolutionary who had anything to do with him hated him or at least distrusted him. He was not a gifted speaker or writer, he had no military experience and he took no visible leadership role in the crucial weeks and months of the revolution. Nevertheless, Lenin gave him a position in the leadership of the Bolsheviks. The last tsar disappeared and the tsar’s secret service was officially over. However, the staff and the files did not disappear into thin air.
For the author Edward Ellis Smith, the American intelligence expert, the picture that emerges in the book “The Young Stalin” is that Stalin was lucky enough not to be exposed and in the following decades he worked diligently to destroy files and his early history distort. As a dictator, he gradually destroyed almost all of his old Bolshevik comrades. Edward Ellis Smith explains that Stalin’s rule was comparable to that of a tsar. It is almost as if, it is said in the last sentences of the book, as if the Okhrana had finally won over the Bolsheviks. A few pages earlier, Smith speculates that at the time of the revolution, parts of the Okhrana went underground and collaborated with Stalin in some form.
