The Unseen Hand - Ralph Epperson




The Russian Revolution

The Russian Revolution of 1917 was started by starving Russian workers who were being oppressed by the tyrannical leader of Russia, Czar Nicholas II.

This is a one-sentence summary of the official explanation of the cause of the Communist Revolution. But is there another explanation? Is it possible that the Russian workers were being used by someone else for another reason, just as in the French Revolution of 1789?

Perhaps the true cause of the Russian Revolution can be traced to a war of competition in the oil industry that started after the American Edward L. Drake drilled the first oil well in 1859. Drake was not the one, however, who saw the enormous potential in the oil business for exorbitant profits.

John D. Rockefeller was one of the early refiners of oil, as he started in 1863 with two partners. Rockefeller's interest was not satisfied with just one refinery, however. As author William Hoffman observed: "What he wanted was to be the largest refiner in the world, the only refiner in the world."

By 1872, Rockefeller controlled twenty-five percent of America's refining capacity and by 1879 he controlled ninety-five percent. His goal shifted now from national control to international control. His company. Standard Oil, was supplying ninety percent of America's foreign oil sales and America was the sole source of an exportable surplus. But something was happening to his international market. "The wall of Standard's international oil monopoly had been breached with the opening of Russia's great Baku field on the Caspian Sea. By 1883, a railroad had been built to the Black Sea, and the Czar had invited the Nobel brothers and the Rothschild family to help develop these great oil riches."

Standard Oil now had an international competitor in the oil business! The Rothschild family was now in a position to compete favorably with Standard Oil in the sale of oil in the world market. By 1888, this new oil source had overtaken Standard Oil as the international seller of crude oil.

The development of Russia's oil supply to the point where it could overtake the United States can be illustrated by the following table indicating Petroleum Production:

Year USARussia
186070,0001,300
18853,120,0002,000,000
19019,920,00012,170,000

The rapid growth of the oil industry led Russia into the industrialized world. The traditional explanation of Russia's economy at this time was that the nation was an agrarian economy, far behind the other European economies. However, during the period of 1907 to 1913, Russia's increase in its industrial production rate exceeded that of the United States, England, and Germany, long believed to be the industrialized giants of the day.

The following is typical of the conclusion of many researchers who have examined this period in history:

"The Russian revolution of 1917 came not at the end of period of stagnation and decay, but rather after more than a half-century of the most rapid and comprehensive economic progress." And with this progress came the development of a middle class, the enemy of the conspiracy.

There are historians who now believe that the Russian Revolution of 1917 was in truth a revolution instigated by the American and European oil interests to wrest control of the Russian oil fields from the Rothschild-Nobel combination.

But other forces were at work as well in the Russian Revolution. After the defeat of Napoleon and the occupation of Paris in 1814 by Russian troops, many Russian aristocrats visited France. The liberal ideas of the French Revolution appealed to many of them and resulted in the formation of two secret Masonic lodges (in Russia), the Northern Star and the Southern Star. Both lodges enlisted as members many influential and wealthy Russian nobles.

The secret society had been brought to Russia. In a book entitled Russia 1917, author George Katkov cited the enormous influence the secret societies had in the Communist Revolution:

"There is no doubt . . . that a widespread net of conspiratorial organizations modeled on freemasons' lodges worked for revolution in Russia and played a decisive role in the formation of the first Provisional Government."

With the cirri val of the secret society, the near powerful could conspire to replace the monarchy as a form of government through control over the Provisional Government that replaced the Czar after he abdicated. The conspirators now had two of the three essential parts of the "pincers movement" written about by Jan Kozak.

The third part, the "mob," was organized in 1895, when Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and nine others, including Leon Trotsky, formed the Social Democratic Labor Party, the forerunner of the Communist Party.

Perhaps the incident that provoked Lenin's hatred of the Russian monarchy and the Czar occurred in 1881, when his older brother was executed for having taken part in the assassination of Czar Alexander II, the grandfather of Nicholas II, the Czar at the time of Lenin's revolution.

Lenin's revolutionary career began while he was a student at the University of Kazan, where he became a devotee of Karl Marx. Lenin learned that Marx had anticipated two revolutionary methods for total control of a society: the violent and the non-violent.

Marx's ten-plank program discussed in an earlier chapter constituted Marx's non-violent method of communizing a society.

The Russian Communist Party was torn between the advocates of both methods. Lenin preferred a violent revolution to gain control of Russia, and Trotsky preferred the non-violent. The supporters of Lenin became the majority on the debates on the issue and became known as the Bolsheviks (translated as "the majority" in Russian), and the supporters of Trotsky became the minority and were known as the Mensheviks ("the minority)."

Perhaps the most crucial event in the Russian Revolution occurred in the spring of 1905, when the British Fabian Society, a non-violent revolutionary group, met the Bolsheviks, a violent revolutionary group, in London, England. It was at this meeting that loans were arranged between the two groups so that the Bolsheviks could start their revolution. Joseph Fels, a member of the Fabian Society and a wealthy American soap manufacturer, loaned the Bolsheviks large sums of money, as did other members of the Fabians.

Arrangements also were made to finance the Japanese government in a war with the Russian government in an attempt to weaken the monarchy so that it would make the task of the Bolsheviks much easier. From New York, Jacob Schiff, J.P. Morgan, the First National Bank, and the National City Bank loaned Japan approximately $30,000,000 to attack the Russian government from the east.

In 1905, with financing from members of the Fabian Society and with the knowledge that American bankers had loaned Japan money to move against Russia's eastern front, Lenin started his revolution on May 1, the anniversary of the founding of the Illuminati.

But Lenin and his Bolsheviks were not initially successful in their revoludon in spite of all of the assistance of the wealthy banking interests and members of the Fabian Society. The Czar exiled Lenin to Switzerland, Trotsky to the United States, and Joseph Stalin to Siberia.

The Bolsheviks were at least partially successful in weakening the monarchy, as the Czar responded to the charges of the Revolution and instituted a series of reforms. For instance, he recognized the principle of limited government, proclaimed a set of fundamental laws, and established a national parliament (called the Duma) with a share in the law-making process for the people. In other words, the monarchy was changing into a democratic republic.

In an extremely puzzling move, the Czar, possibly the richest man in the world, deposited $400,000,000 in the Chase Bank (the Rockefeller interests,) the National City Bank, Guaranty Bank (the Morgan interests,) the Hanover Trust Bank, and the Manufacturers Trust Bank, and $80,000,000 in the Rothschild Bank in Paris. It is possible that he realized that his government was in trouble and he was hoping that his deposits would buy toleration from these interests after their attempt to remove him failed in 1905.

The revolution led inexorably on, and on March 15, 1917, the Czar abdicated in favor of a provisional government led ultimately by the Socialist Alexander Kerensky. One of the first acts of this government was to issue amnesty to the exiled Bolsheviks and back to the Russian Revolution came Lenin, Trotsky, and Stalin.

Many historians feel that the Kerensky government was a temporary front for the Bolsheviks, for three important reasons:

  1. Kerensky was allowed to live after Lenin assumed control of the government while virtually all the other members of the Provisional Government were butchered in the revolution that followed.
  2. Kerensky issued a general amnesty not only for the Bolshevik leaders, but all others exiled since the aborted revolution of 1905. It is estimated that this act freed over 250,000 dedicated revolutionaries.
  3. Kerensky himself admitted that the Kerensky government had "received some support privately from industry in America," possibly from the same individuals who financed Lenin in 1905.

So back came the major Communist revolutionaries to the revolution.

Trotsky left New York City on March 27, 1917, on the S.S. Christiana with 275 other followers on his way to Canada. He and his followers were detained in Halifax, Nova Scotia, by the Canadian government, which found $10,000 on his person. This large quantity of money held by Trotsky was indeed a strange amount, as he himself had admitted that the only money he had received during the years of 1916 and 1917 while in New York was $310 that he later admitted he had distributed among 5 emigrants who were returning to Russia.

The subject of Trotsky's $10,000 came up in 1919 during a Senate investigating committee's hearings into the subject of Bolshevik propaganda and German money.

"It is quite remarkable that the (Overman) Committee adjourned abruptly before the source of Trotsky's funds could be placed into the record. When questioning resumed the next day, Trotsky and his $10,000 were no longer of interest."

Some did know where the money had come from, however, even if officially the United States government did not want to know. Congressman Louis McFadden, the Chairman of the House Banking Committee, went on record as saying:

"They (the private banking monopolies) financed Trotsky's mass meetings of discontent and rebellion in New York. They paid Trotsky's passage from New York to Russia so that he might assist in the destruction of the Russian empire. They fomented and instigated the Russian Revolution and they placed a large fund of American dollars at Trotsky's disposal in one of their branch banks in Sweden."

The Canadian government, discovering that Trotsky carried an American passport, questioned the American government as to why they would allow Trotsky to return to Russia when not only were Canadian troops fighting the Germans in World War I, but American troops as well. It followed, according to the Canadian reasoning, that if the Russian government, led by Trotsky and Lenin, signed a peace treaty with Germany, because Russia was also at war with Germany at the time, it would free German troops at war with Russia to kill American troops as well as Canadian. It certainly appeared to the Canadians that it was in America's best interest to keep Russia in the war against Germany and not assist Trotsky in his desire to overthrow the Czar.

Canada's efforts failed, as the Wilson administration pressured the Canadian government into releasing Trotsky. Trotsky and his followers sailed as they had intended.

Perhaps one of the reasons that the Democratic President Woodrow Wilson permitted Trotsky to leave Nova Scotia was that Charles Crane, of the Westinghouse Company and Chairman of the Democratic Finance Committee, was accompanying Trotsky.

Lenin also started his return to Russia along with thirty-two other Russian revolutionaries. These activists left Switzerland in an armored train protected by German troops and they journeyed across war-torn Germany. This was strange as Germany was at war with Russia, and it was unusual for Lenin and his followers not to be prisoners of war. Their destination was Sweden, where Lenin received something like 22 million marks held for him in a Swedish bank.

There are some historians who believe the reason that Lenin and his fellow Russian revolutionaries received such preferential treatment was because the German government and Lenin had reached an agreement to end their war when the Bolsheviks took control of the government

Stalin returned from Siberia, and now the key individuals were in place for the continuation of the revolution. The Bolsheviks replaced the Kerensky government on November 7, 1917. The provisional government had set November 25th as the first general election ever held in Russia. For the first time in their history, the Russian people would hold free elections and they could choose Bolshevism should they choose to do so.

There was some dissension amongst the Bolsheviks as to whether they should allow the elections to be held as scheduled. Trotsky took the position that they should and his view ultimately prevailed. The people would get the opportunity to choose the form of government they wanted.

There were nearly 42 million votes cast, and the Bolshevik Communists only received thirty percent of the vote. The Bolsheviks, when the Russian people had a chance to accept or reject Communist leadership of their government, were rejected by the people by a seventy to thirty margin.

Yet the claim is continuously made that the Russian people rose up and overthrew the Czar because they wished to replace the monarchy with a Communist government

Another of the interesting charges made by the Bolshevik government is that they had captured the seven members of the Imperial family: the Czar, the Czarina (the Czar's wife,) the Czarevitch (the Czar' only son,) and their four daughters. The claim was made that all seven had been murdered in the basement of the Ipatiev House in Ekaterinburg, Russia.

The claim continued that the bodies of the Imperial family had been dumped into an abandoned mine near the small town. Yet when various investigators attempted to check this story out, "no bodies, bones, skulls, or dental work of members of the Imperial family were ever found."

Rumors that the family had survived their captivity at Ekaterinburg and had not been murdered started to make the rounds of Europe shortly after the story was told that they had been murdered, but the Bolsheviks continued to deny them, holding to their official position that they were all dead.

These rumors were just rumors until a colonel (the Polish equivalent of general) in the Polish Army Intelligence defected to the United States in 1961. He had supplied the Western countries with the names of hundreds of Soviet spies safely hidden in Western governments prior to his leaving the Polish government.

The charges the colonel made while in Poland had been tested by the courts of the Western countries, and in each case, the spies he had named were found guilty. The American government tested his information as well, and ". . former FBI agent John Norpel testified before the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee that, to his knowledge, no information (the defector) gave our government ever turned out to be wrong."

The defector, named Michael Goloniewski, brought additional names of Soviet spies with him when he defected. But there was one individual that the colonel named that was never brought to trial. The colonel contended that ". . . Secretary of State Henry Kissinger has been a Soviet agent and that his involvement with Soviet Intelligence was made to agencies of our government even before his rise to prominence."

This charge was detailed in a book by Frank Capell, entitled Henry Kissinger, Soviet Agent, that was published in 1974. Capell reported:

"that under the name of 'Bor,' and described as an agent of ODRA, (a spy group under the command of a Soviet intelligence general,) was Sergeant Henry Kissinger, a U.S. Army counter-intelligence interrogator and instructor at the Military Intelligence School."

This is the charge that Goloniewski made that never got a hearing in an American court. Those charged in Europe with being Soviet spies, in each case, had been tried and convicted, but for some unexplained reason, his charges against Kissinger never made it to court

But the story about Goloniewski is even more interesting.

He also claimed that the Imperial family, the Czar of Russia and the rest of his family, had survived the ordeal at Ekaterinburg and had lived in Europe since 1918. He claimed that they had been taken out of Russia in the back of trucks, and then taken by ship to friendly ports where they could live in anonymity.

Goloniewski's charge was partially substantiated by an article that appeared in the Detroit Free Press in 1970 that claimed:

"British government documents recently made public in London indicate that President Woodrow Wilson backed a secret mission to Russia in 1917 which may have resulted in the rescue of Czar Nicholas and his family the following year. The documents . . . state that the U.S. government placed $75,000 at the disposal of Sir William Wiseman, a partner in the New York banking house of Kuhn, Loeb & Co."

The article went on to explain why the Russian Communists had agreed to let the Czar and his family escape:

"There is also mounting evidence that the unpublished complete text of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk, signed March 3, 1918, contains a guarantee from the Lenin government that 'no harm' will come to the Romanovs, according to researchers."

The treaty, named after the city where it was signed, was a peace treaty signed between the German and Russian governments to end their involvement against each other in World War I. Many historians now believe that the charge in the newspaper article about there being such a secret codicil in this Treaty is correct.

[Illustration] from The Unseen Hand by Ralph Epperson

COLONEL MICHAL GOLONIEWSKI, WHO CLAIMS TO BE THE ADULT ALEXIS, IN 1964. THE COMMUNIST GOVERNMENT SUPPOSEDLY MURDERED THE ENTIRE FAMILY OF THE CZAR IN 1918, BUT THE COLONEL CHARGES THAT THEY WERE SPIRITED OUT OF RUSSIA TO SAFETY IN EUROPE. THE COLONEL'S CLAIM TO BE THE SON OF THE CZAR WAS CONFIRMED BY THE AMERICAN GOVERNMENT, YET FEW OUTSIDE OF THOSE WHO INVESTIGATED THIS CLAIM WILL AGREE THAT THE FAMILY SURVIVED THE ALLEGED MASSACRE. PERHAPS THE REASON THIS IS SO IS THAT ANY LEGALLY CERTIFIED HEIR TO THE ROMANOV FORTUNE WOULD INHERIT SEVERAL BILLIONS OF DOLLARS DEPOSITED IN AMERICAN AND EUROPEAN BANKS BY THE CZAR PRIOR TO THE REVOLUTION.


But Goloniewski makes one more astonishing charge: he claims to be the Czarevitch, the son of the Czar of Russia. The Colonel's claim was investigated by the American government:

"A number of skull measurements and comparison of facial features, ears, relative distances between mouth, nose, eyebrow, forehead, etc., have been made of Goloniewski and compared with photographs and paintings of the young Czarevitch Alexis. In general, they have turned out to be more affirmative than not."

One fact that would certainly improve the Colonel's case that he was the son of the Czar would be some sort of evidence that he had a blood condition similar to the one that the young Czarevitch exhibited as a boy. This condition, which reduces the ability of the blood to coagulate, was called hemophilia by those who knew the young Czarevitch as a boy, as that was the state of the medical profession at the time.

Goloniewski "has been tested by Dr. Alexander S. Wiener, a co-discoverer of the Rh factor in blood, who found that the Colonel does indeed suffer from a blood disease, the main feature of which is slow blood coagulation."

Other tests, on his fingerprints and sole (foot) prints, blood tests, dental X-rays, and handwriting tests, also suggest that his claim could be true.

In fact, the individual who had the colonel tested was Herman Kimsey, the Chief of Research and Analysis of the Central Intelligence Agency, who, according to sworn testimony, claimed that: "Michael Goloniewski (was) in reality the Tsarevich Aleksei, a fact Kimsey and his staff personally confirmed. . . ."

[Illustration] from The Unseen Hand by Ralph Epperson

ALEXIS, THE SON OF NICHOLAS II, CZAR OF RUSSIA, IN 1914.


The colonel's charges that the Imperial family had survived their capture and reported assassination were in part confirmed in 1977 by another source, when a woman claiming to be Anastasia, the Czarevitch's sister, had her charges certified by a French ear expert. This expert made ear comparisons between her ears and the known pictures of the young Anastasia. These comparisons, made by one of France's best known forensic experts, would be admissible in French courts as proof of Anastasia's claims.

But the Colonel has had difficulty in proving his claims in an American court, and few, if any, in government will listen any more. Perhaps the reason the Colonel is having difficulty lies in the fact that the Czar left millions of dollars in American and European banks, and that this wealth is today worth billions of dollars. If the Colonel is certified to be the heir to the Czar, he would have a good claim on these deposits, money that he has no aversion about saying would be used to destroy Communism around the world. The Colonel is no friend of the international bankers who were the recipients of these deposits.

"(It is interesting that the colonel charges that Herman Kimsey, the C.I.A. official who conducted the tests that certified that he was who he claimed to be, was murdered in January, 1971, by means of a "wrong blood transfusion.")

The Russian people were being conditioned to the fact that the Czar was dead and that the revolution had succeeded in replacing the monarchy with a Communist form of government The United States, during the revolution, took little or no direct action against the Bolsheviks, although it appeared to other nations, especially in Europe, that the American government was supporting the Communists. At least that is the gist of a correspondence the American government received from the U.S. legation in Bern, Switzerland, which read: ". . . people are asking why the President expresses support of Bolsheviki, in view of rapine, murder and anarchy of these bands." (Rapine is defined as the seizing and carrying away of things by force and plunder.)

Just what was the American government supporting?

Lenin had answered that question by writing:

"Our power does not know liberty or justice. It is entirely established on the destruction of the individual will. We are the masters. Complete indifference to suffering is our duty. In the fulfillment of our calling, the greatest cruelty is a merit." And:

"Though a systematic terror, during which every breach of contract, every treason, every lie will be lawful, we will find the way to abase humanity down to the lowest level of existence. That is indispensible to the establishment of our dominance."

Lenin also declared his philosophical kinship with Karl Marx when he declared on November 8, 1917, just after the Communists took over the Russian government:

"The right of private property in land is forever abolished. All land owned by the Church, private persons, by peasants, is taken away without compensation."

It is interesting that the peasants of Russia, the supposedly landless class that the Russian Communists were causing a revolution to assist, lost their land as well.

Lenin had lied to the people. He had promised them that the land would be taken away from the landed gentry and given to them, the "poor, downtrodden working class." Some of the peasants already owned land that was taken away by Lenin's decree.

The Revolution, with American help, was now complete: the Bolsheviks had seized control of the once prosperous Russian government.

One of the first acts of the Bolshevik government in 1917 was to dissolve the lodges of the Freemasons.

But the most insidious activity of the new Communist government occurred when they signed a peace treaty with Germany to end their involvement in World War I, just as the Canadian government had feared. As a result of this peace treaty, the Germans were able to move their troops to the western front to kill American and Canadian soldiers.

With the war in eastern Europe now over, the secret Communist organizations could start Communist revolutions all over Europe. For instance, the German Communists, calling themselves the German "Spartacists" after the Roman slave Spartacus who led an uprising against the Roman empire, (or was it because Adam Weishaupt, the founder of the Illuminati, had called himself Spartacus in his dealings with his fellow Illuminati members) revolted against the German government.

Revolutions were also instigated in Austria and Hungary, but all of these failed and the traditional method of governmental rule prevailed.

Life magazine, in its article on revolution, correctly identified the enemy of these revolutions:

"Their nemesis was Europe's solid middle class. . . a class once weakly represented in Russia. Chiefly because of it, no Communist Party has been able to seize power in Western Europe to this day."

As is the case in every major Communist revolution, the enemy is the middle class, and their elimination becomes the reason for the revolution.

But the American support of the Bolshevik government did not end with the ending of the fighting between the Germans and the Russians. President Woodrow Wilson refused Japan's request to enter the revolution against the Bolsheviks in 1919. This effort would have put enormous pressure on the Bolsheviks who would have had trouble raising an army against the Japanese, just like the Czar had in 1905.

The Fabian Society, non-violent Marxists, also assisted the Bolshevik government later when they pressured the labor unions in England: "The sweeping threat by British trade unions to 'down tools' in 1920 was instigated by an arch-Fabian Arthur Henderson. This threat effectively ended British military intervention in Russia and enabled the Bolsheviks to capture large stores of British-made munitions—a decisive factor in the survival of Bolshevik armed rule."

The "non-violent" branch of the Conspiracy was now assisting the "violent," even though Lenin himself was warning the world that his intent was to destroy the free-enterprise system:

"As long as Capitalism (the free enterprise system) and Communism remain, We cannot live in peace. In the end, one or the other will perish."

Lenin also received assistance from those who supposedly had the most to lose in a Communist Russia: the wealthy American "capitalists" themselves.

The director of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, William B. Thompson, gave a personal contribution of $1,000,000 to the Bolsheviks. Mr. Thompson was also a heavy stockholder in the Chase National Bank, owned by the Rockefeller interests.

The Morgan and Rockefeller interests also contributed cash to the cause, as did Jacob Schiff, the senior partner of Kuhn, Loeb and Co., who gave Lenin $20,000,000. Schiff was a partner of Paul Warburg, the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, and a participant at the Jekyll Island, Georgia, meetings that wrote the Federal Reserve bill that created America's central banking system.

In addition to assistance from the Americans, primarily the banking interests, Lenin also received, according to Alexander Kerensky, the sum of forty million gold marks (about $5,000,000) from the German banking interests.

While the banking fraternity was financing the Russian Revolution, they were also bringing World War I to a close by causing the Treaty of Versailles to be signed. President Woodrow Wilson led the American delegation to the signing of the treaty, taking along with him, as delegates or assistants to the delegation, his trusted assistant Colonel Edward Mandell House; Thomas Lamont, a partner of J.P. Morgan; Paul Warburg; and four young visionaries: Allen Dulles, later the head of the Central Intelligence Agency; John Foster Dulles, later the Secretary of State in President Eisenhower's cabinet; Walter Lippmann, later a nationally syndicated columnist; and Christian Herter, later the Secretary of State who replaced John Foster Dulles.

The German delegation to the signing included Paul Warburg's brother, Max, who was the president of the M.N. Warburg and Co., international bankers, and the individual who assisted Lenin in crossing war-torn Germany during his return to Russia from exile in Switzerland.

But even with all of the financial assistance given to Lenin by the wealthy "capitalists," the Bolsheviks only controlled a small percentage of Russia. The Communists now had to consolidate their power and expand it through the remainder of Russia. The strategy utilized to achieve this goal was forced starvation of the Russian people.

The Bolsheviks, in keeping with Lenin's dictum to utilize terror in their quest for political power, would move into an area, grab all of the food supplies and the livestock, and then inform the peasants who previously owned these items that they were to be placed on a "collective farm" where the property would be owned by the state in the name of the people. Those who resisted the imposition of the collective were either starved or murdered, or placed into concentration camps so that they could learn about the merits of collectivism through the teachings of the Bolsheviks.

One of the Bolsheviks committing these heinous crimes against the people was Nikita Khrushchev, later to become the leader of the Russian government. His crimes were documented in a seven part study conducted by the House Committee on Un-American Activities, in a report entitled The Crimes of Khrushchev. This report concluded that

"Khrushchev . . . as the No. 1 Communist official in the Moscow area. . .sent thousands to their death, (and) scores of thousands to hideous slave-labor camps."

Obviously, food production dropped when the government took producers off the fields. So the starvation perpetuated itself to the point where millions of Russian peasants starved all across the nation.

It was now important that the Bolshevik government have outside assistance if it was to survive.

The American government again filled a very important void in the Russian economy. This time it was Herbert Hoover who

". . . saved Lenin's dictatorship from popular revolt in the early 1920's. There is further proof that Hoover, then President Harding's Secretary of Commerce, knew U.S. shipments of food, which the American people were told were to save starving Russians, actually were used to strengthen Bolshevik power."

In his book Herbert Hoover and Famine Relief to Soviet Russia, professor Benjamin Weissman of Rutgers University revealed that Hoover "continued to send public foodstuffs to Russia long after it was obvious the Bolsheviks were shipping their own food abroad in order to purchase machinery."

Because of this American assistance, Lenin and the Bolsheviks were able to take power in the remainder of Russia. They began to build "the Socialist Order." This program included the following:

  1. Private ownership of land was abolished.
  2. Banks were nationalized.
  3. Most industrial enterprises were nationalized.
  4. The merchant marine was nationalized.
  5. The stock market was slowly abolished.
  6. The right of inheritance was abolished.
  7. Gold was declared a state monopoly.
  8. All government debts were declared null and void.
  9. The old criminal courts were replaced by revolutionary tribunals in which any citizen could act as judge or lawyer.
  10. The old strict marriage and divorce laws were replaced by very lenient civil codes.
  11. The church was not abolished, but its lands were seized and religious teaching was forbidden in the schools.

Lenin, in keeping with Marx's teachings that the state should create a central bank and have an exclusive monopoly on the issuance of money took control of the Russian banking system. His first priority in this move was to create massive inflation. He

". . . used the printing press to destroy the people's savings and redistribute the wealth by sharing the poverty. In 1921, Communist economist Eugene Preobrazhensky had even dedicated a book to the 'printing press of the People's Commissariat of Finance,' which he described as that 'machine-gun which attacked the bourgeois regime in its rear—its monetary system—by converting the bourgeois economic law of money circulation into a means of destruction of that same regime and into a force of financing the revolution.'"

Lenin used the printing press to increase the number of rubles in circulation "nearly 20,000 times from 1921 to 1923." In fact the quantity of rubles issued each month was so staggering, the Communists weren't even capable of remembering the exact quantity issued.

"In March, 1922, the Commissar of Finance. . .announced that the issues of that month alone amounted to either twenty-three of twenty-four trillions, he wasn't sure which."

The resulting inflation raised the general index of prices to 16,000 times what it was in 1913. It had its desired effect The middle class was eliminated as a class in Russia.

Now that the local banks had been nationalized, the next step was to create an international bank, which was formed in the fall of 1922. It was based on a "syndicate that involved the former Russian private bankers and some new investment from German, Swedish, American and British bankers."

So Lenin now rewarded those who had helped him finance the Russian Revolution by allowing them to become part of the international bank he was creating. In fact, the Rockefellers were included in his plans as well.

"In the 1930's the Chase National was one of four American banks and financial houses to institute relations with the Soviets (in addition to Equitable Trust, Guaranty Trust, and Kuhn Loeb.)"

It was in 1929 that the final piece fell into place. The Russian government made it a crime for the Russian people to own gold in any form. The people had lost their right to check government's intrusions into the money supply by their ability to print increasingly worthless paper money.

Now that the middle class had been destroyed as a class of people through inflation, the Soviets focused their attention on the poor. The starvation continued, even after Lenin died and Stalin replaced him. In 1930 Stalin began his campaign to confiscate the lands of the peasant farmers and herd these men and their families into 'collective' or state farms. To crush their spirit, the regime created a man-made famine. Armed squads stripped vast areas of all grain, cattle, and food. More than 5.5 million more peasants died in concentration camps. Prominent Bolshevik Nikolai Bukharin admitted 'we are conducting a mass annihilation of defenseless men together with their wives and children.'"

In 1970, the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee released a study entitled The Human Cost of Soviet Communism which asserted that at least 21.5 million persons have been executed or have died in prison camps in the Soviet Union during the past fifty-one years. The author of the report stated that his estimate was conservative and that the real figure may have been as high as 45 million.

But even this cost in human misery is not considered too high by certain Americans. President Harry Truman was quoted by author Eldorous L. Dayton in his book Give 'em Hell, Harry as saying: "Moscow emerged from the dark ages only in 1917."

So, in summary, Communism was imposed down on the people: the people did not rise up and demand Communism. But, even with the ample evidence supporting this statement, others still do not choose to believe that this is true. Life magazine, for one, in its series on Revolutions, concluded this about the Russian Revolution of 1917: "The Russian Revolution began spontaneously in an urban insurrection against a feudal regime."

Another author, Robert Goldston, in his book The Russian Revolution, stated his opinion thus: "Revolutions are not conspiracies—they are vast social upheavals as inevitable and self-justifying as earthquakes."

In fact, four American presidents felt that the price the Russian people paid for Bolshevik "progress" was too high and they showed their contempt for the Bolshevik government by refusing to recognize them as Russia's government. This American policy lasted until 1933 when President Franklin Roosevelt granted diplomatic recognition to the Communist government, legitimizing the brutal regime, and in essence approving their methods in achieving control of the Russian government