Dragons and Democracy - VI

In “some notes on a neglected theme”, Conquest turns his attention to an examination of the origins and spread of Marxism-Leninism from an unusual perspective – that of economics. As he notes sardonically, this approach is, however, perfectly in keeping with the Materialist Conception of History.

The essay’s study of “revolutionary high finance” begins, of course, with Lenin, who was the first political activist in history to contemplate and realize the establishment of a cadre of “professional revolutionaries” – in other words, revolutionaries who had to be paid. Lenin was not averse to accepting financial assistance from sources that other socialists would have found objectionable – his association with Alexandra Kalmykova (known to the Bolsheviks as "The Bucket"), a well-to-do woman publisher and owner of a popular bookshop that in later years financed Lenin’s first émigré newspaper Iskra, and his marrying off of two Bolsheviks to the Schmidt heiresses, are proof of that. There were also other methods of obtaining funding for the Bolshevik party: bank robberies were a simple expedient, and were mostly organized by the young Stalin, under the name of Dzhugashvili. There were also money diversion scams, one of which involved the siphoning off of funds intended for the Social Democrats as a whole.

Conquest notes that when Lenin took power over Russia, “large sums became available”:

Whoever controls a state, however poor it may be, can wring money out of it – as various ex-dictators of Third or Fourth World countries have more recently demonstrated. At any rate, Soviet foreign policy and influence required massive funding. The Soviet regime now began to employ a vast and increasingly experienced apparatus of propaganda and persuasion. Ideas do not merely step into the “intellectual” consciousness; this sort of general penetration must be materially assisted and was.

From 1921, with the formation of the Comintern, funding became a very important consideration. What has been neglected, or denied, until recently, is the huge advantage over left-wing rivals that the continuous financial support from Moscow (up until the late 1980s) gave the world’s Communist parties. A party or organization that can afford a network of paid officials, newspapers, book publishing companies, and so on has a very big edge over one that cannot.

The essay shows how the huge international and global business concern that was Soviet Communism developed from its early roots in pre-revolutionary crime and capitalism to the situation that characterized the 1920s, when Soviet workers complained that their hard-earned money was being used, via “party contributions”, to finance revolutionary activity abroad. The 1920s were also the period when Lenin ordered the seizure of church valuables – Conquest speculates, ironically, that “the organization and propaganda of the seizure cost more than the value of the loot.” During the devastating famine that took hold of the country in the early years of the decade, the Soviet Union was still exporting most of its grain overseas. As a result, Herbert Hoover negotiated the bringing of American humanitarian aid to Russia, and Congress voted millions of dollars to this cause – what happened to the money is to this day not clear. There are pointers, however: in 1921 the Communist Party of Great Britain was receiving £55,000 per annum, at a time when its own income was around £100 per annum…

Above all, Conquest emphasizes once again, the obvious result of all this was that

the Communist parties could afford large permanent staffs both centrally and locally, and above all could publish propaganda and versions of Soviet falsifications in a new way. The general wave of Western intellectual leftism was given a disciplined, single-minded center (and a vast output of Moscow’s media products).

“It took time,” he notes, before all those who thought of themselves as Communists were reduced to proper obedience. But eventually, as we know, they proved able to switch from anti-Fascism to anti-anti-Fascism overnight.”

Drawing on documents which have only recently become available – through documents such as Valerio Riva’s Ora da Mosca, and Fond 89 at the Hoover Institution Archives, Conquest presents overwhelming evidence of the extent of the Soviet funding of the world’s Communist parties. Some of the figures are astonishing: in 1959, 43 listed Communist parties received a total of $8,759,700; “by 1963, it was c. $15,750,000 covering eighty-three Communist parties and a few others.” During the same period, the CPUSA received $42,1202,000, the French Communist Party $50,004,000 and the Italian $47,233,000.

Conquest also looks at “another of Stalin’s material investments in the struggle for foreign support":

Moscow did not depend only on the direct financing of foreign Communist parties. A quite important example of other financing was the diversion into the hands of the American ambassador to Russia, Joseph Davies, and his collector wife, of important artistic treasures free, or at nominal prices, from the Tretyakov Gallery and various nationalized monasteries and other collections. Davies became a keen adulator of and misinformer on the USSR.

See also: Dragons and Democracy
Dragons and Democracy - II
Dragons and Democracy - III
Dragons and Democracy - IV
Dragons and Democracy - V