[Fwd: Der Spiegel churns out old lies on the October Revolution]

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Morgen op ned2 een aflevering van Maks In Europa over de zogenaamde
financiële banden van Lenin met Duitsland. Der Spiegel maakte zich
onlangs ook schuldig aan deze laster. Zie onderstaand artikel.

-------- Original Message --------
Subject: Der Spiegel churns out old lies on the October Revolution
Date: Tue, 18 Dec 2007 15:23:49 -0800 (PST)
From: Vngelis <meberry68 at hotmail.com>
Organization: http://groups.google.com
Newsgroups: alt.politics.socialism.trotsky

Der Spiegel churns out old lies on the October Revolution
By Peter Schwarz
15 December 2007

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Some medieval courts not only condemned their worst opponents to
death, they also prescribed a series of extremely cruel and bloody
forms of execution to be carried out one after the other. The thirst
for revenge and urge to deter others mixed with the fear that those
subjected to torture could return and take revenge. The Russian
Revolution and its best-known leader, Vladimir Illyich Lenin, have
suffered a similar fate over the past 90 years. Up to this day,
propagandistic efforts have not ceased to strike dead this most
important revolution of the twentieth century.

The German magazine Der Spiegel supplied the most recent contribution
to a long list of such vituperative attacks. It appeared last weekend
with the headline, "The Bought Revolution: How Emperor Wilhelm II
Financed Lenin's October Revolution." The heads of Lenin and the
German emperor decorate the glossy title page of the magazine, which
has a distribution of more than 1 million. A DVD featuring a 50-minute-
long film on the same topic is attached. The film was also shown the
evening of December 10 on one of Germany's main television channels.

In the past, one has come to fear the worst from Der Spiegel, but the
magazine has outdone itself with this latest contribution. The 12-page
article and the film make a mockery of any serious attempt to deal
with historical development. The authors sensationally announce the
discovery of "hitherto unknown documents," which allegedly prove "the
extent of the secret cooperation" between Lenin and Germany. Der
Spiegel investigated "more than a dozen archives throughout Europe"
and discovered "hitherto unknown or unevaluated material." The article
then goes on to regurgitate a series of well-worn slanders without
offering a trace of serious evidence.

"Without William II's assistance to Lenin the October Revolution of 90
years ago would not have taken place as it did," reads the central
thesis of Der Spiegel. In order to back up its thesis, however, the
magazine bases itself on contentions that are as old as the Russian
Revolution itself: Lenin's train journey through Germany and his
alleged link to Alexander Gelfand, alias Parvus.

In his monumental History of the Russian Revolution of 1930, Leon
Trotsky dedicates an entire chapter to such claims. The slander that
Lenin had links to the leadership of the German army dominated public
discourse in Russia in July 1917. Tensions between the population and
the provisional government led by Alexander Kerensky had dramatically
intensified. The first significant rebellion against his government
took place. The workers, soldiers and peasants wanted peace and bread;
Kerensky wanted to continue the war. The Bolsheviks rapidly gained
support.

Under these circumstances, the rumour was spread that Lenin was in the
pay of the German general staff. Trotsky writes: "The leaders of a
revolutionary party, whose lives for decades had been passed in a
struggle against rulers, both crowned and uncrowned, found themselves
portrayed before the country and the whole world as hired agents of
the Hohenzollern. On a scale hitherto unheard of, this slander was
sown in the thick of the popular masses, a vast majority of whom had
heard of the Bolshevik leaders for the first time only after the
February revolution. Mud-slinging here became a political factor of
primary importance."

The slanders were aimed at inciting soldiers at the front to turn
against Lenin and encourage a pogrom-like mood against the Bolsheviks.
Lenin was eventually forced to go into hiding, the offices and print
shops of the Bolsheviks were demolished and party leaders, including
Trotsky, were arrested.

Trotsky not only demonstrates in detail the factual, political and
psychological untenability of the slander that Lenin was in the pay of
the emperor, he also meticulously uncovers its source. It originated
from the nebulous underworld of the Tsarist secret police, which had
survived the February revolution intact. Trotsky writes: "The latter
institution has nowhere been a propagator of good morals. But in
Russia the Intelligence Service was the very sewer of the Rasputin
régime."

Der Spiegel adopts a large proportion of the anti-Bolshevist
propaganda of those times. It has employed the publicist Elizabeth
Heresch as its expert. This Slavicist and interpreter has published
several books dealing favourably with the family of the Russian Tsar--
sufficient in the eyes of Der Spiegel to qualify her as an expert on
revolution. Seven years ago, Heresch published a book with the title
The Secret File on Parvus: The Bought Revolution. Der Spiegel has now
largely taken up this theme. For her book, Heresch carried out
research in the archives of the Tsarist secret police--i.e., she picked
her manure from the same sewer as the original slanderers of Lenin.

The central charge made by Der Spiegel is that the German government
supported "the Bolsheviks and other revolutionaries in Russia with
money, ammunition and weapons" and up until the end of 1917 spent at
least 26 million marks (75 million euros by today's values). The
phrase "and other revolutionaries" is telling. Der Spiegel furnishes
no proof that the Bolsheviks actually received German money. Instead
it resorts to the mechanism of amalgam. Various episodes, events and
dubious statements, which bear no sequential or factual relation, are
causally linked and distorted into a chain of evidence that does not
hold up to any serious investigation.

The most important piece of evidence introduced by Der Spiegel is a
"23-page plan for the overthrow of the Tsar by mass strikes" submitted
by Alexander Gelfand in February 1915 to the German Foreign Ministry
in Berlin. The plan lists a long catalogue of measures aimed at
destabilising the Tsarist regime, Germany's opponent in the war. The
measures include acts of sabotage, the incitement of national
minorities, strike agitation amongst workers and financial support for
opposition tendencies, including the Bolsheviks. This plan, writes Der
Spiegel, met with approval in Berlin, and Gelfand was subsequently
given millions.

Gelfand, party name Parvus, was a well-known and notorious figure in
socialist circles at the beginning of the twentieth century. He was
born in Belarus and grew up in Odessa, where he joined the
revolutionary movement as a young man. In 1886, he fled to
Switzerland. He established relations with prominent revolutionary
socialists and wrote for Marxist publications such as Karl Kautsky's
Neue Zeit. He took part in the Russian revolution of 1905 and together
with Trotsky elaborated the theory of the permanent revolution.

In the following years, Parvus turned sharply to the right.
Discredited in socialist circles following a financial scandal, he
moved to Constantinople, where he earned a fortune in arms dealing and
other business enterprises. At the beginning of the war he moved to
Copenhagen and worked from there as an unapologetic German chauvinist.
He set up and financed the magazine Die Glocke, which promoted war
propaganda within the Social Democratic Party and tried to justify it
theoretically.

At the time Lenin, Trotsky and Rosa Luxemburg publicly dissociated
themselves from Parvus and sharply denounced his political views and
manoeuvrings. When Parvus visited Lenin in Zurich in 1915, Lenin
showed him the door--as even Der Spiegel concedes. Nevertheless, Der
Spiegel maintains that Lenin allowed himself to be financed by Parvus
with German money.

In fact, the authors of the article are merely recycling the old
slanders of July 1917. Parvus had developed a commercial network to
Russia from his base in Scandinavia. In Petrograd, the rumour was
spread that it was an espionage network, to which Lenin was connected
by the Polish revolutionaries Ganetsky and Kozlovsky. Der Spiegel also
cites the activities carried out by Ganetsky (Jakob Fürstenberg) and
Kozlovsky for Gelfand's enterprises to disprove the "thesis of
Bolshevist innocence."

All of these slanders have been dealt with and answered by Trotsky in
his History of the Russian Revolution: "The testimony...concerned the
trade operations of Ganetsky and Kozlovsky between Petrograd and
Stockholm. This wartime commerce, which evidently had recourse at
times to a code correspondence, had no relation to politics. The
Bolshevik party had no relation to this commerce. Lenin and Trotsky
had publicly denounced Parvus, who combined good commerce with bad
politics, and in printed words had appealed to the Russian
revolutionists to break off all relations with him."

How does Der Spiegel then attempt to demonstrate the opposite? With
pure conjecture. "It is hard to accept that Lenin did not use this
network in order to ferry money to Petrograd," the article declares.
"What is clear is that the Bolsheviks needed money for their
revolutionary work." Or to put it another way: the Bolsheviks needed
money, therefore they could be bought.

The fact is that the party had hardly any money at the time. The
chronic shortage of funds on the part of the Bolsheviks was well
known. The situation for the party only improved somewhat after the
February revolution with the influx of support and funds from numerous
new working class supporters. In April 1917, in an open and public
action, the Bolsheviks collected 75,000 roubles from workers in
Petrograd in order to purchase their own print shop. This historically
proven fact does not prevent Der Spiegel from insinuating that the
purchase of precisely this print shop was proof of "dubious" channels
used to finance the Bolsheviks.

The Der Spiegel authors are obsessed with the notion that in politics
money makes everything possible--including revolutionary uprisings.
Parvus's plan to organise a general strike in Russia in 1916 with
German money failed. Nevertheless, Der Spiegel continues to maintain
that the demonstrations against the Kerensky government, organised by
the Bolsheviks two years later, were financed by German money.

To back up its claim, the magazine cites the statement found by Mrs.
Heresch of a "nurse" in the Petrograd police documents. This "nurse"
relates that she had seen "how Bolsheviks distributed rouble coins to
passers-by in order to win their support for a demonstration. People
then had posters pushed into their arms with slogans like 'Down with
the provisional government!' " In the film, the "nurse" is even
portrayed by an actress, and one sees greedy hands dipping into a
money-filled bucket.

This scene is characteristic of the approach to historical and
political issues taken by Der Spiegel and its staff. For such people,
any notion of a genuine popular mass movement, which turns against a
hated regime, is incomprehensible and fills them with fear. They are
incapable of imagining the development of great social movements,
which are not motivated by financial incentive or bribery. Their only
conception of politics is based on the commonplace practices of modern
bourgeois society--i.e., narrow-mindedness, corruption and a readiness
to be bought.

Since the material from the Petrograd police archives does little to
prove their case, the magazine finally turns to Lenin's journey
through Germany. The facts are so well documented that it is not
necessary to go into them at length here.

Lenin, of course, knew that the German general staff had reckoned it
could benefit from his presence in Russia, otherwise it would not have
allowed him to travel through Germany. The Russian revolutionary,
however, was more farsighted than the German generals. While the
latter thought that political unrest in Russia (they never reckoned
with a successful revolution) could relieve the pressure on one of the
two main fronts in their war, Lenin knew that a success for the
revolution in Russia would also bring about an end to the German
empire. He was to be proven correct. The empire survived the October
Revolution by just one year.

Lenin sought to carefully eliminate any suspicion of complicity
between himself and the Hohenzollerns. This was behind the designation
of his train carriage as extra-territorial and the detailed agreements
negotiated with the Germans by the Swiss revolutionary Fritz Platten
(not Parvus). This, however, does not prevent Der Spiegel from re-
evoking the spectre of Lenin as a German agent. Across the glossy
front page of the magazine and the article inside is the copy of a
text taken from a "German secret service communication" that reads:
"Lenin's passage to Russia successful. He is working completely to
plan."

The wishful thinking of a German spy is simply equated with reality.

In its argumentation, Der Spiegel is merely repeating the agitation of
those Russian nationalists who, after three years of bloody war, were
prepared in 1917 to send hundreds of thousands of additional Russian
soldiers to their deaths in the trenches in order to defend the
interests of Russian, British and French imperialism against Germany
and Austria. From the very start of the war, Lenin, on the other hand,
had based his stance on the interests of the international working
class and put forward the slogan "The main enemy is at home." He
refused to support any of the warring imperialist camps and regarded
the war as proof that the capitalist system had reached its final
stage and was ripe for socialist revolution.

If one regards Lenin's behaviour from the standpoint of the political
principles he put forward and publicly fought for, then there is not
the least discrepancy between his deeds and his words. The claim that
he was a mercenary of the Hohenzollerns, whom he hated and publicly
opposed, is simply absurd.

The workers of Russia and Germany understood that. In Russia, the
slanders against Lenin quickly failed to find a hearing when the
workers and soldiers saw that only the Bolsheviks were ready to
terminate the war and fulfil their demand for land and bread. And when
workers and soldiers rose up against the emperor in Germany in
November 1918, they looked upon Lenin as a role model, and not as a
mercenary of Wilhelm.

This, however, is beyond the comprehension of the Der Spiegel writers.
Their view of history is entirely subjective. They can only see
intrigues and corruption as the driving force in great historical
events that involve and influence millions. The mere fact that Lenin
opposed the chauvinist delirium in 1914 and ruled out any armistice
with the Tsar is proof enough for them that Lenin was a German agent.

In the DVD issued by Der Spiegel, the historian Gerd Koenen declares:
"From the standpoint of the other Russian socialists they [the
Bolsheviks] were something like German agents whether they received
money or not, because they had decisively sabotaged from the inside
the assertiveness of Russia against the German war machine." This
from, of all people, Gerd Koenen! In the 1970s, he attacked Leon
Trotsky and the Marxist tradition of the October Revolution in his
function as a devoted Maoist and supporter of Stalin; today, he does
the same as an outright anticommunist.

The question arises as to why Der Spiegel invests so much of its time
and energy in order to slander the October Revolution, which took
place 90 years ago. Has it not endlessly been declared that the break-
up of the Soviet Union 15 years ago meant not just the end of the
Stalinist bureaucracies, but also socialism and Marxism? This is
obviously not the case. Against a background of increasing social
crisis, a rapidly expanding gulf between rich and poor and the return
of war and militarism, the ruling class once again fears the spectre
of revolution.

Many workers and young people are looking for a socialist alternative.
They could turn to the October Revolution and seek to penetrate the
web of lies and distortions left by bourgeois and Stalinist
propaganda. According to Der Spiegel, this necessary process of
clarification must be prevented at all costs. This explains why the
magazine dredges the sewer in its attempt, 90 years on, to vilify the
Russian Revolution.

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