Comment: Whenever his haters 'fact-check' him, they discover that Putin's knowledge of history is sublime. Putin's remarks about a little-known fact of US meddling in Russian affairs over 100 years ago were part of this riveting answer he gave to a British Sky News reporter during his marathon Q&A in December...
(The relevant portion begins at 04:36)
"It would be better for the whole world if a state in Siberia and another four states emerged in the European part of what is now greater Russia."
The quotation is real — it belongs to Edward House, Wilson's informal chief adviser on European politics and diplomacy during World War I.
To find out more about America's proposal to carve up the Russian Empire (and to get some much-needed historical context), Meduza turned to historian Alexander Etkind, who recently authored a book about William Bullitt, the U.S. diplomat sent to negotiate with Lenin on behalf of the Paris Peace Conference. It was Bullitt who devised the plan in 1918 to partition Russia.
Washington averted Russia's partition before suggesting it
In 1917 and 1918, two revolutions and then the start of a bloody civil war plunged Russia into chaos. In March 1918, the Bolsheviks exited the war, signing a separate peace treaty with the Central Powers. The deal threatened to flood Germany with resources just as it was losing the wherewithal to continue fighting, encouraging some among the Allies to support a Japanese invasion of Russia from the east.
Alexander Etkind told Meduza that Woodrow Wilson and Edward House resisted this plan for three reasons: (1) They nurtured "romantic" affinity for Russia that was fashionable in the early 20th century; (2) On purely racist grounds, they opposed an Asian invasion of a white European territory; and (3) On geopolitical grounds, they feared strengthening Japan by endorsing a scheme that would grant it access to the natural riches of Siberia and the Urals.
Comment: On 'romantic affinity' for Russia: this may simply mean that the US elite weren't then quite psychopathic enough to follow this plan through. On 'racist grounds', the US had no problem funding Japan's war against Russia in 1905. Reason number 3 is most likely: they didn't want Japan to get a head-start on plundering Siberia because they wanted to get stuck in there themselves.
In negotiations, Wilson and House impeded progress on the Japanese invasion plan and diluted it with different conditions, such as limits on the Japanese invasion force to 10,000 men and a proposal to have Czechoslovakian troops advance simultaneously from the west.
Lenin endorsed America's plan to partition Russia, but Wilson dropped it
The concept of breaking up Russia into smaller independent states was the product of President Wilson's broader thinking about self-determination, Etkind told Meduza. Modeled on the creation of the Balkan states from the remnants of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, Wilson envisioned border demarcations, followed by referenda on which territories belonged to what state, followed by elections and the formation of governments, and ending with recognition by the League of Nations.
Comment: Hence the term 'balkanization'. Indeed, Wilson was so concerned with 'the plight of small countries', that his government effectively founded dozens of them in eastern Europe. This was classic geopolitical divide-and-conquer.
The Wilson administration tapped a diplomat and journalist named William Bullitt to travel to Russia and normalize relations with the Bolsheviks. In Petrograd, Bullitt spoke to Grigory Zinoviev and Maxim Litvinov before meeting Vladimir Lenin in Moscow. This trip occurred in April 1919 when the Bolsheviks were at their most vulnerable during Russia's Civil War.
Trying to craft a plan that would satisfy all sides of the conflict, William Bullitt proposed the partition of the former Russian Empire into 23 parts. Some of these new nations, like Finland, Ukraine, and the Baltic states, already enjoyed international recognition. Others would have been new, like Southern Russia, The Urals, Siberia, and Tatarstan. The Bolsheviks would have received control over Moscow, Petrograd, and eight surrounding provinces.
Lenin agreed to Bullitt's plan and signed an accord pledging his participation in a conference to be held in Oslo with representatives from all 23 "states."
Comment: Now you understand why Putin has intimated many times, though perhaps not outright stated, that Lenin was a traitor. At the very least, he was a lunatic.
When Bullitt returned to Paris to get presidential authorization to move forward, however, Woodrow Wilson suddenly fell ill. Etkind told Meduza that Wilson may have suffered his first stroke at the time or perhaps the U.S. president was merely reluctant to endorse so monumental an initiative. Without Wilson's support, the plan to break up Russia and end the civil war collapsed.
Etkind says Vladimir Putin probably fails to appreciate all the complexities of America's "partition plan" for WWI-era Russia. At the same time, even if he grasped the history better, Putin likely wouldn't thank the White House for preserving a unified Russia.
Comment: Putin failing to appreciate all the complexities?! This so-called historian has obviously never read any of Putin's historical treatises.
The deeper meaning hidden in Putin's recent allusions to Russian history, says Etkind, is the president's apparent panic about a new wave of "decolonization" that will trigger the Russian Federation's own dissolution.
Wed, 28 Dec 2022 13:14 UTC ???????????
Time from Venus???????
" Comment: Now you understand why Putin has intimated many times, though perhaps not outright stated, that Lenin was a traitor. At the very least, he was a lunatic. "
Vladimir Il'ič Ul'janov, aka LENIN ??? AGREE!
November 16, 1917. Comrades Polivanov and Zalkind, senior officials of the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs of the newly born Bolshevik regime, sign a document addressed to the President of the Council of People's Commissars, Lenin. The document reads: "According to the resolution taken at the meeting of Comrades People's Commissars Lenin, Trotsky, Podvoysky, Dybenko, Volodarsky, we have carried out the following:
1) in the archives of the Ministry of Justice from the file on the "betrayal" of comrades Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Kollontaj, etc. we have removed the order of the German imperial bank no. 7433 of 2 March 1917 with the authorization of a payment to comrades Lenin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Sumenson, Kozlovskij, etc. for the propaganda of peace in Russia.
2) All the registers of the Nya Banken of Stockholm containing the accounts of comrades Lenin, Trotsky, Zinoviev, etc., opened under the order of the German imperial bank no. 2754 ".
A few rather disturbing lines, which allude to betrayals and German bank transfers. The question, in fact, is not unknown. For some time there has been talk of Germanic funding aimed at "convincing" Russia to get out of the conflict, thus allowing the German army to concentrate on the "hottest" front, the western one, which saw the Kaiser's men engaged against the hated France.
This is not new, but Lenin had always denied it. He could not really admit any agreement, all the more of an economic nature, between bourgeois and militarist German imperialism and Bolshevik pacifism. Now, however, bank receipts and bank statements found by some journalists of the German periodical Der Spiegel in the Russian and German military archives and in those of some Swiss banks would remove all doubts.
Of course, that daring return to Russia, completed on April 3, 1917, of a Lenin who had hitherto been exiled in Switzerland, had caused scholars to debate for years. Well protected inside a sealed wagon that left Zurich and passed through all of Germany under the eyes of hundreds of willing German soldiers, the future animator of the October Revolution had taken the luxury - together with his comrade Karl Radek - to move to enemy land and to return to his homeland in order to kick off the Bolshevik propaganda with his famous April Theses. James Joice, speaking of his adventurous reunion, would have defined Lenin as a "sort of Trojan horse" of the revolution.
On the 17th of that month a telegram had left Stockholm. The head of the German secret services warned Berlin:
"Lenin’s entry into Russia was successful. He is working exactly as required. "
To organize and finance Lenin's trip was a somewhat enigmatic figure, such Parvus Helphand, for the registry office Alexander Israel Helphand, a Russian-German socialist democrat who, according to the historian George Vernadsky (See Lenin, the red dictator, Yale university Press , of 1932), acted as an intermediary between Germany and Lenin by transferring several million rubles from one side to the other.
To finance and bring Trotsky to Russia, on the other hand, we weighed the bank JP Morgan of Rockefeller as revealed by Harold Nicolson in his Dwight Morrow of 1935. JP Morgan, which financed the Russian revolutionaries on several occasions as well as the Federal Reserve Bank itself ( See Robert Maddox, The Unknown War with Russia, Presidio Press, 1977), paid for all the expenses of Trotsky and his family's stay in exile in a luxury hotel in New York. Then he organized his return to Moscow on March 26, 1917 - also providing for his release when, on April 13, he was intercepted and arrested in Halifax by the Canadian secret services, thanks to strong pressure from the British Prime Minister Lloyd George on the Canadian politician McKenzie King, who thanks to his interest he was later appointed Director of the Research Department of the Rockefeller Foundation, a $ 30,000-a-year assignment, later gaining the position of Prime Minister - thus initiating the Revolution.
Eustace Mullins - in his controversial The New Order, Ezra Pound Institute, 1985 - argues that in the early 1920s a Federal Reserve office was located on Wall Street, at 120 Broadway, specifically aimed at financing the Bolshevik Party, engaged in difficult construction of the USSR.
Lenin hired by the German secret services and American banks to start a Communist Revolution aimed at getting Russia out of the way of the conflict. The evidence that the Spiegel reporters cite seems truly pitiless. It is clear that for four years the German Foreign Ministry alone paid 26 million marks into the Soviet coffers (about 75 million euros today). But the total funding was much larger, and it resulted in armaments, explosives and, of course, a lot of money. Indeed, the German periodical claims that already in September 1914, when the war had just begun, "two particularly influential characters" had received an advance of 50,000 gold marks from the Kaiser to set up an insurrection in Russia which, once , would have obtained an additional German coverage of another two million marks.
From the left (and by historians such as Vladimir Buldakov or Roy Medvedev), the question is downplayed. This was already known, say Lenin's supporters, stating that the father of the October Revolution did not stipulate any agreement with the Germans and that it was only a momentary "convergence of interests", which allowed the leader of the Bolsheviks to "exploit" the proceeds of Western capitalism for the benefit of communism. In other words: politics has nothing to do with morality.
But scholars such as Viktor Kuznetsov, who in his book The mystery of the October upheaval, do not see it as a simple operation of political opportunism justified by the "Reason of State". Lenin and the German-Bolshevik conspiracy, cites incontrovertible documents, even if unknown more to the Russians than to Western historians and speaks of a real "original sin" of the Leninist Revolution.
Scandal or not? Ultimately it all depends on the idea of politics we believe in.