The history of the revolutionary movement in Russia was never elegant. It was not a history of starched collars, white gloves, and polished shoes. It was a history of dirt mixed with blood. There are many different kinds of history—political, social, economic, diplomatic, military, and cultural. Many excellent books have been written about all of these subjects, both in Russia and elsewhere.
But Russia—which an American president once called “the evil empire,” a label that the government of Gorbachev and Yeltsin came to agree with—also had a different kind of history, namely, a criminal history. That part of the past is the subject of this book. It focuses on the criminal side of the interactions and working methods of the Bolshevik leaders during the first quarter of the twentieth century. The Bolsheviks carried out expropriations prior to the Revolution to finance it; they murdered the millionaires Savva Morozov and Nikolai Shmidt to seize their inheritances; and they entered into mercenary collaborations with foreign intelligence services and governments that were hostile to Russia. At Lenin’s urging the Soviet government signed a separate peace with Kaiser Wilhelm I in 1918 sabotage the revolution in Germany. The enemies of Lenin’s Treaty of Brest-Litovsk—most importantly Felix Dzerzhinsky, the head of Russia’s security services, the Cheka—organized the assassination of the German ambassador Count Mirbach in order to provoke Germany into breaking the treaty; and how Lenin, Trotsky, and Sverdlov used Mirbach’s murder to destroy the Left Socialist Revolutionary Party and establish a single-party dictatorship in Russia. After the attempt to undermine the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk failed, it is our thesis that Dzerzhinsky and Yakov Sverdlov, the de facto general secretary of the party, organized an assassination attempt against Lenin on August 30, 1918 (the so-called “Kaplan assassination attempt”), during which Lenin was wounded; and that Sverdlov’s subsequent sudden death in March 1919 was not accidental, but may have been an act of revenge for his role in organizing the attempt. The murders of the heads of the German communist movement—Liebknecht and Luxemburg—in Germany: the theory supported here is that Karl Radek, a prominent Russian Bolshevik who was in Germany at this time, may have been involved in the murders of Liebknecht and Luxemburg. Beginning in 1922, Lenin was gradually ousted from power by Stalin and Dzerzhinsky, and as a result of this power struggle within the party he was murdered by them; and after which Trotsky was shunted aside, while Dzerzhinsky, Sklyansky, and Frunze—other prominent Bolsheviks—were eliminated. The leadership of the Bolshevik Party bore a striking resemblance to an organized crime group. Almost none of its members died of natural causes. And almost all the Soviet leaders of Stalin’s generation, including Stalin himself, were done away with, in one way or another.
This book is based on wide-ranging sources, including both published and archival materials. Detailed references to these sources are given at the end of every chapter.