Alexander Parvus

Alexander Lvovich Parvus, born Israel Lazarevich Gelfand (8 September 1867 – 12 December 1924) and sometimes called Helphand in the literature on the Russian Revolution, was a Marxist theoretician, publicist, and controversial activist in the Social Democratic Party of Germany.[3] He also read widely on his own, including material by the iconic Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko, the journalist Nikolai Mikhailovsky, and the political satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin, which led the young Gelfand to begin to question the legitimacy of the Tsarist Empire.[10] Alienated from the backwardness of agrarian Russia and the limited political horizons there, Gelfand moved to Dresden, in Germany, joined the Social Democratic Party and took over the editorship of the socialist newspaper Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung.From 28 January to 6 March 1898, Parvus used his newspaper to run a series of polemical articles attacking the German Marxist Eduard Bernstein, who had queried Marx's prediction that the collapse of capitalism was inevitable, and advocated a non-violent reforms as the route to socialism.[11] On 25 September 1898, Parvus and his assistant editor, Julian Marchlewski were expelled from Saxony, and settled in Munich, handing control of Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung to Rosa Luxemburg.Arrested in April 1906, he was visited by Rosa Luxemburg in the Peter and Paul Fortress[17] Sentenced to three years' exile in Siberia, Parvus escaped and emigrated to Germany, where he published a book about his experiences called In the Russian Bastille during the Revolution.His firm dealt with the deliveries of foodstuffs for the Ottoman army and he was a business partner of the Krupp concern, of Vickers Limited, and of the famous arms dealer Basil Zaharov.Von Wangenheim sent Parvus to Berlin where the latter arrived on the 6 March 1915 and presented a 20-page plan titled A preparation of massive political strikes in Russia to the German government.However, Lenin kept him at arm's length to disguise the changing roles of both men, Parvus' involvement with German intelligence and his own liaisons with his old ally, who was not respected any more among the socialists after his years in Turkey and after becoming a millionaire entrepreneur.A large part of the transactions of these companies were genuine, but those served to bury the transfer of money to the Bolsheviks, a strategy made feasible by the weak and overburdened fiscal and customs offices in Scandinavia, which were inadequate for the booming black market in these countries during the war.The evidence published by Alexander Kerensky's Government in preparation for a trial scheduled for October (November) 1917 was recently reexamined and found to be either inconclusive or outright forgery.[26] (See also Sisson Documents) Leon Trotsky responded to allegations that Lenin had colluded with Parvus or German intelligence in his return to St Petersburg[27] in his History of the Russian Revolution.[30] During his lifetime, Alexander Parvus' reputation among his revolutionary peers suffered as a result of the Maxim Gorky affair (see above) and the fact that he was in effect a German government agent.A fictionalized version of him as a German Zionist mastermind behind the new world order is portrayed by the Armenian Actor Kevork Malikyan in the 2017 Turkish TV series Payitaht: Abdülhamid about the struggles and intelligence of the Ottoman Sultan in keeping the declining empire together.