Based on the wikipedia article it looks like Jacob Schiff funded the Russian Revolution because he was Jewish, and disliked the anti-Semitism of the Tzarist regime. As the article discusses, he funded the Japanese side in the Russo-Japanese war for the same reason.
Given this I don't think it makes sense to say that the Russian Revolution was funded by "Wall St." but rather that it was supported by a wealthy Jewish American who opposed the Tzarist regime.
The entire Schiff connection is bogus, and you'll see that the sites that talk about him tend to be one click away from outright anti-semitic conspiracy pages.
Schiff and many Americans were definitely involved in funding Russian revolutionaries -- that was quite a common thing. The posthumous memoirs of Samuel Harper, a Rockefeller man and one of the founding figures of Slavic studies in the US, are quite frank on this point. Not online, but I recall an anecdote about some little old lady in Chicago writing a check and saying "I hope this one pays for the bomb that blows up the Czar!"
Your second point is entirely correct. However, they're not one click away from "Haven Monahan", yet another Fidel eulogy, Trump as the puppet of Putin, etc. You can't possibly think it's this easy to have a clue?
A nice factual fact, by the way, is Averell Harriman's giant manganese concession in Georgia in the '20s:
The topic of American capitalists running huge factories in the USSR in the 20's is absolutely fascinating, and I'm glad you linked to it here. But it is entirely separate from what the parent comment is trying to say.
With respect to financing the Bolsheviks, I don't dispute that Americans did it. My issue is with the insinuation that Wall Street Jews were the puppetmasters, which is where this stuff leads.
Nobody did more to help the Bolshevik cause than Germany, by allowing Lenin to cross their territory in a sealed train during a world war. The rest was luck, ruthlessness, and quickly broken promises.
As Jennings Wise (a legitimate historian from the '30s, his Wilson biography is quite good) said: "Historians must never forget that Woodrow Wilson, despite the efforts of the British police, made it possible for Leon Trotsky to enter Russia with an American passport."
The Germans were not exactly in a position to promote the Bolshevik cause in 1919 (eg, at the proposed Prinkipo conference). Or in point 6 of the Fourteen Points.
The top thread above is giving the Soviet (and American) party-line interpretation of the American "anti-Bolshevik" intervention in the Russian Civil War. Actually if you read enough primary docs (for instance, the memoir of Graves, who commanded the Siberian force) it quickly becomes clear that the actual goal of the policy was to sandbag the Whites (and, in Siberia, also the Japanese). The American forces involved are all full of bureaucratic duplicity and all swear up, down, left and sideways that they're enemies of godless Bolshevism. And some of them actually are.
"this stuff leads" -- sure. And reading the NYT leads to Castro-worship, "hands up, don't shoot," Haven Monahan, and other fake news of a sinister persuasion. If you let it.
Wise's Wilson book is quite good. It was written in 1937. The only people who care about it today are anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. So what? Who cares? They will all die, and the book will still be there. It's a book.
I don't see what it is in my comment that you disagree with.
I was only pointing out that Schiff funded the Bolsheviks because of his political views that were related to bring an American Jew. And there seems to be plenty of evidence in the Wikipedia article for that asking.
I never made the claim that Schiff was particularly important. Can you point to something specifically in my post that if incorrect?
wait so why did you reply to my comment instead of just to the original comment? Is there something wrong with me addressing inaccuracies in the portrayal of Schiff's role, even if I don't address the aspects that interest you?
That's a surprising link for you to post, especially since it doesn't support what you have said in the slightest.
tldr: Jacob Schiff was a super wealthy Jewish banker. Because of the state endorsed pogroms in Russia he refused to lend to the Russian Empire and instead lent to Japan - helping them to buy weapons and win the Russian-Japanese war.
After the fall of the empire he no longer blacklisted Russia.
The simplification of a complex political and social event like the Russian Revolution to the 'Bankrolling of Jews' is not only stupid and narrow minded but is part of a long and sordid history.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism
On a sort of related matter if anyone would like to read a very entertaining novel about conspiracy theories, check out Umberto Eco's 'Prague Cemetery'.
I posted the link as a reference to who he is. There's much more about him and what he's done elsewhere. It's very easy to label inconvenient hypotheses as "conspiracy theories" - George Soros was one of those until we saw proof about his involvement everywhere.
Well the second site you posted has the following masthead: "NEW WORLD ORDER / WORLD WAR II / CONSPIRACY / ECONOMICS / NEWS"
Like you say there are lots of sites about Schiff and the Russian Revolution. I'm not surprised you didn't post them here since they have urls like strangeside, jewishracism, judeo-masonic, communism-explained and so on.
Well, world history is full of conspiracy facts, so, there's nothing wrong with that being in the title. Conspiracy theories, when founded on facts, are also fine. We can't know most of the facts so you suggest people should stop thinking and creating theories?! Debunk with verifiable facts instead of labeling - that's the only right thing to do.
BTW, I don't know how much of it [0] is true; I only know for a fact that Leon Trotsky was in the Wall St. circles before he went back to Russia with some money, which obviously was not his, but to suppress facts just because major Jewish figures were involved and that can fuel anti-Semitism is wrong.
The thing is, most people on HN have better things to do with their time than go around debunking other people's random stuff they found on the internet somewhere.
That said, the principle of "Nobody's debunked it yet, so heck, it might as well be true" probably isn't the best operating maxim to base one's worldviews on.
What makes you think you represent a significant portion of the community here? I've seen much less impactful stuff like website design attracting a lot of energy for virtually no reason, for example. And here we're discussing serious stuff, which is aligned with the OP. If you don't care, spend your time in the thousand other threads.
This is not about the Jews although it's convenient to discard Wall St. involvement as Anti-Semitism, but about how and why did the Bolshevik Revolution happen as it did. This is especially important today amidst the Cultural Marxism gaining more and more territory worldwide.
You posted the source and then said "this is a fact and gets hidden because it could cause antisemitism." The source is antisemitic garbage, it doesn't even try to establish a connection between Schiff and Trotsky before blaming Schiff for all the deaths of the revolution.
I disagree. Anti-Semitism accusations and PC, in general, are the way to sweep things under the rug. Neither I or anybody else is suggesting that these things were done, if they were, because they were Jewish people. There are things presented as facts in that post and I am interested to know which ones are false and which are not. How hard is to understand this?!
Very, as I said you presented it as a source for your very ridiculous claim. Expecting other's to check it is silly, you're unwilling, and the source gives you no reason to believe it's true.
No, it is not ridiculous at all. And as you can tell, many already checked it. If you don't like all this or disagree, then there are plenty of other threads you can find joy! You get too emotional because you're prejudiced. I am surprised how many hacker wannabes actually cannot hack their sorry brains and open themselves to ideas. By definition, hackers typically rebel against the status quo and don't become their most loyal supporters!
You cannot handle "sorry brains"? But what if I feel sorry for brains that lack self-control and which cannot adapt to the world that is not dominated by their likes? The same status quo, which they consider as some unseen accomplishment of the humanity, is actually more repressive and not much different than the Communist regimes some of us know intimately. Yeah, let's not bring these things up to a discussion, sugarcoat and falsify history, so that the poor billionaires don't get attacked by anti-Semites! Give me a break, please! I personally expect a lot more from this community, which has turned into an oversensitive version of Reddit!
I can handle a lot of things. The HN community, however, cannot handle uncivil comments: they're toxic and force the community into spiraling incivility, producing enmity that keeps people from being able to discuss other topics after laying in to each other over politics.
If you want to make a volatile political argument on HN, the onus is on you to do so with extraordinary calmness and careful writing. Here, you're doing the opposite.
>On a sort of related matter if anyone would like to read a very entertaining novel about conspiracy theories, check out Umberto Eco's 'Prague Cemetery'.
Would you say it has any parallels with Foucault's Pendulum?
Yep, definitely. I've only read a few of Eco's novels but I think they all deal with similar ideas, or look at the same ideas through different lenses.
Prague Cemetery ruminates on the ideas of slanderous conspiracies [slanderous isn't really a strong enough word, they are really hateful]. At the start of the book Royalists are spreading conspiracies about the Jesuits being behind Italian Republicanism.
By the end of the book the Jesuits have either been replaced by the Jews, or are working hand in hand with them. As in Focault's Pendulum many of the people manufacturing the conspiracy are also believers in it. In the Name of the Rose there are long passages about the nature of heresy and how a power [the Church] declaring something to be a heretical belief can attract those who oppose that power, in effect spreading that heresy, even in cases where the heretical belief might be manufactured or non-existent.
One major difference is that the book also sets out how these conspiracies serve people's interests. In some cases the interests served are political reactionaries, in other it is political regimes or state intelligence agencies.
It feels like a longer novel that Focault's Pendulum, though I'm not sure if that's correct. I think it loses the run of itself a little in places but it is well worth a read.
If so, the best source on early Western support for the Bolsheviks is Antony (((Sutton))), from the (((Hoover Institution))). Not a perfect writer but generally trustworthy:
Sutton, by the way, writes (this is true): "There is no
concrete evidence that Jews were involved in the Bolshevik Revolution because they were Jewish."
See also the lives of Raymond Robins and William Boyce Thompson, who I guess don't get much attention from the tinfoil hats on account of not being (((Jews))):
Robins, really the main American Bolshevik booster, wrote an autobiography of sorts. It's hilariously disingenuous but worth reading anyway, and it's free.
It must be nice living in this world where official truth always === truth. I officially apologize as an Anglo-American for all those sleek smug copies of the Economist we export. Make sure you don't read too many (((books))) tho, it can cause you all kinds of real-life problems!
Your reply deflects from the parent's statement. Sure, a lot of westerners supported the Bolsheviks, but that doesn't mean Jacob Schiff was one of them.
> It must be nice living in this world where official truth always === truth. I officially apologize as an Anglo-American for all those sleek smug copies of the Economist we export. Make sure you don't read too many (((books))) tho, it can cause you all kinds of real-life problems!
It must be nice living in this world where smug secret truth always === truth. I officially apologize as an Anglo-American for all those sleek smug "I know better than you sheeple" opinions we export. Make sure you don't read too many (((books))) tho, it can cause you all kinds of real-life problems!
When you go trawling in the swamp of uncanonical information, you actually have to perform the filtering work yourself. If you're not interested in judging sources yourself, by all means stick to the Economist! It's not that bad.
Yes, Schiff's role is relatively minor. But that's also a far cry from "nothing to see here, move along, the October Revolution is purely a product of the legitimate revolutionary aspirations of the Russian workers and peasants."
Unless you're actually concerned with whether the problem is the Jooze, or this one guy Schiff, or whatever, the larger and broader point that the Bolsheviks had strong support from influential East Coast circles is basically correct and extremely relevant. It's easy to use a small factual error to disguise this broader and more interesting truth.
When you're filtering water from a swamp, the fact that the swamp has moose turds in it shouldn't bother you that much. Of course it has moose turds. It's a swamp. That's why you brought your filter. I do wish there was a better source of water, but there really isn't.
The Russian Revolution is a remarkable event in history because almost everyone who has written about it since WWII has followed what's essentially the mainstream American or Soviet lines (which are not at all that different). You simply can't get out of this box without going into the swamp. Harvard University Press is not publishing any Czarist accounts of 1917 by Czarist history professors.
If you're going to write this comment, you should apologize to the commenter who you made fun of with your (((books))) from the (((Hoover Institution))) snark, because you've just agreed with them. Meanwhile, (((conspiracy theories))) are a real thing, while a general belief that the Hoover Institution is anti-Semitic is neither in evidence on this thread nor, really, a thing at all.
the russian civil war had multiple competing factions with a bevy of foreign influences onto each....
a little "funding" has an impact that works out to be a wash, considering that most of the combatants in the war had obsolete weapons, no organization, no food, no logistic chain, no cold weather gear, no education, etc...
What's not often mentioned when discussing the revolution was that western powers, including the USA immediately invaded the Soviet Union to attempt to overthrow the government. This explains a lot in the ensuing history, including the paranoid militancy of the Soviet Union.
Yes, there are some fascinating pictures of Allied troops marching through Vladivostok in 1918. [1] The Red Scare followed that immediately, and wasn't caused by any Russian aggression towards the US. [2]
>The Red Scare followed that immediately, and wasn't caused by any Russian aggression towards the US.
One of the pillars of the Bolsheviks world view (based on the Marx's economical and political class theory) was "worlwide revolution", and it was really happening in many parts of the world at the time (almost whole Europe was basically on fire and China too - one can see why US had reasons to worry especially given the active communist movement in US back then) And for Bolsheviks it wasn't just passive view though, they did for example tried to militarily help German revolutionary comrades and if not for the new Poland state and army which happened to be on the way to Germany, the 20th century in Europe may have looked somewhat differently.
"The Bolsheviks were also implementing a new strategy, "Revolution from abroad" (Revolutsiya izvne—literally, "revolution from the outside"), based on an assumption that revolutionary masses desire revolution but are unable to carry it out without help from more organized and advanced Bolsheviks. Hence, as Leon Trotsky remarked, the revolution should be "brought on bayonets" (of the Red Army), as "through Kiev leads the straight route for uniting with Austro-Hungarian revolution, just as through Pskov and Vilnius goes the way for uniting with German revolution. Offensive on all fronts! Offensive on the west front, offensive on the south front, offensive on the all revolutionary fronts!"."
" Lenin, meanwhile, saw Poland as the bridge the Red Army had to cross to assist other communist movements and bring about other European revolutions."
Of course, the same is true of capitalists; we don't notice anymore because their program for world domination has mostly succeeded. It wasn't peaceful either.
>capitalists; ... their program for world domination has mostly succeeded
Unfortunately human race hasn't been able to come up with a better thing yet. Most of the 20th century was spent on implementation (and dealing with consequences) of the 2 most progressive (as they looked back then and as the theories like the Marx's state) approaches - communism and fascism (the both actually almost the same in the core - total government economical and political control). We all know the results of those approaches.
There is libertarian socialism, or anarchism - which seems very promising. Essentially the extension of democracy into the workplace. In Spain in 1936 by all accounts it was very successful and popular. Productivity improved dramatically and petty crime became non existent. However it was crushed by the combined force of western democracies, Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. They hate democracy. Not surprising - democracy is a threat to any power system.
Libya until recently had a very interesting political system where all decisions had to be ratified by the population. Unfortunately that was also overthrown by an invasion, unfortunately a rather common pattern with this kind of thing (Chile under Allende, Guetemala 1953, etc.)
Yes communnism represented a real threat to the American ruling class, the threat of workers taking matters in their own hands. We must also look at the US labor history which is among the most violent in the world, (except Tsarist Russia) After many bloody labor wars, US labour was basically crushed in the 20's only to rise again in the 30's and then be mostly deestroyed after WW2 again.
> Yes communnism represented a real threat to the American ruling class, the threat of workers taking matters in their own hands
No offence but we know exactly what Trotsky and Lenin represented ... and it very much wasn't "workers taking matters in their own hands". This may have been unknown at the time, maybe even to those men themselves, but it is not unknown to me, or to you.
53 comments
[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 120 ms ] thread[0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jacob_Schiff
Given this I don't think it makes sense to say that the Russian Revolution was funded by "Wall St." but rather that it was supported by a wealthy Jewish American who opposed the Tzarist regime.
https://www.amazon.com/Russia-Believe-Memoirs-Samuel-Harper/...
Your second point is entirely correct. However, they're not one click away from "Haven Monahan", yet another Fidel eulogy, Trump as the puppet of Putin, etc. You can't possibly think it's this easy to have a clue?
A nice factual fact, by the way, is Averell Harriman's giant manganese concession in Georgia in the '20s:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chiatura_mine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/W._Averell_Harriman
Giant holes in the ground are hard to sweep under the rug...
With respect to financing the Bolsheviks, I don't dispute that Americans did it. My issue is with the insinuation that Wall Street Jews were the puppetmasters, which is where this stuff leads.
Nobody did more to help the Bolshevik cause than Germany, by allowing Lenin to cross their territory in a sealed train during a world war. The rest was luck, ruthlessness, and quickly broken promises.
The Germans were not exactly in a position to promote the Bolshevik cause in 1919 (eg, at the proposed Prinkipo conference). Or in point 6 of the Fourteen Points.
The top thread above is giving the Soviet (and American) party-line interpretation of the American "anti-Bolshevik" intervention in the Russian Civil War. Actually if you read enough primary docs (for instance, the memoir of Graves, who commanded the Siberian force) it quickly becomes clear that the actual goal of the policy was to sandbag the Whites (and, in Siberia, also the Japanese). The American forces involved are all full of bureaucratic duplicity and all swear up, down, left and sideways that they're enemies of godless Bolshevism. And some of them actually are.
"this stuff leads" -- sure. And reading the NYT leads to Castro-worship, "hands up, don't shoot," Haven Monahan, and other fake news of a sinister persuasion. If you let it.
Wise's Wilson book is quite good. It was written in 1937. The only people who care about it today are anti-Semitic conspiracy theorists. So what? Who cares? They will all die, and the book will still be there. It's a book.
https://archive.org/details/WoodrowWilsonJenningsCWise
(This is a badly transcribed bootleg.)
I was only pointing out that Schiff funded the Bolsheviks because of his political views that were related to bring an American Jew. And there seems to be plenty of evidence in the Wikipedia article for that asking.
I never made the claim that Schiff was particularly important. Can you point to something specifically in my post that if incorrect?
Your comment seems to begin and end with a Wikipedia article you just read.
Outright puppet, no. But an unwitting accomplice, arguably so. Or per the hackneyed (but useful) saying:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Useful_idiot
tldr: Jacob Schiff was a super wealthy Jewish banker. Because of the state endorsed pogroms in Russia he refused to lend to the Russian Empire and instead lent to Japan - helping them to buy weapons and win the Russian-Japanese war.
After the fall of the empire he no longer blacklisted Russia.
The simplification of a complex political and social event like the Russian Revolution to the 'Bankrolling of Jews' is not only stupid and narrow minded but is part of a long and sordid history. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jewish_Bolshevism
On a sort of related matter if anyone would like to read a very entertaining novel about conspiracy theories, check out Umberto Eco's 'Prague Cemetery'.
Like you say there are lots of sites about Schiff and the Russian Revolution. I'm not surprised you didn't post them here since they have urls like strangeside, jewishracism, judeo-masonic, communism-explained and so on.
[0]: http://www.tomatobubble.com/id695.html
Then why post it?
That said, the principle of "Nobody's debunked it yet, so heck, it might as well be true" probably isn't the best operating maxim to base one's worldviews on.
While website design is right on the money, I have to assume that Jewish New World Order conspiracy theories don't fit that description.
That's got as much proof as the page you linked. There's a difference between being open to ideas and believing any shit someone says.
If you want to make a volatile political argument on HN, the onus is on you to do so with extraordinary calmness and careful writing. Here, you're doing the opposite.
Would you say it has any parallels with Foucault's Pendulum?
Prague Cemetery ruminates on the ideas of slanderous conspiracies [slanderous isn't really a strong enough word, they are really hateful]. At the start of the book Royalists are spreading conspiracies about the Jesuits being behind Italian Republicanism.
By the end of the book the Jesuits have either been replaced by the Jews, or are working hand in hand with them. As in Focault's Pendulum many of the people manufacturing the conspiracy are also believers in it. In the Name of the Rose there are long passages about the nature of heresy and how a power [the Church] declaring something to be a heretical belief can attract those who oppose that power, in effect spreading that heresy, even in cases where the heretical belief might be manufactured or non-existent.
One major difference is that the book also sets out how these conspiracies serve people's interests. In some cases the interests served are political reactionaries, in other it is political regimes or state intelligence agencies.
It feels like a longer novel that Focault's Pendulum, though I'm not sure if that's correct. I think it loses the run of itself a little in places but it is well worth a read.
If so, the best source on early Western support for the Bolsheviks is Antony (((Sutton))), from the (((Hoover Institution))). Not a perfect writer but generally trustworthy:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Antony_C._Sutton
Sutton, by the way, writes (this is true): "There is no concrete evidence that Jews were involved in the Bolshevik Revolution because they were Jewish."
See also the lives of Raymond Robins and William Boyce Thompson, who I guess don't get much attention from the tinfoil hats on account of not being (((Jews))):
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Raymond_Robins
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/William_Boyce_Thompson
Robins, really the main American Bolshevik booster, wrote an autobiography of sorts. It's hilariously disingenuous but worth reading anyway, and it's free.
It must be nice living in this world where official truth always === truth. I officially apologize as an Anglo-American for all those sleek smug copies of the Economist we export. Make sure you don't read too many (((books))) tho, it can cause you all kinds of real-life problems!
> It must be nice living in this world where official truth always === truth. I officially apologize as an Anglo-American for all those sleek smug copies of the Economist we export. Make sure you don't read too many (((books))) tho, it can cause you all kinds of real-life problems!
It must be nice living in this world where smug secret truth always === truth. I officially apologize as an Anglo-American for all those sleek smug "I know better than you sheeple" opinions we export. Make sure you don't read too many (((books))) tho, it can cause you all kinds of real-life problems!
When you go trawling in the swamp of uncanonical information, you actually have to perform the filtering work yourself. If you're not interested in judging sources yourself, by all means stick to the Economist! It's not that bad.
Yes, Schiff's role is relatively minor. But that's also a far cry from "nothing to see here, move along, the October Revolution is purely a product of the legitimate revolutionary aspirations of the Russian workers and peasants."
Unless you're actually concerned with whether the problem is the Jooze, or this one guy Schiff, or whatever, the larger and broader point that the Bolsheviks had strong support from influential East Coast circles is basically correct and extremely relevant. It's easy to use a small factual error to disguise this broader and more interesting truth.
When you're filtering water from a swamp, the fact that the swamp has moose turds in it shouldn't bother you that much. Of course it has moose turds. It's a swamp. That's why you brought your filter. I do wish there was a better source of water, but there really isn't.
The Russian Revolution is a remarkable event in history because almost everyone who has written about it since WWII has followed what's essentially the mainstream American or Soviet lines (which are not at all that different). You simply can't get out of this box without going into the swamp. Harvard University Press is not publishing any Czarist accounts of 1917 by Czarist history professors.
a little "funding" has an impact that works out to be a wash, considering that most of the combatants in the war had obsolete weapons, no organization, no food, no logistic chain, no cold weather gear, no education, etc...
EDIT: It's as different as Sherlock Holmes versus Sherlock Hlomes and roughly as grating to one's ear.
1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Expeditionary_Force_S...
2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_Scare
One of the pillars of the Bolsheviks world view (based on the Marx's economical and political class theory) was "worlwide revolution", and it was really happening in many parts of the world at the time (almost whole Europe was basically on fire and China too - one can see why US had reasons to worry especially given the active communist movement in US back then) And for Bolsheviks it wasn't just passive view though, they did for example tried to militarily help German revolutionary comrades and if not for the new Poland state and army which happened to be on the way to Germany, the 20th century in Europe may have looked somewhat differently.
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soviet_westward_offensive_of_1... :
"The Bolsheviks were also implementing a new strategy, "Revolution from abroad" (Revolutsiya izvne—literally, "revolution from the outside"), based on an assumption that revolutionary masses desire revolution but are unable to carry it out without help from more organized and advanced Bolsheviks. Hence, as Leon Trotsky remarked, the revolution should be "brought on bayonets" (of the Red Army), as "through Kiev leads the straight route for uniting with Austro-Hungarian revolution, just as through Pskov and Vilnius goes the way for uniting with German revolution. Offensive on all fronts! Offensive on the west front, offensive on the south front, offensive on the all revolutionary fronts!"."
From https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Polish%E2%80%93Soviet_War :
" Lenin, meanwhile, saw Poland as the bridge the Red Army had to cross to assist other communist movements and bring about other European revolutions."
Unfortunately human race hasn't been able to come up with a better thing yet. Most of the 20th century was spent on implementation (and dealing with consequences) of the 2 most progressive (as they looked back then and as the theories like the Marx's state) approaches - communism and fascism (the both actually almost the same in the core - total government economical and political control). We all know the results of those approaches.
Libya until recently had a very interesting political system where all decisions had to be ratified by the population. Unfortunately that was also overthrown by an invasion, unfortunately a rather common pattern with this kind of thing (Chile under Allende, Guetemala 1953, etc.)
https://chomsky.info/nothing-for-other-people-class-war-in-t...
No offence but we know exactly what Trotsky and Lenin represented ... and it very much wasn't "workers taking matters in their own hands". This may have been unknown at the time, maybe even to those men themselves, but it is not unknown to me, or to you.