RUSSIA’S REVOLUTION BENEFITS PROFITEERS

Sun (Auckland), Volume 1, Issue 2, 24 March 1927, Page 12

RUSSIA’S REVOLUTION BENEFITS PROFITEERS

KRASSIN ACQUIRES WEALTH Messages from Paris say that although the Russian Embassy has denied that Krassin, former Soviet Ambassador to France and to Great Britain, died a millionaire, his moneymaking propensities were notorious. He had acquired a fortune before the revolution and is believed to have preserved it by depositing his securities in Sweden. Serge de Chessin, authority on all things in the Soviet Republic, recently sent to “L’Echo de Paris” a record of the method by which Krassin amassed wealth and held on to it under the Bolshevist regime. He said: “Nothing is more certain than that Krassin was a financial adventurer. He belonged by right to the train of profiteers whom Lenin protected with sneering cynicism—like Furstenberg— Ganetzky, former smuggler, whom he made director in a bank, or the celebrated Taratouta. “Krassin’s benefactor was the German metallurgical industry. It supported him sump tut. usly so as to allow him to finance himself during the long years when the Bolshevists in exile were trailed by all the police forces in Europe. For a quarter of a century Krassin, in the pay of German industry, had a double in the person of the Communist Nikititch. One drew down German marks; the other prepared the. Russian revolt. Krassin was successful in both roles. Safe in Stockholm. At the hour of the proletarian revolution his fortune was safely hidden in Stockholm banks, and the revolution offered him a no less lucrative career than the German manufacturers did. “He had never envisaged the revolution except as Russian defeat first, and then a transformation of socialised Russia into a hinterland for German high finance. He subscribed in advance to Rathenau’s phrase to Radek: 1 ‘What does the regime in Russia matter to us if the General Electric Company can do business there?’ The truth is that in the eyes of Krassin’s employers—the Genera* Electric, Siemens and Galke, Siemens and Schuckert—no regime could offer more than the revolution in the way of an inflow of products ‘made in Germany.’ Obliged to Flee. “Here we touch the central point of Krassin’s biography. It was not in vain that this man, obliged to flee from Russia after a revolutionary prank, was enabled to return there through German influences at theCzars court. A Krassin of St. Petersburg was more useful to Germany than several army corps on the Prussian frontiers. Installed in the centre of the enemy’s position—its metal industry—this mercenary of industrial Pan-Germanism could sap Russian resistance at its base. He could at the proper moment dry ujd the sources of production. He could sabotage the fabrication of war materials. He could deliver thousands of disarmed soldiers to the shell fire of the Krupps.

Krassin d‘id not fail his German friendships or his revolutionary engagements. During the war he succeeded in getting charge of several war supplies factories. He put his creatures—German sympathisers or Communists—in places controlling artillery munitions.