Sisson documents
The Sisson documents are a collection of 68 forged documents that were intended to provide evidence of financial support for the Bolsheviks by the German Reich during the First World War .
Origin and publication
The namesake of the document collection Edgar Sisson worked in early 1918 for the American Committee for Public Information ( CPI ) in Petrograd . It was an organization that should support America's entry into the war propagandistically and justify it. Through the mediation of Ferdynand Antoni Ossendowski , the American Sisson bought a collection of 68 secret papers for $ 25,000, which apparently documented financial support for the Russian Revolution by the German General Staff and the German Reichsbank . The diplomat brought the documents to the USA via Scandinavia. From September 15, 1918, the documents were published in the American press. The result was the discrediting of the Russian revolutionaries as Ludendorff's paid agents . Since the authenticity of the papers was partly in doubt, the CPI published the book The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy . The book contained several of the documents with translation and analysis by renowned historians John Franklin Jameson and Samuel Harper of the National Board for Historical Service . The two historians rated the documents as authentic. Edgar Sisson made no profit from his risky smuggling. Their authenticity remained controversial. In 1956 the historian George F. Kennan proved that the documents were forgeries. Recent research suggests that the forger was Ossendowski himself.
background
In order to destabilize the tsarist empire and achieve a separate peace with Russia, the German empire actually spent considerable sums of money. The Federal Foreign Office , the Reichsbank and the German General Staff were all involved in the support campaign for Russian socialists . At the end of December 1915, one million rubles had already flowed from the German Foreign Office through the businessman Dr. Alexander Helphand-Parvus on the "Promotion of the Revolutionary Movement in Russia". A total of up to 50 million marks should have flowed. Whether the Bolsheviks also benefited from this is still a matter of dispute.
literature
- Gerhard Schiesser and Jochen Trauptmann: Russian Roulette - The German Money and the October Revolution , Verlag Das Neue Berlin, Berlin 1998, ISBN 978-3360008503 .
- Boris Chavkin : Alexander Parvus. Financier of the world revolution . In: Forum for Eastern European History of Ideas and Contemporary History. 11/2, 2007, pp. 31–58 (documentary appendix: PDF; 1.56 MB )
- Alan Axelrod: Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda New York, Palgrave Macmillan, 2009.
- George F. Kennan: The Sisson Documents Journal of Modern History, v. 28: 130-54 (1956).
- В. И. Старцев: Ненаписанный роман Фердинанда Оссендовского , 2001.
Web links
Individual evidence
- ^ Alan Axelrod: Selling the Great War: The Making of American Propaganda p. 205
- ↑ WI Startsev: The unwritten novel by Ferdinand Ossendowski. 2001, p. 190.
- ↑ Boris Chavkin: Alexander Parvus. Financier of the world revolution . In: Forum for Eastern European History of Ideas and Contemporary History. 11/2, 2007 footnote 34