A must-read financial history for investors navigating today's volatile global markets Following an unprecedented economic boom fed by foreign investment, the Russian Revolution triggered the largest sovereign default in history. In Bankers and Bolsheviks, Hassan Malik tells the story of this boom and bust, chronicling the experiences of leading financiers of the day as they navigated one of the most lucrative yet challenging markets of the first modern age of globalization. He reveals how a complex web of factors—from government interventions to competitive dynamics and cultural influences—drove a large inflow of capital during this tumultuous period. This gripping book demonstrates how the realms of finance and politics—of bankers and Bolsheviks—grew increasingly intertwined, and how investing in Russia became a political act with unforeseen repercussions.

Why did the 1917 American Red Cross Mission to Russia include more financiers than medical doctors? Rather than caring for the victims of war and revolution, its members seemed more intent on negotiating contracts with the Kerensky government, and subsequently the Bolshevik regime. In a courageous investigation, Antony Sutton establishes tangible historical links between US capitalists and Russian communists. Drawing on State Department files, personal papers of key Wall Street figures, biographies and conventional histories, Sutton reveals: The role of Morgan banking executives in funnelling illegal Bolshevik gold into the US; the co-option of the American Red Cross by powerful Wall Street forces; the intervention by Wall Street sources to free the Marxist revolutionary Leon Trotsky, whose aim was to topple the Russian government; the deals made by major corporations to capture the huge Russian market a decade and a half before the US recognized the Soviet regime; the secret sponsoring of Communism by leading businessmen, who publicly championed free enterprise. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution traces the foundations of Western funding of the Soviet Union. Dispassionately, and with overwhelming documentation, the author details a crucial phase in the establishment of Communist Russia. This classic study - first published in 1974 and part of a key trilogy - is reproduced here in its original form. (The other volumes in the series include Wall Street and the Rise of Hitler and a study of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 Presidential election in the United States.)

How Lenin’s regime turned Russia’s priceless cultural patrimony into armored cars, trains, planes, and machine guns Historians have never resolved a central mystery of the Russian Revolution: How did the Bolsheviks, despite facing a world of enemies and leaving nothing but economic ruin in their path, manage to stay in power through five long years of civil war? In this penetrating book, Sean McMeekin draws on previously undiscovered materials from the Soviet Ministry of Finance and other European and American archives to expose some of the darkest secrets of Russia’s early days of communism. Building on one archival revelation after another, the author reveals how the Bolsheviks financed their aggression through astonishingly extensive thievery. Their looting included everything from the cash savings of private citizens to gold, silver, diamonds, jewelry, icons, antiques, and artwork. By tracking illicit Soviet financial transactions across Europe, McMeekin shows how Lenin’s regime accomplished history’s greatest heist between 1917 and 1922 and turned centuries of accumulated wealth into the sinews of class war. McMeekin also names names, introducing for the first time the compliant bankers, lawyers, and middlemen who, for a price, helped the Bolsheviks launder their loot, impoverish Russia, and impose their brutal will on millions.

This dissertation describes and analyzes the financial boom that made Russia the largest net international debtor in the world by 1914, as well as the Bolshevik default of 1918 -- one of the biggest in international financial history. For the Bolsheviks the default was a highly significant attack on "finance capital." Yet few historians have paid much attention to the financial history of the Russian Revolution. This study focuses in particular on the decision-making of the small but influential group of financiers and government officials who acted as the "gatekeepers" of international finance, channeling international capital to Russia in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Argues that the stock market crash of 1929 and subsequent Depression occurred as a result of poor decisions on the part of four central bankers who jointly attempted to reconstruct international finance by reinstating the gold standard.

Wall Street and the Russian Revolution will give readers critical insight into what might be called the "Secret History of the 20th century." The Russian Revolution, like the war in which it was born, represents the real beginning of the modern world. The book will look not just at the sweep of events, but probe the economic, ideological and personal motivations of the key figures involved, revealing heretofore unknown or misunderstood connections. Was Trotsky, for instance, a political genius, an unprincipled egomaniac, or something of each? Readers should come away with not only a far deeper understanding of what happened in Russia a century ago, but also what happened in America and how that still shapes the relations of the twocountries today.

‘The contribution made by American capitalism to German war preparations can only be described as phenomenal. It was certainly crucial to German military capabilities... Not only was an influential sector of American business aware of the nature of Naziism, but for its own purposes aided Naziism wherever possible (and profitable) - with full knowledge that the probable outcome would be war involving Europe and the United States.’ Penetrating a cloak of falsehood, deception and duplicity, Professor Antony C. Sutton reveals one of the most remarkable but unreported facts of the Second World War: that key Wall Street banks and American businesses supported Hitler’s rise to power by financing and trading with Nazi Germany. Carefully tracing this closely guarded secret through original documents and eyewitness accounts, Sutton comes to the unsavoury conclusion that the catastrophic Second World War was extremely profitable for a select group of financial insiders. He presents a thoroughly documented account of the role played by J.P. Morgan, T.W. Lamont, the Rockefeller interests, General Electric Company, Standard Oil, National City Bank, Chase and Manhattan banks, Kuhn, Loeb and Company, General Motors, the Ford Motor Company, and scores of others in helping to prepare the bloodiest, most destructive war in history. This classic study, first published in 1976 - the third volume of a trilogy - is reproduced here in its original form. (The other volumes in the series study the 1917 Lenin-Trotsky Revolution in Russia and the 1933 election of Franklin D. Roosevelt in the United States.)