Access Provided by Universitat Zurich at 05/01/11 10:46AM GMT Articles World War and World Revolution Alexander Helphand-Parvus in Germany and Turkey HANS-LUKAS KIESER The number of those who resist the tyranny of Russia, who take up arms and throw dynamite, increases every day. When the Russians rise up, the Ottomans must rise up too, and when the Ottomans rise up, the Russians must do the same. The world is in turmoil. Besides Russia, the Spanish, Portuguese, Belgians, and French are rising up. —Ottoman exile journal İntikam (Revenge), no. 30, Geneva, 28 March 1900 A classic question of modern Middle Eastern studies concerns the limited impact of revolutionary European and Russian socialism in the late Ottoman world. In the 1910s, however, there was a cluster of significant intellectual convergences between leftist revolutionaries and the Young Turk “rightist revolution”:1 the concept of anti-imperialism; the desire for a strong state; support for world war as a catalyst of revolution and destroyer of the existing order; and, of particular importance, an identification of classes with ethno-religious groups that justified ethno-religious war and expropriation as forms of class struggle. In this article, I seek to explain these convergences by considering the connections among émigré intellectuals of both the Right and the Left in the 1910s. I focus in particular on the Russo-German socialist Alexander Parvus (1867–1924), whom the ruling Young Turks regarded as an expert on economy and revolution and who, perhaps unintentionally, provided an intellectual foundation for the appropriation of leftist concepts by the Right.2 I thank the editors of Kritika for their impeccable support, as well as Hamit Bozarslan (Paris), Rolf Hosfeld (Berlin), Ronald Suny (Ann Arbor), Steven J. Zipperstein (Stanford), and the anonymous reviewers of Kritika for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this article. 1 This is the term that Dominik J. Schaller and I propose in our edited volume, Der Völkermord an den Armeniern und die Shoah = The Armenian Genocide and the Shoah (Zurich: Chronos, 2002), 11–80. 2 There is an excellent biography of Parvus that dates from the 1960s: Winfried B. Scharlau and Zbyněk A. Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution: Parvus-Helphand. Eine politische Biographie Kritika: Explorations in Russian and Eurasian History 12, 2 (Spring 2011): 387–410. 388 HANS-LUKAS KIESER Though an adventurous and often solitary outsider, Parvus was an influential activist whose record of both decisive agitation and widely read publications is impressive. He exhibited a clever opportunism as he moved among concepts, models, and empires; and unlike many other socialists from tsarist Russia, he included the Ottoman capital in his transnational, cross-border area of operations. This article focuses on Parvus’s multiple activities during his stay in Istanbul in 1910–15, and in particular his impact on the revolutionary introduction of an exclusively Turkish-Muslim “national economy” (millî iktisad ). Having become a sophisticated though dissatisfied socialist intellectual in Germany, Parvus embraced the possibilities of influence, power, and enrichment that opened to him in Istanbul during the Balkan wars and World War I—wars that he treated as means to his final aim of world revolution. By way of introducing the respective Russian and Turkish revolutionary lexicons, this article first goes back to the revolutionary Russian and Ottoman student diasporas in Switzerland, where Parvus had studied before adopting German social democracy (SPD) as his social and spiritual home. The diasporas of education and political activism in belle-époque Switzerland were a hotbed for the elaboration of utopias, for revolutionary activity, and for networking by both the Left and the Right. This was the starting point for Parvus’s career as a prolific socialist writer and activist. Born Izrail´ Lazarevich Gel´fand (Helphand) in Berazino, east of Minsk, in 1867, Parvus gained notoriety under his pen name in the SPD at the end of the 19th century. An aura of fascination still surrounds his personality. “In a world of mediocrity and a time of decadence, he was colourful, ambitious, theoretical, prophetic, extraordinary—a man of incredible intuition and intelligence,” a Turkish academic has recently written.3 The present article, by contrast, seeks to demystify Parvus’s intellectual and political performance, though without vilifying him in the manner of his former friends such as Karl Radek, Lev Trotskii, and Rosa Luxemburg—most of them, like Parvus, Jewish émigrés from Russia— as well as that of the National Socialists, for whom he was the Jewish prototype of both a Marxist revolutionary and a capitalist war profiteer. Dividing his political and intellectual biography into pre-1910 and post-1917 periods, this article departs from earlier portraits by stressing Parvus’s time in Istanbul as a pivotal and revealing episode that prepared him to be an agent of the wartime German (Cologne: Wissenschaft & Politik, 1964), published in English as The Merchant of Revolution: The Life of Alexander Israil Helphand (Parvus), 1867–1924 (London: Oxford University Press, 1965). Because at the time of its writing the Ottoman world of the 1910s was strikingly underresearched, this biography could not sufficiently reflect on Parvus’s impact in and from Istanbul. 3 M. Asım Karaömerlioğlu, “Helphand-Parvus and His Impact on Turkish Intellectual Life,” Middle Eastern Studies 40, 6 (2004): 145–65, quotation 159. The same fascination characterizes Paul Dumont, “Un économiste social-démocrate au service de la Jeune Turquie,” in Mémorial Ömer Lütfi Barkan (Paris: Maisonneuve, 1980), 75–86. WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 389 government and its policy of backing the Russian Revolution of 1917. Contrary to what earlier biographers have written, this sojourn in Istanbul was of decisive significance for Parvus’s outlook and offers crucial insights concerning the specific people with whom he maintained contact and the kinds of regimes and politics to which he was drawn.4 Parvus mirrored, produced, and distilled a blend of leftist revolutionary discourses, for he aspired to scientific truth, universalism, and a future without proletarian misery. Emotionally, however, he was inclined to an irrational Russophobia. Like Karl Marx before him, he looked forward to a world war that would destroy tsarism and international capitalism, which, he felt, had also held him back in his own life and career. In the 1910s, Parvus changed from a revolutionary preoccupied with class struggle to a “geo-revolutionary” who thought more in geostrategic terms and set great store by Wilhelmine Germany’s potentially transformative military power and its hoped-for social-democratic world mission. His dogmatically anti-Russian strategy of war/revolution cost him the sympathy of many committed socialists, among them a few Ottoman Armenians, whose community was threatened by his strategy. In contrast to the ruling Young Turks, whom Parvus courted in the Ottoman capital (and by whom he allowed himself to be courted), the Armenian parties cultivated strong ties with international socialism. As Heinz Schurer aptly argued half a century ago, “The Russian revolutionary transformed into a German patriot did all he could to bring about the Russian defeat from within for the sake of a German triumph [in World War I]. When the October Revolution came, however, the emotional attraction of the new Russia proved irresistible and Parvus violently swung back to his old country, only to be rejected.”5 Certain of eventual German victory and convinced that socialism would spread around the world after triumphing in Germany, Parvus found himself excluded from Bolshevik Russia, even though it was his initiative that had made possible Lenin’s return from Zurich to St. Petersburg. Parvus’s political and intellectual life was thus a shambles in 1918. Instead of being a beacon of socialism and democracy, his adopted country—Germany—was in a sorry state, something to which he himself had unintentionally contributed. Now cured of his apocalyptic fantasies of war and revolution, Parvus changed belatedly into a sober and farsighted political thinker, but one whose credibility and influence had dramatically declined. 4 Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 138. Heinz Schurer, “Alexander Helphand-Parvus: Russian Revolutionary and German Patriot,” Russian Review 18, 4 (1959): 313–31. 5 390 HANS-LUKAS KIESER Education and Activism in Switzerland Parvus became an adviser to the Young Turks and a contributor to Türk Yurdu (The Turk’s Home), the most important Turkish nationalist review, in the 1910s. Yet, while earlier studying in Switzerland, he had been been preoccupied principally with Germany and Russia, not the Ottoman world and its small but growing diaspora in Switzerland. For their part, the Young Turks in Switzerland were impressed by the Russian revolutionaries and adopted as a slogan the declaration, “When the Russians rise up, the Ottomans must rise up too.” Born in 1867 to a Jewish lower middle-class family in the shtetl of Berazino in what is now Belarus´, Israil Helphand (Izrail´ Gel´fand) was raised in Odessa, a cosmopolitan port city on the Black Sea, where he attended a Russian secondary school. Like the educated Ottoman youth and many other Russians, Jews and non-Jews alike, Israil Helphand dreamed of studying in Western Europe. In 1886, he had the chance to go to Zurich, where there was already a significant Russian colony.6 Eager to distance himself from his own background, he decided to study at the more conservative University of Basel, where the historian Jacob Burckhardt and the classical philologist and philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche taught, and where there were no colonies of students from tsarist Russia or the Ottoman Empire. The professor who appealed most to Helphand was the German economist Carl Bücher, a former journalist at the Frankfurter Zeitung, who left Basel for Karlsruhe in 1890. As Helphand wrote in his farewell address to Bücher, he owed his notion of scientific truth and his methodology, which included the comprehensive use of statistics, to this professor. Thanks to his studies and his doctorate in economics, he gained greater confidence in himself, his intellectual capacities, and his Marxist framework. Loyal to his socialist convictions, he would henceforth write for the proletarians, not the bourgeois academia that had almost turned down his dissertation.7 Helphand’s socialist orientation also led him to enter into contact with Georgii Plekhanov, Rosa Luxemburg, Julian Marchelewski (Karski), and many others, all of whom were also resident in finde-siècle Switzerland. Yet, in contrast to socialists like Luxemburg and Eduard 6 Cf. Monika Bankowski-Züllig, “Zurich—das russische Mekka,” in Ebenso neu als kühn: 120 Jahre Frauenstudium an der Universität Zurich, ed. Katharina Belser et al. (Zurich: eFeF-Verlag, 1988), 127–39. 7 Israil Helphand, Adresse an Professor Carl Bücher bei seinem Weggang von Basel, Autumn 1890 (Basel: M. Schwenck, n.d. [1890]), copy held at the Universitätsbibliothek Basel. The faculty was not enthusiastic about his dissertation, which Bücher had directed, so that he passed only de rite (the lowest accepted degree): Israil Helphand, “Technische Organisation der Arbeit: ‘Cooperation und Arbeitstheilung,’ ” (Ph.D. diss., University of Basel, 1891). WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 391 Bernstein,8 Helphand did not participate in the human rights movement that emerged in response to the anti-Armenian persecutions of 1895–96 and after. Anti-Russian and anti-British geostrategic thinking, together with statesponsored anti-Armenian propaganda in the German press, largely prevented the German intelligentsia of both the Left and the Right—and, by extension, Helphand too—from developing a sense of solidarity with the victims.9 In both the late Ottoman and the late tsarist empires, an educated and rebellious youth and its mentors were eager to revolt against the “imperial establishment” and its manifest injustices. But although there were some interactions and shared concerns, deep divisions between Ottoman and Russian revolutionaries predominated. Even if they lived side by side in educational and activist diasporas in Swiss towns, they did not collaborate. Switzerland of the Belle Époque was the favorite place for students and activists from Russia. In Alfred Senn’s aphorism, the Russian Revolution of 1917 was made in Switzerland. Russian social democracy had been founded in Geneva in 1883 by, among others, Georgii Plekhanov, a seminal Marxist theorist; 5 out of 14 congresses of the First and Second Socialist Internationals took place in Switzerland, as did the exile congresses of the SPD in the 1880s and most Zionist congresses. Even before organized socialism acquired its main hubs, Alexander Herzen, the so-called father of Russian socialism, had lived for a time in Geneva, and it was there that he had published the first opposition journal, Kolokol (The Bell). All this is well known and has been thoroughly researched.10 Less well known is the contemporaneous, though smaller, diaspora of Ottoman students and agitators in Switzerland. They were concentrated in French-, not German-speaking Switzerland.11 This was a result of the Francocentrism of the Ottoman Reform age and the special place given to French as the “language of progress.” By contrast, most social revolutionaries from Russia, including Parvus, respected German as the language of science, 8 Cf. Eduard Bernstein, Die Leiden des armenischen Volkes und die Pflichten Europas: Rede gehalten in einer Berliner Volksversammlung (26. Juni 1902) (Berlin: n.p., 1902). 9 Cf. Axel Meissner, Martin Rades “Christliche Welt” und Armenien: Bausteine für eine internationale Ethik des Protestantismus (Berlin: Lit, 2010), 51–157; and Margaret Anderson, “ ‘Down in Turkey, Far Away’: Human Rights, the Armenian Massacres, and Orientalism in Wilhelmine Germany,” Journal of Modern History 79, 1 (2007): 80–111. 10 Among many works, see Ladislas Mysyrowicz, “Université et revolution: Les étudiants d’Europe orientale à Genève au temps de Plekhanov et de Lénine,” Schweizerische Zeitschrift für Geschichte 25, 4 (1975): 514–62; Monika Bankowski, Peter Brang, Carsten Goehrke, and Werner G. Zimmermann, eds., Asyl und Aufenthalt: Die Schweiz als Zuflucht und Wirkungsstätte von Slawen im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert (Basel: Helbing & Lichtenhahn, 1994). 11 Cf. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Vorkämpfer der “Neuen Türkei”: Revolutionäre Bildungseliten am Genfersee (1870–1939) (Zurich: Chronos, 2005) (Turkish edition: Türklüğe İhtida, 1870–1939: İsvicre’sinde Yeni Türkiye’nin Oncüleri [Istanbul: Iletisim, 2008]). 392 HANS-LUKAS KIESER “civilization,” and “high culture.” The first Ottoman students in Geneva in the late 19th century experienced culture shocks and confusion when they arrived.12 With regard to atheism, nihilism, and anarchism, they felt a deep disquiet visà-vis the revolutionary youth from Russia. They were particularly disconcerted when activists from this background applied their concepts to Ottoman society, as did the Armenian revolutionaries from the Caucasus. At the end of the 19th century, Geneva was for a few years the center of the oppositional Comité Union et Progrès (Committee of Union and Progress, CUP) that had been founded in Istanbul in 1889. Originating mainly from the Caucasus, and solidly established from the 1880s onward in the town and university of Geneva, the revolutionary Armenians were, by contrast, intimately acquainted with Marxism and the Russian revolutionaries. Beginning in 1887, they founded the revolutionary social-democratic party Hntshak (The Bell), and then a journal with the same name, both inspired by Herzen’s Kolokol. Plekhanov represented them at the Second International. In 1890, small circles of revolutionary students and populists (narodniki) from Tbilisi, Moscow, and St. Petersburg merged and founded the Dashnaktsutiun or Armenian Revolutionary Federation (ARF) in Tbilisi. An attempt at union with Hntshak failed, leaving the two groups distinct. The ARF, too, chose the city of Geneva as its Western center, which was also responsible for most parts of the Ottoman Empire, and it published its monthly Droshak [Flag] there from 1891 on.13 The Russian and Ottoman Armenians might have served as the most direct bridge between Russians and Ottomans and among European, Russian, and Ottoman revolutionary ideas and concepts. The Young Turks in opposition struggled against the regime of Sultan Abdülhamid II, while the Armenian revolutionaries struggled against both the Hamidian and the tsarist systems. Despite attempts at collaboration, however, relations between Armenians and Young Turks in Switzerland existed only on an individual basis, never collectively and politically. Nonetheless, the general revolutionary feeling did excite the Young Turks, and they admired the revolutionary organization and enthusiasm of their fellow students from Russia and praised “the force that provides an Ottoman Armenian …, or a Russian Jew, with the courage to play with bombs,” as Bahaeddin Şakir 12 One of these students, Ali Kemal, described this in his memoirs: Ömrüm (Istanbul: Isis, 1985, first ed. 1913), 90–91. 13 Anahide Ter Minassian, “Élites arméniennes en Suisse: Le rôle de Genève dans la formation des élites arméniennes au début du XXe siècle,” in Die armenische Frage und die Schweiz/La question arménienne et la Suisse (1896–1923), ed. Hans-Lukas Kieser (Zurich: Chronos, 1999), 29– 52; Ronald G. Suny, Looking toward Ararat: Armenia in Modern History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993), 63–93; Taline Ter Minassian, “Genève: ‘Capitale’ de l’édition arménienne? La presse et les éditions arméniennes en Suisse avant la première guerre mondiale,” in Armenische Frage, 53–65. WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 393 wrote.14 Moreover, they shared resentments against Russia and the European powers. But they were definitely not ready to replace their religious creed, however weakly they actually subscribed to it, with socialism. Only Turkism—Turkish ethno-nationalism—could play this role, and it would begin to take the place of religion only some years later. On a deeper level, there was mistrust and a gap between different political languages: a secular, socialist millennialism that fundamentally distrusted the existing state and world system versus a deeply internalized vision of a strong Ottoman state that had to be re-empowered according to a manifestly successful modern European model. The ex-Ottoman Bulgarians might also have formed an important link between Young Turks and Russians in Geneva. Numbering several hundred at the University of Geneva in the early 20th century, Bulgarian students formed the second largest group at the university after the Russians. Among them were many active socialists. The Bulgarian Christian Rakovski’s autobiography shows the transnational socialist networks and their links in fin-de-siècle Switzerland.15 Armenians figure in them, but Muslim Ottomans do not, though Rakovski paid attention to the Ottoman world and clearly recognized the shortcomings of European socialism with regard to what he called “the Eastern questions.” Parvus must have known Rakovski and a few Armenian socialists in Switzerland, perhaps personally. Around 1900, the Young Turks admired powers like France, Britain, and Germany, and they hesitated to adopt radically revolutionary or antiauthoritarian theories. They hoped for a re-empowered Ottoman state that would occupy a respected place among the European powers, but their aims did not include a world revolution based on class struggle. Only after the decisive turn to Turkism after 1910 did an important part of Turko-Muslim academic youth begin to think in terms of social revolution. When, at the Second Congress of the Ottoman Opposition in Paris in December 1907, the ARF and CUP (at that time called CPU, Comité Progrès et Union) agreed on an alliance, it was a serious attempt to bridge the gap between the Young Turks’ desire for a strong modern state above all and the leftist-inspired Armenian revolution, now pragmatically reduced to Ottoman reforms and especially the rule of law in eastern Anatolia. The alliance lasted until 1912.16 14 Quoted in Mehmed Ş. Hanioğlu, Preparation for a Revolution: The Young Turks, 1902–1908 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 182. 15 Christian Rakovsky, Selected Writings on Opposition in the USSR, 1923–30, ed. Gus Fagan (London: Allison and Busby, 1980), quoted from Marxists Internet Archive, www.marxists.org/ archive/rakovsky/1926/autobiog/autobiog.htm (accessed 15 June 2009). 16 Dikran M. Kaligian, Armenian Organization and Ideology under Ottoman Rule, 1908–1914 (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2008). 394 HANS-LUKAS KIESER The Young Turks in Geneva of the fin de siècle were seekers, not activists. Some 12 years later, the picture was different. The CUP had meanwhile become an elitist club of activists on the road to establishing, in 1913, a single-party regime. By that time, activist students in the diaspora were clear about their goals: a “social revolution” in terms of Turkism or Turkish ethnic nationalism (see below).17 They were now organized in Foyers Turcs (Türk Yurdu), founded in 1911—based on the same principles as the Turkish Hearths (Türk Ocağı) that existed at the time in Istanbul and Asia Minor. (Türk Yurdu and Türk Ocağı were both translated in French as Foyers Turcs.) Türk Yurdu was also the name of the main paper of the Turkist movement that attracted a broad academic youth on the eve of and during World War I. The Foyers Turcs and their journal Türk Yurdu stood close to the CUP that partly financed them. By this time, the European center of Turkism was the Ottoman-Turkish diaspora in Geneva and Lausanne. Their objectives concerned above all the future of the Turks specifically and not, as 20 years previously, that of the Ottoman Empire in general. Moreover, the “great ideal” or “national ideal” (millî mefkûre) was to be reached by “social revolution“ (inkılâb-ı içtimâî ), a key term that the Foyers Turcs manifestly borrowed from the leftist social revolutionaries. During a congress of Turkists from Europe and Istanbul in Petit-Lancy (Geneva) in March 1913, “the unanimous opinion of all congress participants crystallized,” according to the minutes, “that ‘Anatolia was the homeland [anayurt] that would guarantee the political existence of Ottoman Turkdom.’ And the Turkists [Yurdcu] planned with full conviction to make the Turks the masters of Anatolia and, supported by established men in various walks of life, to lead the way on behalf of the Turks who were as yet unaware of the salutary works aimed at guaranteeing their existence. And they swore solemnly that, being on the road toward the great national ideal, they would make Anatolia their national home.” An important related topic was the “liberation of the economy from the yoke of aliens,” among whom the Turkists counted the comprador bourgeoisie of foreign companies and non-Muslim businessmen. In short, “social revolution” meant the economic and educational empowerment of the Turkish Muslims, men and women, for the sake of a new Turkish nation in Anatolia. The congress took place during the First Balkan War, in which the Ottoman Empire lost Macedonia and hundreds of thousands of Muslim refugees (muhacir) flocked to Istanbul and Anatolia.18 17 Lozan Türk Yurdu Cemiyeti’nin Muharrerat ve Zabt-ı Sabık Defteri, Archive of the Turkish Historical Society, Ankara, Y 653. 18 Yurdcular Yasası: İsviçre’de Cenevre şehrine yakın Petit-Lancy Köyünde Pension Racine’de kurulan İkinci Yurdcular Derneği’ nin muzakerat ve mukerreratı (Istanbul: Yeni Turan Matbaası, n.d. [1913]), 69–70. WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 395 In 1913, Turkism reached a peak in the diaspora and in the Ottoman capital, where the socialist Parvus, 20 years after he had left Switzerland, now addressed the Turkists and took up their ideal of “social revolution.” From Russia via Switzerland to Germany and Turkey Like most students from the tsarist and Ottoman worlds, Israil Helphand believed that Western Europe was superior in its science, organization, and democratic character. Like the Ottoman Muslims, he distinguished this aspect of Europe from its contemporary imperialist, capitalist, and colonialist aspects. Helphand believed in particular in the superiority of the German Social Democrats. He was the first socialist from tsarist Russia—before Luxemburg, Radek, and Karski—to begin a career among them, after finishing his doctorate in Basel. Looking back, Parvus wrote in his autobiography that in the 1890s, “German social democracy became my fatherland.”19 Thanks to him, the German Social Democrats began to take the Russian Social Democrats around Plekhanov in Geneva seriously and entered into contact with them.20 Parvus preached revolution in the Sächsische Arbeiterzeitung, castigating “opportunists,” “reformists,” and all other forms of nonmilitant evolutionary optimism. He attacked, among others, the respected SPD member Eduard Bernstein, a Berlin Jew. Later, however, he would express much more pragmatic opinions in some ways similar to those of Bernstein.21 The 1905 revolution, which caused him to return to Russia, distracted him temporarily from German affairs. He contended that the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–5 would “end with the breakdown of the political equilibrium in all countries”—the prelude to world revolution. As a member of the executive committee of the St. Petersburg Soviet, he tried to light the fuse of revolution by provoking an economic collapse through mass strikes and other measures. The leaders, including Parvus and Lev Trotskii (to whom Parvus had been a mentor), were arrested by the police, though they were able to escape after a few months of relatively mild confinement.22 What led Parvus to Turkey were his efforts to confront his own uncomfortable position of a revolutionary writer who lacked money, had failed as an activist in Russia, and remained a loner even within the Social Democratic Party of his chosen fatherland. Hastening to St. Petersburg in October 1905, he had left his lossmaking publishing house and its debts to his business associate Karski in Munich, just as in the same year he had left his wife and his son without plans to provide for 19 20 21 22 Parvus, Im Kampf um die Wahrheit (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 1918), 7. Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 35. Ibid., 43–59. Ibid., 70–72 and 101–9, quotation 71. 396 HANS-LUKAS KIESER them in the future.23 On his return to Germany, he was admired for a short time as a hero of the 1905 revolution and a near martyr of the tsarist regime who in 1907 had adventurously escaped “the Russian Bastille.”24 As a “Russia expert,” but one who had a bone to pick with his native country, he contributed to a generalized view of Russia as “barbaric” among German Social Democrats, and thus to their desire for a military crusade against it, as well as to the spread of Russophobia even among moderate friends like Adolf Müller in Munich.25 By way of Vienna, Parvus moved to Istanbul, where he arrived in the autumn of 1910. According to Parvus’s friend Georg Gnadauer, what attracted him to Turkey was both the possibility of studying the Young Turk Revolution of July 1908 and the fact that Istanbul was “the center of multiple diplomatic threads and the place where Eastern problems were to be studied [and] from which already at that time the great crisis of imperialism, the World War, threatened to burst into flame.”26 Parvus in fact substantially changed his revolutionary ideas around 1910. He now became convinced that what was needed to precipitate the breakdown of the capitalist system was not, in the first instance, class struggle, but rather war between states. “War carries all capitalist contradictions to extremes. A world war can only end with a world revolution,” he wrote in 1910.27 He derided now as “revolutionism” the attitude of Karl Liebknecht and his former close friend Luxemburg, both of whom remained loyal to the priority of class struggle over geostrategic Realpolitik.28 Anti-tsarist feelings continued to inform Parvus’s thinking, but some of his anti-liberal resentments disappeared during his stay in Istanbul between 1910 and 1915, as he discovered a new world in which he felt free and at ease both economically and emotionally. He was listened to and admired; he began to enjoy the power of money and even to live the life of an haut bourgeois and bon vivant. He became a successful merchant, 23 Those German socialists who in this context demanded some bourgeois morality Parvus snubbed as Philistines (Philister), as Karl Marx had before him. See Parvus, “Philister über mich: Meine Antwort an K. Kautsky,” Die Glocke 5–42 (17 January 1920): 1331–39. Being a “revolutionary,” he gave himself the right to act outside the relationships and obligations of the world in which he lived and whose morals he despised as bourgeois (Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 78–83). 24 As he put it in the title of his commercially successful narrative published in Parvus, In der russischen Bastille während der Revolution: Eindrücke, Stimmungen und Betrachtungen (Dresden: Kaden, 1907). 25 Karl Heinrich Pohl, Adolf Müller, Geheimagent und Gesandter in Kaiserreich und Weimarer Republik (Cologne: Bund, 1995), 124–25. 26 “Parvus [sic]—Reden bei der Trauerfeier am 17. Dezember 1924,” Die Glocke 10–38 (20 December 1924): 1231–32. Parvus himself used similar words in Im Kampf um die Wahrheit, 24. 27 Parvus, Der Klassenkampf des Proletariats (Berlin: Buchhandlung Vorwärts, 1911), 147 (first ed. of this chapter in 1910). 28 Ibid., 136–47. WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 397 an agent of the German embassy, an influential writer for a Turkish audience, and an adviser and mediator for the Committee of Union and Progress. The CUP had organized the Young Turk Revolution of 1908 and forced the reopening of the Ottoman parliament. In 1913, it established a dictatorial regime that lasted until the end of World War I. Parvus must have stood in close contact with Mehmed Javid Bey, the financial expert and minister of economics of the CUP, and with Mehmed Talat Bey (later Pasha), the main networker and primus inter pares of the CUP’s Central Committee.29 Blurred Boundaries: From Leftist to Rightist Revolution—and to World War The Bulgarian socialist Rakovski, an expert on contemporary Ottoman and Balkan issues,30 introduced the greenhorn Parvus to the Constantinopolitan metropolis, just as he hosted Parvus’s friend Lev Trotskii during the Balkan wars of 1912–13. In his letters to the SPD leader Karl Kautsky in the spring of 1911, Parvus appears eager “to study a [different, Ottoman] world” and, as a leading activist, to promote socialism in the Balkans and the Ottoman Empire. “In Comrade D. Vlachow [Dimitar Vlahov] I have found a man of quick comprehension and fine grasp of the [illegible word] questions of socialism. He would be for Turkey what Trotskii had been for the revolutionary struggle in St. Petersburg, only in different circumstances,” Parvus wrote in a letter of 3 April 1911. Vlahov, an ethnic Bulgarian, was a member of the Ottoman parliament and opened a door to the political life in the capital for Parvus. “The arrival of friend Rak. [Rakovski] was timely. We are now inseparable, which reminds me of the beautiful days that I spent with Trotskii in St. Petersburg. We are becoming a force, but one that unfortunately lacks a social base. If only we had here the hundreds of thousands of workers of St. Petersburg.”31 Not least for this last reason, and in a distinct departure from his earlier Sturm und Drang period, Parvus began to concentrate on other activities. In the Ottoman capital, he was now not so much a spokesperson of the proletariat but rather a mentor to the educated Turkish elite, which perceived him as a sympathetic observer of the new Turkish nationalism. For the Young Turks in power, Parvus, holder of a European Ph.D. in economics, became an attractive 29 Except for Parvus’s own publications, there is a striking paucity of sources and exact data as far as his stay in Istanbul is concerned; and the person mainly responsible for this nebulous situation seems to have been Parvus himself, who destroyed all relevant documents. Karaömerlioğlu’s recent article, which focuses on those years, does not provide new archival data. Cf. Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 11–12. 30 Cf. Rakovski’s “La révolution turque,” Le socialisme, no. 37 (1 August 1908): 1–2. 31 Letter to Kautsky of 3 April 1911, Kautsky Papers, D XVII, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 398 HANS-LUKAS KIESER financial expert, a banker, and a merchant—especially in the context of the First Balkan War, which began in the autumn of 1912. For the adherents to the new current of Turkism, he began to be a “European” (as he emphasized) mentor. “I wrote financial articles and was busy with founding banks. Once I made my first commercial gains, I put them aside because they were the lever for further advancement.” The theorist of world war leading to world revolution was turning, so other socialists increasingly charged, into a war profiteer. “In time I acquired both the capital and the contacts; when the world war began, the roads to capitalist accumulation suddenly opened wide to me… . The war has led many persons of liberal profession to commerce.”32 Parvus’s main key to success in Istanbul was his ability to apply his economic intuition and concepts to the Ottoman situation. In particular, he knew how to “speak to the Turkish soul” in the critical year 1912, when the parliamentary system began to crumble, the Balkan wars began, the ARF broke its alliance with the CUP, and Armenians appealed to the great powers for reforms in the eastern provinces.33 Yusuf Akçura invited him to edit the economic column of Türk Yurdu. This was a topic, he insisted, that was highly important but for which no Turkish author could be found. Parvus was recommended as someone who had already proven his quality with newspaper articles, notably for Tanin (Buzzing Noise), the main newspaper close to the CUP.34 The first of a number of articles by Parvus in Türk Yurdu appeared in early spring 1912. He confirmed the readers of Türk Yurdu in their feeling that Turkey was the victim of European imperialism and capitalism; that the resulting financial penetration was as bad as a military invasion; and that the Turkish-Muslim peasantry, the largest segment of the population and the group in whose name the Turkists had begun to speak, was in fact the most abused group in the empire. It was this Turkish peasantry, he remarked, that paid heavy and unjust taxes—“a peasant in Anatolia pays on average 30 percent more taxes than a peasant in Armenia”—and bore the duty of general military service, from which most non-Muslims had succeeded in liberating themselves. In contrast to the Christian-Armenian and Macedonian peasants, Parvus remarked, the Turkish-Muslim peasantry also did not enjoy the support and solidarity of its 32 Parvus, “Philister über mich,” 1331–39, here 1334. Cf. Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 137f.; Parvus, Im Kampf um die Wahrheit, 24; Parvus, “Ein Verleumdungswerk,” Die Glocke 1–3 (1 October 1915): 123–30. 33 For a study of the late Ottoman economic situation that relies heavily on Parvus’s concepts, see Muammer Sencer, Türkiye’nin malî tutsaklığı: Parvus efendi (Istanbul: May 1977). In the appendix some of Parvus’s Istanbul writings are reproduced in transliteration. 34 “İktisat,” Türk Yurdu, 9 Mart 1327 [22 March 1912], vol. 1 of the new ed. (Ankara: Tutibay, 1998), 145–46. WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 399 ethno-religious elites and their political organizations.35 In short, his arguments encouraged the Young Turks to become representatives of a Turkish ethnoreligious group. Though he avoided polemics against the non-Muslim subjects of the empire, Parvus’s remarks concurred with the argument made by an early anti-Christian article in Türk Yurdu in September and October 1912, again supposedly by a European expert, that the “Turks” had to embrace an imperial Turkism and become empowered at the expense of the Ottoman Christians, whom the author depicted as economically successful spongers who lacked patriotism and worked only for the interests of their own communities.36 Parvus quickly learned the Turkish nationalist vocabulary, its topoi, catchwords, historical images, and—last but not least—apocalyptic mentality, which regarded the task of becoming a modern nation in existential terms. As in his publications for German or Russian readers, he combined the authoritative discourse of the social sciences (though this time not openly socialist) with the attitude of a preacher and prophet. He addressed his readership with an insistent and direct “you,” claiming for himself an imposing but somewhat mysterious and chameleon-like “we” that could stand for science, socialism, Germany, Europe, or simply, as a pluralis majestatis, for Parvus himself. (It never stood for the Jews, though he made use of Jewish networks in Istanbul, the Balkans, Europe, and Russia.) The results were lucid social analyses, powerful projections of the future, and passages of impressive rhetorical and even poetic power. Alongside these strengths, however, he displayed a know-it-all manner and used facile arguments that were demagogic and conditioned by the Zeitgeist and by his own unacknowledged emotional ties. It is instructive in this regard to compare his address in German to “proletarian youth” in 1911 and his “letter to the Turkish youth” of June 1913.37 In both addresses he positioned himself as an authoritative scientific teacher and senior adviser who knew the situation and needs of the young in the two countries even as he also identified with them. In the first case, he used a language of revolutionary 35 Sic—nobody else would have dared use the term [Anatolian] Armenia in Türk Yurdu. “Iktisat– Köylüler,” Türk Yurdu, 9 Mart 1327 [22 March 1912], 145–48, quotation 148. 36 Ironically, the article was written by the Ottoman Jew Moïz Kohen Tekinalp, an ideologue of Turkism, under the pseudonym of Monsieur Risal: “Türkler bir rûh-i millî arıyorlar,” Türk Yurdu, 23 Ağustos 1328 [5 September 1912], 1:350–53. Parvus must have known Tekinalp, who lived in Istanbul and, like him, propagandized the German–Ottoman war effort. Cf. Jakob Landau, Tekinalp, Turkish Patriot: 1883–1961 (Istanbul: Nederlands historisch-archaeologisch instituut, 1984), 10. I thank Ugur Pece, at the time my student at Stanford, for having drawn my attention to Risal’s article in his seminar paper. 37 Parvus, Klassenkampf, 148–49; “Türk gençlerine mektub,” Türk Yurdu, 30 Mayıs 1329 [12 June 1913], 2:40–41. For a rhetorically significant address aimed at Russia, see Parvus, Meine Antwort an Kerenski & Co. (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 1917). 400 HANS-LUKAS KIESER socialism; in the second, that of anti-imperialist nationalism. In both cases he admonished the young to learn, be active, and defend the interests of their groups, which in both cases he represented as the chief victims of the present system of power relations. In the German case he went farther, urging “proletarian youth” to behave like soldiers who should place “the cause” above even their own lives—as he declared twice at the end of the address, “bis in den Tod” (until death). In an address of April 1913 to the “Turks,” during the final phase of the First Balkan War, Parvus adopted an apocalyptic tone that strongly appealed to his readers and was similar to the above-mentioned article of September 1912.38 The Balkan states and the great powers, he wrote, “want to annihilate you like the native Indians who perished in America…. They have closed all your roads and besiege you. If you cannot hold your positions and establish an economic force that meets modern demands, your death is certain…. Henceforth the last minute has begun…. If you do not work hard for the return of the Muslim refugees and for the protection of their property, you will have to leave Europe [the Balkans] completely and must assemble in Anatolia.”39 Parvus, in fact, contributed to Turkish fears of extermination and to the new discourse of Anatolia as the Turks’ last resort and ultimate home—and perhaps even to the feeling of those days, as the Turkish author and (relatively liberal) nationalist Halide Edip put it, “that in order to avoid being exterminated the Turks must exterminate others.”40 Parvus—the European expert, socialist theorist, and clever master of rhetoric—identified the Turkish Muslim peasantry as the class that more than any other deserved to benefit from a social revolution. He called the Young Turks and Turkists to identify with this class, which at the same time he represented as the “people” and the core of the “nation” (millet), and to liberate their economy from imperialist exploitation. All this was a strong stimulus for the Turkists’ “social revolution,” and it had a strong impact on the concept of the “national” (Turkish Muslim) economy, millî iktisad. After 1913, the CUP coercively implemented the ideal of millî iktisad against foreigners and non-Muslim citizens in the Ottoman Empire, both groups being defined as alien exploiters. In this way, the spiritual fathers of Turkish nationalism absorbed the revolutionary and anti-liberal elements of socialism, and Parvus served as an intellectual catalyst for this process of revolutionary nation building in the context of war.41 38 Monsieur Risal: “Türkler bir rûh-i millî arıyorlar,” Türk Yurdu, 6 Eylül 1328 [19 September 1912], 365. 39 “İş işten geçmeden gözlerinizi açınız,” Türk Yurdu, 23 Mart 1329 [3 April 1913], 2:200–3, quotation 200–1. 40 Halidé Edib, Memoirs (New York: Century, 1926), 333. 41 Cf. François Georgeon, Aux origines du nationalisme turc: Yusuf Akçura (1876–1935) (Paris: Ed. ADPF, 1980), 57f.; Zafer Toprak, Türkiye’de “milli iktisat” 1908–1918 (Ankara: Yurt, 1982); WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 401 Parvus himself maintained a more or less socialist superstructure in his writings in Istanbul, but his audience received his messages in a way that amplified the seminal Turkist impact. Also contributing to this trend was a Muslim intelligentsia from Russia, based in Istanbul, most of whom had, like Parvus, enjoyed a modern education in Russia and Western Europe. The best known among them are Ali Hüseyinzâde (Turan) from Baku, Ahmed Agayef (Ağaoğlu) from Shusha in Azerbaijan, Yusuf Akçura from Simbirsk on the Volga, Ismail Gasprinski (Gaspıralı) from the Crimea, and Mehmed Reşid Şangiray from the Caucasus, one of the founders of the CUP in 1889 and, after 1913, a fanatical anti-Rum (Greek Orthodox) and anti-Armenian governor. Ali Hüseyinzâde was a student at the Military School for Medicine in Istanbul, where he began to open the eyes of his Ottoman fellows to the transimperial Turkish world (Türk âlemi). Close to the CUP, Ali Hüseyinzâde had fled from the Hamidian police and published the journal Füyuzat (Enlightenment) in Baku in 1906–7. This journal coined the seminal slogan “Europeanize, Turkify, Islamize,” and called for a correspondingly anti-Hamidian revolution in Turkey. After his return to Istanbul in 1911, Ali Hüseyinzâde was appointed a senior consultant and, on Talat Bey’s initiative, he was elected to the CUP’s Central Committee. That same year he became involved in the Foyers Turcs and the journal Türk Yurdu. Like him, Agayef and Gasprinski wrote in Türk Yurdu, of which Yusuf Akçura was the director.42 Parvus interacted with these influential Muslims from Russia, most of whom contributed to the journal Türk Yurdu. Though they had no particular affinity with socialism, they shared Parvus’s distinctly anti-tsarist and anti-imperialist sentiments, as well as his desire to make a clean sweep of the existing power relations. Yet Parvus himself did not advocate a right-wing völkisch or ethnoreligious national revolution, though he did not oppose or warn against interpretations of his message that took this form. In his articles, he maintained an internationalist vocabulary together with abstract notions of history and classes, even while always including some statistics as a proof of the scientific nature of his writing. Parvus contended that the neglect of Turkey’s working class by the country’s intelligentsia and political class “was the reason why the civilized world has received the impression that the Ottoman Christians struggled against Turkish domination.” Once the Turkish elites showed solidarity with the peasantry and state policy took the people’s interest into account, the “Turkish question, that is, the question of Turkish nationality and of the national renewal of the Turks, will join the Bulgarian, Armenian, and similar questions; and the Christian Gerlach, “Nationsbildung im Krieg: Wirtschaftliche Faktoren bei der Vernichtung der Armenier und beim Mord an den ungarischen Juden,” in Armenian Genocide and Shoah, 347–422. 42 Yusuf Akçura, “Hüseyinzâde Ali Bey,” Türk Yurdu, 2 Nisan 1331 [15 April 1915], 4:104–6, Adam, Russlandmuslime, 137. 402 HANS-LUKAS KIESER civilized world will be obliged to deal with the Turkish question just as it has done with the others. In that situation the struggle among the different [ethnoreligious] elements will lose the violence it now has, because then the general relation between the interests of the popular classes will become evident.”43 It is fair to say that Parvus maintained a universalist framework of interethnic popular solidarity in his articles in the Turkish press. Moreover, as a European “friend of the Turks,” he enjoyed considerable goodwill and did not abstain from criticizing the CUP—at least not in the comparatively open political atmosphere before the definitive establishment of the CUP’s one-party regime in the summer of 1913. Thus he postulated a constructive continuity in parliamentary and democratic life; emphasized democracy and the positive sides of the “civilized world” (Europe); underlined Turkey’s need to receive its fair share of European capital; and outlined the positive impact that a peaceful, prosperous, and balanced Europe could have on Turkey in the future.44 The question, however, is which of his messages—peace or revolution/war—proved the most compelling in the “hour of truth,” when Europe collapsed in 1914 and Parvus began to hold an influential position in Istanbul, Berlin, and St. Petersburg. World War I—Dead End of the Fantasy of War/Revolution Parvus’s desire for revolution and political influence, somewhat suppressed after the failure of 1905 in St. Petersburg, reappeared in force in August 1914, together with his approval of war as a factor in revolution. War was also desired by important CUP representatives, among them the 33-year-old minister of war and member of the CUP central committee, Enver Pasha. He and most of his committee brothers (kardeşler) also easily identified with the anti-Russian aspect of the German–Ottoman war alliance.45 Turkist, and to a lesser extent Islamist, war propaganda ran at full strength in the Ottoman capital from August 1914. It used anti-Russian clichés and ideas about the clash of races and religions, and dreamed of a “Great Turanian Empire.”46 Arguing geopolitically and (only to his 43 Parvus, “Iktisat–Köylüler,” 147. See again, e.g., “Türk gençlerine mektub,” 40–41. 45 “The national ideal of our people and our country drives us to annihilate the Muscovite enemy on the one side, in order to obtain a natural imperial frontier that includes and unites all our [Turkic] national comrades; on the other side our religious sentiment drives us to liberate the Muslim world from infidel domination and give the followers of Muhammad independence,” a CUP circular of November 1914 reads. Quoted in Tekin Alp, Türkismus und Pantürkismus (Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1915), 53. 46 Cf. Erol Köroğlu, Ottoman Propaganda and Turkish Identity: Literature in Turkey during World War I (London: I. B. Tauris, 2007); and M. Şükrü Hanioğlu, A Brief History of the Late Ottoman Empire (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008), 179. Interestingly, however, in 1912– 14 more positive impressions of economic and cultural achievements in Russia prevailed in the 44 WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 403 socialist readers in Europe) in terms of world revolution, Parvus fully participated both in anti-Russian and anti-British war propaganda and in the CUP’s struggle for national sovereignty in the shadow of the war. He portrayed Britain as the jealous enemy of modern Germany and above all as the greatest enemy of the Ottoman Empire, which it planned to dismember.47 Even before 1914, he had confirmed his readers in the opinion that when European financiers and diplomats demanded reforms, they “only wanted to break off something from the Ottoman Empire and to live at its expense.”48 The CUP had used the same language when international diplomatic negotiations produced the reform plan for the Kurdo-Armenian provinces in 1913–14. Parvus was well informed about the Armenian problem in Ottoman eastern Anatolia. In his first years in Istanbul, he maintained contacts with leftist Armenian politicians and often visited the editorial office of Azadamard (Fight for Freedom), an Armenian daily.49 In early January 1913, shortly after discussions about reform had reemerged in European diplomacy, he published an article in a German newspaper that openly identified the real problems: the terror-stricken Armenian rural population; increasing aggression by Kurdish chiefs and landlords; and an Ottoman government that gave the Armenians many hollow promises but failed to prosecute crimes, instead coopting and arming the Kurds, whom “it considered the state-supporting element because [they are] Muslim.”50 Did Parvus contribute to the general shift in the position of official Germany? In fact, in the first half of 1913, German diplomacy underwent a fundamental change with respect to its hitherto conniving approach to the Armenian question. It now considered justified the main Armenian demands and suggested that the “German press would have to give up its previous negative attitude toward everything Armenian.”51 Articles sympathetic to the Armenians Ottoman press. An Ottoman–Russian war alliance would therefore also have found propagandists in 1914, Volker Adam has argued. See Adam, Russlandmuslime, 219–305 and 455. 47 Parvus, İngiltere galib gelirse... İtilaf-ı müselles’in zafer ve galibiyetinde husula gelecek tebedüllat-ı araziye (Istanbul: Kader Maatbası, 1330 [March 1914–March 1915]), 12–31, quoted in Mustafa Aksakal, The Ottoman Road to War in 1914: The Ottoman Empire and the First World War (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008), 54–55. 48 “Devlet ve millet,” Türk Yurdu, 15 Teşrînisâni 1328 [28 November 1912], 2:56–57. 49 Raymond Kévorkian, Le génocide des arméniens (Paris: Odile Jacob, 2006), 175. 50 Parvus, “Armenische Wirren” (name of newspaper not mentioned), 8 January 1913, Eduard Bernstein Papers, G 354, International Institute of Social History, Amsterdam. 51 The German documentation on the reform issue, mainly letters by Ambassador Wangenheim, is in Politisches Archiv des Auswärtigen Amtes (Political Archive of the Foreign Ministry, PA-AA)/ R14077–14084 of the German State Archives. Quotation from PA-AA/R14078 (according to the Internet edition at www.armenocide.de, established by Wolfgang and Sigrid Gust, which includes the English translation for this piece). 404 HANS-LUKAS KIESER all of a sudden began to appear in the German press in the spring of 1913,52 and Germany became a crucial partner with Russia in the reform negotiations in the second half of 1913 that led to the plan of 8 February 1914. Parvus, however, did not support the reforms; and only later did he enter into direct contact with the German ambassador in Istanbul, Hans von Wangenheim. The main reason for his contradictory stance on this core issue of the Eastern Question in the late Belle Époque was, again, his anti-Russian attitude. This finally led him to give unrealistic and dangerous advice to the Ottoman and German governments at the beginning of World War I. He proposed a comprehensive scheme of uprisings in tsarist Russia by ethno-religious minorities and proletarians in collaboration with the Triple Alliance, including Armenian-supported revolts in the Caucasus. Sometimes together with Dr. Max Zimmer of the German Embassy, he supported the German Foreign Office (GFO) in efforts to organize pro-German national movements in Bucharest, Sofia, Ukraine, and Georgia.53 With or without Parvus’s advice—we lack concrete sources to say with any certainty—the CUP invited the ARF to lead an anti-Russian guerrilla war aimed at preparing the Ottoman conquest of the Caucasus. By the summer of 1914, however, the Armenians had lost all trust in Parvus, seeing him as an agent of the CUP and Germany.54 Despite the ARF’s refusal to take part in what it saw as a suicidal act, attempts at revolutionizing the Caucasus began in early August. In a seminal German memorandum, dated October 1914 and titled Revolutionizing the Islamic Possessions of Our Enemies, by Max von Oppenheim, a collaborator of the GFO, derogatory language was once more used when speaking of the Armenians and other Eastern Christians, as if German diplomacy had not reassessed its attitude toward them and self-critically reconsidered such language.55 In fact, in August 1914, German diplomacy abandoned the commitment to reforms it had embraced only a few months earlier. The Ottoman government, too, suspended its reform obligations. In September, it announced the abrogation of the Capitulations (tax and legal privileges for foreigners). It also succeeded in obtaining large sums of German 52 See, for example, Paul Rohrbach, “Basra–Kuwait,” Frankfurter Zeitung, 27 May 1913, in Rohrbach to Zimmermann, 22 June 1913, PA-AA/R14079/MF7093/65–75. 53 Wangenheim’s report of 8 January 1915 to the GFO on his meeting with Parvus, facsimile in Ladislaus Singer, Raubt das Geraubte: Tagebuch der Weltrevolution, 1917 (Stuttgart: Seewald, 1967), 153f.; Wolff (no first name), “La Bulgarie germanophile,” Gazette de Lausanne, 26 January 1915. 54 Kévorkian, Génocide, 175; report of the Russian Ministry of the Interior, dated 15 December 1915, quoted in Elisabeth Heresch, Geheimakte Parvus: Die gekaufte Revolution. Biographie (Munich: Langen Müller, 2000), 225. 55 Gottfried Hagen, “German Heralds of Holy War: Orientalists and Applied Oriental Studies,” Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa, and the Middle East 24, 2 (2004): 149–50. WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 405 money to prepare for an attack in the Caucasus. In a memorandum of early 1915 for the GFO, Parvus detailed his scheme without reassessing the Caucasian part that put the Armenians at risk.56 It is true that Dr. Johannes Lepsius, the president of the German–Armenian Friendship Association, also called on the Ottoman Armenians in December 1914 to support the war effort. Yet in contrast to Parvus and the CUP, but in accordance with the ARF’s official position, he limited this appeal to Armenians on Ottoman territory.57 Parvus had supported the repudiation of the Capitulations and the cancellation of the Dette Publique (service on the Ottoman debt). He fully backed the anti-Russian war effort and the insurgency scheme. Pleading for democracy, he argued that it was Germany’s duty to destroy and partition the tsarist empire and thereby trigger revolution and democracy. “Russian democracy can be achieved only through a complete destruction of tsarism and the dismemberment of Russia into small states,” he stated in his meeting with Wangenheim in early 1915.58 In the same sense he spurred his socialist comrades in Germany to give full support to the war effort, thus contributing strongly to the Burgfrieden (national unity across party lines) in Germany. For his Turkish audience he drew the picture of a strong, modern, Turkish-led Islamic empire that extended from Edirne to Basra and blocked Russian expansion to the south.59 Just as Parvus had anticipated the world war, it now galvanized him. “I made the war the starting point of our tactics. Above all, the military might of tsarism, that strongest foundation of reaction, had to be brought down. For this purpose, the excellent military organization created by the German general staff had to be used,” Parvus wrote back in Germany in his newly founded journal, Die Glocke: Sozialistische Halbmonatsschrift, in early autumn 1915.60 He had become a warmonger, former friends charged. Yet many German socialists were fascinated by what they saw as his intellectual brilliance, the necessary cunning he exhibited in Realpolitik, and his personal success,61 whereas the GFO wrongly believed it could use Parvus for its own agenda. In Germany, he not only founded his own publishing house but also engaged in a profitable, though partly illegal, commerce among Russia, Germany, and other countries. Thanks to his clear and effective pro-German commitment in Istanbul, he was also an important contact on European matters for the GFO and the political 56 Memorandum by Dr. Helphand, without date but dated by the GFO 9 March 1915, published in Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 361–74. 57 Lepsius to GFO, 22 December 1914, PA-AA/R14085. 58 Wangenheim’s report of 8 January 1915. 59 Almanya galib gelirse, reproduced in Sencer, Türkiye’nin malî tutsaklığı, 277–79. 60 “Meine Stellungnahme zum Krieg,” Die Glocke 1–3 (1 October 1915): 148–62. 61 Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 9–11 and 175–76. 406 HANS-LUKAS KIESER section of the General Staff, especially with regard to Russia. Though based on a much earlier idea, his scheme to use the world war to revolutionize Russia crystallized after the summer of 1914, and he presented an elaborate plan to the GFO in early 1915.62 Finally, in the spring of 1917, when Chancellor Theobald von Bethmann Hollweg realized how favorably a revolution in Russia might affect Germany and ordered the embassy in Bern to contact Russian exiles in Switzerland to offer them transit through Germany, Parvus could fully play the role of intermediary. German agency, German money, and Parvus’s actions were decisive factors in Lenin’s journey to Russia and the making of the Russian Revolution.63 Lenin himself refused to meet Parvus personally. Yusuf Akçura, in contrast, had met Lenin after attending the conference of the Union des nationalités (Union of Nationalities) in Lausanne in June 1916—a conference in which Parvus seems not to have participated, though it represented an anti-tsarist gathering. Akçura began to see the Russian social revolutionaries as allies against the “imperialists” of the Entente.64 In the summer of 1917, Parvus co-organized a mainly socialist peace congress in Stockholm. (The congress ultimately did not take place.) Talat, now grand vizier and pasha, sent the Turkist Ali Hüseyinzâde and Nesim Masliyah, members of the Ottoman parliament whom he labeled socialists, to the planned congress. This caused Armenian socialists from Geneva to protest against “the pseudosocialist cynicism” of an Ottoman delegation that Talat had sent above all to neutralize the Armenian voices. Turkey’s Austrian allies, meanwhile, wanted the Ottoman delegates to contribute to the failure of the congress by making maximalist demands, such as the maintenance of the Ottoman Empire in its entirety.65 Bitterly disappointed that the Bolsheviks were rejecting him despite his decisive contribution to the making of the October Revolution, Parvus turned fiercely anti-Bolshevik. He began now to emphasize democracy even more, including elements of private enterprise, which, in an unusual move, he now saw 62 Memorandum, dated by the GFO 9 March 1915, published in Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 361–74. 63 Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 248–66; Gautschi, Lenin, 164–76 and 249–71. Beside the considerable sums of German money Parvus received, he financed Dr. Victor Naumann, who had direct contacts to the Imperial Chancellery, out of his own pocket for his services as a special emissary for himself and Adolf Müller in those years (Pohl, Adolf Müller, 182–83). 64 The Lausanne conference did not mention any nationality problem in the Ottoman Empire, but like Parvus—and Erich Ludendorff, the joint chief of the German General Staff since August 1916—postulated the splitting up of the Russian Empire. Cf. Kieser, Vorkämpfer, 82. 65 Cf. “Sitzung des Holländisch-skandinavischen Komitees mit der Delegation aus der Türkei, 12. Juli 1917,” annotated minutes, http://labourhistory.net/stockholm1917/documents/p56.php, accessed 8 September 2009; Johann H. Bernstorff, Erinnerungen und Briefe (Zurich: Polygraphischer Verlag, 1936), 127; Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 11. WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 407 as the cornerstone of the success of socialism.66 This from the same man who, in the months after the February Revolution of 1917, had breathed fire and brimstone against Aleksandr Kerenskii’s left-liberal government.67 Conclusion In the introduction to the first issue of Die Glocke, Parvus stated: “We do not want to be influenced in our judgment by consideration for friends or comrades, not even by pity for poor and persecuted people… . We will express the whole, naked truth freely and plainly, without caring whom it benefits or whom it harms. Because knowledge is the highest contribution that an individual can make to the progress of humanity.”68 He wrote these words at the end of August 1915, when the first phase of the genocide of the Armenian community in Asia Minor, a mass crime of hitherto unknown scale, was nearly complete. Of this event the influential agitator and conduit between Istanbul and Berlin must have been perfectly aware. What guided Parvus’s intellectual activity and gave him a sense of mission and personal importance extending beyond ethics and compassion for “poor and persecuted people” was an apocalyptic scheme of war leading to revolution in the name of an abstract proletariat. While he emphasized this lofty goal, he did not, in fact, care about his own relation to, or the impact of his agitation on, the human realities in the trenches or in Ottoman Armenia or elsewhere. Claiming the right to speak in the first person plural, he argued that the iron laws of history and the aims of revolution demanded “our” sacrifices. Sincere or not, Parvus was too late to be taken seriously by most of his contemporaries when, in 1917, he began to formulate an eloquent, albeit Eurocentric, lament for the insane consequences of the world war—a war whose historical and revolutionary necessity he had inculcated in his readers, in particular the German socialists and soldiers, for three years. “All parties had calculated wrongly,” he wrote in the summer of 1917, complaining of the monstrous destruction caused by the ongoing war. He began to feel the even more catastrophic consequences for Europe of Germany’s defeat and what he thought would be its unavoidable retaliatory mania in the aftermath. Yet he offered no mea culpa, nor did he question the propaganda for a German victory by which he had promoted his insane concept of a German–Ottoman war of destruction against Russia. Like other players of the 1910s, he was unwilling to take responsibility for what had gone fundamentally wrong and for his own inflammatory role in precipitating this outcome. On the 66 Cf. Alexander Helphand, Der Arbeitersozialismus und die Weltrevolution: Briefe an die deutschen Arbeiter (Olten [Switzerland]: Kommissionsverlag W. Trösch, 1919), 13 and 16–17. 67 Parvus, Meine Antwort an Kerenski. 68 Die Glocke 1 (1 September 1915). 408 HANS-LUKAS KIESER contrary, he did not abstain after the war from glorifying, somewhat presumptuously, “the struggle we have risked” and the “responsibility we have assumed.”69 Nevertheless, he reassessed his political thought in the light of the postwar situation. In an address “to the French Germany-haters,” he insisted that the Germans would become the organizers of the next world war if the German Empire were destroyed, if reparations were too heavy, and if Western Europe, in particular Germany and France, did not cooperate against the Russian peril. Again Russia—this time, Bolshevik Russia—was Parvus’s chief enemy. Interestingly, Turkey once again disappeared from Parvus’s world view though it would have been a relevant lesson in applied national “social revolution.”70 Together with such politically diverse figures as the Turcologist Ernst Jäckh, the Orientalist Max von Oppenheim, the left-liberal politician Friedrich Naumann, the journalist Erwin Nossig, and officers like Enver Pasha’s friend Hans Humann, Parvus had been among the German friends of the Young Turk regime and of the war party in Istanbul. Like them, though with different ultimate goals, he had embraced the imperialist agenda of a German-led “Greater Central Europe” whose influence had to extend to Russia and to the Ottoman world.71 For them, Germany—in particular, Germany’s economy, culture, and science—deserved first place in the world. This was true also for Parvus, even if he put German domination into a Eurocentric history of progress toward global socialism. Parvus’s political network and field of action during the war was mirrored in post-1918 Germany by the paradoxical interactions among right-wing German officers, incriminated CUP members in exile, revolutionary socialists from Russia, and German politicians in Berlin. For many of them Parvus’s villa in Berlin was a hub. Though he remained loyal in theory to a socialist worldview, he had contributed in late Ottoman Turkey to bringing together leftist and rightist concepts of revolution; this syncretism was reflected in his intellectual and political networks and eventually entered Kemalism, in particular through the lasting concept of the national economy or millî iktisad.72 69 Parvus, Aufbau und Wiedergutmachung (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaft, 1921), especially 233 and 252; Parvus, Die soziale Bilanz des Krieges (Berlin: Verlag für Sozialwissenschaften, 1917), esp. 16. 70 Parvus, Aufbau und Wiedergutmachung, 195–98, cf. 241. For the term “social revolution,“ see 396 of the present article. 71 Cf. Ernst Jäckh, Das grössere Mitteleuropa: Ein Werkbund-Vortrag (Weimar: Kiepenheuer, 1916); Jäckh, Weltsaat: Erlebtes und Erstrebtes (Stuttgart: Deutsche Verlagsanstalt, 1960), on Parvus 59; for radical militarist statements by Parvus in favor of German domination during a visit to the GFO in December 1917, see Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 301. 72 In contrast, pan-Turkist Enver Pasha’s attempt to profit from post-1918 German–Russian socialist connections in Berlin and Moscow did not in the end succeed, though he was able in 1920 to participate in the Baku Congress led by G. E. Zinov´ev. Cf. Azade-Ayse Rorlich, “Fellow WORLD WAR AND WORLD REVOLUTION 409 Parvus excelled as a suggestive mentor and missionary, an effective agitator, and as Scharlau and Zeman have underlined, a very clever wartime merchant.73 His aspiration to qualify as a thought-provoking scholar of the social sciences, a true-to-life journalist, or a critical witness of his time was to remain overshadowed by his distorting ideological commitment to war. Though clad in scientific language and an impressive body of written work, his emotionally charged fantasies of war and revolution—along with his sweeping notions of history, class, and society—distorted Parvus’s notion of the realities of human experience and of the social order. The idea of “revolution” in fact proved to be a contributing factor to World War I, not an antidote to it, despite the impressive forces for peace that existed among socialists. Hence the pervasive willingness to promote violence that fed World War I, from both the Right and most of the Left. More than any other nonstate actor, Parvus explored all the possibilities for a left–right synergy for revolution and geostrategic transformation in the 1910s. The world that he knew, and that he tried to dominate intellectually, was the economic and political power game of the “Old World” of Europe, Russia, and the Ottoman Empire. He was not familiar with the historical forces at work in England and, in particular, the United States; America’s synergy of modernity and millennialism, and its distinctive notions of historical progress and Jewish– Christian relations, would have profoundly called into question his Eurocentric, secular-apocalyptic, anti-bourgeois approach.74 Parvus lacked a critical analysis of his own formative experiences in late tsarist Russia, including those in shtetls that were undergoing existential crisis, new social rifts, and an apocalyptic mood. Opting to study in Basel, not Zurich or Geneva, he tried to detach himself to a degree from these and similar dynamics in diaspora circles. His emotional intelligence, however, obeyed narrowly power-centered anti-Russian impulses, which he could easily connect to those of the political elite in Istanbul. Expelled in early 1920 from Wädenswil by Lake Zurich—where, from November 1918 on, he had wanted to enjoy the sunset of his life away from the depressing devastation of war—Parvus spent his last years in a villa in Berlin.75 Here he died in 1924, whereas his friend Jäckh was given the chance to leave the Old World after its seminal catastrophe. In the United States, Jäckh discovered Travelers: Enver Pasha and the Bolshevik Government, 1918–1920,” Asian Affairs 13, 3 (1982): 288–96: İlhan Tekeli and Selim İlkin, Cumhuriyetin harcı: Köktenci modernitenin doğuşu (Istanbul: Bilgi, 2003), 141–46; Hasan Babacan, Mehmed Talât Paşa 1874–1921 (Ankara: Türk Tarih kurumu, 2005), 204–5. 73 Cf. Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 229–30. 74 Cf. Hans-Lukas Kieser, Nearest East: American Millennialism and Mission to the Middle East (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 2010), 15–33. 75 Scharlau and Zeman, Freibeuter der Revolution, 319–43. 410 HANS-LUKAS KIESER a different world, one that allowed him to make for himself a new personal, intellectual, and scholarly life; for example, he conceived of a trans-Atlantic anti-Soviet alliance and founded the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Columbia University in New York. After having believed in and advocated the transformative military power of Wilhelmine Germany, Jäckh put his trust successfully in the new transatlantic superpower. In his trajectory, more than in Parvus’s, one may discover seeds of American neoconservatism. It is true that Parvus had been a vociferous patriot of his adopted country, to whose power he had tied his political thinking in the 1910s; and, like ex-Trotskyite neoconservatives a generation later, he had been a fervent supporter of the Russian Revolution before turning vociferously anti-Bolshevik. In contrast to other intellectual supporters of war and revolution in the 1910s, especially those on the right (e.g., Filippo T. Marinetti), he had not been fascinated by any personal experience of war. Cured, moreover, of his militaristic brand of socialism, he became, after the world war, a mostly sober and at times lucid voice for a humble German pragmatism and European cooperation. Though pointedly anti-Bolshevik, his efforts now concentrated on European recovery, prosperity, and reconciliation. He still adopted the tone of a prophet, though now a more thoughtful one who focused on the peaceful reconstruction of Germany and on what he knew to be the virtues of Germany’s hard-working, moderate social democracy.76 This was a valid but late plea for a potentially peaceful European future. Before, and especially in 1914–17, as a missionary and merchant of socialist revolution, he had pushed his luck, played for high geopolitical and social-revolutionary stakes and, measured against his own goals, he had failed. Neither his German nor his Russian hopes had materialized. One area where he had a successful and lasting impact, however, was the concept and establishment of the Turkish national economy. Born of his undogmatic and unprincipled flirtation with power, it transferred aspects of leftist thinking about revolution to the Right; this Turkish development of the 1910s anticipated a menacing evolution that would later occur, in an even more radical form, in his adopted German homeland, which had suffered more lasting wounds from World War I than had Parvus himself. Blauenstrasse 12 CH-4054 Basel, Switzerland hans-lukas.kieser@uzh.ch 76 Parvus, Aufbau und Wiedergutmachung, 91–162.