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History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks
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.
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.
302 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 2008
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About the author
Sean McMeekin
14 books227 followersSean McMeekin is an American historian, focused on European history of the early 20th century. His main research interests include modern German history, Russian history, communism, and the origins of the First and Second World Wars and the roles of Russia and the Ottoman Empire.
He has authored eight books, along with scholarly articles which have appeared in journals such as Contemporary European History, Common Knowledge, Current History, Historically Speaking, The World Today, and Communisme. He is currently Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College.
He has authored eight books, along with scholarly articles which have appeared in journals such as Contemporary European History, Common Knowledge, Current History, Historically Speaking, The World Today, and Communisme. He is currently Francis Flournoy Professor of European History and Culture at Bard College.
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June 4, 2025“In his excellent 2009 book History’s Greatest Heist, historian Sean McMeekin demonstrated that without the crucial financial involvement of Aschberg, the very fragile early Bolshevik regime probably could not have survived. The political upheaval touched off by the Bolshevik coup and the civil war that soon followed had brought Russia’s own industry to a complete standstill, so without the heavy importation of weapons and other war material as well as the cash to pay for such vital trading goods, Lenin’s forces would have faced a desperate situation.”
-Ron Unz, “McCarthyism Part III”
-Ron Unz, “McCarthyism Part III”
July 8, 2017
This book is marred by an overreliance on lists and numbers, as well as a confused chronology, but its subject is simply fascinating.
As the author points out, libraries and movie theaters are filled with stories about looted Nazi treasure and Nazi gold, yet the even larger story of Soviet theft after the Russian Revolution has been ignored. While Nazi Germany throughout its existence stole about $300 million in gold to send to Switzerland, the Bolsheviks sold more than that amount of gold in just 18 months near the end of their Civil War. And while stolen Nazi treasure was only a miniscule part of their economy, in the first few years of the Bolshevik regime, stolen treasure was just about the only good their economy produced. Thus the sale of priceless pictures, ancient icons, and Romanov gold ensured the survival of one of history's most brutal regimes.
The first task of the Bolshevik regime after the October 1917 revolution was the looting of the nation's banks. Yet Russia's bank employees went on strike, and refused to hand over or interpret their books to the ignorant revolutionaries. When the strike was finally broken in March 1918, the Bolsheviks used people's savings accounts to pay their soldiers with "real money," the old Tsarist notes, as opposed to the worthless inflated notes they themselves printed. The Bolsheviks also demanded that all safe-deposit box owners hand their keys over to the state, and, when many refused, the government started a safe-busting operation, the "Safe Commission," that opened almost 15,000 of these over the next few years. The safes' contents of ruble notes and family heirlooms were tossed in piles to be sold. The banks themselves, however, became almost worthless, because, as happened time and again over the next decade, the vast wealth of Russia on which they were based disappeared when they were managed by inept and ideological communists.
Russia's cultural patrimony was another source of funds. Under the former engineer Leonid Krasin, the writer Maxim Gorky, and his wife Maria Andreeva, the government set up the "Commissariat for the Storage and Registration of Artistic and Historical Monuments" in 1918, later transformed into the the "Gokhran" in 1920. "Registration" was the Bolshevik term for collecting items to sell, items that were later "depersonalized," or officially turned over to the state. The Bolsheviks would rampage through towns and buildings, searching for any peasant with a few silver spoons or any apartment with a few pearls and put them in the "registry," not to protect them but to sell them abroad. In 1922, during a Bolshevik induced famine, Lenin and Trotsky decided to attack the Orthodox Church, demanding that they turn "Gold into Bread," and sell their artifacts to feed starving peasants. In fact, the author shows that the Orthodox Church had been selling their own goods to feed their members, but that made the Bolsheviks look inept by comparison, so the government disbanded the church famine relief committee and jailed its members. Lenin in fact said that the "desperate hunger" of the peasants was necessary for ensuring their "neutrality" in the "battle to remove the church valuables." In the midst of the famine, soldiers began plucking pearls one by one off icons or working as graverobbers removing jewelry from corpses. When these were sold abroad, the money did not go to bread. Most, ironically, went to guns and ammunition to shoot peasants trying to defend their churches (1,200 priests and over 20,000 peasants were killed in these battles), or to Rolls Royces and chocolate, tobacco, and fruits for the Bolshevik elite. The picture of these elites, emphasized time and again in the book, is of a handful of slogan-spouting criminals, with boundless cynicism.
One problem, however, was that the Bolshevik's trashing of foreign countries wealth and properties in Russia meant they were subject to blockade until early 1920. They thus had to rely on sympathetic businessmen like the banker Olof Aschberg of Sweden (who earlier had helped wire money to help Lenin return to Russia) to spirit out the loot. They also sent top officials abroad with suitcases filled with millions in notes or jewelry to their few diplomatic posts to hawk on overseas markets. After David Lloyd George of Britain said he would not enforce the blockade after 1920, foreign countries began rushing to secure these Bolshevik goodies, despite their earlier qualms. Almost $600 million gold bars were sold abroad, and auction houses in Berlin and Vienna made mints selling classic Russian icons and jewelry. (There is a lesson here in the problems enforcing contemporary sanctions against Russia.) As Lenin himself said, the capitalists would sell the communists the rope by which they would be hanged.
So this is an amazing story, absent from the history books and well worth telling. But lists of every item stolen, say, from one Anglican church in Moscow (213 dinner knives, 315 dinner forks, 98 dinner spoons, 179 tea spoons, 62 dessert forks and knives, 14 ashtrays, and so on...), or the lists of every plane engine and gun brought from abroad, can get wearisome. Nonetheless, the book finally helps explain why a small band of ideologues and criminals was able to fund a world-shaking revolution.
As the author points out, libraries and movie theaters are filled with stories about looted Nazi treasure and Nazi gold, yet the even larger story of Soviet theft after the Russian Revolution has been ignored. While Nazi Germany throughout its existence stole about $300 million in gold to send to Switzerland, the Bolsheviks sold more than that amount of gold in just 18 months near the end of their Civil War. And while stolen Nazi treasure was only a miniscule part of their economy, in the first few years of the Bolshevik regime, stolen treasure was just about the only good their economy produced. Thus the sale of priceless pictures, ancient icons, and Romanov gold ensured the survival of one of history's most brutal regimes.
The first task of the Bolshevik regime after the October 1917 revolution was the looting of the nation's banks. Yet Russia's bank employees went on strike, and refused to hand over or interpret their books to the ignorant revolutionaries. When the strike was finally broken in March 1918, the Bolsheviks used people's savings accounts to pay their soldiers with "real money," the old Tsarist notes, as opposed to the worthless inflated notes they themselves printed. The Bolsheviks also demanded that all safe-deposit box owners hand their keys over to the state, and, when many refused, the government started a safe-busting operation, the "Safe Commission," that opened almost 15,000 of these over the next few years. The safes' contents of ruble notes and family heirlooms were tossed in piles to be sold. The banks themselves, however, became almost worthless, because, as happened time and again over the next decade, the vast wealth of Russia on which they were based disappeared when they were managed by inept and ideological communists.
Russia's cultural patrimony was another source of funds. Under the former engineer Leonid Krasin, the writer Maxim Gorky, and his wife Maria Andreeva, the government set up the "Commissariat for the Storage and Registration of Artistic and Historical Monuments" in 1918, later transformed into the the "Gokhran" in 1920. "Registration" was the Bolshevik term for collecting items to sell, items that were later "depersonalized," or officially turned over to the state. The Bolsheviks would rampage through towns and buildings, searching for any peasant with a few silver spoons or any apartment with a few pearls and put them in the "registry," not to protect them but to sell them abroad. In 1922, during a Bolshevik induced famine, Lenin and Trotsky decided to attack the Orthodox Church, demanding that they turn "Gold into Bread," and sell their artifacts to feed starving peasants. In fact, the author shows that the Orthodox Church had been selling their own goods to feed their members, but that made the Bolsheviks look inept by comparison, so the government disbanded the church famine relief committee and jailed its members. Lenin in fact said that the "desperate hunger" of the peasants was necessary for ensuring their "neutrality" in the "battle to remove the church valuables." In the midst of the famine, soldiers began plucking pearls one by one off icons or working as graverobbers removing jewelry from corpses. When these were sold abroad, the money did not go to bread. Most, ironically, went to guns and ammunition to shoot peasants trying to defend their churches (1,200 priests and over 20,000 peasants were killed in these battles), or to Rolls Royces and chocolate, tobacco, and fruits for the Bolshevik elite. The picture of these elites, emphasized time and again in the book, is of a handful of slogan-spouting criminals, with boundless cynicism.
One problem, however, was that the Bolshevik's trashing of foreign countries wealth and properties in Russia meant they were subject to blockade until early 1920. They thus had to rely on sympathetic businessmen like the banker Olof Aschberg of Sweden (who earlier had helped wire money to help Lenin return to Russia) to spirit out the loot. They also sent top officials abroad with suitcases filled with millions in notes or jewelry to their few diplomatic posts to hawk on overseas markets. After David Lloyd George of Britain said he would not enforce the blockade after 1920, foreign countries began rushing to secure these Bolshevik goodies, despite their earlier qualms. Almost $600 million gold bars were sold abroad, and auction houses in Berlin and Vienna made mints selling classic Russian icons and jewelry. (There is a lesson here in the problems enforcing contemporary sanctions against Russia.) As Lenin himself said, the capitalists would sell the communists the rope by which they would be hanged.
So this is an amazing story, absent from the history books and well worth telling. But lists of every item stolen, say, from one Anglican church in Moscow (213 dinner knives, 315 dinner forks, 98 dinner spoons, 179 tea spoons, 62 dessert forks and knives, 14 ashtrays, and so on...), or the lists of every plane engine and gun brought from abroad, can get wearisome. Nonetheless, the book finally helps explain why a small band of ideologues and criminals was able to fund a world-shaking revolution.
November 12, 2023
I really rate McMeekin's books highly - and this is one of his finest - but also least read, which is a pity, because it is by far the most original in terms of research and the light it thows on a very important and interesting subject - how Lenin's government financed itself in the very first days of revolution - and the complicity of both anti-communist governments and capitalists businesses of various types in helping it to survive - despite what those same governments and businesses might have said publicly at the time or subsequently - by supplying it with the necessities in guns and other materials they were desperately short of on which the survival of the infant Soviet state and its army depended on. In return they got gold - a great deal of it - the whole scenario is fascinating - (even the Irish rebels against Britain ended up loaning the Bolsheviks money (while they were still fighting Britain) in return for the security of some Tsarist jewellery (the loan was forgotten and the jewels lay in a drawer somewhere until sometime in the 1930's an embarrassed, very Catholic and very anti-communist Irish government insisted on the repayment of the loan and return of the tainted jewels - this story is not in the book). Capitalism always preferred money, no matter what its source to morality of what was right - even trading with those dedicated to destroy them as long as they could make money.
George Orwell wrote about this type of behaviour in Animal Farm, historians may have known it happened but not its extent - truly an eye opening book.
George Orwell wrote about this type of behaviour in Animal Farm, historians may have known it happened but not its extent - truly an eye opening book.
July 17, 2022
Interesting, if a bit chaotic. Worth to know especially the second part describing the behavior of the Allies, especially UK Prime Minister Lloyd George, discrediting the Polish side in the 1920 war , withholding supplies of equipment, lust for profits above all and manipulation of public opinion in the West by Soviet intelligence. Very timely.
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