Sidney Reilly

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phylo_roadking
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Re: Sidney Reilly

#16

Post by phylo_roadking » 29 May 2014, 21:07

The Reichstag gridlock was accomplished by the highly unusual cooperation between the Communists and the National Socialists and obliged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor.
To be fair - it wasn't "highly unusual" if there had been a ten-year history of similar cooperation! 8O
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Re: Sidney Reilly

#17

Post by peterhof » 29 May 2014, 21:32

phylo_roadking wrote:
The Reichstag gridlock was accomplished by the highly unusual cooperation between the Communists and the National Socialists and obliged Hindenburg to appoint Hitler as Chancellor.
To be fair - it wasn't "highly unusual" if there had been a ten-year history of similar cooperation! 8O
Please provide some instances of "similar cooperation." National Socialism - originally the German Workers Party - was founded specifically to oppose the Spartakusbund (later renamed the KPD).
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Re: Sidney Reilly

#18

Post by phylo_roadking » 29 May 2014, 21:55

Have you actually been reading this thread??? The Berlin public transport strikes of 1932, the resistance inside the Occupied Rhineland in the 1920s, etc., etc.
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Re: Sidney Reilly

#19

Post by peterhof » 29 May 2014, 23:15

phylo_roadking wrote:Have you actually been reading this thread??? The Berlin public transport strikes of 1932, the resistance inside the Occupied Rhineland in the 1920s, etc., etc.
Communists and National Socialists fought bloody street battles and broke up one another's political meetings with sticks and brass knuckles. Just because their opinions on some matters happened to coincide does not mean we should lose sight of the forest for the trees. The basic fact remains that Communists and National Socialists were fierce competitors for the hearts and minds of the Proletariat.
We have met the enemy and he is us.

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Re: Sidney Reilly

#20

Post by phylo_roadking » 29 May 2014, 23:28

...except all THS -
Communists and National Socialists fought bloody street battles and broke up one another's political meetings with sticks and brass knuckles. Just because their opinions on some matters happened to coincide does not mean we should lose sight of the forest for the trees. The basic fact remains that Communists and National Socialists were fierce competitors for the hearts and minds of the Proletariat.
...is just moving the goalposts; we WERE discussing active cooperation - of which there are FAR more examples than just the Reichstag in 1932.
Twenty years ago we had Johnny Cash, Bob Hope and Steve Jobs. Now we have no Cash, no Hope and no Jobs....
Lord, please keep Kevin Bacon alive...

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Re: Sidney Reilly

#21

Post by peterhof » 29 May 2014, 23:34

phylo_roadking wrote:
Communists and National Socialists fought bloody street battles and broke up one another's political meetings with sticks and brass knuckles. Just because their opinions on some matters happened to coincide does not mean we should lose sight of the forest for the trees. The basic fact remains that Communists and National Socialists were fierce competitors for the hearts and minds of the Proletariat.
...is just moving the goalposts; we WERE discussing active cooperation - of which there are FAR more examples than just the Reichstag in 1932.
Collusion in the Reichstag brought cooperation to a whole new level. We do not have any real disagreement.
We have met the enemy and he is us.

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Re: Sidney Reilly

#22

Post by Terry Duncan » 30 May 2014, 00:21

peterhof wrote:The New York Mirror was mistaken. The Los Angeles court decision meant no such thing and there is no reason to consider his book "a huge literary hoax." Valtin/Krebs entered the United States illegally in 1926 on an official KPD mission to carry out an assassination as he explains in his book. Krebs operated under a number of guises and aliases and, like Sidney Reilly, it is difficult if not impossible to establish the facts.
Valtin was certainly not exactly honest, it sort of goes with the territory, and Reilly was no different, possibly playing different sides as circumstances required or as suited him. I would be somewhat inclined to look for supporting evidence for anything either claimed.

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Re: Sidney Reilly

#23

Post by James A Pratt III » 06 Jun 2014, 01:22

According to the book "The Sword and the Shield" on the Soviet secret police by Chris Andrews and vasili Mitrokin the whole Reilly or lockhart plot was a Cheka agent provocateur operation from the start. Lenin may have ordered it. The Allied agents had no chance what so ever of overthrowing Lenin. Reilly does not come off all that good in this book.

Kaplan used a Browning possibly a 1900 s/n 150489 which she shot and badly wounded Lenin.

The Bolseviks also issued a couple of hostage orders:

4 September 1918 decree on taking hostages to be executed in reprisal for future attacks on Bolshevik leaders and any other opposion to Bolshevik rule.

5 September 1918 "Resolution" class enemies of the regime were to be isolated in concentration camps and all persons with links to "white guard" organizations, conspiracies and seditious actions were subject to immediate executions.

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Re: Sidney Reilly

#24

Post by peterhof » 06 Jun 2014, 21:30

Yes. After a failed stint as a landlord on his mother’s estate and some very modest success as a practicing lawyer, Lenin had become, in Possony’s term, the “compulsive revolutionary.” For the rest of his life every waking moment, all of his abundant energies and efforts would be utterly devoted to radical politics. The rest of the family likewise was forced onto the Marxist path as the assassination attempt by Alexander (Lenin's older brother) had closed the social and career doors of respectable society even while opening doors to the revolutionary underground. The elder Ulyanov, loyal servant of the Czar, would have been mortified to learn that all of his children and even his wife would become revolutionaries.

A life of subversion and conspiracy had prepared Lenin well. Just a month after the Bolshevik coup d’état, Lenin had decreed formation of the dreaded CheKa — “Extraordinary Commission for Struggle against Counterrevolution and Sabotage.” Hand-picked by Lenin for the job of organizing the CheKa was Felix Dzerzhinsky. According to Steinberg, the Commissar of Justice, Dzerzhinsky “was a revolutionary who . . . brought into the revolution an unquenchable hatred of his class enemies. He had a slender, haggard figure, a nervous twitching face, a satanic, pointed beard, and blue eyes behind which a dry flame of fanaticism gleamed.” His favorite phrase was “We don’t want justice, we want to settle accounts.” Ably assisted by his two killers-in-chief, Peters and Latsis, Dzerzhinsky began the task of ridding Russia of “parasitic elements of the population.”
Latsis, a particularly odious character, described the purpose of the Cheka:

“We are exterminating the bourgeois as a class. We are not looking for evidence or witnesses to reveal the words or deeds against the Soviet power. The first question we ask is: to what class does he belong, what are his origins, upbringing, education or profession? These questions define the fate of the accused. This is the essence of the Red Terror.”

The first “class enemies” were interred in camps on the Solovetsky Islands near Archangel - the “mother tumor,” as Alexander Solshenitsyn put it, “that metastasized into the Gulag.”

The CheKa, like other organs of repression, was staffed largely by minorities such as Poles, Armenians, Jews and Latvians. “Soft, too soft is the Russian”, Lenin had often complained. “He is incapable of applying the harsh measures of revolutionary terror.” These “measures” included: “Dispatch to the front, compulsory labor, confiscation, arrests, and execution by shooting.”
Nor were such measures to be restricted to “class enemies.” In one meeting of the Sovnarkom at which Lenin presided, it was decided to make an example of foresters who had failed to fulfill their wood quota: “. . . when a dozen or two have been shot, the rest will tackle the job in earnest.” Characteristically, Lenin ordered that “the shooting of the foresters, though adopted, must be omitted from the official minutes . . .” By the time of Dzerzhinky’s death in 1926, the Cheka was about twenty times the size of the Okhrana which had numbered some 14,000 at its height.

It is probably true that Reilly's mission to unseat Lenin had little chance of success. Later, after narrowly escaping just steps ahead of pursuing CheKa agents, he returned to the Soviet Union and walked into "The Trust" never realizing that this was a trap set by Stalin's secret police until it was too late. Too bad for Reilly and the world that Kerensky failed to hang Lenin and Trotsky when he had the chance.
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Re: Sidney Reilly

#25

Post by James A Pratt III » 06 Jun 2014, 22:02

Peterhof a fine reply. I read that the okhrana only had a little over 1000 field agents so to speak. Okhrana is Russian for security or protection. back to the Cheka:

Bolshevik Commissar for Justice N.V. Krylenko "We must execute not only the guilty. Execution of the innocent will impress the masses even more."

The people killed in the month after the wounding of Lenin didn't include many political enemies. The Bolsheviks basicly shot anybody they had in prison at this time. I would say many of their victims were peasants caught violating the Bolsheviks grain monopoly laws by trying to sell a bag of flour. Other victims include ex-officers and many upper and middle class people who would have been willing to support the Bolsheviks if only they could restore some sort of order. Some of their victims include a number of former ministers of the Tsarist regime who by 1918 were political harmless. The following were most like all executed on orders of Cheka leader Dzerzhinski:
former Ministers of the Interior N.A. Makralov, A.N. Khvostov, A.D. Protopopov
former war minester M.A. Belynev
former ministers of Justice I.G. Shchelovitov, N.A. Makarov

Also executed outside Perm Russia on 4 September 1918 with a group of hostages were:
Countess Anastasia Hendrikova ex lady in waiting to the Empress Alexandra
Catherine Schneider ex Imperial court letrice (teacher)

The Bolshevik newspapers of the period contained numerous columns about the people who were executed.

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Re: Sidney Reilly

#26

Post by peterhof » 07 Jun 2014, 01:03

While not immediately relevant to Reilly, Lenin's character was shaped by the execution of his much-admired older brother, Alexander. Here is what happened.

In the manner not unusual for younger siblings, Vladimir—the name literally means: rule-the-world—worshipped his older brother. He would read the same books and watch as Alexander performed biological experiments in his room. As the two grew older they became aware of differences between them and by the time they reached their teens, Vladimir had as much reason to resent as to admire Alexander. Anna remembers Alexander confiding to her that he did not like Vladimir.
In January 1886, the elder Ulyanov suddenly died, probably of a brain hemorrhage. He was only fifty-five and had attained a position which entitled him to be addressed as “Excellency.” Alexander, who was studying biology at the University in St. Petersburg, was devastated by his father’s premature death. In her memoirs, Anna recalls that he abandoned his studies and spent his days pacing up and down in his room.

It is not known by what means Alexander was transformed from student to Marxist revolutionary, but when he returned to St. Petersburg in September, 1886, after attending his father’s funeral, he fell in with a group of radical Marxist students who were plotting to assassinate the Czar. The Okhrana had become aware of the plot and the conspirators were arrested on March 1st, 1887. Anna was also arrested when she was found in Alexander’s room.
They were the original ‘gang that couldn’t shoot straight’ as the bombs which Alexander had assembled in his room were found to be defective and their Browning pistols were incapable of firing. Vladimir reacted without emotion to the news of his brother’s arrest, commenting merely that “It’s a serious matter and may turn out badly for Sasha.”

Had the young would-be regicides repented or shown signs of remorse, they would probably have received short prison sentences. But Alexander, given a chance to speak, chose to lecture his judges on the inevitability of socialism. Standing up straight he informed the court that he had read Marx’ Das Kapital, “and then it was,” he declared, “that these ill-defined dreams of freedom, equality, and brotherhood took possession of me in their truly scientific and social aspects, and I learned that it was not only possible to change society, but that change was inevitable.” Ignoring admonitions from the court that he should not speak in theoretical terms, he went on:

"Our intelligentsia is physically so weak and disorganized at the present time that it cannot embark upon open war. Only the terrorist is in a position to defend the right to think freely and the right to participate intellectually in the life of society. Terror, as a form of warfare, originated in the nineteenth century; it is the sole defensive weapon which a minority can resort to in order to demonstrate its physical strength and the consciousness that it is fighting for justice. Russian society is so constituted that we can defend our rights only in these duels with the state power."

On a copy of the trial transcript, the Czar wrote: “This is touching.” It is impossible not to admire Alexander’s youthful courage – the harebrained Marxist dogma seems designed to capture young minds in the full bloom of idealism but not yet tempered by time or wisdom.

The trial concluded on March 19. Most of the defendants were sentenced to terms of hard labor, but five who were unrepentant, including Alexander, were sentenced to death. To his mother who pleaded with him to ask for clemency, Alexander explained: “I cannot do it after everything I said in court. It would be insincere.”
His lawyer, Knyazev, recalled that Alexander told her: “Imagine, Mama, two men facing each other at a duel. One of them has already shot at his opponent, the other has yet to do so, when the one who has shot asks him not to. No, I cannot behave like that.” On the morning of May 8, 1887, having declined their last chance to appeal for clemency, Alexander and four of his compatriots were hanged in the courtyard of Schlüsselburg Fortress. Anna was released with orders to stay under police supervision.

Vladimir, who was then seventeen, did not weep or show any emotion when informed of his brother’s death. His only alleged comment was: “We shall have to find another way.” There can be little doubt however, that these events affected him deeply. Churchill wrote of him that “The intellect was capacious and in some phases superb. It was capable of universal comprehension in a degree rarely reached among men. The execution of the elder brother deflected this broad white light through a prism and the prism was Red.”
We have met the enemy and he is us.

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Re: Sidney Reilly

#27

Post by James A Pratt III » 07 Jun 2014, 21:26

Note Browning Pistols which were one of the weapons of choice of revolutionaries in the early 1900s weren't around when Alexander was hung. The first model was the 1900.

Books on the Okhrana-Terrorist struggle.
Autocracy Under Siege John W Daly
The Watchfull State " "
Thou Shalt Kill Anna Geifman
Fontanka 16 Charles S Arudo & Serge A Stepanov

If you go to amazon.com you will get to read the first pages of the book "Stalin and His hangmen" they mention how in 2002 the Russian put out stamps with some of the early leaders of the Cheka on them who carried out mass killing on their own people and no one or Russia or abroad protested this. This would be like the Germans putting Himmler, heydrich and Eichmann on postage stamps.

I hope this is of some use or interest

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Re: Sidney Reilly

#28

Post by James A Pratt III » 07 Jun 2014, 22:10

Note the Gendarme force part of which was involved in regular criminal police work at its height had 15,718 men in the fall of 1916.

Another book of interest on this subject:
"Young Stalin"

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Re: Sidney Reilly

#29

Post by peterhof » 07 Jun 2014, 23:36

James A Pratt III wrote:Note Browning Pistols which were one of the weapons of choice of revolutionaries in the early 1900s weren't around when Alexander was hung. The first model was the 1900.

Books on the Okhrana-Terrorist struggle.
Autocracy Under Siege John W Daly
The Watchfull State " "
Thou Shalt Kill Anna Geifman
Fontanka 16 Charles S Arudo & Serge A Stepanov

If you go to amazon.com you will get to read the first pages of the book "Stalin and His hangmen" they mention how in 2002 the Russian put out stamps with some of the early leaders of the Cheka on them who carried out mass killing on their own people and no one or Russia or abroad protested this. This would be like the Germans putting Himmler, heydrich and Eichmann on postage stamps.

I hope this is of some use or interest
Given the post-War governments-in-exile of eastern Europe, the life-and-death struggle between national vs. international Socialism, the interwar world was a swirling witches cauldron of intrigue, conspiracy, treachery, duplicity, and betrayal. Men like Reilly certainly had their work cut out for them. :)
We have met the enemy and he is us.

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