Vol. XIII (2007), no 20 - The International Newsletter of Communist ...

The International Newletter of Communist Studies Online XIII (2007), no 20 34
paid for in hard currency – Swedish, Danish, and Norwegian crowns, Dutch guilders, US
dollars, German marks, French and Swiss francs, British pounds – which meant selling precious
metals, principally gold.
Considering the greater importance of gold movements for the fortunes of Communism than
Nazism, why has the former phenomenon attracted so much less scholarly notice? One clue
might lie in archival access. Communist sources relating to precious metals looting and Red
army procurement (principally located at the Russian Government Archive of Economics in
Moscow, RGAE) have only been available to most researchers since 1991 – and this archive
remains less well known than the State and Party Archives – whereas captured Nazi files from
the war have been combed over ever since 1945. Still, most of the Allied intelligence reports
on the outflow of precious metals from Bolshevik Russia, the post-1917 equivalent of
Operation Safehaven, were declassified decades ago. The problem of Bolshevik gold may
have disappeared from the history books, but it fairly screams out for attention in the foreign
office files of the Entente powers – to anyone who looks at them. Contemporary newspaper
accounts of the Russian Civil War and its aftermath, too, are full of colorful reporting about
Russia’s rapidly dwindling precious metals reserves, artfully mixing hard fact, rumor, and the
wildest speculation. The ongoing saga of Russian gold movements was, for years, a passing
obsession of Entente diplomats and intelligence officers, many of whom left behind copious
(though not always accurate) documentation of their findings. 68
Most striking of all, it turns out that many of the Bolsheviks’ principal foreign “financiers of
genocide”, unlike Switzerland’s stubborn “Nazi gold” apologists hiding behind banking secrecy
laws, made no attempt to conceal their contributions to the triumph of Bolshevism. 69 If they
were ever asked about their role in laundering stolen Bolshevik gold, silver, platinum, jewelry
and diamonds, such men described these activities openly and with pride, even, in one
extraordinary case, while under hostile police interrogation. 70 The same can be said of the
Bolsheviks’ own commercial agents and buyers, the most important of which, like Leonid
Krasin, wrote self-glorifying memoirs on the subject. 71 The story of Bolshevik gold
68 The mother-source remains W. J. Novitsky, “Russian Gold Reserve,” unpublished ms, NAA 316, roll
119. Novitsky’s analysis is also available at Columbia University’s Rare Book and Manuscript Library; a
streamlined version was also published in the 4 July 1920 New York Times as “Russian Gold Fund’s
Adventures and Present Status.” An updated, and slightly more accurate, report is the 21 April 1921
report of U.S. commercial attaché Charles Westcott, “Origin and Disposition of the Former Russian
Imperial Gold Reserve,” also at NAA, 316, roll 120.
Both Novitsky and Westcott, along with those who relied on their reports, tended to underestimate
Bolshevik precious metal reserves, in likelihood because neither was aware of the enormous scope of
illicit confiscations above and beyond the Bolshevik-captured portions of the Imperial Gold Reserve.
Most allied observers, for example, remained unaware of the gold, platinum, silver, and diamonds
hoarded at the Gokhran. In addition to the Gokhran files in RGAE fond 7632, opis 1, Gokhran-related
material, such as the files of the “Safe Commission” (seifovaia kommissia), can also be found in RGAE
fond 7733, opis 1.
69 The phrase “financiers of genocide” is Lebor’s.
70 The inimitable Olof Aschberg, while being questioned at the Paris Préfecture de Police.
71 Krasin, O vneshnei torgovle i otnoshenii k nei russkoi kooperatsii (Novgorod: Tipografiya Gubsoyuza,
1921); Voprosyi vneshnei torgovli (Moscow: Gos. izdatel’stvo, 1928); Dela davno minuvshikh dnei
(Vospominaniia) (Moscow: Molodaia gvardiia, 1931).