Alexander Parvus

Alexander Israel Helphand (born Israel Lazarevich Gelfand, Russian: Израиль Лазаревич Гельфанд; 27 August 1867 – 12 December 1924), better known as Alexander Parvus, was a Russian-born Marxist theorist, journalist, and activist who became a prominent figure in the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD).

Parvus is best known for his collaboration with Leon Trotsky in developing the theory of permanent revolution around 1905, and for his controversial role during World War I. He devised a plan to destabilize the Russian Empire by promoting internal revolution, which he presented to the German government. With German financial support, he established a network to aid the Bolsheviks and is widely remembered for his part in arranging Vladimir Lenin's return to Russia from exile in the "sealed train" in 1917.

After the Bolsheviks came to power, Lenin rejected Parvus's request to return to Russia, stating that "the cause of the revolution should not be touched by dirty hands". Parvus remained in Germany, becoming a wealthy industrialist and a political advisor to leaders of the Weimar Republic. His life was marked by sharp contrasts between his revolutionary activities, his intellectual contributions to Marxism, and his later affluence and political maneuvering, which made him an enigmatic and highly controversial figure.

Israel Lazarevich Gelfand was born on 27 August 1867 into a lower middle-class Jewish family in Berezino, in the Minsk Governorate of the Russian Empire. His father was an artisan, possibly a locksmith or blacksmith. When Gelfand was a child, his family's home was destroyed in a fire, an event he later recalled vividly. The family subsequently relocated to Odessa, his father's birthplace, in the early 1870s.

In Odessa, Gelfand attended a gymnasium that emphasized classical studies. His most significant intellectual development, however, came from outside formal education. He became an admirer of the Ukrainian poet Taras Shevchenko and was introduced to the idea of class struggle through Shevchenko's works on the Haidamakas. He was also influenced by Russian radical figures such as the sociologist Nikolay Mikhaylovsky and the satirist Mikhail Saltykov-Shchedrin. The first work on political economy he read was a Russian edition of John Stuart Mill's work, annotated by Nikolay Chernyshevsky. These influences fostered a reasoned contempt for the Tsarist order. In 1885, at the age of 18, he spent a year "going to the people", working as a locksmith's apprentice and traveling between workshops to get to know the working class.

In 1886, Gelfand traveled abroad for the first time, hoping that "travel would resolve my political doubts". He went to Zürich, Switzerland, a center for Russian revolutionary exiles, where he read the works of Alexander Herzen and other revolutionary literature. He became attracted to the nascent Russian Marxist movement, particularly the Emancipation of Labour group founded by Georgi Plekhanov. However, he remained troubled by the fact that Plekhanov's programme had "no place for the peasantry" in what was an overwhelmingly agricultural country.

After a brief return to Russia, Gelfand left his native country permanently in 1887. He decided to pursue higher education, enrolling at the University of Basel in Switzerland in the autumn of 1888. He studied political economy under Professor Karl Bücher, who influenced him with an emphasis on empirical analysis and hard facts. Gelfand spent four years at the university, during which he became a convinced "scientific" socialist under the influence of Karl Marx. In 1891, he received his doctorate with a dissertation titled Technische Organisation der Arbeit, which examined the division of labor from a Marxist perspective. His degree was granted rite, the equivalent of a third-class pass, as his Marxist approach received little sympathy from his examiner. It was at this time that he adopted the name Alexander, appearing on official records as Israel Alexander Helphand.

After completing his studies in 1891, Helphand decided against returning to Russia or joining the exiled Russian revolutionaries, whom he viewed as a "dead branch, cut off from the living body of the people". Instead, he moved to Germany to join the Social Democratic Party of Germany (SPD), convinced that Germany was the country most advanced on the path to socialism and that the world revolution would be decided there. He later wrote, "My parting of company with the Russian intelligentsia dates from that time."