Gold Train a'Comin: None Dare...pp. 41-45

Creed of Gold is a 2014 movie that no one has seen. In fact, I haven't seen this movie either, but I have listened to the August 8th episode of God Awful Movies where they reviewed it. The movie is chock full of anti-federal reserve conspiracy theories and pretty much goes full-on anti-semitic with it. The evil characters are, shall we say, Jewish-adjacent. In the movie, they repeat a claim concerning the formation of the Federal Reserve by discussing a train full of gold that disappeared in Russia. Intrigued about this gold train I spent a few days trying to figure out what the hell that conspiracy was, and what host Eli Boznick was talking about when he described it. Every time I searched I kept getting results about Vladimir Lenin and WWI, but that couldn't have been it...right?

We're through Allen's clumsy attempt at a history of WWI. It's clumsy because I know that he doesn't care about any of this, he's more interested in attacking two targets: the first are the COMMUNIST/SOCIALISTS (that he has his own special definitions for), and the second is the Federal Reserve Bank--which he hasn't named as a specific target yet, but I can see the future on this one dear reader. 

At this point in WWI Russia is getting it's ass kicked. It's getting so bad that even the Ottoman Empire is scoring off of them. Yet the problem is that Russia is never easily defeated. They can, and will, throw bodies at the problem until the problem goes away. Germany needed something that would destabilize an already teetering Russian empire and they had that weapon in a single individual--Vladimir Lenin. 

This is Dan Carlin's take on it in his Hardcore History series covering WWI, and I can't disagree with him on this. As the revolution is boiling over in Russia, and Lenin learns of the February uprising he petitions from Switzerland to be allowed to return to Russia. The Germans (for whom the route would pass through) thought, "yes, let's send the Socialist leader to Russia. His anti-war ideas will do more to defeat Russia than our mustard gas. (that's probably how it went)" 

The Germans placed Lenin in a train forbidding him to leave until he arrived in the Russian capital of Petrograd, and this was the first domino to fall until the October Revolution. By 1918, an armistice is signed and Russia is out of the Great War. 

That, aside from my assumption, is the rough story of Lenin's return to Russia. Allen has it mostly right, but he keeps talking about 5-6M in gold that went with Lenin. There are three problems with this claim. First, when a person doesn't have an exact figure or even a rough estimate, that's a warning sign. Secondly, that figure amounts to 106M in today's money, an amount that the German government at the time could not afford. By 1917, Germany had its own revolution in the fermentation stages. The people were starving at their industrial output was 1/2 of what it needed to be for their 1918 offensive. Simply put, Germany couldn't afford to put that much gold on a train, but they could afford to put a single man with volatile ideas on a train and send him forth. The final problem is that this claim first appears in Daniel Pipe's history of the Russian Revolution and has never been validated. Pipes was a supporter of the Tsarist regime and had every motive to smear the Bolsheviks, which he could do by linking the revolutionary leader to the German enemy. 

That aside, Allen himself loses the thread. Where did the money to destabilize the Russian Empire come from? Well, according to Allen's sources, it came from American bankers. Ok, why would American bankers want to destabilize the only force keeping the German's occupied on a second front? That seems odd, even Allen recognizes this by claiming that it would amount to foolishness and treason. Of course, if Allen is correct, treason wouldn't be an issue for these people...but Allen seems to think that it would be during WWI. 

The book provides a chart of the funding relationships that financed Lenin and Trotsky. It's unsourced bullshit, but the amounts in the chart add up to 31M, which is five times what was claimed earlier. The chart also has Hitler in it, which I don't follow because Hitler was a soldier at this time. Allen is unclear on how much money financed the revolution, and so are we. 

The chapter drones on and on, name-dropping individuals that we aren't familiar with and dubious claims that they are linked to Morgan and the Rothschilds. 

Allen writes, "In the Bolshevik Revolution we see many of the same old faces that were responsible for creating the Federal Reserve System..."--yeah, people like him can never stay away from this subject. However, we know who created the Fed, and these names don't appear anywhere aside from Allen's say-so. Warburg himself, the frontman for the Rothschilds according to the book, wouldn't even move to the United States until 1938. 

All end today with the final problem of this entire section: why? Conspiracy theorists love to ask, cue bono (who benefits); but here there is no benefit. Allen claims that people like Morgan and Rockefeller want to dominate the world so they do so by funding a COMMUNIST revolution in Russia. They have no fear because they control it...but it's far easier to control a system where you are already at the top, like a free market capitalist society. Morgan benefitted when the government broke up Standar Oil, they've already won capitalism. There's no reason to risk everything on a new, unstable, and unpredictable revolution. The gamble is further compounded by the fact, that Lenin--love him or hate him-- was a true believer in the revolution. He wasn't going to be anyone's puppet and he's not the type to be bought off.