Category File
Russian Revolution
2 documented theories filed under this subject.
- The "Sisson Documents"The Sisson Documents were a set of papers publicized in 1918 that purported to prove Vladimir Lenin, Leon Trotsky, and other Bolshevik leaders were acting as paid agents of the German General Staff during World War I. The documents were obtained by Edgar Sisson, a representative of the U.S. Committee on Public Information, and circulated in the United States as evidence of a German-Bolshevik conspiracy. They were widely cited in anti-Bolshevik and anti-radical propaganda during the closing phase of the war and the early Red Scare. Later scholarly analysis, most notably George F. Kennan’s 1956 study, concluded that the documents were forgeries, though the wider historical question of German assistance to revolutionary actors in Russia remained separate from the authenticity of the documents themselves.
- The "Free Love" CommunalismA decree nationalising women appeared in Saratov in early 1918. It was not Bolshevik policy, it was never national law, and its provenance is still argued over — but by 1919 it was being read into the record of a United States Senate committee.