This is my third blog about pre-revolution Russia. In the
Summer of 1907 a several high level Bolsheviks (i.e. Vladimir Lenin, Joseph
Stalin, Maxim Litvinov, Leonid Krasin, and Alexander Bogdanov) planned and
committed a major, very bloody robbery of a money transport on a central square
in the city of Tiflis, Georgia.
Revolutionaries’
Greed For Money
This heinous crime involved bombs and grenades. It left
40 people dead and 50 injured. The perpetrators of this crime got away with the
then incredible amount of 341,000 rubles (worth several million US dollars
today).
Loot The Looters
These kinds of crimes were justified by Lenin and Stalin
as Expropriations of the Expropriators or Loot the Looters. Lenin and Stalin
acted secretly and contravening an explicit prohibition of such acts by the Russian
Social Democratic Labor Party of which these gentlemen were also members of.
The only convicted criminal (Kamo) of this crime
successfully feigned twice insanity in captivity to avoid conviction in Berlin,
Germany and back in Russia. He is rumored to have been killed later by Stalin.
There Is More To
The Story
There are more details about this particular crime that
are interesting, but for sake of brevity, I will stop here.
However, I would be remiss not to mention that it was
asserted that Stalin at the time was acting as an informant of the Russian
secret police and that he informed his contact about the pending robbery, but
without giving away details.
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