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before the Russian Revolution of 1917, made a
successful career in the demimonde where rev-
olutionary politics and commerce intersected.
He was born into a Jewish family near Minsk,
but grew up in
ODESSA
. While at the University
of Basel, he became a Marxist and later worked
in Germany as a socialist journalist, writing
under the pseudonym of Parvus. In Switzer-
land, he also first established the connections
with Russian revolutionaries that would con-
tinue through the rest of his career. During the
RUSSO
-
JAPANESE WAR
(1904-5), he presciently
argued that Russia's defeat in the war could lead
to a revolution that could spread to other coun-
tries. A brief but important intellectual friend-
ship with Leon
TROTSKY
developed during the
1905 Revolution when Helfand worked with
Trotsky in the St. Petersburg Soviet. Helfand's
influence on Trotsky is most visible in the idea of
“permanent revolution,” which Helfand argued
could start with a mass strike such as the one
that gripped Russia in October 1905. Arrested in
April 1906, he was exiled to Siberia but soon fled
and returned to Germany. A partnership with
GORKY
to collect the latter's European royalties as
his literary agent ended bitterly, with Gorky
accusing Helfand of embezzlement, allegations
that permanently tarnished his reputation
within the revolutionary movement. Helfand
next surfaced in 1910 in Istanbul, where he
made a fortune channeling resources from the
German government to the Young Turk move-
ment. In 1915 he moved to neutral Copen-
hagen, a center of wartime intrigue, where he
developed a number of business projects linking
Germany and Russia that most likely served as
cover for his political interests. After the
FEBRU
-
ARY REVOLUTION
of 1917, he was involved in the
negotiations with the German government that
resulted in
LENIN
's return journey to Russia on
the “sealed train.” In the summer of 1917 the
KERENSKY
government forcefully tried to link
Lenin to German funds, accusations that the
BOLSHEVIKS
were never able to shake off. Ironi-
cally the Bolshevik victory in October 1917
undermined Helfand's role as revolutionary
middleman. After the war, he returned to his
Berlin villa where he lived until his death.
Hermitage
The popular name for the State Hermitage
Museum, an art museum located in St. Peters-
burg that is the largest public museum in Russia
and the home to what is considered to be one of
the world's greatest collections of art.
CATHERINE
II
the Great first founded the Hermitage Museum
in 1764 to serve as the home of the royal court's
art collection, built from western European
works she purchased from private collectors. Her
successors, notably
ALEXANDER I
and
NICHOLAS I
,
substantially added to the collection. The collec-
tion was first housed in the Hermitage building,
also known as the Small Hermitage, an annex to
the Winter Palace built by the French architect
Lamothe. As the collection grew, the museum
expanded into the Old Hermitage, another pri-
vate gallery near the Winter Palace, built in
1775-84. After a fire in the Winter Palace in
1837, the Hermitage buildings were rebuilt, and
a New Hermitage (1839-50) was added to house
the ever-growing royal collection. Nicholas I first
opened the collection to the public in 1852. Fol-
lowing the
OCTOBER REVOLUTION
of 1917, the col-
lection was nationalized and the museum became
known as the State Hermitage Museum. With the
Winter Palace no longer serving as the imperial
residence, in Soviet times it became another of
the magnificent buildings—totaling five—that
housed the vast art collection. The buildings
themselves, among the best examples of impe-
rial architecture, are part of the attraction that
the Hermitage exerts on its visitors.
The original collection was built from the
renowned collections of private collectors such
as Baron de Thiers, Count Heinrich Bruhl, and
Sir Robert Walpole. In addition to paintings by
the great masters, it included cameos and stat-
ues. With later purchases, the Hermitage's col-
lection of western European art became one of
the best in the world, especially strong in Italian,
Spanish, Dutch, and Flemish paintings, with
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