Wall Street helped to finance the Bolshevik's sudden and decisive illegal change of government by force
In a highly negative 1976 review of Wall Street and FDR in The Business History Review, Howard Dickman took on Sutton's methodology and arguments. As Dickman tartly notes:
Sutton evidently belongs to the "international banker" school of historical change. The present book is a sequel to his Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, wherein it is purportedly shown that certain elements on Wall Street helped to finance the Bolshevik putsch. Installment number three will examine Wall Street ties to Hitler. The theme underlying all three volumes is that "socialism . . . has come to the United States [Russia, Germany] because it is very much in the interest of the Wall Street establishment to attain a socialist society" (9). Wall Street and FDR is a weak specimen of "conspiracy history" and one of its sub-genres, "ruling class theory." It is poorly written and edited, digressive, repetitious, disorganized, and unconvincing. A vaguely identified Wall Street fox is the quarry: the hunt begins and ends by barking the magic names, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Du Pont, and the chase amounts to leaping over hedgerows of interlocking directorships to prove that every one is connected in some way to everyone else, and all are controlled by the great Wall Street banking houses.
Dickman noted that Sutton often relies upon business connections as proof of his thesis, which is a very problematic method for a sloppy researcher like Sutton. In the 2015 article "The Ludwig Martens–Maxim Litvinov Connection, 1919–1921", Donald James Evans contended that Sutton misidentified a key player in the initial Soviet overtures to the US. Likewise, Todd Pfannstiel's recent Diplomatic History article on the Soviet attempts to gain diplomatic recognition via economic trade was more complicated and a two-way street rather than Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution's more simplistic view of American bankers pulling the strings of economic policy.
One of the biggest problems Sutton has is his denial of agency among any individual, group, or movement that is not his cabal of shady Wall Street types. The Bolsheviks, he asserts in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, might not have been able to seize power were it not for the efforts of individuals like William Boyce Thompson. Such an interpretation flies in the face of the overwhelming bulk of historiography on the RSDLP and Russian radicalism in the late-tsarist period as well as the shortcomings of tsarist autocracy to handle the modernity it enabled. Things were clearly coming to some type of political head in Russia by the twentieth century; the tsarist state structure was incapable of making substantive political reforms (and it was indeed intrinsically hostile to this idea), there was a growing class divide within Russia, and the nationalities issue was one that made the empire a political powderkeg. The world war proved to be the perfect conflagration for Lenin and company, for as Dominic Lieven noted in an LSE lecture, while there were many scenarios in Russia where the Bolsheviks could have seized power without the war, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which they could have kept power without the war. The fact that the Bolsheviks clearly promised to end the war was one of the chief assets in the confusing days of 1917 and did much to garner their support. Whatever shadowy connections they had with American bankers were nugatory compared to this salient fact. Sutton's work, which appeared in the 1970s, shows no sign of even consulting the works of the "revisionist" historians in the West like Alexander Rabinowitch or Sheila Fitzpatrick- whose first works appeared in the late 1960s- that contended the Bolsheviks were a mass political movement and that whatever their faults, it was not a narrow conspiratorial clique that seized power in October 1917.
Indeed, much of Sutton's take on the Bolsheviks and their background is derived from older works from Cold Warriors like Richard Pipes that painted a picture that the Bolsheviks were a minority party animated by a desire for a dictatorship from the start. Although these Cold Warrior types tended to be pro-Wall Street, they found in Sutton an ideological bedfellow of sorts. One of Sutton's major positions during the 1970s was that the United States had enabled the USSR to become a major world power through technological transfer. Such assertions, perpetuated in Sutton's books and lectures, meshed well with the militancy of the intellectuals in Team B that believed that the Soviet colossus was an existential threat and that US Cold War policy needed to isolate the USSR. Normalized business relations between the superpowers worked contrary to this policy and Sutton's thesis that American businesses consistently enabled the USSR dovetailed with Team B's picture of a rising Soviet power. Other anti-communist American groups like the John Birchers found Sutton's conspiratorial take on events was congruent with their anti-elitist notions of effete bankers and other types not taking seriously the threat of communism, both international and domestic.
The idea of a consistent and global plot by a rich few was one of the staples of antisemitic propaganda and this no doubt explains some of the popularity of Sutton within conspiracy circles. Sutton himself toys with antisemitism in his works, dismissing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery, but noting the number of Jews in middle-men positions in Wall Street's conspiracy. As he notes in the appendix of the Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution that "What better way to divert attention from the real operators than by the medieval bogeyman of anti-Semitism?" Thus Sutton can have his antisemitic cake and eat it too. In crude Marxist terms, Sutton dismisses the superstructure of antisemitism while keeping its base of shadowy linkages and networks intact.
Did some American financial chiefs want to deal with the new Bolshevik regime? Of course. The tsarist empire covered a massive part of the earth and the nature of global capitalism meant that businessmen could ignore this geographic reality at their peril. Additionally, Hassan Malik's recent monograph on finance and Russian Revolution was not a given that the successor to the tsarist state would default on tsarist debts. But interest does not mean that they were the essential catalyst that allowed Lenin to capture the state. Such a thesis can only be tenable by ignoring the vast bulk of historiography and research done from 1917 to the 1960s. Sutton shows no engagement with this research and instead takes the earlier historiography that the revisionists have superseded as a given. Not surprisingly, these largely conservative historians have proven to be Sutton's most consistent supporters, even if his "ruling-class theory" seems at odds with their generally pro-Wall Street domestic policies. While Sutton did some pioneering research on the business relationship between Moscow and the US, work like Evans has shown Sutton to be sloppy and prone to making errors. Much like the work of David Irving, whatever dubious merits Sutton's books possess have diminished with time and are more reflective of the author's biases than any real attempt at serious historical scholarship.
How exaggerated is the evil of the soviet union?
Thoughts on this passage regarding Trotsky from a newspaper during the dissolving of the USSR