Not too many people are familiar with Israel Helphand, who later called himself Alexander Parvus. From early in life his ambition was to be a revolutionary and a millionaire. He achieved both ambitions. During the First World War he was both a Bolshevik and a German spy. He is said to have arranged for Lenin’s return to Russia from Switzerland in March 1917. Lenin crossed Germany in a locked railroad car. The negotiation for this journey has been memorably brought to life in a surreal chapter of Solzhenitsyn, in which Parvus explodes out of a suitcase. In 1924 Parvus died on a private island off Germany where he was shamelessly debauching himself with squirt guns and inflatable pool toys.
The figure in the center of the photo, Lev Bronstein — aka Leon Trotsky — needs no introduction! But aren’t you surprised to learn that Mr. Natural (born Shmul Schmeltzer) was also a revolutionary? Well, photos don’t lie, or at least they didn’t in the old days. Decades before he was introduced to the world by Robert Crumb, Mr. Natural "hung around St. Petersburg, when he saw it was the time for change." Indeed, prior to the 1905 uprising he was a member of the notorious St. Petersburg Committee For Struggle. Together with a radical anarchist known as the Old Pooperroo (a member of The Black Hundred group) Schmeltzer on two occasions disrupted Tsarist military parades by shouting the revolutionary slogan,"Up with dresses, down with pants!" In 1907, sentenced to ten years of internal exile in Siberia, he opened the first soft ice cream store in Ekaterinburg, later expanding to Murmansk, Novosibirsk, and as far south as Pinsk. In 1917 he returned to St. Petersburg in time for the October Revolution, arriving in a reindeer-drawn troika. Lenin personally awarded him the rank of Narthex of the Nomenclatura.
Here’s one of Crumb’s depictions of Schmeltzer…
I’m not sure why I feel so compelled lately to expatiate on Russia and the Russian Revolution. I think it started a few years ago with a book called "Court of the Red Czar." When I read about Stalin manning the phonograph and forcing people like Khrushchev and Molotov to dance the foxtrot, I was hooked. Well, let’s not feel as if we have to question these things. Comrades, have the courage of your perversions!