postponed indefinitely. Hellmuth returned to Argentina in October
1945 and was cleared of the espionage charge two years later.HELPHAND, ALEXANDER (1867–1924). A key figure who helped
supply German funds to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia,
Alexander Helphand was born in Berezino, Russia, on 8 September
1867, the son of middle-class Jewish parents. Associated with il-
legal political groups in his youth, he immigrated to Switzerland
in 1886 to study economics at the University of Basel. Although
he never lost contact with Russian revolutionary circles, German
social democracy began to exert a greater attraction for him (his
socialist code name was parvus). In 1891, he became a reporter on
Russian affairs for the daily press and for the Neue Zeit, the theo-
retical journal of German socialism. In 1902, he established his own
publishing house in Munich. In this period, he and his friend Leon
Trotsky advanced the concept of “uninterrupted” (or “permanent”)
revolution, which was later adopted by V. I. Lenin. Adamantly op-
posed to the gradualist revisionist views of Eduard Bernstein and
embracing the notion of a mass spontaneous uprising, Helphand
returned to Russia to take part in the 1905 Revolution as one of
the leaders of the St. Petersburg Soviet. He was arrested early the
following year and sent to Siberia, but by late 1906 he had escaped
and returned to Western Europe.
Helphand resettled in Turkey in 1910. Although his activity as a
journalist continued, his role as a business advisor to Russian and Ar-
menian merchants in Constantinople allowed him to amass consider-
able wealth and influence. He also concluded that a successful revo-
lution in Russia would require the outside assistance of the German
government. With the advent of World War I, he became connected
to the League for the Liberation of the Ukraine, an organization spon-
sored by the Austrian Ministry of Foreign Affairs and directed at the
dissolution of the Russian Empire. Helphand additionally approached
the German ambassador in Constantinople, stressing their common
goal of toppling the tsarist regime and requesting money and autho-
rization to meet with radical Russian émigrés.
Following an initial rebuff from Lenin, who regarded him as a
renegade and “social chauvinist,” Helphand moved his headquar-
ters to Copenhagen in mid-1915 and established the Institute for
178 • HELPHAND, ALEXANDER