The Russian State Bank, the Boer War, and World War I
This stretch of Chapter IV is Goodson at full volume. He tours Tsarist Russia, the Boer War, Australia’s Commonwealth Bank, and World War I as one plot. The money history is specific. The ethnic story is the usual glue.
Book: A History of Central Banking and the Enslavement of Mankind by Stephen Mitford Goodson. ISBN-13: 978-1-910881-49-1. Black House Publishing Ltd (1st ed. 2014; 2nd and 3rd 2017). Goodson was a former non-executive director of the South African Reserve Bank.
A Tsar who said no, then a state bank
Goodson starts at the Congress of Vienna (1814-1815). Behind the talks, he says, Nathan Mayer Rothschild pushed a world order built on central banks. Every major power except Russia owed Rothschild houses. Tsar Alexander I refused the bank and, on 26 September 1815, signed the Holy Alliance with Austria and Prussia instead.
The State Bank of the Russian Empire opens on 12 June 1860. Until 1894 it sits under Finance. After that it is the banker of bankers: coin, notes, money supply, cheap credit. Gold reserves, he says, were the world’s largest and, except in 1906, covered more than 100 percent of the note issue.
The debt table is the flex. Per head: France 288 rubles, Britain 169.8, Germany 135.6, Russia 58.7. By 1914, 83 percent of debt service (less than 2 percent held abroad) comes from state railways. In 1916 the main lines run 100,817 km.
Breadbasket numbers and the missing chapters
Alexander II abolishes serfdom in 1861. By 1914, Goodson says, 80 percent of arable land is with the peasants through the mir. After Stolypin, about two million families take farms on nearly 19 million acres.
1913 is his peak year. Russia is the breadbasket: 42.3 percent of world barley, 30.3 percent of oats, 67 percent of rye, 31.2 percent of wheat. 37.5 million horses. Lowest taxes on his table. No inflation, no unemployment, money created “out of nothing at almost zero interest.” He quotes President Taft calling Russian labour law nearer to perfection than any democracy’s.
Here’s the thing. Those debt and grain figures are a real snapshot. What he does not put next to them is 1905, the pogroms, the Okhrana, or the fact that the same empire folded in four years of war. This is a brochure for a state bank, not a history of late imperial Russia.
Revolution, Litvinov, and Gosbank
On 17 November 1917, in his frame, the Rothschilds finance a “Judeo-Bolshevik revolution” because a working state bank would wreck their system. The revolution was real. An ethnic-banker-only cause is not serious history. He leans on Antony Sutton’s Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, which uses State Department files to argue some Western financiers dealt with the Bolsheviks. That is a narrower claim than the one Goodson wants.
The hinge is Maxim Litvinov, born Wallach-Finkelstein in Goodson’s telling, “Rothschild’s bag-man” for forty years. Prison, escape, Iskra money, London arms. After the 1918 Lockhart swap he moves gold out. On 21 April 1921 he runs gold sales. Hundreds of millions of gold rubles, remelted in France or Switzerland, end at the “American Reserve Bank.”
December 1921: the Kuzbass colony hands industry to foreign investors. Litvinov is foreign minister from 1930 to 1939, dumped by Stalin on 3 May 1939. In late 1941 he goes to Washington and unlocks about $11 billion in Lend-Lease.
Gosbank is founded on 16 November 1921. Goodson treats that as sovereignty recovered. At Bretton Woods in July 1944 the Soviets refuse to sign, calling the World Bank and IMF “branches of Wall Street.” Then 1991: American advisers, a central-bank law, and, for him, a sovereignty loss as bad as an invasion.
Gold on the Witwatersrand
World money sits on the gold standard, which Goodson says the Rothschilds run. In 1886 the Witwatersrand reefs open inside the independent Zuid-Afrikaansche Republiek. Control the gold or lose the system. Uitlanders pour in. After the 1896 Jameson Raid, the South African League agitates for their vote. Kruger offers seven years at Bloemfontein on 30 May 1899. High Commissioner Alfred Milner holds to “reform or war.”
Britain masses troops in September 1899. Peace comes at Vereeniging on 31 May 1902. In between: scorched earth, 46 camps, 155,000 women and children interned. Goodson says 34,000 die of hunger, filth, and cold, 81 percent under 16. British dead: 21,942. War cost £222 million. Debt up £132 million. Bankers get the gold.
The camps are a real atrocity. Historians still argue the exact count, and he barely mentions the Black African camps, but the children died. That part does not need a banker script to be damning.
Australia’s public bank
Then a cleaner case. King O’Malley learns fractional reserve in a New York uncle’s bank in the 1880s and pushes a state bank. First governor Sir Denison Miller, asked where the capital will come from, says he does not need any: “my capital is the entire wealth and credit of the whole of Australia.”
For 12 years, including World War I, Goodson says Australia has a boom. Loans at two-thirds of 1 percent build dams, Murrumbidgee irrigation, the transcontinental railroad, power, harbours, roads. The war costs A$700 million and the bank books it as non-interest debt.
In 1924 Stanley Melbourne Bruce and Earle Page put the bank under a board. Goodson suspects a bribe. London lending follows, and by 1927 federal and state debt hits £1 billion. The 10 October 1924 Act, in his reading, kills debt-free money creation. On 20 March 1947 the House votes 55 to 5 to join the IMF.
This is the chapter’s best money argument. You can debate the golden age. You cannot pretend a public bank that financed a war without interest is a nothing-burger.
World War I, Balfour, and a fake rabbi
World War I, for Goodson, starts on 28 June 1914 when Gavrilo Princip, “allegedly of Jewish origin,” kills Franz Ferdinand. Princip was a Bosnian Serb. He then links Princip to Trotsky (Lev Bronstein, that name is right) and to Lenin, “named Ulyanov when adopted, real name Zederbaum.” Lenin was born Vladimir Ilyich Ulyanov. Zederbaum was Julius Martov. This is sloppy, and it is not a small slip. It is the book treating names as evidence.
He cites Henry Ford’s The International Jew. Then the “real” causes, in order: destroy the Russian Empire and its State Bank; break the other empires into states you can milk with new central banks; steal Palestine for a Rothschild-run Zionist state.
By late 1916, he says, Britain and France are losing. Then Lord Rothschild offers American entry in exchange for Palestine. He prints the Balfour letter to Lord Walter Rothschild. The United States had already declared war in April 1917. Balfour is 2 November 1917. That bargain’s timeline does not work the way he tells it.
He then quotes a “Rabbi Reichorn” line from 1859 about wars being a Jewish harvest. That quote is a known antisemitic fabrication. It has no reliable source. Goodson prints it anyway as prophecy.
Armistice, 11 November 1918. Versailles, 28 June 1919. Germany takes exclusive blame and £6.6 billion in reparations. That last bit is ordinary textbook. The ethnic harvest story is the book at its worst.
What holds
Three grades of claim sit in the same chapter, and he talks as if they are one thing.
The Boer War camps happened. Australia’s early Commonwealth Bank is a genuine public-banking experiment. Tsarist debt, gold, and grain numbers are not invented. They are cherry-picked. They leave out the police state, 1905, and the wartime collapse.
The Rothschild-revolution frame, the Princip and Lenin name games, the Balfour-for-US-entry deal, and the Reichorn quote do not survive a library. Sutton is a real author. Ford is a real bigot. Neither turns World War I into a single banker theft of a state bank and of Palestine.
So here’s what I take. Who issues money, and at what interest, is a fair fight. “A secret ethnic house ran Vienna, Pretoria, Canberra, Sarajevo, and Versailles” is not how you do that fight. Next chapter he tries the same method on the Depression, the BIS, and the Chicago Plan.