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And yet both Ford (who had an apartment on Red Square and sold off Russian art treasures to the West for the Soviets) and Armnhammer came to Stalin and built chemical plants for him in the 30s. Furthermore, they abandoned their American engineers who were then sent to the gulag. Ford further was the main publisher of Mein Kompf in America and his factories in Germany are now being sued for slavery since he had Jews and Slavs for slave labor while building Panzers to fight the Shermans he built for America.

There were individual cases, mostly the children of wealthy industrialist (Hammer's son, for example) who were sympathetic to the Bolsheviks (and some gave money, some helped the regime with business deal that usually went south), but so were many young eggheads at the time; and Ford was a conspiracy nut himself (like Powell), but this by no means indicates widespread or large scale support for the revolution among the US business class or Wall St. Ford was a jew-hater, but he did not build Germany or their war effort or their industry; Hitler did not rely on Henry Ford to ensure his rise to power. The truth is the West did not finance the Bolsheviks and our arrangements with Hitler were largely established pre-Hitler, our investments trailed off into the 1930's. These items you mention are merely anecdotal, or dubious accuracy, and exactly of the breathless type that characterizes Powell's work. Again, the guy is a total nut, a bad historian, and a fraud. I was studying Russian history at the time and did a line by line reading of his "case." It was complete crap; my professor and I spent an afternoon with his "history." It was true for people who really didn't know much about the subject, but wanted to believe in a mysterious, nefarious "business conspiracy." It is stuff for the "New American" and the Birch Society. Trotsky would have laughed his arse off at Powell's claims.

I should have said "the Bolshevik rise to power," I can already hear the chorus of "correctors" telling we "What about WW2? You don't know your history!" The Russians received most of their pre-war support from the Germans, actually, who worked with the Russians to test German weapons that the Germans were not supposed to be working with. Some US firms had dealings with the Reds, but not many, and most, after getting a taste of how business was done over there, bailed. The Russians scraped by in the 1920's. Stalin had some western help, but not much. To suggest that big business put the Reds in power is stupid and wrong.