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Armand Hammer.
Armand Hammer.
A huge scandal erupted in America after the publication of the book “Dossier. secret history Armand Hammer. It described the scandalous details of the life of Armand Hammer, a well-known and very influential American businessman, public figure and a philanthropist. On May 21, 1898, in New York, a boy was born into a family of poor Jewish emigrants, to whom his father gave the proletarian name Armand (from Arm and Hamme hammer and sickle). The son was the second child in the family. The eldest parents named Harry, and the born last child named Victor.
The father of this family, Julius Hammer, in 1915 registered the pharmaceutical company Allied Drug and Chemical, which traded in skin care products. Right hand Julius was his youngest son Armand. Things did not go well for the family company from the very beginning. To stay afloat, the Hammers sometimes had to earn extra money by clandestine abortions.
Soon one of the abortions that Armand did ended lethal outcome. Then the father, taking the guilt of his son upon himself, went to prison for 15 years. And family business headed by Armand, becoming the first American who earned a million dollars during his student years.
Hammer and the USSR. At the beginning of 1921, the young man decided to expand his business in Russia. He hoped that the Bolsheviks who came to power would support the initiative of their ally and creditor, and brought a batch of medicines to post-revolutionary Russia, and also organized the supply of American food to the starving in the Urals.
In the Urals, the businessman was struck by the terrible pictures of the famine that reigned there. This prompted him to the idea of offering the Bolsheviks to buy grain on credit in exchange for popular goods, with which all local warehouses had been packed since tsarist times. Vladimir Lenin liked this idea. And on October 27, 1921, the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade of the RSFSR and Hammer's Allied Drug and Chemical Corporation signed an agreement for the supply of 1 million bushels of American wheat to Soviet Russia in exchange for furs, black caviar and values nationalized by the Bolsheviks.
Commission Armand, from this operation, in which he did not invest a cent, amounted to a huge percentage - more than 100 thousand dollars, with a total transaction price of 600 thousand. In impoverished, hungry and cold Moscow of the twenties, Hammer lived on wide leg. He was given a thirty-room mansion on Sadovo-Samotechnaya Street, which Armand, together with his brother Victor, turned into something like a house of American trade and art.
Alcohol king.
But legal transactions, although profitable, had extremely unpleasant consequences. So, preservatives banned in America were found in Russian caviar, and it had to be sold to Canadian wholesalers at dumping prices. When Hammer tried to sell a collection of art objects brought from Russia to art galleries, their former emigrant owners sued him, accusing him of buying stolen goods.
Returning to the States, Armand liquidated his father's Allied Drug and created the Allied American diversified concern. Then, together with his brother Victor, he again went to Moscow, where he lived for eight years. He opened the first pencil factory in the USSR and represented the interests of 37 American corporations, banks and firms in Moscow, including the Henry Ford company.
On assignment from the Kremlin, in 1932 he tried to get close to Franklin Roosevelt, then a contender for the presidency, and financed his election campaign. And when Prohibition was repealed in 1933, Hammer became the "alcohol king of America", establishing the production of hard liquor in the United States. Armand himself developed the recipe for the Gold Coin branded drink, half of which was cheap whiskey, and the other half was alcohol. By the end of the war, Hammer was making an annual income of seventeen million dollars. His winery was then the largest in the country, with a turnover of forty million. Competitors were furious.
They began to follow Hammer, in the Federal Bureau of Investigation they even opened a case number 61,280 against him, which was led by the head of the FBI, John Edgar Hoover. March 6, 1952 A. Hammer was invited to the city office of the FBI in New York. Armand faced a considerable prison term, but the death of key witnesses, illegal methods of collecting information and luck allowed him to avoid this.
Money laundering.
“In the 1920s, A. Hammer traveled a lot around Europe. The main place of his residence was the Berlin hotel Kaiserhof. From Berlin, he moved to Hamburg, Paris and London, as well as to Riga and Tallinn, where he stayed at the then best hotel in Riga, De Roma, as well as in private hotels. The trips were so frequent that he acquired an Estonian passport. On the surface, Hammer appeared to be a courier or intermediary merchant, but in reality his job was to secretly transfer money received from Moscow to Soviet agents in Europe and the United States.
The accountant and lawyer of the J. Shapiro firm recorded these transactions in the books as a loan or some kind of service. Soviet state trade Organization(Gostorg) issued A. Hammer a bill of exchange for the purchase of goods abroad, which he presented as collateral for a loan at a Lloyd Bank branch. All these operations, which were carried out by Armand Hammer, later became known as "money laundering".
Trade in antiques.
Collaborating with Russia, Hammer preferred to pay for transactions not with money, but with fur, caviar, jewelry, antiques and works of art. Taking things out on a truck from the Winter Palace in Petrograd for sale in Europe, Hammer did not disdain carpet paths. Later, he made slippers out of them, which he sold for a very good price. In the West, especially in the USA, there were many who wanted to buy slippers from the palaces of Russian tsars.
For all his rather long life, Hammer was friendly with all Soviet leaders from V. Lenin to M. Gorbachev. In Russia, his influence was unconditional. His collection of awards included the Soviet Order of Friendship of Peoples, the French Order of the Legion of Honor, the Italian Order of Special Merit, the Swedish Royal Order of the Polar Star, the Belgian Order of the Crown, the Austrian Knight's Cross, the Venezuelan Order of Andres Bellos, the American National Medal of Arts. He was an honorary doctor of 25 universities, and the United World College in the United States was even named after him.
Missing testament.
The story of Hammer's death has been surrounded by some scandalous halo. The day after Hammer's death and the announcement of his will, it turned out that the millionaire left nothing to anyone. And he had nothing to leave. Almost everything that during his lifetime he so cleverly and widely disposed of became the property of various organizations, and the remaining funds were barely enough to pay off debts.
(1898-1991)
Billionaire from Red Square
Communists often have the heart on the left and the wallet on the right. Hammer is not so controversial: he has everything on the side of the East,
Armand Hammer's fortune is estimated at 1.2 billion francs.
With the red billionaires, the situation is exactly the same as with the Roman firefighters and anarchist notaries - they build their image on a paradox. Armand Hammer, the superstar of capitalism and at the same time the hero of the Soviet Union, goes beyond the usual norms and immediately paralyzes any attempt at unkind criticism against him.
The originality of the system
How can you be a multibillionaire and at the same time a convinced Marxist-Leninist? This is the question they ask themselves when they see it in their own far from proletarian Boeing-747, pure hearts, naively believing in the idealism of those who trade in their good feelings. The billionaire from Red Square always gives the same answer to this question, and this has to be content: if he maintains commercial, they are friendly ties with all sorts of Lenins, Stalins and other Ceausescu, he does this because commerce "is a factor of progress and peace”, makes it possible to “overcome prejudices and slander”, for “brings together and civilizes peoples” (zyu!).
One foot here, one foot there
While maintaining friendly relations with the Soviets, Hammer was at the same time very close to American politicians and even participated in the financing of Richard Nicksock's presidential company.
Such a statement, of course, causes a smile in many. But the rope is so long, as they say, that in the end you no longer notice it, and Hammer can trade with Dracula with impunity. You can't call him a banker of tyrants or a prop of totalitarianism - he's just an oddity of the capitalist system.
Capital Marxists from father to son
The main thing is not to accuse him of opportunism. If he is a communist and a capitalist at the same time, then the reason for this is family tradition, as well as personal convictions.
From the very cradle he was brought up in hatred of capitalism. His father, Dr. Julius Hammer, a Russian Jew who settled in the United States, had been, since 1907, a friend and student of Lenin. He participated in the creation of a very anemic American Communist Party and, starting in 1917, all his time, free from patients and a pharmaceutical factory, devoted to establishing a variety of supplies to the young homeland of the proletarians. With the help of Ludwig Martens, the USSR ambassador in Washington, he, in particular, got involved in the underground diamond trade, which fed the treasury of the Soviet Union with money and served as the basis for creating a very interesting personal fortune.
The Pharmacist's Mystery Journey
In 1921, Armand Hammer had to take over the family business, as his father went to prison because of a dark history related to abortion. Their family business, however, was in danger of collapse, as old Julius, absorbed in caring for the working class and trading in red diamonds, completely stopped caring about the production of suppository candles.
Having taken this very responsible place, the young man simply began to work miracles, despite the fact that he was, like his father, devoted with all his heart to the cause of socialism. In less than two years, he rebuilt the family business so brilliantly that he was soon able to drink properly in honor of his first million dollars.
Of course, he could not keep the evil tongues of all those who, as you know, sharpening their teeth against the Communists, on a leash. About this condition, which suddenly grew like a mushroom, a thousand questions rained down, to which he found it difficult to give satisfactory answers. Did he really make that kind of money from his venture alone? (it was imperceptible that the sale of anal candles took on a grand scale)? And most importantly, why did he have to travel to Russia, instead of sitting quietly in his office and prescribing medicines produced by his factory to patients? “And then I went there,” answered Hammer, chuckling, “to treat Russians who were ill with typhus, and Lenin decided to show me what kind of gratitude the working class is capable of. Here he is as a reward and showered me with gold. I didn't believe in something like that.
Angela Zaveli
The second wife of Armand Hammer obtained a divorce from him because of her husband's "mental cruelty" - this was, however, a personal opinion that Stalin apparently did not share.
NEP (new economic policy)
In order to avoid the complete collapse of the Soviet economy, Lenin decided to return to limited capitalism for a while.
Oil
Company -Occidental Petroleum-. commonly referred to as "Ocon", contributes a large share in the fortune of Armand Hammer. It exploits Libyan oil and is one of the twenty largest oil companies in the world. The red billionaire had a significant impact on the policy of this company.
10 percent
For the works of art that Hammer sold at the expense of the Soviet Union, he received a commission of 10 percent, which brought him a mere trifle - eleven million dollars.
Socialism and business
And those who did not believe were right. For the real reason for this trip was far from being so philanthropic. In fact, instead of going to the Urals and fighting typhus there, Hammer arrived in Moscow in order to re-establish the very fruitful trade that his father led, and to appear before the new masters of the Kremlin as his father's successor. And immediately contact was established between the future billionaire and ascetics-ideologists who vowed to bring the entire capitalist system to the grave.
With rare psychological insight, Hammer saw in Lenin a sensitive person, endowed with all the qualities characteristic of a humanist, and in Dzerzhinsky, who headed the bloody Cheka, a man of the highest moral principles. The father of the October Revolution, touched by the unselfishness and idealism of the young Hammer, not only agreed that he would take over the supply of Soviet Russia with goods and smuggling of diamonds, but offered him, in addition, a concession for the asbestos mines of Alachaevsk and almost exclusive rights to trade relations between the country Soviets and the United States.
In the era of the New Economic Policy, this gave him the opportunity to attract Western investment and establish a network of commercial relations that would bring the country out of isolation.
Broker of the socialist economy
From that time on, Hammer took the path that, thanks to communism, made him one of the richest people in the world and incomparable, the most original representative of American capitalism. Of course, it was not at all out of personal sympathy that Lenin gave him the opportunity to play the exceptional role that he had for a long time adhered to in the world of commercial relations between the Soviet empire and the free world. The real reason for this was purely strategic. He needed to attract to the treasury of the revolutionary proletarian movement necessary capital which would enable him, he believed, to destroy the Western economy. And Hammer, in his opinion, simply had to set a bad example for the billionaires of the whole world, who, as he believed, were so stupid that they themselves "sell him a rope on which they will be hanged" - this was one of his favorite expressions.
And this desire was, by the way, excellently fulfilled. Armand Hammer's huge commercial operations behind the Iron Curtain created a dangerous appetite for many, and a number of American firms came to the rescue of the ailing Soviet economy.
Joseph, Nikita, Leonid and others
The capitalist-entrepreneur could not find more faithful companions, more honest partners than the masters of the Kremlin. Neither Stalin, during the great purges, nor Khrushchev, during cold war, nor Brezhnev, when he started a revision of ideological questions, none of them ever tried to put spokes in the wheels of their beloved capitalist. They not only signed him one contract after another, but also provided him with such privileges in the United States that he could not even dream of. The entrance to the Kremlin was more accessible to him than to the largest feudal lords of the party; as a reward for his kind and honest services, he was given a luxurious apartment not far from Red Square; his personal Boeing, which looked like a first-class hotel, had a permanent permit to fly in the Soviet airspace; and he was allowed to telephone the Chairman of the Supreme Council, like an old friend, on any trivial matter that came into his head.
Intelligent Collector
This passion seized him when he exported to the West the treasures of the art of the Holy Rusl, which the destitute Soviet government periodically decided to turn into a ringing, but chrome-plated, coin. On the advice of his brother Victor, a passionate art lover, he decided to create his own collection, which is now among the richest collections in the world. Among others, it includes works by Chagall, Picasso, the Impressionists, as well as a lot of furniture and household items from France in the 18th century. The taste of the communist billionaire has improved greatly during the compilation of this collection. As they say, socialist realism is represented in it very insignificantly.
About gas, fertilizers and works of art
The largest of the contracts concluded by Hammer were: firstly, the construction of gas pipelines, through which Russian gas went through Siberia to Japan and America; secondly, the supply of fertilizers to the Soviet Union, which, as you know, was in dire need Agriculture due to the fault of the peasant officials, who were very cool about their work. His income - is it worth talking about their size? - Hammer invested in the oil enterprises of Libya, as well as in Western countries (which was the most reasonable of him), buying racehorses, luxury hotels, liquor factories, and mainly way-works of art.
He was born on May 21, 1898 in New York in a family of poor Jewish emigrants from the south of Ukraine. His grandmother was a socialist, and his father became an activist in the labor movement and one of the founders of the US Communist Party. There were three sons in the family: the eldest was called Harry, the youngest was named Victor, and the father gave the middle son the proletarian name Armand (from Arm and Hamme - hammer and sickle).
After graduating from Columbia Medical College, Julius Hammer founded a low-profit pharmaceutical company. Armand followed in his father's footsteps. And when the father, having taken the guilt of his son for a fatal abortion, went to prison, Armand headed the family business and became the first American who earned a million dollars in his student years.
A. Hammer was friends with all Soviet leaders from V. Lenin to M. Gorbachev, was a friend of the F. Roosevelt family and British prince Charles, carried out the instructions of J. Kennedy. His collection of awards included: the Soviet Order of Friendship of Peoples, the French Order of the Legion of Honor, the Italian Order of Special Merit, the Swedish Royal Order of the Polar Star, the Belgian Order of the Crown, the Austrian Knight's Cross, the Venezuelan Order of Andres Bellos, the American National Medal of Arts. Hammer has been awarded the Pakistan Peace Prize, the Israeli Leadership Prize, the Mexican National Appreciation Prize and was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize. He was an honorary doctor of 25 universities. The United World College in the United States is named after him.
In March 1919, the Martens Bureau opened in New York - an unofficial representative office of Soviet Russia, which tried to establish contacts with business and political circles in the United States in order to diplomatically recognize the Bolshevik regime, but secretly supported the communist movement overseas. The Hammer firm became a partner because Ludwig Martens (a German Jew from Odessa) was a longtime friend of the Hammer family.
At the end of 1920, the Martens Bureau was closed, and its head was expelled from the United States, leaving unfulfilled contracts and debts. Allegedly wanting to pay them off, in the summer of 1921 A. Hammer went to Moscow. L. Martens took the guest on a trip to the Urals, where a young doctor-businessman saw terrible pictures of famine and offered the Bolsheviks to buy grain on credit in exchange for popular goods, with which local warehouses had been packed since tsarist times.
Vladimir Ulyanov (Lenin) seized on this idea, and under his pressure, on October 27, 1921, the People's Commissariat for Foreign Trade of the RSFSR and Hammer's Allied Drug and Chemical Corporation signed an agreement to supply Soviet Russia with 1 million bushels of American wheat in exchange for furs, black caviar and nationalized Bolsheviks values Gokhran.
Lenin attached great importance to the treaty, seeing in it "the beginning of trade" and "the path to the American business world." He received Hammer in his office in the Kremlin and, as a sign of goodwill, granted a concession to develop asbestos mines near Alapaevsk in the Urals.
Best of the day
Full of impressions, Armand Hammer briefly returned to America, where he founded a new company - Allied American Corporation, and then left for Moscow with his brother Victor, where he lived for eight years. He opened the first pencil factory in the USSR and represented the interests of 37 American corporations, banks and firms in Moscow, including the Henry Ford company. Returning to his homeland, A. Hammer remained a "friend of the Soviet Union", and the photograph presented by Lenin with the inscription "to comrade Hammer" stood in the most honorable place in his California house.
life under the hood
For seventy years, A. Hammer was the main Soviet agent of influence in the United States. In 1932, on instructions from the Kremlin, he tried to get close to Franklin Roosevelt, then still a contender for the presidency, and financed his election campaign. After the abolition of Prohibition in 1933, Hammer became the "alcohol king of America", establishing the production of spirits in the United States.
Containers, alcohol and oak barrels were supplied to him by Amtorg, an American society created by Moscow for trade with the USSR, about which Boris Bazhanov, secretary of I. Stalin, who fled to the West, wrote: “Amtorg is a trade mission that trades. But in fact it replaces and performs the functions and embassies, and trade missions, and bases for all the underground work of the Comintern and the GPU.
Hammer was closely monitored. Did the FBI file a case against him? 61 280, which was led by the head of the FBI, John Edgar Hoover. March 6, 1952 A. Hammer was invited to the city office of the FBI in New York.
That visit and the ensuing inquest could have cost Hammer many years in prison. However, the death of key witnesses, illegal methods of collecting information and luck allowed Hammer to get off with a far from easy fright. Since then, he began to obscure his ties with Moscow, sculpting a legend about his biography, the truth about which was revealed only after his death.
Big Wash"
Armand Hammer's acquaintance with the Baltics took place in 1921: in August he traveled through Riga to Moscow, and in December a steamer with grain for Russia arrived at the port of Tallinn. Since then, Hammer cargoes have been going through Tallinn, and a US diplomatic mission has been operating in Riga, where he regularly visited.
Already on his first visit to Moscow, A. Hammer was recruited by the Bolsheviks and, returning to New York, he brought with him 75 thousand dollars for the needs of the US Communist Party. But this was extremely dangerous, since on the way to Moscow he was detained in Southampton and searched by agents of Scotland Yard. Therefore, to transfer funds to the agents of the Lubyanka and the Kremlin, Hammer and his friends decided to use the Allied American Corporation.
In the 1920s, A. Hammer cruised around Europe, where his main place of residence was the Berlin hotel Kaiserhof. From Berlin, he traveled to Hamburg, Paris and London, as well as to Riga and Tallinn, where he stayed at the then best hotel in Riga, De Roma, and private hotels. The trips were so frequent that he acquired an Estonian passport.
Outwardly, the Hammer looked like a courier or intermediary merchant.
But his job was to secretly transfer money received from Moscow to Soviet agents in Europe and the United States.
A. Hammer received instructions from his father indicating how much money should be received "from a friend" in Germany or the Baltic countries and to whom to transfer it. When he received the money in cash, he either deposited it at a local bank in a specified account, or telegraphed to the New York office of his firm instructing Brother Harry to pay the amount named to a specific person.
The accountant and lawyer of the J. Shapiro firm disguised this transaction in the books as a loan provided by the firm of a certain Soviet organization, or payment for allegedly delivered goods and services, or commission. Since the ends of the operations were in Moscow, it was almost impossible to expose them, although the FBI knew that the recipients of the money were agents of the Comintern and the OGPU.
Over time, the financing scheme has improved. The Soviet State Trade Organization (Gostorg) issued A. Hammer a bill of exchange for the purchase of goods abroad, with which A. Hammer came to the Lloyd Bank branch and presented it as security for the loan.
Since the bill was guaranteed by the Soviet government, Lloyd Bank accepted it and paid Hammer's firm money for the purchase of goods. Hammer spent part of it for its intended purpose, and transferred the rest to a "reserve account" in a New York bank, which was used to finance the Bolshevik agents. Moscow immediately covered the shortages that arose, and it was also not possible to expose these actions.
The operations carried out by Armand Hammer were later called "money laundering", and the Baltic countries, with which Soviet Russia had excellent relations until the mid-1920s, were perfect place for their implementation.
It was in hotels and boarding houses in Latvia and Estonia that Hammer received cash and bills of exchange from Moscow couriers. Hammer perfectly mastered the rules of conspiracy. Therefore, the conveyor for money laundering for the needs Soviet intelligence and the Comintern worked flawlessly, although several special services on both sides of the ocean.
Project "Kama"
On April 16, 1922, between the delegations of defeated Germany and unrecognized Soviet Russia, who arrived at the Genoa Conference, in the town of Rapallo near Genoa, an agreement was signed containing secret military articles, according to which, as the English historian John Wheeler-Bennett writes, "it became possible to train German soldiers and officers in those types of training and weapons that were prohibited in Germany, and to build factories in Russia for the production of aircraft and other military equipment for their subsequent delivery to Germany. "Under the terms of the deal, Germany undertook to supply Soviet Russia with materials, equipment and engineers for the production of weapons for the Reichswehr, and in return Russia was to receive industrial equipment and technologies necessary for the modernization of the Red Army. A project that violated the articles of Versailles Germany's demilitarization treaty was codenamed "Kama" and supervised by Colonel-General Hans von Seeckt, Chief of the General Staff of the Reichswehr, and Arkady Rozengolts was in charge on the Soviet side.
To implement the plan, German intelligence created the Sondergruppe R, which established contact with the headquarters of the Intelligence Directorate of the Red Army in Berlin, and to deliver materials, equipment and specialists from Germany to Russia, a supposedly private investment company to support industrial enterprises (GEFU) was established with offices in Berlin and Moscow and a capital of 75 million gold marks. Moscow allocated 100 million gold marks for the project, and the Soviet foreign trade organization Vestorg and Hammer's Allied American Corporation became the roof of the top-secret enterprise. In May and July 1922, Politburo decisions were made in this regard.
The USSR and the Weimar Republic jointly created combat aircraft and aircraft engines, tanks, artillery systems, warships, ammunition, chemical weapons, and officers trained in military academies from each other. The Hammer company actively participated in this, whose branches functioned in Moscow, Berlin, New York, London, Kyiv, Petrograd and the Baltic countries, which were turned into important transshipment points.
In Riga and Tallinn, A. Hammer rented warehouses near seaports and railway junctions, where military cargo was delivered, sorted and then sent from Germany to the USSR and back.
Baltic screen
To finance such a large-scale enterprise, Moscow needed its own bank in the Baltic region. And then Harju Bank went bankrupt - the fourth largest bank in Estonia, which during the years of the blockade of the Entente (1918-1922) grew fat on trade with Soviet Russia. A. Hammer urgently arrived in Tallinn. He gave the owners of the bank their price of $250,000, and in February 1924, 51% of the bank's shares were in the hands of Hammer and the firm he created for the purchase of agricultural products. The money for the purchase was taken from a "reserve fund" in New York. The deal was done by Julius Hammer. Armand Hammer became the nominal owner of the bank, he made his uncle the director, but in reality Moscow ruled everything.
Harju Bank began to play an important role in the secret operations of the Kremlin, and the new owners brought it to the second place in terms of assets in Estonia. However, clouds soon gathered over the bank. In May 1924, the American representative in Tallinn, F. Colemans, informed the US State Department that A. Hammer's purchase of an Estonian bank was behind the Soviet leadership, which uses Allied American Corporation and Harju Bank to conduct covert operations, which is "considered with considerable concern in Estonia ".
Then information about the Soviet connections of the owner of the bank was leaked to the Estonian press. And although Hammer categorically rejected the "slander of competitors", stating that the purchase of Harju Bank was a purely business enterprise, and even managed to convince the American embassy of this, the Estonian authorities were not convinced. In May 1925, the Estonian government issued an order to close Harju Bank due to the termination of its payments.
But the real reason for closing the bank was something else. Throughout 1924, Moscow interfered in the internal affairs of the Estonian state, and in December, local communists attempted a putsch, which sharply increased anti-Soviet sentiment in Estonia.
In those days, the American embassy in Riga telegraphed to Washington: "All informed people in Reval (Tallinn) are convinced that Harju Bank is going to finance something more serious than the announced purchase butter. There are suspicions that the Moscow authorities shelled out the entire amount or part of it for the purchase of the bank in order to get a means of covertly transferring money abroad.” This frightened the Estonian leadership and prompted it to close the bank.
From fake Faberge to Ventspils
However, the connections of the Hammers with the Baltic countries were not interrupted. Only now their sphere of activity has become the trade in works of art and antiques, which the Bolsheviks have established through the New York "Hammer Gallery" and its European partners. Here they had rich experience. After the signing of the Tartu and Riga peace treaties in the early 1920s, in exchange for recognition by Soviet Russia, the Baltic countries opened a "window to Europe".
Here is what A. Hammer wrote about him: “At that time, Revel was one of the transit points in trade with Russia. But most of the goods that came there from Russia for exchange for food were contraband: works of art, diamonds, platinum and God knows "What else. All this was illegally sent across the border in exchange for food. In the winter of 1921, a branch of the People's Commissariat of Foreign Trade worked in Reval, which bought goods abroad for shipment to Revel, paying for them in gold bars."
The Soviet People's Commissar for Foreign Trade Krasin created a grandiose offshore in the Baltic countries, through which in 1920-1922 the Bolsheviks exported at least 500 tons of gold for a gigantic amount of about 700 million gold rubles! And this is not counting the smuggling of jewelry, antiques, etc. Food, military equipment, and rolling stock were purchased for the proceeds. Much was stolen.
When in 1928-1933 the Bolsheviks were selling the cultural heritage of Russia, the "Baltic window" was remembered again, and the Baltic countries were one of the main places where the valuables of Soviet museums, libraries, churches and classes repressed by the Soviet regime were sold on the cheap. In addition, fake icons, works by masters of Russian realistic painting (Aivazovsky, Shishkin, etc.), as well as false products of the famous jewelry firms Faberge, Sazikov, Ovchinnikov, Bolen, etc., were sold here in large quantities, the production of which was established by the Bolsheviks.
The number of fakes in antique shops in Riga and Tallinn was so high that Western embassies warned their citizens not to shop there. The Hummers took an active part in this. Through diplomatic channels, they were supplied with unmarked jewelry from Moscow, Armand Hammer personally branded them with the hallmarks of Faberge and other firms provided by the OGPU, and then the hot goods dispersed throughout America and Europe.
But this was not the end of the matter. The report of the US State Department of Tax Revenue, compiled in April 1932 on the basis of a secret report by the American agent in the Baltic countries, D. Heyman, reported that Armand and Victor Hammer "continue to carry out secret assignments from the Soviet government and for this purpose move between the United States and Europe" , and Armand's Russian wife, Olga Vadina, is named there as an "OGPU agent" (on May 7, 1929, in Moscow, she bore him a son named Julian. They registered in 1927 and divorced in 1943).
Large-scale cooperation between A. Hammer and Moscow resumed in the 1970s, when already a major oil tycoon, the owner of the Oksydental Petroleum Corporation, conceived a number of grandiose projects with the top leadership of the USSR. They provided for the construction in the Soviet Union (in the Volga region and other places) of large chemical enterprises for the production of dual-use products (chemical fertilizers and chemical weapons), as well as oil refineries in Russia, Ukraine and Lithuania, where Soviet oil would be processed on the basis of Western technologies, and the refined products would then be exported.
At the expense of the Soviet government and the American billionaire, giant factories were built in Dzerzhinsk, Lisichansk, Mazeikiai and other places. However, the export of their products required modern ports and terminals. It was decided to create a network of ports and terminals in the Baltic republics of the USSR.
With the participation of money and know-how of the corporation A. Hammer and his colleagues, the Port of Tallinn was reconstructed and powerful terminals were built in Ventspils, Klaipeda, etc. For obvious reasons, Hammer did not advertise his participation in these construction projects, although he had a vital interest there.
Armand Hammer did not have time to complete his latest project - "The Wise Men of Zion", which provided for the joint production of the latest civilian aircraft by aviation companies in the USA, the USSR and Israel. On December 10, 1990, he died of cancer.
He earned his first million, bypassing the "dry law". The second - entering into marriages with wealthy widows. For many years he has worked hard to Nobel Prize and a British title of nobility. He was the only US capitalist to be awarded the Order of Lenin. Hammer had no doubts about his posthumous fame. He said so: "I will make sure that people will remember only one thing about me - that I helped humanity on an unheard of scale." But it turned out not quite so.
Dr. Hammer
Armand Hammer was born on May 21, 1898 in the USA, where his ancestors had emigrated from Odessa. His uncle held a solid position in the Ford company, and his father, Julius Hammer, worked as a gynecologist, had a small pharmaceutical company and a chain of pharmacies in New York. Julius sympathized with the communists. Perhaps for this reason he was chained to Special attention authorities. And when he had an unsuccessful abortion at the home of one of the patients, he was arrested and sentenced to ten years in prison.Armand then only celebrated his majority and decided to continue his father's business. Although he received a medical education and was referred to as Dr. Hammer all his life (which he was very proud of), he did not work a single day in his specialty.
He turned an inherited pharmaceutical company into a fortification method by selling ginger tincture as a medicine. By diluting it with water, one could get a strong alcoholic drink. Thus, having cunningly bypassed the law, a year later the "doctor" became a millionaire.
Red capitalist.
In 1920 successful businessman Hammer joined the US Communist Party and went on a mission to Russia. The real reason his tour was the need to repay the debt of the Russians to his company. In addition, in a state where hunger, poverty and typhus reigned at that time, one could successfully cash in on the sale of medicines.
Armando was arranged for a meeting with Lenin, which marked the beginning of a lucrative trade with the Soviets. Hammer had a decent percentage of each transaction, representing the interests of dozens of American companies in Russia. Here he expanded his idea and stayed in the country for nine years.
The new NEP man quickly concluded that in the young republic, first of all, there was a question of food, and not of medicines. In exchange for Russian furs and caviar, he arranged for the supply of grain from the States, for which he received the go-ahead for the extraction of Ural asbestos. Later, he built a writing instrument factory in Moscow, which is known as the "factory named after Sacco and Vanzetti". Armand's annual profit of one million dollars compensated for the slight annoyance that the enterprise was not named after him.
Life in Russia was to Hammer's liking. A successful marriage to the daughter of a tsarist officer with a huge dowry, a luxurious mansion in the center of Moscow, servants, a private car with a driver and the favor of the authorities turned his existence into a paradise.
There were rumors that even on his deathbed, Lenin bequeathed to take care of the American friend of the Soviets. Perhaps that is why Hammer enjoyed the patronage of all leaders - from the leader of the proletariat to Mikhail Gorbachev.
The Russian period of the biography of the red capitalist ended when in the Soviet Union all private enterprises were transferred to the state. Hammer lost a significant amount of money, but he managed to take out a private collection of Russian art. Moreover, Stalin offered him to become the financial representative of the USSR in the West, for which our American comrade received far from modest interest.
Oil tycoon
Returning to America, Armand sold the valuables exported from Russia at a profit, and soon set up the production of fake Faberge eggs in the States, since he got the brand name back in Moscow.
But the main source of his income was the sale of alcohol. Making money on human weaknesses, Hammer built a whiskey distillery. The quality of the product was low, but the quantity of the drink produced and the low price allowed the enterprising "doctor" to capture a large part of the market. The fact that Prohibition was abolished in the United States also played into his hands. It was then that Hammer created the famous "United Distillers of America" and received financial government support to increase production.
By the end of the forties, his alcoholic beverage company had become the largest in America.
By the age of 58, Armand Hammer had changed several wives and mistresses. Basically, they became rich widows, whose dowry successfully replenished the treasury of a millionaire.
The next step in the business was the oil refinery, the so-called "Oxy" or "Occidental Petroleum", which by the end of the eighties took 14th place among US industrial firms. Its annual income exceeded 500 million dollars.
To achieve his goals, the magnate did not shun any means. He knew how to persuade, beg, flatter. For example, he told Brezhnev and Gorbachev that they reminded him very much of Lenin. He found mutual language with monarchs, presidents, dictators and mafiosi.
But luck turned away from Hammer when he began to engage in dirty manipulations with finances during one of the election campaigns. Then he almost got a term, but, given his age and state of health, the court treated the elderly man with indulgence. Having paid all the fines, Hammer remained the holder of only one percent of the shares of Oxy.
Ego
Whatever the great schemer did in his life, everything was subordinated to one goal - to perpetuate his "I". His attempts to create the appearance of patronage turned into grandiose shows that failed miserably. He was not so much interested in money as the opportunity to glorify his name with their help.
His last major project was the creation of a monumental Art Museum, on which the magnate spent about a hundred million dollars. It was a mausoleum to itself: on the facades the name of the creator was laid out in huge letters, the front wall of the hall was decorated with a full-length portrait of Hammer, and the central courtyard was a bust of the "doctor". A special chapel was built for the exhibition of the manuscript of Leonardo da Vinci, which was once acquired by Armand and renamed the Hammer Code.
He wanted to immortalize his name by paying $800,000 to have ARMAND HAMMER set in gold in the Metropolitan Museum of Art's Hall of Fame. But the grandson of the millionaire did not spare hundreds of thousands more so that the name of his grandfather disappeared from the Hall of Fame of the memorial.
... Everything in this life comes back like a boomerang. It turns out that when Armand was still a medical student and had a fatal abortion on a woman, his father Julius Hammer took the blame for his son and died in the terrible dungeons of Sing Sing.
Today it is very entertaining to find out - the people who stood up for the world victory of communism.
(Armand Hammer; 1898 - 1990) was an American entrepreneur and business magnate. He is known as the chairman of the Occidental Petroleum Corporation, which he managed for many years, as a well-known art collector, and also for his close connection with the Soviet Union.
Thanks to his business circles all over the world, Hammer had many friends and acquaintances. AT recent years of his life, he recalled that he was the only person in history who was on friendly terms with both Vladimir Ilyich Lenin and Ronald Reagan.
Hammer remains a controversial figure in US history due to his ties to the Soviet Union, which led many to believe that he was disloyal to the United States. During his lifetime, many also objected to him on the grounds that he helped illegally in the election campaign of US President Richard Nixon. Has been charged with crimes due to mismanagement at Occidental Petroleum, including pollution environment and mistreatment of workers.
Hammer craved publicity and appeared frequently in newspaper articles from 1920 to 1990. He often appeared on television, commenting on any events in international sphere or campaigning for cancer vaccine research.
Born May 21, 1898 in Manhattan, New York City in the family of Jewish immigrants from Russia, Julius and Rosa Hammer. His father, Julius Hammer, came to the United States from Odessa, Ukraine in 1875 and settled in the Bronx, one of the boroughs of New York, where he practiced general medicine and also owned five pharmacies. Armand Hammer studied at Columbia University and received a bachelor's degree in 1919, after which he entered the College of Internal Medicine and Surgery. Along with his studies, Hammer also worked alongside his two brothers to support and expand pharmaceutical business my father. During the First World War, after the price of medicines plummeted and Hammer persuaded his family to buy up all the medicines. As prices rose, the family made a fortune. Armand Hammer himself earned $1 million. In 1921, he completed his studies in medicine and received a doctorate in medicine, becoming one of the top ten graduates of the course.
Impatient in his goal to start a medical practice, as well as epidemics and famine raging in the Soviet Union, Hammer was inspired to buy an army field hospital and go to the USSR. After arriving in Moscow in 1921, he came to the conclusion that big problem there was a shortage of food. Drawing on his business savvy, Hammer set up a trade in Russian furs and caviar in exchange for American wheat. Soon he met with Lenin, who persuaded him to give up medicine and come to grips with the development of the economy of the Union. Lenin offered Hammer to run an asbestos mine in Siberia, which Hammer made profitable over the course of several years. Hammer was also able to obtain a concession to trade with several American companies, including Ford Motor Company, United States Rubber, Allis-Chalmers, and Underwood Typewriter. Hammer also asked for the right to produce pencils, which were in short supply at the time and imported at a very high cost. As a result, he formed the A. Hammer Pencil Company and, at the end of his first year of operation, made a profit of $1 million.
The Soviet experiment with capitalism came to an end in 1926, the NEP era ended and the government asked Hammer to sell back the asbestos mine and later the pencil business. Hammer was forced to yield. But on the advice of his brother Victor, who received a Ph.D. in art history from Princeton University, Hammer used his profits to buy the Royal Art, which at the time was known reasons not particularly appreciated by the Bolsheviks. Two brothers, Armand and Victor, organized the Hammer Gallery in New York and took out all the purchased works in 1930 in order to sell them here. Since that time, Hammer began to seriously engage in the trade in works of art. Even during the Great Depression, having changed his sales technique, he continued to trade.
Hammer has been married three times. First time to actress Olga von Ruth in 1927, secondly to Angela Zeweli in 1943, with whom he had a son, Julian, and thirdly to Frances Barrett in 1956, with whom he went to California and left everything their affairs. But the resignation soon tired Hammer and he began to think about new ventures. In 1957, he took control of the loss-making Mutual Broadcasting Company, which he was able to turn into a profit. A year earlier, he had agreed to finance a risky tiny oil well for the Occidental Petroleum Company and was able to turn it into a profitable company by becoming president. The company's equity increased from $175,000 in 1957 to $300 million in 1967. Under Hammer's leadership, the company was successful in the production of coal, chemicals and fertilizers. And, in 1973, Hammer returned to Soviet Union having signed a multi-billion dollar agreement for the construction of an ammonia plant, which was built in 1979 in the city of Togliatti - TogliattiAzot.
But, nevertheless, Hammer's main hobby was collecting works of art, in particular paintings by famous artists, since the 1920s. He always believed that art should be accessible to everyone and repeatedly confirmed this. In 1965, Hammer donated a multi-million dollar collection of Dutch, Flemish, German and Italian artists of the 15th and 17th centuries. UCLA and many other works to the Los Angeles Museum of Art. In 1971, he donated many old master paintings to the District Museum and National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC. In 1972, Hammer donated a $1 million Goya painting to the Hermitage Museum in Leningrad. In addition, Hammer also owned three of the most important collections, consisting of more than 100 works by such masters of painting as Rembrandt, Renoit, Rubens and others, which constantly traveled around the world as valuable exhibits in various exhibitions.
One of critical issues what worried Hammer was to find a cure for cancer. He was a board member of the Eleanor Roosevelt Kenser Foundation founded in 1960. In 1969, he founded the Armand Hammer Center for Cancer Research at the Salk Institute in La Jolla, California. Sponsored the annual Armand Hammer Cancer Research Conference. In 1982, he established the $1 million Hammer Prize for achievements in cancer research.
Last thing public speaking Hammer was November 25, 1990 in honor of the grand opening of the Museum of Armand Hammer (The Armand Hammer Museum of Art and Culture Center in Los Angeles) in Los Angeles. Two weeks later, on December 10, 1990, Armand Hammer died of cancer. bone marrow, at the age of 92 years.
