The October Revolution happened in November 1917. Later Soviet propaganda 'proved' it was 'the will of the people', but few know that the brutal rebellion, which killed millions and raised Lenin's numerically tiny Bolshevik Party to power, was made possible by massive injections of German money laundered through a Swedish bank and a shady arms dealer who had made a fortune in the Balkan wars. The so-called 'workers' and peasants' revolution' has a cast of millions, of which the three stars were neither workers nor peasants. Nor were they Russian. Lenin was a dissident Tatar named Ulyanov; Trotsky was a bourgeois Ukrainian Jew; Stalin was a seminary-educated Georgian undercover agent of the Okhrana secret police, who never did speak Russian well. In this timely publication, Douglas Boyd shows how this still-flying banner of revolution changed the world. AUTHOR: Fluent in several languages, Douglas Boyd was trained as a Russian-language snooper on Warsaw Pact air forces, based at a secret RAF SIGINT base in Berlin and spent time as a Cold War POW in East Berlin. He has scripted and directed historical reconstructions as a BBC TV producer. He has published over ten books with The History Press, including The Kremlin Conspiracy and Daughters of the KGB. SELLING POINTS: . The inside story of how Lenin, Trotsky and Stalin used German money to raise the minority Bolshevik party to totalitarian power . Released to coincide with the centenary of the October . Revolution, when the political world stage was changed forever . Russian-language first- person accounts translated into English for the first time . Strong international aspects in relation to Eastern Europe, Germany and the US . Author has a strong track record and reputation in Russian and Eastern European history 32 b/w illustrations