Raymond Robins: First Influence Recruit for Bolsheviks
A strange, haunted, neurotic, driven man--putty in Gumberg's manipulative hands
My on-going biographical study of Alexander Gumberg (see links below to previous posts)…
Introduction: Alexander Gumberg—Hide in Plain Sight and Admit Nothing
…requires understanding the major personalities that Gumberg manipulated for the Bolsheviks.
The key personality in Gumberg’s life was Raymond Robins. Gumberg recruited Robins in the fall of 1917, in revolutionary Petrograd. Gumberg then used Robins to worm his way into the highest levels of American politics, and Wall Street. When Gumberg began handling Robins, Robins had just become the head of the American Red Cross Mission to Russia.
The American diplomatic community in Petrograd, manipulated remotely by President Wilson and his svengali, Col. House, was not allowed to meet with the ruling Bolsheviks. Gumberg, working directly for the Bolsheviks, with his near-native American English, pretended to be an independent translator/secretary/guide for Americans. Robins, unable to communicate in Russian, and ignorant of Russian history, politics, or culture, glommed on to Gumberg (as did a dazzling array of other American influencers). Gumberg arranged personal meetings for Robins with the Bolshevik leadership--Trotsky, Lenin, Chicherin, and any other Bolshevik necessary. Because the official American diplomats were not allowed to meet with the Bolsheviks, Robins (with Gumberg constantly at his side, translating and guiding) became the conduit for quasi-official Bolshevik-American communications and negotiations. Of course, Gumberg controlled every step Robins took, and every idea Robins thought, to the benefit of the Bolsheviks.
Raymond Robins: Biographic and Personality Profile
Raymond Robins was a strange, haunted, neurotic, driven man.
Objectively reviewing his life story, one cannot help but diagnose Robins as a manic-depressive, obsessive, ego-maniacal, neurotic fantasist, who aggressively pursued his dreams and fantasies in the real world.
His young manhood was consumed with cyclical obsessions and passions, with some success inevitably resulting in disappointments and failures. But it's during this period when the over-arching neurosis of his life manifested. He was in love with his sister, a European superstar actress, a dozen years older than him. He wrote her love letters, detailing his dream of becoming wealthy and buying a retreat that they could dwell in together for the rest of their lives.
According to Robins himself, he bounced around the country, working for short periods in various industries. He claimed to work for a few months as a miner, during which he agitated for workers' rights and unionization. But all these experiences were fleeting; and regardless of length of time, his stories of these times are not really believable. What is discernible, though, is a pattern of obsessive manic pursuit of the idea-of-the-moment, followed by near-suicidal depression after that pursuit failed.
By his late 20's, Robins had a minor professional success--he earned a law degree and worked as a lawyer for a year, culminating in a failure in his only big case. He faced the prospect of ten to twenty years of hard work to slowly build and establish a solid law practice. Instead, Robins' obsessive personality fixated on the just-discovered gold fields of Alaska. He fantasized that he could strike it rich and buy a rural love-nest retreat where he could gaze longingly at his sister.
Robins' mania drove him to drag his equally neurotic older brother, a depressed alcoholic, with him on a ill-planned quest for treasure. Of course, reality crashed the manic quest, and the two nearly starved and froze to death in the gold rush. The brother killed himself within the next couple of years, but Robins, in his textbook manic-depressive manner, seized his next mania: God. During a weeks-long desperate dog-sled and foot trek through the frozen Arctic, Robins saw God, in the form of a moonlit landscape appearing to him to resemble a cross. He also had an encounter with Jesuits in the deep wilderness during this trek.
The vision, and the example of the Jesuit's devoted service, while living in poverty, drove him to crash into despair, and abandon his gold-mania. In the next year or so Robins became a bum in an Alaskan gold-rush settlement. He earned some money working with wood. But his new mania drove him to haunt church and mission libraries, studying the Bible and other spiritual texts. His constant manic obsessed presence morphed into assisting in church activities. After some time, church leaders harnessed his energy, and he became an assistant in a combination church/hospital in Nome, Alaska. He thrived and put to use his skills in public speaking and learned he could preach.
Nome was a boom-town, with all the riches, outlaws, desperadoes, fools, charlatans, con-men, losers and winners found in such places. Without a regular law enforcement officer, the settlement's disputes were dealt with by forceful personalities. Robins, in the full flush of his God-mania, filled that role. With a booming voice, full of self-confidence, and sure of his God-given mission, Robins strutted about the town, settling disputes, and becoming a leader of men.
When Robins and his brother left California for Alaska, he stopped communicating regularly with his beloved sister, Elizabeth. For more than a year, she worried that he was lost or dead. When she finally had word that he was working in a church in Nome, she launched herself on a rescue mission. Determined to bring him out of the wilderness, back to civilization, Elizabeth left England, bound for Alaska. She followed leads, visiting people who knew him in New York, Boston, San Francisco, and Seattle. From Seattle, she boarded a ship for Nome, where she planned to rescue her little brother, Raymond, and bring him home. Raymond refused to leave with her, as winter approached. But soon after she left, his spirit broke.
Raymond's God-mania broke after his sister's visit in Nome. Flat broke, and in debt, he returned to the lower 48 a broken man. After weathering the depressive phase, and a bout of typhoid fever, Raymond was disappointed by his sister's refusal to buy a farm for their idyll. He bounced to Chicago, and began social work in the tenements there. His mania again fired, he worked his way up Jane Adams' Hull House organization, and into Chicago politics. His manic phases fueled his rapid rise in the ranks of this social movement. His evangelical preaching experience and knack for public speaking led to his serving as a spokesman for the social justice movement.
He built a wide network of socialite benefactors, politicians, law enforcement, and others throughout Illinois. This led to personal connections with powerful people around the country. Through this network, Raymond met and married Margaret Dreier. She inherited $18.5 million (in 2024 dollars) from her industrialist father's estate, as did her three sisters (their one brother received more than double their shares).
With his wife's money, Robins never again had to work for pay. Margaret lived frugally, but was generous to her causes and her husband. As a warped token of his love for Margaret, Raymond gave Margaret his dog-eared photo of his sister that he had carried with him since childhood. Elizabeth continued to support Raymond, even as the couple lived on his wife's fortune. Giving up his dream of a rural retreat with his sister, Raymond prevailed upon her to buy a plantation in Florida for he and Margaret to use as a retreat.
Robins, as his public profile rose with speaking engagements and political activities, developed his personal mythology. A complete failure in business, the law, mining, and every other money-making profession, Raymond seems to have felt that he needed to justify the wealth he'd married into. He began telling the lie that his gold-mining in Alaska netted him a $250,000 fortune (over $9 million in 2024 dollars). This was exactly half of what his wife had inherited. [Note: People believed him. Many sources on Robins, to the present day, repeat his lie: Robins was a mining entrepreneur, who earned his fortune in Alaska.]
His mythology combined that lie with exaggerations of his younger years bouncing around the country, working in menial jobs. In his self-made myth, those years became heroic laboring class struggles against capitalists. This part of his myth had him participating in, and leading, labor unrest as an 18 year-old.
The full blown life-story myth that finally emerged was: Colonel Raymond Robins, a self-made millionaire, rose from the laboring ranks, where he led union actions against capitalists, was an evangelist, and is now a settlement house social warrior fighting for justice for the downtrodden.
This half-true/half-false back-story, and his post-marriage wealth, powered Robins' ascent in the newly formed Progressive Party. His speaking skills, aggressive manner, and his personal network of powerful people, raised him to the top ranks of party officials. He became friends with Teddy Roosevelt, the founder and leader of the Party. Robins ran for state office as a Progressive in Illinois, and was soundly trounced. He was on the losing side in the 1916 national elections, which Woodrow Wilson won. The Progressives played a role in that election, sucking away votes from the Republican candidate, ensuring Wilson's win. Wilson thus felt some obligation to Roosevelt.
From the Chicago social justice work, through his marriage, acquisition of an estate in Florida, local, state, and national political activities with the Progressive Party, friendship with Roosevelt, and national speaking tours, Robins continued his manic-depressive roller coaster ride. Months or years of manic activity were followed by bouts of deep depression that required months of recovery. This cycle continued throughout his life. His later years included incidents of amnesia that had Robins disappearing, assuming a false identity, and living a life as a common worker, for weeks or months at a time. Clearly, Robins had a tenuous grasp on reality, and lost that grasp several times during his life.
This, then, was the strange person that Teddy Roosevelt recommended to Wilson to serve on the American Red Cross Russian mission. Robins used his fake mining millionaire myth, along with his semi-fake man of labor myth to pump up his image.
The final touch to Robins' fake life story was his military title, Colonel. All the members of the Red Cross mission were awarded military titles, since their travels would take them into war-zones. No training, no military discipline, but they were issued military uniforms and rank insignia, and called each other by their pretend ranks. Robins went to Washington a fake mining millionaire and lion of labor. He got on the ship in New York bound for war-torn Europe as Major Robins, mining millionaire, and lion of labor. He was granted a promotion while in Russia to lieutenant colonel. Robins, until his death, styled himself as Col. Robins. He was an embellisher, a faker, a fantasist.
The Red Cross mission was financed by Wall Street and industry heavy hitters. The mission leader and main source of funds, Thompson, was an actual mining millionaire, and titan of Wall Street. He disliked Robins' reputation, and was not pleased with Robins' appointment to the mission. Thompson paid for the mission, and paid handsomely, including a $1 million gift to the Russians to fund pro-war propaganda.
During the trans-Atlantic trip, however, Robins won over Thompson with his silver tongue. It's likely that Thompson never saw through Robins' concocted life-story, and swallowed his mining millionaire/union activist lies. When Thompson returned to the US early, after his funding of non-Bolsheviks was publicized, he trusted Robins enough to turn over leadership of the mission to Col. Robins.
Alex Gumberg first met this complicated personality in Petrograd in the late fall of 1917. For a skilled manipulator like Gumberg, Robins' swirling neuroses and personality weaknesses, combined with his delusions of grandeur made it easy to sink his claws into Robins. And that is what Gumberg did. In very short order, Gumberg had Robins eating out of his hand.
The pair provided each other the missing ingredient in their lives. They complemented each other. Gumberg provided Robins direct access to top-level Bolshevik leaders. This access allowed Robins to play the role of international negotiator, making decisions of historical importance, telling the President what he should do. Robins, for his part, provided Gumberg with a door into Wall Street, and national-level American politicians.
Gumberg, who was the Bolshevik handler of more than twenty Americans during the Revolution, was most successful in manipulating Robins. Robins came away from the experience believing that Gumberg was his best friend. While some of Gumberg's targets saw through him, for the manipulator he was, many came away from their interactions with him with a positive feeling. But no-one besides Robins believed that Gumberg was his best friend. Robins facilitated Gumberg’s covert mission of winning recognition for the USSR in the USA. They remained in constant contact until Gumberg’s death in 1939.
Sources:
Robins, E. (1956). Raymond and I. The Macmillan Company.
Salzman, N. (1991). Reform and Revolution: The Life and Times of Raymond Robins. The Kent State University Press.