Alexander Gelfand, known as Parvus, was perhaps the strangest revolutionary of his era. Alexander was born in 1867 in the town of Berezino, Minsk province (territory of modern Belarus), into a Jewish family.

A theorist of Marxism and co-author of the idea of "permanent revolution" alongside Trotsky, he was also a brilliant businessman - and it was this combination that made him a figure evoking a mix of admiration and disdain among his contemporaries.
After the 1905 revolution, arrest, and escape abroad, Parvus engaged in arms trading in the Balkans during the Balkan Wars. The venture turned out to be extremely profitable. By the beginning of World War I, he was already a wealthy man - and this contrast with the image of a "professional revolutionary" was striking.
On the island of Schwanenwerder near Berlin, Parvus built a villa where he lived with genuine bourgeois luxury: good food, expensive cigars, comfort - everything that a true Marxist activist was supposed to renounce. Plump, heavyset, and fond of comfort, he did not fit the romantic image of a fighter for the liberation of the proletariat.
Former comrades did not miss the opportunity to poke fun at him for this. Trotsky, with whom Parvus had once been intellectually close, regarded his new lifestyle with open mockery - for the revolutionary émigré community, a villa by the lake was almost a betrayal of ideals.
Parvus himself apparently saw no contradiction in this. Money was a tool for him - a source of influence and the ability to affect the course of events, including financing revolutionary activities in Russia in 1917.
Thus, this figure remained in history - a bourgeois with revolutionary theory in his head, who died in 1924 rich but politically forgotten and unneeded by the forces whose rise he had once hastened.