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Concept
Sisson Documents
Summary
The Sisson Documents (Dokumenty Sissona) are a set of 68 Russian-language documents obtained in 1918 by Edgar Sisson, the Petrograd representative of the United States Committee on Public Information. Published as The German-Bolshevik Conspiracy, they purported to demonstrate that during World War I, Trotsky and Lenin as well as other Bolshevik leaders were agents directed by the German Empire to bring about Russia's withdrawal from the conflict.
Their authenticity was debated even as they were widely publicized to discredit the Russian Revolution. In 1956, George F. Kennan, in an article in the Journal of Modern History, demonstrated that they were forgeries. Various analyses however, including that of Kennan did not exclude the possibility that the Bolsheviks received some German logistical or financial support up to 1917, as opposed to following the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk in 1918.
Sisson had worked as a reporter for the Chicago Tribune, as managing editor of Collier's Weekly, and then as editor of Cosmopolitan before joining the Committee on Public Information (CPI), a wartime unit of the United States government that sought to control information and promote America's war effort principally on the home front but also overseas. He joined the CPI's central administration in April 1917. On October 27 of that year he left the United States for Russia to serve as the CPI's operative there, but he arrived after the Bolsheviks had overthrown the Russian Provisional Government and was frustrated in most of his efforts. He managed to recruit Russians to deliver US propaganda to Germany and also distributed a million Russian-language copies of Woodrow Wilson war message to the US Congress.
He believed his greatest success came when he acquired the Sisson Documents in Petrograd in the spring of 1918. Sisson returned to the US in May and became head of the CPI's Foreign Section in July 1918. His report describing the documents reached Wilson on May 9, 1918, and the administration released them to the American press on September 15.
Official source
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