Sutton is not very valuable as a source. Although he did uncover various linkages and connections between the nascent Soviet state and Western businesses, Antony Sutton's corpus of work suffers from unsupportable theses, deep problems in methodology, and a conspiratorial mindset that denudes what little value his work has for scholars in the twenty-first century.

In a highly negative 1976 review of Wall Street and FDR in The Business History Review, Howard Dickman took on Sutton's methodology and arguments. As Dickman tartly notes:

Sutton evidently belongs to the "international banker" school of historical change. The present book is a sequel to his Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, wherein it is purportedly shown that certain elements on Wall Street helped to finance the Bolshevik putsch. Installment number three will examine Wall Street ties to Hitler. The theme underlying all three volumes is that "socialism . . . has come to the United States [Russia, Germany] because it is very much in the interest of the Wall Street establishment to attain a socialist society" (9). Wall Street and FDR is a weak specimen of "conspiracy history" and one of its sub-genres, "ruling class theory." It is poorly written and edited, digressive, repetitious, disorganized, and unconvincing. A vaguely identified Wall Street fox is the quarry: the hunt begins and ends by barking the magic names, Rockefeller, Morgan, and Du Pont, and the chase amounts to leaping over hedgerows of interlocking directorships to prove that every one is connected in some way to everyone else, and all are controlled by the great Wall Street banking houses.

Dickman noted that Sutton often relies upon business connections as proof of his thesis, which is a very problematic method for a sloppy researcher like Sutton. In the 2015 article "The Ludwig Martens–Maxim Litvinov Connection, 1919–1921", Donald James Evans contended that Sutton misidentified a key player in the initial Soviet overtures to the US. Likewise, Todd Pfannstiel's recent Diplomatic History article on the Soviet attempts to gain diplomatic recognition via economic trade was more complicated and a two-way street rather than Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution's more simplistic view of American bankers pulling the strings of economic policy.

One of the biggest problems of Sutton has is his denial of agency among any individual, group, or movement that are not his cabal of shady Wall Street types. The Bolsheviks, he asserts in Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution, might not have been able to seize power were it not for the efforts of individuals like William Boyce Thompson. Such an interpretation flies in the face of the overwhelming bulk of historiography on the RSDLP and Russian radicalism in late-tsarist period as well as the shortcomings of tsarist autocracy to handle the modernity it enabled. Things were clearly coming to some type of political head in Russia by the twentieth century; the tsarist state structure was incapable of making substantive poltical reforms (and it was indeed intrinsically hostile to this idea), there was a growing class divide within Russia, and the nationalities issue was one that made the empire a political powderkeg. The world war proved to be the perfect conflagration for Lenin and company, for as Dominic Lieven noted in a LSE lecture, while there were many scenarios in Russia where the Bolsheviks could have seized power without the war, it is difficult to imagine a scenario in which they could have kept power without the war. The fact that the Bolsheviks clearly promised to end the war was one of the chief assets in the confusing days of 1917 and did much to garner them support. Whatever shadowy connections they had with American bankers was nugatory compared to this salient fact. Sutton's work, which appeared in the 1970s, shows no sign of even consulting the works of the "revisionist" historians in the West like Alexander Rabinowitch or Sheila Fitzpatrick- whose first works appeared in the late 1960s- that contended the Bolsheviks were a mass political movement and that whatever their faults, it was not a narrow conspiratorial clique that seized power in October 1917.

Indeed, much of Sutton's take on the Bolsheviks and their background is derived from older works from Cold Warriors like Richard Pipes that painted a picture that they Bolsheviks were a minority party animated by a desire for a dictatorship from the start. Although these Cold Warrior-types tended to be pro-Wall Street, they found in Sutton an ideological bedfellow of sorts. One of Sutton's major positions during the 1970s was that the United States had enabled the USSR to become a major world power through technological transfer. Such assertions, perpetuated in Sutton's books and lectures, meshed well with the militancy of the intellectuals in Team-B that believed that the Soviet colossus was an existential threat and that US Cold War policy needed to isolate the USSR. Normalized business relations between the superpowers worked contrary to this policy and Sutton's thesis that American businesses consistently enabled the USSR dovetailed with Team-B's picture of a rising Soviet power. Other anti-communist American groups like the John Birchers found Sutton's conspiratorial take on events was congruent with their anti-elitist notions of effete bankers and other types not taking seriously the threat of communism, both international and domestic.

The idea of a consistent and global plot by a rich few was one of the staples of antisemitic propaganda and this no doubt explains some of the popularity of Sutton within conspiracy circles. Sutton himself toys with antisemitism in his works, dismissing the Protocols of the Elders of Zion as a forgery, but noting the number of Jews in middle-men positions in Wall Street's conspiracy. As he notes in the appendix in the Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution that "What better way to divert attention from the real operators than by the medieval bogeyman of anti-Semitism?" Thus Sutton can have his antisemitic cake and eat it too. In crude Marxist terms, Sutton dismisses the superstructure of antisemitism while keeping its base of shadowy linkages and networks intact.

Did some American financial chiefs want to deal with the new Bolshevik regime? Of course. The tsarist empire covered a massive part of the earth and the nature of global capitalism meant that businessmen could ignore this geographic reality at their peril. Additionally, Hassan Malik's recent monograph on finance and Russian Revolution, it was not a given that the successor to the tsarist state would default on tsarist debts. But interest does not mean that they were the essential catalyst that allowed Lenin to capture the state. Such a thesis can only be tenable by ignoring the vast bulk of historiography and research done on 1917 since the 1960s. Sutton shows no engagement with this research and instead takes the earlier historiography that the revisionists have superseded as a given. Not surprisingly, these largely conservative historians have proven to be Sutton's most consistent supporters, even if his "ruling-class theory" seems at odds with their generally pro-Wall Street domestic policies. While Sutton did some pioneering research on the business relationship between Moscow and the US, work like Evans has shown Sutton to be sloppy and prone to making errors. Much like the work of David Irving, whatever dubious merits Sutton's books possess have diminished with time and are more reflective of the author's biases than any real attempt at serious historical scholarship.

Not really. I'm not a historian, but I know some things about that historical period, and I can say Anthony Sutton misrepresents many aspects of it. The book can be broken down to four general claims (being the first half of the book, due to space I can only cover this part but if you wish I can expand it to the whole book):

1. Trotsky was a German Spy: His claim is that Trotsky was financed by german agents (this is important because Sutton claims a good deal of this dirty money came from germany, which received it from Wall Street). His main argument focuses on a particular period when Trotsky was living in New York (from January to around April 1917, after being kicked out of Europe) before leaving to help Lenin lead the Bolshevik revolution after the Provisional Goverment did the February Revolution. His first claim is that Trotsky didn't had enough money for all his expenses so he was receiving money from other sources, but he conveniently ignores the fact that his wife left Spain (were he previously was) with 500 dollar in cash (around 10,000 today). He also claims that Trostky used to ride a car in New York with a personal chauffeur (but he also ignores that both the car and the chauffeur were actually from a friend he made in New York, and not his). Another weird claim of his is that Woodrow Wilson gave him a US passport to go to Russia, which is both nonsensical (why would a US passport help you get to Russia in 1917?) and actually contradicts the evidence we have (he received a british passport which he needed because all ships going from America to Scandinavia had to stop at Halifax, Nova Scotia, a British port, due to the wartime blockade British had. He also needed a Russian Passport since that was what Kelensky Provisional Goverment asked for, which he got from the Russian consulate at 55 Broadway). New York deputy attorney general Alfred H. Becker was tasked with a full investigation in early 1918 about Trotsky and his money funds, and after tracing every dime Trotsky earned he was unable to verify and indication that Trotsky got any money from German sources.

Another claim made about this was that before leaving the US, Trotsky was handed 10,000 US dollars to finance the revolution, by the Germans. This rather odd claim came from a telegram by Captain Guy Gaunt (a British spy in America), to Halifax Nova Scotia in Canada (where Trotsky ship had to stop before going to Europe), asking to stop the ship that was carrying Trotsky. The telegram was full of mistakes (nobody named Voskoff was on the ship, "Chudnovksy" was misspelled, and the man Muchin named in the cable was not a part of Trotsky group), furthermore, the 10,000 dollars were never found, even after the ship was detained in Halifax and Trotsky and his associated were arrested and inspected. Eventually Trotsky was released because news about his arrest were made public in Russia, Europe and the US, and a lot of pressure was put in releasing him, specially in Russia were many pro-bolsheviks were demanding information about his arrest. Now, Sutton only knew that some friends of Trotsky in America came to know about his situation and tried getting answers from Canada (from postmaster general R. M. Coulter) but he didn't knew all the story since many details were released as declassified documents decades after his book, so all he knew was that someone in London approved the release. The reason why Trotsky was released was because Britain sent a British Colonel, senior inspect of the MI-5, to inspect the situation himself (Claude E. M. Dansey). He was sent because the War Office in London had grown concerned over the perfomance of the Brtain intelligence operations in New York (specially Wiseman, who was heading said operations, who was seen as an amateur in the field).

The 10,000 dollars tip, he soon figured out, came from an informer named Casimir Pilenas, who was later discharged of his duties after Dansey studied the entire thing (he reported: "I told Wiseman that Pilenas had better be discharged at once, and Wiseman said that he was going to do so" and "it looked to me like the work of a russian agent provocateur"). Pilenas eventually got involved in a notorious anti-semitic operation in 1918, by being the chief promoter of english-language versions of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, presenting this documents to the American military intelligence, claiming Bolshevism was a Jewish plot to control the world (which maybe had something to do with him trying to get Trotsky, a jewish bolshevik, arrested on charged of being a german spy carrying money from them?).

2. Lenin was also a German Spy: This claim comes largely from two different sources and claims. The first one is that Lenin was sent from Switzerland were he was hiding, to Russia using a german train, so that he could get to Russia and spread the revolution. The claim that he used a train was true, but it's also true many enemies of Lenin were riding that same train (Menshevik promoters in particular, members of a left-wing party that disgreed with the Bolsheviks in many key topics).

The reason germans helped both Mensheviks and Lenin (among other Bolsheviks) was because they were trying to get Russia out of World War I so they could focus all their troops in the Western Front instead of splitting them between the east and the west. Hence, they helped both Mensheviks and Bolcheviks because both parties wanted to take power and make a peace treaty with Germany. The second claim comes from a series of accusations by Kerensky about secret telegrams showing Lenin was a german spy in the pay, which prompt them to arrest many bolsheviks (Lenin managed to escape to finland, but Trotsky and others were arrested) while a trial was set to happen in November (trial that that never came to be because by then, the Bolsheviks did their revolution and the entire Kerensky goverment was dissolved). Now, when Sutton wrote this, many of the documents from Soviet Russia were classified, and he only had copies of the telegrams that were in the Hoover Institute, but since the fall of the Soviet Goverment, this documents had been released and were studied by historians. Not only the Kerensky Goverment was going to issue a final veredict of "not guilty" on the accused after failing to find any solid proof of this spy stuff, but the telegrams, when properly studied, fail to show any german plot (Semion Lyandres wrote a paper on this called "The Bolsheviks "German Gold" Revisited: An Inquiry into the 1917 Accusations"). Of course, the fact that Lenin and Trotsky helped instigate a coup to overthrow the Kaiser later in 1918 after the end of WW1 points that maybe they were not german spies paid by said Kaiser. Now, chances are the Bolsheviks were partly helped with cash by the germans (through german spies infiltrated in bolshevik groups) but how this money was funneled was certainly not with banks or conventional means (most likely it was indirectly, through people like Parvus or Keskula, and without the Bolsheviks knowing, since at that time being tied to germany in any way gave bad optics among russian socialists), since the Kerensky investigation revised all bank payments and found none that could be tied to germany.

(I continue in a second post).