The Bolshevik Nationalization of Russia's Banks in 1917 Came Right Out of the Playbook of the Communist Manifesto: the "Centralization of Credit in the Hands of the State"

The Bolshevik nationalization of Russia’s banks in 1917 came right out of the playbook of the Communist Manifesto. “The proletariat will use its political supremacy,” Marx had instructed, “to wrest, by degrees, all capital from the bourgeoisie.” Such a program “cannot be effected,” he emphasized, “except by means of despotic inroads on the rights of property,” including the “centralization of credit in the hands of the State, by means of a national bank with State capital and an exclusive monopoly.” Lenin, continuing this line of thought, had written earlier in 1917, “The big banks are that ‘state apparatus’ which we need for the realization of Socialism and which we take ready-made from capitalism. . . . This ‘state apparatus’ . . . we can ‘lay hold of’ and ‘set in motion’ at one stroke, by one decree, for the actual work of bookkeeping, control, registration, accounting, and summation is here carried out by employees, most of whom are themselves in a proletarian or semi-proletarian position.”

--Sean McMeekin, History's Greatest Heist: The Looting of Russia by the Bolsheviks (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2009), 11.