From Lenin to Nixon: The fall of the dollar, the rise of a new world

Soon after the 1917 Revolution, the Bolsheviks imagined that money itself could be annihilated. They saw Ruble as not a medium of exchange but a relic of bourgeois corruption. 

Lenin and Trotsky flooded Russia with Rubles until the currency collapsed, believing that once money died, society could be reorganized around coupons for food, housing, and education.  Yet by 1921, their utopia dissolved into chaos. Trade froze, incentives vanished, and the nation discovered that money is not just an instrument of greed but the grammar of civilization. To abolish it was to unwrite the syntax of social life.

Across the Channel, Britain staged a quieter revolution. The pound had been born in 1694, when a syndicate of bankers lent £1.2 million to the Crown and in return secured the right to issue notes, monetizing royal debt and tethering currency to gold. For centuries, this alchemy of credit and metal sustained the most trusted money in the world. 

But in 1931 Britain abandoned the gold standard, and in 1946 the Bank of England was nationalized. Money ceased to be metal; it became pure abstraction, underwritten not by gold but by trust in the state.

America soon followed. In 1933 Roosevelt severed the dollar’s partial link to gold; in 1971 Nixon severed it entirely. The dollar floated free, and with it began the global regime of fiat money—currencies backed not by substance but by promise, force, and habit. Western strategists believed they had devised the perfect scheme: export inflation to the world while consuming without constraint. 

But history is cunning. The torrents of paper that poured out of America and Europe were absorbed by Asia, which converted them into factories, supply chains, and industries. The West exported inflation; the East imported prosperity.

Now, in the third decade of the twenty-first century, the dollar—the most traded and most weaponized currency in history—stands at the edge of exhaustion. Its very ubiquity makes it uncontrollable. Since its detachment from gold, its long arc has been one of decline, a slow erosion masked by inertia. 

A major crisis could trigger a stampede away from the dollar, and Washington will discover that hegemony built on paper can dissolve like paper in water. The death of the dollar will not be the collapse of one currency but the implosion of an entire financial order.

For two decades, Asia and even multinational corporations have been preparing for this twilight. Local-currency trade, sovereign funds, digital payments, and strategic stockpiles are scaffolding a post-dollar world. The West still mistakes this for adjustment; in truth it is replacement. The illusion that the dollar is eternal is America’s last superstition.

Money is always more than money. It is trust made tangible, empire made portable, the metaphysics of power disguised as paper. The Bolsheviks proved it could not be abolished; the British proved it could be nationalized; the Americans proved it could be globalized. What remains to be proven is how it will end. 

When the dollar dies, it will not merely mark the decline of a currency. It will announce the end of an epoch, and perhaps the beginning of another story for mankind.