https://neodemocracy.blogspot.com/2017/05/marx-on-ottoman-turks.html?m=1

Couldn’t find anything about the funds, although I know I have seen articles and evidence of it in the past. However, I did find excerpts from Marx that he published in the New York Tribune where he is pretty blatantly arguing against the building Russian tsarist imperialist hegemony, and showing that if the Russians continued their strategy in the Crimean War and took all of Turkey that it would become a massive hegemonic empire (which would be a setback for revolution). Thus he argues for defense of the Ottoman Empire against the Russian imperialists.

So in effect he’s reaching the same conclusion here that I was arguing, that it’s fine for revolutionaries to play empires off of each other to prevent the creation of a single hegemonic empire. In modern day, America has become what Marx feared tsarist Russia would become, the empire that is disastrous to global revolution and set it back a century. So he would argue that it’s fine to support Russia (even if it was an empire like the Turks of yore, which it no longer is) if it means preventing or weakening the global hegemon (America/the collective west) to open up avenues for revolution.