History Forum / General / General Topics / November 2007

Want to see ""Typical Jewish Behaviour""? As we call it - TJB
Watch them attack the 'messenger' and not the message.

A Taboo Subject

Although officially Jews have never made up more than five percent of the
country's total population, they played a highly disproportionate and
probably decisive role in the infant Bolshevik regime, effectively
dominating the Soviet government during its early years. Soviet historians,
along with most of their colleagues in the West, for decades preferred to
ignore this subject. The facts, though, cannot be denied.

With the notable exception of Lenin (Vladimir Ulyanov), most of the leading
Communists who took control of Russia in 1917-20 were Jews. Leon Trotsky
(Lev Bronstein) headed the Red Army and, for a time, was chief of Soviet
foreign affairs. Yakov Sverdlov (Solomon) was both the Bolshevik party's
executive secretary and -- as chairman of the Central Executive Committee --  
head of the Soviet government. Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky) headed the
Communist International (Comintern), the central agency for spreading
revolution in foreign countries. Other prominent Jews included press
commissar Karl Radek (Sobelsohn), foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov
(Wallach), Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Moisei Uritsky.

Lenin himself was of mostly Russian and Kalmuck ancestry, but he was also
one-quarter Jewish. His maternal grandfather, Israel (Alexander) Blank, was
a Ukrainian Jew who was later baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.

A thorough-going internationalist, Lenin viewed ethnic or cultural loyalties
with contempt. He had little regard for his own countrymen. "An intelligent
Russian," he once remarked, "is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish
blood in his veins."
Critical Meetings

In the Communist seizure of power in Russia, the Jewish role was probably
critical.

Two weeks prior to the Bolshevik "October Revolution" of 1917, Lenin
convened a top secret meeting in St. Petersburg (Petrograd) at which the key
leaders of the Bolshevik party's Central Committee made the fateful decision
to seize power in a violent takeover. Of the twelve persons who took part in
this decisive gathering, there were four Russians (including Lenin), one
Georgian (Stalin), one Pole (Dzerzhinsky), and six Jews.

To direct the takeover, a seven-man "Political Bureau" was chosen. It
consisted of two Russians (Lenin and Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), and
four Jews (Trotsky, Sokolnikov, Zinoviev, and Kamenev). Meanwhile, the
Petersburg (Petrograd) Soviet -- whose chairman was Trotsky -- established
an 18-member "Military Revolutionary Committee" to actually carry out the
seizure of power. It included eight (or nine) Russians, one Ukrainian, one
Pole, one Caucasian, and six Jews. Finally, to supervise the organization of
the uprising, the Bolshevik Central Committee established a five-man
"Revolutionary Military Center" as the Party's operations command. It
consisted of one Russian (Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), one Pole
(Dzerzhinsky), and two Jews (Sverdlov and Uritsky).
Contemporary Voices of Warning

Well-informed observers, both inside and outside of Russia, took note at the
time of the crucial Jewish role in Bolshevism. Winston Churchill, for one,
warned in an article published in the February 8, 1920, issue of the London
Illustrated Sunday Herald that Bolshevism is a "worldwide conspiracy for the
overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the basis
of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible equality."
The eminent British political leader and historian went on to write:

   There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of
Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by
these international and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly
a very great one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable
exception of Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover,
the principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders.
Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal subordinate,
Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or Lunacharski cannot
be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of Zinovieff, the Dictator of the
Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet
institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing. And the
prominent, if not indeed the principal, part in the system of terrorism
applied by the Extraordinary Commissions for Combatting Counter-Revolution
[the Cheka] has been taken by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses

   Needless to say, the most intense passions of revenge have been excited
in the breasts of the Russian people.

David R. Francis, United States ambassador in Russia, warned in a January
1918 dispatch to Washington: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are
Jews and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or
any other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a
worldwide social revolution."

The Netherlands' ambassador in Russia, Oudendyke, made much the same point a
few months later: "Unless Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately, it is
bound to spread in one form or another over Europe and the whole world as it
is organized and worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one
object is to destroy for their own ends the existing order of things."

"The Bolshevik Revolution," declared a leading American Jewish community
paper in 1920, "was largely the product of Jewish thinking, Jewish
discontent, Jewish effort to reconstruct."

As an expression of its radically anti-nationalist character, the fledgling
Soviet government issued a decree a few months after taking power that made
anti-Semitism a crime in Russia. The new Communist regime thus became the
first in the world to severely punish all expressions of anti-Jewish
sentiment. Soviet officials apparently regarded such measures as
indispensable. Based on careful observation during a lengthy stay in Russia,
American-Jewish scholar Frank Golder reported in 1925 that "because so many
of the Soviet leaders are Jews anti-Semitism is gaining [in Russia],
particularly in the army [and] among the old and new intelligentsia who are
being crowded for positions by the sons of Israel."
Historians' Views

Summing up the situation at that time, Israeli historian Louis Rapoport
writes:

   Immediately after the [Bolshevik] Revolution, many Jews were euphoric
over their high representation in the new government. Lenin's first
Politburo was dominated by men of Jewish origins

   Under Lenin, Jews became involved in all aspects of the Revolution,
including its dirtiest work. Despite the Communists' vows to eradicate
anti-Semitism, it spread rapidly after the Revolution -- partly because of
the prominence of so many Jews in the Soviet administration, as well as in
the traumatic, inhuman Sovietization drives that followed. Historian Salo
Baron has noted that an immensely disproportionate number of Jews joined the
new Bolshevik secret police, the Cheka And many of those who fell afoul of
the Cheka would be shot by Jewish investigators.

   The collective leadership that emerged in Lenin's dying days was headed
by the Jew Zinoviev, a loquacious, mean-spirited, curly-haired Adonis whose
vanity knew no bounds.

"Anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka," wrote
Jewish historian Leonard Schapiro, "stood a very good chance of finding
himself confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator." In
Ukraine, "Jews made up nearly 80 percent of the rank-and-file Cheka agents,"
reports W. Bruce Lincoln, an American professor of Russian history.
(Beginning as the Cheka, or Vecheka) the Soviet secret police was later
known as the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB.)

In light of all this, it should not be surprising that Yakov M. Yurovksy,
the leader of the Bolshevik squad that carried out the murder of the Tsar
and his family, was Jewish, as was Sverdlov, the Soviet chief who co-signed
Lenin's execution order.

Igor Shafarevich, a Russian mathematician of world stature, has sharply
criticized the Jewish role in bringing down the Romanov monarchy and
establishing Communist rule in his country. Shafarevich was a leading
dissident during the final decades of Soviet rule. A prominent human rights
activist, he was a founding member of the Committee on the Defense of Human
Rights in the USSR.

In Russophobia, a book written ten years before the collapse of Communist
rule, he noted that Jews were "amazingly" numerous among the personnel of
the Bolshevik secret police. The characteristic Jewishness of the Bolshevik
executioners, Shafarevich went on, is most conspicuous in the execution of
Nicholas II:

   This ritual action symbolized the end of centuries of Russian history,
so that it can be compared only to the execution of Charles I in England or
Louis XVI in France. It would seem that representatives of an insignificant
ethnic minority should keep as far as possible from this painful action,
which would reverberate in all history. Yet what names do we meet? The
execution was personally overseen by Yakov Yurovsky who shot the Tsar; the
president of the local Soviet was Beloborodov (Vaisbart); the person
responsible for the general administration in Ekaterinburg was Shaya
Goloshchekin. To round out the picture, on the wall of the room where the
execution took place was a distich from a poem by Heine (written in German)
about King Balthazar, who offended Jehovah and was killed for the offense.

In his 1920 book, British veteran journalist Robert Wilton offered a
similarly harsh assessment:

   The whole record of Bolshevism in Russia is indelibly impressed with the
stamp of alien invasion. The murder of the Tsar, deliberately planned by the
Jew Sverdlov (who came to Russia as a paid agent of Germany) and carried out
by the Jews Goloshchekin, Syromolotov, Safarov, Voikov and Yurovsky, is the
act not of the Russian people, but of this hostile invader.

In the struggle for power that followed Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin
emerged victorious over his rivals, eventually succeeding in putting to
death nearly every one of the most prominent early Bolsheviks leaders -
including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and Kamenev. With the passage of time,
and particularly after 1928, the Jewish role in the top leadership of the
Soviet state and its Communist party diminished markedly.
Put To Death Without Trial

For a few months after taking power, Bolshevik leaders considered bringing
"Nicholas Romanov" before a "Revolutionary Tribunal" that would publicize
his "crimes against the people" before sentencing him to death. Historical
precedent existed for this. Two European monarchs had lost their lives as a
consequence of revolutionary upheaval: England's Charles I was beheaded in
1649, and France's Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793.

In these cases, the king was put to death after a lengthy public trial,
during which he was allowed to present arguments in his defense. Nicholas
II, though, was neither charged nor tried. He was secretly put to death -
along with his family and staff -- in the dead of night, in an act that
resembled more a gangster-style massacre than a formal execution.

Why did Lenin and Sverdlov abandon plans for a show trial of the former
Tsar? In Wilton's view, Nicholas and his family were murdered because the
Bolshevik rulers knew quite well that they lacked genuine popular support,
and rightly feared that the Russian people would never approve killing the
Tsar, regardless of pretexts and legalistic formalities.

For his part, Trotsky defended the massacre as a useful and even necesssary
measure. He wrote:

   The decision [to kill the imperial family] was not only expedient but
necessary. The severity of this punishment showed everyone that we would
continue to fight on mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the
Tsar's family was needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and instill
a sense of hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to
show that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either total victory or
total doom This Lenin sensed well.

Historical Context

In the years leading up to the 1917 revolution, Jews were disproportionately
represented in all of Russia's subversive leftist parties. Jewish hatred of
the Tsarist regime had a basis in objective conditions. Of the leading
European powers of the day, imperial Russia was the most institutionally
conser-vative and anti-Jewish. For example, Jews were normally not permitted
to reside outside a large area in the west of the Empire known as the "Pale
of Settlement."

However understandable, and perhaps even defensible, Jewish hostility toward
the imperial regime may have been, the remarkable Jewish role in the vastly
more despotic Soviet regime is less easy to justify. In a recently published
book about the Jews in Russia during the 20th century, Russian-born Jewish
writer Sonya Margolina goes so far as to call the Jewish role in supporting
the Bolshevik regime the "historic sin of the Jews." She points, for
example, to the prominent role of Jews as commandants of Soviet Gulag
concentration and labor camps, and the role of Jewish Communists in the
systematic destruction of Russian churches. Moreover, she goes on, "The Jews
of the entire world supported Soviet power, and remained silent in the face
of any criticism from the opposition." In light of this record, Margolina
offers a grim prediction:

   The exaggeratedly enthusiastic participation of the Jewish Bolsheviks in
the subjugation and destruction of Russia is a sin that will be avenged
Soviet power will be equated with Jewish power, and the furious hatred
against the Bolsheviks will become hatred against Jews.

If the past is any indication, it is unlikely that many Russians will seek
the revenge that Margolina prophecies. Anyway, to blame "the Jews" for the
horrors of Communism seems no more justifiable than to blame "white people"
for Negro slavery, or "the Germans" for the Second World War or "the
Holocaust."
Words of Grim Portent

Nicholas and his family are only the best known of countless victims of a
regime that openly proclaimed its ruthless purpose. A few weeks after the
Ekaterinburg massacre, the newspaper of the fledgling Red Army declared:

   Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies by the scores
of hundreds, let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own
blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritskii let there be floods of blood of
the bourgeoisie -- more blood, as much as possible.

Grigori Zinoviev, speaking at a meeting of Communists in September 1918,
effectively pronounced a death sentence on ten million human beings: "We
must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet
Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They
must be annihilated."
'The Twenty Million'

As it turned out, the Soviet toll in human lives and suffering proved to be
much higher than Zinoviev's murderous rhetoric suggested. Rarely, if ever,
has a regime taken the lives of so many of its own people.

Citing newly-available Soviet KGB documents, historian Dmitri Volkogonov,
head of a special Russian parliamentary commission, recently concluded that
"from 1929 to 1952 21.5 million [Soviet] people were repressed. Of these a
third were shot, the rest sentenced to imprisonment, where many also died."

Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of the Soviet Commission of Party Control, and
head of a special commission during the 1960s appointed by premier
Khrushchev, has similarly concluded: "From January 1, 1935 to June 22, 1941,
19,840,000 enemies of the people were arrested. Of these, seven million were
shot in prison, and a majority of the others died in camp." These figures
were also found in the papers of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan.

Robert Conquest, the distinguished specialist of Soviet history, recently
summed up the grim record of Soviet "repression" of it own people:

   It is hard to avoid the conclusion that the post-1934 death toll was
well over ten million. To this should be added the victims of the 1930-1933
famine, the kulak deportations, and other anti-peasant campaigns, amounting
to another ten million plus. The total is thus in the range of what the
Russians now refer to as 'The Twenty Million'."

A few other scholars have given significantly higher estimates.
The Tsarist Era in Retrospect

With the dramatic collapse of Soviet rule, many Russians are taking a new
and more respectful look at their country's pre-Communist history, including
the era of the last Romanov emperor. While the Soviets -- along with many in
the West -- have stereotypically portrayed this era as little more than an
age of arbitrary despotism, cruel suppression and mass poverty, the reality
is rather different. While it is true that the power of the Tsar was
absolute, that only a small minority had any significant political voice,
and that the mass of the empire's citizens were peasants, it is worth noting
that Russians during the reign of Nicholas II had freedom of press,
religion, assembly and association, protection of private property, and free
labor unions. Sworn enemies of the regime, such as Lenin, were treated with
remarkable leniency.

During the decades prior to the outbreak of the First World War, the Russian
economy was booming. In fact, between 1890 and 1913, it was the fastest
growing in the world. New rail lines were opened at an annual rate double
that of the Soviet years. Between 1900 and 1913, iron production increased
by 58 percent, while coal production more than doubled. Exported Russian
grain fed all of Europe. Finally, the last decades of Tsarist Russia
witnessed a magnificent flowering of cultural life.

Everything changed with the First World War, a catastrophe not only for
Russia, but for the entire West.
Monarchist Sentiment

In spite of (or perhaps because of) the relentless official campaign during
the entire Soviet era to stamp out every uncritical memory of the Romanovs
and imperial Russia, a virtual cult of popular veneration for Nicholas II
has been sweeping Russia in recent years.

People have been eagerly paying the equivalent of several hours' wages to
purchase portraits of Nicholas from street vendors in Moscow, St. Petersburg
and other Russian cities. His portrait now hangs in countless Russian homes
and apartments. In late 1990, all 200,000 copies of a first printing of a
30-page pamphlet on the Romanovs quickly sold out. Said one street vendor:
"I personally sold four thousand copies in no time at all. It's like a
nuclear explosion. People really want to know about their Tsar and his
family." Grass roots pro-Tsarist and monarchist organizations have sprung up
in many cities.

A public opinion poll conducted in 1990 found that three out of four Soviet
citizens surveyed regard the killing of the Tsar and his family as a
despicable crime. Many Russian Orthodox believers regard Nicholas as a
martyr. The independent "Orthodox Church Abroad" canonized the imperial
family in 1981, and the Moscow-based Russian Orthodox Church has been under
popular pressure to take the same step, in spite of its long-standing
reluctance to touch this official taboo. The Russian Orthodox Archbishop of
Ekaterinburg announced plans in 1990 to build a grand church at the site of
the killings. "The people loved Emperor Nicholas," he said. "His memory
lives with the people, not as a saint but as someone executed without court
verdict, unjustly, as a sufferer for his faith and for orthodoxy."

On the 75th anniversary of the massacre (in July 1993), Russians recalled
the life, death and legacy of their last Emperor. In Ekaterinburg, where a
large white cross festooned with flowers now marks the spot where the family
was killed, mourners wept as hymns were sung and prayers were said for the
victims.

Reflecting both popular sentiment and new social-political realities, the
white, blue and red horizontal tricolor flag of Tsarist Russia was
officially adopted in 1991, replacing the red Soviet banner. And in 1993,
the imperial two-headed eagle was restored as the nation's official emblem,
replacing the Soviet hammer and sickle. Cities that had been re-named to
honor Communist figures -- such as Leningrad, Kuibyshev, Frunze, Kalinin,
and Gorky -- have re-acquired their Tsarist-era names. Ekaterinburg, which
had been named Sverdlovsk by the Soviets in 1924 in honor of the
Soviet-Jewish chief, in September 1991 restored its pre-Communist name,
which honors Empress Catherine I.
Symbolic Meaning

In view of the millions that would be put to death by the Soviet rulers in
the years to follow, the murder of the Romanov family might not seem of
extraordinary importance. And yet, the event has deep symbolic meaning. In
the apt words of Harvard University historian Richard Pipes:

   The manner in which the massacre was prepared and carried out, at first
denied and then justified, has something uniquely odious about it, something
that radically distinguishes it from previous acts of regicide and brands it
as a prelude to twentieth-century mass murder.

Another historian, Ivor Benson, characterized the killing of the Romanov
family as symbolic of the tragic fate of Russia and, indeed, of the entire
West, in this century of unprecedented agony and conflict.

The murder of the Tsar and his family is all the more deplorable because,
whatever his failings as a monarch, Nicholas II was, by all accounts, a
personally decent, generous, humane and honorable man.
The Massacre's Place in History

The mass slaughter and chaos of the First World War, and the revolutionary
upheavals that swept Europe in 1917-1918, brought an end not only to the
ancient Romanov dynasty in Russia, but to an entire continental social
order. Swept away as well was the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany, with its
stable constitutional monarchy, and the ancient Habsburg dynasty of
Austria-Hungary with its multinational central European empire. Europe's
leading states shared not only the same Christian and Western cultural
foundations, but most of the continent's reigning monarchs were related by
blood. England's King George was, through his mother, a first cousin of Tsar
Nicholas, and, through his father, a first cousin of Empress Alexandra.
Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm was a first cousin of the German-born Alexandra,
and a distant cousin of Nicholas.

More than was the case with the monarchies of western Europe, Russia's
Tsar personally symbolized his land and nation. Thus, the murder of the
last emperor of a dynasty that had ruled Russia for three centuries not
only symbolically presaged the Communist mass slaughter that would
claim so many Russian lives in the decades that followed, but was
symbolic of the Communist effort to kill the soul and spirit of Russia
itself.
http://www.ihr.org/jhr/v14/v14n1p-4_Weber.html