The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime
Assessing the Grim Legacy of Soviet Communism
by Mark Weber
In the night of July 16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police
murdered Russia's last emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife,
Tsaritsa Alexandra, their 14-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four
daughters. They were cut down in a hail of gunfire in a half-cellar room of
the house in Ekaterinburg, a city in the Ural mountain region, where they
were being held prisoner. The daughters were finished off with bayonets. To
prevent a cult for the dead Tsar, the bodies were carted away to the
countryside and hastily buried in a secret grave.
Bolshevik authorities at first reported that the Romanov emperor had been
shot after the discovery of a plot to liberate him. For some time the deaths
of the Empress and the children were kept secret. Soviet historians claimed
for many years that local Bolsheviks had acted on their own in carrying out
the killings, and that Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, had nothing to do
with the crime.
In 1990, Moscow playwright and historian Edvard Radzinsky announced the
result of his detailed investigation into the murders. He unearthed the
reminiscences of Lenin's bodyguard, Alexei Akimov, who recounted how he
personally delivered Lenin's execution order to the telegraph office. The
telegram was also signed by Soviet government chief Yakov Sverdlov. Akimov
had saved the original telegraph tape as a record of the secret order.
Radzinsky's research confirmed what earlier evidence had already indicated.
Leon Trotsky -- one of Lenin's closest colleagues -- had revealed years
earlier that Lenin and Sverdlov had together made the decision to put the
Tsar and his family to death. Recalling a conversation in 1918, Trotsky
wrote:
My next visit to Moscow took place after the [temporary] fall of
Ekaterinburg [to anti-Communist forces]. Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked in
passing: "Oh yes, and where is the Tsar?"
"Finished," he replied. "He has been shot."
"And where is the family?"
"The family along with him."
"All of them?," I asked, apparently with a trace of surprise.
"All of them," replied Sverdlov. "What about it?" He was waiting to see my
reaction. I made no reply.
"And who made the decision?," I asked.
"We decided it here. Ilyich [Lenin] believed that we shouldn't leave the
Whites a live banner to rally around, especially under the present difficult
circumstances."
I asked no further questions and considered the matter closed.
Recent research and investigation by Radzinsky and others also corroborates
the account provided years earlier by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the
London Times in Russia for 17 years. His account, The Last Days of the
Romanovs - originally published in 1920, and recently reissued by the
Institute for Historical Review -- is based in large part on the findings of
a detailed investigation carried out in 1919 by Nikolai Sokolov under the
authority of "White" (anti-Communist) leader Alexander Kolchak. Wilton's
book remains one of the most accurate and complete accounts of the murder of
Russia's imperial family.
A solid understanding of history has long been the best guide to
comprehending the present and anticipating the future. Accordingly, people
are most interested in historical questions during times of crisis, when the
future seems most uncertain. With the collapse of Communist rule in the
Soviet Union, 1989-1991, and as Russians struggle to build a new order on
the ruins of the old, historical issues have become very topical. For
example, many ask: How did the Bolsheviks, a small movement guided by the
teachings of German-Jewish social philosopher Karl Marx, succeed in taking
control of Russia and imposing a cruel and despotic regime on its people?
In recent years, Jews around the world have been voicing anxious concern
over the specter of anti-Semitism in the lands of the former Soviet Union.
In this new and uncertain era, we are told, suppressed feelings of hatred
and rage against Jews are once again being expressed. According to one
public opinion survey conducted in 1991, for example, most Russians wanted
all Jews to leave the country. But precisely why is anti-Jewish sentiment so
widespread among the peoples of the former Soviet Union? Why do so many
Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians and others blame "the Jews" for so much
misfortune?
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.
Notes
1.. Edvard Radzinksy, The Last Tsar (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp. 327,
344-346.; Bill Keller, "Cult of the Last Czar," The New York Times, Nov. 21,
1990.
2.. From an April 1935 entry in "Trotsky's Diary in Exile." Quoted in:
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), pp. 770,
787.; Robert K. Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: 1976), pp.
496-497.; E. Radzinksy, The Last Tsar (New York: Doubleday, 1992), pp.
325-326.; Ronald W. Clark, Lenin (New York: 1988), pp. 349-350.
3.. On Wilton and his career in Russia, see: Phillip Knightley, The First
Casualty (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976), pp. 141-142, 144-146, 151-152,
159, 162, 169, and, Anthony Summers and Tom Mangold, The File on the Tsar
(New York: Harper and Row, 1976), pp. 102-104, 176.
4.. AP dispatch from Moscow, Toronto Star, Sept. 26, 1991, p. A2.;
Similarly, a 1992 survey found that one-fourth of people in the republics of
Belarus (White Russia) and Uzbekistan favored deporting all Jews to a
special Jewish region in Russian Siberia. "Survey Finds Anti-Semitism on
Rise in Ex-Soviet Lands," Los Angeles Times, June 12, 1992, p. A4.
5.. At the turn of the century, Jews made up 4.2 percent of the population
of the Russian Empire. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York:
1990), p. 55 (fn.). By comparison, in the United States today, Jews make up
less than three percent of the total population (according to the most
authoritative estimates).
6.. See individual entries in: H. Shukman, ed., The Blackwell Encyclopedia
of the Russian Revolution (Oxford: 1988), and in: G. Wigoder, ed.,
Dictionary of Jewish Biography (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1991). The
prominent Jewish role in Russia's pre-1914 revolutionary underground, and in
the early Soviet regime, is likewise confirmed in: Stanley Rothman and S.
Robert Lichter, Roots of Radicalism (New York: Oxford, 1982), pp. 92-94. In
1918, the Bolshevik Party's Central Committee had 15 members. German scholar
Herman Fehst -- citing published Soviet records -- reported in his useful
1934 study that of six of these 15 were Jews. Herman Fehst, Bolschewismus
und Judentum: Das j�dische Element in der F�hrerschaft des Bolschewismus
(Berlin: 1934), pp. 68-72.; Robert Wilton, though, reported that in 1918 the
Central Committee of the Bolshevik party had twelve members, of whom nine
were of Jewish origin and three were of Russian ancestry. R. Wilton, The
Last Days of the Romanovs (IHR, 1993), p. 185.
7.. After years of official suppression, this fact was acknowledged in
1991 in the Moscow weekly Ogonyok. See: Jewish Chronicle (London), July 16,
1991.; See also: Letter by L. Horwitz in The New York Times, Aug. 5, 1992,
which cites information from the Russian journal "Native Land Archives.";
"Lenin's Lineage?"'Jewish,' Claims Moscow News," Forward (New York City),
Feb. 28, 1992, pp. 1, 3.; M. Checinski, Jerusalem Post (weekly international
edition), Jan. 26, 1991, p. 9.
8.. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: Knopf, 1990), p. 352.
9.. Harrison E. Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions,
1905-1917 (Doubleday, 1978), p. 475.; William H. Chamberlin, The Russian
Revolution (Princeton Univ. Press, 1987), vol. 1, pp. 291-292.; Herman
Fehst, Bolschewismus und Judentum: Das j�dische Element in der F�hrerschaft
des Bolschewismus (Berlin: 1934), pp. 42-43.; P. N. Pospelov, ed., Vladimir
Ilyich Lenin: A Biography (Moscow: Progress, 1966), pp. 318-319. This
meeting was held on October 10 (old style, Julian calendar), and on October
23 (new style). The six Jews who took part were: Uritsky, Trotsky, Kamenev,
Zinoviev, Sverdlov and Soklonikov. The Bolsheviks seized power in Petersburg
on October 25 (old style) -- hence the reference to the "Great October
Revolution" -- which is November 7 (new style).
10.. William H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution (1987), vol. 1, p.
292.; H. E. Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions,
1905-1917 (1978), p. 475.
11.. W. H. Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 1, pp. 274, 299, 302,
306.; Alan Moorehead, The Russian Revolution (New York: 1965), pp. 235, 238,
242, 243, 245.; H. Fehst, Bolschewismus und Judentum (Berlin: 1934), pp. 44,
45.
12.. H. E. Salisbury, Black Night, White Snow: Russia's Revolutions,
1905-1917 (1978), p. 479-480.; Dmitri Volkogonov, Stalin: Triumph and
Tragedy (New York: Grove Weidenfeld, 1991), pp. 27-28, 32.; P. N. Pospelov,
ed., Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: A Biography (Moscow: Progress, 1966), pp.
319-320.
13.. "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A struggle for the soul of the Jewish
people," Illustrated Sunday Herald (London), February 8, 1920. Facsimile
reprint in: William Grimstad, The Six Million Reconsidered (1979), p. 124.
(At the time this essay was published, Churchill was serving as minister of
war and air.)
14.. David R. Francis, Russia from the American Embassy (New York: 1921),
p. 214.
15.. Foreign Relations of the United States -- 1918 -- Russia, Vol. 1
(Washington, DC: 1931), pp. 678-679.
16.. American Hebrew (New York), Sept. 1920. Quoted in: Nathan Glazer and
Daniel Patrick Moynihan, Beyond the Melting Pot (Cambridge, Mass.: 1963), p.
268.
17.. C. Jacobson, "Jews in the USSR" in: American Review on the Soviet
Union, August 1945, p. 52.; Avtandil Rukhadze, Jews in the USSR: Figures,
Facts, Comment (Moscow: Novosti, 1978), pp. 10-11.
18.. T. Emmons and B. M. Patenaude, eds., War, Revolution and Peace in
Russia: The Passages of Frank Golder, 1913-1927 (Stanford: Hoover
Institution, 1992), pp. 320, 139, 317.
19.. Louis Rapoport, Stalin's War Against the Jews (New York: Free Press,
1990), pp. 30, 31, 37. See also pp. 43, 44, 45, 49, 50.
20.. Quoted in: Salo Baron, The Russian Jews Under Tsars and Soviets (New
York: 1976), pp. 170, 392 (n. 4).
21.. The Atlantic, Sept. 1991, p. 14.; In 1919, three-quarters of the
Cheka staff in Kiev were Jews, who were careful to spare fellow Jews. By
order, the Cheka took few Jewish hostages. R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution
(1990), p. 824.; Israeli historian Louis Rapoport also confirms the dominant
role played by Jews in the Soviet secret police throughout the 1920s and
1930s. L. Rapoport, Stalin's War Against the Jews (New York: 1990), pp.
30-31, 43-45, 49-50.
22.. E. Radzinsky, The Last Tsar (1992), pp. 244, 303-304.; Bill Keller,
"Cult of the Last Czar," The New York Times, Nov. 21, 1990.; See also: W. H.
Chamberlin, The Russian Revolution, vol. 2, p. 90.
23.. Quoted in: The New Republic, Feb. 5, 1990, pp. 30 ff.; Because of the
alleged anti-Semitism of Russophobia, in July 1992 Shafarevich was asked by
the National Academy of Sciences (Washington, DC) to resign as an associate
member of that prestigious body.
24.. R. Wilton, The Last Days of the Romanovs (1993), p. 148.
25.. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), p. 787.; Robert K.
Massie, Nicholas and Alexandra (New York: 1976), pp. 496-497.
26.. An article in a 1907 issue of the respected American journal National
Geographic reported on the revolutionary situation brewing in Russia in the
years before the First World War: " The revolutionary leaders nearly all
belong to the Jewish race, and the most effective revolutionary agency is
the Jewish Bund " W. E. Curtis, "The Revolution in Russia," The National
Geographic Magazine, May 1907, pp. 313-314. Piotr Stolypin, probably
imperial Russia's greatest statesman, was murdered in 1911 by a Jewish
assassin. In 1907, Jews made up about ten percent of Bolshevik party
membership. In the Menshevik party, another faction of the Russian Social
Democratic Labor Party, the Jewish proportion was twice as high. R. Pipes,
The Russian Revolution (1990), p. 365.; See also: R. Wilton, The Last Days
of the Romanovs (1993), pp. 185-186.
27.. Martin Gilbert, Atlas of Jewish History (1977), pp. 71, 74.; In spite
of the restrictive "Pale" policy, in 1897 about 315,000 Jews were living
outside the Pale, most of them illegally. In 1900 more than 20,000 were
living in the capital of St. Petersburg, and another 9,000 in Moscow.
28.. Sonja Margolina, Das Ende der L�gen: Russland und die Juden im 20.
Jahrhundert (Berlin: 1992). Quoted in: "Ein ganz heisses Eisen angefasst,"
Deutsche National-Zeitung (Munich), July 21, 1992, p. 12.
29.. Krasnaia Gazetta ("Red Gazette"), September 1, 1918. Quoted in:
Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), pp. 820, 912 (n. 88).
30.. Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (New York: 1990), p. 820.
31.. Contrary to what a number of western historians have for years
suggested, Soviet terror and the Gulag camp system did not begin with
Stalin. At the end of 1920, Soviet Russia already had 84 concentration camps
with approximately 50,000 prisoners. By October 1923 the number had
increased to 315 camps with 70,000 inmates. R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution
(1990), p. 836.
32.. Cited by historian Robert Conquest in a review/ article in The New
York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 1993, p. 27.
33.. The New York Review of Books, Sept. 23, 1993, p. 27.
34.. Review/article by Robert Conquest in The New York Review of Books,
Sept. 23, 1993, p. 27.; In the "Great Terror" years of 1937-1938 alone,
Conquest has calculated, approximately one million were shot by the Soviet
secret police, and another two million perished in Soviet camps. R.
Conquest, The Great Terror (New York: Oxford, 1990), pp. 485-486.; Conquest
has estimated that 13.5 to 14 million people perished in the
collectivization ("dekulakization") campaign and forced famine of 1929-1933.
R. Conquest, The Harvest of Sorrow (New York: Oxford, 1986), pp. 301-307.
35.. Russian professor Igor Bestuzhev-Lada, writing in a 1988 issue of the
Moscow weekly Nedelya, suggested that during the Stalin era alone
(1935-1953), as many as 50 million people were killed, condemned to camps
from which they never emerged, or lost their lives as a direct result of the
brutal "dekulakization" campaign against the peasantry. "Soviets admit
Stalin killed 50 million," The Sunday Times, London, April 17, 1988.; R. J.
Rummel, a professor of political science at the University of Hawaii, has
recently calculated that 61.9 million people were systematically killed by
the Soviet Communist regime from 1917 to 1987. R. J. Rummel, Lethal
Politics: Soviet Genocide and Mass Murder Since 1917 (Transaction, 1990).
36.. Because of his revolutionary activities, Lenin was sentenced in 1897
to three years exile in Siberia. During this period of "punishment," he got
married, wrote some 30 works, made extensive use of a well-stocked local
library, subscribed to numerous foreign periodicals, kept up a voluminous
correspondence with supporters across Europe, and enjoyed numerous sport
hunting and ice skating excursions, while all the time receiving a state
stipend. See: Ronald W. Clark, Lenin (New York: 1988), pp. 42-57.; P. N.
Pospelov, ed., Vladimir Ilyich Lenin: A Biography (Moscow: Progress, 1966),
pp. 55-75.
37.. R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), pp. 187-188.;
38.. The Nation, June 24, 1991, p. 838.
39.. Bill Keller, "Cult of the Last Czar," The New York Times, Nov. 21,
1990.
40.. "Nostalgic for Nicholas, Russians Honor Their Last Czar," Los Angeles
Times, July 18, 1993.; "Ceremony marks Russian czar's death," Orange County
Register, July 17, 1993.
41.. R. Pipes, The Russian Revolution (1990), p. 787.
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Appendix
A striking feature of Mr. Wilton's examination of the tumultuous 1917-1919
period in Russia is his frank treatment of the critically important Jewish
role in establishing the Bolshevik regime.
The following lists of persons in the Bolshevik Party and Soviet
administration during this period, which Wilton compiled on the basis of
official reports and original documents, underscore the crucial Jewish role
in these bodies. These lists first appeared in the rare French edition of
Wilton's book, published in Paris in 1921 under the title Les Derniers Jours
des Romanoffs. They did not appear in either the American or British
editions of The Last Days of the Romanors published in 1920.
"I have done all in my power to act as an impartial chronicler," Wilton
wrote in his foreword to Les Derniers Jours des Romanoffs. "In order not to
leave myself open to any accusation of prejudice, I am giving the list of
the members of the [Bolshevik Party' s] Central Committee, of the
Extraordinary Commission [Cheka or secret police], and of the Council of
Commissars functioning at the time of the assassination of the Imperial
family.
"The 62 members of the [Central] Committee were composed of five Russians,
one Ukrainian, six Letts [Latvians], two Germans, one Czech, two Armenians,
three Georgians, one Karaim [Karaite] (a Jewish sect), and 41 Jews.
"The Extraordinary Commission [Cheka or Vecheka] of Moscow was composed of
36 members, including one German, one Pole, one Armenian, two Russians,
eight Latvians, and 23 Jews.
"The Council of the People's Commissars [the Soviet .government] numbered
two Armenians, three Russians, and 17 Jews.
"Ac.cording to data furnished by the Soviet press, out of 556 important
functionaries of the Bolshevik state, including the above-mentioned, in
1918-1919 there were: 17 Russians, two Ukrainians, eleven Armenians, 35
Letts [Latvians], 15 Germans, one Hungarian, ten Georgians, three Poles,
three Finns, one Czech, one Karaim, and 457 Jews."
"If the reader is astonished to find the Jewish hand everywhere in the
affair of the assassination of the Russian Imperial family, he must bear in
mind the formidable numerical preponderance of Jews in the Soviet
administration," Wilton went on to write.
Effective governmental power, Wilton continued (on pages 136-138 of the same
edition) is in the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party. In 1918, he
reported, this body had twelve members, of whom nine were of Jewish origin,
and three were of Russian ancestry. The nine Jews were: Bronstein (Trotsky),
Apfelbaum (Zinoviev), Lurie (Larine), Uritsky, Volodarski, Rosenfeld
(Kamenev), Smidovich, Sverdlov (Yankel), and Nakhamkes (Steklov). The three
Russians were: Ulyanov (Lenin), Krylenko, and Lunacharsky.
"The other Russian Socialist parties are similar in composition," Wilton
went on. "Their Central Committees are made up as follows:"
Mensheviks (Social Democrats): Eleven members, all of whom are Jewish.
Communists of the People: Six members, of whom five are Jews and one is a
Russian.
Social Revolutionaries (Right Wing): Fifteen members, of whom 13 are Jews
and two are Russians (Kerenski, who may be of Jewish origin, and
Tchaikovski).
Social Revolutionaries (Left Wing): Twelve members, of whom ten are Jews and
two are Russians.
Committee of the Anarchists of Moscow: Five members, of whom four are Jews
and one is a Russian.
Polish Communist Party: Twelve members, all of whom are Jews, including
Sobelson (Radek), Krokhenal (Zagonski), and Schwartz (Goltz).
"These parties," commented Wilton, "in appearance opposed to the Bolsheviks,
play the Bolsheviks' game on the sly, more or less, by preventing the
Russians from pulling themselves together. Out of 61 individuals at the head
of these parties, there are six Russians and 55 Jews. No matter what may be
the name adopted, a revolutionary government will be Jewish."
[Although the Bolsheviks permitted these leftist political groups to operate
for a time under close supervision and narrow limits, even these pitiful
remnants of organized opposition were thoroughly eliminated by the end of
the 1921 .]
The Soviet government, or "Council of People's Commissars' (also known as
the "Sovnarkom") was made up of the following, Wilton reported:
Peoples Commissariat (Ministry) Name Nationality
Chairman V.I. Ulyanov (Lenin) Russian
Foreign Affairs G.V. Chicherin Russian
Nationalities J. Dzhugashvili [Stalin] Georgian
Agriculture Protian Armenian
Economic Council Lourie (Larin) Jew
Food Supply A.G. Schlikhter Jew
Army and Navy [Military] L.D. Bronstein (Trotski) Jew
State Control K.I. Lander Jew
State Lands Kaufmann Jew
Works [Labor] V. Schmidt Jew
Social Relief E. Lilina (Knigissen) Jew
Education A. Lunacharsky Russian
Religion Spitzberg Jew
Interior Apfelbaum [Radomyslski] (Zinoviev) Jew
.Hygiene Anvelt Jew
Finance I. E. Gukovs [and G. Sokolnikov] Jew
Press Voldarski [Goldstein] Jew
Elections M.S. Uritsky Jew
Justice I.Z. Shteinberg Jew
Refugees Fenigstein Jew
Refugees Savitch (Assistant) Jew
Refugees Zaslovski (Assistant) Jew
Out of these 22 "Sovnarkom" members, Wilton summed'up, there were three
Russians, one Georgian, one Armenian, and 17 Jews.
The Central Executive Committee, Wilton continues, was made up of the
following members:
Y. M. Sverdlov [Solomon] (Chairman) Jew
Avanesov (Secretary) Armenian
Bruno Latvian
Breslau Latvian [?]
Babtchinski Jew
N. I. Bukharin Russian
Weinberg Jew
Gailiss Jew
Ganzberg [Ganzburg ] Jew
Danichevski Jew
Starck German
Sachs Jew
Scheinmann Jew
Erdling Jew
Landauer Jew
Linder Jew
Wolach Czech
S. Dimanshtein Jew
Encukidze Georgian
Ermann Jew
A. A. Ioffe Jew
Karkhline Jew
Knigissen Jew
Rosenfeld (Kamenev) Jew
Apfelbaum (Zinoviev) Jew
N. Krylenko Russian
Krassikov Jew
Kaprik Jew
Kaoul Latvian
Ulyanov (Lenin) Russian
Latsis Jew
Lander Jew
Lunacharsky Russian
Peterson Latvian
Peters Latvian
Roudzoutas Jew
Rosine Jew
Smidovitch Jew
Stoutchka Latvian
Nakhamkes (Steklov) Jew
Sosnovski Jew
Skrytnik Jew
L. Bronstein (Trotsky) Jew
Teodorovitch Jew [?]
Terian Armenian
Uritsky Jew
Telechkine Russian
Feldmann Jew
Fromkin Jew
Souriupa Ukrainian
Tchavtchevadze Georgian
Scheikmann Jew
Rosental Jew
Achkinazi Imeretian [?]
Karakhane Karaim [Karaite]
Rose Jew
Sobelson (Radek) Jew
Schlichter Jew
Schikolini Jew
Chklianski Jew
Levine-(Pravdine) Jew
Thus, concluded Wilton, out of 61 members, five were Russians, six were
Latvians, one was a German, two were Armenians, one was a Czech, one was an
Imeretian, two were Georgians, one was a Karaim, one. was a Ukrainian, and
41 were Jews.
The Extraordinary Commission of Moscow (Cheka) 'the Soviet secret police and
predecessor of the GPU, the NKVD and the KGB was made up of the following:
F. Dzerzhinsky (Chairman) Pole
Y. Peters (Deputy Chairman) Latvian
Chklovski Jew
Kheifiss Jew
Zeistine Jew
Razmirovitch Jew
Kronberg Jew
Khaikina Jew
Karlson Latvian
Schaumann Latvian
Leontovitch Jew
Jacob Goldine Jew
Galperstein Jew
Kniggisen Jew
Katzis Latvian
Schillenkuss Jew
Janson Latvian
Rivkine Jew
Antonof Russian
Delafabre Jew
Tsitkine Jew
Roskirovitch Jew
G. Sverdlov (Brother of president of the Central Executive Committee)
Jew
Biesenski Jew
J. Blumkin (Count Mirbach's assassin) Jew
Alexandrovitch (Blumkin's accomplice) Russian
I. Model Jew
Routenberg Jew
Pines Jew
Sachs Jew
Daybol Latvian
Saissoune Armenian
Deylkenen Latvian
Liebert Jew
Vogel German
Zakiss Latvian
Of these 36 Cheka officials, one was a Pole, one a German, one an Armenian,
two were Russians, eight were Latvians, and 23 were Jews.
"Accordingly," Wilton sums up, "there is no reason to be surprised at the
preponderant role of Jews in the assassination of the Imperial family. It is
rather the opposite that would have been surprising."
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Bibliographic information Author:
Weber, Mark
Title:
The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet
Regime
Source:
The Journal for Historical Review (http://www.ihr.org)
Date:
January/February 1994
Issue:
Volume 14 number 1
Location:
Page 4
ISSN:
0195-6752
Attribution: "Reprinted from The Journal of Historical Review, PO Box
2739, Newport Beach, CA 92659, USA. Domestic subscriptions $40 per year;
foreign subscriptions $60 per year."
Please send a copy of all reprints to the Editor.