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.1
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:2
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 reissued in 1993 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.3
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.4 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,5 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.6
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.7
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.“8
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.9
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).10 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.11 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).12
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:13
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.“14
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.“15
„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.“16
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.17
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.“18
Historians’
Views
Summing up the situation at that time, Israeli historian Louis Rapoport
writes:19
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.“20 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.21
(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.22
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:23
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:24
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:25
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.26
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.“27
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.“28 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:29
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.“30
‘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.31
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.“32
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:34
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.35
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.36
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.37 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.38 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.“39
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.40
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:41
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 jüdische Element in der Führerschaft 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 jüdische Element in der Führerschaft 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
Lügen: 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.
From The Journal of Historical Review, Jan.-Feb. 1994 (Vol. 14, No.
1), pages 4-22.
About the Author
Mark Weber was born and raised in Portland, Oregon. He studied history at
the University of Illinois (Chicago), the University of Munich, Portland State
University and Indiana University (M.A., 1977).
