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Jewish Bolshevism

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White Army propaganda poster depicting Leon Trotsky. The caption reads: "Peace and Liberty in Sovdepia"
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Jewish Bolshevism (also Judeo-Bolshevism or Judeo-Communism, a related term in Polish language is Żydokomuna) is an antisemitic political epithet and a label for a conspiracy theory which blames Jews for Bolshevism.

It became popular among anti-communist and antisemitic sources after the Russian October Revolution (1917) and spread worldwide in the 1920s with the publication and circulation of the pamphlet, The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. It made an issue out of the ethnic Jewish background of many of the Bolsheviks (most notably Leon Trotsky) during and after the revolution.

The term "Judeo-Bolshevism" was subsequently adopted and used in Nazi Germany to refer to Jews and communists together, implying that the communist movement served Jewish interests and/or that all Jews were communists.[1]

According to Daniel Pipes, "primarily through the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Whites spread these charges to an international audience."[2] James Webb writes: "[i]t is rare to find an anti-Semitic source after 1917 which does not stand in debt to the White Russian analysis of the Revolution."[3]

Background

Main articles: History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union, Cantonist, May Laws, Pogrom, and Beilis trial

Jews had been a persecuted minority in the Russian Empire. They had endured a form of physical segregation in the Pale of Settlement, as well as sporadic persecutions supported by Tsarist governments. While masses of Russian Jews emigrated (in the period from 1881 to 1920, more than two million Jews left the Russian Empire[4]), many chose to engage in political activism. On the eve of the February Revolution, the Bolshevik party had about 10,000 members[5], of which 364 were ethnic Jews.[4] However, these were heavily weighted in leadership positions.

Jewish Bund and Mensheviks

The General Jewish Labor Union (the Bund) sought to unite all Jewish workers in the Empire and to ally with the wider Russian social democratic movement to achieve a democratic and socialist Russia. They hoped to see the Jews achieve recognition as a nation with a legal minority status.[6]

The Bund was a secular socialist party, opposed to what they saw as the reactionary nature of traditional Jewish life in Russia. Created in 1897, before the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP), the Bund became a founding collective member of the RSDLP at its first congress in Minsk in March 1898.[7] For the next five years, the Bund was recognized as the sole representative of the Jewish workers in the RSDLP, although many Russian socialists of Jewish descent, especially outside of the Pale of Settlement, joined the RSDLP directly.

At the RSDLP's Second Congress in Brussels and London in August 1903, the Bund's autonomous position within the RSDLP was rejected by a majority of the delegates and the Bund's representatives left the Congress, the first of many splits in the Russian social democratic movement in the years to come.[8] The Bund formally rejoined the RSDLP when all of its faction reunited at the Fourth (Unification) Congress in Stockholm in April 1906, but the party remained fractured along ideological and ethnic lines. The Bund generally sided with the party's Menshevik faction led by Julius Martov and against the Bolshevik faction led by Vladimir Lenin during the factional struggles in the runup to the Russian Revolution of 1917.

Jewish Bolsheviks

Main article: History of the Jews in Russia and the Soviet Union § Jews and Bolshevism
File:1922 Bezbozhnik magazine cover.jpg
1922 issue of the Bezbozhnik (The Atheist) magazine. By 1934, 28% of Christian Orthodox churches, 42% of Muslim mosques and 52% of Jewish synagogues were shut down in the USSR.[9]

A disproportionate number of ethnic Jews served in the Russian revolutionary leadership before the revolution and for years after. Most of them were hostile to traditional Jewish culture and Jewish political parties, and were eager to prove their loyalty to the Communist Party's atheism and proletarian internationalism, and committed to stamp out any sign of "Jewish cultural particularism".

Of the nine members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party in April 1917, three were Jewish (Kamenev, Zinoviev and Sverdlov). Of the twelve people who, during a historic meeting on October 10, 1917, planned the details of the October Revolution, six were Jewish (Zinoviev, Kamenev, Trotsky, Uritsky, Sverdlov, and Sokolnikov, although Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed the revolution).

Out of Lenin's fifteen Peoples' Commissars (Narkoms) in 1919, six were Jewish (Trotsky, Uritsky, Isaac Steinberg, I. A. Teodorovich, Semyon Dimanstein and Sokolnikov). Among the 23 Narkoms between 1923–1930, there were twelve Russians, five Jews, two Georgians (Stalin and Ordzhonikidze), one Pole, one Moldavian, one Latvian, and one Ukrainian. The situation had clearly evolved, within a relatively short time, to the advantage of the Russian majority. In the 1930s, there was one person of Jewish descent in the Politburo (Lazar Kaganovich).

In 1922, of the 44,148 members of the Bolshevik party that had joined before 1917 (the Old Guard, as Lenin referred to them) 7.1% were Jewish (65% were Russian).

The number of Jews in top administrative positions began to decline soon after 1917. It continued to shrink heavily in the 1930s when Stalin had his old comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev executed while in prison, after a rigged trial in 1936. Kamenev and Zinoviev had previously been expelled, in 1926 and 1927, from the top positions they shared with Stalin in the Soviet ruling elite. Leon Trotsky had concurrently been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1927 and was then assassinated in Mexico City in 1940, by Soviet agent Ramón Mercader. Thus by the year 1940, and after his rapprochement with Hitler's Germany, Stalin had eliminated virtually all Jews from very high level government positions inside the Soviet Union. Thus the so-called Jewish Bolshevism, in the Soviet Union, had lasted at most ten years (1917-1927).[citation needed]

Walter Laqueur states in his book The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day:

To what extent did the presence of many Jews among the Communist leadership contribute to antisemitism? It certainly played an important role in antisemitic propaganda, and it is certainly true that during the 1920s Jews were heavily overrepresented in the ranks of party and state officials. With the rise of Stalin, Jews were removed from key positions and very often "liquidated." The fact that other minorities were also disproportionately highly represented did not greatly matter - there was no tradition of anti-Latvianism in Russia, nor were Latvians found in the very top positions. Nor did it matter that Jews were equally strongly represented among other anti-Communist parties of the left such as the Mensheviks and the Social Revolutionaries, or that the anti-Stalinist opposition was to a considerable extent of Jewish extraction.[10]

File:Protocols of the Elders of Zion 1927 Paris Ru emig.jpg
1927 imprint of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion in Russian language. Paris, France. Text on the cover reads: "Jewish Government in Russia"

In his 1938 book The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proved Forgery, based on his testimony at the Berne Trial, Vladimir Burtsev wrote:

"Antisemites... refused to acknowledge the important and undisputable fact that the Jews who participated in the Socialist and Anarchist movements around the world, including the Russian Jews in particular, were renegades of the Jewish nation who had no connection with Jewish history nor with Jewish religion nor with Jewish masses, but were rather exclusively internationalists, promoting the ideas shared by Socialists of other ethnicities, and were hostile to the Jewish nation in general."[11]

Cheka

There are also claims that Jews were highly prominent among the members of the Soviet secret police. Indeed, of the 12 members of the Cheka Counter-revolutionary department in 1918, 6 were Jewish. However, of the 42 Cheka prosecutors in September, 1918, at the height of Red Terror, only 8 were Jewish. The rest were 14 Latvians, 13 Russians and 7 Poles. Only 3.7% of the rank-and-file Cheka agents were Jewish at that time.[citation needed]

In the mid-1930s, under the leadership of Genrikh Yagoda (who was Jewish), the Jewish presence in the secret police became predominant: of the people surrounding Yagoda, 39% were Jewish and only 30% Russian.[dubious – discuss])[citation needed] The immediate predecessors to Yagoda in that same position were also Jewish: Iosif Unschlicht and Meier Trilisser.[dubious – discuss][citation needed] Genrikh Yagoda's secret police oversaw the execution of both Zinoviev and Kamenev, but fell victim to Stalin's next round of purges: Yagoda was replaced by Nikolai Yezhov, also of Jewish descent,[dubious – discuss])[citation needed] in September 1936, then Yezhov too was arrested and executed in March 1937. Under Yezhov, the number of Jews fell precipitiously (to just 6 people) while the number of ethnic Russians among the leadership of the secret police, NKVD rose to 102 people (67%)[citation needed] and the purges, at Stalin's instigation, entered their bloodiest period (1937–1938) (see Great Purge).

Yevsektsiya

Yevsektsiya (Russian: ЕвСекция) was the Jewish section of the Soviet Communist party. It was created to challenge and eventually destroy the rival Bund and Zionist parties, suppress Judaism and "bourgeois nationalism" and replace traditional Jewish culture with "proletarian culture", as well as to impose the ideas of Dictatorship of the proletariat onto the Jewish worker class. An important aim of the Yevsektsiya was to mobilize the world Jewry in favor of the Soviet regime. The first conference of Yevsektsiya took place in October 1918. For most of its existence, the Yevsektsya was headed by Semyon Dimanstein.

The Yevsektsia was disbanded in 1929, after the creation of the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. Many of its members perished in the Great Purge, along with their Gentile counterparts. Dimanstein was executed in 1938 and was rehabilitated posthumously in 1955, 2 years after the death of Stalin.

Jewish anti-Bolsheviks

In 1917, a significant part of Jewish revolutionaries, especially Esers, were opposed to Bolshevik coup. The Red Terror was triggerred by assassination of Uritsky and an attempt of the assassination of Lenin, and in both cases the perpetrators were Jews. In the first party executed during the Red Terror of 130 persons 12 were Jews [12]

Reactions and allegations

"The great majority of non-Jews reacted negatively to the intensification of Jewish political activity, and it became one of the important factors in the exacerbation of differences between Jews and their surroundings that cast its shadow over the two inter-war decades. ... It was apparently the emigrants who fled the Russian Revolution who brought to the West the claim that Bolshevism was a Jewish affair (the old anti-Semitic argument regarding 'Jewish domination' in new guise)."[13]

Nazi Germany

File:Nazi Lithuanian poster.JPG
1941 Nazi propaganda poster in Lithuanian language equating Stalinism and Jews

In Nazi Germany, this term expressed the common perception that Communism was a Jewish-inspired and Jewish-led movement seeking world domination from its very origin: Karl Marx. The term was popularized in print by German journalist Dietrich Eckhart, who authored the pamphlet "Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin" in the early 1920s, thereby tying Moses and Lenin as both Communists and Jews. Alfred Rosenberg's 1923 edition of the Protocols "gave a forgery a huge boost".[14] This was followed by Hitler's highly inflammatory statement in "Mein Kampf" (1924): "In Russian Bolshevism we must see Jewry's twentieth century effort to take world dominion unto itself".

According to Michael Kellogg, the author of The Russian Roots of Nazism. White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945:

In his groundbreaking 1939 book, L’Apocalypse de notre temps: Les dessous de la propagande allemande d’après des documents inédits (The Apocalypse of Our Times: The Hidden Side of German Propaganda According to Unpublished Documents), Henri Rollin stressed that “Hitlerism” represented a form of “anti-Soviet counter-revolution” which employed the “myth of a mysterious Jewish-Masonic-Bolshevik plot.” Rollin investigated the National Socialist belief, which was taken primarily from White émigré views, that a vast Jewish-Masonic conspiracy had provoked World War Ⅰ, toppled the Russian, German, and Austro-Hungarian Empires, and unleashed Bolshevism after undermining the existing order through the insidious spread of liberal ideas. German forces promptly destroyed Rollin’s work in 1940 after they occupied France, and the book has remained in obscurity ever since.[15]

United States and Great Britain, 1920s

The American Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, wrote in January 1918 that most of the Bolshevik leaders were Jewish.[16] Also, in a report to the United States and other governments from British Intelligence, entitled "A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad", it is stated in the first paragraph that international Communism is controlled by Jews.[17]

Captain Montgomery Schuyler, a military intelligence officer in Russia, reported regularly to the chief of staff of U.S. Army Intelligence (the Army handled intelligence before the CIA was established), who relayed the reports to the President. In one of these, declassified in 1958, Schuyler states:

It is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States, but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning, guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type …[18]

In another report on June 9, 1919, Schuyler cites Robert Wilton, who was then the chief correspondent in Russia for The Times of London. He writes the following, which the historical record shows[citation needed], incidentally, to be mostly inaccurate:

A table made up in 1918, by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times in Russia, shows at that time there were 384 commissars including 2 Negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number, 264 had come from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government.[18]

"Even Winston Churchill briefly joined this bandwagon, blaming the Russian Revolution on Jews."[14] In his article in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8 1920, Churchill asserted:

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 atheistic 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. [19]

Churchill also declared that Bolshevism must be "strangled in its cradle".[20] Such attitudes were not uncommon in the UK at the time of the allied intervention in the Russian Civil War. The British court of inquiry, appointed to investigate the Arab 1920 Palestine riots, associated Zionism with Bolshevism and identified Ze'ev Jabotinsky with a Labor Zionist party Poale Zion, which the court called "a definite Bolshevist institution."[21] In reality he was a right-wing leader. "The association of the fiercely antisocialist Jabotinsky with a Marxist party was not the only nonsense in the report."[21]

In the early 1920s, a leading British antisemite Henry Hamilton Beamish announced that "Bolshevism was Judaism."[22]

Iran, 2006

The allegation was revived in a December 28, 2006 interview by Iranian Presidential Advisor Mohammad Ali Ramin who was appointed secretary-general of the new "World Foundation for Holocaust Studies" established at the International Conference to Review the Global Vision of the Holocaust:

"The Bolshevik Soviet government in Lenin's time, and later, in Stalin's - both of whom were Jewish, though they presented themselves as Marxists and atheists... - was one of the forces that, until the Second World War, cooperated with Hitler in promoting the idea of establishing the State of Israel."[23]

References

  1. ^ Walter Laqueur (1965): Russia and Germany (Boston: Little, Brown and Company)
  2. ^ Daniel Pipes (1997): Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (The Free Press - Simon & Shuster) p.93. ISBN 0-684-83131-7
  3. ^ James Webb (1976): Occult Establishment: The Dawn of the New Age and The Occult Establishment, (Open Court Publishing), p.295. ISBN 0-87548-434-4
  4. ^ a b Political Activity and Emigration. Beyond the Pale. The History of Jews in Russia. (Exhibition by Friends and Partners Project)
  5. ^ Sergey Kara-Murza, Soviet Civilization, vol. 1 (The chapter about the growth of Russian political parties during February-October 1917 online) Template:Ru icon
  6. ^ Alan Woods. Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution. Part 1: The Birth of Russian Marxism. Section 3. The Jewish Workers' Movement
  7. ^ Alan Woods. Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution. Part 1 Section 5. The First Congress of the RSDLP
  8. ^ Alan Woods. Bolshevism: The Road to Revolution. Part 1 Section 6. The Second Congress
  9. ^ Religions attacked in the USSR (Beyond the Pale)
  10. ^ Walter Laqueur. The Changing Face of Antisemitism: From Ancient Times to the Present Day. Oxford University Press, 2006 ISBN 0-19-530429-2 p.105
  11. ^ Template:Ru icon The Protocols of the Elders of Zion: A Proved Forgery (Ch. 3) by Vladimir Burtsev
  12. ^ Samson Madiyevsky, Jews and the Russian Revolution: whether there Was a Choice, an article in Lechaim (online)
  13. ^ Ben-Sasson, H.H., ed. (1976): A History of the Jewish People. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge). ISBN 0-674-39730-4, p.944
  14. ^ a b Daniel Pipes (1997): Conspiracy: How the Paranoid Style Flourishes and Where It Comes From (The Free Press - Simon & Shuster) p.95. ISBN 0-684-83131-7
  15. ^ The Russian Roots of Nazism. White Émigrés and the Making of National Socialism, 1917–1945 by Michael Kellogg (excerpt)
  16. ^ Francis, David R. Russia From the American Embassy. New York: C. Scribner's & Sons, 1921. p. 214.
  17. ^ U.S. National Archives. Dept. of State Decimal File, 1910–1929, file 861.00/5067.
  18. ^ a b U.S. National Archives. Record group 120: Records of the American Expeditionary Forces, June 9, 1919.
  19. ^ Churchill, Winston. "Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People." Illustrated Sunday Herald. 8 February 1920.
  20. ^ Cover Story: Churchill's Greatness. Interview with Jeffrey Wallin. (The Churchill Centre)
  21. ^ a b Tom Segev, One Palestine, Complete, Metropolitan Books, 1999. p.141
  22. ^ James Webb (1976): Occult Establishment: The Dawn of the New Age and The Occult Establishment, (Open Court Publishing), p.130. ISBN 0-87548-434-4
  23. ^ Mohammad Ali Ramin, Advisor to Iranian President Ahmadinejad: 'Hitler Was Jewish' (MEMRI Special Dispatch Series No.1408) January 3, 2007

See also

Further reading

  • Arkady Vaksberg: Stalin against the Jews, 1994, Vintage Books (a division of Random House, New York), ISBN 0-679-42207-2
  • Yuri Slezkine: The Jewish Century, 2004, Princeton University Press, ISBN 0-691-11995-3
  • Richard Pipes: Russia under the Bolshevik regime, 1993, Alfred A.Knopf, New York, ISBN 0-394-50242-6
  • Mikhail Agursky: The Third Rome.National Bolshevism in the USSR,1987,Westview Press, ISBN 08133-0139-4
  • Robert Wistrich: Revolutionary Jews from Marx to Trotsky, 1976, Harrap, London, ISBN 0-245-52785-0
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