200 years together 400-500

liquidation in 1915 was legally validated.1655 The restrictions were removed layer by layer: travel, habitation, educational institutions, participation in local self-government, the right to acquire property anywhere in Russia, participation in government contracts, from stock exchanges, hiring servants, workers and stewards of a different religion, the right to occupy high positions in the government and military service, guardianship and trusteeship. Recalling a cancellation of an agreement with the United States, they repealed similar restrictions on “foreigners who are not at war with the Russian government,” mainly in reference to Jews coming from the United States. The promulgation of the Act inspired many emotional speeches. Deputy Freedman of the State Duma asserted: “For the past thirty-five years the Jews have been subjected to oppression and humiliation, unheard of and unprecedented even in the history of our long suffering people…. All of it … was the result of state-sponsored anti-Semitism.”1656 Attorney O.O. Gruzenberg stated: “If the pre-Revolution Russian government was a vast and monstrous prison, … then its most stinking, terrible cell, its torture chamber was carted away for us, the six-million Jewish people.  And for the first time the Jewish child learned … about this usurious term `interest´ in the state school…. Like hard labor camp prisoners on their way to camp, all Jews were chained together as despised aliens…. The drops of blood of our fathers and mothers, the drops of blood of our sisters and brothers fell on our souls, there igniting and enlivening  the unextinguishable Revolutionary fire.”1657 Rosa Georgievna, the wife of Vinaver, recalls: “The events (of the March 1917 Revolution) coincided with the Jewish Passover. It looked like this was a second escape from Egypt. Such a long, long path of suffering and struggle has passed, and how quickly everything had happened. A large Jewish meeting was called,” at which Milyukov spoke: “At last, a shameful spot has been washed away from Russia, which can now bravely step into the ranks of civilized nations.” Vinaver “proposed to the gathering to build a large Jewish public house in Petrograd in memory of the meeting, which will be called “The House of Freedom.”1658 Three members of the State Duma, M. Bomash, E. Gurevich and N. Freedman published an “open letter to the Jewish people”: that now “our military misfortunes could deal grave damage to the still infirm free Russia. Free Jewish warriors … will draw new strength for the ongoing struggle, with the tenfold energy extending the great feat of arms.” And here was the natural plan: “The Jewish people should quickly re-organize their society. The longobsolete forms of our communal life must be renewed on the free, democratic principles.”1659 1655AJE, Volume 7, Page 377 1656Rech’, March 25, 1917, Page 6 1657Ibid 1658R.G. Vinaver, Memoirs (New York, 1944) //  Hraneniye Guverskovo Instituta Voyni, Revolutsiyi I Mira – Stanford, California, Mashinopis’, Page 92 1659Russkaya Volya, March 29, Page 5
The author-journalist David Eisman responded to the Act with an outcry: “Our Motherland! Our Fatherland! They are in trouble! With all our hearts … we will defend our land…. Not since the defense of the Temple has there been such a sacred feat of arms.” And from the memoirs of Sliozberg: “The great fortune to have lived to see the day of the declaration of emancipation of Jews in Russia and the elimination of our lack of rights — everything I have fought for with all my strength over the course of three decades — did not fill me with the joy as it should had been,” because the collapse had begun right away.1660 And seventy years later one Jewish author expressed doubts too: “Did that formal legislative Act really change the situation in the country, where all legal norms were precipitously losing their power?”1661 We answer: in hindsight, from great distance, one should not downplay the significance of what was achieved. Then, the Act suddenly and dramatically improved the situation of the Jews. As for the rest of the country, falling, with all its peoples, into an abyss — that was the unpredictable way of the history. The most abrupt and notable change occurred in the judiciary. If earlier, the Batyushin’s commission on bribery investigated the business of the obvious crook D. Rubinstein, now the situation became reversed: the case against Rubinstein was dropped, and Rubinstein paid a visit to the Extraordinary Investigatory Commission in the Winter Palace and successfully demanded prosecution of the Batyushin’s commission itself. Indeed, in March 1917 they arrested General Batyushin, Colonel Rezanov, and other investigators. The investigation of activities of that commission began in April, and, as it turned out, the extortion of bribes from the bankers and sugar factory owners by them was apparently significant. Then the safes of Volga-Kama, Siberian, and Junker banks, previously sealed up by Batyushin, were unsealed and all the documents returned to the banks. (Semanovich and Manus were not so lucky. When Simanovich was arrested as secretary to Rasputin, he offered 15,000 rubles to the prison convoy guards, if they would let him make a phone call, yet “the request was, of course, turned down.”1662 As for Manus, suspected of being involved in shady dealings with the German agent Kolyshko, he battled the counterintelligence agents who came for him by shooting through his apartment’s door. After his arrest, he fled the country). The situation in the Extraordinary Investigatory Commission of the Provisional Government can be manifestly traced by records of interrogations in late March. Protopopov was asked how he came to be appointed to the Ministry of Internal Affairs, and in response he mentioned the directive issued by him: “the residence rights of the Jews were significantly expanded” in Moscow. Asked about the priorities of his Ministry, he first recalled the foodstuffs affair, and, after then the progressive 1660G.B. Slyozberg, Dela Minuvshikh Dney, Volume 3, Page 360 1661B. Orlov, Rossiya byez Yevreev (Russia without Jews) // “22”: Obshestvenno-politicheskiy a literaturniy zhurnal yevreyskoy inteligentsi’I iz SSSR v Izrayelye.  Tel-Aviv, 1988, No. 60, Page 157. 1662Rech’, March 17, 1917, Page 5
issue — the Jewish question….” The director of the Department of Police, A.T. Vasilyev didn’t miss an opportunity to inform the interrogators that he helped defend the sugar factory owners (Jews): “Gruzenberg called me in the morning in my apartment and thanked me for my cooperation”; “Rosenberg  … visited me to thank me for my efforts on his behalf.”1663 In this way, the accused tried to get some leniency for themselves. A notable aspect of the weeks of March was an energetic pursuit of known or suspected Judeophobes. The first one arrested, on February 27, was the Minister of Justice Scheglovitov. He was accused of personally giving the order to unjustly pursue the case against Beilis. In subsequent days, the Beilis’s accusers, the prosecutor Vipper and Senator Chaplinsky, were also arrested. (However, they were not charged with anything specific, and in May 1917 Vipper was merely dismissed from his position as the chief prosecutor of the Criminal Department of the Senate; his fate was sealed later, by the Bolsheviks). The court investigator Mashkevich was ordered to resign — for during the Beilis trial he had sanctioned not only expert witness testimony against the argument on the ritual murder, but he also allowed a second expert testimony arguing for the case of such murder. The Minister of Justice Kerensky requested transfer of all materials of the Beilis case from the Kiev Regional Court,1664 planning a loud re-trial, but during the stormy course of 1917 that didn’t happen. The chairman of the “Union of the Russian People,” Dmitry Dubrovin, was arrested and his archive was seized; the publishers of the farright newspapers Glinka-Yanchevsky and Poluboyarinova were arrested too; the bookstores of the Monarchist Union were simply burned down. For two weeks, they hunted for the fugitives N. Markov and Zamyslovsky, doing nightly searches for two weeks in St. Petersburg, Kiev and Kursk. Zamislovsky was hunted for his participation in the case against Beilis, and Markov, obviously, for his speeches in the State Duma. At the same time, they didn’t touch Purishkevich, one assumes, because of his Revolutionary speeches in the Duma and his participation in the murder of Rasputin. An ugly rumor arose that Stolypin took part in the murder of Iollos, and in Kremenchuk, a street that had previously been named after Stolypin was renamed  after Iollos. Over all of Russia there were hundreds of arrests, either because of their former positions  or even because of their former attitudes. It should be noted that the announcement of Jewish equality did not cause a single pogrom. It is worth noticing not only for the comparison to 1905, but also because, all through March and April, all major newspapers were constantly reporting the preparation of pogroms, and that somewhere, the pogroms had already supposedly begun.
1663Padeniye Tsarskovo Rezhima (Fall of the Tsarist Regime): Stenographicheskiye otchyoti doprosov a pokazani’I, dannikh v. 1917 g. v Chryezvichaynoy Sledstvennoy Kommissi’I Vremennovo Pravityelstva. L.: GUZ, 1924, T.1. Pages 119-121, 429 1664Russkaya Volya (Russian Will), April 21, 1917, Page 4
Rumors started on March 5, that somewhere either in Kiev or Poltava Province, Jewish pogroms were brewing, and someone in Petrograd put up a hand-written anti-Jewish flyer. As a result, the Executive Committee of Soviet Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies formed a special “visiting commission … led by Rafes, Aleksandrovich, and Sukhanov.” Their task was to “delegate commissars to various towns, with the first priority to go into the regions where the Black Hundreds, the servants of the old regime, are trying to sow ethnic antagonism among the population.”1665 In the newspaper Izvestia SRSD [Soviet Workers and Soldiers’ Deputies] there was an article Incitement to Pogrom: “It would be a huge mistake, tantamount to a crime, to close our eyes to a new attempt of the overthrown dynasty…” — because it is them [translator’s note — the Monarchists] who organize the trouble…. “In Kiev and Poltava provinces, among the underdeveloped, backwards classes of the population at this moment there is incitement against Jews…. Jews are blamed for the defeats of our Army, for the revolutionary movement in Russia, and for the fall of the monarchy…. It’s an old trick, … but all the more dangerous because of its timing…. It is necessary to quickly take decisive measures against the pogrom instigators.”1666 After this the commander of the Kiev Military District General Khodorovich issued an order: all military units are to be on high alert and be ready to prevent possible anti-Jewish riots. Long after this, but still in April, in various newspapers, every two or three days they published rumors of preparations for Jewish pogroms,1667 or at the very least, about moving of piles of “pogrom literature” by railroads. Yet the most stubborn rumors circulated about a coming pogrom in Kishinev — that was to happen at the end of March, right between the Jewish and (Russian) Orthodox Passovers, as happened in 1903. And there were many more such alarming press reports (one even said that the police in Mogilev was preparing a pogrom near the Headquarters of Supreme High Command). Not one of these proved true. One need only get acquainted with the facts of those months, to immerse oneself in the whole “February” atmosphere — of the defeated Right and the triumphant Left, of the stupor and confusion of the common folk — to dismiss outright any realistic possibility of  anti-Jewish pogroms. But how could ordinary Jewish residents of Kiev or Odessa forget those horrible days twelve years before? Their apprehension, their wary caution to any motion in that direction was absolutely understandable. The well-informed newspapers were a different story. The alarms raised by the newspapers, by enlightened leaders of the liberal camp, and half-baked socialist intellectuals — one cannot call this anything except political provocation. Provocation, however, that fortunately didn’t work. 1665Izvestiya Petrogradskovo Sovieta Rabochikh I Soldatskikh Deputatov, (heretofore “Izvestiya), March 6, 1917, Page 4 1666Izvestiya, March 6, Page 2 1667For example: Birzheviye Vedomosti, April 8 and 12, 1917; Russkaya Volya, April 9, 1917; Izvestiya, April 15, and 28, 1917; et. al.
One actual episode occurred at the Bessarabian bazaar in Kiev, on April 28: a girl stole a piece of ribbon in a Jewish shop and ran away; the store clerk caught up to her and began to beat her. A crowd rushed to lynch the clerk and the store owner, but the police defended them. In another incident, in the Rogachevsky district, people, angered by exorbitant prices, smashed the stores — including Jewish ones. Where and by whom was the Jewish emancipation met with hostility? Those were our legendary revolutionary Finland, and our “powerful” ally, Romania. In Finland (as we learned in Chapter 10 from Jabotinsky) the Jews were forbidden to reside permanently, and since 1858, only descendants of “Jewish soldiers who served here” (in Finland, during the Crimean War) were allowed to settle. “The passport law of 1862 … confirmed that Jews were forbidden entry into Finland,” and “temporary habitation [was permitted] at the discretion of a local governor”; the Jews could not become Finnish citizens; in order to get married, a Jew had to go to Russia; the rights of Jews to testify in Finnish courts were restricted. Several attempts to mitigate the restriction of the civil rights of the Jews in Finland were not successful.1668 And now, with the advent of Jewish equal rights in Russia, Finland, not having yet announced its complete independence (from Russia), did not legislate Jewish equality. Moreover, they were deporting Jews who had illegally moved to Finland, and not in a day, but in an hour, on the next train out. (One such case on March 16 caused quite a splash in the Russian press.) But Finland was always extolled for helping the revolutionaries, and liberals and socialists stopped short of criticizing her. Only the Bund sent a wire to very influential Finnish socialists, reprimanding them that this “medieval” law was still not repealed. The Bund, “the party of the Jewish proletariat, expresses strong certainty that you will take out that shameful stain from free Finland.”1669 However, in this certainty, the Bund was mistaken. And a huge alarm was raised in the post-February press about the persecution of Jews in Romania. They wrote that in Jassy it was even forbidden to speak Yiddish at public meetings. The All-Russian Zionist Student Congress “Gekhover” proposed “to passionately protest this civil inequality of Jews in Romania and Finland, which is humiliating to the world Jewry and demeaning to worldwide democracy.”1670 At that time Romania was weakened by major military defeats. So the Prime Minister Bratianu was making excuses in Petrograd in April saying that “most of the Jews in Romania … migrated there from Russia,” and in particular that “prompted Romanian government to limit the political rights of the Jews”; he promised equality soon.1671 However, in May
1668Yevreyskaya Encyclopedia (Jewish Encyclopedia): Volume 16 SPB: Obshestvo dlya Nauchnikh Yevreskikh Izdanni’I I Izd-Vo Brokaw-Yefron, 1906-1913. Volume 15, Page 281-284 1669Izvyestiya, March 26, 1917 Page 2 1670Russkaya Volya, April 15, 1917, Page 4 1671Birzheviye Vedomosti, April 23, 1917, Page 3
we read: “In fact, nothing is happening in that direction.”1672 (In May, the Romanian communist Rakovsky reported that “the situation of the Jews in Romania is … unbearable”; the Jews were blamed for the military defeat of the country; they were accused of “fraternizing” with Germans in the occupied parts of the country. “If the Romanian government was not afraid [to anger their allies in the Entente], then one would fear for the very lives of the Jews.”)1673 The worldwide response among the allies of the February Revolution was expressed in a tone of deep satisfaction, even ecstasy among many, but in this response there was also a short-sighted calculation: that now Russia will become invincible in war.  In Great Britain and the USA there were large meetings in support of the Revolution and the rights of the Jews. (I wrote about some of these responses in March 1917 in Chapters 510 and 621). From America they offered to send a copy of the Statue of Liberty to Russia. (Yet as the situation in Russia continued to deteriorate, they never got around to the Statue). On March 9 in the House of Commons of the British Parliament the Minister of Foreign Affairs was asked a question about the situation of the Jews in Russia: does he plan to consult with the Russian government regarding guarantees to the Russian Jews for the future and reparations for the past? The answer showed the full trust that the British government had for the new Russian government.1674 From Paris, the president of the International Jewish Union congratulated [Russian Prime Minister] Prince Lvov, and Lvov answered: “From today onward liberated Russia will be able to respect the faiths and customs of all of its peoples forever bound by a common religion of love of their homeland.” The newspapers Birzhevka, Rech and many others reported on the sympathies of  Jacob Schiff, “a well known leader of North American circles that are hostile to Russia.” He wrote: “I was always the enemy of Russian absolutism, which mercilessly persecuted my co-religionists. Now let me congratulate … the Russian people for this great act which they committed so perfectly.”1675 And now he “invites the new Russia to conduct broad credit operations in America.”1676 Indeed, “at the time he provided substantial credit to the Kerensky government.”1677 Later in emigration, the exiled Russian right-wing press published investigative reports attempting to show that Schiff actively financed the Revolution itself. Perhaps Schiff shared the short-sighted Western hope that the liberal revolution in Russia would strengthen Russia in the war. Still, the known and public acts of Schiff, who had always been hostile to Russian absolutism, had even greater effect than any possible secret assistance to such a revolution.
1672ibid, May 19, Page 1 1673Dyen’ (Day), May 10, 1917 1674Birzheviye Vedomosti, March 11, 1917, Page 2 1675Birzheviye Vedomosti, March 10, 1917, Page 6 1676Rech’, March 10, 1917, Page 3 1677Encyclopedia Judaica, Jerusalem, Keter Publishing House, 1971, Volume 14, Page 961
The February Revolution itself often consciously appealed for support to Jews, an entire nation enslaved. Eye-witness testimonies that Russian Jews were very ecstatic about the February Revolution are rife. Yet there are counter-witnesses too, such as Gregory Aronson, who formed and led the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies of Vitebsk (which later had as a member Y.V. Tarle, a future historian). He wrote that on the very first day, when news of the Revolution reached Vitebsk, the newly formed Security Council met in the city Duma, and immediately afterwards Aronson was invited to a meeting of representatives of the Jewish community (clearly, not rank and file, but leaders). “Apparently, there was a need to consult with me as a representative of the new dawning era, what to do further…. I felt alienation from these people, from the circle of their interests and from the tense atmosphere, which was at that meeting….  I had a sense that this society belonged mostly to the old world, which was retreating into the past.”1678 “We were not able to eliminate a certain mutual chill that had come from somewhere. The faces of the people I was working with, displayed no uplift or faith. At times, it appeared that these selfless social activists perceived themselves as elements of the old order.”1679 That is a precise witness account.  Such bewilderment, caution and wavering predominated among religiously conservative Jews, one assumes, not only in Vitebsk.  The sensible old Jewry, carrying a sense of many centuries of experience of hard ordeals, was apparently shocked by the sudden overthrow of the monarchy and had serious misgivings. Yet, in the spirit of the 20th century, the dynamic masses of every nation, including Jews, were already secular, not chained to traditions and very eager to build “the happy new world.” The Jewish Encyclopedia notes “a sharp intensification of the political activity of Jewry, noticeable even against a background of stormy social uplift that gripped Russia after February 1917.”1680 Myself, having worked for many years on the “February” press and memoirs of the contemporaries of the February, could not fail to noticed this “sharp strengthening,” this gusting. In those materials, from the most varied witnesses and participants of those events, there are so many Jewish names, and the Jewish theme is very loud and persistent.  From the memories of Rodzyanko, from the town governor Balk, from General Globachyov and many others, from the first days of the Revolution in the depths of the Tavrichesky Palace, the numbers of Jews jumped out at me — among the members of the commandants office, the interrogation commissions, the pamphlet-merchants and so on.  V.D. Nabokov, who was well disposed towards Jews, wrote that on 1678G.Y. Aronson, Intervyu Radiostantsi’I “Svoboda” // Vospominaniya o revolutsi’I 1917 goda, Intervyu No. 66, Munchen, 1966, Page 13-14 1679G. Aronson, Revolutsionnaya Yunost’: Vospominaniya, 1903-1917 // Inter-University Project on the History of the Menshevik Movement, Paper No. 6, New York, August 1961, Page 33 1680AJE, T. 7, Page 378
March 2 at the entrance to the Tavrichesky mini-park in front of the Duma building, there was “an unbelievable crush of people and shouting; at the entrance of the gates some young, Jewish-looking men were questioning the bypassers.”1681 According to Balk, the crowd that went on the rampage at the “Astoria” [an elite hotel in St. Petersburg] on the night of February 28, consisted of armed … soldiers, sailors and Jews.1682 I would indulge some emigrant irritability here as they used to say “well, that’s all the Jews”; yet the same was witnessed by another neutral observer, the Methodist pastor Dr. Simons, an American who had already been in Petrograd for ten years and knew it well. He was debriefed by a commission of the American Senate in 1919: “Soon after the March Revolution of 1917, everywhere in Petrograd you could see groups of Jews, standing on benches, soap boxes and such, making speeches…. There had been restrictions on the rights of Jews to live in Petrograd, but after the Revolution they came in droves, and the majority of agitators were Jews … they were apostate Jews.1683 A certain “Student Hanokh” came to Kronstadt a few days before a planned massacre of sixty officers, who were named on a hit-list; he became the founder and chairman of the Kronstadt’s “Committee of the Revolutionary Movement.” (The order of the Committee was to arrest and try each and all officers. “Somebody had carefully prepared and disseminated false information,” triggering massacres first in Kronstadt, then in Sveaborg; it was “because of the uncertainty of the situation, when every fabrication was taken for a hard fact.”1684) The baton of the bloody Kronstadt affair was carried by the drop-out psychoneurologist “Dr. Roshal.” (Later, after the October coup, S.G. Roshal was appointed the Commandant of the Gatchina, and from November he was the commissar of the whole Romanian Front, where he was killed upon arrival.1685) A certain Solomon and a Kaplun spoke on behalf of the newly-formed revolutionary militia of the Vasilievsky Island (in the future, the latter would become the bloody henchman of Zinoviev). The Petrograd Bar created a special “Commission for the examination of the justice of imprisoning persons arrested during the time of the Revolution” (thousands were arrested during this time in Petrograd) — that is, to virtually decide their fate without due process (and that of all the former gendarmes and police). This commission was headed by the barrister Goldstein. Yet, the unique story of the petty officer Timofey Kirpichnikov, who triggered the street 1681V. Nabokov, Vremennoye Pravitelstvo // Arkhiv Russkoy Revolutsi’I, izdavaemiy I.V. Gessenom.  Berlin:  Slovo, 1922-1937,  Vol. 1, Page 15 1682A. Balk, Posledniye pyat’ dney tsarskovo Petrograda (23-28 Fevralya 1917) Dnevnik poslednevo Petrogradskovo Gradonachal’nika // Khranenie Guverskovo Instituta, Mashinopis’, Page 16 1683Oktyabrskaya revolutsiya pered sudom amerikanskikh senatorov: Ofitsialniy otchyot “overmenskoy kommissi’I” Senata.  M.;L.; GIZ, 1927 Page 5 1684D.O. Zaslavskiy, Vl. A. Kantorovich.  Khronika Fevralskoy revolutsi’I, Pg.: Biloye, 1924. Volume 1, Page 63, 65 1685Rosskiskaya Yevreyskaya Encyclopedia, 2-e izd., ispr. I dop. M., 1995, Volume 2, Page 502
Revolution, was written in March 1917 and preserved for us by the Jew Jacob Markovich Fishman — a curious historical figure. (I with gratitude relied on this story in The Red Wheel.) The Jewish Encyclopedia concludes: “Jews for the first time in Russian history had occupied posts in the central and regional administrations.”1686 On the very heights, in the Executive Committee of the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, invisibly ruling the country in those months, two leaders distinguished themselves: Nakhamkis-Steklov and Gummer-Sukhanov.On the night of March 1st to March 2nd they dictated to the complacently-blind Provisional Government a program which preemptively destroyed its power for the entire period of its existence. Reflective contemporary G.A. Landau thus explains the active participation of the Jews in the revolution: “The misfortune of Russia, and the misfortune of the Russian Jewry, is that the results of the first Revolution [1905] were still not processed, not transformed into a new social fabric; no new generation was born, when a great and back-breaking war broke out. And when the hour of disintegration came, it came upon the generation that from the very beginning was a kind of exhausted remnant of the previous revolution; it found the inertia of depleted spirituality, lacking an organic connection to the situation, and chained by spiritual stagnation to the ten-years-ago-bygone period. And so the organic Revolutionism of the beginning of the 20th century [of the First Russian Revolution of 1905] had turned into the mechanical `permanent Revolution´ of the wartime era.”1687 Through many years of detailed studies I have spent much time trying to comprehend the essence of the February Revolution and the Jewish role in it. I came to this conclusion and can now repeat: no, the February Revolution was not something the Jews did to the Russians, but rather it was done by the Russians themselves, which I believe I amply demonstrated in The Red Wheel. We committed this downfall ourselves:  our anointed Tsar, the court circles, the hapless high-ranking generals, obtuse administrators, and their enemies — the elite intelligentsia, the Octobrist Party, the Zemstvo, the Kadets, the Revolutionary Democrats, socialists and revolutionaries, and along with them, a bandit element of army reservists, distressingly confined to the Petersburg’s barracks. And this is precisely why we perished. True, there were already many Jews among the intelligentsia by that time, yet that is in no way a basis to call it a Jewish revolution. One may classify revolutions by their main animating forces, and then the February Revolution must be seen as a Russian national Revolution, or more precisely, a Russian ethnic Revolution. Though if one would judge it using the methodology of materialistic sociologists — asking who benefited the most, or
1686AJE, Volume 7, Page 381 1687G.A. Landau, Revolutsionniye idyee v Yevreyskoy obshestvennosti // Rossi’I I every: Sb. 1 / Otechestvennoye ob’yedinennie russkikh yevreyev za granitsyey.  Paris: YMCA – Press, 1978, Page 116 [1-e izd. – Berlin: Osnova, 1924]
benefited most quickly, or the most solidly and in the long term from the Revolution, — then it could be called otherwise, Jewish, for example. But then again why not German? After all, Kaiser Wilhelm initially benefited from it. But the remaining Russian population got nothing but harm and destruction; however, that doesn’t make the Revolution “non-Russian.” The Jewish society got everything it fought for from the Revolution, and the October Revolution was altogether unnecessary for them, except for a small slice of young cutthroat Jews, who with their Russian internationalist brothers accumulated an explosive charge of hate for the Russian governing class and burst forth to “deepen” the Revolution. So how, having understood this, was I to move through March 1917 and then April 1917? Describing the Revolution literally hour by hour, I frequently found the many episodes in the sources that had a Jewish theme. Yet would it be right to simply pour all that on the pages of March 1917?  Then that easy and piquant temptation — to put all the blame on Jews, on their ideas and actions, to see them as the main reason for these events — would easily skew the book and overcome the readers, and divert the research away from the truly main causes of the Revolution. And so in order to avoid the self-deception of the Russians, I persistently and purposely downplayed the Jewish theme in The Red Wheel, relative to its actual coverage in the press and on the streets in those days. The February Revolution was carried out by Russian hands and Russian foolishness. Yet at the same time, its ideology was permeated and dominated by the intransigent hostility to the historical Russian state that ordinary Russians didn’t have, but the Jews — had. So the Russian intelligentsia too had adopted this view. (This was discussed in Chapter 11). This intransigent hostility grew especially sharp after the trial of Beilis, and then after the mass expulsion of Jews in 1915. And so this intransigence overcame the moderation. Yet the Executive Committee of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, which was formed within hours of the Revolution, appears very different. This Executive Committee was in fact a tough shadow government that deprived the liberal Provisional Government of any real power, while at the same time, criminally refused to accept responsibility for its power openly. By its “Order No. 1,” the Executive Committee  wrested the power from the military and created support for itself in the demoralized garrison of Petrograd. It was precisely this Executive Committee, and not the judiciary, not the timber industrialists, not the bankers, which fast-tracked the country to her doom. In the summer of 1917, Joseph Goldenberg, a member of the Executive Committee explained to the French Diplomat Claude Anet: “The Order No. 1 was not a mistake; it was a necessity…. On the day we executed the Revolution, we realized that if we did not destroy the old army, it would crush the Revolution. We had to choose between the army and the Revolution, and we did
not waver: we chose the latter … [and we inflicted,] I dare say, a brilliant blow.”1688 So there you have it. The Executive Committee quite purposely destroyed the army in the middle of the war. Is it legitimate to ask who were those successful and fatal-for-Russia leaders of the Executive Committee? Yes, it is legitimate, when actions of such leaders abruptly change the course of history. And it must be said that the composition of the Executive Committee greatly concerned the public and the newspapers in 1917, during which time many members of the Committee concealed themselves behind pseudonyms from the public eye: who was ruling Russia?  No one knew. Then, as it turned out, there was a dozen of soldiers, who were there just for show and weren’t very bright, they were kept out of any real power or decision making. From the other thirty, though, of those who actually wielded power, more than half were Jewish socialists. There were also Russians, Caucasians, Latvians and Poles. Less than a quarter were Russians. The moderate socialist V.B. Stankevich noted: “What really stuck out in the composition of the Committee was the large foreign element … totally out of proportion to their part of the population in Petrograd or the country in general.” Stankevich asks, “Was this the unhealthy scum of Russian society? Or was this the consequence of the sins of the old regime, which by its actions violently pushed the foreign element into the Leftist parties? Or was that simply the result of free competition?” And then, “there remains an open question — who bears more guilt for this — the foreign born, who were there, or the Russians who could have been there but weren’t?”1689 For a socialist that might be a case to look for a guilty party. Yet wouldn’t it better for all — for us, for you, for them — to avoid sinking into that mad dirty torrent altogether?
1688Claude Anet, La revolution russe: Juin-Novembre 1917. Paris: Payot et C-ie, 1918, Page 61 1689V.B. Stankevich, Vospominaniya, 1914-1919, Berlin: Izd-vo I.P. Ladizhnikova, 1920, Page 86
Chapter 14. During 1917
In the beginning of April 1917 the Provisional Government had discovered to its surprise that Russian finances, already for some time in quite bad shape, were on the brink of complete collapse. In an attempt to mend the situation, and stir enthusiastic patriotism, the government loudly, announced the issuance of domestic Freedom Loan bonds. Rumors about the loan had began circulating as early as March and Minister of Finance Tereshchenko informed the press that there were already multi-million pledges from bankers to buy bonds, “mainly from the Jewish bankers, which is undoubtedly related to the abolition of religious and national restrictions.”1690 Indeed, as soon as the loan was officially announced, names of large Jewish subscribers began appearing in newspapers, accompanied by prominent front-page appeals: “Jewish citizens! Subscribe to the Freedom Loan!” and “Every Jew must have the Freedom Loan bonds!”1691 In a single subscription drive in a Moscow synagogue 22 million rubles was collected. During the first two days, Jews in Tiflis subscribed to 1.5 million rubles of bonds; Jews in Minsk – to half a million in the first week; the Saratov community – to 800 thousand rubles of bonds. In Kiev, the heirs of Brodsky and Klara Ginzburg each spent one million. The Jews abroad came forward as well: Jacob Schiff, 1 million; Rothschild in London, 1 million; in Paris, on the initiative of Baron Ginzburg, Russian Jews participated actively and subscribed to severalmillion worth of bonds.1692 At the same time, the Jewish Committee in Support for Freedom Loan was established and appealed to public.1693 However, the government was very disappointed with the overall result of the first month of the subscription. For encouragement, the lists of major subscribers (who purchased bonds on 25 thousand rubles or more) were published several times: in the beginning of May, in the beginning of June and in the end of July.  “The rich who did not subscribe”1694 were shamed. What is most striking is not the sheer number of Jewish names on the lists (assimilated Russian-Germans with their precarious situation during the Russo-German War 1690Delo Naroda, March 25, 1917, p. 3 1691Russkaya Volya, April 14, 1917, p. 1; April 20, p. 1. See also Rech, April 16, 1917, p. 1; April 20, p. 1. 1692Russkaya Volya, April 23, 1917, p. 4. 1693Birzhevye Vedomosti, May 24, 1917, p. 2. 1694See, for instance, Russkaya Volya, May 10, 1917, p. 5; Birzhevye Vedomosti, May 9, 1917, p. 5; Birzhevye Vedomosti, June 1, 1917, p. 6; Rech, July 29, 1917, p. 6.
were in the second place among bond-holders) but the near absence of the top Russian bourgeoisie, apart from a handful of prominent Moscow entrepreneurs. In politics, “left and center parties burgeoned and many Jews had became politically active.”1695 From the very first days after the February Revolution, central newspapers published an enormous number of announcements about private meetings, assemblies and sessions of various Jewish parties, initially mostly the Bund, but later Poale Zion, Zionists, Socialist Zionists, Territorialist Zionists, and the Socialist Jewish Workers’ Party (SJWP). By March 7 we already read about an oncoming assembly of the All-Russian Jewish Congress – finally, the pre-revolutionary idea of Dubnov had become widely accepted. However, “because of sharp differences between Zionists and Bundists,” the Congress did not materialize in 1917 (nor did it occur in 1918 either “because of the Civil War and antagonism of Bolshevik authorities”).1696 “In Petrograd, Jewish People’s Group was re-established with M. Vinaver at the helm.”1697 They were liberals, not socialists; initially, they hoped to establish an alliance with Jewish socialists. Vinaver declared: “we applaud the Bund – the vanguard of the revolutionary movement.”1698 Yet the socialists stubbornly rejected all gestures of rapprochement. The rallying of Jewish parties in Petrograd had indirectly indicated that by the time of revolution the Jewish population there was already substantial and energetic. Surprisingly, despite the fact that almost no “Jewish proletariat” existed in Petrograd, the Bund was very successful there. It was extraordinarily active in Petrograd, arranging a number of meetings of local organization (in the lawyer’s club and then on April 1 in the Tenishev’s school); there was a meeting with a concert in the Mikhailovsky Theatre; then on April 14-19 “the AllRussian Conference of the Bund took place, at which a demand to establish a national and cultural Jewish autonomy in Russia was brought forward again.”1699 (“After conclusion of speeches, all the conference participants had sung the Bund’s anthem Oath, The Internationale, and La Marseillaise.”1700) And, as in past, Bund had to balance its national and revolutionary platforms: in 1903 it struggled for the independence from the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party, and yet in 1905 it rushed headlong into the All-Russian revolution. Likewise, now, in 1917, the Bund’s representatives occupied prominent positions in the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies [a Soviet is the Russian term used for an elected (at least in theory)
1695Kratkaya Evreiskaya Entsiklopediya [The Short Jewish Encyclopedia (henceforth—SJE)]. Jerusalem, 1994. v. 7, p. 399. 1696Ibid., p. 380-381. 1697Ibid., p. 379. 1698G. Aronson. Evreyskaya obshchestvennost v Rossii v 1917-1918 [The Jewish Public in Russia in 1917-1918] // Kniga o russkom evreystve: 1917-1967 [The Book of Russian Jewry: 1917-1967 (henceforth — BRJ-2)]. New York: Association of Russian Jews, 1968, p. 6. 1699SJE, v.7, p. 378. 1700Izvestiya, April 9, 1917, p. 4.
council] and later among the Social Democrats of Kiev. “By the end of 1917 the Bund had nearly 400 sections countrywide, totaling around 40,000 members.”1701 Developments in Poale Zion were no less amazing. In the beginning of April they also held their All-Russian Conference in Moscow. Among its resolutions we see on the one hand a motion to organize the All-Russian Jewish Congress and discuss the problem of emigration to Palestine. On the other hand, the Poale Zion Conference in Odessa had simultaneously announced the party’s uncompromising program of class warfare: “Through the efforts of Jewish revolutionary democracy the power over destinies of the Jewish nation was … wrested from the dirty grasp of ‘wealthy and settled’ Jews despite all the resistance of bourgeoisie to the right and the Bund to the left…. Do not allow the bourgeois parties to bring in the garbage of the old order…. Do not let the hypocrites speak – they did not fight but sweated out the rights for our people on their bended knees in the offices of anti-Semitic ministers; …  they did not believe in the revolutionary action of the masses.” Then, in April 1917, when the party had split the “Radical Socialist” Poale Zion moved toward the Zionists, breaking away from the main “Social Democratic” Poale Zion,1702 which later would join the Third International.1703 Like the two above-mentioned parties, the SJWP also held its statewide conference at which it had merged with the Socialist Zionists, forming the United Jewish Socialist Workers’ Party (Fareynikte) and parting with the idea “of any extraterritorial Jewish nation” with its own parliament and national autonomy. “Fareynikte appealed to the Provisional Government asking it to declare equality of languages and to establish a council on the affairs of nationalities” which would specifically “fund Jewish schools and public agencies.” At the same time, Fareynikte closely collaborated with the Socialist Revolutionaries.1704 However, it was Zionism that became the most influential political force in the Jewish milieu.1705 As early as the beginning of March, the resolution of Petrograd’s Zionist Assembly contained the following wording: “The Russian Jewry is called upon to support the Provisional Government in every possible way, to enthusiastic work, to national consolidation and organization for the sake of the prosperity of Jewish national life in Russia and the national and political renaissance of Jewish nation in Palestine.” And what an inspiring historical moment it was – March 1917 – with the British troops closing on Jerusalem right at that time! Already on March 19 the proclamation of Odessa’s Zionists stated: “today is the time when states rearrange themselves on national foundations. Woe to us if we miss this historic opportunity.” In April, the Zionist movement was strongly reinforced by the public announcement of Jacob 1701SJE, v.7, p. 378-379. 1702SJE, v.7, p. 378. 1703Izvestiya, September 15, 1917, p. 2. 1704SJE, v.6, p. 85; v.7, p. 379. 1705SJE, v.7, p. 378.
Schiff, who had decided to join Zionists “because of fear of Jewish assimilation as a result of Jewish civil equality in Russia. He believes that Palestine could become the center to spread ideals of Jewish culture all over the world.”1706 In the beginning of May, Zionists held a large meeting in the building of Petrograd Stock Exchange, with Zionist hymns performed several times. In the end of May the All-Russian Zionist Conference was held in the Petrograd Conservatory. It outlined major Zionist objectives: cultural revival of the Jewish nation, “social revolution in the economic structure of Jewish society to transform the ‘nation of merchants and artisans into the nation of farmers and workers,’ an increase in emigration to Palestine and ‘mobilization of Jewish capital to finance the Jewish settlers’.” Both Jabotinsky’s plan on creation of a Jewish legion in the British Army and the I. Trumpeldorf’s plan for the “formation of a Jewish army in Russia which would cross the Caucasus and liberate Eretz Yisrael [The land of Israel] from Turkish occupation have been discussed and rejected on the basis of the neutrality of Zionists in the World War I.”1707 The Zionist Conference decreed to vote during the oncoming local elections for the parties “not farther to the right than the People’s Socialists,” and even to refuse to support Constitutional Democrats like D. Pasmanik, who later complained: “It was absolutely meaningless – it looked like the entire Russian Jewry, with its petty and large bourgeoisie, are socialists.”1708 His bewilderment was not unfounded. The congress of student Zionist organization, Gekhover, with delegates from 25 cities and all Russian universities, had taken place in the beginning of April in Petrograd. Their resolution stated that the Jews were suffering not for the sake of equality in Russia but for the rebirth of Jewish nation in the native Palestine. They decided to form legions in Russia to conquer Palestine. Overall, “during the summer and fall of 1917 Zionism in Russia continued to gain strength: by September its members numbered 300,000.”1709 It is less known that in 1917 Jewish “orthodox movements enjoyed substantial popularity second only to the Zionists and ahead of the socialist parties” (as illustrated by their success “during elections of the leadership of reorganized Jewish communities”).1710 There were rallies (“The Jews are together with the democratic Russia in both love and hatred!”), public lectures (“The Jewish Question and the Russian Revolution”), city-wide “assemblies of Jewish high school students” in Petrograd and other cities (aside from general student meetings). In Petrograd,
1706Birzhevye Vedomosti, April 12, 1917, p. 4. 1707SJE, v.6, p. 463, 464. 1708D. Pasmanik. Chego zhe my dobivaemsya? [What are we struggling for?] // Rossiya i evrei: Otechestvennoe objedinenie russkikh evreev za granitsei [Russia and Jews: Expatriate Society of Russian Jews in Exile (henceforth—RJ)]. Paris, YMCA-Press, 1978, p. 211 [The 1st Edition: Berlin, Osnova, 1924]. 1709SJE, v.7, p. 378. 1710Ibid., p. 379.
the Central Organ of Jewish Students was established, though not recognized by the Bund and other leftist parties. While many provincial committees for the assistance to the “victims of the war” (i.e., to Jewish refugees and deportees) ceased to exist because at this time “democratic forces needed to engage in broader social activities,” and so the Central Jewish Committee for providing such aid was formed by April. In May the Jewish People’s Union was established to facilitate consolidation of all Jewish forces, to prepare for the convocation of the All-Russian Jewish Union and to get ready for the oncoming elections to the Constituent Assembly. In the end of May there was another attempt of unification: the steering committee of the Jewish Democratic Alliance convened the conference of all Jewish democratic organizations in Russia. Meanwhile, lively public discussion went on regarding convocation of the All-Russian Jewish Congress: the Bund rejected it as inconsistent with their plans; the Zionists demanded the Congress include on their agenda the question of Palestine – and were themselves rejected by the rest; in July the All-Russian Conference on the Jewish Congress preparation took place in Petrograd.1711 Because of social enthusiasm, Vinaver was able to declare there that the idea of united Jewish nation, dispersed among different countries, is ripe, and that from now on the Russian Jews may not be indifferent to the situation of Jews in other countries, such as Romania or Poland. The Congress date was set for December. What an upsurge of Jewish national energy it was! Even amid the upheavals of 1917, Jewish social and political activities stood out in their diversity, vigor and organization. The “period between February and November 1917 was the time of blossoming” of Jewish culture and healthcare. In addition to the Petrograd publication The Jews of Russia, the publisher of The Jewish Week had moved to Petrograd; publication of the Petrograd-Torgblat in Yiddish had begun; similar publications were started in other cities. The Tarbut and Culture League [a network of secular, Hebrew-language schools] had established “dozens of kindergartens, secondary and high schools and pedagogic colleges” teaching both in Yiddish and in Hebrew. A Jewish grammar school was founded in Kiev. In April, the first All-Russian Congress on Jewish Culture and Education was held in Moscow. It requested state funding for Jewish schools A conference of the Society of Admirers of Jewish Language and Culture took place. The Habima Theatre, “the first professional theatre in Hebrew in the world,”1712 opened in Moscow. There were an exposition of Jewish artists and a conference of the Society on Jewish Health Care in April in Moscow. These Jewish activities are all the more amazing given the state of general governmental, administrative and cultural confusion in Russia 1917. A major event in the Jewish life of the time was the granting of official permission for Jewish youth to enlist as officers in the Russian Army. It was a large-scale move: in April, the headquarters of the Petrograd military district
1711Ibid., p. 380-381. 1712Ibid., p. 379.
had issued an order to the commanders of Guards military units to immediately post all Jewish students to the training battalion at Nizhny Novgorod with the purpose of their further assignment to military academies1713 – that is virtually mass-scale promotion of young Jews into the officer ranks. “Already in the beginning of June 1917, 131 Jews graduated from the accelerated military courses at the Konstantinovsky military academy in Kiev as officers; in the summer 1917 Odessa, 160 Jewish cadets were promoted into officers.”1714 In June 2600 Jews were promoted to warrant-officer rank all over Russia. There is evidence that in some military academies Junkers [used in Tsarist Russia for cadets and young officers] met Jewish newcomers unkindly, as it was in the Alexandrovsky military academy after more than 300 Jews had been posted to it. In the Mikhailovsky military academy a group of Junkers proposed a resolution that: “Although we are not against the Jews in general, we consider it inconceivable to let them into the command ranks of the Russian Army.” The officers of the academy dissociated themselves from this statement and a group of socialist Junkers (141-strong) had expressed their disapproval, “finding antiJewish protests shameful for the revolutionary army,”1715 and the resolution did not pass. When Jewish warrant officers arrived to their regiments, they often encountered mistrust and enmity on the part of soldiers for whom having Jews as officers was extremely unusual and strange. (Yet the newly-minted officers who adopted new revolutionary style of behavior gained popularity lightningfast.) On the other hand, the way Jewish Junkers from the military academy in Odessa behaved was simply striking. In the end of March, 240 Jews had been accepted into the academy. Barely three weeks later, on April 18 old style, there was a First of May parade in Odessa and the Jewish Junkers marched ostentatiously singing ancient Jewish songs. Did they not understand that Russian soldiers would hardly follow such officers? What kind of officers were they going to become? It would be fine if they were being prepared for the separate Jewish battalions. Yet according to General Denikin, the year 1917 saw successful formation of all kinds of national regiments – Polish, Ukrainian, Transcaucasian (the Latvian units were already in place for a while) – except the Jewish ones: it was “the only nationality not demanding national selfdetermination in military. And every time, when in response to complaints about bad acceptance of Jewish officers in army formation of separate Jewish regiments was suggested, such a proposal was met with a storm of indignation on the part of Jews and the Left and with accusations of a spiteful provocation.”1716 (Newspapers had reported that Germans also planned to form separate Jewish regiments but the project was dismissed.) It appears, though, that new Jewish officers still wanted some national organization in the military. 1713Rech, April 27, 1917, p. 3. 1714SJE, v.7, p. 378. 1715Russkaya Volya, April 25, 1917, p. 5. 1716A. I. Denikin. Ocherki russkoi smuty. V1: Krushenie vlasti I armii, fevral-sentyabr 1917 [Russian Turmoil. Memoirs. V1: Collapse of Authority and Army]. Paris, 1922, p. 129-130.
In Odessa on August 18, the convention of Jewish officers decided to establish a section which would be responsible for connections between different fronts “to report on the situation of Jewish officers in the field.” In August, “unions of Jewish warriors appeared; by October such unions were present at all fronts and in many garrisons. During the October 10-15, 1917 conference in Kiev, the AllRussian Union of Jewish Warriors was founded.”1717 (Although it was a new ‘revolutionary army’, some reporters still harbored hostility toward officer corps in general and to officer’s epaulettes in particular; for instance, A. Alperovich whipped up emotions against officers in general in Birzhevye Vedomosti [Stock Exchange News] as late as May 5.)1718 Various sources indicate that Jews were not eager to be drafted as common soldiers even in 1917; apparently, there were instances when to avoid the draft sick individuals passed off as genuine conscripts at the medical examining boards, and, as a result, some district draft commissions began demanding photo-IDs from Jewish conscripts (an unusual practice in those simple times). It immediately triggered angry protests that such a requirement goes against the repulsion of national restrictions, and the Ministry of Internal Affairs forbade asking for such IDs. In the beginning of April the Provisional Government issued an order by telegraph to free without individual investigation all Jews previously exiled as suspects of espionage. Some of them resided in the now-occupied territories, while others could safely return home, and yet many deportees asked for permission to reside in the cities of the European part of Russia. There was a flow of Jews into Petrograd (Jewish population of 50,000 in 1917)1719 and a sharp increase of Jewish population in Moscow (60,000).1720 Russian Jews received less numerous, but highly energetic reinforcement from abroad. Take those two famous trains that crossed hostile Germany without hindrance and brought to Russia nearly 200 prominent individuals, 30 in Lenin’s and 160 in Natanson-Martov’s train, with Jews comprising an absolute majority (the lists of passengers of the ‘exterritorial trains’ were for the first time published by V. Burtsev).1721 They represented almost all Jewish parties, and virtually all of them would play a substantial role in the future events in Russia. Hundreds of Jews returned from the United States: former emigrants, revolutionaries, and draft escapees – now they all were the ‘revolutionary fighters’ and ‘victims of Tsarism’. By order of Kerensky, the Russian embassy in the USA issued Russian passports to anyone who could provide just two witnesses (to testify to identity) literally from the street. (The situation around Trotsky’s group was peculiar. They were apprehended in Canada on suspicion of connections with Germany. The investigation found that Trotsky travelled not 1717SJE, v.7, p. 379. 1718Birzhevye Vedomosti, May 5, 1917, p. 2. 1719SJE, v.4, p. 775. 1720SJE, v.5, p. 475. 1721Obshchee delo, October 14 and 16, 1917
with flimsy Russian papers, but with a solid American passport, inexplicably granted to him despite his short stay in the USA, and with a substantial sum of money, the source of which remained a mystery.1722) On June 26 at the exalted “Russian rally in New York City” (directed by P. Rutenberg, one-time friend and then a murderer of Gapon), Abraham Kagan, the editor of Jewish newspaper Forwards, addressed Russian ambassador Bakhmetev “on behalf of two million Russian Jews residing in the United States of America”: “We have always loved our motherland; we have always sensed the links of brotherhood with the entire Russian nation…. Our hearts are loyal to the red banner of the Russian liberation and to the national tricolor of the free Russia.” He had also claimed that the self-sacrifice of the members of Narodnaya Volya [literally, The People’s Will, a terrorist leftwing revolutionary group in Tsarist Russia, best known for its assassination of Tsar Alexander II, known as ‘the Tsar Liberator for ending serfdom] “was directly connected to the fact of increased persecution of the Jews” and that “people like Zundelevich, Deich, Gershuni, Liber and Abramovich were among the bravest.”1723 And so they had begun coming back, and not just from New York, judging by the official introduction of discounted railroad fare for ‘political emigrants’ travelling from Vladivostok. At the late July rally in Whitechapel, London, “it was found that in London alone 10,000 Jews declared their willingness to return to Russia”; the final resolution had expressed pleasure that “Jews would go back to struggle for the new social and democratic Russia.”1724 Destinies of many returnees, hurrying to participate in the revolution and jumping headlong into the thick of things, were outstanding. Among the returnees were the famous V. Volodarsky, M. Uritsky, and Yu. Larin, the latter was the author of the ‘War Communism economy’ program. It is less known that Yakov Sverdlov’s brother, Veniamin, was also among the returnees. Still, he would not manage to rise higher than the deputy Narkom [People’s Commissar] of Communications and a member of Board of the Supreme Soviet of the National Economy. Moisei Kharitonov, Lenin’s associate in emigration who returned to Russia in the same train with him, quickly gained notoriety by assisting the anarchists in their famous robbery in April; later he was the secretary of Perm, Saratov and Sverdlov gubkoms [guberniya’s Party committee], and the secretary of Urals Bureau of the Central Committee. Semyon Dimanshtein, a member of a Bolshevik group in Paris, would become the head of the Jewish Commissariat at the People’s Commissariat of Nationalities, and later the head of YevSek [Jewish Section] at the All-Russian Central Executive Committee; he would in fact supervise the entire Jewish life. Amazingly, at the age of 18 he managed “to pass qualification test to become a rabbi” and became a member of the Russian Social Democratic Workers’ Party
1722A. Sutton. Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution. Translation from English, Moscow, 1998, p. 14-36. 1723Rech, June 27, 1917, p. 3; June 28, p. 2-3. 1724Rech, August 2, 1917, p. 3.
– all this in course of one year.1725 Similarly, members of the Trotsky’s group had also fared well: the jeweler G. Melnichansky, the accountant Friman, the typographer A. Minkin-Menson, and the decorator Gomberg-Zorin had respectively headed Soviet trade unions, Pravda, the dispatch office of bank notes and securities, and the Petrograd Revolutionary Tribunal. Names of other returnees after the February Revolution are now completely forgotten, yet wrongly so, as they played important roles in the revolutionary events. For example, the Doctor of Biology Ivan Zalkind had actively participated in the October coup and then in fact ran Trotsky’s People’s Commissariat of Internal Affairs. Semyon Kogan-Semkov became the “political commissar of Izhevsk weapons and steel factories” in November 1918; that is he was in charge of the vindictive actions during suppression of major uprising of Izhevsk workers1726 known for its large, in many thousands, victim’s toll; in a single incident on the Sobornaya Square in Izhevsk 400 workers were gunned down.1727 Tobinson-Krasnoshchekov later headed the entire Far East as the secretary of the Far East Bureau and the head of local government. GirshfeldStashevsky under the pseudonym “Verkhovsky” was in command of a squad of German POWs and turncoats, that is, he laid foundation for the Bolshevik international squads; in 1920 he was the head of clandestine intelligence at the Western front; later, in peacetime, “he, on orders of Cheka Presidium, had organized intelligence network in the Western Europe”; he was awarded the title of “Honorary Chekist.”1728 Among returnees were many who did not share Bolshevik views (at least at the time of arrival) but they were nevertheless welcomed into the ranks of Lenin’s and Trotsky’s party. For instance, although Yakov Fishman, a member of the Military Revolutionary Committee of the October coup, had deviated from the Bolshevik mainstream by participating in the Left Socialist Revolutionary insurrection in July 1918, he was later accepted into the Russian Communist party of Bolsheviks (RCPB) and entrusted with a post in the Military Intelligence Administration of the Red Army. Or take Yefim Yarchuk, who had returned as an Anarchist Syndicalist, but was delegated by the Petrograd Soviet to reinforce the Kronstadt Soviet; during the October coup he had brought a squad of sailors to Petrograd to storm the Winter Palace. The returnee Vsevolod Volin-Eikhenbaum (the brother of the literary scholar) was a consistent supporter of anarchism and the ideologist of Makhno [a Ukrainian separatist-anarchist] movement; he was the head of the Revolutionary Military
1725Russkaya Evreiskaya Entsiklopediya [The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia (henceforth— RJE)]. 2nd edition, Moscow, 1994 – 1997. v. 1, p. 240, 427; v. 2, p. 124; v. 3, p. 29, 179, 280. 1726RJE, v. 1, p. 473; v. 3, p. 41. 1727Narodnoe soprotivlenie kommunismu v Rossii: Ural i Prikamye. Noyabr 1917 – yanvar 1919 [People’s Resistance to Communism: Urals and Prikamye. November 1917 – January 1919. Redactor M. Bernshtam. Paris: YMCA-Press, 1982, p. 356. Volume 3 of the series Issledovaniya Noveishei Russkoi istorii [Studies of Modern Russian History]. 1728RJE, v. 2, p. 85; v. 3, p. 106.
Soviet in the Makhno army. We know that Makno was more of an advantage than a detriment to Bolsheviks and as a result Volin was later merely forced to emigrate together with a dozen of other anarchists.1729 The expectations of returnees were not unfounded: those were the months marked by a notable rise to prominence for many Jews in Russia. “The Jewish Question exists no longer in Russia.”1730 (Still, in the newspaper essay by D. Aizman, Sura Alperovich, the wife of a merchant who moved from Minsk to Petrograd, had expressed her doubts: “So there is no more slavery and that’s it?” So what about the things “that ‘Nicholas of yesterday’ did to us in Kishinev [in regard to the Kishinev pogrom]?”1731) In another article David Aizman thus elaborated his thought: “Jews must secure the gains of revolution by any means … without any qualms. Any necessary sacrifice must be made. Everything is on the stake here and all will be lost if we hesitate…. Even the most backward parts of Jewish mass understand this.” “No one questions what would happen to Jews if the counter-revolution prevails.” He was absolutely confident that if that happens there would be mass executions of Jews. Therefore, “the filthy scum must be crushed even before it had any chance to develop, in embryo. Their very seed must be destroyed…. Jews will be able to defend their freedom.”1732 Crushed in embryo…. And even their very seed…. It was already pretty much the Bolshevik program, though expressed in the words of Old Testament. Yet whose seed must be destroyed? Monarchists’? But they were already breathless; all their activists could be counted on fingers. So it could only be those who had taken a stand against the unbridled, running wild soviets, against all kinds of committees and mad crowds; those, who wished to halt the breakdown of life in the country – prudent ordinary people, former government officials, and first of all officers and very soon the soldier-general Kornilov. There were Jews among those counter-revolutionaries, but overall that movement was the Russian national one. What about press? In 1917, the influence of print media grew; the number of periodicals and associated journalists and staff was rising. Before the revolution, only a limited number of media workers qualified for draft deferral, and only those who were associated with newspapers and printing offices which were established in the pre-war years. (They were classified as ‘defense enterprises’ despite their desperate fight against governmental and military censorship.) But now, from April, on the insistence of the publishers, press privileges were expanded with respect to the number of workers exempt from military service; newly founded political newspapers were henceforth also covered by the exemption (sometimes fraudulently as the only thing needed to qualify was maintaining a circulation of 30,000 for at least two weeks). Draft privileges were introduced on the basis of youth, for the ‘political emigrants’
1729RJE, v. 3, p. 224, 505; v. 1, p. 239. 1730Rech, June 28, 1917, p. 2. 1731Russkaya Volya, April 13, 1917, p. 3. 1732Russkaya Volya, April 9, 1917, p. 3.
and those ‘released from exile’ – everything that favored employment of new arrivals in the leftist newspapers. At the same time, rightist newspapers were being closed: Malenkaya Gazeta [Small Newspaper] and Narodnaya Gazeta [People’s Newspaper] were shut down for accusing Bolsheviks of having links with Germans. When many newspapers published the  telegrams fraudulently attributed to the Empress and the fake was exposed (it was “an innocent joke of a telegraph operator lady,” for which, of course, she was never disciplined) and so they had to retract their pieces, Birzhevye Vedomosti, for instance, had produced such texts: “It turned out that neither the special archive at the Main Department of Post and Telegraph, where the royal telegrams were stored, nor the head office of telegraph contain any evidence of this correspondence.”1733 See, they presented it as if the telegrams were real but all traces of their existence had been skillfully erased. What a brave free press!
As early as in the beginning of March the prudent Vinaver had warned the Jewish public: “Apart from love for freedom, self-control is needed…. It is better for us to avoid highly visible and prominent posts…. Do not hurry to practice our rights.”1734 We know that Vinaver (and also Dan, Liber and Branson) “at different times have been offered minister posts, but all of them refused, believing that Jews should not be present in Russian Government.” The attorney Vinaver could not, of course, reject his sensational appointment to the Senate, where he became one of four Jewish Senators (together with G. Blumenfeld, O. Gruzenberg, and I. Gurevich).1735 There were no Jews among the ministers but four influential Jews occupied posts of deputy ministers: V. Gurevich was a deputy to Avksentiev, the Minister of Internal Affairs; S. Lurie was in the Ministry of Trade and Industry; S. Schwartz and A. GinzburgNaumov – in the ministry of Labor; and P. Rutenberg should be mentioned here too. From July, A. Galpern became the chief of the administration of the Provisional Government (after V. Nabokov)1736; the director of 1st Department in the Ministry of Foreign Affairs was A. N. Mandelshtam. The assistant to the head of the Moscow military district was Second Lieutenant Sher (since July 1917); from May, the head of foreign supply department at General Staff was A. Mikhelson; the commissar of the Provisional Government in the field construction office was Naum Glazberg; several Jews were incorporated by Chernov into the Central Land Committee responsible for everything related to allotting land to peasants. Of course, most of those were not key posts, having negligibly small influence when compared to the principal role of the Executive
1733Birzhevye vedomosti, May 7, 1917, p. 3. 1734G. Aronson. Evreyskaya obshchestvennost v Rossii v 1917-1918 [The Jewish Public in Russia in 1917-1918]. // BRJ-2, p. 7. 1735RJE, v. 7, p. 381. 1736Ibid.
Committee, whose ethnic composition would soon become a hotly debated public worry. At the August Government Conference dedicated to the disturbing situation in the country, apart from the representatives of soviets, parties, and guilds, a separate representation was granted to the ethnic groups of Russia, with Jews represented by eight delegates, including G. Sliozberg, M. Liber, N. Fridman, G. Landau, and O. Gruzenberg. The favorite slogan of 1917 was “Expand the Revolution!” All socialist parties worked to implement it. I. O. Levin writes: “There is no doubt that Jewish representation in the Bolshevik and other parties which facilitated “expanding of revolution” – Mensheviks, Socialist Revolutionaries, etc. – with respect to both general Jewish membership and Jewish presence among the leaders, greatly exceeds the Jewish share in the population of Russia. This is an indisputable fact; while its reasons should be debated, its factual veracity is unchallengeable and its denial is pointless”; and “a certainly convincing explanation of this phenomenon by Jewish inequality before the March revolution … is still not sufficiently exhaustive.”1737 Members of central committees of the socialist parties are known. Interestingly, Jewish representation in the leadership of Mensheviks, the Right and the Left Socialist Revolutionaries, and the Anarchists was much greater than among the Bolshevik leaders. At the Socialist Revolutionary Congress, which took place in the end of May and beginning of June 1917, 39 out of 318 delegates were Jewish, and out of 20 members of the Central Committee of the party elected during the Congress, 7 were Jewish. A. Gotz was one of the leaders of the right wing faction and M. Natanson was among the leaders of the left Socialist Revolutionaries.”1738 (What a despicable role awaited Natanson, “the wise Mark,” one of the founder of Russian Narodnichestvo [“Populism”]! During the war, living abroad, he was receiving financial aid from Germany. In May 1917 he returned in Russia in one of the ‘extraterritorial trains’ across Germany; in Russia, he had immediately endorsed Lenin and threw his weight in support of the latter’s goal of dissolving the Constituent Assembly; actually, it was he who had voiced this idea first, though Lenin, of course, needed no such nudge.) Local government elections took place in the summer. Overall, socialist parties were victorious, and “Jews actively participated in the local and municipal work in a number of cities and towns outside of the [former] Pale of Settlement.” For instance, Socialist Revolutionary O. Minor .became head of the Moscow City Duma; member of the Central Committee of the Bund, A. Vainshtein (Rakhmiel),of the Minsk Duma; Menshevik I. Polonsky, of the Ekaterinoslav Duma, Bundist D. Chertkov, of the Saratov Duma.” G. Shreider had become the mayor of Petrograd, and A. Ginzburg-Naumov was elected a deputy mayor in Kiev.”1739
1737I. O. Levin. Evrei v revolutsii [The Jews in the Revolution]. // RJ, p. 124. 1738RJE, v. 7, p. 399.
But most of these persons were gone with the October coup and it was not they who shaped the subsequent developments in Russia. It would become the lot of those who now occupied much lower posts, mostly in the soviets; they were numerous and spread all over the country: take, for instance, Khinchuk, head of the Moscow Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, or Nasimovich and M. Trilisser of the Irkutsk Soviet (the latter would later serve in the Central Executive Committee of the Soviets of Siberia and become a famous Chekist).1740 All over the provinces “Jewish socialist parties enjoyed large representation in the Soviets of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies.”1741 They were also prominently presented at the All-Russian Democratic Conference in September 1917, which annoyed Lenin so much that he had even demanded surrounding the Alexandrinsky Theater with troops and arresting the entire assembly. (The theater’s superintendent, comrade Nashatyr, would have to act on the order, but Trotsky had dissuaded Lenin.) And even after the October coup, the Moscow Soviet of Soldiers’ Deputies had among its members, according to Bukharin, “dentists, pharmacists, etc., – representatives of trades as close to the soldier’s profession as to that of the Chinese Emperor.”1742 But above all of that, above all of Russia, from the spring to the autumn of 1917, stood the power of one body – and it was not the Provisional Government. It was the powerful and insular Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet, and later, after June, the successor to its power, the AllRussian Central Executive Committee (CEC) – it was they who had in fact ruled over Russia. While appearing solid and determined from outside, in reality they were being torn apart by internal contradictions and inter-factional ideological confusion. Initially, the Executive Committee of the Petrograd Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies unanimously approved the Order No. 1, but later was doubtful about the war – whether to continue destroying army or to strengthen it. (Quite unexpectedly, they declared their support for the Freedom Loan; thus they had incensed the Bolsheviks but agreed with the public opinion on this issue, including the attitudes of liberal Jews.) The Presidium of the first All-Russian CEC of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies (the first governing Soviet body) consisted of nine men. Among them were the Social Revolutionaries (SRs) A. Gots and M. Gendelman, the Menshevik, F. Dan, and the member of Bund, M. Liber. (In March at the All-Russian Conference of the Soviets, Gendelman and Steklov had demanded stricter conditions be imposed on the Tsar’s family, which was under house arrest, and also insisted on the arrest of all crown princes – this is how confident they were in their power.) The prominent Bolshevik, L. 1739G. Aronson. Evreyskaya obshchestvennost v Rossii v 1917-1918 [The Jewish Public in Russia in 1917-1918] // BRJ-2, p. 10. RJE, v. 7, p. 381. 1740RJE, v. 3, p. 162, 293. 1741G. Aronson. Evreyskaya obshchestvennost v Rossii v 1917-1918 [The Jewish Public in Russia in 1917-1918] // BRJ-2, p. 7. 1742Izvestiya, November 8, 1917, p. 5.
Kamenev, was among the members of that Presidium. It also included the Georgian, Chkheidze; the Armenian, Saakjan; one Krushinsky, most likely a Pole; and Nikolsky, likely a Russian – quite an impudent [ethnic] composition for the governing organ of Russia in such a critical time. Apart from the CEC of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, there was also the All-Russian Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies, elected in the end of May. Of its 30 members, there were only three actual peasants – an already habitual sham of the pre-Bolshevik regime. Of those thirty, D. Pasmanik identified seven Jews: “a sad thing it was, especially considering Jewish interests”; and “they had become an eyesore to everybody.”1743 Then this peasant organ put forward a list of its candidates for the future Constituent Assembly. Apart from Kerensky, the list contained several Jews, such as the boisterous Ilya Rubanovich, who had just arrived from Paris, the terrorist Abram Gots, and the little-known Gurevich…1744 (In the same article, there was a report on the arrest for desertion of warrant officer M. Golman, the head of the Mogilev Guberniya, a Peasant Soviet.1745) Of course, the actions of the executive committees could not be solely explained by their ethnic composition – not at all! (Many of those personalities irreversibly distanced themselves from their native communities and had even forgotten the way to their shtetls.) All of them sincerely believed that because of their talents and revolutionary spirit, they would have no problem arranging workers’, soldiers’ and peasants’ matters in the best way possible. They would manage it better simply because of being more educated and smarter than all this clumsy hoi polloi. Yet for many Russians, from commoner toa general, this sudden, eyestriking transformation in the appearance among the directors and orators at rallies and meetings, in command and in government, was overwhelming. V. Stankevich, the only officer-socialist in the Executive Committee, provided an example: “this fact [of the abundance of Jews in the Committee] alone had enormous influence on the public opinion and sympathies…. Noteworthy, when Kornilov met with the Committee for the first time, he had accidently sat in the midst of Jews; in front of him sat two insignificant and plain members of the Committee, whom I remember merely because of their grotesquely Jewish facial features. Who knows how that affected Kornilov’s attitudes toward Russian revolution?”1746 Yet the treatment of all things Russian by the new regime was very taletelling. Here is an example from the “days of Kornilov” in the end of August 1918.  Russia was visibly dying, losing the war, with its army corrupted and the
1743D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaya revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 153-154. 1744Rech, July 28, 1917, p. 3. 1745Ibid.; see also G. Lelevich. Oktyabr v stavke [The October in the general Headquarters]. Gomel, 1922, p. 13, 66-67. 1746V. B. Stankevich. Vospominaniya, 1914-1919 [Memoirs, 1914-1919]. Berlin, publishing house of I. P. Ladyzhnikov, 1920, p. 86-87.
rear in collapse. General Kornilov, cunningly deceived by Kerensky, artlessly appealed to the people, almost howling with pain: “Russian people! Our great Motherland is dying. The hour of her death is nigh…. All, whose bosoms harbor a beating Russian heart, go to the temples and pray to God to grant us the greatest miracle of salvation for our beloved country!”1747 In response to that the ideologist of the February Revolution and one of the leading members of the Executive Committee, Gimmer-Sukhanov, chuckled in amusement: “What an awkward, silly, clueless, politically illiterate call … what a lowbrow imitation of Suzdalshchina [‘Suzdalshchina’ refers to resistance in Suzdal to the Mongol invaders]!”1748 Yes, it sounded pompously and awkwardly, without a clear political position. Indeed, Kornilov was not a politician but his heart ached. And what about Sukhanov’s heart – did he feel any pain at all? He did not have any sense of the living land and culture, nor he had any urge to preserve them – he served to his ideology only, the International, seeing in Kornilov’s words a total lack of ideological content. Yes, his response was caustic. But note that he had not only labeled Kornilov’s appeal an ‘imitation’, he had also derogatorily referred to ‘Suzdalshchina,’ to Russian history, ancient art and sanctity. And with such disdain to the entire Russian historical heritage, all that internationalist ilk – Sukhanov and his henchmen from the malicious Executive Committee, steered the February Revolution. And it was not the ethnic origin of Sukhanov and the rest; it was their antinational, anti-Russian and anti-conservative attitudes. We have seen similar attitudes on the part of the Provisional Government too, with its task of governing the entire Russia and its quite Russian ethnic composition. Yet did it display a Russian worldview or represent Russian interests if only a little? Not at all! The Government’s most consistent and ‘patriotic’ activity was to guide the already unraveling country (the ‘Kronstadt Republic’ was not the only place which had “seceded from Russia” by that time) to the victory in war! To the victory at any cost! With loyalty to the allies! (Sure, the allies, their governments, public and financers, put pressure on Russia. For instance, in May, Russian newspapers cited The Morning Post from Washington: “America made it clear to the Russian government” that if [Russia] makes a separate peace [with Germany], the United States would “annul all financial agreements with Russia.”1749 Prince Lvov [Prince Georgi Lvov, led the Russian Provisional Government during the Russian revolution’s initial phase, from March 1917 until he relinquished control to Alexander Kerensky in July 1917] upheld the sentiment: “The country must determinately send its army to battle.”1750) They had no concern about consequences of the ongoing war for Russia. And this 1747A. I. Denikin. Ocherki russkoi smuty. V1: Krushenie vlasti I armii, fevral-sentyabr 1917 [Russian Turmoil. Memoirs. V1: Collapse of Authority and Army]. Paris, 1922, p. 216. 1748Nik Sukhanov. Zapiski o revolutsii [Memoirs of the Revolution]. Berlin, Publishing House of Z. I. Grzhebin, 1923, v.5, p. 287. 1749Russkaya Volya, May 7, 1917, p. 4. 1750Ibid., p. 6.
mismatch, this loss of sense of national self-preservation, could be observed almost at every meeting of the Provisional Government cabinet, almost in every discussion. There were simply ridiculous incidents. Throwing millions of rubles left and right and always keenly supporting “cultural needs of ethnic minorities,” the Provisional Government at its April 6 meeting had rejected the request of the long-established “Great Russian Orchestra of V. V. Andreev” to continue getting paid as before, “from the funds of the former His Majesty’s Personal Chancellery” (the funds were confiscated by the Provisional Government itself). The petition was turned down despite the fact that the requested sum, 30 thousand rubles per year, was equivalent to the annual pay of just three minister assistants. “Deny!” (Why not disband your so-called “Great Russian” orchestra? – What kind of name is that?) Taken aback and believing that it was just a misunderstanding, Andreev petitioned again. Yet with an unusual for this torpid government determination, he was refused a second time too, at the April 27 meeting.1751 Milyukov, a Russian historian and minister of the Provisional Government, did not utter a single specifically Russian sentiment during that year. Similarly, “the key figure of the revolution,” Alexander Kerensky, could not be at any stage accused of possessing an ethnic Russian consciousness. Yet at the same time the government demonstrated constant anxious bias against any conservative circles, and especially – against Russian conservatives. Even during his last speech in the Council of the Russian Republic (Pre-Parliament) on October 24, when Trotsky’s troops were already seizing Petrograd building after building, Kerensky emphatically argued that the Bolshevik newspaper Rabochy Put (Worker’s Way) and the right-wing Novaya Rus (New Russia)  – both of which Kerensky had just shut down – shared similar political views….
The “darned incognito” of the members of the Executive Committee was, of course, noticed by the public. Initially it was the educated society of Petrograd that was obsessed with this question, which several times surfaced in newspapers. For two months, the Committee tried to keep the secret, but by May they had no other choice but reveal themselves and had published the actual names of most of the pseudonym-holders (except for Steklov-Nakhamkis and Boris Osipovich Bogdanov, the energetic permanent chair of the council; they had managed to keep their identities secret for a while; the latter’s name confused the public by similarity with another personality, BogdanovMalinovsky). This odd secrecy irritated the public, and even ordinary citizens began asking questions. It was already typical in May that if, during a plenary
1751Zhurnaly zasedanii Vremennogo Pravitelstva [Minutes of the meetings of the Provisional Government]. Petrograd, 1917. V1: March-May; April 6 meeting (book 44, p. 5) and April 27 meeting (book 64, p. 4).
meeting of the Soviet, someone proposed Zinoviev or Kamenev for something, the public shouted from the auditorium demanding their true names. Concealing true names was incomprehensible to the ordinary man of that time: only thieves hide and change their names. Why is Boris Katz ashamed of his name, and instead calling himself “Kamkov”? Why does Lurie hide under the alias of “Larin”? Why does Mandelshtam use the pseudonym “Lyadov”? Many of these had aliases that originated  out of necessity in their past underground life , but what had compelled the likes of Shotman, the Socialist Revolutionary from Tomsk, (and not him alone) to become “Danilov” in 1917? Certainly, the goal of a revolutionary, hiding behind a pseudonym, is to outsmart someone, and that may include not only the police and government. In this way, ordinary people as well are unable to figure out who their new leaders are. Intoxicated by the freedom of the first months of the February Revolution, many Jewish activists and orators failed to notice that their constant fussing around presidiums and rallies produced certain bewilderment and wry glances. By the time of the February Revolution there was no “popular anti-Semitism” in the internal regions of Russia, it was confined exclusively to the areas of the Pale of Settlement. (For instance, Abraham Cogan had even stated in 1917: “We loved Russia despite all the oppression from the previous regime because we knew that it was not the Russian people” behind it but Tsarism.1752) But after just a few months following the February Revolution, resentment against Jews had suddenly flared up among the masses of people and spread over Russia, growing stronger with each passing month. And even the official newspapers reported, for instance, on the exasperation in the waiting lines in the cities. “Everything has been changed in that twinkle of the eye that created a chasm between the old and the new Russia. But it is queues that have changed the most. Strangely, while everything has moved to the left, the food lines have moved to the right. If you … would like to hear Black Hundred propaganda  … then go and spend some time in a waiting line.” Among other things you will find out that “there are virtually no Jews in the lines, they don’t need it as they have enough bread hoarded.” The same “gossip about Jews who tuck away bread” rolls from another end of the line as well; “the waiting lines is the most dangerous source of counterrevolution.”1753 The author Ivan Nazhivin noted that in the autumn in Moscow anti-Semitic propaganda fell on ready ears in the hungry revolutionary queues: “What rascals! …  They wormed themselves onto the very top! … See, how proudly they ride in their cars…. Sure, not a single Yid can be found in the lines here…. Just you wait!”1754 Any revolution releases a flood of obscenity, envy, and anger from the people. The same happened among the Russian people, with their weakened Christian spirituality. And so the Jews – many of whom had ascended to the top,
1752Rech, June 28, 1917, p. 2. 1753Rech, May 3, 1917, p. 6. 1754Ivan Nazhivin. Zapiski o revolutsii [Notes about Revolution]. Vienna, 1921, p. 28.
to visibility, and, what is more, who had not concealed their revolutionary jubilation, nor waited in the miserable lines – increasingly became a target of popular resentment. Many instances of such resentment were documented in 1917 newspapers. Below are several examples. When, at the Apraksin market on Sennaya Square, a hoard of goods was discovered in possession of Jewish merchants, “people began shout … ‘plunder Jewish shops!’, because ‘Yids are responsible for all the troubles’ … and this word ‘Yid’ is on everyone’s lips.”1755 A stockpile of flour and bacon was found in the store of a merchant (likely a Jew) in Poltava. The crowd started plundering his shop and then began calling for a Jewish pogrom. Later, several members of the Soviet of Workers’ Deputies, including Drobnis, arrived and attempted to appease the crowd; as a result, Drobnis was beaten.1756 In October in Ekaterinoslav soldiers trashed small shops, shouting “Smash the bourgeois! Smash the Yids!” In Kiev at the Vladimirsky market a boy had hit a woman, who tried to buy flour out her turn on the head Instantly, the crowd  started yelling “the Yids are beating the Russians!” and a brawl ensued. (Note that it had happened in the same Kiev where one could already see the streamers “Long live free Ukraine without Yids and Poles!”) By that time “Smash the Yids!” could be heard in almost every street brawl, even in Petrograd, and often completely without foundation. For instance, in a Petrograd streetcar two women “called for disbanding of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies, filled, according to them, exclusively by ‘Germans and Yids’. Both were arrested and called to account.”1757 Newspaper Russkaya Volya (Russian Freedom) reported: “Right in front of our eyes, anti-Semitism, in its most primitive form … re-arises and spreads…. It is enough to hear to conversations in streetcars [in Petrograd] or in waiting lines to various shops, or in the countless fleeting rallies at every corner and crossroad … they accuse Jews of political stranglehold, of seizing parties and soviets, and even of ruining the army … of looting and hoarding goods.”1758 Many Jewish socialists, agitators in the front units, enjoyed unlimited success during the spring months when calls for a “democratic peace” were tolerated and fighting was not required. Then nobody blamed them for being Jewish. But in June when the policy of the Executive Committee had changed toward support and even propaganda for the offensive, calls of “smash the Yids!” began appearing and those Jewish persuaders suffered battering by unruly soldiers time and time again. Rumors were spreading that the Executive Committee in Petrograd was “seized by Yids.” By June this belief had taken root in the Petrograd garrison and factories; this is exactly what soldiers shouted to the member of the
1755Rech, June 17, 1917, evening issue, p. 4. 1756Rech, September 9, 1917, p. 3. 1757Rech, August 8, 1917, p. 5. 1758Russkaya Volya, June 17, 1917, evening issue, p. 4.
Committee Voitinsky who had visited an infantry regiment to dissuade the troops from the looming demonstration conceived by Bolsheviks on June 10. V. D. Nabokov, hardly known for anti-Semitism, joked that the meeting of the foremen of the Pre-Parliament in October 1917 “could be safely called a Sanhedrin”: its majority was Jewish; of Russians, there were only Avksentiev, me, Peshekhonov, and Chaikovsky….” His attention was drawn to that fact by Mark Vishnyak who was present there also.1759 By autumn, the activity of Jews in power had created such an effect that even Iskry (Sparks), the illustrated supplement to the surpassingly gentle Russkoe Slovo (Russian Word) that would until then never dare defying public opinion in such a way, had published an abrasive anti-Jewish caricature in the October 29 issue, that is, already during fights of the October coup in Moscow. The Executive Committee of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies actively fought against anti-Semitism. (I cannot rule out that the harsh refusal to accept the well-deserved Plekhanov into the CEC in April 1917 was a kind of revenge for his anti-Bund referral to the “tribe of Gad,” which was mentioned in Lenin’s publications.1760 Indeed, I cannot provide any other explanation.) On July 21 the 1st All-Russian Congress of Soviets had issued a proclamation about a struggle against anti-Semitism (“about the only resolution approved by the Congress unanimously, without any objections or arguments”1761). When in the end of June (28th and 29th) the re-elected Bureau of the CEC had assembled, they had heard a report on “the rise of anti-Semitic agitation … mainly in the northwestern and southwestern” guberniyas; a decision was made immediately to send a delegation of 15 members of the CEC with special powers there1762, subordinating them to the direction of the “Department on the Struggle against Counter-Revolution.” On the other hand, Bolsheviks, who advanced their agenda under the slogan “Down with the ministers-capitalists!” not only did nothing to alleviate this problem, they even fanned its flames (along with the anarchists, despite the fact that the latter were headed by one Bleikhman). They claimed that the Executive Committee was so exceptionally lenient toward the government only because capitalists and Jews control everything (isn’t that reminiscent of Narodnaya Volya [the People’s Will terrorist organization] of 1881?). And when the Bolshevik uprising of July 3-4 broke out (it was in fact targeted not against the already impotent Provisional Government but against the Bolshevik’s true competitor – Executive Committee), the Bolsheviks slyly exploited the anger of soldiers toward Jews by pointing them to that very body – see, there they are!
1759V. Nabokov. Vremennoye pravitelstvo [The Provisional Government] // Archive of Russian Revolution, published by Gessen. Berlin: Slovo, 1922, v. 1, p. 80. 1760V. I. Lenin. Sochineniya [Works]. In 45 volumes, 4th Edition (henceforth — Lenin, 4th edition). Moscow, Gospolitizdat, 1941-1967, v. 4, p. 311. 1761Izvestiya, June 28, 1917, p. 5. 1762Izvestiya, June 30, 1917, p. 10.
But when the Bolsheviks had lost their uprising, the CEC had conducted an official investigation and many members of the commission of inquiry were Jews from the presidium of the CEC. And because of their “socialist conscience” they dared not call the Bolshevik uprising a crime and deal with it accordingly. So the commission had yielded no result and was soon liquidated. During the garrison meeting, arranged by the CEC on October 19, just before the decisive Bolshevik uprising, “one of representatives of 176th Infantry Regiment, a Jew,” warned that “those people down on the streets scream that Jews are responsible for all the wrongs.”1763 At the CEC meeting during the night of October 25, Gendelman reported that when he was giving a speech in the Peter and Paul Fortress earlier that afternoon he was taunted: “You are Gendelman! That is you are a Yid and a Rightist!”1764 When on October 27 Gotz and his delegation to Kerensky tried to depart to Gatchina from the Baltiysky Rail Terminal, he was nearly killed by sailors who screamed that “the soviets are controlled by Yids.”1765 And during the ‘wine pogroms’ on the eve of the ‘glorious Bolshevik victory,’ the calls “Slaughter Yids!” were heard also. And yet there was not a single Jewish pogrom over the whole year of 1917. The infamous outrageous pogroms in Kalusha and Ternopol were in fact the work of frenzied drunken revolutionary soldiers, retreating in disorder. They smashed everything on their way, all shops and stores; and because most of those were Jewish-owned, the word spread about ‘Jewish pogroms’. A similar pogrom took place in Stanislavov, with its much smaller Jewish population, and quite reasonably it was not labeled a ‘Jewish’ pogrom. Already by the mid-summer of 1917 the Jews felt threatened by the embittered population (or drunken soldiers), but the ongoing collapse of the state was fraught with incomparably greater dangers. Amazingly, it seems that both the Jewish community and the press, the latter to a large extent identified with the former, learned nothing from the formidable experiences of 1917 in general, but narrowly looked at the “isolated manifestations of pogroms.” And so time after time they missed the real danger. The executive power behaved similarly. When the Germans breached the front at Ternopol in the night of July 10, the desperate joint meeting of the CEC of the Soviet of Workers’ and Soldiers’ Deputies and the Executive Committee of the Soviet of Peasants’ Deputies had taken place. They had acknowledged that should the revolution perish, the country crumbles down (in that exact order), and then named Provisional Government a “Government for Salvation of the Revolution,” and noted in their appeal to the people that “dark forces are again prepared to torment our longsuffering Motherland. They are setting backward masses upon the Jews.”1766
1763Rech, October 20, 1917, p. 3. 1764Izvestiya, October 26, 1917, p. 2. 1765Delo Naroda, October 29, 1917, p. 1. 1766Rech, July 11, 1917, p. 3.
On July 18 at a panel session of the State Duma, in an extremely small circle, Rep. Maslennikov spoke against the Executive Committee and among other things spelled out the real names of its members. On the very same evening at the factional meeting of the CEC they beat an alarm: “This is a case of counterrevolution, it must be dealt with according to the recently issued decree of the Minister of Internal Affairs Tsereteli on suppression of counterrevolution! (The decree was issued in response to the Bolshevik uprising, though it was never used against Bolsheviks.) In two days Maslennikov made excuses in an article in the newspaper Rech [Speech]: indeed, he named Steklov, Kamenev, and Trotsky but never intended to incite anger against the entire Jewish people, and “anyway, attacking them, I had absolutely no wish to make Jewish people responsible for the actions of these individuals.”1767 Then, in mid-September, when the all gains of the February Revolution were already irreversibly ruined, on the eve of the by now imminent Bolshevik coup, Ya. Kantorovich warned in Rech about the danger that: “The dark forces and evil geniuses of Russia will soon emerge from their dens to jubilantly perform Black Masses….” Indeed, it will happen soon. Yet what kind of Black masses? – “…Of bestial patriotism and pogrom-loving ‘truly-Russian’ national identity.”1768 In October in Petrograd I. Trumpeldor had organized Jewish selfdefense forces for protection against pogroms, but they were never needed. Indeed, Russian minds were confused, and so were Jewish ones. Several years after the revolution, G. Landau, looking back with sadness, wrote: “Jewish participation in the Russian turmoil had astonishingly suicidal overtones in it; I am referring not only to their role in Bolshevism, but to their involvement in the whole thing. And it is not just about the huge number of politically active people, socialists and revolutionaries, who have joined the revolution; I am talking mainly about the broad sympathy of the masses it was met with…. Although many harbored pessimistic expectations, in particular, an anticipation of pogroms, they were still able to reconcile such a foreboding with an acceptance of turmoil which unleashed countless miseries and pogroms. It resembled the fatal attraction of butterflies to fire, to the annihilating fire…. It is certain there were some strong motives pushing the Jews into that direction, and yet those were clearly suicidal…. Granted, Jews were not different in that from the rest of Russian intelligentsia and from the Russian society…. Yet we had to be different … we, the ancient people of city-dwellers, merchants, artisans, intellectuals … we had to be different from the people of land and power, from peasants, landowners, officials.”1769 And let’s not forget those who were different. We must always remember that Jewry was and is very heterogeneous, that attitudes and actions vary greatly
1767Rech, July 21, 1917, p. 4. 1768Rech, September 16, 1917, p. 3. 1769G. A. Landau. Revolutsionnye idei v evreiskoi obchshestvennosti [Revolutionary ideas in Jewish society] // RJ, p. 105, 106.
among the Jews. So it was with the Russian Jewry in 1917: in provinces and even in the capital there were circles with reasonable views and they were growing as October was getting closer. The Jewish stance toward Russian unity during the months when Russia was pulled apart not only by other nations, but even by Siberians, was remarkable. “All over the course of revolution Jews, together with Great Russians, were among the most ardent champions of the idea of Great Russia.”1770 Now, when Jews had gotten their equal rights, what could they have in common with different peoples on the periphery of the former empire? And yet the disintegration of a united country would fracture Jewry. In July at the 9th Congress of Constitutional Democrats, Vinaver and Nolde openly argued against territorial partition of peoples and in favor of Russian unity.1771 Also in September, in the national section of the Democratic Conference, the Jewish socialists spoke against any federalization of Russia (in that they had joined the Centralists). Today they write in an Israeli magazine that Trumpeldor’s Jewish detachments “backed the Provisional Government and had even foiled the Kornilov’s mutiny.”1772 Perhaps. However, in rigorously studying events of 1917, I did not encounter any such information. But I am aware of opposite instances: in early May 1917 in the thundering patriotic and essentially counterrevolutionary “Black Sea Delegation,” the most successful orator calling for the defense of Russia was Jewish sailor Batkin. D. Pasmanik had published the letters of millionaire steamship owner Shulim Bespalov to the Minister of Trade and Industry Shakhovsky dated as early as September 1915: “Excessive profits made by all industrialists and traders lead our Motherland to the imminent wreck.” He had donated half a million rubles to the state and proposed to establish a law limiting all profits by 15%. Unfortunately, these self-restricting measures were not introduced as ‘rush to freedom’ progressives, such as Konovalov and Ryabushinsky, did not mind making 100% war profits. When Konovalov himself became the Minister of Trade and Industry, Shulim Bespalov wrote to him on July 5, 1917: “Excessive profits of industrialists are ruining our country, now we must take 50% of the value of their capitals and property,” and added that he is ready to part with 50% of his own assets. Konovalov paid no heed.1773 In August, at the Moscow All-Russian State Conference, O. O. Gruzenberg (a future member of the Constituent Assembly) stated: “These days the Jewish people … are united in their allegiance to our Motherland, in unanimous
1770D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaya revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 245. 1771Rech, July 26, 1917, p. 3. 1772I. Eldad. Tak kto zhe nasledniki Zhabotinskogo? [So Who Are the Heirs of Jabotinsky?] // “22”: Obshchestvenno-politicheskiy i literaturniy zhurnal evreyskoy intelligentsii iz SSSR v Izraile [Social, Political and Literary Journal of the Jewish Intelligentsia from the USSR in Israel (henceforth – “22”)]. Tel-Aviv, 1980, (16), p. 120. 1773D. S. Pasmanik. Russkaya revolutsia i evreistvo: (Bolshevism i iudaizm) [Russian Revolution and Jewry: Bolshevism and Judaism]. Paris, 1923, p. 179-181.
aspiration to defend her integrity and achievements of democracy” and were prepared to give for her defense “all their material and intellectual assets, to part with everything precious, with the flower of their people, all their young.”1774 These words reflected the realization that the February regime was the best for the Russian Jewry, promising economic progress as well as political and cultural prosperity. And that realization was adequate. The closer it got to to October coup and the more apparent the Bolshevik threat, the wider this realization spread among Jews, leading them to oppose Bolshevism. It was taking root even among socialist parties and during the October coup many Jewish socialists were actively against it. Yet they were debilitated by their socialist views and their opposition was limited by negotiations and newspaper articles – until the Bolsheviks shut down those newspapers. It is necessary to state explicitly that the October coup was not carried by Jews (though it was under the general command of Trotsky and with energetic actions of young Grigory Chudnovsky during the arrest of Provisional Government and the massacre of the defenders of the Winter Palace). Broadly speaking, the common rebuke, that the 170-million-people could not be pushed into Bolshevism by a small Jewish minority, is justified. Indeed, we had ourselves sealed our fate in 1917, through our foolishness from February to October-December. The October coup proved a devastating lot for Russia. Yet the state of affairs even before it promised little good to the people. We had already lost responsible statesmanship and the events of 1917 had proved it in excess. The best Russia could expect was an  inept, feeble, and disorderly pseudodemocracy, unable to rely on enough citizens with developed legal consciousness and economic independence. After October fights in Moscow, representatives of the Bund and PoaleZion had taken part in the peace negotiations – not in alliance with the Junkers or the Bolsheviks — but as a third independent party. There were many Jews among Junkers of the Engineers School who defended the Winter Palace on October 25: in the memoirs of Sinegub, a palace defender, Jewish names appear regularly; I personally knew one such engineer from my prison experience. And during the Odessa City Duma elections the Jewish block had opposed the Bolsheviks and won, though only marginally. During the Constituent Assembly elections “more than 80% of Jewish population in Russia had voted” for Zionist parties.1775 Lenin wrote that 550 thousands voted for Jewish nationalists.1776 “Most Jewish parties have formed a united national list of candidates; seven deputies were elected from that list – six Zionists” and Gruzenberg. The success of Zionists was facilitated by the
1774Rech, August 16, 1917, p. 3. 1775V. Boguslavsky. V sachshitu Kunyaeva [In Defense of Kunyaev] // “22”, 1980, (16), p. 169. 1776Lenin, 4th edition, v. 30, p. 231.
recently published declaration of British Minister of Foreign Affairs Balfour on the establishment of ‘Jewish national home’ in Palestine, which was “met with enthusiasm by the majority of Russian Jewry (celebratory demonstrations, rallies and worship services took place in Moscow, Petrograd, Odessa, Kiev and many other cities).”1777 Prior to the October coup, Bolshevism was not very influential among Jews. But just before the uprising, Natanson, Kamkov, and Shteinberg on behalf of the left Socialist Revolutionaries had signed a combat pact with Bolsheviks Trotsky and Kamenev.1778 And some Jews distinguished themselves among the Bolsheviks in their very first victories and some even became famous. The commissar of the famed Latvian regiments of the 12th Army, which did so much for the success of Bolshevik coup, was Semyon Nakhimson. “Jewish soldiers played a notable role during preparation and execution of the armed uprising of October 1917 in Petrograd and other cities, and also during suppression of mutinies and armed resurrections against the new Soviet regime.”1779 It is widely known that during the ‘historical’ session of the Congress of Soviets on October 27 two acts, the ‘Decree on Land’ and the ‘Decree on Peace’, were passed. But it didn’t leave a mark in history that after the ‘Decree on Peace’ but before the ‘Decree on Land’ another resolution was passed. It declared it “a matter of honor for local soviets to prevent Jewish and any other pogroms by dark forces.”1780(Pogroms by ‘Red forces of light’ were not anticipated.) So even here, at the Congress of Workers’ and Peasants’ Deputies, the Jewish question was put ahead of the peasant one.
1777SJE, v.7, p. 381. 1778Kh. M. Astrakhan. Bolsheviki i ikh politicheskie protivniki v 1917 godu [The Bolsheviks and Their Political Adversaries in 1917]. Leningrad, 1973, p. 407. 1779Aron Abramovich. V reshayuchshey voine: Uchastie i rol evreev SSSR v voine protiv natsisma [In the Deciding War: Participation and Role of Jews in the USSR in the War Against Nazism] 2nd Edition, Tel Aviv, 1982, v. 1, p. 45, 46. 1780L. Trotsky. Istoriya russkoi revolutsii. T. 2: Oktyabrskaya revolutsia [The History of Russian Revolution]. Berlin, Granit, 1933, v. 2: October Revolution, Part 2, p. 361.
Chapter 15. Alongside the Bolsheviks
This theme—the Jews alongside the Bolsheviks—is not new, far from it. How many pages already written on the subject! The one who wants to demonstrate that the revolution was “anything but Russian”, “foreign by nature”, invokes Jewish surnames and pseudonyms, thus claiming to exonerate the Russians from all responsibility in the revolution of seventeen. As for the Jewish authors, those who denied the Jews’ share in the revolution as well as those who have always recognised it, all agree that these Jews were not Jews by spirit, they were renegades. We also agree on that. We must judge people for their spirit. Yes, they were renegades. But the Russian leaders of the Bolshevik Party were also not Russians by the spirit; they were very anti‐Russian, and certainly anti‐Orthodox. With them, the great Russian culture, reduced to a doctrine and to political calculations, was distorted. The question should be asked in another way, namely: how many scattered renegades should be brought together to form a homogeneous political current? What proportion of nationals? As far as the Russian renegades are concerned, the answer is known: alongside the Bolsheviks there were enormous numbers, an unforgivable number. But for the Jewish renegades, what was, by the enrolment and by the energy deployed, their share in the establishment of Bolshevik power? Another question concerns the attitude of the nation towards its own renegades. However, the latter was contrasted, ranging from abomination to admiration, from mistrust to adherence. It has manifested itself in the very reactions of the popular masses, whether Russian, Jewish, or Lithuanian, in life itself much more than in the briefings of historians. And finally: can nations deny their renegades? Is there any sense in this denial? Should a nation remember or not remember them? Can it forget the monster they have begotten? To this question the answer is no doubt: it is necessary to remember. Every people must remember its own renegades, remember them as their own—to that, there is no escape. And then, deep down, is there an example of renegade more striking than Lenin himself? However, Lenin was Russian, there is no point in denying it. Yes, he loathed, he detested everything that had to do with ancient Russia, all Russian history and a fortiori Orthodoxy. From Russian literature he had
retained only Chernyshevsky and Saltykov‐Shchedrin; Turgenev, with his liberal spirit, amused him, and Tolstoy the accuser, too. He never showed the least feeling of affection for anything, not even for the river, the Volga, on whose banks his childhood took place (and did he not instigate a lawsuit against his peasants for damage to his lands?). Moreover: it was he who pitilessly delivered the whole region to the appalling famine of 1921. Yes, all this is true. But it was we, the Russians, who created the climate in which Lenin grew up and filled him with hatred. It is in us that the Orthodox faith has lost its vigour, this faith in which he could have grown instead of declaring it a merciless war. How can one not see in him a renegade? And yet, he is Russian, and we Russians, we answer for him. His ethnic origins are sometimes invoked. Lenin was a mestizo issued from different races: his paternal grandfather, Nikolai Vasilyevich, was of Kalmyk and Chuvash blood, his grandmother, Anna Aleksievna Smirnova, was a Kalmyk, his other grandfather, Israel (Alexander of his name of baptism) Davidovitch Blank, was a Jew, his other grandmother, Anna Iohannovna (Ivanovna) Groschopf, was the daughter of a German and a Swede, Anna Beata Estedt. But that does not change the case. For nothing of this makes it possible to exclude him from the Russian people: we must recognise in him a Russian phenomenon on the one hand, for all the ethnic groups which gave him birth have been implicated in the history of the Russian Empire, and, on the other hand, a Russian phenomenon, the fruit of the country we have built, we Russians, and its social climate—even if he appears to us, because of his spirit always indifferent to Russia, or even completely anti‐Russian, as a phenomenon completely foreign to us. We cannot, in spite of everything, disown him. What about the Jewish renegades? As we have seen, during the year 1917, there was no particular attraction for the Bolsheviks that manifested among the Jews. But their activism has played its part in the revolutionary upheavals. At the last Congress of the Russian Social‐Democratic Labour Party (RSDLP) (London, 1907), which was, it is true, common with the Mensheviks, of 302‒ 305 delegates, 160 were Jews, more than half—it was promising. Then, after the April 1917 Conference, just after the announcement of the explosive April Theses of Lenin, among the nine members of the new Central Committee were G. Zinoviev, L. Kamenev, Ia. Sverdlov. At the VIth summer Congress of the RKP (b) (the Russian Communist Party of the Bolsheviks, the new name of the RSDLP), eleven members were elected to the Central Committee, including Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Trotsky, Uritsky.1781 Then, at the “historic meeting” in Karpovka Street, in the apartment of Himmer and Flaksermann, on 10 October 1917, when the decision to launch the Bolshevik coup was taken, among the twelve participants were Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov, Uritsky, Sokolnikov. It was there that was elected the first “Politburo” which was to have such a brilliant future, and among its seven members, always the same: Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sokolnikov. Which is already a lot. D. S. Pasmanik clearly states: “There is no doubt that the Jewish renegades
1781SJE, t. 7, p. 399.
outnumbered the normal percentage…; they occupied too great a place among the Bolshevik commissioners.”1782 Of course, all this was happening in the governing spheres of Bolshevism and in no way foreshadowed a mass movement of Jews. Moreover, the Jewish members of the Politburo did not act as a constituted group. Thus Kamenev and Zinoviev were against a hasty coup. The only master of the work, the genius of October’s coup de force, was in fact Trotsky: he did not exaggerate his role in his Lessons of October. This cowardly Lenin, who, he, had been hiding out, made no substantial contribution to the putsch. Basically, because of his internationalism and following his dispute with the Bund in 1903, Lenin adhered to the opinion that there was not and never would be such a thing as a “Jewish nationality”; that this was a reactionary action which disunited the revolutionary forces. (In agreement with him, Stalin held the Jews for a “paper nation”, and considered their assimilation inevitable.) Lenin therefore saw anti‐Semitism as a manœuvre of capitalism, an easy weapon in the hands of counter‐revolution, something that was not natural. He understood very well, however, what mobilising force the Jewish question represented in the ideological struggle in general. And to exploit, for the good of the revolution, the feeling of bitterness particularly prevalent among the Jews, Lenin was always ready to do so. From the first days of the revolution, however, this appeal proved to be oh so necessary! Lenin clung to it. He, who had not foreseen everything on the plane of the state, had not yet perceived how much the cultivated layer of the Jewish nation, and even more so its semi‐cultivated layer, which, as a result of the war, was found scattered throughout the whole of Russia, was going to save the day throughout decisive months and years. To begin with, it was going to take the place of the Russian officials massively determined to boycott the Bolshevik power. This population was composed of border residents who had been driven out of their villages and who had not returned there after the end of the war. (For example, Jews expelled from Lithuania during the war had not all returned after the revolution: only the small rural people had returned, while the “urban contingent” of the Jews of Lithuania and “the young had stayed to live in the big cities of Russia.”1783) And it was precisely “after the abolition of the Pale of Settlement in 1917 that the great exodus of Jews from its boundaries into the interior of the country ensued.”1784 This exodus is no longer that of refugees or expellees, but indeed of new settlers. Information from a Soviet source for the year 1920 testifies: “In the city of Samara, in recent years, tens of thousands of Jewish refugees and expellees have established themselves”; in Irkutsk, “the Jewish population has 1782D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsiia i evreistvo (Bolchevism i ioudaism) [The Russian Revolution and the Jews {Bolshevism and Judaism}], Paris, 1923, p. 155. 1783S. Gringaouz, Evreiskaya natsionalnaia avtonomiia v Litve i drougikh stranakh Pribaltiki [Jewish national self‐government in Lithuania and the other Baltic countries]—BJWR-2, p. 46. 1784SJE, t. 2, p. 312.
increased, reaching fifteen thousand people; important Jewish settlements were formed in Central Russia as well as on the banks of the Volga and the Urals.” However, “the majority continue to live on subsidies from social welfare and other philanthropic organisations.” And here are the Izvestia calling for “the Party organisations, the Jewish sections and the departments of the National Commissariat to organise a vast campaign for the non‐return to the ‘tombs of the ancestors’ and for the participation in the work of production in Soviet Russia.”1785 But put yourself in the place of the Bolsheviks: they were only a small handful that had seized power, a power that was so fragile: in whom, great gods, could one have confidence? Who could be called to the rescue? Simon (Shimon) Dimantstein, a Bolshevik from the very beginning and who, since January 1918, was at the head of a European Committee specially created within the Commissariat of Nationalities, gives us the thought of Lenin on this subject: “the fact that a large part of the middle Jewish intelligentsia settled in Russian cities has rendered a proud service to the revolution. They defeated the vast sabotage enterprise we faced after the October Revolution, which was a great danger to us. They were numerous—not all, of course, far from it—to sabotage this sabotage, and it was they who, at that fateful hour, saved the revolution.” Lenin considered it “inappropriate to emphasise this episode in the press…”, but he remarked that “if we succeeded in seizing and restructuring the State apparatus, it was exclusively thanks to this pool of new civil servants— lucid, educated, and reasonably competent.”1786 The Bolsheviks thus appealed to the Jews from the very first hours of their takeover, offering to some executive positions, to others tasks of execution within the Soviet State apparatus. And many, many, answered the call, and immediately entered. The new power was in desperate need of executors who were faithful in every way—and there were many of them among the young secularised Jews, who thus mingled with their colleagues, Slavs and others. These were not necessarily “renegades”: there were among them some without political party affiliations, persons outside the revolution, who had hitherto remained indifferent to politics. For some, this approach was not ideological; it could be dictated only by personal interest. It was a mass phenomenon. And from that time the Jews no longer sought to settle in the forbidden countryside, they endeavoured to reach the capitals: “Thousands of Jews joined the Bolsheviks in crowds, seeing them as the most fierce defenders of the revolution and the most reliable internationalists… The Jews abounded in the lower levels of the Party apparatus.”1787 “The Jew, who obviously could not have come from the nobility, the clergy, or the civil service, found himself among the ranks of the personalities of the 1785Izvestia, 12 Oct. 1920, p. 1. 1786V. Lenin, O evreiskom voprosis v Rossii [On the Jewish Question in Russia]. Preface by S. Dimanstein, M., Proletarii, 1924, pp. 17 18. ‒ 1787Leonard Schapiro, The Role of the Jews in the Russian Revolutionary Movement, in The Slavonic and East European Review, vol. 40, London, Athlone Press, 1961 62, p. 164. ‒
future of the new clan.”1788 In order to promote the Jews’ commitment to Bolshevism, “at the end of 1917, while the Bolsheviks were still sketching out their institutions, a Jewish department within the Commissariat of Nationalities began to function.”1789 This department was, since 1918, transformed into a separate European Commissariat. And in March 1919, at the VIIIth Congress of the RKP (b), the Communist European Union of Soviet Russia was to be proclaimed as an integral but autonomous part of the RKP (b). (The intention was to integrate this Union into the Comintern and thereby permanently undermine the Bund). A special European section within the Russian Telegraph Agency was also created (ROSTA). D. Schub justifies these initiatives by saying that “large contingents of the Jewish youth joined the Communist Party” following the pogroms in the territories occupied by the Whites1790 (i.e. from 1919 onwards). But this explanation does not hold the road. For the massive entry of the Jews into the Soviet apparatus occurred towards the end of the year 1917 and during 1918. There is no doubt that the events of 1919 (see infra, chapter 16) strengthened the link between the Jewish elites and the Bolsheviks, but they in no way provoked it. Another author, a communist, explains “the particularly important role of the Jewish revolutionary in our labour movement” by the fact that we can observe with the Jewish workers, “highly developed, the traits of character required of any leading role,” traits which are still in draft form among the Russian workers: an exceptional energy, a sense of solidarity, a systematic mind.1791 Few authors deny the role of organisers that was that of the Jews in Bolshevism. D. S. Pasmanik points out: “The appearance of Bolshevism is linked to the peculiarities of Russian history… But its excellent organisation, Bolshevism, is due in part to the action of the Jewish commissioners.”1792 The active role of the Jews in Bolshevism did not escape the notice of observers, notably in America: “The Russian revolution rapidly moved from the destructive phase to the constructive phase, and this is clearly attributable to the edifying genius inherent to Jewish dissatisfaction.”1793 In the midst of the euphoria of October, how many were not, the Jews themselves admit it, with their heads held high, their action within Bolshevism! Let us remember: just as, before the revolution, the revolutionaries and liberal radicals had been quick to exploit for political purposes—and not for charity—the restrictions imposed on Jews, likewise, in the months and years
1788M. Kheifets, Nashi obschiie ouroki [Our lessons]—“22”, no. 14, p. 62. 1789Jewish Tribune, Weekly, Number dedicated to the interests of Russian Jews, Paris, 1923, September 7, p. 1. 1790D. Schub, Evrei vrusskoï revolioutsii [The Jews in the Russian Revolution]—BJWR-2, p. 142. 1791Iou. Larine, Evrei i antisemitizn v SSSR [The Jews and anti‐Semitism in the USSR], M., L., Giz, 1929, pp. 260 262. ‒ 1792D. S. Pasmanik, Tchevo my dobyvaemsia? [What are we looking for?]—RaJ, p. 212. 1793American Hebrew, Sept. 10, 1920, p. 507.
that followed October, the Bolsheviks, with the utmost complaisance, used the Jews within the State apparatus and the Party, too, not because of sympathy, but because they found their interest in the competence, intelligence and the particularism of the Jews towards the Russian population. On the spot they used Latvians, Hungarians, Chinese: these were not going to be sentimental… The Jewish population in its mass showed a suspicious, even hostile attitude towards the Bolsheviks. But when, as a result of the revolution, it had acquired complete freedom which fostered a real expansion of Jewish activity in the political, social and cultural spheres—a well‐organised activity to boot—it did nothing to prevent the Bolshevik Jews from occupying the key positions, and these made an exceedingly cruel use of this new power fallen into their hands. From the 40s of the twentieth century onwards, after Communist rule broke with international Judaism, Jews and communists became embarrassed and afraid, and they preferred to stay quiet and conceal the strong participation of Jews in the communist revolution, however the inclinations to remember and name the phenomenon were described by the Jews themselves as purely antiSemitic intentions. In the 1970s and 1980s, under the pressure of new revelations, the vision of the revolutionary years was adjusted. A considerable number of voices were heard publicly. Thus the poet Nahum Korzhavin wrote: “If we make the participation of the Jews in the revolution a taboo subject, we can no longer talk about the revolution at all. There was a time when the pride of this participation was even prized… The Jews took part in the revolution, and in abnormally high proportions.”1794 M. Agursky wrote on his part: “The participation of the Jews in the revolution and the civil war has not been limited to a very active engagement in the State apparatus; it has been infinitely wider.”1795 Similarly, the Israeli Socialist S. Tsyroulnikov asserts: “At the beginning of the revolution, the Jews… served as the foundation of the new regime.”1796 But there are also many Jewish writers who, up to this day, either deny the Jews’ contribution to Bolshevism, or even reject the idea rashly, or—this is the most frequent—consider it only reluctantly. However the fact is proven: Jewish renegades have long been leaders in the Bolshevik Party, heading the Red Army (Trotsky), the VTsIK (Sverdlov), the two capitals (Zinoviev and Kamenev), the Comintern (Zinoviev), the Profintern (Dridzo‐Lozovski) and the Komsomol (Oscar Ryvkin, and later Lazar Shatskin, who also headed the International Communist Youth). “It is true that in the first Sovnarkom there was only one Jew, but that one was Trotsky, the number two, behind Lenin, whose authority surpassed that of all the others.”1797 And from November 1917 to the summer of 1918, the real 1794Literatournyi kourier [The Literary Courier], quarterly, USA, 1985, no. 11, p. 67. 1795M. Agursky, Ideologuia natsional‐bolchevisma [The ideology of National‐Bolshevism], Paris, YMCA Press, 1980, p. 264. 1796S. Tsyroulnikov, SSSR, evrei i Israil [The USSR, the Jews, and Israel]—TN, no. 96, p. 155. 1797L. Schapiro, op. cit., pp. 164 165. ‒
organ of government was not the Sovnarkom, but what was called the “Little Sovnarkom”: Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin, Kareline, Prochian. After October, the VTsIK Presidium was of equal importance to that of the Sovnarkom, and among its six members were Sverdlov, Kamenev, Volodarski, Svetlov‐Nakhamkis. M. Agursky rightly points out: for a country where it was not customary to see Jews in power, what a contrast! “A Jew in the presidency of the country… a Jew in the Ministry of War… There was there something to which the ethnic population of Russia could hardly accustom itself to.”1798 Yes, what a contrast! Especially when one knows of what president, of what minister it was!
The first major action of the Bolsheviks was, by signing the peace separated from Brest‐Litovsk, to cede to Germany an enormous portion of the Russian territory, in order to assert their power over the remaining part. The head of the signatory delegation was Ioffe; the head of foreign policy, Trotsky. His secretary and attorney, I. Zalkin, had occupied the cabinet of comrade Neratov at the ministry and purged the old apparatus to create a new organisation, the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. During the auditions held in 1919 in the American Senate and quoted above, the doctor A. Simons, who from 1907 to 1918 had been the dean of the Methodist Episcopal Church of Petrograd, made an interesting remark: “While they did not mince their words to criticise the Allies, Lenin, Trotsky, and their followers never expressed—at least I have never heard—the slightest blame on Germany.” And at the same time, when I spoke with official representatives of the Soviet government, I discovered that they had a desire to preserve friendly relations with America as far as possible. This desire was interpreted by the allied chancelleries as an attempt to detach America from its partners. Moreover, if the Soviet regime collapsed, they expected our country [the United States] to serve as a refuge for the Bolshevik demons who could thus save their skin.”1799 The calculation is plausible. Is it not even… certain? It may be supposed that Trotsky himself, strengthened by his recent experience in America, comforted his companions with this hope. But where the calculation of the Bolshevik leaders was more ambitious and well‐founded, it was when it dealt with the use of the great American financiers. Trotsky himself was an incontestable internationalist, and one can believe him when he declares emphatically that he rejects for himself all belonging to Jewishness. But judging by the choices he made in his appointments, we see that the renegade Jews were closer to him than the renegade Russians. (His two
1798M. Agursky, p. 264. 1799Oktiabrskaïa revolioutsiia pered soudom amcrikanskikh senatorov [The October Revolution in front of the tribunal of American Senators], Official Report of the Overmen’s Committee of the Senate, M. L., GIZ, 1927, p. 7.
closest assistants were Glazman and Sermuks, the head of his personal guard, Dreitser.1800) Thus, when it became necessary to find an authoritative and ruthless substitute to occupy this post at the War Commissariat—judge the lack! —, Trotsky named without flinching Ephraim Sklyansky, a doctor who had nothing of a soldier or a commissar. And this Sklyansky, as vice‐president of the Revolutionary Council of War, would add his signature above the one of the Supreme Commander, the General S. S. Kamenev! Trotsky did not think for a moment of the impression that the appointment of a doctor or the extraordinary promotion of a Sklyansky would make on the non‐commissioned members: he could not care less. And yet, it was he who once declared: “Russia has not reached the maturity necessary to tolerate a Jew at its head”; this famous sentence shows that the question concerned him all the same when it was formulated about him… There was also this well‐known scene: the inaugural session of the Constituent Assembly is opened on 5 January 1918 by the Dean of Deputies, S. P. Chevtsov, but Sverdlov, with utter imprudence, snatches the bell from him, chases him from the tribune, and resumes the meeting. This Constituent Assembly, so long awaited, so ardently desired, that sacred sun that was about to pour happiness onto Russia—it only takes a few hours for Sverdlov and the sailor Jelezniakov to wring its neck! The pan‐Russian Commission for the election of the Constituent Assembly had previously been dissolved, and its organisation had been entrusted to a private person, the young Brodsky. As for the Assembly—so ardently desired— its management was handed to Uritsky, who was assisted by Drabkin, who was to set up a new chancellery. It was thus, by this kind of operation, that the new type of—Jewish—government was sketched. Other preliminary actions: eminent members of the Constituent Assembly, personalities known to the whole of Russia, such as the Countess Panina, an immense benefactress, were arrested by an obscure personage, a certain Gordon. (According to the newspaper Den [The Day], Gordon was the author of some wicked patriotic articles that appeared in Petrogradski Kourier [The Courier of Petrograd], then went on to trade in cabbage and chemical fertilisers—before finally becoming Bolshevik.1801) Another thing not to be forgotten: the new masters of the country did not neglect their personal interest. In other words: they plundered honest people. “Stolen money is usually converted into diamonds… In Moscow, Sklyansky is said to be ‘the first diamond buyer’”; he was caught in Lithuania, during the baggage verification of Zinoviev’s wife, Zlata Bernstein‐Lilina—“jewelery was found, worth several tens of millions of rubles.”1802 (And to say that we believed in the legend that the first revolutionary leaders were disinterested idealists!) In 1800Roheri Conquest, Bolshoi terror [The Great Terror], trans. from English “The Great Terror”, London, 1968, French trans., Paris, 1968. 1801Den, 1917, December 5, p. 2. 1802S. S. Maslov, Rossiia posle tchetyriokh let revolioutsii (Russia after four years of revolution), Paris, Rousskaya petchat, 1922, book 2, p. 190
the Cheka, a trustworthy witness tells us, himself having passed in its clutches in 1920, the chiefs of the prisons were usually Poles or Latvians, while “the section in charge of the fight against traffickers, the least dangerous and the most lucrative, was in the hands of Jews.”1803 Other than the positions at the front of the stage, there existed in the structure of Lenin’s power, as in any other conspiracy, silent and invisible figures destined to never write their names in any chronicle: from Ganetski, that adventurer Lenin liked, up to all the disturbing figures gravitating in the orbit of Parvus. (This Evgeniya Sumenson, for example, who surfaced for a short time during the summer of 1917, who was even arrested for financial manipulation with Germany and who remained in liaison with the Bolshevik leaders, although she never appeared on the lists of leaders of the apparatus) After the “days of July”, Russkaya Volio published raw documents on the clandestine activity of Parvus and his closest collaborator, Zurabov, who “occupies today, in the social democratic circles of Petrograd, a well‐placed position”; “were also found in Petrograd Misters Binstock, Levin, Perazich and a few others.”1804 Or also: Samuel Zaks, the brother‐in‐law of Zinoviev (his sister’s husband), the boss of the subsidiary of the Parvus pharmacy in Petrograd and the son of a wealthy maker of the city, who had given the Bolsheviks, in 1917, a whole printing house. Or, belonging to the Parvus team itself, Samuel Pikker (Alexander Martynov1805, whom had formerly polemicised Lenin on theoretical questions—but now the time had come to serve the Party and Martynov had gone into hiding). Let us mention some other striking figures. The most illustrious (for massacres in Crimea) Rosalia Zalkind‐Zemlyachka, a real fury of terror: she was in 1917 1920, long before Kaganovich, secretary of the Committee of the ‒ Bolsheviks of Moscow along with V. Zagorsky, I. Zelensky, I. Piatnitsky.1806 When one knows that the Jews constituted more than a third of the population of Odessa, it is not surprising to learn that “in the revolutionary institutions of Odessa there were a great number of Jews”. The President of the Revolutionary War Council, and later of the Sovnarkom of Odessa, was V. Yudovsky; the chairman of the Provincial Party Committee, the Gamarnik.1807 The latter would soon rise in Kiev to be the chairman of the provincial committees— Revolutionary Committee, Party Executive Committee, then Chairman of the Regional Committees, and finally Secretary of the Central Committee of
1803S. E. Troubetskoi, Minovchee [The Past], Paris, YMCA Press, 1989, pp. 195 196, coll. ‒ The Library of Russian Memoirs (LRM); Series: Our recent past, fasc. 10. 1804Ruskaya Uolia [The Russian Will], 1917, 8 July, evening delivery, p. 4. 1805Bolsheviki: Dokoumenty po istorii bolchevizma s 1903 in 1916 god byvch. Moskovskogo Okhrannogo Otdeleniia [The Bolsheviks: Materials for the history of Bolshevism from 1903 to 1916 from the former Moscow Okhrana]. Presented by M. A. Tsiavlovski, supplemented by A. M. Serebriannikov, New York, Telex, 1990, p. 318. 1806SJE, t. 5, p. 476. 1807SJE, t. 6, p. 124.
Belarus, member of the Military Region Revolutionary War Council of Belarus.1808 And what about the rising star, Lazar Kaganovich, the president of the Provincial Committee Party of Nizhny Novgorod in 1918? In August‒ September, the reports of mass terror operations in the province all begin with the words: “In the presence of Kaganovich”, “Kaganovitch being present”1809— and with what vigilance!… There is a photo, which was inadvertently published and which bears this caption: “Photograph of the Presidium of one of the meetings of the Leningrad Committee, that is to say of the Petrograd Soviet after the October Revolution. The absolute majority at the presidium table is constituted of Jews.”1810 Reviewing all the names of those who have held important positions, and often even key positions, is beyond the reach of anyone. We will cite for illustrative purposes a few names, trying to attach them with a few details.— Here is Arkady Rosengoltz among the actors of the October coup in Moscow; he was afterwards a member of the Revolutionary War Councils of several army corps, then of the Republic; he was Trotsky’s “closest assistant”; he then occupied a number of important posts: the Commissariat of Finance, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (an organ of inquisition), and finally the Commissariat for Foreign Trade for seven years.—Semyon Nakhimson, who, on the eve of October, was commissioner of the notorious Latvian skirmishers, was the fierce commissioner of the military region of Yaroslav (he was killed during an insurrection in the city).—Samuel Zwilling, who, after his victory over the Orenburg ataman, Dutov, took the head of the Orenburg District Executive Committee (he was killed shortly thereafter).—Zorakh Grindberg, Commissioner for Instruction and Fine Arts of the Northern Commune, who took a stand against the teaching of Hebrew, the “right arm” of Lunacharsky.— Here is Yevgeniya Kogan, wife of Kuybyshev: she was already in 1917 secretary of the Party Committee of the region of Samara; in 1918 19 she ‒ became a member of the Volga Military Revolutionary Tribunal; in 1920 she met at the Tashkent City Committee, then in 1921 in Moscow, where she became Secretary of the City Committee and then Secretary of the National Committee in the 1930s.—And here is the secretary of Kuybyshev, Semyon Zhukovsky: he goes from political sections to political sections of the armies; he is sometimes found in the Propaganda Department of the Central Committee of Turkestan, sometimes the political leader of the Baltic Fleet (for the Bolsheviks, everything is at hand…), and, finally, at the Central Committee.— Or there are the Bielienki brothers: Abram, at the head of the personal guard of Lenin during the last five years of his life; Grigori, who moved from the Krasnaya Presnia District Committee to the position of head of the agitprop at the Comintern; finally, he is found at the Higher Council of the National
1808RJE (2nd edition revised and completed), t. 1, p. 267. 1809Nijegorodski Partarkhiv [Archives of the Nizhny Novgorod Party], f. 1, op. 1, file 66, leaflets 3, 12, etc. 1810Larine, p. 258.
Economy, the Workers’ and Peasants’ Inspectorate (RKI), at the Commissariat of Finances.—Dimanstein, after passing through the European Commission and the European Section, is at the Central Committee of Lithuania–Belarus, at the Commissariat of Instruction of Turkestan, then Head of the Political Propaganda of Ukraine.—Or Samuel Filler, an apothecary apprentice from the province of Kherson, who hoisted himself up to the presidium of the Cheka of Moscow and then of the RKI.—Anatoly (Isaac) Koltun (“deserted and emigrated immediately after”, then returned in 1917): he is found both as a senior officer in the Central Control Commission of the VKP (b) and in charge of the Party of Kazakhstan, then in Yaroslavl, in Ivanovo, then back to the Control Commission, and then to the Moscow Court—and suddenly he is in Scientific Research!1811 The role of the Jews is particularly visible in the RSFSR organs responsible for what constitutes the crucial problem of those years, the years of war communism: supplies. Let’s just look at the key positions.—Moisei Frumkin: from 1918 to 1922, member of the college of the Commissariat of Supply of the RSFSR, and from 1921—in full famine—Deputy Commissioner: he is also Chairman of the Board of Trustees of the Food Fund (Glavprodukt) and has as his assistant I. Rafailov.—Iakov Brandenbourgski–Goldzinski, returning from Paris in 1917 and immediately becoming a member of the Petrograd Supply Committee and from 1918 onwards a member of the Commissariat; during the civil war, with extraordinary powers in the VTsIK for requisition operations in several provinces.—Isaak Zelensky: in 1918 20 in the supply section of the Moscow ‒ Soviet, then member of the college of the RSFSR Supply Commissariat; Later in the Secretariat of the Central Committee and Secretary for Central Asia.— Semyon Voskov (arrived from America in 1917, actor of the October coup in Petrograd): in 1918, commissioner of supply for the immense region of the North.—Miron Vladimirov–Cheinfinkel: since October 1917 as head of the supply service for the city of Petrograd, then member of the college of the Supply Commission of the RSFSR; in 1921: commissioner for the Supply for Ukraine, then for Agriculture. —Grigori Zusmanovich, commissioner in 1918 at the Supply of the Army in Ukraine.—Moisei Kalmanovitch: late 1917, commissioner of the Supply of the Western Front; In 1919 1920, commissioner ‒ of the supply of the Byelorussian SSR, then of the Lithuania–Belarus SSR, and chairman of a special commission for the supply of the Western Front (at the summit of his career: president of the Administration Council of the Central Bank of the USSR).1812 Recently published documents inform us of the way in which the great peasant revolt of 1921 in Western Siberia broke out, the insurrection of Ichim. After the fierce requisitions of 1920, when the region had, on 1 January 1921, fulfilled the required requisition plan by 102%, the Supply Commissioner of the Tyumen Province, Indenbaum, instituted an additional week to “finalise” it, the
1811(rec) Bolchevki [The Bolsheviks], 1903 1916, p. 340; RJE, t. 1, pp. 100 101, 376, 427, ‒ ‒ 465 466; t. 2, pp. 51, 61, 321, 482; t. 3, p. 306. ‒ 1812RJE, t. 1, pp. 160, 250, 234, 483, 502, 533; t. 3, p. 260.
1st to 7th January, i.e. the week before Christmas1813. The commissioner of requisitions at Ichim received, as did the others, the official direction: “Requisitions must be carried out without taking into account the consequences, confiscating, if necessary, all the grain in the villages (emphasised by me—A. S.) and leaving the producer only a ration of famine.” In a telegram signed by his hand, Indenbaum demanded “the most merciless repression and systematic confiscation of the wheat that might still be there.” In order to form the brigades of requisition, were recruited, not with the consent of Ingenbaum, thugs, and sub‐proletarians who had no scruples in bludgeoning the peasants. The Latvian Matvei Lauris, a member of the Provincial Commissariat of Supply, used his power for his personal enrichment and pleasure: having taken up his quarters in a village, he had thirty‐one women brought in for himself and his squad. At the Xth Congress of the RKP (b), the delegation of Tyumen reported that “the peasants who refused to give their wheat were placed in pits, watered, and died frozen.”1814 The existence of some individuals was only learned a few years later thanks to obituaries published in the Izvestia. Thus: “comrade Isaac Samoylovich Kizelstein died of tuberculosis”; he had been an agent of the Cheka College, then a member of the Revolutionary War Council of the 5th and 14th Armies, “always devoted to the Party and to the working class”.1815 And oh how many of these “obscure workers” of all nationalities were found among the stranglers of Russia! Bolshevik Jews often had, in addition to their surname as underground revolutionaries, pseudonyms, or modified surnames. Example: in an obituary of 1928, the death of a Bolshevik of the first hour, Lev Mikhailovich Mikhailov, who was known to the Party as Politikus, in other words by a nickname; his real name, Elinson, he carried it to the grave.1816 What prompted an Aron Rupelevich to take the Ukrainian surname of Taratut? Was Aronovitch Tarchis ashamed of his name or did he want to gain more weight by taking the name of Piatnitsky? And what about the Gontcharovs, Vassilenko, and others…? Were they considered in their own families as traitors or simply as cowards? Observations made on the spot have remained. I. F. Najivin records the impressions he received at the very beginning of Soviet power: in the Kremlin, in the administration of the Sovnarkom, “reigns disorder and chaos. We see only Latvians and even more Latvians, Jews and even more Jews. I have never been an anti‐Semite, but there were so many it could not escape your attention, and each one was younger than the last.”1817
1813According to the Julian calendar still in force in the Orthodox Church. Christmas is celebrated on January 7th. 1814Zemlia sibirskaia, dalnievostotchnaia [Siberian Land, Far East], Omsk, 1993, nos. 5 6 ‒ (May June), pp. 35 37. ‒ ‒ 1815Izvestia, 1931, 7 April, p. 2. 1816Izvestia, 1928, 6 March, p. 5; RJE, t. 2, pp. 295 296. ‒ 1817Iv. Najivine, Zapiski o revolioutsii [Notes on the Revolution]. Vienna, 1921, p. 93.
Korolenko himself, as liberal and extremely tolerant as he was, he who was deeply sympathetic to the Jews who had been victims of the pogroms, noted in his Notebooks in the spring of 1919: “Among the Bolsheviks there are a great number of Jews, men and women. Their lack of tact, their assurance are striking and irritating,” “Bolshevism has already exhausted itself in Ukraine, the ‘Commune’ encounters only hatred on its way. One sees constantly emerge among the Bolsheviks—and especially the Cheka—Jewish physiognomies, and this exacerbates the traditional feelings, still very virulent, of Judæophobia.”1818 From the early years of Soviet rule, the Jews were not only superior in number in the upper echelons of the Party, but also, more remarkably and more sensitively for the population, to local administrations, provinces and townships, to inferior spheres, where the anonymous mass of the Streitbrecher had come to the rescue of the new and still fragile power which had consolidated it, saved it. The author of the Book of the Jews of Russia writes: “One cannot fail to evoke the action of the many Jewish Bolsheviks who worked in the localities as subordinate agents of the dictatorship and who caused innumerable ills to the population of the country”—and he adds: “including the Jewish population.”1819 The omnipresence of the Jews alongside the Bolsheviks had, during these terrible days and months, the most atrocious consequences. Among them is the assassination of the Imperial family, of which, today, everybody speaks, and where the Russians now exaggerate the share of the Jews, who find in this heart‐wrenching thought an evil enjoyment. As it should, the most dynamic Jews (and they are many) were at the height of events and often at the command posts. Thus, for the assassination of the Tsar’s family: the guards (the assassins) were Latvians, Russians, and Magyars, but two characters played a decisive role: Philip Goloshchekin and Yakov Yurovsky (who had received baptism). The final decision belonged to Lenin. If he dared to decide in favour of the assassination (when his power was still fragile), it was because he had foreseen both the total indifference of the Allies (the King of England, cousin of the tsar, had he not already, in the spring of 1918, refused asylum to Nicholas II?) And the fatal weakness of the conservative strata of the Russian people. Goloshchekin, who had been exiled to Tobolsk in 1912 for four years, and who in 1917 was in the Urals, was in perfect agreement with Sverdlov: their telephone conversations between Yekaterinburg and Moscow revealed that 1918 they were on first‐name basis. As early as 1912 (following the example of Sverdlov), Goloshchekin was a member of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party. After the coup of October, he became secretary of the
1818P. I. Negretov, V. G. Korolenko; Letopis jizni i tvortchestva [V. G. Korolenko: Chronicle of Life and Work, 1917 1921] under publ. of A. V. Khrabrovitski, Moskva: Kniga, 1990, p. ‒ 97, 106. 1819G. Aronson, Evreiskaya obschestvennost v Rossii v 1917 1918 gg. [The Jewish Public ‒ Opinion in Russia in 1917 1918], SJE-2, 1968, p. 16. ‒
Provincial Committee of Perm and Yekaterinburg, and later of the Ural Region Committee, in other words he had become the absolute master of the region.1820 The project of assassination of the imperial family was ripening in the brains of Lenin and his acolytes—while, on their side, the two patrons of the Urals, Goloshchekin and Bieloborodov (president of the Ural Soviet), simmered their own machinations. It is now known that at the beginning of July 1918 Goloshchekin went to Moscow in order to convince Lenin that letting the tsar and his family “flee” was a bad solution, that they had to be openly executed, and then announce the matter publicly. Convincing Lenin that the tsar and his family should be suppressed was not necessary, he himself did not doubt it for a moment. What he feared was the reaction of the Russian people and the West. There were, however, already indications that the thing would pass without making waves. (The decision would also depend, of course, on Trotsky, Kamenev, Zinoviev, Bukharin—but they were for the time absent from Moscow, and their mentality, with the possible exception, possibly, of that of Kamenev, allowed to suppose none of them would have anything to say about it. Trotsky, as we know, approved of this without feeling any emotion. In his diary of 1935, he says that on his arrival in Moscow he had a conversation with Sverdlov. “I asked incidentally: ‘By the way, where is the tsar?’—‘It’s done, he replied. Executed.’—‘and the family?’—‘the family as well, with him.’—‘all of them?’ I asked with a touch of astonishment. ‘All of them! replied Sverdlov… so what?’ He was waiting for a reaction from me. I did not answer anything. ‘And who decided it?’ I asked.—‘All of us, here’—I did not ask any more questions, I forgot about it… Basically, this decision was more than reasonable, it was necessary—not merely in order to frighten, to scare the enemy, to make him lose all hope, but in order to electrify our own ranks, to make us understand that there was no turning back, that we had before us only an undivided victory or certain death.”1821 M. Heifets sought out who was able to attend this last council chaired by Lenin; without a doubt: Sverdlov, Dzerzhinsky; probably: Petrovsky and Vladimirski (of the Cheka), Stutchka (of the Commissariat for Justice); Perhaps: V. Schmidt. Such was the tribunal that condemned the tsar. As for Goloshchekin, he had returned to Yekaterinburg on 12 July, awaiting the last signal sent from Moscow. It was Sverdlov who transmitted Lenin’s last instruction. And Yakov Yurovsky, a watchmaker, the son of a criminal who had been deported to Siberia—where was born the offspring—had been placed in July 1918 at the head of the Ipatiev house. This Yurovsky was manœuvring the operation and reflecting on the concrete means of carrying it out (with the help of Magyars and Russians, including Pavel Medvedev, Piotr Ermakov), as well as the best way of making the bodies disappear.1822 (Let us point out here the
1820(Rec.) Bolshevik, 1903 1916, p. 13, pp. 283 284. ‒ ‒ 1821Lev Trogski, Dnevniki i pisma [Newspapers and Letters], Ermitage, 1986, p. 101. 1822Mikhail Heifets, Tsareoubiistvo v 1918 godou [The Assassination of the Tsar in 1918], Moscow‐Jerusalem, 1991, pp. 246 247, 258, 268 271. ‒ ‒
assistance provided by P. L. Voïkov, the regional supply commissioner, who supplied barrels of gasoline and sulphuric acid to destroy the corpses.) How the deadly salvos succeeded each other in the basement of the Ipatiev house, which of these shots were mortal, who were the shooters, nobody later could specify, not even the executants. Afterwards, “Yurovsky boasted of being the best: ‘It was the bullet from my colt that killed Nicholas’.” But this honour also fell to Ermakov and his “comrade Mauser”.1823 Goloshchekin did not seek glory, and it is this idiot of Bieloborodov who beat him. In the 1920s, everyone knew it was him, the tsar’s number one killer. In 1936, during a tour in Rostov‐on‐Don, during a Party Conference, he still boasted of it from the rostrum—just a year before being himself executed. In 1941 it was Goloshchekin’s turn to be executed. As for Yurovsky, after the assassination of the tsar, he joined Moscow, “worked” there for a year alongside Dzerzhinsky (thus shedding blood) and died of natural death.1824 In fact, the question of the ethnic origin of the actors has constantly cast a shadow over the revolution as a whole and on each of its events. All the participations and complicities, since the assassination of Stolypin, necessarily collided with the feelings of the Russians. Yes, but what about the assassination of the tsar’s brother, Grand Duke Mikhail Alexandrovich? Who were his assassins? Andrei Markov, Gavril Myasnikov, Nikolai Zhukov, Ivan Kolpaschikov—clearly, all of them Russians. Here, everyone must—oh how much!—ask themselves the question: have I enlightened my people with a little ray of good, or have I obscured it with all the darkness of evil? So that is that when it comes to the executioners of the revolution. And what about the victims? Hostages and prisoners by entire batches— shot, drowned on crowded barges: the officers—Russians; the nobles—mostly Russians; the priests— Russians; members of the Zemstvos—Russians; and the peasants fleeing enlistment in the Red Army, taken up in the forests—all Russians. And this Russian intelligentsia of high moral, anti‐anti‐Semitic—for it also, it was bad deaths and bloody basements. If names and lists of all those who had been shot and drowned in the first years of Soviet power could be found today, from September 1918 onwards, if statistics were available, it would be surprising to find that the revolution in no way manifested its international character, but indeed its anti‐Slavic character (in accordance, moreover, with the dreams of Marx and Engels). And it is this that has imprinted this deep and cruel mark on the face of the revolution, which defines it best: who has it exterminated, carrying away its dead forever, without return, far from this sordid revolution and this unfortunate country, the body of this poor, misguided people?
1823Ibidem, p. 355. 1824Ibidem, pp. 246, 378 380. ‒
During all those months, Lenin was very much occupied with the climate of tension that had arisen around the Jewish question. As early as April 1918, the Council of the People’s Commissars of Moscow and the Moscow region published in the Izvestia1825 (thus for a wider audience than the region of Moscow alone) a circular addressed to the Soviets “on the question of the antiSemitic propaganda of the pogroms”, which evoked “events having occurred in the region of Moscow that recalled anti‐Jewish pogroms” (no city was named); it stressed the need to organise “special sessions among the Soviets on the Jewish question and the fight against anti‐Semitism”, as well as “meetings and conferences”, in short, a whole propaganda campaign. But who, by the way, was the number one culprit, who had to have his bones broken? But the Orthodox priests, of course! The first point prescribed: “Pay the utmost attention to the anti‐Semitic propaganda carried out by the clergy; take the most radical measures to stop the counter‐revolution and the propaganda of the priests” (we do not ask ourselves at this moment what measures these were… but, in reality, who knows them better than we do?). Then point number two recommended “to recognise the necessity to not create a separate Jewish fighting organisation” (at the time a Jewish guard was being considered). The point number four entrusted the Office of Jewish Affairs and the War Commissariat with the task of taking “preventive measures to combat anti‐Jewish pogroms”. At the height of the same year 1918, Lenin recorded on gramophone a “special discourse on anti‐Semitism and the Jews”. He there denounced “the cursed tsarist autocracy which had always launched uneducated workers and peasants against the Jews. The tsarist police, assisted by landowners and capitalists, perpetrated anti‐Jewish pogroms. Hostility towards the Jews is perennial only where the capitalist cabal has definitely obscured the minds of the workers and the peasants… There are among the Jews workmen, men of labour, they are the majority. They are our brothers, oppressed as we are by capitalism, they are our comrades who struggle with us for socialism… Shame on the cursed tsarism!… Shame on those who sow hostility towards the Jews!”—“Recordings of this speech were carried all the way to the front, transported through towns and villages aboard special propaganda trains which criss‐crossed the country. Gramophones spread this discourse in clubs, meetings, assemblies. Soldiers, workers and peasants listened to their leader’s harangue and began to understand what this was all about.”1826 But this speech, at the time, was not published (… by intentional omission?); it only was so in 1926 (in the book of Agursky senior). On 27 July 1918 (just after the execution of the imperial family), the Sovnarkom promulgated a special law on anti‐Semitism: “The Soviet of the
1825Izvestia, 1918, 28 April, p. 4. 1826Iou. Larine, Evrei i antisemitism v SSSR* [The Jews and anti‐Semitism in the USSR], pp. 7 8 (with a reference to S. Agursky, Evreiskii rabotchii v kommounistitcheskom dvijenii ‒ [The Jewish Worker in the Communist Movement], Minsk GIZ, 1926, p. 155.
People’s Commissars declares that any anti‐Semitic movement is a danger to the cause of the Revolution of the workers and peasants.” In conclusion (from Lenin’s own hand, Lunacharsky tells us): “The Sovnarkom directed all Soviet deputations to take radical measures to eradicate anti‐Semitism. The inciters of pogroms, those who propagate them, will be declared outlaws.” Signed: VI. Ulyanov (Lenin).1827 If the meaning of the word “outlaw” may have escaped some at the time, in the months of the Red Terror it would appear clearly, ten years later, in a sentence of a communist militant—Larine—who was himself, for a while, the commissar of the people and even the promoter of “war communism”: “to ‘outlaw’ the active anti‐Semites was to shoot them.”1828 And then there is Lenin’s famous reply to Dimanstein in 1919. Dimanstein “wished to obtain from Lenin that be retained the distribution of Gorky’s tract containing such praises to the address of the Jews that it could create ‘the impression that the revolution was based only on the Jews and especially on the individuals from the middle class’.” Lenin replied—as we have already said— that, immediately after October, it was the Jews who had saved the revolution by defeating the resistance of the civil servants, and consequently “Gorky’s opinion was perfectly correct.”1829 The Jewish Encyclopædia does not doubt it either: “Lenin refused to sweep under the carpet the extremely pro‐Semite proclamation of M. Gorky, and it was disseminated in great circulation during the civil war, in spite of the fact that it risked becoming an asset in the hands of the anti‐Semites who were enemies of the revolution.”1830 And it became so, of course, for the Whites who saw two images merge, that of Judaism and that of Bolshevism. The surprising (short‐sighted!) indifference of the Bolshevik leaders to the popular sentiment and the growing irritation of the population is blatant when we see how much Jews were involved in repression directed against the Orthodox clergy: it was in summer 1918 that was initiated the assault on the Orthodox churches in central Russia and especially in the Moscow region (which included several provinces), an assault which only ceased thanks to the wave of rebellions in the parishes. In January 1918, the workers who were building the fortress of Kronstadt rebelled and protested: the executive committee of the Party, composed “exclusively of non‐natives”, had designated for guard duty, instead of militia… Orthodox priests, while “not a Jewish rabbi, not a Moslem mullah, not a Catholic pastor, not a Protestant pastor, was put to use.”1831 (Let us note in
1827Izvestia, 1918, 27 July, p. 4. 1828Iou. Larine, p. 259. 1829V. I. Lenin, O evreiskom voprose v Rossii [On the Jewish Question in Russia], preface by S. Dimanstein. M., Proletarii, 1924, 3 July. 1830SJE, t. 4, p. 766. 1831Tserkovnye Vedomosti [News of the Church], 1918, no. 1 (quoted according to M. Agursky, p. 10)
passing that even on this small, fortified island of the “prison of the peoples” there were places of worship for all the confessions…) A text entitled “Charge on the Jews!” appeared even all the way to the Pravda, a call from the workers of Arkangelsk “to Russian workers and peasants conscious of their fate”, in which they read: “are profaned, defiled, plundered”—“exclusively Orthodox churches, never synagogues… Death by hunger and disease carries hundreds of thousands of innocent lives among the Russians,” while “the Jews do not die of hunger or disease.”1832 (There was also, during the summer 1918, “a criminal case of anti‐Semitism in the church of Basil the Blissful, in Moscow…”). What madness on the part of the Jewish militants to have mingled with the ferocious repression exerted by the Bolsheviks against Orthodoxy, even more fierce than against the other confessions, with this persecution of priests, with this outburst in the press of sarcasms aimed at the Christ! The Russian pens also zealously attacked Demian Bedny (Efim Pridvorov), for example, and he was not the only one. Yes, the Jews should have stayed out of it. On 9 August 1919, Patriarch Tikhon wrote to the president of the VTsIK Kalinin (with a copy to the Sovnarkom president, Ulyanov–Lenin) to demand the dismissal of the investigating magistrate Chpitsberg, in charge of the “affairs” of the Church: “a man who publicly outrages the religious beliefs of people, who openly mocks ritual gestures, who, in the preface to the book The Religious Plague (1919), gave Jesus Christ abominable names and thus profoundly upset my religious feeling.”1833 The text was transmitted to the Small Sovnarkom, from which came the reply on 3 September: “classify the complaint of citizen Belavine (Patriarch Tikhon) without follow‐up.”1834 But Kalinin changed his mind and addressed a secret letter to the Justice Commissioner, Krasikov, saying that he believed that “for practical and political considerations… replace Chpitsberg with someone else”, given that “the audience in the court is probably in its majority Orthodox” and that it is therefore necessary “to deprive the religious circles… of their main reason for ethnic revenge.”1835 And what about the profanation of relics? How could the masses understand such an obvious outrage, so provocative? “‘Could the Russians, the Orthodox have done such things?’ they asked each other across Russia. ‘All that, it is the Jews who have plotted it. It makes no difference, to those who crucified Christ’.”1836—And who is responsible for this state of mind, if not the Bolshevik power, by offering to the people spectacles of such savagery?
1832Pravda, 1919, 3 July. 1833Sledstvennoe delo Patriarkha Tikhona [The instruction of Patriarch Tikhon], rec. of documents from the materials of the Central Archives, M., 2000, doc. no. 58, pp. 600 604. ‒ 1834GARF, f. 130, op. 4, ed. Khr. 94, l. 1, Minutes of the meeting of the Small Council of 2 Sept. 1920, no. 546. 1835GARF, f. 1235, op. 56, d. 26, l. 43. 1836S. S. Maslov, p. 43.
S. Bulgakov, who followed closely what happened to Orthodoxy under the Bolsheviks, wrote in 1941: “In the USSR, the persecution of Christians “surpassed in violence and amplitude all previous persecutions known throughout History. Of course, we should not blame everything on the Jews, but we should not downplay their influence.”1837—“Were manifested in Bolshevism, above all, the force of will and the energy of Judaism.”—“The part played by the Jews in Bolshevism is, alas, disproportionately great. And it is above all the sin of Judaism against Ben–Israel… And it is not the ‘sacred Israel’, but the strong will of Judaism that, in power, manifested itself in Bolshevism and the crushing of the Russian people.”—“Although it derived from the ideological and practical programme of Bolshevism, without distinction of nationality, the persecution of Christians found its most zealous actors among Jewish ‘commissioners’ of militant atheism,” and to have put a Goubelman– Iaroslavski at the head of the Union of the Godless was to commit “in the face of all the Russian Orthodox people an act… of religious effrontery.”1838 Another very ostensible effrontery: this way of rechristening cities and places. Custom, in fact, less Jewish than typically Soviet. But can we affirm that for the inhabitants of Gatchina, the new name of their city—Trotsk—did not have a foreign resonance? Likewise for Pavlosk, now Slutsk… Uritsky gives its name to the square of the Palace, Vorovski to the Saint‐Isaac Plaza, Volodarski to the Prospect of the Founders, Nakhimson to the Saint Vladimir Prospect, Rochal to the barge of the Admiralty, and the second‐class painter Isaak Brodsky gives his name to the so beautiful Saint Michael street… They could no longer stand each other, their heads were turning. Through the immensity of Russia, it flashes by: Elisabethgrad becomes Zinovievsk… and let’s go boldly! The city where the tsar was assassinated takes the name of the assassin: Sverdlovsk. It is obvious that was present in the Russian national consciousness, as early as 1920, the idea of a national revenge on the part of Bolshevik Jews, since it even appeared in the papers of the Soviet government (it served as an argument to Kalinin). Of course, Pasmanik’s refutation was right: “For the wicked and narrowminded, everything could not be explained more simply—the Jewish Kahal1839 has decided to seize Russia; or: it is the revengeful Judaism that settles its accounts with Russia for the humiliations undergone in the past.”1840 Of course, we cannot explain the victory and the maintenance of the Bolsheviks.—But: if the pogrom of 1905 burns in the memory of your family, and if, in 1915, were driven out of the western territories, with the strikes of a whip, your brothers by blood, you can very well, three or four years later, want to avenge yourself in 1837Arch. Sergui Bulgakov Khristianstvo i evreiskii vopros [Christianity and the Jewish Question], rec, Paris, YMCA Press, 1991, p. 76. 1838Ibidem, pp. 98, 121, 124. 1839Former governing body of the Jewish Community. 1840D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsiia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and the Jews], p. 156.
your turn with a whip or a revolver bullet. We are not going to ask whether Communist Jews consciously wanted to take revenge on Russia by destroying, by breaking the Russian heritage, but totally denying this spirit of vengeance would be denying any relationship between the inequality in rights under the tsar and the participation of Jews in Bolshevism, a relationship that is constantly evoked. And this is how I. M. Biekerman, confronted with “the fact of the disproportionate participation of the Jews in the work of barbaric destruction”, to those who recognise the right of the Jews to avenge past persecutions, refutes this right: “the destructive zeal of our co‐religionists is blamed on the State, who, by its vexations and persecutions, would have pushed the Jews into the revolution”; well no, he says, for “it is to the manner in which an individual reacts to the evil suffered that he is distinguished from another, and the same is true of a community of men.”1841 Later, in 1939, taking in the destiny of Judaism under the black cloud of the coming new era, the same Biekerman wrote: “The great difference between the Jews and the world around them was that they could only be the anvil, and never the hammer.”1842 I do not intend to dig here, in this limited work, the great historical destinies, but I am expressing a categorical reservation on this point: perhaps this was so since the beginning of time, but, as of 1918, in Russia, and for another fifteen years, the Jews who joined the revolution also served as hammer —at least a large part of them. Here, in our review, comes the voice of Boris Pasternak. In his Doctor Zhivago, he writes, it is true, after the Second World War, thus after the Cataclysm which came down, crushing and sinister, over the Jews of Europe and which overturned our entire vision of the world—but, in the novel itself, is discussed the years of the revolution—, he speaks of “this modest, sacrificial way of remaining aloof, which only engenders misfortune,” of “their [i.e. the Jews’] fragility and their inability to strike back.” Yet, did we not both have before us the same country—at different ages, certainly, but where we lived the same 20s and 30s? The contemporary of those years remains mute with astonishment: Pasternak would thus not have seen (I believe) what was happening?—His parents, his painter father, his pianist mother, belonged to a highly cultivated Jewish milieu, living in perfect harmony with the Russian intelligentsia; he himself grew up in a tradition already quite rich, a tradition that led the Rubinstein brothers, the moving Levitan, the subtle Guerchenson, the philosophers Frank and Chestov, to give themselves to Russia and Russian culture… It is probable that this unambiguous choice, that perfect equilibrium between life and service, which was theirs, appeared to Pasternak as
1841I. M. Biekerman, Rossiia i rousskoie evrcistvo [Russia and the Russian Jews], RaJ, p. 25. 1842Id, K samosoznaniou evreia tchem my byli. Tchem my doljny, byt [For the selfconsciousness of the Jew: who have we been, who we must become], Paris, 1930, p. 42.
the norm, while the monstrous gaps, frightening relative to this norm, did not reach the retina of his eye. On the other hand, these differences penetrated the field of view of thousands of others. Thus, witness of these years, Biekerman writes: “The too visible participation of the Jews in the Bolshevik saturnalia attracts the eyes of the Russians and those of the whole world.”1843 No, the Jews were not the great driving force of the October coup. The latter, moreover, brought them nothing, since the February revolution had already granted them full and complete freedom. But, after the coup de force took place, it was then that the younger laic generation quickly changed horses and launched themselves with no less assurance into the infernal gallop of Bolshevism. Obviously, it was not the melamedes1844 that produced this. But the reasonable part of the Jewish people let itself be overwhelmed by hotheads. And thus an almost entire generation became renegade. And the race was launched. G. Landau looked for the motives that led the younger generation to join the camp of the new victors. He writes: “Here was the rancour with regard to the old world, and the exclusion of political life and Russian life in general, as well as a certain rationalism peculiar to the Jewish people,” and “willpower which, in mediocre beings, can take the form of insolence and ruthless ambition.”1845 Some people seek an apology by way of explanations: “The material conditions of life after the October coup created a climate such that the Jews were forced to join the Bolsheviks.”1846 This explanation is widespread: “42% of the Jewish population of Russia were engaged in commercial activity”; they lost it; they found themselves in a dead‐end situation—where to go? “In order not to die of hunger, they were forced to take service with the government, without paying too much attention to the kind of work they were asked to do.” It was necessary to enter the Soviet apparatus where “the number of Jewish officials, from the beginning of the October Revolution, was very high.”1847 They had no way out? Did the tens of thousands of Russian officials who refused to serve Bolshevism have somewhere to go?—To starve? But how were living the others? Especially since they were receiving food aid from organisations such as the Joint, the ORT1848, financed by wealthy Jews from the West. Enlisting in the Cheka was never the only way out. There was at least another: not to do it, to resist.
1843I. M. Biekerman, RaJ, pp. 14 15. ‒ 1844Those who teach Jewish law privately. 1845G. A. Landau, Revolioutsionnye idei v evreiskoi obschestvennosti [The Revolutionary Ideas in Jewish Public Opinion], RaJ, p. 117. 1846D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsiia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and the Jews], p. 156. 1847D. S. Pasmanik, p. 157. 1848Obchtchestvo Pemeslennogo Troude welded evreiev: Association for craftwork among Jews.
The result, Pasmanik concludes, is that “Bolshevism became, for the hungry Jews of cities, a trade equal to the previous trades—tailor, broker, or apothecary.”1849 But if this is so, it may be said, seventy years later, in good conscience: for those “who did not want to immigrate to the United States and become American, who did not want to immigrate to Palestine to remain Jews, for those, the only issue was communism”?1850 Again—the only way out!? It is precisely this that is called renouncing one’s historical responsibility! Other arguments have more substance and weight: “A people that has suffered such persecution”—and this, throughout its history—“could not, in its great majority, not become bearers of the revolutionary doctrine and internationalism of socialism,” for it “gave its Jewish followers the hope of never again being pariahs” on this very earth, and not “in the chimerical Palestine of the great ancestors.” Further on: “During the civil war already, and immediately afterwards, they were stronger in competition with the newcomers from the ethnic population, and they filled many of the voids that the revolution had created in society… In doing so, they had for the most part broken with their national and spiritual tradition,” after which “all those who wanted to assimilate, especially the first generation and at the time of their massive apparition, took root in the relatively superficial layers of a culture that was new to them.”1851 One wonders, however, how it is possible that “the centuries‐old traditions of this ancient culture have proved powerless to counteract the infatuation with the barbaric slogans of the Bolshevik revolutionaries.”1852 When “socialism, the companion of the revolution, melted onto Russia, not only were these Jews, numerous and dynamic, brought to life on the crest of the devastating wave, but the rest of the Jewish people found itself deprived of any idea of resistance and was invited to look at what was happening with a perplexed sympathy, wondering, impotent, what was going to result from it.”1853 How is it that “in every circle of Jewish society the revolution was welcomed with enthusiasm, an inexplicable enthusiasm when one knows of what disillusionments composed the history of this people”? How could “the Jewish people, rationalist and lucid, allow itself to indulge in the intoxication of revolutionary phraseology”1854? D. S. Pasmanik evokes in 1924 “those Jews who proclaimed loudly and clearly the genetic link between Bolshevism and Judaism, who openly boasted about the sentiments of sympathy which the mass of the Jewish people
1849D. Choub, Evrei v rousskoi revolioutsii [The Jews in the Russian Revolution], BJWR-2, p. 143. 1850Chlomo Avineri, Vozvraschenie v istoriiou [Back to the story]—“22”, 1990, no. 73, p. 112. 1851D. Chiurmann, O natsionalnykh fobiiakh [On national phobias],—“22”, 1989, no. 68, pp. 149 150. ‒ 1852I. O. Levine, Evrei v revolioutsii [The Jews in the Revolution], RaJ, p. 127. 1853Landau, RaJ, p. 109. 1854D. O. Linski, O natsionalnom samosoznanii rousskogo evreia [The National Consciousness of the Russian Jew], RaJ, pp. 145, 146.
nourished towards the power of the commissioners.”1855 At the same time, Pasmanik himself pointed out “the points which may at first be the foundation of a rapprochement between Bolshevism and Judaism… These are: the concern for happiness on earth and that of social justice… Judaism was the first to put forward these two great principles.”1856 We read in an issue of the London newspaper Jewish Chronicle of 1919 (when the revolution had not yet cooled down) an interesting debate on the issue. The permanent correspondent of this paper, a certain Mentor, writes that it is not fitting for the Jews to pretend that they have no connection with the Bolsheviks. Thus, in America, the Rabbi and Doctor Judah Magnes supported the Bolsheviks, which means that he did not regard Bolshevism as incompatible with Judaism.1857 He writes again the following week: Bolshevism is in itself a great evil, but, paradoxically, it also represents the hope of humanity. Was the French Revolution not bloody, it as well, and yet it was justified by History. The Jew is idealistic by nature and it is not surprising, it is even logical that he believed the promises of Bolshevism. “There is much room for reflection in the very fact of Bolshevism, in the adherence of many Jews to Bolshevism, in the fact that the ideals of Bolshevism in many respects join those of Judaism—a great number of which have been taken up by the founder of Christianity. The Jews who think must examine all this carefully. One must be foolish to see in Bolshevism only its off‐putting aspects…”1858 All the same, is not Judaism above all the recognition of the one God? But, this in itself is enough to make it incompatible with Bolshevism, the denier of God! Still on the search for the motives for such a broad participation of the Jews in the Bolshevik adventure, I. Biekerman writes: “We might, before of the facts, despair of the future of our people—if we did not know that, of all the contagions, the worst is that of words. Why was the Jewish consciousness so receptive to this infection, the question would be too long to develop here.” The causes reside “not only in the circumstances of yesterday,” but also “in the ideas inherited from ancient times, which predispose Jews to be contaminated by ideology, even if it is null and subversive.”1859 S. Bulgakov also writes: “The face that Judaism shows in Russian Bolshevism is by no means the true face of Israel… It reflects, even within Israel, a state of terrible spiritual crisis, which can lead to bestiality.”1860 As for the argument that the Jews of Russia have thrown themselves into the arms of the Bolsheviks because of the vexations they have suffered in the
1855D. S. Pasmanik, RaJ, p. 225. 1856D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsiia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and Judaism], p. 129. 1857Jewish Chronicle, 28 March 1919, p. 10. 1858Ibidem, 4 April 1919, p. 7. 1859Biekerman, RaJ, p. 34. 1860Arch. Sergui Bulgakov, Khristianstvo i evreiskii vopros [Christianity and the Jewish Question], pp. 124 125. ‒
past, it must be confronted with the two other communist shows of strength that occurred at the same time as that of Lenin, in Bavaria and in Hungary. We read in I. Levin: “The number of Jews serving the Bolshevik regime is, in these two countries, very high. In Bavaria, we find among the commissaries the Jews E. Levine, M. Levin, Axelrod, the anarchist ideologist Landauer, Ernst Toller.” “The proportion of Jews who took the lead of the Bolshevik movement in Hungary is of 95%…. However, the situation of the Jews in terms of civic rights was excellent in Hungary, where there had not been any limitation for a long time already; in the cultural and economic sphere, the Jews occupied such a position that the anti‐Semites could even speak of a hold of the Jews.”1861 We may add here the remark of an eminent Jewish publisher of America; he writes that the Jews of Germany “have prospered and gained a high position in society.”1862 Let us not forget in this connection that the ferment of rebellion that was at the origin of the coups de force—of which we shall speak again in chapter 16—had been introduced by the Bolsheviks through the intermediary of “repatriated prisoners” stuffed with propaganda. What brought all these rebels together—and, later, beyond the seas—, was a flurry of unbridled revolutionary internationalism, an impulse towards revolution, a revolution that was global and “permanent”. The rapid success of the Jews in the Bolshevik administration could not be ignored in Europe and the United States. Even worse: they were admired there! At the time of the passage from February to October, Jewish public opinion in America did not mute its sympathies for the Russian revolution.
Meanwhile, the Bolsheviks were conducting their financial operations diligently abroad, mainly via Stockholm. Since Lenin’s return to Russia, secret supplies had come to them, of German provenance, through the Nia Banken of Olof Aschberg. This did not exclude the financial support of certain Russian bankers, those who, fleeing the revolution, had sought refuge abroad but had transformed there into volunteer support of the Bolsheviks. An American researcher, Anthony Sutton, has found (with half a century of delay) archival documents; he tells us that, if we are to believe a report sent in 1918 to the State Department by the U.S. Ambassador in Stockholm, “among these ‘Bolshevik bankers’ is the infamous Dmitri Rubinstein that the revolution of February had gotten out of prison, who had reached Stockholm and made himself the financial agent of the Bolsheviks”; “we also find Abram Jivotovski, a relative of Trostky and Lev Kamenev.” Among the syndicates were “Denisov of the ex‐Bank of Siberia, Kamenka of the Bank Azov‐Don, and Davidov of the Bank for Foreign Trade.
1861Levine, RaJ, pp. 125, 126. 1862Norman Podgorets, Evrei v sovremennom mire [The Jews in the Modern World] (Int.) BM, no. 86, p. 113.
Other ‘Bolshevik bankers’: Grigori Lessine, Shtifter, Iakov Berline, and their agent Isidore Kohn.”1863 These had left Russia. Others, in the opposite direction, left America to return. They were the revenants, all of them “revolutionaries” (some from long ago, others of recent date) who dreamed of finally building and consolidating the New World of Universal Happiness. We talked about it in Chapter 14. They were flocking across the oceans from the port of New York to the East or from the port of San Francisco in direction of the West, some former subjects of the Russian Empire, others purely and simply American citizens, enthusiasts who even did not know the Russian language. In 1919, A. V. Tyrkova–Williams wrote in a book published then in England: “There are few Russians among the Bolshevik leaders, few men imbued with Russian culture and concerned with the interests of the Russian people… In addition to foreign citizens, Bolshevism recruited immigrants who had spent many years outside the borders. Some had never been to Russia before. There were many Jews among them. They spoke Russian badly. The nation of which they had become masters was foreign to them and, moreover, they behaved like invaders in a conquered country.” And if, in tsarist Russia, “Jews were excluded from all official posts, if schools and State service were closed to them, on the other hand, in the Soviet Republic all committees and commissariats were filled with Jews. Often, they exchanged their Jewish name for a Russian name… but this masquerade did not deceive anyone.”1864 That same year, 1919, at the Senate Hearings of the Overmen Commission, an Illinois university professor, P. B. Dennis, who arrived in Russia in 1917, declared that in his opinion—“an opinion that matched that of other Americans, Englishmen, Frenchmen…—, these people deployed in Russia an extreme cruelty and ferocity in their repression against the bourgeoisie” (the word is used here without any pejorative nuance in its primary sense: the inhabitants of the boroughs). Or: “Among those who carried out ‘murderous propaganda’ in the trenches and in the rear, there were those who, one or two years before [i.e. in 1917 1918], still lived New York.” ‒ 1865 In February 1920, Winston Churchill spoke in the pages of the Sunday Herald. In an article entitled “Zionism Against Bolshevism: Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People”, he wrote: “Today we see this company of outstanding personalities, emerging from clandestinity, from the basements of the great cities of Europe and America, who grabbed by the hair and seized by the throat the Russian people, and established itself as the undisputed mistress of the immense Russian Empire.”1866
1863A. Sutton, Orol strit i bolshevitskaya revolioutsiia, [Wall Street and the Bolshevik Revolution], trans. from the English, M., 1998, pp. 141 142. ‒ 1864Ariadna Tyrkova‐Williams, From Liberty to Brest–Litovsk London, Macmillan and Co., 1919, pp. 297 299. ‒ 1865Overmen, pp. 22 23, 26 27. ‒ ‒ 1866Jerry Muller, Dialektika traguedii antisemitizm i kommounizm v Tsentralnoï i Vostotchnoï Evrope, Evreiskaya Tribouna* (The Jewish Tribune), 1920, no. 10, p. 3.
There are many known names among these people who have returned from beyond the ocean. Here is M. M. Gruzenberg: he had previously lived in England (where he had met Sun Yat–sen), then lived for a long time in the United States, in Chicago where he had “organised a school for the immigrants”, and we find him in 1919 general consul of the RSFSR in Mexico (a country on which the revolutionaries founded great hopes: Trotsky would turn up there…), then, in the same year, he sat in the central organs of the Comintern. He took service in Scandinavia, Sweden; he was arrested in Scotland. He resurfaced in China in 1923 under the name of Borodin1867 with a whole squad of spies: he was the “principal political adviser to the Executive Committee of the Kuomintang”, a role which enabled him to promote the career of Mao Tse–tung and of Zhou Enlai. However, having suspected Borodin– Gruzenberg of engaging in subversive work, Chiang Kai–shek expelled him from China in 1927. Returning to the USSR, he passed unharmed the year 1937; during the war with Germany, we find him editor‐in‐chief of the Soviet Information Office alongside Dridzo–Lozovsky. He will be executed in 1951.1868 (About the Bolshevik Jews executed in the 1930s, see infra, chapter 19.) Among them also, Samuel Agursky, who became one of the leaders of Belarus; arrested in 1938, he served a sentence of deportation. (He is the father of the late M. Agursky, who prematurely disappeared, and who did not follow the same path as his progenitor, far from it!1869 1870—Let us also mention Solomon Slepak, an influential member of the Comintern, he returned to Russia by Vladivostok where he took part in assassinations; he then went to China to try to attract Sun Yat–sen in an alliance with communism; his son Vladimir would have to tear himself, not without a clash, from the trap into which his father had fallen in his quest for the radiant future of communism.1871 Stories like this, and some even more paradoxical, there are hundreds of them. Demolishers of the “bourgeois” Jewish culture also turned up. Among them, the collaborators of S. Dimanstein in the European Commissariat: the S.– R. Dobkovski, Agursky (already mentioned), and also “Kantor, Shapiro, Kaplan, former emigrant anarchists who had returned from London and New York”. The objective of the Commissariat was to create a “Centre for the Jewish Communist Movement”. In August 1918, the new Communist newspaper in Yiddish Emes (the Truth) announced: “The proletarian revolution began in the street of the Jews”; a campaign was immediately launched against the Heders and the “Talmud‐Torah”… In June 1919, countersigned by S. Agursky and Stalin, the dissolution of the Central Bureau of the Jewish Communities was
1867This is the character of Man’s Fate by Andre Malraux. 1868RJE, t. 1, p. 154. 1869Collaborator of the collection From Under the Rubble, published by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn in 1974. 1870Ibidem, p. 22. 1871Chaim Potok, The Gates of November, Chronicles of the Slepak Family, New York, Alfred A. Knopf, 1996, pp. 37, 44 45. ‒
proclaimed,1872 which represented the conservative fraction of Judaism, the one that had not sided with the Bolsheviks.
It is nonetheless true that the socialist Jews were not attracted primarily to the Bolsheviks. Now however: where were the other parties, what had become of them? What allowed the Bolshevik Party to occupy an exclusive position was the disintegration of the old Jewish political parties. The Bund, the Zionist Socialists and the Zionists of the Poalei had split up and their leaders had joined the victors’ camp by denying the ideals of democratic socialism—such as M. Raies, M. Froumkina‐Ester, A. Weinstein, M. Litvanov.1873 Is it possible? Even the Bund, this extremely belligerent organisation to which even Lenin’s positions were not suitable, which showed itself so intransigent on the principle of the cultural and national autonomy of the Jews? Well yes, even the Bund! “After the establishment of Soviet power, the leadership of the Bund in Russia split into two groups (1920): the right, which in its majority, emigrated, and the left which liquidated the Bund (1921) and adhered in large part to the Bolshevik Party.”1874 Among the former members of the Bund, we can cite the irremovable David Zaslavski, the one who for decades would put his pen at the service of Stalin (he would be responsible for stigmatising Mandelstam and Pasternak). Also: the Leplevski brothers, Israel and Grigori (one, from the outset, would become an agent of the Cheka and stay there for the rest of his life, the other would occupy a high position in the NKVD in 1920, then would be Deputy Commissar of the People, President of the Small Sovnarkom of the RSFSR, then Deputy Attorney General of the USSR (1934 39); he would be a victim of repression in 1939. Solomon Kotliar, ‒ immediately promoted First Secretary of Orthbourg, of Vologda, of Tver, of the regional Committee of Orel. Or also Abram Heifets: he returned to Russia after February 1917, joined the Presidium of the Bund’s Main Committee in Ukraine, was a member of the Central Committee of the Bund; in October 1917, he was already for the Bolsheviks and, in 1919, he figured in the leading group of the Comintern.1875 To the leftists of the Bund joined the left of the Zionist Socialists and the SERP1876; those entered the Communist Party as early as 1919. The left wing of the Poalei–Tsion did the same in 1921.1877 In 1926, according to an internal
1872G. Aronson, Evreiski vopros v epokhou Stalina [The Jewish Question in Stalin’s Era], BJWR, pp. 133 134. ‒ 1873Ibidem, pp. 135 136. ‒ 1874SJE, t. 1, p. 560. 1875RJE, t. 1, p. 478; t. 2, pp. 78, 163; t.3, p. 286. 1876Sotsial–evreiskaya raborchaya partia: Jewish Social Workers Party. 1877S. Dimanstein, Revolioutsionnie dvijenie sredi evreev [The revolutionary movement among the Jews] in The Revolutionaries through several essays, ed. of M. N. Pokrovski, t. 3, b. I, M L, GJZ, p. 215. ‒
census, there were up to 2,500 former members of the Bund in the Party. It goes without saying that many, later on, fell under the blade: “Under Stalin, the majority of them were victims of ferocious persecutions.”1878 Biekerman exclaims: “The Bund, which had assumed the role of representative of the Jewish working masses, joined the Bolsheviks in its most important and active part.”1879 In his memoirs, David Azbel tries to explain the reasons for this accession by reflecting on the example of his uncle, Aron Isaakievich Weinstein, an influential member of the Bund that we mentioned above: “He had understood before all others that his Party, as well as the other socialist parties, were condemned… He had understood also another thing: to survive and continue to defend the interests of the Jews would be possible only by joining the Bolsheviks.”1880 For how many of them the reasons 1) survive, 2) continue to defend the interests of the Jews, were decisive? Tentatively, both objectives were achieved. It will note also that after October the other socialist parties, the S.–R. and the Mensheviks, who, as we know, had a large number of Jews in their ranks and at their heads, did not stand up against Bolshevism either. Scarcely aware of the fact that the Bolsheviks had dismissed this Constituent Assembly which they had called for, they withdrew, hesitated, divided themselves in their turn, sometimes proclaiming their neutrality in the civil war, other times their intention to temporise. As for the S.–R., they downright opened to the Bolsheviks a portion of the Eastern front and tried to demoralise the rear of the Whites. But we also find Jews among the leaders of the resistance to the Bolsheviks in 1918: out of the twenty‐six signatures of the “Open Letter of Prisoners on the Affair of the Workers’ Congress” written at Taganka Prison, no less of a quarter are Jewish.1881 The Bolsheviks were pitiless towards the Mensheviks of this kind. In the summer of 1918, R. Abramovich, an important Menshevik leader, avoided execution only by means of a letter addressed to Lenin from an Austrian prison by Friedrich Adler, the one who had shot down the Austrian Prime Minister in 1916 and who had been reprieved. Others, too, were stoic: Grigori Binshtok, Semyon Weinstein; arrested several times, they were eventually expelled from the country.1882 In February 1921, in Petrograd, the Mensheviks certainly supported the deceived and hungry workers, they pushed them to protest and strike—but without any real conviction. And they lacked audacity to take the lead of the
1878SJE, t. 1, p. 560. 1879I. M. Biekerman, RaJ, p. 44. 1880D. Azbel, Do, vo vremia i posle [Avant, pendant et après], VM, 1989, no. 104, p. 231. 1881Nezavisimoie rabotcheie dvijeniie v 1918 godou: Dokumenty i materialy [The independent workers’ movement], established by M. Bernstam, Paris, YMCA Press, 1981, pp. 291 293, ‒ in Research on Contemporary Russian History. 1882RJE, t. 1, pp. 135 136, 199 200. ‒ ‒
Kronstadt insurrection. However, this did not in any way protect them from repression. We also know a lot of Mensheviks who joined the Bolsheviks, who exchanged one party label for another. They were: Boris Maguidov (he became head of the political section in the 10th Army, then Donbass, secretary of the provincial committees of Poltava, Samara, instructor on the Central Committee): Abram Deborine, a true defector (he rapidly climbed the echelons of a career of “red professor”, stuffing our heads with Dialectical Materialism and Historical Materialism…); Alexander Goikhbarg (member of the Soviet Revolutionary Committee, public prosecutor at the trial of the ministers of Kolchak, member of the college of the Commissariat for Justice, then president of the Little Sovnarkom). Some of them held out for some time until their arrest, such as I. Liakhovetski–Maïski1883; the others, in great numbers, were reduced very early to silence, from the trial of the imaginary “Unified Menshevik Bureau” of 1931 (where we find Guimmer–Sukhanov who was the designer of the tactics of the Executive Committee in March 1917.) A huge raid was organised throughout the Union to apprehend them. There were defectors in the S.–R.: Lakov Lifchitz, for example, vicepresident of the Chernigov Cheka in 1919, then Kharkov, then president of the Kiev Cheka and, at the height of a rapid career, vice‐president of the Ukrainian GPU. There was anarchist communists, the most famous being Lazar Kogan (Special Section of the Armies, Assistant to the Chief of the Army of the Vecheka in 1930—senior official of the Gulag and, in 1931, chief of the White Sea shipyard of the NKVD). There are extremely sinuous biographies: Ilya Kit– Viitenko, a lieutenant in the Austrian army, taken prisoner by the Russians, and from the moment the Bolsheviks are in power, takes his ranks at the Cheka– Guepeou and then in the army and, in the 1930s, was one of the reformers of the Red Army. And then in the hole for twenty years!1884 And what about the Zionists? Let us remember: in 1906 they had posited and proclaimed that they could not stay away from the Russians’ fight against the yoke of the Autocracy, and they had actively engaged in the said battle. This did not prevent them, in May 1918 (when the yoke still weighed so heavily), to declare that, in matters of Russian domestic policy, they would henceforth be neutral, “very obviously in the hope of avoiding the risk” that the Bolsheviks “would accuse them of being counter‐revolutionaries.”1885 And at first—it worked. Throughout the year 1918 and during the first six months of 1919, the Bolsheviks left them alone: in the summer of 1918 they were able to hold the All‐Russian Congress of Jewish Communities in Moscow, and hundreds of these Communities had their “Palestinian Week”; their newspapers appeared freely and a youth club, the “Heraluts”1886, was created.—But in the spring of 1883RJE, t. 1, pp. 331, 419; t. 2, pp. 221 222, 230. ‒ 1884RJE, t. 2, pp. 36, 51 52, 176. ‒ 1885I. B. Shekhtman, Sovetskaia Rossiia, Sionizm i Izrail [Soviet Russia, Zionism, and Israel], BJWR-2, p. 31. 1886Ibidem, p. 315.
1919 local authorities undertook to ban the Zionist press here and there, and in the autumn of 1919 a few prominent figures were accused of “espionage for the benefit of England”. In the spring of 1920, the Zionists organised a Pan‐Russian Conference in Moscow. Result: all the participants (90 people) were interned in the Butyrka prison; some were condemned, but the penalty was not applied, following the intervention of a delegation of Jewish syndicates from America. “The Vecheka presidium declared that the Zionist organisation was counterrevolutionary, and its activity was now forbidden in Soviet Russia… From this moment began the era of clandestinity for the Zionists.”1887 M. Heifets, who is a thoughtful man, reminds us very well of this: did the October coup not coincide exactly with the Balfour declaration which laid the foundations of an independent Jewish state? Well, what happened?: “A part of the new Jewish generation followed the path of Herzl and Jabotinsky, while the other [let us precise: the biggest] yielded to temptation and swelled the ranks of the Lenin–Trotsky–Stalin band.” (Exactly what Churchill feared.) “Herzl’s way then appeared distant, unreal, while that of Trotsky and Bagritsky enabled the Jews to gain immediate stature and immediately become a nation in Russia, equal in right and even privileged.”1888 Also defector, of course, and not least, Lev Mekhlis, of the Poalei–Tsion. His career is well known: in Stalin’s secretariat, in the editorial board of the Pravda, at the head of the Red Army’s political sector, in the State Defence Commissariat and Commissioner of State Control. It was he who made our landing in Crimea in 1942 fail. At the height of his career: in the Orgburo of the Central Committee. His ashes are sealed in the wall of the Kremlin.1889 Of course, there was an important part of the Jews of Russia who did not adhere to Bolshevism: neither the rabbis, the lecturers, nor the great doctors, nor a whole mass of good people, fell into the arms of the Bolsheviks. Tyrkova writes in the same passage in her book, a few lines later: “This predominance of the Jews among the Soviet leaders put to despair those of the Russian Jews who, despite the cruel iniquities suffered under the tsarist regime, regarded Russia as the Motherland and led the common life of all Russian intelligentsia, refusing, in communion with her, any collaboration with the Bolsheviks.”1890— But at the time they had no opportunity of making themselves heard publicly, and these pages are naturally filled not with their names, but with those of the conquerors, those who have bridled the course of events. Two illustrious terrorist acts perpetrated by Jewish arms against the Bolsheviks in 1918 occupy a special place: the assassination of Uritsky by Leonid Kannegisser, and the attack on Lenin by Fanny Kaplan. Here too, though the other way around, was expressed the vocation of the Jewish people to be always among the first. Perhaps the blows fired at Lenin were rather the result 1887S. Hepshtein, Rousskie sionisty v barbe za Palestinou [The Russian Zionists in the Fight for Palestine], BJWR-2, pp. 390 392. ‒ 1888Heifets, “22”, 1980, no. 14, p. 162. 1889RJE, t. 2, pp. 276 277. ‒ 1890Ariadna Tyrkova‐Williams, op. cit., p. 299.
of S.–R. intentions1891. But, as for Kannegisser (born of hereditary nobility by his grandfather, he entered the School of Officer Cadets in 1917; by the way, he was in friendly relations with Sergei Yesenin), I admit full well Mark Aldanov’s explanation: in the face of the Russian people and History, he was moved by the desire to oppose the names of Uritsky and Zinoviev with another Jewish name. This is the feeling he expresses in a note transmitted to his sister on the eve of the attack, in which he says he wants to avenge the peace of Brest‐Litovsk, that he is ashamed to see the Jews contribute to install the Bolsheviks in power, and also avenge the execution of his companion of the School of artillery at the Cheka of Petrograd. It should be noted, however, that recent studies have revealed that these two attacks were perpetrated under suspicious circumstances.1892 There is strong presumption that Fanny Kaplan did not shoot Lenin at all, but was apprehended “to close the case”: a convenient culprit, by chance. There is also a hypothesis that the Bolshevik authorities themselves would have created the necessary conditions for Kannegisser to fire his shot. This I strongly doubt: for what provocation would the Bolsheviks have sacrificed their beloved child, president of the Cheka? One thing, however, is troubling: how is it that later, in full Red Terror, when was attained by force of arms, through the entire country, thousands of innocent hostages, totally unconnected with the affair, the whole Kannegisser family was freed from prison and allowed to emigrate… We do not recognise here the Bolshevik claw! Or would it be the intervention of a very long arm to the highest ranking Soviet instances?—A recent publication tells us that the relatives and friends of L. Kannegisser had even drawn up an armed attack plan against the Cheka of Petrograd to free their prisoner, and that all, as soon as they were arrested, were released and remained in Petrograd without being disturbed. Such clemency on the part of the Bolshevik authorities may be explained by their concern to avoid ill feelings with the influential Jewish circles in Petrograd. The Kannegisser family had kept its Judaic faith and Leonid’s mother, Rosalia Edouardovna, declared during an interrogation that her son had fired on Uritsky because he “had turned away from Judaism.”1893 But here is a Jewish name that has not yet obtained the deserved celebrity: Alexander Abramovich Vilenkin, hero of the clandestine struggle against the Bolsheviks. He was a volunteer in the hussars at the age of seventeen, in 1914, he was decorated four times with the Cross of Saint George, promoted to officer, then, on the eve of the revolution, he became captain of cavalry; in 1918, he joined the clandestine organisation Union for the Defence of the Homeland and of Liberty; he was apprehended by the Cheka at the time when, as the organisation had been discovered, he was delaying the destruction of compromising documents. Focused, intelligent, energetic, uncompromising 1891Party of Socialists Revolutionaries (S–R.). 1892B. Orlov, Mif o Fanni Kaplan [The Myth of Fanny Kaplan], ME, 1975, no. 2; G. Nilov. Ouritski, Voldarski, and others, Strana i Mir, Munich, 1989, no. 6. 1893Nikolaï Koniaev, On oubival, slovno pisal stikhotvorenic [He killed as he would have written verses], Don, pp. 241, 250 252. ‒
towards the Bolsheviks, he infused in others the spirit of resistance. Executed by the Bolsheviks—it goes without saying. (The information about him came to us from his comrade‐in‐arms in the underground in 1918, and also from his cellmate in 1919, Vasily Fyodorovich Klementiev, captain in the Russian army.1894) These fighters against Bolshevism, whatever their motivations, we venerate their memory as Jews. We regret that they were so few, as were too few the White forces during the civil war.
A very prosaic and entirely new phenomenon reinforced the victory of the Bolsheviks. These occupied important positions, from which many advantages resulted, notably the enjoyment in both capitals of “vacant” apartments freed by their owners, “former aristocrats”, now on the run. In these apartments could live a whole tributary flock of the former Pale of Settlement. This was a real “exodus”! G. A. Landau writes: “The Jews have climbed the stairs of power and occupied a few ‘summits’… From there, it is normal that they brought (as they do everywhere, in any environment) their relatives, friends, companions from their youth… A perfectly natural process: the granting of functions to people who are known, trusted, protected, or simply begging for your favours. This process multiplied the number of Jews in the Soviet state apparatus.”1895 We will not say how many Zinoviev’s wife, Lilina, thus brought parents and relatives, nor how Zinoviev distributed positions to his ‘own’. They are the focus, but the influx, not to have been noticed at the moment, was enormous and concerns tens of thousands of people. The people transmigrated en masse from Odessa to Moscow. (Is it known that Trotsky himself gratified his father, whom he moderately loved, of a Sovkhoz in the suburbs of Moscow?) These migrations can be followed throughout biographies. So that of David (not to be confused with Mark) Azbel. In 1919, still a kid, he left Chemigov where he was born to come to Moscow where his two aunts already lived. He first lived in the house of one of them, Ida, “a wealthy merchant of the First Guild”, whose husband had returned from America, and then with the other, Liolia, who was housed in the First House of the Soviets (The National) with all the best of the Soviet Union. Their neighbour Ulrich, who would later become famous, said jokingly: “Why don’t we open a synagogue in the National where only Jews live?” A whole Soviet elite then left Saint Petersburg to settle in the Second House of the Soviets (the Metropolis), in the Third (the Seminary, Bojedomski Street), in the Fourth (Mokhovaya / Vozdvijenka street) and in the Fifth (Cheremetievski street). These tenants received from a special distribution centre abundant parcels: “Caviar, cheese, butter, smoked sturgeon were never
1894V. F. Klementiev, V bolchevitskoï Moskve: 1918 1920 [In the Moscow of the Bolsheviks], ‒ M., Rousski Pout (Russian Memories, series: Our close past, book 3). 1895Landau, RaJ, p. 110.
lacking on their table” (we are in 1920). “Everything was special, designed especially for the new elite: kindergartens, schools, clubs, libraries.” (In 1921‒ 22, the year of the murderous famine on the Volga and the help of TARA1896, in their “model school, the canteen was fed by the ARA foundation and served American breakfasts: rice pudding, hot chocolate, white bread, and fried eggs.”) And “no one remembered that, the day before, it was vociferated in the classrooms that the bourgeois should be hung high on the lantern.” “The children of the neighbouring houses hated those of the ‘Soviet Houses’ and, at the first opportunity, went after them.” The NEP came. The tenants of the National then moved into cosy apartments or pavilions that had previously belonged to aristocrats or bourgeois. In 1921: “spend the summer in Moscow, where you suffocate?”, no, you are invited to an old mansion, now confiscated, in the outskirts of Moscow. There, “everything is in the state, as in the days of the former owners”… except that high fences are erected around these houses, that guards are posted at the entrance… Wives of the commissioners began to frequent the best spas of the West. We see the development, owed to the scarcity of food, of misery and the concealment of foodstuffs, a second‐hand trade and a whole traffic of goods. “Having bought for peanuts an entire lot of commodities from emigrating merchants, Aunt Ida and Uncle Micha sold them under the table” and thus became “probably the richest people in all of Moscow.”—However, in 1926 they were sentenced to five years’ imprisonment for “economic counterrevolution”, to which were added, at the end of the NEP, ten years of camp.1897 Let us also quote: “When the Bolsheviks became ‘the government’, all sorts of individuals from the Jewish sub‐proletariat joined them, wishing to get their share.”1898—And as free trade and private enterprise were forbidden, many Jewish families saw their daily lives greatly modified: “The middle‐aged people were mostly deprived, while the younger ones, rid of all spiritual ‘ballast’, by having social careers, were able to maintain their elders… Hence the excessive number of Jews in the Soviet state apparatus.” Note: the author does not justify this process by calling it a “unique issue”, but he notes with grief the aspect that counts: “This destructive process did not meet the resistance it would have required in the Jewish milieu,” on the contrary, it found there “voluntary executants and a climate of sympathy.”1899 It is thus that many Jews entered the Soviet ruling class. But could this process, however occult as it was, go unnoticed by the disadvantaged Russian social strata? And how could the man in the street react? Either by jeers: “Rosa of the Sovnarkhoz”, “the husband of Khaïka of the Cheka”. Or by funny stories, from those that flooded Russia as early as 1918: “Vyssotski tea, Brodsky sugar, 1896American Relief Administration (1919 1923) the Hoover commission rescued the victims ‒ of the 1922 famine in Russia. 1897D. Azbel, ME, 1989, no. 104, pp. 192 196, 199, 203, 209, 223, 225 226. ‒ ‒ 1898V. S. Mandel, RaJ, p. 200. 1899Landau, RaJ, pp. 111 112. ‒
Trotsky Russia.” And, in Ukraine, it gave: “Hop! Harvest Workers / All Jews are bosses!” And they began to whisper a new slogan: “The Soviets without the Jews!” The co‐authors of the book of Russia and the Jews became alarmed in 1924: it is clear that “not all Jews are Bolsheviks and all Bolsheviks are not Jews, but there is no need today to prove the zealous participation of the Jews in the martyrdom imposed on an exsanguinate Russia by the Bolsheviks. What we must, on the contrary, is try to elucidate in a calm manner how this work of destruction was refracted in the consciousness of the Russian people. The Russians had never seen any Jews in command before.”1900 They now saw them today at every step. Invested with a ferocious and unlimited power. “To answer the question of Judaism’s responsibility in the emergence of Bolshevik Jews, we must first consider the psychology of non‐Jews, that of all these Russians who suffer directly from the atrocities committed… The Jewish actors of public life who wish to prevent any new bloody tragedy, to save the Jews of Russia from new pogroms, must take account of this fact.”1901 We must “understand the psychology of the Russians who suddenly found themselves under the authority of an evil, arrogant, rude, self‐confident and impudent brood.”1902 It is not for the purpose of settling accounts that we must remember History. Nor to reassume mutual accusations. But to understand how, for example, it was possible for important layers of a perfectly correct Jewish society to have tolerated an enormous participation of Jews in the rise (1918) of a State that was not only insensitive to the Russian people, foreign to Russian history, but which, moreover, inflicted on the population all the outbursts of terror. The presence of Jews alongside the Bolsheviks raises questions not because it would induce a foreign origin to this power. When we speak of the abundance of Jewish names in revolutionary Russia, we paint a picture of nothing new: how many Germanic and Baltic names have figured, for a century and a half to two centuries, in The tsarist administration? The real question is: in what direction did this power work? D. S. Pasmanik, however, gives us this reflection: “Let all the Russians who are capable of reflecting ask themselves whether Bolshevism, even with Lenin at its head, would have triumphed if there had been in Soviet Russia a satisfied and educated peasantry owning land? Could all the ‘Sages of Zion’ gathered together, even with a Trotsky at their head, be able to bring about the great chaos in Russia?”1903 He is right: they could never have done so.
1900I. M. Biekerman, RaJ, p. 22. 1901D. S. Pasmanik, RaJ, p. 212. 1902D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and Judaism], p. 200. 1903Ibidem, p. 157.
But the first to ask the question should be the Jews more than the Russians. This episode of History should call out to them today. The question of the mass participation of the Jews in the Bolshevik administration and the atrocities committed by the Jews should be elucidated in a spirit of far‐sighted analysis of History. It is not admissible to evade the question by saying: it was the scum, the renegades of Judaism, we do not have to answer for them. D. S. Chturmann is right to remind me of my own remarks about the communist leaders of any nation: “they have all turned away from their people and poured into the inhuman.”1904 I believe it. But Pasmanik, was right to write in the 20s: “We cannot confine ourselves to saying that the Jewish people do not answer for the acts committed by one or the other of its members. We answer for Trotsky as long as we have not dissociated ourselves from him.”1905 Now, to dissociate oneself does not mean to turn away, on the contrary, it means rejecting actions, to the end, and learning from them. I have studied Trotsky’s biography extensively, and I agree that he did not have any specifically Jewish attachments, but was rather a fanatical internationalist. Does this mean that a compatriot like him is easier to incriminate than the others? But as soon as his star rose, in the autumn of 1917, Trotsky became, for far too many people, a subject of pride, and for the radical left of the Jews of America, a true idol. What can I say of America? But of everywhere else as well! There was a young man in the camp where I was interned in the 50s, Vladimir Gershuni, a fervent socialist, an internationalist, who had kept a full conscience of his Jewishness; I saw him again in the 60s after our release, and he gave me his notes. I read there that Trotsky was the Prometheus of October for the sole reason that he was Jewish: “He was a Prometheus not because he was born such, but because he was a child of the Prometheus‐people, this people, who, if it was not attached to the rock of obtuse wickedness by the chains of a patent and latent hostility, would have done much more than he did for the good of humanity.” “All historians who deny the participation of Jews in the revolution tend not to recognise in these Jews their national character. Those, on the contrary, and especially Israeli historians, who see Jewish hegemony as a victory of the Judaic spirit, those ones exalt their belonging to Jewishness.”1906 It was as early as the 20s, when the civil war ended, that arguments were made to exonerate the Jews. I. O. Levin reviews them in the collection Russia and the Jews (the Bolshevik Jews were not so numerous as that… there is no reason why a whole people should respond to the acts of a few…, The Jews
1904Dora Chturmann, Gorodou i mirou [Urbi and orbi], Paris–New York, Third Wave, 1988, p. 357. 1905D. S. Pasmanik, Rousskaia revolioutsia i evreistvo [The Russian Revolution and Judaism], p. 11. 1906Sonja Margolina. Das Ende der Lügen: Russland und die Juden im 20 Jahrhundert [The End of Lies: Russia and the Jews in the 20th Century], Berlin, Siedler Verlag, 1992, pp. 99‒ 100.
were persecuted in tsarist Russia…, during the civil war the Jews had to flee the pogroms by seeking refuge with the Bolsheviks, etc.), and he rejected them by arguing that it was not a matter of criminal responsibility, which is always individual, but a moral responsibility.1907 Pasmanik thought it impossible to be relieved of a moral responsibility, but he consoled himself by saying: “Why should the mass of the Jewish people answer for the turpitudes of certain commissioners? It is profoundly unjust. However, to admit that there is a collective responsibility for the Jews is to recognise the existence of a Jewish nation of its own. From the moment when the Jews cease to be a nation, from the day when they are Russians, Germans, Englishmen of Judaic confession, it is then that they will shake off the shackles of collective responsibility.”1908 Now, the twentieth century has rightly taught us to recognise the Hebrew nation as such, with its anchorage in Israel. And the collective responsibility of a people (of the Russian people too, of course) is inseparable from its capacity to build a morally worthy life. Yes, they are abounding, the arguments that explain why the Jews stood by the Bolsheviks (and we will discuss others, very solid, when we talk about the civil war). Nevertheless, if the Jews of Russia remember this period only to justify themselves, it will mean that the level of their national consciousness has fallen, that this consciousness will have lost itself. The Germans could also challenge their responsibility for the Nazi period by saying: they were not real Germans, they were the dregs of society, they did not ask for our opinion… But this people answers for its past even in its ignominious periods. How to respond? By endeavouring to conscientise it, to understand it: how did such a thing happen? Where lies our fault? Is there a danger that this will happen again? It is in this spirit that the Jewish people must respond to their revolutionary assassins as well as the columns of well‐disposed individuals who put themselves at their service. It is not a question here of answering before other peoples, but before oneself, before one’s conscience and before God. As we Russians must answer, both for the pogroms, and our incendiary peasants, insensible to all pity, and for our red soldiers who have fallen into madness, and our sailors transformed into wild beasts. (I have spoken of them with enough depth, I believe, in The Red Wheel, and I will add an example here: the Red Guard A. R. Bassov, in charge of escorting Shingaryov1909—this man passionate of justice, a popular intercessor—, began by collecting money from the sister of the prisoner—as a tip and to finance his transfer from the Peter and Paul fortress to the Mariinski hospital—and a few hours later, in the same night, he leads to
1907I. O. Levine, RaJ, p. 123. 1908D. S. Pasmanik, p. 198. 19091869 1918; Publicist, physician, one of the cadet leaders (K.D.). Deputy in the Duma in ‒ 1917, shot dead by the terrorists.
the hospital some sailors who coldly shoot down Shingaryov and Kokochkine.1910 1911 In this individual—so many homegrown traits!!) Answer, yes, as one answers for a member of one’s family. For if we are absolved of all responsibility for the actions of our compatriots, it is the very notion of nation which then loses all true meaning.
19101871 1918, jurist, leader of the Cadet party, deputy in the Duma in 1917, also shot down ‒ by the terrorists. 1911A. I. Chingariova, postface to Dnevnik A. Chingariova. Kak eto bylo: Petropavloskaia krepost [Journal of the fortress Peter and Paul, 27 Nov. 1917 5 Jan. 1918], 2nd ed., M., ‒ 1918, pp. 66 68. ‒
Chapter 16. During the Civil War
Trotsky once boasted that during the Civil War, “even” traveling in his special Revvoyensovet’s [Revolutionary Military Council] railroad coach, he was able to find time to acquaint himself with the latest works of French literature. Not that he realized exactly what he said. He acknowledged that he was able to find not just time, but room in his heart between appeals to the “revolutionary sailors,” forcibly mobilized units of Red Army, and a thrown order to execute every tenth soldier in a unit that wavered in battle. Well, he usually did not stay around to supervise carrying out such orders. Orchestrating a bloody war on the vast plains of Russia, he was absolutely untouched by the unprecedented sufferings of her inhabitants, by her pain. He soared aloft, above it all, on the wings of the international intoxication of the Revolution. The February Revolution was a Russian revolution: no matter how headlong, erroneous and pernicious it was, it did not aspire to burn down the entire pre-existing life, to annihilate the whole pre-revolutionary Russia. Yet immediately after the October [Bolshevik revolution], the Revolution spilled abroad and became an international and devastating plague, feeding itself by devouring and destroying social order wherever it spread — everything built was to be annihilated; everything cultivated — to be confiscated; whoever resisted — to be shot. The Reds were exclusively preoccupied with their grand social experiment, predestined to be repeated, expanded and implemented all over the world. From an easy, quick blow, the October coup snowballed into a fierce threeyear-long Civil War, which brought countless bloody calamities to all the peoples of Russia. The multinationality of the former Empire and the cannon recoil from the Great War complicated both the inhumane Bolshevik plot and its implementation. Unlike the French Revolution, which unfolded on the territory of mono-national France and did not see much foreign intervention apart from a short incursion of hostile troops, and with all its horrors being a national affair from beginning to end, the Russian Revolution was horribly aggravated by its multinational madness. It saw the strong participation of Red Latvians (then Russian subjects), former German and Austrian prisoners of war (organized into full-blown regiments like the Hungarians), and even large numbers of Chinese. No doubt the brunt of the fighting for the Reds was carried out by Russians;
some of them were drafted on pain of death while others volunteered in a mad belief they would be fighting for a happy future for themselves. Yet the Russian Jews were not lost in all that diversity. The politically active part of Russian Jewry, which backed the Bolshevik civic regime in 1917, now just as boldly stepped into the military structures of Bolsheviks. During the first years after the October Revolution in the midst of the internationalist frenzy, the power over this enormous land was effortlessly slipping into the hands of those clinging to the Bolsheviks. And they were overwhelmed by the newfound immensity of that power. They immediately began using it without a backward glance or any fear of control — some, without doubt, in the name of higher ideals, while others — in the name of lower ones (“obstinacy of fanaticism in some and ability to adapt in others”1912). At that time, nobody could imagine that the Civil War would ignite enormous Jewish pogroms, unprecedented in their atrocity and bloodshed, all over the South of Russia. We can judge the true nature of the multi-ethnic war from the Red pogrom during the suppression of the Kronstadt Uprising in March 1921. A well-known socialist-revolutionary and sociologist Pitrim Sorokin writes: “For three days, Latvian, Bashkir, Hungarian, Tatar, Russian, Jewish and international rabble, crazed by alcohol and the smell of blood, raped and killed without restraint.”1913 Or here is another recollection from ordinary witnesses. During the feast of the Epiphany in 1918, an Orthodox Sacred Procession stirred forth from the gates of the Kremlin in Tula — and an “international squad” gunned it down. Even with the ruthless international squads, the force of  the “Red Guard” alone was no longer sufficient. The Bolshevik regime needed a regular army. In 1918, “Lev Trotsky, with the help of Sklyansky and Jacov Sverdlov, created the Red Army.” “Many Jews were fighting in its ranks. Some units were entirely Jewish, like, for example, the brigade of Josef Furman.”1914 The Jewish share in the command corps the Red Army become large and influential and this trend continued for many years even after the end of the Civil War. This Jewish involvement has been researched by several Jewish authors and encyclopedias. In the 1980s, Israeli scholar Aaron Abramovich used many Soviet sources (including The Fifty-Year Anniversary of the Soviet Armed Forces, The Soviet Historical Encyclopedia, volumes of Directives of the Front Command of the Red Army) to compile detailed nominal rosters of highly ranked Jewish commanders (exclusively Jewish ones) in the Red Army during the period from the Civil War up to the aftermath of Second World War. Let’s skim through the pages allocated to the Civil War.1915 This is a very extensive roster; it begins with the Revvoyensoviet, where Abramovich lists L. 1912Г.А. Ландау. Революционные идеи в еврейской общественности // Россия и евреи: Сб. 1 (далее — РиЕ) / Отечественное объединение русских евреев за границей. Париж: YMCA-Press, 1978, с. 117 [1-е изд. — Берлин: Основа, 1924]. 1913Pitirim Sorokin. Leaves from a Russian Diary. New York: E.F.Button & Co., 1925, p. 267. 1914Краткая Еврейская Энциклопедия (далее — КЕЭ). Иерусалим: Кетер, 1976. Т. 1, с. 686.
Trotsky, E. Sklyansky, A. Rosengoltz, and Y. Drabkin-Gusev. Trotsky ordered the “establishment of fronts with headquarters, and formation of new armies,” and “Jews were present in almost all the revvoyensoviets of the fronts and armies.” (Abramovich lists the most prominent individuals: D. Vayman, E. Pyatnitsky, L. Glezarov, L. Pechyorsky, I. Slavin, M. Lisovsky, G. Bitker, Bela Kun, Brilliant-Sokolnikov, I. Khodorovsky). Earlier, at the onset of the Civil War, the Extraordinary Command Staff of the Petrograd Military District was headed by Uritsky, and among the members of the Petrograd Committee of Revolutionary Defense were Sverdlov (the chairman), Volodarsky, DrabkinGusev, Ya. Fishman (a leftist Socialist Revolutionary) and G. Chudnovsky. In May 1918 there were two Jews among the eleven commissars of military districts: E. Yaroslavsky-Gubelman (Moscow District) and S. Nakhimson (Yaroslavsky District). During the war, several Jews were in charge of armies: M. Lashevich was in charge of the 3rd — and later, of the 7th Army of Eastern Front; V. Lazarevich was in charge of the 3rd Army of the Western Front, G. Sokolnikov led the 8th Army of the Southern Front, N. Sorkin — the 9th, and I. Yakir — the 14th Army. Abramovich painstakingly lists numerous Jewish heads of staff and members of the revvoyensoviets in each of the twenty armies; then the commanders, heads of staff and military commissars of divisions (the list of the latter, i.e., those in charge of the ideological branch of command, was threetimes longer than the list of Jewish commanders of divisions). In this manner Abramovich describes brigades, regiments and separate detachments. He lists Jewish heads of political administrations and revolutionary military tribunals at all levels, noting that “especially large percentage of Jews can be found among political officers at all levels of the Red Army….” “Jews played an important role in the provision and supply services. Let’s name some of them….” “Jews occupied important positions in military medicine as well: heads of sanitary administrations of the fronts and armies, senior doctors of units and bodies of troops….” “Many Jews — commanders of large units and detachments — were distinguished for their courage, heroism and generalship” but “due to the synoptic character of this chapter we cannot provide detailed descriptions of the accomplishments of Jewish Red Army soldiers, commanders and political officers.” (Meticulously listing the commanders of armies, the researcher misses another Jew, Tikhon Khvesin, who happened to be in charge of the 4th Army of the Eastern Front, then — of the 8th Army of the Southern Front, and later of the 1st Army of the Turkestan Front.1916) The Russian Jewish Encyclopedia provides additional information about some commanders. (Here I would like to commend this encyclopedia (1994), for in our new free times its authors performed an honest choice — writing frankly about everything, including less than honorable things.)
1915Арон Абрамович. В решающей войне: Участие и роль евреев СССР в войне против нацизма. 2-е изд. Тель-Авив, 1982. Т. 1, с. 45-61. 1916Российская Еврейская Энциклопедия (далее — РЕЭ). 2-е изд., испр. и доп. М., 1997. Т. 3, с. 285.
Drabkin-Gusev became the Head of Political Administration of the Red Army and the Chief of the entire Red Army in 1921. Later he was the head of IstPart (Commission on the History of October Revolution and Bolshevist Party) and a big figure in the Comintern, and was buried in the Kremlin wall [in Moscow]. Mikhail Gaskovich-Lashkevich was a member of many revvoyensoviets, and later he was in charge of the Siberian Military District, and even later — the First Deputy Chairman of the Revvoyensoviet of the USSR (yet he was buried merely on the Field of Mars [in St. Petersburg]). Israel Razgon  was the military commissar of the Headquarters of Petrograd Military District and participated in the suppression of the Kronstadt Uprising; later, he was in charge of the Red Army of Bukhara, suppressing the uprising in Central Asia; still later he worked in the Headquarters of the Black See Fleet. Boris Goldberg was Military Commissar of the Tomskaya Guberniya, later of the Permskaya Guberniya, still later of the Privolzhskiy Military District, and even later he was in charge of the Reserve Army and was acknowledged as one of the founders of Soviet Civil Aviation. Modest Rubenstein was Deputy Head of the Revvoyensoviet of the Special Army, and later he was head of political administration of an army group. Boris Hippo was the Head of Political Administration of the Black Sea Fleet. (Later he worked in the political administrations of the Baltic Sea Fleet, the Turkestan Front, was the Head of Political Administration of the  CentralAsian Military District, and later  of the Caucasian Army.) Michail Landa was a head of the political division of an army, later — Deputy Head of Political Administration of the entire Red Army, and still later Head of Political Administration of the Byelorussian and then of the Siberian Military Districts. Lev Berlin was Commissar of the Volga Military Flotilla and later worked in the Political Administration of the Crimean Army and still later in that of the Baltic Fleet.1917 Yet how many outstanding characters acted at lower levels? Boris Skundin, previously a lowly apprentice of clockmaker Sverdlov, Sr., successively evolved into the military commissar of a division, commissar of army headquarters, political inspector of front, and, finally, into Deputy Head of Political Administration of the 1st Cavalry Army. Avenir Khanukaev was commander of a guerilla band who later was tried before the revolutionary tribunal for crimes during the capture of Ashgabat and acquitted, and in the same year of 1919 was made into political plenipotentiary of the TurkCommission of the All-Russian Central Executive Committee of the Soviet of People’s Commissars on Kashgar, Bukhara and Khiva. Moses Vinnitsky (“Mishka-Yaponchik”) was a member of the Jewish militia squad in Odessa 1905, and later a gang-leader; he was freed from a hard labor camp by the February Revolution and became a commander of a Jewish
1917РЕЭ, т. 1, с. 122, 340, 404, 515; т. 2, с. 120, 126, 434, 511.
fighting brigade in Odessa, simultaneously managing the entire criminal underworld of Odessa. In 1919 he was a commander of a special battalion and later he was in charge of an infantry regiment in the Red Army. His unit was “composed of anarchists and criminals.” In the end he was shot by his own side. Military commissar Isaiah Tzalkovich was in command of a composite company of the [Red] cadets during the suppression of the Kronstadt Uprising.1918 We can see extraordinary Jewish women in the higher Bolshevik ranks as well. Nadezda Ostrovskaya rose from the Head of Gubkom [Party Committee of a Guberniya, the highest executive authority in a guberniya] of Vladimir Guberniya to the post of the Head of Political Administration of the entire 10th Army. Revekka Plastinina headed Gubrevkom and later the Gubkom of Archangel Guberniya. Is it proper to mention here Cecilia Zelikson-Bobrovskaya, who was a seamstress in her youth, and became the Head of the Military Department of the Moscow Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks?1919 Or take one of the Furies of the Revolution Eugenia Bosh (or her sister Elena Rozmirovich)? Or another thing — the Soviets used  the phrase “Corps of Red Cossacks.” Yet those were not Cossacks who embraced communist ideology but plain bandits (who occasionally disguised themselves as Whites for deception). Those “Cossack Corps” were made of all nationalities from Romanians to Chinese with a full-blown Latvian cavalry regiment. A Russian, Vitaly Primakov, was in command and its Political Department was headed by I. I. Minz (by Isaac Greenberg in the Second Division) and S. Turovskiy was head of the Headquarters. A. Shilman was the head of operative section of the staff, S. Davidson managed the division newspaper, and Ya. Rubinov was in charge of the administrative section of the staff.1920 Since we began particularizing let’s look at the famous leaders of the Red Army, at those never-fading names: Vladimir Antonov-Ovseyenko, Vasily Blucher, Semyon Budyonny, Klim Voroshilov, Boris Dumenko, Pavel Dybenko, Aleksa Dundich, Dmitry Zhloba, Vasily Kikvidze, Epifan Kovtukh, Grigory Kotovsky, Philip Mironov, Mikhail Muravyov, Vitaly Primakov, Ivan Sorokin, Semyon Timoshenko, Mikhail Tukhachevsky, Ieronim Uborevich, Mikhail Frunze, Vasily Chapaev, Yefim Shchadenko, Nikolay Shchors. Why, couldn’t they pull it off without Jews? Or take hundreds and thousands of Russian generals and officers of the former Imperial Army, who served in the Red Army, though not in the political sections (they were not invited there), but in other significant posts. True, they
1918РЕЭ, т. 3, с. 61, 278, 305, 503. 1919РЕЭ, т. 1, с. 144; т. 2, с. 354, 388-389. 1920Червонное казачество: воспоминания ветеранов: [Сб.] М.: Воениздат, 1969.
had a commissar with a gun behind them, and many served on pain of execution of their hostage families especially in case of military failures. Yet they gave an invaluable advantage to the Reds, which actually might have been crucial for the eventual victory of Bolsheviks. Why, “just about half of the officers of the General Staff worked for the Bolsheviks.”1921 And we should not forget that initial and fatal susceptibility of many Russian peasants (by no means all of them, of course) to Bolshevik propaganda. Shulgin flatly noted: “Death to the Bourgeois” was so successful in Russia because the smell of blood inebriates, alas, so many Russians; and they get into a frenzy like wild beasts.”1922 Yet let’s avoid going into another unreasonable extreme, such as the following: “The most zealous executioners in Cheka were not at all the `notorious Jews,´ but the recent minions of the throne, generals and officers.”1923 As though they would be tolerated in there, in the Cheka! They were invited there with the only one purpose — to be executed. Yet why such a quicktemper? Those Jews, who worked in the Cheka, were, of course, not the “notorious Jews,” but quite young and “committed” ones, with revolutionary garbage filling their heads. And I deem that they served not as executioners but mostly as interrogators. The Cheka (“Extraordinary Commission,” Che-Ka) was established in December 1917. It instantly gained strength and by the beginning of 1918 it was already filling the entire populace with mortal fear. In fact, it was the Cheka that started the “Red Terror” long before its beginning was officially announced on September 5, 1918. The Cheka practiced terror from the moment of its inception and continued it long after the end of the Civil War. By January of 1918, the Cheka was “enforcing the death penalty on the spot without investigation and trial.” Then the country saw the snatching of hundreds and later thousands of absolutely innocent hostages, their mass executions at night or mass drowning in whole barges. Historian S. P. Melgunov, who himself happened to experience perilous incarceration in Cheka prisons, unforgettably reflected upon the whole epic story of the “Red Terror” in his famous book “Red Terror” in Russia 1918-1923. “There was not a single town or a district without an office of the omnipotent All-Russian Extraordinary Commission [that is, the Cheka], which from now on becomes the main nerve of state governance and absorbs the last vestiges of law”; “there was not a single place (in the RSFSR [Russian Federation]) without ongoing executions”; “a single verbal order of one man (Dzerzhinsky) doomed to immediate death many thousand people.” And even when investigation took place, the Chekists [members of the Cheka] followed their official instructions: “Do not look for evidence incriminating a suspect in 1921В.В. Шульгин. «Что нам в них не нравится…»: Об Антисемитизме в России [далее — В.В. Шульгин]. Париж, 1929, с. 145. 1922Там же, с. 157. 1923Б. Мирский. Чёрная сотня // Еврейская трибуна: Еженедельник, посвященный интересам русских евреев. Париж, 1924, 1 февраля, с. 3.
hostile speech or action against Soviet power. The very first question you should ask him is about the social class he belongs to, and what is his descent, upbringing, education and profession. It is these questions that should determine the suspect’s fate (the words of M. Latsis in the bulletin Red Terror on November 1, 1918 and in Pravda on December 25, 1918).” Melgunov notes: “Latsis was not original here, he simply rephrased the words of Robespierre in Convent about the mass terror: `To execute the enemies of the Fatherland, it is sufficient to establish their identities. Not punishment but elimination is required´.” Directives from the center are picked up and distributed all over Russia by the Cheka Weekly and Melgunov cites the periodical profusely: “Red Sword is published in Kiev … in an editorial by Lev Krainy we read: `Old foundations of morality and humanity invented by the bourgeoisie do not and cannot exist for us´…. A. certain Schwartz follows: `The proclaimed Red Terror should be implemented in a proletarian way…  If physical extermination of all servants of Tsarism and capitalism is the prerequisite for the establishment of the worldwide dictatorship of proletariat, then it wouldn’t stop us.´”1924 It was a targeted, pre-designed and long-term Terror. Melgunov also provides estimates of the body count of that “unheard-of swing of murders” (precise numbers were practically not available then). “Yet, I suppose these horrors … pale into insignificance with respect to the number of victims if compared to what happened in the South after the end of the Civil War. Denikin’s [the general of the White army in command of the South Russian front] rule was crumbling. New power was ascending, accompanied by a bloody reign of vengeful terror, of mere retaliation. At this point it was not a civil war, it was physical liquidation of a former adversary.” There were waves and waves of raids, searches, new raids and arrests. “Entire wards of prisoners are escorted out and every last man is executed. Because of the large number of victims, a machine-gun is used”; “they execute 15-16-years-old children and 60-years-old elders.” The following is a quote from a Cheka announcement in  the Kuban region: “Cossack villages and settlements, which give shelter to Whites and Greens [Ukrainian nationalists], will be destroyed, the entire adult population — executed, and all property — confiscated.” After Wrangel [another White general] left, “Crimea was dubbed the `All-Russian Cemetery´” (different estimates suggest the number of murdered as between 120,000 and 150,000). “In Sevastopol people were not just shot but hanged, hanged by dozens and even by hundreds,” Nakhimov Prospect [a major street] was lined with the corpses of the hanged … people arrested on the streets and hastily executed without trial.” Terror in the Crimea continued through 1921.1925 But no matter how deep we dig into the history of Cheka, special departments, special squads, too many deeds and names will remain unknown, covered by the decomposed remnants of witnesses and the ash of incinerated
1924С.П. Мельгунов. «Красный Террор» в России, 1918-1923. 2-е изд. доп. Берлин: Ватага, 1924, с. 43, 48, 57, 70-71, 72-73. 1925Там же, с. 50, 99, 100, 105, 109, 113.
Bolshevik documents. Yet even the remaining documents are overly eloquent. Here is a copy of a secret “Extract from the protocol of a meeting of the Political Bureau of the Central Committee of the All-Russian Communist Party of Bolsheviks” dated by April 18, 1919, obtained from the Trotsky archive at Columbia University. “Attended cc.[comrades] Lenin, Krestinsky, Stalin, Trotsky. Heard: …3. Statement of c. Trotsky that Jews and Latvians constitute a huge percentage of officials in the front-line Chekas, front-line and rear area executive commissions and central Soviet agencies, and that their percentage in the front-line troops is relatively small, and that because of this, strong chauvinist agitation is conducted among the Red Army soldiers with certain success, and that, according to c. Trotsky’s opinion, it is necessary to redistribute the Party personnel to achieve a more uniform representation of officials of all nationalities between front-line and rear areas. Decided: To propose cc. Trotsky and Smilga to draft an appropriate Directive of the Central Committee to the commissions responsible for the allotment of cadres between the central and local Soviet organizations and the front.”1926 Yet it is hard to believe that the meeting produced the intended effect. A contemporary researcher, the first who approached “the problem of the role and place of Jews (and other ethnic minorities) in Soviet machinery,” studied declassified archive documents and concluded that “at the initial stage of activity of the punitive agencies, during the `Red Terror,´ national minorities constituted approximately 50% of the central Cheka apparatus, with their representation on the major posts reaching 70%.”1927 The author provides September 25, 1918 statistical data: among the ethnic minorities — numerous Latvians and fairly numerous Poles “– the Jews are quite noticeable, especially among “major and active Cheka officials,” i.e., commissars and investigators. For instance, among the “investigators of the Department of CounterRevolutionary Activities — the most important Cheka department — half were Jews.”1928 Below are the service records of several Chekists of the very first call (from the Russian Jewish Encyclopedia).1929 Veniamin Gerson was in the Cheka from 1918, and from 1920 he was a personal referent to Dzerzhinsky. Israel Leplevsky, a former member of Bund, joined the Bolsheviks in 1917 and worked in the Cheka from 1918; he was the head of the State Political
1926Columbia University, New York, Trotsky’s Archive, bMs Russ 13 T-160, Дело: «Партийная переписка № 9 за 1919 г.», с. 9. 1927Л.Ю. Кричевский. Евреи в аппарате ВЧК-ОГПУ в 20-е годы // Евреи и русская революция: Материалы и исследования / Ред.-сост. О.В. Будницкий. Москва; Иерусалим: Гешарим, 1999, с. 321, 344. 1928Л.Ю. Кричевский. Евреи в аппарате ВЧК-ОГПУ в 20-е годы // Евреи и русская революция, с. 327-329. 1929РЕЭ, т. 1, с. 106, 124, 223, 288; т. 2, с. 22, 176, 302, 350, 393; т. 3, с. 374, 473.
Directorate [formed from the Cheka in 1922] of the Podolsk Guberniya and later  of the Special Department of Odessa. And he climbed all the way up to the post of head of the OGPU [Joint State Political Directorate, the successor to the Cheka] of USSR! Later he occupied posts of Narkom of Internal Affairs of Byelorussia and Uzbekistan. Zinovy Katznelson became a Chekist immediately after the October Revolution; later he was a head of special departments in several armies, and then of the entire Southern Front. Still later we can see him in the highest ranks in the Cheka headquarters, and even later at different times he was in charge of the Cheka of the Archangel Guberniya, the Transcaucasian Cheka, the North Caucasus GPU, the Kharkov GPU [another Cheka-successor secret police organization]; he also was deputy to the Narkom of Internal Affairs of Ukraine and deputy head of the entire GULag [that is, the government agency that administered the main Soviet penal labor camp systems]. Solomon Mogilevsky was chair of the Ivano-Voznesensk tribunal in 1917, then in charge of Cheka in Saratov. Later we find him again in an army tribunal; and after that he was in succession: deputy head of the Bureau of Investigations of the Moscow Cheka, head of Foreign Affairs Department of Cheka headquarters, and head of the Cheka of Transcaucasia. Did Ignaty Vizner contemplate the scale of his actions when he investigated the case of Nicolay Gumilev? Not likely — he was too busy. He served in the Special Section at the Presidium of Cheka headquarters, he was the founder of the Bryansk Cheka, and later he was an investigator in the case of the Kronstadt Uprising and a special plenipotentiary of the Presidium of the Cheka-GPU on cases of special importance. Lev Levin-Velsky, former member of the Bund [a Jewish socialist labor organization], was in charge of the Cheka of the Simbirsk Guberniya in 19181919, later  of the Special Department of the 8th Army, still later  of the Cheka of the Astrakhan Guberniya. Beginning in 1921, he was an envoy plenipotentiary of the central Cheka in the Far East, and later, from 1923, an envoy plenipotentiary of the OGPU in Central Asia. Still later, from the beginning of 1930, he worked in the Moscow OGPU. (And even later in his career he was deputy Narkom of Internal Affairs of the USSR.) Or consider Nahum (Leonid) Etington: active in the Cheka beginning in 1919, later head of the Cheka of the Smolensk Guberniya; still later he worked in the GPU of Bashkiria; it was he who orchestrated the assassination of Trotsky. Isaak (Semyon) Schwartz: in 1918-1919 he was the very first chair of the All-Ukranian Cheka. He was succeeded by Yakov Lifshitz who beginning in 1919 was the head of the Secret Operations Division and simultaneously a deputy head of the Cheka of the Kiev Guberniya; later he was deputy head of the Cheka of the Chernigov Guberniya, and still later — of the Kharkov Guberniya; and even later he was in charge of the Operative Headquarters of the
All-Ukrainian Cheka; still later, in 1921-1922, he ran the Cheka of the Kiev Guberniya. Let’s look at the famous Matvei Berman. He began his career in a districtCheka in the North Urals; in 1919 he was assigned as deputy dead of the Cheka of the Yekaterinburg Guberniya, from 1920 — head of Cheka of Tomsk Guberniya, from 1923 — of the Buryat-Mongolian Guberniya, from 1924 — Deputy Head of the OGPU of all of Central Asia, from 1928 — head of the OGPU of Vladivostok, from 1932 — head of the entire GULag and simultaneously a deputy Narkom of the NKVD [a successor organization to the Cheka, GPU and OGPU] (from 1936). (His brother Boris was in the State Intelligence Organs since 1920; in 1936 he served as deputy head of foreign intelligence section in the NKVD.) Boris Pozern, a commissar of the Petrograd Commune, substantially contributed to matching images of a Jew and that of a Chekist in people’s minds; on September 2, 1918, he co-signed the proclamation on “Red Terror” with Zinoviev and Dzerzhinsky. (The Encyclopedia missed one Aleksandr Ioselevich, secretary of the Petrograd Cheka, who had co-signed the Red Terror execution lists with Gleb Bokiy in September, 1918.) Yet there were others, even more famous individuals. For instance, Yakov Agranov, a Chekist, phenomenally successful in conducting repressions; he invented “Tagantzev’s Conspiracy” (through which he had killed Gumilev); he directed “cruel interrogations of participants of the Kronstadt Uprising.” Or take notorious Yakov Blumkin, who participated in the assassination of the German ambassador in 1918; he was arrested and later amnestied, and then served in Trotsky’s secretariat, and later — in Mongolia, Transcaucasia, the Middle East, and was shot in 1929. And there were numerous personnel behind every Cheka organizer…. And hundreds and thousands of innocents met them during interrogations, in basements and during the executions. There were Jews among the victims too. Those who suffered from the massive communist onslaught on the “bourgeoisie” were mostly merchants. “In the Maloarkhangelsk District, a merchant (Yushkevich) was placed on a red-hot cast-iron stove by members of a communist squad for failure to pay taxes.” (From the same source: some peasants, who defaulted on the surplus appropriation system, were lowered on ropes into water wells to simulate drowning; or, during the winter, they froze people into ice pillars for failure to pay revolutionary taxes. The particular sort of punishment depended on the imagination of the executioners.1930) Similarly, Korolenko described how two millers, named Aronov and Mirkin, were extrajudicially shot for not complying with absurd communist-mandated prices on flour.1931 Or here is another
1930С.С. Мослов. Россия после четырёх лет революции (далее С.С.Маслов). Париж: Русская печать, 1922. Кн. 2, с. 193. 1931П.И. Негретов. В.Г. Короленко: Летопись жизни и творчества, 1917-1921 / Под ред. А.В. Храбровицкого. Москва: Книга, 1990, с. 151-154, 232-236.
example. In 1913, former Kiev Governor Sukovkin advocated innocence of Beilis [during Beilis’ Trial]. When the Reds came, he was arrested. Thousands of Jews in Kiev signed a petition on his behalf, yet the Cheka had shot him nevertheless. How then can we explain that the Russian populace generally regarded the new terror as “Jewish terror”? Look how many innocent Jews were accused of that. Why was the perception that Chekists and Jews were all but the same so widespread among both the Reds and the Whites alike and among the people in general? Who is responsible for that? Many. And the White Army is also responsible as we discuss below. Yet not the least among these reasons is because of the Chekists themselves, who facilitated this identification by their ardent service on the highest posts in Cheka. Today we hear bitter complaints that it was not only Jews who clung to the power, and why any particular clemency should be expected from the Jewish Chekists? True. These objections, however, cannot alter the harsh certitude: the incredibly enormous power on an unimaginable scale had come into the hands of those Jewish Chekists, who at that time were supreme, by status and rank, representatives of Russian Jewry (no matter how horribly it sounds). And those representatives (again, not elected by their own people) were not capable of finding enough self-restraint and self-scrutinizing sobriety to come around, check themselves, and opt out. It is like the Russian cautionary proverb: “Ah, do not hurry to grab, first blow on your fingers” And the Jewish people (who did not elect those Chekists as their representatives), that already numerous and active city-dwelling community (weren’t there prudent elders among them?) also failed to stop them: be careful, we are a small minority in this country! (Yet who listened to elders in that age?) G. Landau writes: “Loss of affiliation with a social class overthrew the fine structure of Jewish society and destroyed the inner forces of resistance and even that of stability, sending even them under the chariot of triumphant Bolshevism.” He finds that apart from the ideas of socialism, separatist nationalism, and permanent revolution, “we were astonished to find among the Jews what we never expected from them — cruelty, sadism, unbridled violence — everything that seemed so alien to a people so detached from physical activity; those who yesterday couldn’t handle a rifle, today were among the vicious cutthroats.”1932 Here is more about the aforementioned  Revekka Plastinina-Maizel from the Archangel Guberniya Cheka: “Infamous for her cruelty all over the north of Russia…, [she] voluntarily `perforated napes and foreheads´… and personally shot more than one hundred men.” Or “about one Baka who was nicknamed `a bloody boy´ for his youth and cruelty” — first “in Tomsk and then as the head of the Cheka” of the Irkutsk Guberniya.1933 (Plastinina’s career carried her up
1932Г.А. Ландау. Революционные идеи в еврейской общественности // РиЕ, с. 117-118. 1933С.С. Маслов, с. 196.
right to a seat in the Supreme Court of RSFSR which she occupied in 1940s.1934) Some may recall the punitive squad of Mandelbaum in Archangel in the north of Russia, others — the squad of “Mishka-Yaponchik” in Ukraine…. What would you expect from  peasants in the Tambov Guberniya if, during the heat of the suppression of the great peasant uprising in this Central-Russian black-earth region, the dismal den of the Tambov Gubcom was inhabited by masterminds of grain allotments, secretaries of Gubcom P. Raivid and Pinson and by the head of the propaganda department, Eidman? (A. G. Shlikhter, whom we remember from Kiev in 1905, was there as well, this time as the chairman of the Executive Committee of the guberniya.) Y. Goldin was the Foodstuffs Commissar of the Tambov Guberniya; it was he who triggered the uprising by exorbitant confiscations of grain, whereas one N. Margolin, commander of a grain confiscation squad, was famous for whipping the peasants who failed to provide grain. (And he murdered them too.) According to Kakurin, who was the chief of staff to Tukhachevsky, a plenipotentiary representative of the Cheka headquarters in the Tambov Guberniya during that period was Lev Levin. Of course, not only Jews were in it! However, when Moscow took the suppression of the uprising into her own hands in February 1921, the supreme command of the operation was assigned to Efraim Sklyansky, the head of “Interdepartmental Anti-Banditry Commission,” — and so the peasants, notified about that with leaflets, were able to draw their own conclusions. And what should we say about the genocide on the river Don, when hundreds of thousands of the flower of Don Cossacks were murdered? What should we expect from the Cossack memories when we take into consideration all those unsettled accounts between a revolutionary Jew and a Don Cossack? In August 1919, the Volunteer Army took Kiev and opened several Chekas and found the bodies of those recently executed; Shulgin1935 composed nominal lists of victims using funeral announcements published in the reopened Kievlyanin; one can’t help noticing that almost all names were Slavic … it was the “chosen Russians” who were shot. Materials produced by the Special Investigative Commission in the South of Russia provide insights into the Kiev Cheka and its command personnel (based on the testimony of a captured Cheka interrogator)1936: “The headcount of the `Cheka´ staff varied between 150 and 300 … percentage-wise, there was 75% Jews and 25% others, and those in charge were almost exclusively Jews.” Out of twenty members of the Commission, i.e., the top brass who determined people’s destinies, fourteen were Jews. “All detained were kept either in the `Cheka´ building or in the Lukyanov’s prison…. A special shed was fitted for executions in the building on Institutskaya St. 40, on the corner with Levashovskaya St., where the main 1934РЕЭ, т. 2, с. 388-389. 1935В.В. Шульгин, Приложения, с. 313-318. 1936Чекист о ЧК (Из архива «Особой Следств. Комиссии на Юге России») // На чужой стороне: Историко-литературные сборники / Под ред. С.П.Мельгунова. Берлин: Ватага; Прага: Пламя, 1925. Т. 9, с. 111-141.
`Cheka´ office of the guberniya had moved from Ekaterininskaya St. An executioner (and sometimes `amateur´ Chekists) escorted a completely naked victim into a shed and ordered the victim to fall facedown on the ground. Then he finished the victim with a shot in the back of the head.  Executions were performed using revolvers (typically Colts). Usually because of the short distance, the skull of the executed person exploded into fragments…. The next victim was similarly escorted inside and laid down nearby…. When number of victims was exceeding … the capacity of the shed, new victims were laid down right upon the dead or were shot at the entrance of the shed…. Usually the victims went to their execution without resistance.” This is what the “people were whispering about.” Or take another incident, witnessed by Remizov (whom it is hard to suspect of anti-Semitism given his revolutionary-democratic past): “Recently there was a military training nearby, at the Academy, and one Red Army soldier said: `Comrades, lets not go to the front, it is all because of Yids that we fight!´ And someone with a brief-case asked him: `Which regiment are you from?´ And the soldier again: `Comrades, let’s not go to the front, it is all because of Yids!´ And that one with a briefcase ordered: `Shoot him!´ Then two other Red Army soldiers came out and the first one tried to flee. But he didn’t make it to the corner as others got him and shot him — his brain spilled over and there was a pool of blood.”1937 The Kronstadt Uprising had distinctly anti-Jewish character (and so all the more was it doomed): they destroyed portraits of Trotsky and Zinoviev [both Jewish], but not those of Lenin. And Zinoviev didn’t have guts to go to negotiate with the rebels — he would be torn into pieces. So they sent Kalinin [Russian]. There were labor strikes in Moscow in February 1921  that had the slogan: “Down with Communists and Jews!” We have already mentioned that during the Civil War the majority of Russian socialists (and there were numerous Jews among them) were, of course, on Lenin’s side, not on Admiral Kolchak’s and some of them actually fought for the Bolsheviks. (For example, consider Bund member Solomon Schwartz: during the period of the provisional government, he was a director of a department in a ministry; during the Civil War he volunteered to the Red Army though he did not indicate his rank; later he emigrated abroad where he published two books about the Jewish situation in the USSR; we will cite him below.) Thus it looked as though not only Bolshevik Jews, but all of Jewry had decided to take the Red side in the Civil War. Could we claim that their choice was completely deliberate? No. Could we claim that they didn’t have any other choice? Again, no. Shulgin describes the enormous exodus  from Kiev on October 1, 1919 as the city was to be surrendered to Bolsheviks. It was an entirely Russian exodus, people were leaving on foot with knapsacks, across the bridges over Dnepr
1937Алексей Ремизов. Взвихренная Русь. London: Overseas Publications, 1979, с. 376-377.
river; he estimated their numbers at around 60,000. “There were no Jews in this exodus: they were not noticeable among those many thousands of Russians (men, women and children), with bundles in their hands streaming across the beautiful Chain Bridge under a sorrowful net of rain.” There were more than 100,000 Jews in Kiev at that time, Shulgin writes. And all of those rich and very rich Jews — they didn’t leave, they chose to stay and wait for arrival of Bolsheviks. “The Jews decided not to share their fate with us. And with that they carved a new and possibly the deepest divide between us.”1938 So it was in many other places. According to the testimony of socialistrevolutionary S. Maslov: “It is a fact that in towns and cities of southern Russia, especially in cities to the west of the Dnepr that changed hands repeatedly, the arrival of Soviets was most celebrated and the most of hollow sympathy was expressed in the Jewish quarters, and not infrequently only in those alone.”1939 A contemporary American historian (Bruce Lincoln, author of a big treatise about our Civil War) “said that the entire Ukrainian Cheka was composed of almost 80% by Jews,” that “can be explained by the fact that, prior to arrival of the Reds, cruel pogroms went on non-stop; indeed those were the bloodiest pogroms since the times of Bogdan Khmelnytsky [leader of the Cossack rebellion in Ukraine in 1648-1657].”1940 We will discuss the pogroms soon, though it should be noted that the time sequence was actually the opposite: those 80% [Jews] were already staffing the Cheka in 1918, whereas the Petliura’s [a Ukrainian publicist, writer, journalist who  was head of state during the Ukrainian independence of 1918-1920] pogroms only gathered momentum during 1919 (the pogroms by White Army troops began in the fall of 1919). Yet it is impossible to answer the eternal question who is the guilty party, who pushed it into abyss. Of course, it is incorrect to say that the Kiev Cheka did what it did because it was three-quarters Jewish. Still, this is something that Jewish people should remember and reflect upon. And yes, there were Jews then who appealed to their compatriots looking back on the tragedy that had befallen both Russia and Russian Jewry. In their proclamation To the Jews of all countries!, this group wrote in 1923 that “overly zealous participation of Jewish Bolsheviks in the oppression and destruction of Russia … is blamed upon all of us … the Soviet rule is identified with Jewish rule, and fierce hatred of Bolsheviks turns into the equally fierce hatred of Jews…. [We] firmly believe that Bolshevism is the worst of all evils possible for the Jews and all other peoples of Russia, and that to fight tooth and nail against the rule of that international rabble over Russia is our sacred duty before humankind, culture, before our Motherland and the Jewish people.”1941 Yet the
1938В.В. Шульгин, с. 95-96. 1939С.С. Маслов, с. 44. 1940Изложение беседы с Б.Линкольном см.: В.Любарский. Что делать, а не кто виноват // Время и мы: Международный журнал литературы и общественных проблем. НьюЙорк, 1990, № 109, с. 134. 1941РиЕ, с. 6, 7.
Jewish community “reacted to these declarations with great indignation.”1942 (We will discuss it in the next chapter.)
The Civil War spilled over Russia’s borders. Let’s  review that briefly (though the events in Europe are outside of the scope of this book). The Bolsheviks invaded Poland in 1920. (At this point they had recalled and adroitly used the Russian “national longing and national enthusiasm” — as Nahamkis-Steklov put it in an Izvestia editorial.1943) And it appears that Polish Jews met the Red Army very warmly. According to a Soviet source, whole battalions of Jewish workers participated in the fighting at Minsk.1944 Reading from the Jewish Encyclopedia: “on numerous occasions, Poles accused Jews of supporting the enemy, of `anti-Polish´, `pro-Bolshevist´ and even `proUkrainian´ attitudes.” During the Soviet-Polish war many Jews “were killed [by Polish Army] on charges of spying for the Red Army.”1945 However, we should be wary of possible exaggerations here as we remember similar accusations in espionage made by Russian military authorities during the war, in 1915. The Soviets quickly formed a revolutionary “government” for Poland headed by F. Dzerzhinsky. In it were Y. Markhlevsky and F. Kon. Of course, they were surrounded by “blood work” specialists and ardent propagandists. (Among the latter we see a former pharmacist from Mogilev A. I. Rotenberg. Soon after the aborted Red revolution in Poland, he, together with Bela Kun and Zalkind-Zemlyachka, went on to conduct the deadly “cleansing” of the Crimea. In 1921 he participated in that glorious work again — this time “purging” Georgia, again under the direct command of Dzerzhinsky. At the end of 1920s Rotenberg was in charge of the Moscow NKVD.) Not only Poland but Hungary and Germany as well were affected by the Red Revolution. An American researcher writes: “the intensity and tenacity of anti-Semitic prejudice in both the east and the center of Europe was significantly influenced by Jewish participation in the revolutionary movement.” “In the beginning of 1919, the Soviets, under predominantly Jewish leadership, started revolutions in Berlin and Munich,” and “the share of activist Jews was” disproportionately high in the German Communist Party of that period,” though “that party’s support in the Jewish community at large was not significant.” Four out of eleven members of the Central Committee were Jews with a university education.” In December 1918, one of them, Rosa Luxemburg, wrote: “In the name of the greatest aspirations of humankind, our motto when we deal with our enemies is: “Finger into the eye, knee on the chest!” Rebellion in Munich was led by a theater critic, Kurt Eisner, a Jew of 1942Г.А. Ландау. Революционные идеи в еврейской общественности // РиЕ, с. 100. 1943Ю. Стеклов. Народная оборона — национальная оборона // Известия, 1920, 18 мая, с. 1. 1944Ю. Ларин. Евреи и антисемитизм в СССР. М.; Л.: ГИЗ, 1929, с.31. 1945КЕЭ, т 6, с.646; т. 1, с. 326.
“bohemian appearance.” He was killed, but the power in conservative and Catholic Bavaria was seized by “a new government made up of leftist intellectual Jews, who proclaimed the `Bavarian Soviet Republic´”(G. Landauer, E. Toller, E. Muhsam, O. Neurath) In a week the republic “was overthrown by an even more radical group,” which declared the “Second Bavarian Soviet Republic” with Eugen Levine at the helm.1946 Let’s read an article about him in the Encyclopedia: born into merchant Jewish family, he used to be a socialist-revolutionary; he participated in the [Russian] revolution of 1905, later became German national, joined the “Spartacist movement” of R. Luxemburg and K. Liebknecht, and now he became the head of  the Communist government in Bavaria, which also included the abovementioned E. Muhsam, E. Toller and a native of Russia, M. Levin.1947 The uprising was defeated in May 1919. “The fact that the leaders of the suppressed Communist revolts were Jews was one of the most important reasons for the resurrection of political antiSemitism in contemporary Germany.”1948 “While Jews played a  “quite conspicuous”  role in the Russian and German communist revolutions, their role in Hungary became central…. Out of 49 People’s Commissars there, 31 were Jews,” Bela Kun being the most prominent of them; “the foreign minister (de-facto head of government),” he would orchestrate a bloodbath in the Crimea half a year later. Here we find Matyas Rakosi, Tibor Szamuely, Gyorgy Lukacs. “Granted, the prime-minister was a gentile, Sandor Garbai, but Rakosi later joked that Garbai was elected because someone had to sign execution orders on Sabbath days.” “Statues of Hungarian kings and heroes were knocked off their pedestals, the national anthem outlawed, and wearing the national colors criminalized.” “The tragedy of the situation was escalated by the fact that historically Hungarian Jews were much wealthier than their Eastern-European countrymen and were much more successful in Hungarian society.”1949 The direct relation between the Hungarian Soviet Republic and our Civil War becomes more clear by the virtue of the fact that special Red Army Corps were being prepared to go to the rescue of the Hungarian Soviet Republic, but they couldn’t manage it in time and the Republic fell (in August 1919).
The breakdown of the universally hated Russian Empire cost all involved dearly, including the Jews. G. Landau writes: “In general, revolution is gruesome, risky and dangerous business. It is especially gruesome and dangerous for a minority, which in many ways is alien to the bulk of 1946Дж. Мюллер. Диалектика трагедии: антисемитизм и коммунизм в Центральной и Восточной Европе // “22”: Общественно-политический и литературный журнал еврейской интеллигенции из СССР в Израиле. Тель-Авив, 1990, № 73, с. 96, 99-100. 1947КЕЭ, т. 4, с. 733-734. 1948Дж. Мюллер. Диалектика трагедии… // “22”, 1990, № 73, с. 99. 1949Там же, с. 100-101.
population…. To secure their wellbeing, such minority should unwaveringly cling to law and rely on unshakable continuity of social order and on the inertia of statutory power. Forces of revolutionary misalignment and permissiveness hit such a minority particularly hard.”1950 It was looming — straight forward, into the so promising future! Yet in the near future, during the Civil War, there was no law and Jewry was hit by pillages and pogroms on the scale not even close to anything they experienced in days of the Tsar. And those pogroms were launched not by the White side. Because of the density of the Jewish population in Ukraine, it was inevitable that a third force, apart from the Reds and Whites, would interfere in the Jewish destinies — that of Ukrainian separatism. In April 1917, when the Ukrainian Rada [upper house of parliament] assembled for the first time, “Jewry … did not yet believe in the victory of Ukrainian Nationalism,” and that was manifested in the character of their voting during municipal summer elections: Jews did not have “any reason” to vote for Ukrainian separatists.1951 But already in June, when something resembling real independent Ukrainian governance was taking shape — under which apparently the Jews would have to live from now on — the Jewish representatives entered the Lesser [lower] Rada, and a Vice-Secretariat on Jewish nationality (“Jewish Ministry”) was established. The latter worked on the long-cherished project of “Jewish National Autonomy” (according to which every nationality and now — the Jewish one, creates its own national union, which can legislate according to the needs and interests of their nation and for that it receives financial support from the treasury, and a representative of the union becomes a member of the cabinet). Initially, the formative Ukrainian government was generally benevolent toward Jews, but by the end of 1917 the mood changed, and the bill on autonomy was met in the Rada with laughter and contempt; nevertheless, in January 1918, it was passed, though with difficulties. For their part, the Jews reluctantly accepted “the Third Universal” (November 9, 1917, the initiation of Ukrainian independence from Russia) as now they feared anarchy, traditionally dangerous for Jewish populations, and were afraid of a split within Russian Jewry. Still, Jewish philistines were making fun of the Ukrainian language and shop-signs, were afraid of Ukrainian nationalism, and believed in the Russian state and Russian culture.1952 Lenin wrote: Jews, like Great Russians, “ignore the significance of the national question in Ukraine.”1953 However, everything pointed  toward secession and the Jewish delegates in the Rada did not dare to vote against the Fourth Universal (January 11, 1918, on complete secession of Ukraine). Immediately thereafter, the Bolsheviks began an offensive against Ukraine. The first “Ukrainian” Central Committee of the Ukrainian Communist Party of Bolsheviks was formed in Moscow and later 1950Г.А. Ландау. Революционные идеи в еврейской общественности // РиЕ, с. 115. 1951И.Б. Шехтман. Еврейская общественность на Украине (1917-1919) //Книга о русском еврействе*, 1917-1967 (далее — КРЕ-2). Нью-Йорк: Союз Русских Евреев, 1968, с. 22. 1952Там же, с. 29, 30, 35. 1953В.И. Ленин. Сочинения: В 45 т. 4-е изд. М.: Госполитиздат, 1941-1967. Т. 30, с. 246.
moved to Kharkov; it was headed by Georgiy Pyatakov and among its members were Semyon Schwartz and Serafima Gopner. When by the end of January 1918 they moved to Kiev, Grigory Chudnovsky took the post of the Commissar of Kiev, Kreitzberg became a commissar of finances, D. Raikhstein ” press commissar, Shapiro — commissar of the army. “There was no shortage of Jewish names among the top Bolsheviks … in such centers as Odessa and Ekaterinoslav. That was sufficient to fuel talks about “Bolshevik Jews” and “Jewish Bolsheviks” among the troops loyal to the Rada. Verbal cursing about “traitorous Jews” became almost commonplace”; “in the very midst of street fighting [for Kiev], the Zionist fraction produced an official inquiry on the matter of anti-Jewish excesses.” The question turned into a “verbal skirmish between Ukrainian delegates and representatives of national minorities.”1954 Thus enmity split apart the Jews and the Ukrainian separatists. “The Ukrainian government and the leaders of Ukrainian parties were evacuated to Zhitomir, but the Jewish representatives did not follow them,” they remained under the Bolsheviks. And in addition, the Bolsheviks in Kiev were “supported by a sizable group of Jewish workers, who returned from England after the [February, Kerensky] revolution” and who now wholly siding with the Soviet regime … took up the posts of commissars and … officials,” and created a “special Jewish squad of Red Guards.”1955 Yet soon after the conclusion of the Treaty of Brest-Litovsk [in which the Soviets ceded Ukraine to the Central Powers] as the government of independent Ukraine returned to Kiev under the aegis of Austrian and German bayonets in the beginning of February of 1918, the “haidamakas” [spontaneous, popular uprisings against Polish rule that took place in Ukraine in the 18th century] and “free Cossacks” began snatching and shooting  any former “Jewish commissars,” they could find. Yet those were not actual Jewish pogroms, and very soon Petliura’s government was replaced by the Hetman government of [Cossack leader] Skoropadsky for the next seven months. “The command of the units of the German Army that had occupied Kiev in the spring, treated the needs of Jewish population with understanding.” (And that population was notinsubstantial: in 1919, 21% of Kiev’s inhabitants were Jewish.1956) A Jewish Kadet [a member of Russian Constitutional Democrat Party] Sergei Gutnik became the Minister of Trade and Industry in the Hetman government.1957 Under the Hetmanate, Zionists acted without hindrance, and an independent Jewish Provisional National Assembly and a Jewish National Secretariat were elected. Yet  Hetmanate fell and in December 1918 Kiev came under the control of the Directorate of Ukraine led by Petliura and Vynnychenko. The Bund and Poale-Zion [a movement of Marxist Jewish workers] did their best to help their fellow socialists of the Directorate and Jewish Secretariat and also made
1954И.Б. Шехтман. Еврейская общественность… // КРЕ-2, с. 33-34. 1955И.Б. Шехтман. Еврейская общественность… // КРЕ-2, с. 35-37. 1956КЕЭ, т. 4, с. 256. 1957РЕЭ, т. 1, с. 407.
conciliatory moves. But Petliura saw it differently. His mouthpiece, the newspaper Vidrodzhennya wrote: “The birth of the Ukrainian State was not expected by the Jews. The Jews did not anticipate it despite having an extraordinary ability of getting the wind of any news. They … emphasize their knowledge of Russian language and ignore the fact of Ukrainian statehood … Jewry again has joined the side of our enemy.”1958 Jews were blamed for all the Bolshevik victories in Ukraine. In Kiev, the Sich Riflemen plundered apartments of wealthy people which in masse came over to the capital while the military and atamans [originally Cossack commanders, then used by the Ukrainian National Army] robbed smaller towns and shtetls. That year, a regiment named after Petliura inaugurated mass pogroms by pillaging the town of Sarny. A Jewish deputy from the Lesser Rada attempted to ward off the growing tendency toward pogroms among Petliura’s troops: “We need to warn Ukrainians that you cannot found your state on anti-Semitism. Leaders of the Directorate should remember that they are dealing with the world’s people, which outlived many of its enemies” and threatened to start a struggle against such government.1959 Jewish parties quickly began to radicalize toward the Left, thus inevitably turning their sympathies to Bolshevism. Arnold Margolin, then Deputy Minister of Foreign Affairs of Ukraine, said that the situation in Ukraine was reminiscent of the worst times of Khmelnytsky and Gonta [Cossack leader against Polish occupation of Ukraine].1960 D. Pasmanik bitterly noted that Zionists and Jewish nationalists supported the Directorate’s government for a while even when anti-Jewish pogroms raged across Ukraine1961: “How could Jewish socialists forget about the pogromist attitudes of Petliura and other heroes of the Ukrainian Revolution”.. How could they forget about the Jewish blood shed by the descendants and disciples of Khmelnytsky, Gonta and Zalizniak”1962 “Between December 1918 and August 1919, Petliura’s troops carried out dozens of pogroms, killing, according to the Commission of International Red Cross, around 50,000 Jews. The largest pogrom happened on February 15, 1919, in Proskurov after a failed Bolshevik coup attempt.”1963 “Jewish pogroms that went on non-stop from the very moment of Ukrainian independence became particularly ferocious during the period of the so-called Directorate and kept going until the Ukrainian armed forces existed.”1964 S. Maslov writes: “True, in the Tsar’s times Jews were killed during pogroms but they have never had been killed in such numbers as now and with
1958И.М. Троцкий. Еврейские погромы на Украине и в Белоруссии 1918-1920 гг. // КРЕ2*, с. 59. 1959Там же, с. 62. 1960Там же. 1961Д.С. Пасманик. Чего же мы добиваемся? // РиЕ, с. 211. 1962И.М. Бикерман. Россия и русское еврейство // РиЕ, с. 66-67. 1963КЕЭ, т. 6, с. 570. 1964И.М. Бикерман. Россия и русское еврейство // РиЕ, с. 65.
such callous indifference”; “sometimes during anti-Jewish pogroms by rebellious peasant bands the entire shtetls were exterminated with indiscriminate slaughter of children, women and elders.”1965 After the pogromists finished with their business, peasants from surrounding villages usually arrived on wagons to join in looting commercial goods often stored in large amounts in the towns because of the unsettled times.1966 “All over Ukraine rebels attacked passenger trains and often commanded `communists and Jews to get out´ of the coach and those who did were shot right on the spot”; or, checking papers of passengers, “suspected Jews were ordered to pronounce `kukuruza´ [corn]) and those who spoke with an accent were escorted out and executed.”1967 American scholar Muller thinks that “the mass extermination of Jews in Ukraine and Byelorussia during the Civil War was by no means a result of articulated policy but rather a common peasant reaction.”1968 Independent rebellious bands of Grigoriev, Zelyony, Sokolovsky, Struk, Angel, Tyutyunik, Yatzeiko, Volynetz and Kozyr-Zirka were particularly uncontrolled and because of this acted with extreme atrocity. However, Nestor Makhno was different. The raging Civil War provided fertile soil for the self-realization of Makhno’s criminal and rebellious personality. We are not going to recount his villainous and clinically-mad deeds in this work, yet it should be noted that he did not harbor anti-Jewish attitudes and that his anarchist-communist followers loudly proclaimed their “implacable hostility toward any form of antiSemitism.” At different times, a certain Aaron Baron was his Chief of Staff, Lev Zadov-Zenkovsky was his head of counter-intelligence, Volin-Eikhenbaum was head of Makhno’s agitprop, Arshinov was his close adviser, and one Kogan headed Administration of Huliaipole [his “capital”]. There was even a 300strong separate Jewish company among his troops,  led by Taranovsky, and though at one point they betrayed Makhno, nevetheless Taranovsky was later pardoned and even made the Makhno’s Chief of Staff . “The Jewish poor joined Makhno’s army in masses” and allegedly Makhno trapped and executed ataman Grigoriev for the latter’s anti-Semitism. In March 1919 Makhno executed peasants from Uspenovka village for a pogrom in the Jewish agricultural colony Gorkoye. However, despite his indisputable pro-Jewish stance (later in emigration in Paris “he was always in a Jewish milieu” until his death), his often uncontrollable troops carried out several Jewish pogroms, for instance, in 1918 near Ekaterinoslav1969 or in the summer of 1919 in Aleksandrovsk, though Makhno and his officers rigorously protected Jewish populations and punished pogromists with death.”1970 1965С.С. Мослов, с. 25, 26. 1966Ю. Ларин. Евреи и антисемитизм в СССР, с. 40, 41. 1967С.С. Маслов, с. 40. 1968Дж. Мюллер. Диалектика трагедии… // “22”, 1990, № 73, с. 97. 1969В. Литвинов. Махно и евреи // “22”, 1983, № 28, с. 191-206. 1970КЕЭ, т. 6, с. 574.
To examine the anti-Jewish pogroms during the Russian Civil War, we consult a large volume Jewish Pogroms: 1918-1921 compiled by Jewish Public Committee for Aid to Victims of Pogroms in 1923 and published later in 1926.1971 (The year of publication explains why we find nothing about pogroms by the Reds — the book “aims to examine the roles of Petliura’s troops, the Volunteer [White] Army, and Poles in the carnage of pogroms in the described period.”) Regular troops participated in pogroms in larger cities and towns as they marched, whereas independent bands acted in the hinterlands, thus effectively denying the Jews safety anywhere. Pogroms by Petliura’s troops were particularly atrocious and systematic and sometimes even without looting, such as, for example, pogroms in Proskurov, Felsztyn and Zhytomir in February of 1919, Ovruch in March, Trostyanets, Uman and Novomirgorod in May 1919. The worst pogroms by bands were in Smila (March 1919), Elisavetgrad, Radomyshl, Vapniarka and Slovechno in May 1919, in Dubovka (June 1919); by Denikin’s troops — in Fastov (September 1919) and Kiev (October 1919). In Byelorussia, there were pogroms by Polish troops, for example, in Borisov and in the Bobruisk District, and by Polish-supported troops of Bulak-Balachowicz in Mazyr, Turov, Petrakov, Kapatkevitchy, Kovchitsy and Gorodyatitchy (in 1919, 1920, and 1921). Ukrainian Jewry was horrified by the murderous wave of pogroms. During brief periods of respite, the Jewish population fled en masse from already pillaged or threatened places. There was indeed a mass exodus of Jews from shtetls and small towns into larger cities nearby or toward the border with Romania in a foolish hope to find aid there, or they simply “aimlessly fled in panic” as they did from Tetiiv and Radomyshl. “The most populous and flourishing communities were turned into deserts. Jewish towns and shtetls looked like gloomy cemeteries — homes burnt and streets dead and desolated. Several Jewish townships were completely wrecked and turned into ashes — Volodarka, Boguslav, Borshchagovka, Znamenka, Fastov, Tefiapol, Kutuzovka and other places.”1972
Let us now examine the White side. At first glance it may appear counterintuitive that Jews did not support the anti-Bolshevik movement. After all, the White forces were substantially more pro-democratic then Bolsheviks (as it was with [White generals] Denikin and Wrangel) and included not only monarchists and all kinds of nationalists but also many liberal groups and all varieties of anti-Bolshevik socialists. So why didn’t we see Jews who shared the same political views and sympathies there?
1971Еврейские погромы, 1918-1921 / Сост. З.С. Островский. М.: Акц. об-во «Школа и книга», 1926. 1972Еврейские погромы, 1918-1921, с. 73-74.
Fateful events irredeemably separated the Jews from the White movement. The Jewish Encyclopedia informs us that “initially many Jews of Rostov supported the White movement. On December 13, 1917 a merchant prince, A. Alperin, gave 800,000 rubles collected by the Jews of Rostov to A. Kaledin, the leader of Don Cossacks, `to organize anti-Bolshevik Cossack troops.”1973 Yet when General Alekseev [another White commander] was mustering his first squadron in December 1917 in the same city of Rostov and needed funds and asked (note — asked and did not impress) the Rostov-Nakhichevan bourgeoisie (mainly Jewish and Armenian) for money, they refused and he collected just a dab of money and was forced to march out into the winter with unequipped troops — into his Ice March. And later “all appeals by the Volunteer Army were mostly ignored, yet whenever the Bolsheviks showed up and demanded money and valuables, the population obediently handed over millions of rubles and whole stores of goods.”1974 When former Russian prime minister (of the Provisional Government) prince G. E. Lvov, begging for aid abroad, visited New York and Washington in 1918, he met a delegation of American Jews who heard him out but offered no aid.1975 However, Pasmanik quotes a letter saying that by the end of 1918 “more than three and half millions rubles … were being collected in the exclusive Jewish circle” with accompanying “promises and reassurances” of goodwill toward Jews from the White authorities. Despite that, Jews were officially prohibited to buy land in the Chernomorskaya Guberniya because of “vicious speculations by several Jews,” though the order was revoked soon afterwards.1976 Here is another example from my own sources: again in Rostov in February 1918 when the White movement was merely nascent and seemed almost hopeless, an elderly Jewish engineer and manufacturer A. I. Arkhangorodsky, who sincerely considered himself a Russian patriot, literally pushed his reluctant student son into joining the White youth marching out into the night [February 22], embarking on their Ice March (however, his sister didn’t let him go). The Jewish Encyclopedia also tells us that the “Jews of Rostov were joining Cossack guerilla squadrons and the student’s battalion of [White] general L. Kornilov’s army.”1977 In Paris in 1975, Col.  Levitin, the last surviving commander of the Kornilov Regiment, told me that quite a few Jewish warrant officers, who were commissioned in Kerensky’s times, were loyal to Kornilov during the so-called “days of Kornilov” in August 1917. He recalled one Katzman, a holder of the Order of St. George from the First Kutepov Division.
1973КЕЭ, т. 7, с, 403. 1974Д.С. Пасманик. Русская революция и еврейство: (Большевизм и иудаизм). Париж, 1923, с. 169. 1975Т.И. Полнер. Жизненный путь Князя Георгия Евгениевича Львова. Париж, 1932, с. 274. 1976Д.С. Пасманик. Русская революция и еврейство, с. 176-177. 1977КЕЭ, т. 7, с. 403.
Yet we know that many Whites rejected sympathetic or neutral Jews — because of the prominent involvement of other Jews on the Red side, mistrust and anger was bred among the White forces. A modern study suggests that “during the first year of its existence, the White movement was virtually free of anti-Semitism at least in terms of major incidents and Jews were actually serving in the Volunteer Army. However … the situation dramatically changed by 1919. First, after the Allied victory [in WWI], the widespread conviction among the Whites that Germans helped Bolsheviks was displaced by a mythos about Jews being the backbone of Bolshevism. On the other hand, after the White troops occupied Ukraine, they came under influence of obsessive local anti-Semitism that facilitated their espousal of anti-Jewish actions.”1978 The White Army “was hypnotized by Trotsky and Nakhamkis [an agent of the Bolshevik Central Committee] and that caused the identification of Bolshevism with Jewry and led to pogroms.”1979 The Whites perceived Russia as occupied by Jewish commissars — and they marched to liberate her. And given considerable unaccountability of separate units of that nascent and poorly organized army strewn over the vast Russian territories and the general lack of central authority in that war, it is not surprising that, unfortunately, some White troops carried out pogroms. “A. I. Denikin …, like some other leaders of the South Army (e.g., V. Z. Mai-Mayevsky), endorsed Kadet [the Constitutional Democratic Party] and Socialist Revolutionary views and sought to stop the outrages perpetrated by his troops. Yet those efforts were not effective.”1980 Naturally, many Jews were driven by survival instinct and even if they initially expected goodwill on the part of the Volunteer Army, after pogroms by Denikin’s troops they lost any inclination to support the White movement. Pasmanik provides a lively case. “Aleksandrovsk was taken by the Volunteers from the Bolsheviks. They were met by unanimous sincere joy of the citizenry…. Overnight half of the town was sacked and filled by the screaming and moaning of distressed Jews…. Wives were raped … men beaten and murdered, Jewish homes were totally ransacked. The pogrom continued for three days and three nights. Post-executive Cossack cornet Sliva dismissed complaints of the Public Administration saying `it is always like that: we take a city and it belongs to the troops for three days.´”1981 It is impossible to explain all this plunder and violence by soldiers of the Volunteer Army by actions of Jewish commissars. A top White general, A. von Lampe, claims that rumors about Jewish pogroms by the Whites are “tendentiously exaggerated”, that these pillaging “requisitions” were unavoidable actions of an army without quartermaster services or regular supplies from the rear areas. He says that Jews were not targeted deliberately but that all citizens suffered and that Jews “suffered more” 1978Г.В. Костырченко. Тайная политика Сталина: Власть и антисемитизм. М.: Международные отношения, 2001, с. 56-57. 1979Д.С. Пасманик. Чего же мы добиваемся? // РиЕ, с. 216. 1980Г.В. Костырченко. Тайная политика Сталина, с. 56. 1981Д.С. Пасманик. Русская революция и еврейство, с. 185.
because they were “numerous and rich.” “I am absolutely confident that in the operational theaters of the White armies there were no Jewish pogroms, i.e., no organized extermination and pillaging of Jews. There were robberies and even murders … which were purposefully overblown and misrepresented as antiJewish pogroms by special press…. Because of these accidents, the Second Kuban Infantry Brigade and the Ossetian Cavalry Regiment were disbanded…. All the people, be they Christian or Jewish, suffered in disorderly areas.”1982 There were executions (on tip offs by locals) of those unfortunate commissars and Chekists who did not manage to escape and there were quite a few Jews among them. Events in Fastov in September 1919 appear differently. According to the Jewish Encyclopedia, Cossacks “behaved outrageously … they killed, raped and flouted Jewish religious feelings (they had broken into a synagogue during Yom Kippur, beat up the  whole congregation, raped the women and tore apart the Torah scrolls.) About one thousand were killed.”1983 A methodical quarter-byquarter pillaging of Jews in Kiev after a brief return of the White troops in the end of October 1919 was dubbed the “quiet pogrom.” Shulgin writes: “The commanders strictly prohibited `pogroms.´ Yet the “Yids” were really an annoyance and, secondly, the `heroes´ were hungry…. In general, the Volunteers in large cities were starving.” There were nights of plunder but without murder and rape. It was “the end of Denikin’s period … and the beginning of the agony of the Volunteer Army.”1984 “By the route of its offensive and, particularly, its retreat,” during its last brutal retreat in November-December of 1919, the White Army carried out “a large number of Jewish pogroms” (acknowledged by Denikin), apparently not only for plunder but also for revenge. However, Bikerman says that “murders, pillage and rape of women were not faithful companions of the White Army, unlike what is claimed by our [Jewish] National Socialists who exaggerate the horrible events to advance their own agenda.”1985 Shulgin agrees: “For a true White, a massacre of unarmed civilians, the murder of women and children, and robbing someone’s property are absolutely impossible things to do.” Thus, the “true Whites” in this case are guilty of negligence. They were not sufficiently rigorous in checking the scum adhering to the White movement.”1986 Pasmanik concurred that “everybody understands that General Denikin did not want pogroms but when I was in Novorossiysk and Ekaterinodar in AprilMay 1919, i.e., before the march to the north, I could sense a thickened and
1982Ген. А. фон Лампе. Причины неудачи вооружённого выступления белых // Посев, 1981, № 3, с. 38-39 (перепечатка из: Русский колокол, 1929, № 6-7). 1983КЕЭ, т. 6, с. 572. 1984В.В. Шульгин, с. 97-98. 1985И.М. Бикерман. Россия и русское еврейство // РиЕ, с. 64. 1986В.В. Шульгин. с. 86.
pervasive atmosphere of anti-Semitism everywhere.”1987 Whatever it was — negligence or revenge — it served well to ignite the “White” pogroms of 1919. Still, “by unanimous testimony of those unlucky enough to experience both types of pogroms [those by Petliura’s troops and those by White Army], it was predominantly Petliura’s troops who went for Jewish life and soul — they did the most killing.”1988 “It was not the Volunteer Army that initiated Jewish pogroms in the new Russia. They began in the “reborn” Poland the day after she become a free and independent state. While in Russia itself they were started by the Ukrainian troops of the Democrat Petliura and the Socialist Vynnychenko…. The Ukrainians turned pogroms into an everyday event.”1989. The Volunteer Army did not start the pogroms but it carried on with them, being fueled by a false conviction that all Jews were for Bolsheviks. “The name of L. Trotsky was particularly hated among the Whites and Petliura’s soldiers and almost every pogrom went under a slogan `This is what you get for Trotsky. ´” And even “the Kadets who in the past always denounced any expression of anti-Semitism, and all the more so the pogroms … during their November 1919 conference in Kharkov … demanded that Jews `declare relentless war against those elements of Jewry who actively participate in the Bolshevist movement.´” At the same time the Kadets “emphasized … that the White authorities do everything possible to stop pogroms,” namely that since the beginning of October 1919 “the leadership of the [Volunteer] Army began punishing pogromists with many measures including execution” and as a result “pogroms stopped for a while.” Yet “during the December 1919-March 1920 retreat of the Volunteer Army from Ukraine the pogroms become particularly violent” and the Jews were accused “of shooting the retreating Whites in the back.” (Importantly, “there were no pogroms in Siberia by A. Kolchak’s troops,” as “Kolchak did not tolerate pogroms.”1990) D.O. Linsky, himself a former White Guard, emphatically writes: “Jewry was possibly given a unique chance to fight so hard for the Russian land, that the slanderous claim, that for Jews Russia is just geography and not Fatherland, would disappear once and for all.” Actually, “there was and is no alternative: the victory of anti-Bolshevik forces will lead from suffering to revival of the whole country and of the Jewish people in particular…. Jewry should devote itself to the Russian Cause entirely, to sacrifice their lives and wealth…. Through the dark stains on the White chasubles one should perceive the pure soul of the White Movement…. In an army where many Jewish youths were enlisted, in an army relying on extensive material support from Jewish population, antiSemitism would suffocate and any pogromist movement would be countered and checked by internal forces. Jewry should have supported the Russian Army
1987Д.С. Пасманик. Русская революция и еврейство, с. 186-187. 1988Я.М. Бикерман. Россия и русское еврейство // РиЕ, с. 65-66. 1989Д.С. Пасманик. Русская революция и еврейство, с. 173-174. 1990КЕЭ, т. 6, с. 572-574.
which went on in an immortal struggle for the Russian land…. Jewry was pushed from the Russian Cause, yet Jewry had to push away the pushers.” He writes all this “after having painful personal experience of participation in the White movement. Despite all those dark and serious problems that surfaced in the White movement, we delightfully and with great reverence bow our uncovered heads before this one and only commendable fact of the struggle against the ignominy of Russian history, the so-called Russian Revolution.” It was “a great movement for the unfading values of [upholding] the human spirit.”1991 Yet the White Army did not support even those Jews who volunteered for service in it. What a humiliation people like doctor Pasmanik had to go through (many Jews were outraged after finding him “among the pogromists”)! “The Volunteer Army persistently refused to accept Jewish petty officers and cadets, even those who in October 1917 bravely fought against Bolsheviks. It was a huge moral blow to Russian Jewry.” “I will never forget,” he writes, “how eleven Jewish petty officers came to me in Simferopol complaining that they were expelled from fighting units and posted as … cooks in the rear.”1992 Shulgin writes: “If only as many Jews participated in the White Movement as did in the `revolutionary democracy´ or in `constitutional democracy´ before that….” Yet only a tiny part of Jewry joined the White Guards … only very few individuals, whose dedication could not be overvalued as the anti-Semitism [among the Whites] was already clearly obvious by that time. Meanwhile, there were many Jews among the Reds…, there, most importantly, they often occupied the `top command positions´…. Aren’t we really aware of the bitter tragedy of those few Jews who joined the Volunteer Army” The lives of those Jewish Volunteers were as endangered by the enemy’s bullets as they were by the `heroes of the rear´ who tried to solve the Jewish question in their own manner.”1993 Yet it was not all about the “heroes of the rear.” And anti-Semitic feelings had burst into flames among the young White officers from the intellectual families — despite all their education, tradition, and  upbringing. And this all the more doomed the White Army to isolation and perdition. Linsky tells us that on the territories controlled by the Volunteer Army, the Jews were not employable in the government services or in the OsvAg (“Information-Propaganda Agency,” an intelligence and counter-intelligence agency, established in the White Army by General A.M. Dragomirov). Yet he refutes the claim that publications of OsvAg contained anti-Semitic propaganda and that pogromists were not punished. No, “the command did not want Jewish pogroms, yet … it could not act against the pogromist attitudes of their troops … it psychologically couldn’t use severe measures…. The army was not as it used to be, and requirements of the regular wartime or peacetime military
1991Д.О. Линский. О национальном самосознании русского еврея // РиЕ, с. 149-151. 1992Д.С. Пасманик. Русская революция и еврейство, с. 183. 1993В.В. Шульгин, с. 55, 81, 82.
charters could not be fully applied to it,” as the minds of all soldiers were already battle-scarred by the Civil War.1994 “Although they didn’t want pogroms, Denikin’s government didn’t dare to denounce anti-Semitic propaganda loudly,” despite the fact that the pogroms inflicted great harm on Denikin’s army. Pasmanik concludes: the Volunteer Army “generally assumed a hostile attitude toward the entire Russian Jewry.”1995 But I. Levin disagrees, saying that “the views of only one part of the movement, those of the active pogromists, are now attributed to the whole movement,” while in reality “the White Movement was quite complex, it was composed of different factions … with often opposite views.”1996 Yet to bet on Bolsheviks, to walk in their shadows because of fear of pogroms, is … obvious and evident madness…. A Jew says: either the Bolsheviks or the pogroms, whereas he should have been saying: the longer the Bolsheviks hold power, the closer we are to certain death.”1997 Yet the “JudeoCommunists” were, in the parlance of the Whites, agitators as well. All this was resolutely stopped by Wrangel in Crimea, where there was nothing like what was described above. (Wrangel even personally ordered Rev. Vladimir Vostokov to stop his public anti-Jewish sermons.) In July 1920, Shulim Bezpalov, the aforementioned  Jewish millionaire, wrote from Paris to Wrangel in the Crimea: “We must save our Motherland. She will be saved by the children of the soil and industrialists. We must give away 75% of our revenue until the value of ruble has recovered and normal life rebuilt.”1998 Yet it was already too late…. Still, a part of the Jewish population of the Crimea chose to evacuate with Wrangel’s army.1999 True, the White Movement was in desperate need of the support by the Western public opinion, which in turn largely depended on the fate of Russian Jewry. It needed that support, yet, as we saw, it had fatally and unavoidably developed a hostility toward the Jews and later it was not able to prevent pogroms. As Secretary of State for War, Winston Churchill “was the major advocate of the Allied intervention in Russia and military aid to the White armies.” Because of the pogroms, Churchill appealed directly to Denikin: “my goal of securing the support in the Parliament for the Russian national movement will be incomparably more difficult,” if the pogroms are not stopped. “Churchill also feared the reaction of powerful Jewish circles among the British elite.”2000 Jewish circles in the USA held similar opinions [on the situation in Russia].
1994Д.О. Линский. О национальном самосознании русского еврея // РиЕ, с. 157, 160-161. 1995Д.С. Пасманик. Русская революция и еврейство, с. 181, 187. 1996И.О. Левин. Евреи в революции // РиЕ, с. 136. 1997И.М. Бикерман. Россия и русское еврейство // РиЕ, с. 81,82. 1998Д.С. Пасманик. Русская революция и еврейство, с. 181. 1999КЕЭ, т. 4, с. 598. 2000Michael J. Cohen. Churchill and the Jews. London; Totowa, NJ: Frank Cass, 1985, p. 56, 57.
However, the pogroms were not stopped, which largely explains the extremely weak and reluctant assistance given by the Western powers to the White armies. And calculations by Wall Street naturally led it to support Bolsheviks as the more likely future rulers over Russia’s riches. Moreover, the climate in the US and Europe was permeated by sympathy toward those who claimed to be builders of a New World, with their grandiose plans and great social objective. And yet, the behavior of the former Entente of Western nations during the entire Civil War is striking by its greed and blind indifference toward the White Movement — the successor of their wartime ally, Imperial Russia. They even demanded that the Whites join the Bolshevik delegation at the Versailles Peace Conference; then there was that delirious idea of peace negotiations with the Bolsheviks on the Princes’ Islands. The Entente, which did not recognize any of the White governments officially, was hastily recognizing all those new national states emerging on the periphery of Russia — thus unambiguously betraying the desire for its dismemberment. The British hurried to occupy the oil-rich region of Baku; the Japanese claimed parts of the Far East and the Kamchatka Peninsula. The American troops  in Siberia were more of hindrance than a help and actually facilitated the capture of Primorye by the Bolsheviks. The Allies even extorted payments for any aid they provided — in gold from Kolchak; in the South of Russia, in the form of Black Sea vessels, concessions  and future obligations. (There were truly shameful episodes: when the British were leaving the Archangel region in the Russian north, they took with them some of the Tsar’s military equipment and ammunition. They gave some of what they couldn’t take to the Reds and sunk the rest in the sea — to prevent it from getting into the hands of the Whites!) In the spring of 1920, the Entente put forward an ultimatum to the White Generals Denikin and Wrangel demanding an end to their struggle against the Bolsheviks. (In the summer of 1920 France provided some material aid to Wrangel so that he could help Poland. Yet only six months later they were parsimoniously deducting Wrangel’s military equipment as payment for feeding of those Russian soldiers who retreated to Gallipoli.) We can judge about the actions of the few occupational forces actually sent by the Entente from a testimonial by Prince Grigory Trubetskoy, a serious diplomat, who observed the French Army during its occupation of Odessa in 1919: “French policies in the South of Russia in general and their treatment of issues of Russian statehood in particular were strikingly confused, revealing their gross misunderstanding of the situation.”2001
2001Кн. Гр. Н. Трубецкой. Очерк взаимоотношений Вооружённых Сил Юга России и Представителей Французского Командования. Екатеринодар, 1919 // Кн. Гр. Н.Трубецкой. Годы смут и надежд. Монреаль, 1981, с. 202.