Russia and the Jews

hilating anyone who seemed to stand in their way. This
lack of restraint and the associated banditry unleashed similarly
unrestrained counter-moves on other fronts of the
civil war.
These should actually be designated one and all as revolutionary
excrescences that affected every part of the population
instead of applying the special label “pogrom” to
any one subpopulation. The genocidal measures taken by
the Red revolutionaries were an ideologically cloaked, continuous
sequence of pogroms against everyone else.
Simeon Petlyura, by the way, fell victim to a GPU hit
man in Paris in 1926.
✦
Considerable Fluctuation Movements in the 20th Century
Solzhenitsyn assigned special importance to the
Soviet Jewish migration during the 1920s from
their rural domiciles into the large cities of Russia.
Only this made possible their intensified collaboration
in the power centers of the new regime.
According to Solzhenitsyn in The Jews in the Soviet
Union:
The “great exodus” of the Jewish population into the
large cities began for several reasons in the earliest years
of communist power. Some Jewish authors give these concise
descriptions: “Thousands of Jews streamed out of the
shtetls and a few cities in the south toward Moscow, Petrograd
and Kiev, toward ‘a real life.’ . . . Starting in 1917
the Jews moved in hordes to Leningrad and Moscow.” The
Jewish Encyclopedia gives the following numbers: “Hundreds
of thousands of Jews moved to Moscow, Leningrad
and into other large urban centers. . . . In 1920 there lived
in Moscow about 28,000 Jews, in 1923 about 86,000, in
1926, according to the Soviet Census, about 131,000, and
in 1933 about 226,000.” 116
Jewish-communist authors wrote of about 1 million
Jewish settlers in the central cities of the new regime, and
that in 1923 “nearly 50% of the entire Jewish population
of Ukraine” had moved into the large cities, also into the
Russian Federation, into the Transcaucasus region and into
Central Asia. Every fifth settler landed in Moscow.” 117
This migration was unleashed not only by the enthusiasm
of those Jews for Bolshevism, but certainly also for
reasons of simple survival. Because under the Leninist and
Trotskyite policy of “war communism,” all private business
was forbidden, the craftsman was limited in his activity
and a new category was created, “persons without
rights.” Jews too were affected by all this.
Whoever therefore had not struck firm economical
roots made sure he vanished into the anonymity of the
large cities to follow the new privileged class. Five-sixths
of Soviet Jews “selected this path and landed positions in
the communist administration and organizations. On the
national level, the average percentage of Jews in the communist
apparatus in 1925-1926, according to official data,
was six times higher than their share of the population.” 118
A Jewish man by the name of Joseph Bikerman wrote
in 1923 of his great concern concerning his ethnic countrymen:
The Jew is now to be found everywhere at every level.
The Russian sees him at all points: at the top of the heap
in the ancient capital of Moscow and in the other capital
on the Neva [St. Petersburg] as well as in the Red Army.
. . . Russian people see the Jews now in the function of
both judge and executioner. He finds Jews at every step
and turn, Jews who are not communists but were just as
poor as he still is, but who now have the last word and are
advancing Soviet power. 119
This development was furthered from the beginning of
the revolution by its merciless fight against the bourgeoisie
the aristocrats, government officials and military officers
under the czar, and the entire Russian intelligentsia [educated
class], which persecution went so far as denying any
entrance into higher education to their children. Thus the
Jews created for themselves a huge privilege: Since this
subpopulation “was persecuted under the czarist government,”
it obtained—even for its own bourgeoisie—unrestricted
acceptance into universities, and this ensured that
they were qualified thereafter for executive functions
within all the activities of the state. The Russian proletarian
intellectuals lost out to a large extent. The Jewish Encyclopedia
admits:
Now that there were no more restrictions according to
ethnicity for admission to the universities, . . . in the academic
year 1926/27 Jews constituted 15.4% of all the
students in the USSR, a portion nearly twice as high as
that of the Jews in the entire urban population of the
country. 120
28 S E P T E M B E R / O C T O B E R 2 0 0 8 B A R N E S R E V I E W . C O M • 1 - 8 7 7 - 7 7 3 - 9 0 7 7 O R D E R I N G