Russia and the Jews

the tremendous crimes of the NKVD/MVD. General Reichmann
of the NKVD was praised by Etchov in the
1930s while head of the Kharkov administrative area of
the NKVD, was infamous for his special brutality. In
1940 he played a key role in the Katyn shooting of the
Polish officers who were prisoners of war.
Twice decorated “Hero of the Soviet Union,” Army
General Ivan Danilovich Chernyakhovsky, as the commander-in-chief
of the Belarussian front, was responsible
for atrocities against the civilian population and German
prisoners of war in East Prussia. The list could go on and
on and on. 138
✦
‘Jewish Commissars’ Were No German Invention
The proofs to which Solzhenitsyn refers for the far
above average percentage of Jewish leaders in
the Bolshevik terror in comparison with the total
population of Russia are almost exclusively
taken from Jewish sources. This is a welcome procedure
because it extracts him from any credible reproach of
“anti-Semitism” or basic one-sidedness on this subject.
Here we limit ourselves to a selection of Solzhenitsyn’s
general conclusions in order to avoid being crushed by the
multiplicity of Jewish commissar names and functions,
promotions and transfers to new responsibilities:
It is beyond all doubt that in the
party called “the Bolsheviks” and in
all the other parties that contributed
so much to the success of the revolution—the
Mensheviks, Social
Revolutionaries and others—Jews
represented a far higher percentage
than their proportion of the population
of Russia. . . . References to
the lack of civil rights of the Russian
Jews before the February Revolution . . . give no exhaustive
answer by itself to this phenomenon. 139
The majority of the Russians, from the simple man
from the people to the highest-ranking general, were
stunned just to look at all these new orators and leaders of
demonstrations and meetings, these persons who now had
the final say and abruptly appeared so different from their
leaders in former times. 140
The very trick many of these people used of exchanging
their real [Jewish] names with Russian-sounding
aliases and thus misleading the citizenry—mostly the Russians—as
Solzhenitsyn explains, “greatly vexed them even
in the early months after the February Revolution against
the Jews. . . . Now a wave of popular anger swept over the
Jews.” 141
From Solzhenitsyn’s The Jews in the Soviet Union:
“In the Bolshevik Party and
in all the other parties that
contributed to the success of
the revolution, Jews represented
a far higher percentage than
their proportion of the general
population of Russia.”
Before our eyes the most primal anti-Semitism is reborn.
. . . One need only listen [in Petrograd] to discussions
on the streetcars, in the lines before various
businesses or in any of the innumerable spontaneous
demonstrations at every intersection. . . . The Jews are accused
of supremacism in politics, and it is said that they
were bringing all the parties and the Soviets under their
thumb, even destroying the army. 142 . . . It is said even of
the Executive Committee in Petrograd that it is infiltrated
by Jews. 143
Even if Solzhenitsyn stresses that
the October Revolution should be attributed
to Russians as such “despite
the over-all guidance by Trotsky” and
the energetic assistance of others—
since Lenin is considered to be clearly
Russian 144 —this does not weaken the
details that follow:
Jewish military men played an important
role in both the preparation and execution
of the armed rebellion of October 1917 in Petrograd
and in other cities of the country and also in the final
crushing of the mutinies and armed resistance against the
new Soviet regime. 145
The resolution to launch the Bolshevik uprising of
Oct.10, 1917 was made by 12 men, half of whom were
Jews: Trotsky (founder of the Red Army), Zinoviev (later
chairman of the Communist Internationale, the “Comintern,”
Kamenev (a member of the CC and the Politburo),
Sverdlov (director of the All-Russian Central Executive
Committee), Uritsky (commissar of the Extraordinary
Staff of the Petrograd military district, murdered shortly
thereafter) and Sokolnikov. In the Politburo that was soon
to be elected they were reunited, with the exception of
Sverdlov and Uritsky. 146
The “Jewish question” ranked ten times higher than issues
affecting farmers even at this first congress [of the
32 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