Russia and the Jews

Soviets on October 27, 1917], which was supposed to be
a congress of workers and deputies of the peasants, and
which had issued various decrees about peace and land. 147
Lenin himself referred to this circumstance:
What rendered a large service to the revolution was the
fact that because of the war a significant number of Jews,
who belonged to the mid-level intelligentsia, had relocated
to the large Russian cities. Only because of this reserve of
well-trained and more or less prudent and intelligent new
civil servants could we succeed in taking over the state apparatus
thoroughly remaking it. 148
And Solzhenitsyn adds:
From the first day, the Bolsheviks brought Jews into
the Soviet power apparatus—some in directing positions,
others as implementers. . . . It was in any case a mass phenomenon.
Thousands of Jews streamed [in late 1917 and
in 1918] into the Bolshevik ranks, since they saw in them
the most decisive representatives of revolution, the most
reliable internationalists, and they formed the majority of
the lower layers of the party structure. 149
The creation of a Jewish commissariat in 1918 reflected
this. It was designed to become a center for the
Jewish communist movement. 150 Its task consisted of putting
the new urban Jews into the service of communism
and smashing all the old organizational structures of conservative
Jewry in Russia. The consequence was that an
important segment of their leaders crossed over to the Bolsheviks.
151
Stalin later ordered the cruel persecution of these same
leaders. But as early as 1920 the Jewish-dominated Cheka
presidium prohibited all Zionist [i.e. “striving for a Jewish
homeland in Palestine”] organizations as “counterrevolutionary”
and locked up all the participants in the spring
1920 All-Russian Zionist Conference in Moscow. 152
In the widely cast demonization campaign of the Bolsheviks,
which targeted the aristocracy, the rich, state officials,
the “hired hands of capitalism,” officers, priests,
monks, nuns, farmers (the “kulaks”) and all the other
“auxiliaries of czarism,” the once lowly Jews ended up as
the only category that did not make the list. And so they
could give the new “purgers” a boost, which however came
across to others, who knew them as a previously outcast
people, as overzealous and unscrupulous. This is how they
acted. It may be that they encountered the other, the goyim,
dehumanizing him because of the tenets of their religion,
Pictured here is Béla Kun (the former Aaron Cohn, a Hungarian
national). He proclaimed the dictatorship of the proletariat
on March 21, 1919 in Budapest. After the bloody rule
and collapse of his Soviet republic on August 1, 1919, he went
to Russia and took part (after 1920) as a member of the Revolutionary
War Council in the Russian civil war and spent
many years participating in Bolshevik “purges,” to which, just
in the Crimea, 60,000-70,000 people fell victim. In 1935 he
rose to become a delegate to the Comintern—and on November
30, 1939 was himself executed.
preserved among themselves, however, an unusual level
of co-operation.
So it was surely no coincidence that the secret services
Cheka and GPU, brutal from the outset and given unrestricted
authority, used Jewish regional directors (primarily
in Petrograd, Moscow, Odessa and Kiev) to implement
force to an extraordinary extent, aside from the Pole Felix
Dzerzhinsky, who had undergone 11 years of czarist banishment.
153
An investigation published in 1999 in Moscow revealed:
In Kiev, Isaac Schwartz assumed the direction of the
10-member Kiev Cheka collective. Initially seven of its
members were Jewish. The Cheka personnel in Ukraine—
with Ukrainians being 80% of the population—was 75%
of Jewish origin. 154
If as late as 1934, with a Jewish population percentage
of approximately 2%, fully 39% of the top officials of the
T B R • P. O . B O X 1 5 8 7 7 • W A S H I N G T O N , D . C . 2 0 0 0 3 T H E B A R N E S R E V I E W 33