Russia and the Jews

Jewish socialists. . . . . They remained in the party and state
apparatus and, above all else, this large number of energetic
Jews in the civil service is what the people saw.
No matter whether one describes all this with statistics
or with a wealth of specific examples, it is not to be denied
that a powerful wave of Jews washed into the Soviet bureaucracy
of these years. And this was a state where freedom
of speech, freedom of trade and freedom of religion
were suppressed, not to mention basic human dignity. 201
In any case, the Jewish culture of the USSR, which
should properly be designated as “Soviet, proletarian culture
in theYiddish language” was, in Solzhenitsyn’s words,
“entirely crushed and plowed under.” The autonomous Soviet-Jewish
school programs also collapsed. Jewish historiography
and the Jewish press also shrank substantially
between 1928 and 1930, and as early as 1919 the Hebrew
language, the rival of Yiddish, was shoved into the category
of the counter-revolutionary.
Solzhenitsyn says:
By 1923 only two Zionist organizations were permitted
in the Soviet Union. . . . In the spring of 1924 there were
so many arrests (although they were brief) and sentences
[“only between three and 10 years camp detention, afterward
reduced] that it reached epidemic proportions. Afterward
the [Zionists] went underground—and this
underground movement was finally smashed only at the
end of the 1920s. . . . Some of the Zionists remained in
detention or in banishment. 202
Quoting Solzhenitsyn: “[Jewish writers deplored later
those] immoral, thoughtless and shameless people [from
their own ranks in the service of Bolshevism who had
torn down] valuable, admired and honored things in Judaism”
and left behind poverty, suffering as well as hopelessness.
203 This also concerned—with exceptions—
synagogues, prayer shawls, Torah scrolls, prayer books and
religious writings. 204 Solzhenitsyn says:
Young Jewish writers and poets expressed their enthusiasm
over empty synagogues, lonely rabbis who had no
more students to instruct, and rascals from the shtetls who
turned into feared Red commissars. 205
Within four years, from 1928 to 1931, 138,000 officials
were removed from public service, and of them 23,000
were classified under the category “enemies of Soviet
power” and lost their “citizen rights.” . . . From January
1930 to June 1931 in the Donets region 48% of all engi-
Stalin: The World’s Worst Megamurderer
Josef Stalin is notorious for millions of political murders, 13 million
of which were in the terror famine. Victims of the terror famine
were chiefly located in the Ukraine and the Kuban steppe. One
of the blood purges was against the so-called “Doctors Plot.”
Many of the doctors were Jews, as were many other victims of
Stalinist purges. However, most victims of Stalin and communism
were non-Jews. Different authorities give various figures for the
numbers of people killed by Stalin. I.G. Dyadkin estimates 56 to
62 million “unnatural deaths” for the USSR overall, with 34 to 49
million under Stalin. Norman Davies refers to 50 million killed during
1924-53, excluding WWII war losses. This would divide (more
or less) into 33 million killed prewar and 17 million after 1939.
William Cockerham claims 50 million-plus. Roy Medvedev says
40 million. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says 60 million. A median figure
would be 51 million for the entire Stalin era—20 million during
the 1930s. The Soviet Union and communist China appear to be
the greatest megamurderers of all history, apparently killing at
least 100 million people. Stalin is responsible for at least 43 million
of these. Most of the deaths, perhaps around 39 million, are
due to lethal forced labor in gulag and transit thereto. Communist
China up to 1987, but mainly from 1949 through the “cultural revolution,”
which alone may have seen over 1 million murdered, is
the second worst megamurderer. Then there are the lesser communist
megamurderers, such as North Korea, Tito’s Yugoslavia
and the Pol Pot regime in Cambodia. In sum, the communists
probably have murdered somewhere around 110 million, or near
two-thirds of all those killed by all governments and others from
1900 to 1987. Shockingly, the world total is several times the 38
million that have been killed in all last century’s international and
domestic wars.
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