WALENDYsolje-Russia-and-the-Jews

MURDERING THE ROYAL ROMANOVS: In the night of July 16-17,1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police murdered Russia’s last emperor,Czar Nicholas II (officially also the King of Poland and the GrandDuke of Finland), plus his wife, Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, andtheir 14-year-old son, Czarevich Alexis. The four daughters—all grandduchesses—were also killed. They were Olga, Maria, Anastasia andTatiana. All were cut down in a hail of gunfire in a cellar room of ahouse in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains region. The daughterswere killed with bayonets after bullets allegedly bounced off jewelsthey had hidden in their corsets. In 1990, Moscow playwright and historianEdvard Radzinsky announced the result of his detailed investigationinto the murders. He unearthed the reminiscences of Lenin’sbodyguard, Alexei Akimov, who recounted how he personally deliveredLenin’s execution order to the telegraph office. The telegram was alsosigned by Soviet government chief Yakov Sverdlov. Akimov saved theoriginal telegraph tape as a record of the secret order.One day after this Marshal Tukhachevsky added a furtherorder:The poison-gassing of the rebels. . . . The forests wherethe bandits are hiding are to be cleared by the use of poisongas. This must be carefully calculated so that the layer ofgas penetrates the forests and kills everyone hiding there.. . . The inspector of the artillery must immediately orderthe necessary quantities of poison gas and bring up thespecialists who are competent for such operations. . . .His “extermination order” No. 171 had to be withdrawnon July 19 on higher orders. But such brutal procedureswere the usual practice at that time for Bolsheviktroops and obviously also the most important reason forhis later promotion to the head of the general staff of theRed Army and to marshal. 214If by 1930 the Jewish section of the CC of the partyhad been already closed, during the process of theYeshovinapurge of 1937-38 its prominent functionaries were alsoarrested and soon thereafter liquidated. 215ManyYevsektsia members also came under the steamrollerwho had held leading positions in the central andlocal departments of the All-Union Society for the AgriculturalResettlement of Jewish Workers as well as in thesocial, cultural and educational institutions of SovietJewry. [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, p. 324]The Jewish school and training systems also cameunder repression. Jewish scientific institutions were closedand Jewish writers and artists, however eccentric and degeneratetheir Stalin cult, were not spared. The din surroundingthe “construction of socialism” drowned out allsuspicions of anti-Semitism.Solzhenitsyn also reminds us of the fates of many Russian-Jewishsocialists who had not followed the Bolsheviksor had even fought against them. An accounting of thosevictims would distract from the fact that a great number ofthe perpetrators of Jewish origins were still in charge duringthe years 1937-1939 from Yeshov to finally Beria.A similar repression also hit two-thirds of the exiledGerman anti-fascists living in the USSR, and the PolishT 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 43