WALENDYsolje-Russia-and-the-Jews

existence. This unproven statement makes it abundantlyclear just how tainted he is by Germanophobia.In the Black Book of Communism we read:Between July and December 1941, 210 penal colonies,135 prisons and 27 camps were shifted eastward, that is,approximately 750,000 prisoners altogether. . . . Most prisonerswere evacuated on foot, over distances of often morethan 1,000 kilometers [600 miles]. . . .When no time remained to evacuate the camps, whichoccurred frequently in the first weeks of the war, the prisonerswere summarily lined up against a wall and shot.This happened particularly in the western Ukraine , wherethe NKVD massacred 10,000 prisoners in Lvov at the endof June of 1941, 1,200 prisoners in the prison of Lutsk,1,500 in Stanyslaviv, 500 in Dubno etc. In the regions ofLvov, Shitomir and Vinnitsa the Germans, upon their arrival,discovered dozens of mass graves.Or why does he pass over without any comment thecollective deportations, together with expropriations andother brutalities, of 446,480 Volga Germans and another448,120 Russian Germans in August/September 1941,with an average of 2,000 humans packed into each freighttrain for a 4-to-8-week trip, hauled away into the southernSiberian regions of Omsk, Novosibirsk and Barnaul or intoKrasnoyarsk in Siberia and Kazakhstan, with a death tollof 20% and more?To carry out these crimes against humanity immediatelyafter the outbreak of Germany’s Russian campaign,Beria had imported the Deputy People’s Commissar of theHarsh Trials in Postwar YearsInterior, General Ivan Serov, into the “Autonomous Republicof the Volga Germans,” along with 14,000 NKVDtroops, some in German uniform, to deceive and provokethe people there.He might also have mentioned that 450,000 out of the600,000 Jews forcibly kidnapped from Poland into the Soviet—notthe German—sphere of influence, disappearedwithout a trace.The Black Book of Communism adds: “If one takes intoaccount the further deportations of Germans carried outin 1942, one comes up with a total figure [for all ethnicgroups] of 1,209,430 people deported within one year—from August 1941 until June, 1942.”If Solzhenitsyn, without proof, states that Germans hadfarmers shot as partisans if they did not deliver their “quotas”and burned their farms down, 216 those were certainlySoviet methods, not German.Or why speak of a “mass liquidation of 33,771 Jewscarried out in BabiYar near Kiev in September 1941” as awell-known “fact,” only to boost that figure to “100,000murdered by the Germans there” simply because “one mayassume it,” as Solzhenitsyn has stated before?If Solzhenitsyn had carefully researched all of this andplaced it in the context of the conflict with Germany, hecould have opened up a broad new field of historical interconnectionsand, thereby, in accordance with his ownwords, he could have counteracted the “stupidification ofthe natives” in Central Europe.But he did not.And here he, too, remains a prisoner of Soviet/Alliedwartime propaganda.✦In the postwar period, Soviet Jews faced not only figuratively“harsh trials” but, starting from 1948, renewedpurges and the smashing of many of theirpositions of power.Stalin kept “liberating” the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee(JAFC) from its leading figures by shooting them.State attacks against those code-worded as “cosmopolitans”in the sciences, arts and the Soviet press led to analogousfates.The JAFC, according to the Kremlin’s view, had pursuedZionist goals too independently, and had lost sight of“the determined fight against International Reaction.”Here Solzhenitsyn is quoted in depth from his massivetome The Jews in the Soviet Union:As things proceeded, the fate of the JAFC was graduallyalso decided. At the end of 1948 its offices weresealed, its documents sent to KGB headquarters, theLubyanka [Prison], and the newspaper and publishinghouse were closed. Subsequently the two key figures inthe JAFC, I.S. Fefer and W.I. Suskin, were secretly arrested.They remained in the Lubyanka for over threeyears. Further arrests followed. Thirteen men from theJAFC were condemned to death in 1952 and then shot.The full annihilation of the JAFC was accompanied byequally secret subordinate trials; 110 people were arrested,10 of them shot, and 5 died during the investigation. In theautumn of 1952 Stalin proceeded more openly. A wave ofarrests among the Jews began. 21756 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