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The term Jewish Bolshevism, was used by enemies of the Bolsheviks alluding to the fact that, immediately after the 1917 Russian Revolution, a majority of the Bolshevik leaders, such as Leon Trotsky, Grigory Zinoviev, Lev Kamenev, Grigori Sokolnikov, Karl Radek, Yakov Sverdlov, Adolf Ioffe and Moisei Uritsky, were ethnic Jews by birth. Also, Lenin had a maternal Jewish grandfather (Alexander Blank). The derogatory meaning of the term is associated with the conspiracy theory that Jewry is dominating or was planning to dominate the world.
A similar term used by the Nazis in Germany is often translated as Judeo-Bolshevism. In Nazi Germany, this term expressed the common perception that Communism was a Jewish-inspired and Jewish-led movement seeking world domination from its very origin : Karl Marx. The term was popularized in print by German journalist Dietrich Eckhart, who authored the pamphlet: " Der Bolschewismus von Moses bis Lenin " during the early 1920's. This followed Hitler's highly inflammatory statement in "Mein Kampf" (1924) : "In Russian Bolshevism we must see Jewry's twentieth century effort to take world dominion unto itself".
The significant Jewish involvement in all Russian Revolutionary movements had complex social roots. An important factor remains that Jews had been, for centuries, an oppressed and despised minority in Czarist Russia, where it had long endured a form of physical apartheid ("The Pale of Settlement" located in what are now parts of Poland, Ukraine,Latvia, Lithuania and Belarus ).
In 1922, of the 44,148 members of the Bolshevik party that had joined before 1917 (the Old Guard, as Lenin referred to them) only 7.1% were Jewish (65% were Russian). The numbers of Jews were higher at the top. Of the 9 members of the Central Committee of the Bolshevik party in April 1917, during which Lenin's "April Theses" were declared, 3 were Jewish ( Kamenev, Zinoviev plus Sverdlov and not counting Lenin). Of the 12 people who, during a historic meeting on October 10, 1917, planned the details of the October Revolution, 6 were Jewish ( Zinoviev,Kamenev, Trotsky,Uritsky,Sverdlov, and Sokolnikov, although Kamenev and Zinoviev opposed the revolution). See for more numbers (in Russian). Also see Soljenitsyn's :"Deux Siecles Ensemble ...",Tome 2,page 85.
The number of Jews in top administrative positions began to decline soon after 1917 . It continued to shrink heavily in the 1930's when Stalin had his old comrades Kamenev and Zinoviev shot while in prison, after a rigged trial in 1936. Kamenev and Zinoviev had previously been expelled , in 1926 and 1927, from the top positions they shared with Stalin in the Soviet ruling elite. Leon Trotsky had concurrently been expelled from the Soviet Union in 1927 and was then assassinated in Mexico City in 1940, by soviet agent Raul Mercader. Thus by the year 1940, and after his rapprochement with Hitler's Germany, Stalin had eliminated virtually all Jews from very high level government positions inside the Soviet Union. Thus so-called Jewish Bolshevism, in the new Soviet Union, had lasted not more than ten years( 1917-1927 ).
Among Lenin's 15 Peoples' Commissars "narkoms" in 1919, 6 were Jewish ( Trotsky, Uritsky , Isaac Steinberg , I. A. Teodorovich, Simeon Dimanstein and Sokolnikov). However among the 23 narkoms ( People's Commissars) between 1923–1930, there were 12 Russians, only 5 Jews, 2 Georgians (Stalin and Ordzhonikidze), 1 Pole, 1 Moldavian, 1 Latvian, and 1 Ukrainian. The situation had clearly evolved,within a relatively short time, to the advantage of the Russian majority.
To restate the case again in fewer words: there were 3 Jews among the 5 members of the Politburo in the first half of the 1920's (Trotsky, Zinoviev,Kamenev and not counting Lenin ). There were none among the 9 members of the Politburo in 1927, the above three having been expelled from the Party. In the 1930's, there was only 1 person of Jewish descent in the Politburo, namely Kaganovich.
There are also claims that Jews were highly prominent among the members of the secret police and other instruments of oppression. Indeed, of the 12 members of the Cheka Counter-revolutionary department in 1918, 6 were Jewish. However, of the 42 Cheka prosecutors in September, 1918, at the height of Red Terror, only 8 were Jewish . As to the rest there were 14 Latvians, 13 Russians and 7 Poles. Only 3.7% of the rank-and-file Cheka agents were Jewish at that time.
In the mid-1930's, under the leadership of Genrikh Yagoda (who was Jewish), the Jewish presence in the secret police briefly became dominant: of the people surrounding Yagoda, 39% were Jewish and only 30% Russian. The immediate predecessors to Yagoda in that same position were also Jewish : Iosif Unschlicht and Meier Trillisser. Genrikh Yagoda's secret police oversaw the execution of both Zinoviev and Kamenev, but fell victim to Stalin's next round of purges: Yagoda was replaced with ethnic Russian Nikolai Yezhov in September 1936, then he was arrested and executed in March 1937. Under Yezhov, the number of Jews fell precipitiously (to just 6 people) while the number of ethnic Russians among the leadership of the secret police, NKVD rose to 102 people (67%) and the purges, at Stalin's instigation, entered their bloodiest period (1937–1938).
See and (in Russian) for sources, more numbers and commentary.
Contemporary assessments in the U.S.A.'s and Great Britain ,during the 1920's , of the involvement of ethnic Jews in the Bolshevik revolution often tended, for political reasons, to overstate the case :
Captain Montgomery Schuyler, a military intelligence officer in Russia, reported regularly to the chief of staff of U.S. Army Intelligence (the Army handled intelligence before the CIA was established), who relayed the reports to the President. In one of these, declassified in 1958, Schuyler states:
It is probably unwise to say this loudly in the United States, but the Bolshevik movement is and has been since its beginning, guided and controlled by Russian Jews of the greasiest type …
In another report on June 9 1919, Schuyler cites Robert Wilton, who was then the chief correspondent in Russia for The Times of London. He writes the following , which the historical record shows,incidentally, to be mostly inaccurate :
A table made up in 1918, by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times in Russia, shows at that time there were 384 commissars including 2 Negroes, 13 Russians, 15 Chinamen, 22 Armenians and more than 300 Jews. Of the latter number, 264 had come from the United States since the downfall of the Imperial Government.
Winston Churchill, in an article which originally appeared in the Illustrated Sunday Herald on February 8 1920, wrote:
There is no need to exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for the most part atheistic Jews …
Even the American Ambassador to Russia, David Francis, wrote in January 1918 that most of the Bolshevik leaders were Jewish. Also, in a report to the United States and other governments from British Intelligence, entitled "A Monthly Review of the Progress of Revolutionary Movements Abroad", it is stated in the first paragraph that international Communism is controlled by Jews.
Russian writer and Nobel Prize winner Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn has recently (2002) reviewed in great depth, and in a truly unbiased and heartfelt way, the role of the Jewish people in left wing movements in Russia,including in revolutionary Bolshevism. He writes (translated from Russian ): “ As we can see, during 1917, there was no selective preference of the Jewish people towards the Bolsheviks. However the overall Jewish involvement in all forms of revolutionary movements had become apparent for quite some time. At the latest meeting of the Russian Social Democratic Party (London, 1907), if one includes the Mensheviks, the Jewish representatives totaled over 160 seats or about one half of the 302-305 attendees of this congress. ” Also in the same chapter : " the Jewish population as a whole had a very guarded even hostile attitude towards the Bolsheviks at the beginning. But, as the revolution progressed, the Jewish population acquired complete freedom while it gained the expansion of its political,social and cultural activities which, incidentally, were very well organized . Consequently the Jewish population did nothing to prevent Bolshevik Jews from taking over the leadership of the new system . Unfortunately the newcomers took advantage of the change to cruelly exceed the powers that had fallen into their own hands "
References
- Arkady Vaksberg, " Stalin against the Jews ", 1994, Vintage Books (a division of Random House,New York),ISBN 0-679-42207-2
- Alexandre Soljenitsyne, "Deux siecles ensemble,1917-1972, Juifs et Russes pendant la periode sovietique", 2003,Librairie Artheme Fayard,Paris. ISBN 2-213-61518-7. This exhaustive historical study, originally published in Russian, has never been translated in English.
- ^ U.S. National Archives. Record group 120: Records of the American Expeditionary Forces, 9 June 1919.
- Churchhill, Winston. Zionism versus Bolshevism: A Struggle for the Soul of the Jewish People. Illustrated Sunday Herald. 8 February 1920.
- Francis, David R. Russia From the American Embassy. New York: C. Scribner's & Sons, 1921. p. 214.
- U.S. National Archives. Dept. of State Decimal File, 1910–1929, file 861.00/5067.