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As Solzhenitsyn says in The Jews in the Soviet Union:

We find many Jewish names in the same cabinet on the level of the different Deputy People's Commissars for finances, radio and telecommunication systems, railways, river transport, agriculture, forestry, foodstuffs, education and law. The most important deputy people's commissars were Y. Gamarnik (defense), A. Gurevich (who made a crucial contribution to the setting-up of the metallurgical industry in the USSR) and Simeon Ginsburg (heavy industry, later people's commissar for the building industry, then for armaments factories.

Solzhenitsyn also found many Jews in leading positions locally: for example, working as first secretaries on the area committee ruling the Volga Germans and on regional committees in the Far East. 177 Two hundred thousand starving, poorly clothed workers were used to enlarge the Kusnezker Kombinat [Kusnezker Collective Combine, in the Urals — Ed.]. The control of this hell was in the hands of S. Frankfuter and then I. Epstein.

Bolshevik Uprisings in Post-WWI Germany



At the Comintern congresses in Moscow one met the elite of the Jewish communists of Soviet Russia." (More than one page of names follows in Solzhenitsyn 's book of Jewish names from Russia and numerous other countries.)

Motto of the Comintern chairman Zinoviev: "It is not crucial whether we hang the class enemies illegally or legally. 178 . . . The communist parties and also the secret apparatus of the Comintern were substantially shaped by Eastern European "Red assimilators" in a whole set of countries.

When in 1919 the leaders of the KPD [the Kommunistische Partei Deutschlands, "Communist Party of Germany" — Ed.], namely Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, were murdered after their failed Spartacist uprising, their successor was Paul Levi. August Thalheimer took over the editorship of Die Rote Fahne ("The Red Flag"); its editorship was "mainly Jewish." [Jewish Bolshevism — Myth and Reality, p. 165] Adolf Yoffe, the first Soviet ambassador to Berlin, made his Central European location into "the headquarters of the revolution." ["Jewish Bolshevism— Myth and Reality," p. 127]

Leo Flieg ran until 1932 the secretariat of the "Org" office of the CC of the KPD, and at the same time administered, as an agent of the Comintern, the financing in the millions of revolution that flowed from Moscow to the Soviet embassy in Berlin, as Solzhenitsyn points out, "for the setting up of a Red Army arranged into proletarian 'hundreds' [groups of 100, a concept from ancient Rome], designed to conquer power in Germany according to a guerrilla concept." 180

All of them were ethnic foreigners, just as were the KPD Comintern comrades Ruth Fischer, Heinz Neumann and, among others, Arkadi Maslov (born Isaac Chemeringsky in Russia) of the German CC and Politburo. The same is true of the internationally operating communist press baron Willi Miinzenberg, the GPU boss for Western Europe Ignaz Reiss and the "Red Chapel" boss Leopold Trepper, who, out of his Brussels location, ran Moscow's European espionage operations and prepared himself early on for his future tasks in World War II.

His confession:

"I became a communist because I am a Jew."

As Solzhenitsyn tells us in his The Jews in the Soviet Union:

At the beginning of 1919 the communist "Councils" (in German, Rate), led mainly led by Jews in Berlin and Munich, carried out their first armed rebellions and, in the KPD at that time, the portion of Jewish activists was disproportionately high, although the Jewish municipality did not particularly support this party . . . .

The rebellion in Munich was led by a Jew with a bohemian exterior, the theater critic Kurt Eisner. He was murdered. . . .

G. Landauer, Ernst Toller, E. Muhsam and O. Neurath pro- claimed their new government of leftist Jewish intellectuals in Munich the "Bavarian Soviet Repub- lic." One week later this "republic" fell to a still more radical group,which proclaimed itself the "Second Bavarian Soviet Republic," at the head of which stood one Eugene Levine. . . .

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The fact that the leaders of these communist rebellions, suppressed by the army and the volunteer Freikorps, had been Jews was one of the most important causes for the revival of political anti-Semitism in the Germany of the [post-WWI] revolutionary period.

In any case, members of this minority of 0.7% of the German population became 10% of the KPD parliamentary group in the German parliament, the Reichstag, by 1925.

This supplemented the significant effect of American Jewry on Germany as part of the Versailles policies of the WWI victors after 1919. One may note the word "revival," meaning that there was no serious political antisemitism in the imperial (Kaiser) Germany of 1870-1918.

What Solzhenitsyn forgot to mention was that from the outset the CPSU and the Comintern, under the direction of Grigory Zinoviev, affected incessantly the revolts after 1918 in Central Europe with organizational assistance, personnel and weapons. (Of Zinoviev, ne Radomyslsky, Solzhenitsyn comments "only thieves concealed their names and used pseudonyms.")

By 1923, Zinoviev had already picked out, according to Solzhenitsyn, "the future cabinet members of Soviet Germany. A significant group was selected from among various Russian Soviet functionaries, which were to be the core of the future German Soviet of People's Commissars. He listed the economic cadres . . . the military ... the Comintern functionaries and some leading GPU coworkers.

Pravda published almost at the same time [1923] some poetic verses about a Germany in flames."

And this nameless chosen one, at that time among the revolutionaries on the Bolsheviks' Central Committee enunciated calmly the following "modest" objective at the Xlth Party Congress of the CPSU (from March 27-April4, 1922):

We possess the monopoly on legality. We have refused political liberty to our opponents. We do not permit anyone who wants to compete with us to legally exist. . . . The dictatorship of the proletariat is — as Comrade Lenin says — a very cruel thing. In order to ensure the victory of the dictatorship of the proletariat, we cannot avoid the need to snap the spines of all opponents of this dictatorship.

Solzhenitsyn then swivels over to Hungary, a country of which he notes: "The Jews had lived substantially more prosperously than other Eastern European co-religionists and had enjoyed substantially more success in their careers in Hungarian society" This, Solzhenitsyn points out, would have been some- thing to appreciate about the tolerant Austro-Hungarian monarchy:

The Jews had played a very considerable role in the revolutionary uprisings in Russia and Germany, but their role in Hungary was truly a leading one. ... Of the 49 people's commissars, fully 3 1 were Jews; the primary per- son among them was Bela Kun, the minister of foreign affairs who was in fact the head of the government; one and a half years later [after the collapse of his uprising in Hungary and his departure] he was to inundate the Crimea with blood.

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MIKHAIL IVANOVICH KALININ



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Kalinin was an early and close collaborator with Lenin and Stalin. He defended Germany— propagandistically for strictly tactical reasons— against the Versailles Treaty, which violated international law. He served from 1919 until his death in 1946 as Soviet head of state, president of the Executive Committee of the CPSU and (beginning in 1938) was chairman of the Executive Committee of the Supreme Soviet of the Soviet Union. He was among the co-signatories of the order to shoot the 15,000 captured Polish officers in April - May 1940. In 1945, the German provincial capital of East Prussia, Koenigsberg, was renamed Kaliningrad after this Russian collaborator in Bolshevik crimes.

Emigration — Between the Wars



Among the 1.16 million Russian emigrants who escaped the civil war conditions that existed after 1917 were more than 200,000 Jews. Of them, most turned to Poland, Germany and France for refuge while some sought admission into Palestine, the U.S., Canada and the countries of South America. They did not play their own independent political role, but instead were integrated into the general trends coming out of New York that were steered by international Zionism.

While one important participant in the creation of the Red Army, E. M. Sklyansky, built up a reputation in Moscow as "the greatest of the diamond dealers," Mrs. Zinoviev, Slata Bernstein-Lilina, attempted unsuccessfully a border crossing into Lithuania; the would-be emigre was carrying "jewels valued at several tens of thousands of millions of rubles [several billion dollars — Ed]."

The comment of Solzhenitsyn:

"With all this, we are still attached to the legend that the first revolutionary leaders were self-less idealists."

In the Western world, in the meantime, equating Bolshevism with Jewry was becoming "the usual European thinking of the time," as Solzhenitsyn put it.

Perhaps in 1922 Dr. Pasmanik was too hasty in his opinions, but he wrote:

In the whole civilized world, in all nations and the members of all social classes and political parties, the belief has become stronger that the Jews have played a crucial role in the emergence of Bolshevism and all its formations. Our personal experience has showed us the fact that not only avowed anti-Semites are attached to this opinion but . . . representatives of public opinion in the democracies are pointing to hard facts, i.e. to the role of the Jews in the Bolshevik movement, not only in Russia, but also in Hungary, Germany and everywhere else where Bolshevism has appeared.

This opinion was fed by the unreserved support for Bolshevism on the part of American Jewry. There Solzhenitsyn saw prevailing "the opinion that the fall of the Bolsheviks in Russia inevitably would entail for the Jews the danger of a new, bloody wave of pogroms and of massive loss of life. . . . With this in mind, Bolshevism is preferred as the lesser evil."

It certainly would have been more meaningful to admit that:

  • A heavy-consciousness of guilt was in play in considering a change of power,

  • Certain power objectives and expectations about building up a dangerous eastern front against Germany militated for a positive international reevaluation and strengthening of Soviet might.

When Stalin began with his elimination of Trotsky and his close collaborators — the "Trotskyites" [A renown Trotskyite, Iriwin Kristol, father of William “Bill” Kristol was the shaper of the neoconservative movement that would form in the mid 20th century] — and his party began more or less obviously to "purge" Jews, "and anti- Jewish tendencies in the USSR were echoed in the pages of the Soviet press," this did not overly agitate the "holy warriors" on the east coast of the USA, who otherwise were "anxious about the fate" of every mistreated Jew in foreign countries. Their calculation was to use the USSR as a power factor against Germany and therefore to sacrifice their ethnic brothers whom Stalin was executing, and the fate of the German Jews was also unimportant.

Even in 1939, on the eve of World War II, "it cannot be denied that feeling among the Russian Jews abroad was to set their hopes in the inviolability of the Soviet dictatorship. . . ." Jewish public opinion in the whole world thus turned against Russia and in favor of the Bolsheviks."

The correct conclusion is drawn by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn: "[The fact] that in the Jewish milieu Bolshevism was favored affected the general course of events in Europe. What more need be said?

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EPHRAIM SKLYANSKY



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Ephraim Sklyansky (a physician from a Jewish family) was a pitiless deputy of Trotsky in the Revolutionary War Council. He created the Red Army together with Trotsky and Sverdlov, and participated with General Tukhachevsky and the regional Cheka head Lev Levin in ruthlessly crushing the farmer uprisings. He "drowned" (many believe he was killed at the behest of Stalin) in 1925 during a mission to the U.S.

Stalin: The World's Worst Mega-murderer



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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 1 930s. 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 1 987, 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.

Jews Fell Under the Bolshevik Steamroller Too



Under Lenin's "New Economic Policy" (NEP) of 1920, which persisted until 1927 and allowed certain areas of free trade and business, the Jews of Russia, due to their often good relations with foreign authorities and relief organizations, assumed a privileged position in comparison with the rest of the population in terms of trade and starting new enterprises. In order to stimulate donations and investments from the American- Jewish bourgeoisie, the commissars in Moscow also developed a "generous" resettlement program. According to Solzhenitsyn:

Initially, the plans provided for the resettlement of approximately 100,000 families, or about 20% of the whole Jewish population of the USSR, into the southern Ukraine and into the north of the Crimea. It was intended to establish new, Jewish national districts. But many refused the opportunities this presented to go into agriculture despite their continuing unemployment. About half of all Jews who said they were willing to be resettled actually took up residence in the villages of the new colonies. In Ukraine and in Belarus about 455,000 hectares [1,756 sq. mi.] were made available for Jewish colonization and in the Crimea 697,000 hectares [2,691 sq. mi.].

Actually between 1919 and 1923 more than 23,000 Jews . . . established themselves on lands now standing empty in the proximity of the shtetls and cities of the former Jewish settlement counties [to which they had been confined by the czars]."

Even Jewish journalists abroad found the whole procedure immoral, since the reassigned lands had been expropriated from the former owners. Those were sitting in prison, had been deported into banishment or had already been shot.

But at the beginning of the 1930s, when [the government] tried to take away their gold and valuable jewelry . . . practically the whole male Jewish population became familiar with the interior of the prisons of the GPU. Even in their worst nightmares under the czars, Jewish traders could not have imagined undergoing such things. In order to free themselves from the status of the "persons without rights," many Jewish families moved . . . into the large cities The traders were forced to close their businesses.

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Even the Jewish agriculture program remained practically without lasting effect, because the collectivization of agriculture after 1927 expropriated the new Jewish settlers again, merging under the slogan "internationalization" the Jewish kolchoses with the non- Jewish ones.

As compensation, so to speak, the committee for the land settlement of Jewish labor devised a project to resettle Jews in general to Birobijan, an area as large as Switzerland and located between two tributaries of the Amur River and the Chinese border — in any case, far away from the real centers of power and Western Zionist influences. But there was no escaping from the Bolsheviks' pro-grams to strip people of all ownership and property. One sentence of Solzhenitsyn 's is revelatory: the Bolsheviks were luring Jews at that time into resettling in Birobijan with the bait that this would protect them from falling into the status of "persons without rights."

The author describes what awaited them there:

The families, sent off with excessive haste, arrived on location and were horrified at the conditions they saw. ... In the first work year only 25 farm-houses were built and only 125 hectares tilled, on none of which seed was sow for the next year. Many did not remain for a long time in Birobijan Of those who arrived over the course of the whole year of 1928 more than half had abandoned Birobijan by February 1929.

Parallel with the structural changes of 1937, which saw the final end of [Lenin's] "New Economic Policy," within the Communist Party the overzealous Jewish committees and Jewish sections of various agencies that had existed since 1918 also were dissolved, whereby "all national forms of expression of Russian Jewry, including communist outlets, were lost."

Solzhenitsyn from The Jews in the Soviet Union:

Nevertheless, the closing of the Yevsektsia [Bolshevik Russian word for "Jewish sections"] did not excessively discourage many of the former section members and other 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.

In any case, the Jewish culture of the USSR, which should properly be designated as "Soviet, proletarian culture in the Yiddish 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.

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.

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 engineers were dismissed or arrested. 206 Those affected were allegedly "sabotage specialists."

When Stalin thrust himself forward after the death of Lenin on January 21, 1924 to the apex of the Bolshevik Party, he had undoubtedly recognized that he faced a powerful phalanx of Jewish functionaries who stuck closely together and that he would have to skillfully divide them if he wished to not be ground up between them.

First, starting from 1925 he began to gradually push Trotsky out of office along with his usually young Jewish functionaries under the strategic slogan (used at first for tactical anti-Trotsky reasons) of "socialism in one country" [build up the Soviet Union's industry and military might first] versus Trotsky's notion of "permanent world revolution." Then, after a sensation-causing show trial in 1935 he had G.J. Zinoviev (formerly Apfelbaum) and Levi Kamenev (formerly Rosenfeld) liquidated. By this time the numbers of top Jewish personnel in the party machinery began to noticeably thin 207 — although, as Solzhenitsyn says,

"the purges of the years 1930-1933 had been aimed primarily at Russian elements in the party."

The "cleansing waves" (purges) initiated by Stalin in the years 1937- 1938 also brought down many Jews. It was only the publication of the biographic volumes of the new Russian Jewish Encyclopedia and the Great Jewish National Biography that has made known to us today so very many names, and affiliations with Jewry, of once prominent Jewish Chekists, GPU and NKVD personnel, officers of the Red Army, party officials and diplomats.

Stalin's "purges" (the glorifying word used for extermination that the "Western press" immediately adopted as their own) not only had a tremendous and lasting effect on the party, but also on the entire state apparatus, including the highest governing bodies.

Even if they were not targeting people in an anti-Semitic way, nevertheless they even-handedly and in a hard-to-understand way, without revealing their governing principle, affected a large number of active communist Jews.

There was no reaction in Russia or abroad to this wave of elimination of Jews. Stalin could apparently permit himself anything without losing his international reputation as the "little father of the paradise of workers and farmers."

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Solzhenitsyn tells us:

The commanders of the Red Army also came in great number under the steamroller. In the summer of 1938, without exception, all the commanders of the military districts who had taken up these posts in the year 1937 had disappeared without a trace. The political administration of the Red Army suffered its largest losses during the personnel destruction campaign of 1937 after the terrorized Gamarnik [People's Commissar for Defense] committed suicide. In terms of the political collaborators, all 17 army commissars died, 25 of 28 corps commissars and 34 of 36 brigade and division commissars. We can recognize in the lists now published of the military commanders shot in 1937-38 a considerable percentage of Jews.

Solzhenitsyn presents a long list of prominent Jewish names in the Soviet party, diplomacy, economy and military, including their specific careers up to high military leadership positions that they occupied through 1941. Another victim was the civil war terrorist and later front commander Gre- gory Stern, who in March 1939, before the XVIIIth Party Congress, had overeagerly announced:

Together, we have destroyed a little heap of all sorts of crap — all these Tukhachevskys (Michael N., Marshal, Deputy War Commissar), Gamarniks (Defense Commissar), Uborevichs (Ieronim), general, military commander of the Belarus region) and similar low-lifes.

Another one who did not escape the Cheka firing squad was the Red Spain fighter and later commander as well as inspector of the Red air fleet Jacob Smushkevich. They all had certainly worked their way up the ranks through the Terror. Thus one reads about Marshal M.N. Tukhachevsky, who was the general responsible in 1921 for the liquidation operations against the 50,000 "bandits" (anti-Soviet resistance farmers) of Alexander Antonov in the province of Tambov: "He pulled out all stops: the taking of hostages, executions, internment in concentration camps, extermination by poisonous gas and deportation of whole villages."

His "Order of the Day No. 171" of June 11, 1921 demanded that subordinates proceed pitilessly to shoot everyone who does not give his name or reveal hidden weapons, and to shoot hostages, treat families as bandits who had granted refuge to anti-communist fighters, and to take refugees' property or to burn down their houses.

MURDERING THE ROYAL ROMANOVS



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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 Grand Duke of Finland), plus his wife, Empress Alexandra Fyodorovna, and their 1 4-year-old son, Czarevich Alexis. The four daughters— all grand duchesses— were also killed. They were Olga, Maria, Anastasia and Tatiana. All were cut down in a hail of gunfire in a cellar room of a house in Yekaterinburg, in the Ural Mountains region. The daughters were killed with bayonets after bullets allegedly bounced off jewels they had hidden in their corsets [Possibly a myth.] In 1990, Moscow playwright and historian Edvard Radzinsky announced the result of his detailed investigation into the murders. He unearthed the reminiscences of Lenin's bodyguard, Alexei Akimov, who recounted how he personally delivered Lenin's execution order to the telegraph office. The telegram was also signed by Soviet government chief Yakov Sverdlov. Akimov saved the original telegraph tape as a record of the secret order.

Jews Fell Under the Bolshevik Steamroller Too: Continued



One day after this Marshal Tukhachevsky added a further order:

The poison-gassing of the rebels The forests where the bandits are hiding are to be cleared by the use of poison gas. 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 order the necessary quantities of poison gas and bring up the specialists who are competent for such operations. . . .

His "extermination order" No. 171 had to be withdrawn on July 19 on higher orders. But such brutal procedures were the usual practice at that time for Bolshevik troops and obviously also the most important reason for his later promotion to the head of the general staff of the Red Army and to marshal.

If by 1930 the Jewish section of the CC of the party had been already closed, during the process of the Yeshovina purge of 1937-38 its prominent functionaries were also arrested and soon thereafter liquidated.

Many Yevsektsia members also came under the steamroller who had held leading positions in the central and local departments of the All-Union Society for the Agricultural Resettlement of Jewish Workers as well as in the social, cultural and educational institutions of Soviet Jewry. [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, p. 324]

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The Jewish school and training systems also came under repression. Jewish scientific institutions were closed and Jewish writers and artists, however eccentric and degenerate their Stalin cult, were not spared. The din surrounding the "construction of socialism" drowned out all suspicions of antisemitism.

Solzhenitsyn also reminds us of the fates of many Russian-Jewish socialists who had not followed the Bolsheviks or had even fought against them. An accounting of those victims would distract from the fact that a great number of the perpetrators of Jewish origins were still in charge during the years 1937-1939 from Yeshov to finally Beria.

A similar repression also hit two-thirds of the exiled German anti-fascists living in the USSR, and the Polish Communist Party was completely liquidated. These numbers became accessible after Nikita Khrushchev ordered studies done at the XXIInd Party Congress of the CPSU in 1956. [The Black Book of Communism, p. 330]

In Solzhenitsyn 's handling of the true extent of the persecution of Jews during the Yeshov era (1937-38), based on what he found in the Jewish encyclopedias and other books by Jewish authors, Solzhenitsyn began to have doubts and to notice contradictions.

On the one hand, Solzhenitsyn refers to the dissolution that was ordered in 1938 of the Jewish sections of the Communist Party, sections which had existed for many years. Solzhenitsyn refers to "the across-the-board arrests of high Yevsektsia functionaries in Moscow, as well as of the whole upper level of the administration of the Jewish resettlement organization."

Solzhenitsyn then quotes an S. Schwartz, who had written:

"In the context of the purge, nearly all Jewish communists left the stage who had played any important roles." [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, p. 339]

Then the great Russian author refers to the Book of Russian Jewry, which claimed that ". . . after the Yeshov terror in the Soviet Union not one personality of any name in Jewish public life, in journalism, culture or even science remained free." [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, pp. 138, 332]

A recent historian even opines that of the "over 50 percent" Jews among the most important NKVD apparatchiks, by January 1939 only six percent remained. This "purge ratio" with a remainder of only "six percent" might be a substantial exaggeration on the part of interested parties, intent on highlighting their role, as usual, as "victims" and making the reader forget their own terrible complicity in communist crimes. [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, p. 308]

Solzhenitsyn opposes to this the fact that half a million Jews had remained as state officials at the same time, occasionally in important positions, and the influx of Jewish migrants continued, particularly from Ukraine into Moscow. [Vol. II, Jews in the Soviet Union, pp. 330-331]

In addition, he brings up the incredible preference for Jews in the education system, which had begun in 1917: "In 1935 the Jewish percentage of college students was nearly 7 times the Jewish percentage of the country as a whole In 1929, 13.5% of all students at the universities of the USSR were Jews, in 1933 12.2%, in 1936 13.3%, and of doctoral students they were 1 8% with a Jewish portion of 1.8%) of the population." [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, p. 331]

The effect this had on the composition of the leadership class in all areas of state activity was as one would expect. In The Little Jewish Encyclopedia, however, without of course indicating the true reason — continuous revolutionary terror — for the high Jewish ratios in comparison to their population average of 1.8%>, we read: "Country- wide, by end of the 1920s already 13.6%o of those active in the sciences were Jews, in 1937. . . already 17.6%o. In 1939 they represented over 1 5,000 scientists and university professors, i.e. 15.7%o of those so employed." [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, p. 337]

Solzhenitsyn mentions further examples from culture and the press as well as of those who daily churned out atrocity propaganda. He raises the issue of "an ocean of vile brochures meant to make idiots of the masses." [Vol. II, Jews in the Soviet Union, p. 336]

"Among the film directors of the 1930s Jews formed a clear majority. Who was being suppressed here, the viewer being treated as a fool, with his soul flattened with lies and crude didactics or the directors who manufactured falsified movie biographies, pseudo-historical movies and current-events propaganda films with all their inflated monumentality and inner emptiness?"

Rather disapprovingly, The Jewish Encyclopedia notes:

"An inconceivable number of Jews, cameramen and directors made popular-science movies, instructional and documentary films; these were the Soviet films that were the most strongly affected by the state, and here a skillful cut- ting and splicing technique permitted them to present tendentiously arranged materials as genuine film documents."

The official Soviet atmosphere of the 1930s was completely free of animosity toward Jews, and until the beginning of war [in 1939, right after Stalin signed his Non- Aggression Pact with Hitler] an overwhelming majority of Soviet Jews probably remained well-disposed toward the Soviet ideology. [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, pp. 334-335]

At this point Solzhenitsyn comes back to Grigory Aronson and on page 140 throws his own statement back at him:

The Jews were not robbed of their general citizen rights They continued to occupy posts in the state and party machinery, and in the diplomatic corps as among the army generals and the university professors there were still some Jews Thus we enter the year 1939." [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, p. 332]

Solzhenitsyn found the summarizing confession of The Jewish Encyclopedia impressive: "It was precisely at the end of the 1930s that the Jews reached the high point of their importance in the different areas of life in Soviet society within the whole era that Soviet power existed." [Vol. II, The Jews in the Soviet Union, p. 338]

But it was during this "high point" that, as historical science proves, there were 40 million victims of political terror, among whom, it should not be overlooked, there were at least some thousands, if not more, of hapless Jewish victims.

Here Solzhenitsyn has correctly recognized that doubts are appropriate about the representations of the Jewish encyclopedias and all the authors who write the history of their own brethren in connection with the Stalin era. After all, they stand before the delicate task of explaining to the world why their brethren served the Bolshevik system and from the outset could support those responsible for the persecutions. It could not have been for humanitarianism, for the Red Terror of Lenin and Stalin was its exact opposite.

The very concealment and playing down of these singular crimes, which were world-historical in their nature and scope, could not forever remain hidden as to the methods, the order of magnitude and the perpetrators. And assignments of blame to others are unconvincing. And so they become entangled in constant contradictions and lies, on the one hand praising their "clever brethren," so numerous in high state positions, in the economy, in academic occupations, receiving titles and medals, and on the other hand attempt to serve their mandatory role as poor victims who need the compassion of the world.

After all, postwar they had to display without reservation their enthusiasm for the "great, peace-loving Soviet Union" in its "liberation struggle for civilization" and with its "Jewish 'Heroes of the Soviet Union." This was necessary to maintain their dogmatic and singular defamation of National Socialist Germany and drive from the consciousness of mankind the incredible performance of the Third Reich during the peace years in building a solid, happy country.

For all that, one fact remains: The Germans did not first bring up this small people in their evaluation of Bolshevism! It was the Russians themselves and the other peoples of the world!

The Ukrainian Independence Movement



This movement actually predated the Stalin era. Ukraine, which is about the size of France, had been under the domination of the czars of Russia for 200 years. With the collapse of Russian rule in March 1917, it seemed the long-awaited opportunity for independence had finally arrived. Ukrainians declared their country to be an independent republic and re-established the ancient capital city of Kiev as their seat of government. However, by the end of 1 91 7, Vladimir Lenin sought to reclaim all the areas formerly controlled by the czars, especially Ukraine.

As a result, four years of chaos and conflict followed in which Ukrainian nationalist troops fought against Lenin's Red Army, and also against Russia's White Army (troops still loyal to the czar) as well as other invading forces, including the Germans and Poles. By 1921 , the battles ended with a Soviet victory. But the resistance continued. The people refused to become cogs in the Soviet farm machine and remained stubbornly determined to return to their pre-Soviet farming lifestyle. Some refused to work at all, leaving the wheat and oats to rot in unharvested fields. Once again, they were placing themselves in conflict with Stalin. Stalin responded to their unyielding defiance by dictating a policy that would deliberately cause mass starvation and result in the deaths of millions. An estimated 7-10 million persons perished in the farming area of Ukraine, known as the breadbasket of Europe, with the people deprived of the food they had grown with their own hands. Shown are victims of the terror famine.