With the eventual fall of Tsarist rule, the influence of Jews in the rise of Russian communism was profound

With the eventual fall of Tsarist rule, the influence of Jews in the rise of Russian communism was profound. (After all, as Louis Rapoport notes, "[Karl] Marx, Ferdinand Lassalle, and Eduard Bernstein [were] men of Jewish origin who laid the foundations of communism and socialism.") [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 15] During the 1917 revolution, two communist factions, the Mensheviks and Bolsheviks vied for power. Leading up to the revolution, eight of the seventeen Menshevik Party central committee members were Jewish. The "entire Menshevik Party which included many Jewish members ... was politically linked with the Jewish Labor Bund [a party largely championing Jewish nationalism]." [LEVIN, N., 1988, p. 13] The head of the Menshevik Party was also Jewish, Raphael Abramovich. [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 31]

The rival Bolshevik revolutionary faction, however, prevailed in the overthrow of the tsarist government, replacing it with a communist government headed by V. I. Lenin. (A Jew, Boris Zbarsky, even was the one who embalmed Lenin's corpse for permanent display in the Kremlin). [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 95] At the time of the revolution, the chairman of the Central Committee of the Communist Party, Jacob Sverdlov, was Jewish. [WEYL, 1968, p. 197] As the new ruling Bolshevik clique took shape, three of the six members of the original ruling Politburo were also Jewish. Two of them, Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Grigori Zinoviev (Apfelbaum), joined with Stalin to form the threesome that ruled Russia at leader V. I. Lenin's death. [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 30] (Zinoviev once remarked that "We must carry along with us ninety million out of the one hundred million Soviet Russian population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.") [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 31] Another Jew, Angelica Balabanova, formerly an associate of Mussolini in Italy, headed the first Communist Comintern. Karl Radek (Sobelsohn) was "one of the leading agents of the Communist International ... The short-lived Hungarian Soviet Republic was led by Bela Kun (a variant of Cohen) and the organizer of the Workers' and Soldiers' Soviets of the even more ephemeral Bavarian Soviet Republic was Eugen Levine." [WEYL, p. 197]

Howard Sachar notes more deeply the case of Hungary where

"a free election took place in November 1945, and the communists won

only 8 percent of the vote ... With the intimidating force of the Red

Army behind them, the Communists turned their efforts in the next

year to infiltration ... Their Soviet-trained leadership included a large

majority of Jews. Although many of the commissars from the Bela

Kun era in 1919 had been killed, a number of them survived in Soviet

exile. These were the men who returned now in the wake of the Red

Army. Their spokesman was Matyas Rakosis ... He returned

at the head of a quintet of fellow Jews that included Erno Gero, who

would become the communist government's economic overlord;

Mihaly Farka, its military and defense chieftain; Jozeph Revai, its

cultural 'pope'; and most importantly, Gabor Peter, who would be

named head of the dreaded security police." [SACHAR, H., 1985,

Jewish pre-eminence in the new Russian regime was throughout the communist system. As Zvi Gitelman notes:'

"The idea that the Bolshevik regime was a Jewish one gained

popularity because of the relatively large numbers of Jews who

in 1917 suddenly rushed into governmental posts from which

they had been barred under the tsars. So striking was the

prominence of Jews in high places that when it was proposed

that a Jewish ticket be put forth in the elections to the Constituent

Assembly, Maxim Vinaver commented, 'Why do Jews need a

separate ticket? Whichever party wins, we will still be the

winners.'" [GITELMAN, Z., 1972, p. 114]

In the struggle for power in Russia, notes Nathaniel Weyl, "the prominence of Jews in the leadership of the Bolshevik Party was no greater than their prominence in the leadership of other, less totalitarian parties." Prominent Jews in rival socialist factions included Julius Martov (Tsederbaum), Raphael Abramovitch, and I. N. Steinberg. Boris Savinkov, also Jewish, was the "legendary head of the Terrorist Brigade of the Socialist Revolutionary Party." Aaron Baron and Lev Chorny were well-known Anarchists. [WEYL, 1968, p. 199-200] Building to the Russian revolution era, prominent Jewish revolutionaries also included Grigory Abramovich Perets and Nikolay Utin. One of the founders (in 1876) of the "Land and Liberty" revolutionary party was Mark Natanson. "Another Jew," notes Leon Schapiro, "Aaron Zundelevich, played an important part on its executive committee. There were Jewish propagandists, Jewish organisers, Jewish terrorists ... It is impossible to doubt the importance of the Jewish contribution to the less spectacular business of organisation and staff-work. It was the Jews, with their long experience of exploiting conditions on Russia's western frontier which adjoined the Pale for smuggling and the like, who organised the illegal transport of literature, planned escapes and illegal crossings, and generally kept the wheels of the whole organisation running." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 152] One of the Land and Liberty party's later branches, the "Black Repartition" group, "soon became the cradle of the Marxist movement. Jewish revolutionaries participated in all stages and in all aspects of this movement." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 149-151]

"The abundance of Jewish names in the higher and middle levels of power (in the [Bolshevik] Party and state apparat, in the military, ministry, etc.) is indisputable," says apologist Jewish author Arkady Vaksberg, "... For anti-Semites now, this is an odious and outrageous fact; from the point of view of normal people not blinded by chauvinist hatred, it is meaningless." [VAKSBERG, p. 22] "Among the second-string leaders of the Soviet," observed Nathaniel Weyl, "were Gregory Sokolnikov (Brilliant), Solomon Lozovsky, who would head the Red International of Labor Unions, and Moses Uritsky, chief of the Petrograd Cheka and number two man in the Soviet secret police."[WEYL, 1968, p. 198]

In 1923, notes Isaac Deutscher, "a triumvirate, composed of Stalin, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, formed itself within the Politbureau ... Between them, the three men virtually controlled the whole [Communist] party and, through it, the Government ... Zinoviev was, in addition, the President of the Communist International." [DEUTSCHER, p. 255] Amidst intrigue and power struggles within the communist movement, however, by 1927 Kamenev and Zinoviev "at last threw in their lot with Trotsky." [DEUTSCHER, p. 307] Trotsky, an enemy of Stalin, was "the founder and builder of the Red Army," [DEUTSCHER, p. 192] and once the "number two man next to Lenin. " [NEW ENCYC BRITTANICA, p. 945] He was also Jewish, born Lev Davidovich Bronstein. Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, notes Arkady Vaksberg, "alone formed the 'leadership nucleus' and had every reason to expect to inherit the mantle of leadership from Lenin. The man closest to the 'troika' (Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev) after [Yakov] Sverdlov's death was Grigori Sokolnikov." [VAKSBERG, p. 19] All five of these men poised to rule Russia were Jewish. Kamenev once told Trotsky (his brother-in-law) [WALSH, p. 440] that "It will be enough for you and Zinoviev to appear together on the platform in order to reconquer the whole party." [DEUTSCHER, p. 308] It didn't work out that way. Stalin proved to be a more ruthless and/or shrewd leader in the struggle for power.

Nonetheless, Jews were very well represented in the Soviet system under Stalin. As Isaac Deutscher notes,

"Jews were quite prominent in [Stalin's] entourage, though far less

so than they had been in Lenin's. [Max] Litvinov stood for over a decade

at the head of the Soviet diplomatic service; Kagonovich was to

the end Stalin's factotum; Mekhlis was the chief political Commissar

of the army; and Zaslavsky and Ehrenburg were the most popular

of Stalin's sycophants. Yet he was not averse from playing on

anti-Jewish emotions when this suited his convenience. During

the struggle of against the inner-party oppositions his agents made

the most of the circumstance that Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev,

and Radek were of Jewish origin." [DEUTSCHER, p. 605]

"Lev Mekhlis," notes Louis Rapoport,

"would become Stalin's secretary and one of the most despised

men in Soviet history ... Immediately after the Revolution, many

Jews were euphoric over their high representation in the new

government. Lenin's first Politburo was dominated by men of

Jewish origins ... Under Lenin, Jews became involved in all aspects

of the Revolution, including its dirtiest work. Despite the Communists'

vow to eradicate anti-Semitism, it spread rapidly after the Revolution --

partly because of the prominence of so many Jews in the Soviet

administration, as welll as in the traumatic, inhuman Sovietization

drives that followed." [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 30]

The Soviet Union's leading communist newspaper was Pravda. It's "leading staff members," Yakov Khavinson and David Zaslavsky, were Jewish, as were the Soviet Unions ambassadors to the U.S., Maxim Litvinov and Ivan Maisky, who were recalled in 1943. [VAKSBERG, p. 260, 139]

In 1994, Russian-born (and raised) Jewish author Arkady Vaksberg wrote a book entitled Stalin Against the Jews. Its fundamental thesis is that Stalin was a fanatical anti-Semite. (Louis Rapoport's Stalin's War Against the Jews reflects the same theme). The fact that many Jews (including millions of others) died under his direction is beyond question. And Stalin's actions in later life reflect his suspicions of the loyalty of many in the Jewish community. But the fact that Stalin was nonetheless surrounded by Jews everywhere in positions of high power (Lazar Kaganovich, Pyatnitsky, Fillip Goloschekin "and many others who were made part of the ruling circle") [VAKSBERG, p. 20] is described by Vaksberg as "camoflauge" for the Soviet leader's hatred of Jews. [VAKSBERG, p. 27] Yet Vaksberg's own evidence to portray the Russian Jewish community as solely victims consistently deflates the premise of Stalin's enduring anti-Semitism.Vaksberg assails Stalin as a singularly rabid, irrational Jew-hater even while stating that "the people who surrounded Stalin and who had rendered him service in the twenties and thirties were mostly Jews" [VAKSBERG, p. 35] and conceding that Jews especially close to Stalin like Emelyan Yaroslavky (Mines Gubelman), Moisey Gubelman, Lev Mekhlis ("Stalin's right hand man"), [VAKSBERG, p. 23] Lazar Kaganovich and Isaac Mintz all survived Stalin's declared "anti-Zionist" purges.

"Why did Stalin, as an anti-Semite," wonders Vaksberg, "have two Jewish secretaries -- Lev Mekhlis and Grigori Kanner?" [VAKSBERG, p. 27] Why too, we might add in turning Vaksberg's facts to different theses, whenever Stalin went on a vacation, did Lazar Kaganovich, a Jew, take over running the government? [VAKSBERG, p. 51] And why, we might add, if Stalin was so all-encompassingly hateful of Jews, did he entrust his life to a Jewish bodyguard, Matyas Rakoszy? [VAKSBERG, p. 40] And if Stalin was singularly focused in his alleged hatred of Jews, why did his "personal corps of physicians" include "Drs. Weisbrod, Moshenberg, and Lev Gigorievich Levin?" [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 37] Even prominent non-Jewish Communist Party officials (and close associates of Stalin's social circle), President Mikhail Kalinin, Bukharin, Molotov, Voroshilov, Andreyev, Poskrebyshev, and Rykov, all had Jewish wives. Stalin's own daughter Svetlana Allilueva had an affair with Jewish screenwriter Alexei Kapler; she later married Grigory Morozov (Moroz), also Jewish. [VAKSBERG, p. 138; RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 208] The fact that Stalin reportedly did not approve of these men is routinely explained by Jewish scholars as anti-Semitism. Stalin's sister-in-law (eventually imprisoned) by his first wife was also Jewish. And there is controversial testimony that Stalin even had a Jewish mistress, Rosa Kaganovich. [RAPAPORT, L., p. 46, 241]

Over a hundred Jewish generals also served in Stalin's Soviet army, including the chief of the Soviet Air Force at the start of World War II, General Jacob Smushkevich. [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 78]

"It seemed," says Louis Rapoport,

"there were Jews wherever [Stalin] looked. His loyal tin soldier, Marshal

Voroshilov, was devoted to his Jewish wife, Catherine. Marshal Bulganin

was also happily married to a Jew, Nadezhda. Politburo member Andrei

Andreyev, who fell from grace in 1950, was married to Dora Khazan, and

Kaganovich the Jew was married to Maria, also one of the tribe.

Malenkov, who was suspected of being a bit of a philo-Semite, had a

Jewish son-in-law, as, it was said, did Khrushchev. The up-and-coming

Leonid Brezhnev was said to have a Jewish wife." [RAPOPORT, L.,

Stalin's alleged fanatical anti-Semitism had further curious twists. "Another non-Jew not only helped create Israel," notes M. Hersch Goldberg, "but saved it. Incredible as it may seem, that man was Joseph Stalin. The tale of Stalin's role in helping create and then insure the early survival of Israel has been little told; and on those occasions when it has been mentioned, there has been no satisfactory explanation for it." This includes the fact that in 1947 the Soviet Union publicly supported the creation of a Jewish state, and was the second country (after the U.S.) to recognize its establishment. Stalin also initially supported Israel in its war of independence against the Arabs and supported Israel with shipments of arms through Czecheslovakia. Even the Soviet delegate to the United Nations, also President of the Security Council, was of Jewish heritage -- Jacob Malik. [GOLDBERG, M. H., 1976, p. 220-224] It would seem that if Stalin was truly overwhelmed with feelings of irrational anti-Semitism, Jewish power within his own government had overwhelmed him.

From the start of his argument about Stalin's single-minded hatred of Jews, Arkady Vaksberg marks the early struggle for power between Stalin and Trotsky-Zinoviev-Kamenev-Sikolnikov: "All four men whom Stalin perceived as his rivals in the struggle for power were Jewish. Each of them, especially Trotsky, naturally had a large number of allies in higher eschelons of power who could influence the distribution of posts and positions and the political clout and popularity of candidates. There was a certain ethnic 'imbalance' here too." [VAKSBERG, p. 19]

As normal in Jewish scholarship (framing Jews as victims even as they act as oppressors), Vaksberg even makes the preposterous claim that the reason Jewish commanders ran 11 of the 12 major Gulag Archipelago concentration camps (including the director of them all, Matvei Berman, who also headed the slave labor project that built the Belomar-Baltic Canal) was that Stalin wanted to make Jews look bad, and foment anti-Semitism. "It could not," he insists, "have been sheer coincidence." [VAKSBERG, p. 98] Maybe not. But other possible reasons are too profoundly troubling for Vaksberg to consider.

Jews were also everywhere prominent in Soviet secret police organizations. "From the beginning," writes Benjamin Ginsberg, "the Soviet state relied upon military, police, and security services to sustain itself, and Jews were active in these agencies. ... Jews ... staff[ed] and direct[ed] the coercive instruments upon which the state relied to control its citizens." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 30] Genrikh Yagoda, for instance, was the Soviet Chief of the Secret Police in the 1930s. A pharmacist, he specialized "in preparing poisons for his agents to use in liquidating Stalin's opponents." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 31] "Yagoda was the man Stalin trusted most within the repressive aparat without which no totalitarian regime can exist," says Arkady Vaksberg, "The Soviet version of dictatorship and Stalin personally would not have survived without the 'faithful watchdogs of the revolution' and their 'punishing swords.'" [VAKSBERG, p. 36] Yagoda's brother-in-law, Leopold Averebakh was the "chief supervisor of Party purity in Soviet literature." [VAKSBERG, p. 35]

"Working side by side with Yagoda," notes Arkady Vaksberg about a kindred Jewish government deputy, "was another professional chekist (a euphemism for professional executioner), Meer Trilissen ... The many actions undertaken by Trilissen's agents included blowing up the cathedral in Sofia with the Bulgarian tsar and his government inside." [VAKSBERG, p. 38]

Other Jews, Matvei Berman and Naftali Frenkel of the secret police, were instrumental in the creation of the slave labor system in which 200,000 workers died during one project alone, the White Sea-Baltic Canal. [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 31] "It was Frenkel," notes Louis Rapoport,

"who refined Berman's use of prisoners as slave labors ... Most of

the chief overseers of the Canal were Jews. Solzhenitsyn described

them as 'six hired murderers each of whom accounted for thirty

thousand lives: Firin - Berman - Frenkel - Kogan - Rappoport - Zhuk

... Thousands of Jewish revolutionaries helped to spearhead the

Terror machine with a messianic fervor. One of them, Matvei Berman,

had helped to institutionalize slave labor as early as 1922." [RAPAPORT,

L., 1990, p. 30, 44]

Likewise, Yakov Agranov, Karl Danker "and other representatives of the Jewish proletariat ... distinguished themselves with a talent for execution." [VAKSBERG, p. 39] Other prominent Jewish officials in the Soviet government included K.V. Pauler, Chief Operations Officer of the secret police in the 1930's, Lev Inzhir (Chief Accountant for the Gulag: Inzhir "the all-powerful clerk, was kept busy with figures on transit points, rail depots and harbors, human and other freight transfers, length of terms, morality rates."), "top" Chekist Aron Soltz, [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 44, 45] M. I. Gay who headed a secret police organization that conducted mass arrests and executions during "The Great Terror" of the 1930s, and A.A. Slutsky and Boris Berman who were in charge of terrorist and espionage activities abroad in the 1930s.

Noting that "many of the prosecution witnesses and agent provocateurs against" Jewish enemies of the communist state were also Jewish, Louis Rapoport adds that

"Some of the main instruments of the Terror [against everyone] were

also of Jewish origin: M. I. Gay, who headed a special secret police

department; A. A. Slutsky and his deputies Boris Berman and

Shpiegelglas, who were in charge of terror and espionage abroad;

and NKVD operations chief Pauker. None of these mass executioners

survived [later purges against them] [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, p. 49-50]

The man who headed the firing squad that executed the Russian royal family, Yakov Yurovsky, was also Jewish, as was the Bolshevik official who reported the deaths to Lenin, Yakov Sverdlov. [KRICHEVSKY, Behind, 1997, p. 8] Or, as Arkady Vaksberg puts it: "There is no getting around the fact that the first violins in the orchestra of death of the tsar and his family were four Jews -- Yakov Yurovsky, Shaia Goloshchekin, Lev Sosnovsky, and Pinkus Vainer (Pert Voikov). The concert master and conducter was Yakov Sverdlov." [VAKSBERG, p. 37]

As Zvi Gitelman notes about the Cheka, the early Soviet terrorist police organization:

"The high visibility of Jews in the Bolshevik regime was dramatized

by the large numbers of Jews in the Cheka ... From the Jewish point

of view it was no doubt the lure of immediate physical power which

attracted many Jewish youths ... Whatever the reasons, Jews were

heavily represented in the secret police ... Since the Cheka was the

most hated and feared organ of the Bolshevik government, anti-

Jewish feelings increased in direct proportion to Cheka terror."

[GITELMAN, 1972, p. 117] [Parallel Jewish representation in the Polish

communist secret police will be addressed in the Holocaust chapter].

Leon Schapiro remarks that "it is difficult to suggest a satisfactory reason for the prevalence of Jews in the Cheka ... Anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with, and very possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator." [SCHAPIRO, L., 1961, p. 165]

"I doubt that there was another poet (or novelist or playwright or artist)," says Arkady Vaksberg, "who was surrounded by as many Chekists as [Vladimir] Mayakovsky. [Mayakowsky was the leading poet of the Russian revolution era.] And sadly, they were almost all Jewish." These included at least three Jewish generals in the secret terrorist organization: Yakov Agranov, Moisey Gorb, and Lev Elbert. [VAKSBERG, p. 45]

Another Jewish author, Richard Pipes, adds that

"The worst bestialities were committed by some of the provincial

Chekas -- which operated at a distance from the eyes of the

central organs and had no fear of being reported on by foreign

diplomats or journalists. There exists a detailed description of

the operations of the Kiev Cheka in 1919 by one of its staff,

I. Belerosov, a former law student and tsarist officer, which he

gave to general Denikin's investigators.

According to Belerosov, at first (fall and winter of 1918-1919)

the Kiev Cheka went on a 'continuous spree' of looting, extortion,

and rape. Three-quarters of the staff were Jews, many of them

riffraff incapable of any other work, cut off from the Jewish

community although careful to spare fellow Jews." [PIPES, R.,

In later years, another Jew, Zakhar Ilyich Volovich, "was involved in many of the dirty circles of the NKVD [precursor to the KGB], crimes even today enveloped in dark secrecy." [VAKSBERG, p. 45-46] Among the many Jewish executives in the Main Directorate of State Security of the NKVD were Mosiey Boguslavsky, Yakov Veinshtok, Zakhlar Volovich, Mark Gai, Matvei Gerzon, Moisey Gorb, Ilya Grach, Yakov Deich, Grigory Rapoport, Abram Ratner, Abram Slutsky, David Sokolinsky, Solomon Stoibelman, Meer Trilesser, Semyon Firin, Vladimir Tsesarsky, Leonid Chertok, Isak Shapiro, Grigory Yakubovsky, "and many other NKVD workers of the same level and same origins." [VAKSBERG, p. 98] The non-Jewish head of the NKVD, Lavrenti Beria, had "many Jews in his close entourage ... [who were in] major positions in the NKVD." These included Generals Arkady Gertsovsky, Veniamin Gulst, Ilya Ilyushin-Edleman, Matvei Potashnik, Solomon Milshtein, Lev Novobratsky, Leonid Raikhman, and Naum Eitigen. Heads of NKVD "investigative groups" included Colonels Boris Rodos, Lev Shvartsman, Isaia Babich, Iosif Babich, Iosif Lorkish, and Mark Spekter. [VAKSBERG, p. 102]

Among these, Colonel Lev Shvartsman stands out for Arkady Vaksberg as "one of the most vicious KGB executioners ... He personally tortured Mikhail Koltsov, diplomats, major scientists, and cultural figures." [VAKSBERG, p. 223] Likewise, another Jew, Colonel Boris Rodos was a "sadist [who] ... at the Academy of Internal Affairs taught ... the methods of working over prisoners in their cells." [VAKSBERG, p. 211] "As a Jew," notes Yevgenia Albats in his book about the history of the KGB, "I'm interested in another question entirely: Why were there so many Jews among the NKVD-MGB investigators -- including many of the most terrible? It's a painful question for me, but I cannot evade it." [ALBATS, Y., 1994, p. 147]

"Such Bolshevik Jewish luminaries as Lev Kamenov, Grigori Zinoviev, and Yakov Sverdlov," says Ukrainian-American author Myron Kuropas, "helped Lenin come to power; and it was Jews like Maxim Litvinov, Lazar Kaganovich, and hundreds of lesser lights who were in the forefront of Stalin's rise to power. It was they who later helped Stalin engineer Ukraine's genocidal famine and the brutal Soviet takeover of Western Ukraine. When the USSR began to decline, writes [a former KGB officer married to a Jewish officer in the same force], 'the flower of this educated leadership and their children emigrated to Israel and the West.' I can't help but wonder how many of these criminals now reside in the United States." [KUROPAS, M., 8-14-94, p. 77]

Some estimates suggest that between a fourth and a fifth of the rural Ukrainian population perished by enforced starvation. [MOYNAHAN, p. 120] One of the dedicated Jewish communists was Lev Kopolev. "We were realizing historical necessity," he wrote,

"We were performing our revolutionary duty. We were obtaining grain

for the socialist fatherland ... I saw women and children with distended

bellies, turning blue, with vacant, lifeless eyes. And corpses -- corpses

in ragged sheepskin coats and cheap felt boots; corpses in peasant huts,

in the melting snow of old Vologda, under the bridges of Kharkov ... I

saw all this and did not got out of my mind or commit suicide ... I

believed [in the new Soviet order] because I wanted to believe."

In 1987, Stuart Kahan, an American relative of Russian communist strongman Lazar Kaganovich (originally named Moiseyevich; he is described by Kahan as the Soviet "Apparatus of Terror"), wrote a book about him. The author interviewed the elderly Kaganovich in Yiddish via his father, and concluded that his relative

"was, to put it mildly, a devil. That relative exuded evil, an evil

that put millions of people to death ... [KAHAN, S., p. 5] ... Although

the Church was left intact, its lands were seized [by the communist

movement]. Even prior religious teaching was forbidden in the schools.

Of course, word came down that it was the Jews who did this. After all,

wasn't the revolution prepared and fashioned by Jews? Both of Karl

Marx's grandfathers were rabbis, and Lenin's grandfather was also

Jewish. And wasn't Yarkov Sverdlov, the first chief of state, a Jew,

as was Trotsky himself? ... That Trotsky, unquestionably the most

outstanding man among the Bolsheviks, was a Jew did not seem an

insuperable obstacle in a party in which the percentage of Jews, 52

percent, was rather high compared to the percentage of Jews (1.8

percent) in the total population." [KAHAN, p. 80-81]

Kaganovich "eventually held more key posts in the power structure than anyone except Stalin ... He demolished the huge Church of Christ the Savior and replaced it with the Palace of the Soviets. As commissar of heavy industry during the war years, he chose his brother Mikhail as his deputy and controlled everything from the vast fuel and steel industries to chemicals and building materials." [RAPOPORT, L., 1990, -. 43]

Jewish author Arkaday Vaksberg even calls yet another Jewish Soviet leader, Rozalia Zemlyachka (Zalkind), "a sadist and monster who would play a major role in the slaughter in the Crimea after the destruction of the last strongholds of the White Movement [anti-communists] there." [VAKSBERG, p. 23] Another Jew, Bela Hun, "spread bloody terror" with Semlyachka. [VAKSBERG, p. 41] Another government (and Jewish) terrorist, "the lawyer Moisey Uritsky ... was the scourge of Petrograd in 1918, terrorizing the citizenry as the local Cheka. He was killed by another Jew, Leonid Kanegisser." [VAKSBERG, p. 23] Another Jewish Soviet leader, Filipp Goloschchekin, "was one of the main organizers of the murder of the tsar's family in 1918 ... [He also] displayed boundless cruelty in the genocide of the Kazakhs when he became Party leader of Kazakhstan." [VAKSBERG, p. 17]

As even Winston Churchill once wrote about Jewish influence in the communist world:

"This [communist] movement among Jews is not new. From the days

of Spartacus-Weishaupt [Adam Weishaupt, the Bavarian founder in

1776 of one of the most famous conspiratorial groups, the Illuminati, in

history], to those of Karl Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela

Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxemberg (Germany), and Emma Goldman

(United States), this worldwide conspiracy for the overthrow of

civilisation and for the reconstitution of society on the basis of

arrested development and envious malevolence, an impossible equality

has been steadily growing. It has been the mainspring of every subversive

movement during the nineteenth century." [PIPES, D., 1997, p. 139]

Jews were also "particularly visible in the Soviet cultural and propaganda apparatus" and they "dominated the Soviet film industry." [GINSBERG, B., 1993, p. 31] Half of the June 1930 membership of the Communist Academy -- a philosophy organization -- were also Jewish. "It is obvious that from the very first moves to revive academic and scholarly work in the philosophical field [in Russia]," notes Yehoshua Yakhot, "the part played by Jews was considerable and, in a certain sense, predominant." [YAHOT, p. 244] By 1984, as one percent of the Soviet populace, one author even found that even 33 per cent of Soviet musicologists were Jews. [BRAUN, J. , p. 85]

More than once in Soviet history, Jews have fallen under government suspicion for a collective foreign intrigue -- many charged as agents of "American imperialism" or Israel. Sometimes portrayed in the Soviet press during Stalin era as men of "uncertain allegiance," notes Isaac Deutscher, the newspapers

"revealed systematically the Jewish names of writers who had been

know to the public under Russian pseudonyms ... The Jews were to

some extent protected by their prominence in vital spheres of the

national life, in the management of industry, in nuclear research, in

the [communist] party machine, in the academic world, and in the

armed forces. (Nearly twenty thousand Jews held teaching posts in

the Universities)." [DEUTSCHER, p. 608]

Among those many purged by Stalin in 1953 was the Jewish head (Palgunov) of Tass, the government news agency. [HYDE, H.M., 1971, p. 590] In 1937, in a purge of the Commander of the Red Army, seven of his top generals went with him. Four of these generals were Jewish --Yan Garmarik, Yon Yakir, R. Eideman, and B. Feldman. [HYDE, H.M., 1971, p. 351-352]

Opponents of indigenous European nationalist movements, Jews also rose to power in enforcing communist rule over post-World War II Soviet satellite countries, including Czecheslovakia, Hungary, and Poland. In Hungary, for example, Mathiou Rakosi was the Communist Party leader and Peter Gabor headed the secret police. Eduard Oklag, Yokub Berman and Gilyari Minz were prominent in the Polish government, Anna Pauker in Romania. "It was she," notes Howard Sachar, "not the [Communist] party's chairman, Gheorghe Gheorghin-Dej, who made the key policy decisions in her triple capacity as deputy premier, foreign minister, and deputy secretary of the central committee … Simeon Bughichi, Mrs. Pauker's successor as foreign minister, was also Jewish ... There were several Jews [after World War II] ... who played leading roles in the [Yugoslavian communist] government. The most eminent of these was Moshe Pijade [president of the Yugoslav National Assembly]." [SACHAR, H., 1985, p. 363, 365, 315]

A number of these Jewish leaders throughout the communist system met their end in government power purges. In Czecheslovakia, for example, Rudolph Slansky and ten other Jewish elites of the party were tried; eight were executed. "The Slansky trial," note Ronald Radosh and Joyce Milton, "was in part a move to purge the Czech communist party of its Jewish leadership." [RADOSH/MILTON, p. 349] Jewish scholar Barnet Litvinoff adds that

"When Stalin's tyranny was at its height, and his grasp upon his

satellites complete, powerful Jewish personalities were conspicuous

in the Communist hierarchies of Poland, Czechoslovakia, Hungary,

and Romania ... Hilary Minc and Jacob Berman who returned to

Warsaw ... stood very close to the master in the Kremlin ... Erno

Gero, Matyas Rakosi, and Mihaly Farkas occupied similar

positions in Hungary, while Anna Pauker was the unquestioned

mistress of Romania, with authority comparable to Rudolf

Slansky's in Czechoslovakia. The list was an extensive one, and

included government and Party officials alike, ambassadors

abroad, and some military figures trained by the Soviet secret

police, not to mention university professors, film producers and

broadcasting personalities." [LITVINOFF, B., p. 104-105]

Ultimately, Benjamin Ginsberg [GINSBERG, B., 1993] alludes to the reoccurring paradigm to all this, that Jews throughout European history have sought benefit from allegiance to ruling powers -- from absolute monarchists to communist dictatorships -- which oppressed, suffocated, and even massacred non-Jewish masses. As a people who historically distanced themselves from the indigenous peoples of every land they lived and as centuries-old nemeses of the Christian order, Jews were ideally suited to function as dispassionate legislators -- and exploiters and oppressors -- over those of whom they had no bond or interest. "The Gentile population in general," says Ewa Morawska about Eastern Europe, "and the inhabitants of villages surrounding the [Jewish community] in particular, were seen by Jews primarily in instrumental terms as suppliers of ... material livelihood." [MORAWSKA, p. 15] For those many Jews who had a religious basis in their lives, traditional Judaism often served the interests of devaluing others. As consequence, Jewish communities periodically engendered the wrath -- and sometimes violence -- of the common populace.

Jewish scholar George Mosse frames the common bond between the polar politics of the Jewish European capitalist and communist this way:

"There was an affinity between the Jewish bourgeoisie which supported

the newest in the arts, placing themselves squarely on the side of the

modernists, and their wayward socialist children, who wanted to

overthrow the existing social and economic order. This affinity was

based on shared ideals that the sons wanted to realize more completely

than the fathers had." [MOSSE, G., 1985, p. 57]

"Empirical data," adds Jewish scholar Norman Cantor, "support the contention of French and German anti-Semites in the 1920s and 1930s that the Jews were both capitalists and communists, and thus doubly anathema to the reactionary racist movements that funneled into Judeo-phobic fascism. The German cartoons of the 1920s who depicted Jews as both bloated capitalists swallowing European civilization and nefarious red terrorists plotting to blow up western civilization were not engaging in absolute fantasy, even though Jewish apologists then and historians now like to make that accusation and try to forget the whole thing." [CANTOR, p. 275]