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History
See other History Articles

Title: Stalin's death penalty for "anti-semitism"
Source: etext.org
URL Source: http://www.etext.org/Politics/MIM/c ... t.php?mimfile=Stalinonjews.txt
Published: Aug 30, 2006
Author: Joseph Stalin
Post Date: 2006-08-30 13:47:16 by bluegrass
Ping List: *New History*
Keywords: None
Views: 2658
Comments: 33

Works, Vol. 13, July 1930-January 1934, Moscow: Foreign Languages Publishing House, 1955, p. 30

"Anti-Semitism: Reply to an Inquiry of the Jewish News Agency in the United States"

Joseph Stalin

In answer to your inquiry:

National and racial chauvinism is a vestige of the misanthropic customs characteristic of the period of cannibalism. Anti-semitism, as an extreme form of racial chauvinism, is the most dangerous vestige of cannibalism.

Anti-semitism is of advantage to the exploiters as a lightning conductor that deflects the blows aimed by the working people at capitalism. Anti-semitism is dangerous for the working people as being a false path that leads them off the right road and lands them in the jungle. Hence Communists, as consistent internationalists, cannot but be irreconcilable, sworn enemies of anti-semitism.

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

J. Stalin January 12, 1931

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#1. To: bluegrass (#0)

In the U.S.S.R. anti-semitism is punishable with the utmost severity of the law as a phenomenon deeply hostile to the Soviet system. Under U.S.S.R. law active anti-semites are liable to the death penalty.

Ironic, in view of what happened in the last years of Stalin's rule.

aristeides  posted on  2006-08-30   13:49:34 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#2. To: bluegrass (#0)

It wasn't when Lenin and Stalin killed millions of peasants that American communist intellectuals turned on Soviet Communism. It wasn't when Stalin blew up churches that they thought he was a threat. It wasn't when his Gulag system was set up that they turned on him. Nope. It was only when Stalin started to target Jews in his government that they turned on him and became "Cold Warriors".

Burkeman1  posted on  2006-08-30   13:53:13 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#3. To: Burkeman1 (#2)

It wasn't when Lenin and Stalin killed millions of peasants that American communist intellectuals turned on Soviet Communism. It wasn't when Stalin blew up churches that they thought he was a threat. It wasn't when his Gulag system was set up that they turned on him. Nope. It was only when Stalin started to target Jews in his government that they turned on him and became "Cold Warriors".

Well said!

scrapper2  posted on  2006-08-30   13:56:59 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#4. To: Burkeman1 (#2)

It was only when Stalin started to target Jews in his government that they turned on him and became "Cold Warriors".

Exactly. And the Cold War "thawed" when Jews began to regain influence in Russia.

The ADL itself admits to your thesis, though they reverse it:


...Stalin's campaign against the Jews coincided with the start of the Cold War, and it was continued by his successors who conceived and orchestrated the first worldwide campaign against Zionism, portraying it as not just racist but the incarnation of evil itself.

Democracy and Anti-Semitism Remarks by Carl Gershman, President, The National Endowment for Democracy at the conference on "Anti-Semitism - A Threat to Democracy" December 16, 2004


"We can make a natural alliance through the ownership of the great industries of the world and through the sharing of their profits." -Lord Charles Beresford, in a 1903 speech to the (Anglo-American-Jewish) Pilgrims Society.

bluegrass  posted on  2006-08-30   14:02:16 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#5. To: aristeides (#1)

Ironic, in view of what happened in the last years of Stalin's rule.

LOL! Stalin was subject to his own death penalty.

"We can make a natural alliance through the ownership of the great industries of the world and through the sharing of their profits." -Lord Charles Beresford, in a 1903 speech to the (Anglo-American-Jewish) Pilgrims Society.

bluegrass  posted on  2006-08-30   14:07:49 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#6. To: aristeides, bluegrass (#1)

In his book "Stalin Against the Jews," Arkady Vaksberg makes a plausible case that, despite the fog of his rhetoric against "anti-Semitism," Stalin's '30's purges were deliberately targeted at top Jewish members of the Party---such as Yagoda, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and of course his arch-enemy, Trotsky. (Then again, it might have simply been a reflection of the predominance Jews achieved in the early Soviet regime---for that see Yuri Slezkine's "Jewish Century")

Putative re-location of Jews to the "Jewish Autononomous Oblast" of Birobidzhan (Pete Seeger had a "folk-song" celebrating it: "Now if you look for paradise/You'll see it there before your eyes/Stop your search and go no further on/There we have a collective farm/All run by husky Jewish arms..."), located in the remote Russian Far East, was according to Vaksberg to serve as a pretext for Stalin's own "Final Solution," which the "Doctor's Plot" just before Stalin's death was to inaugurate.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   14:10:38 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#7. To: aristeides (#1)

Ironic, in view of what happened in the last years of Stalin's rule.

Solzhenitsyn and others put Stalins later years in proper context. Killing or exiling Jews was not due to his anti-semitism but rather to his paranoia of the Trotsky wing of Communism which happened to be mostly Jews.

When power was at stake, Stalin had no qualms about killing his own.

Over the years Jews have vehmently claimed that Lenin and Stalin were not Jews.

Cynicom  posted on  2006-08-30   14:30:34 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#8. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#6)

That makes sense. Hitler admired Stalin by the late 30s believing Stalin had shed the Communist Revolution yolk(this would seem to reference the point in your post), and was now the head of a 'proper' nationalist state. Hitler certainly admired Stalin's ruthlessness and entirely immoral/ammoral will to power, and in Hitler's last days, the Corporal said he should have done what Stalin did and killed all the generals when he had the chance.

JohnGalt  posted on  2006-08-30   14:37:32 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#9. To: Cynicom (#7)

Over the years Jews have vehmently claimed that Lenin and Stalin were not Jews.

Lenin's maternal grandfather was Jewish---that's it. His grandmother on his mother's side was, IIRC, Swedish and Swiss German. His father was Kalmyk Mongol. Lenin wouldn't even qualify as "Halbjude."

I don't know where this factoid that "Stalin was Jewish" came from, but it's false. Stalin was an ex-seminarian---there's even an anecdote recounting that Stalin's mother would rather Stalin had become a priest than General Secretary, and told him so before she died in 1937.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   14:50:42 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#10. To: JohnGalt (#8)

That makes sense. Hitler admired Stalin by the late 30s believing Stalin had shed the Communist Revolution yolk(this would seem to reference the point in your post), and was now the head of a 'proper' nationalist state. Hitler certainly admired Stalin's ruthlessness and entirely immoral/ammoral will to power, and in Hitler's last days, the Corporal said he should have done what Stalin did and killed all the generals when he had the chance.

Stalin's daughter, Svetlana Alliluyeva, recounted that even after the end of the war, Stalin often expressed regret that Hitler had turned on him, and sighed about all the great things he and "the Germans" could have done together.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   14:52:54 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#11. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#6)

In his book "Stalin Against the Jews," Arkady Vaksberg makes a plausible case that, despite the fog of his rhetoric against "anti-Semitism," Stalin's '30's purges were deliberately targeted at top Jewish members of the Party---such as Yagoda, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and of course his arch-enemy, Trotsky. (Then again, it might have simply been a reflection of the predominance Jews achieved in the early Soviet regime---for that see Yuri Slezkine's "Jewish Century")

I think it was the latter case - Stalin's fear of the Trotsky wing, which like all wings of Soviet communism, had significant Jewish membership generally and particularly in its leadership.

Jews were still popular with Stalin in the 30's. If you will recall, Stalin sent one of his favorite Jewish commanders, to starve the Ukrainians, genocide against an almost entirely Christian nation.

http://www.lewrockwel l.com/margolis/margolis45.html

"Stalin and the Ukranian Massacre" by Eric Margolis

Five years ago, I wrote a column about the unknown Holocaust in Ukraine. I was shocked to receive a flood of mail from young Americans and Canadians of Ukrainian descent telling me that until they read my article, they knew nothing of the 1932–33 genocide in which Stalin's regime murdered 7 million Ukrainians and sent 2 million to concentration camps.

How, I wondered, could such historical amnesia afflict so many young North- American Ukrainians? For Jews and Armenians, the genocides their people suffered are vivid, living memories that influence their daily lives. Yet today, on the 70th anniversary of the destruction of a quarter of Ukraine's population, this titanic crime has almost vanished into history's black hole.

So has the extermination of the Don Cossacks by the Soviets in the 1920's, and Volga Germans, in 1941; and mass executions and deportations to concentration camps of Lithuanians, Latvians, Estonians, and Poles. At the end of World War II, Stalin's gulag held 5.5 million prisoners, 23% Ukrainians and 6% Baltic peoples.

Almost unknown is the genocide of 2 million of the USSR's Muslim peoples: Chechen, Ingush, Crimean Tatars, Tajiks, Bashkir, Kazaks. The Chechen independence fighters today branded "terrorists" by the US and Russia are the grandchildren of survivors of Soviet concentration camps.

Add to this list of forgotten atrocities the murder in Eastern Europe from 1945– 47 of at least 2 million ethnic Germans, mostly women and children, and the violent expulsion of 15 million more Germans, during which 2 million German girls and women were raped.

Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people. In 1932 he sent Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch, and NKVD secret police chief G. Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization

Ukraine was sealed off. All food supplies and livestock were confiscated. NKVD death squads executed "anti-party elements." Furious that insufficient Ukrainians were being shot, Kaganovitch "the Soviet Adolf Eichmann" set a quota of 10,000 executions a week. Eighty percent of Ukrainian intellectuals were shot.

During the bitter winter of 1932–33, 25,000 Ukrainians per day were being shot or dying of starvation and cold. Cannibalism became common. Ukraine, writes historian Robert Conquest, looked like a giant version of the future Bergan- Belsen death camp.

The mass murder of 7 million Ukrainians, 3 million of them children, and deportation to the gulag of 2 million (where most died) was hidden by Soviet propaganda. Pro-communist westerners, like the New York Times' Walter Duranty, Sidney and Beatrice Webb, and French Prime Minister Edouard Herriot, toured Ukraine, denied reports of genocide, and applauded what they called Soviet "agrarian reform." Those who spoke out against the genocide were branded "fascist agents."

The US, British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine. The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically, Hitler and Mussolini. Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and many senior communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish, Hitler's absurd claim that communism was a Jewish plot to destroy Christian civilization became widely believed across fearful Europe.

When war came, Roosevelt and Churchill allied themselves closely to Stalin, though they were well aware his regime had murdered at least 30 million people long before Hitler's extermination of Jews and gypsies began. Yet in the strange moral calculus of mass murder, only Germans were guilty.

Though Stalin murdered 3 times more people than Hitler, to the doting Roosevelt he remained "Uncle Joe." At Yalta, Stalin even boasted to Churchill he had killed over 10 million peasants. The British-US alliance with Stalin made them his partners in crime. Roosevelt and Churchill helped preserve history's most murderous regime, to which they handed over half of Europe.

After the war, the Left tried to cover up Soviet genocide. Jean-Paul Sartre denied the gulag even existed. For the Allies, Nazism was the only evil; they could not admit being allied to mass murders. For the Soviets, promoting the Jewish Holocaust perpetuated anti-fascism and masked their own crimes.

The Jewish people saw their Holocaust as a unique event. It was Israel's raison d'être. Raising other genocides would, they feared, diminish their own.

While academia, media and Hollywood rightly keep attention on the Jewish Holocaust, they ignore Ukraine. We still hunt Nazi killers but not communist killers. There are few photos of the Ukraine genocide or Stalin's gulag, and fewer living survivors. Dead men tell no tales.

Russia never prosecuted any of its mass murderers, as Germany did.

We know all about crimes of Nazis Adolf Eichmann and Heinrich Himmler; about Babi Yar and Auschwitz.

But who remembers Soviet mass murderers Dzerzhinsky, Kaganovitch, Yagoda, Yezhov, and Beria? Were it not for Alexander Solzhenitsyn, we might never know of Soviet death camps like Magadan, Kolyma, and Vorkuta. Movie after movie appears about Nazi evil, while the evil of the Soviet era vanishes from view or dissolves into nostalgia.

The souls of Stalin's millions of victims still cry out for justice.

scrapper2  posted on  2006-08-30   15:01:06 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#12. To: Peetie Wheatstraw, Cynicom (#9)

Lenin spoke fluent Yiddish and his wife was a Jew. Culturally, Lenin was a Jew.

"We can make a natural alliance through the ownership of the great industries of the world and through the sharing of their profits." -Lord Charles Beresford, in a 1903 speech to the (Anglo-American-Jewish) Pilgrims Society.

bluegrass  posted on  2006-08-30   15:10:46 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#13. To: scrapper2 (#11)

Jews were still popular with Stalin in the 30's. If you will recall, Stalin sent one of his favorite Jewish commanders, to starve the Ukrainians, genocide against an almost entirely Christian nation.

You're referring to Lazar Kaganovich, like Stalin the son of a cobbler. What Stalin liked about Kaganovich was his ruthless efficiency, and complete disregard for human life. Of course, that didn't stop Stalin from arresting and forcing the suicide of Lazar's brother, Mikhail---Stalin liked to do stuff like that to test the abjectness of his henchman's loyalty.

According to Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin may have had several Jewish mistresses in the '30's after his second wife's suicide. He liked their bold and quick wit. Of course, when he got tired of all that pertness, he had them arrested, tortured and shot, like Bronislava Poskrebysheva, his trusted secretary's wife, when she impertinently went to see him about her brother's arrest. Poskrebyshev knew what had happened to his wife, whom he loved very much, but could not do or say anything about it.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   15:18:50 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#14. To: bluegrass (#12)

Lenin spoke fluent Yiddish and his wife was a Jew. Culturally, Lenin was a Jew.

Krupskaya Jewish? News to me. As is the report that Lenin spoke Yiddish---why would he need to? (He did know German, but then a lot of educated Russians did) Lenin was aware of his part Jewish origins and admired and was close to his "Jewish comrades," as he called them. I'm not sure that I would go so far as to deem that "cultural Jewishness."

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   15:24:30 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#15. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#9)

I don't know where this factoid that "Stalin was Jewish" came from, but it's false.

I have never read any scholarly works by non-Jews that were able to speak with that certainty.

Cynicom  posted on  2006-08-30   15:29:29 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#16. To: Cynicom (#15)

I have never read any scholarly works by non-Jews that were able to speak with that certainty.

Cite a few such non-Jewish scholarly works for me. I've seen speculation that Stalin was Ossetian (an Iranian people)---that was current even during Stalin's lifetime. (Incidentally, "South Ossetia," part of Georgia during the Soviet era, is now seeking to secede and be united with "North Ossetia," part of the Russian Federation, with Russian connivance of course). Never seen anything remotely plausible that he was Jewish---first time I saw such a claim was here in fact.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   15:37:32 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#17. To: Peetie Wheatstraw, All (#13)

scrapper2: Jews were still popular with Stalin in the 30's. If you will recall, Stalin sent one of his favorite Jewish commanders, to starve the Ukrainians, genocide against an almost entirely Christian nation.

Peetie Wheatstraw: You're referring to Lazar Kaganovich, like Stalin the son of a cobbler.

Peetie, while you are correct in identifying Lazar Kaganovich as being the Jewish commander that Stalin sent to implement the Ukrainian Holocaust you don't respond to the fact that the article I quote to you written by Eric Margolis also provides ample evidence that Jewish communist leaders were alive and well in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930's and continued to be power players for some time after.

http://www.lewrockwel >http://l.com/margolis/margolis4 5.html

"Stalin and the Ukrainian Massacre" by Eric Margolis

...Among these monstrous crimes, Ukraine stands out as the worst in terms of numbers. Stalin declared war on his own people. In 1932 he sent Commissars V. Molotov and Lazar Kaganovitch, and NKVD secret police chief G. Yagoda to crush the resistance of Ukrainian farmers to forced collectivization...The US, British, and Canadian governments, however, were well aware of the genocide, but closed their eyes, even blocking aid groups from going to Ukraine. The only European leaders to raise a cry over Soviet industrialized murder were, ironically, Hitler and Mussolini. Because Kaganovitch, Yagoda and many senior communist party and NKVD officials were Jewish...

Dr. Kevin Macdonald makes similar points in his article. Macdonald actually draws on the book you refer to in an earlier post to make his points:

http://www.vdare.co m/misc/051105_macdonald_stalin.htm

"“Stalin’s Willing Executioners”?"

"...The once-common view that the Bolshevik Revolution was a Jewish revolution and that the Soviet Union was initially dominated by Jews has now been largely eliminated from modern academic historiography. The current view, accepted by almost all contemporary historians, is that Jews played no special role in Bolshevism and indeed, were uniquely victimized by it. Slezkine’s book [The Jewish century] provides a bracing corrective to this current view...Although in the decades immediately before the Russian Revolution Jews had already made enormous advances in social and economic status, a major contribution of Slezkine’s book is to document that Communism was, indeed, “good for the Jews.” After the Revolution, there was active elimination of any remnants of the older order and their descendants. Anti-Semitism was outlawed. Jews benefited from “antibourgeois” quotas in educational institutions and other forms of discrimination against the middle class and aristocratic elements of the old regime, which could have competed with the Jews....Despite the important role of Jews among the Bolsheviks, most Jews were not Bolsheviks before the Revolution. However, Jews were prominent among the Bolsheviks, and once the Revolution was underway, the vast majority of Russian Jews became sympathizers and active participants.

Jews were particularly visible in the cities and as leaders in the army and in the revolutionary councils and committees. For example, there were 23 Jews among 62 Bolsheviks in the All-Russian Central Executive Committee elected at the Second Congress of Soviets in October, 1917. Jews were leaders of the movement and to a great extent they were its public face.

Their presence was particularly notable at the top levels of the Cheka and OGPU (two successive acronyms for the secret police). Here Slezkine provides statistics on Jewish overrepresentation in these organizations, especially in supervisory roles, and quotes historian Leonard Shapiro’s comment that “anyone who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka stood a very good chance of finding himself confronted with and possibly shot by a Jewish investigator.”

During the 1930s, Slezkine reports, the secret police, now known as the NKVD, “was one of the most Jewish of all Soviet institutions”, with 42 of the 111 top officials being Jewish. At this time 12 of the 20 NKVD directorates were headed by ethnic Jews, including those in charge of State Security, Police, Labor Camps, and Resettlement (deportation).

The Gulag was headed by ethnic Jews from its beginning in 1930 until the end of 1938, a period that encompasses the worst excesses of the Great Terror.

They were, in Slezkine’s remarkable phrase, “Stalin’s willing executioners”.

Slezkine appears to take a certain pride in the drama of the role of the Jews in Russia during these years. Thus he says they were

“among the most exuberant crusaders against ‘bourgeois’ habits during the Great Transformation; the most disciplined advocates of socialist realism during the ‘Great Retreat’ (from revolutionary internationalism); and the most passionate prophets of faith, hope, and combat during the Great Patriotic War against the Nazis”.

Sometimes his juxtapositions between his descriptions of Jewish involvement in the horror of the early Soviet period and the life styles of the Jewish elite seem deliberately jarring. Lev Kopelev, a Jewish writer who witnessed and rationalized the Ukrainian famine in which millions died horrible deaths of starvation and disease as an “historical necessity” is quoted saying “You mustn’t give in to debilitating pity. We are the agents of historical necessity. We are fulfilling our revolutionary duty.”

On the next page, Slezkine describes the life of the largely Jewish elite in Moscow and Leningrad where they attended the theater, sent their children to the best schools, had peasant women (whose families were often the victims of mass murder) for nannies, spent weekends at pleasant dachas and vacationed at the Black Sea.

Again, Slezkine discusses the heavily Jewish NKVD and the Jewish leadership of the Great Terror of the 1930s. Then, he writes that in 1937 the prototypical Jewish State official “probably would have been living in elite housing in downtown Moscow . . . with access to special stores, a house in the country (dacha), and a live-in peasant nanny or maid”. He writes long and lovingly detailed sketches of life at the dachas of the elite—the “open verandas overlooking small gardens enclosed by picket fences…”

The reader is left on his own to recall the horrors of the Ukrainian famine, the liquidation of the Kulaks, and the Gulag.

Slezkine attempts to dodge the issue of the degree to which the horrors perpetrated by the early Soviet state were rooted in the traditional attitudes of the Jews who in fact played such an extensive role in their orchestration. He argues that the Jewish Communists were Communists, not Jews.

This does not survive factual analysis.

One might grant the possibility that the revolutionary vanguard was composed of Jews like Trotsky, apparently far more influenced by a universalist utopian vision than by their upbringing in traditional Judaism. But, even granting this, it does not necessarily follow for the millions of Jews who left the shtetl towns, migrated to the cities, and to such a large extent ran the USSR.

It strains credulity to suppose that these migrants completely and immediately threw off all remnants of the Eastern European shtetl culture—which, as Slezkine acknowledges, had a deep sense of estrangement from non-Jewish society, a fear and hatred of peasants, hostility toward the Czarist upper class, and a very negative attitude toward Christianity.

In other words, the war against what Slezkine terms “rural backwardness and religion” — major targets of the Revolution — was exactly the sort of war that traditional Jews would have supported wholeheartedly, because it was a war against everything they hated and thought of as oppressing Jews.

However, while Slezkine seems comfortable with the notion of revenge as a Jewish motive, he does not consider traditional Jewish culture itself as a possible contributor to Jewish behavior in the new Communist state.

Moreover, while it was generally true that Jewish servants of the Soviet regime had ceased being religious Jews, this did not mean they ceased having a Jewish identity. (Albert Lindeman made this point when reviewing Slezkine in The American Conservative [article not on line].)

Slezkine quotes the philosopher Vitaly Rubin speaking of his career at a top Moscow school in the 1930s where over half the students were Jewish:

“Understandably, the Jewish question did not arise there…All the Jews knew themselves to be Jews but considered everything to do with Jewishness a thing of the past...There was no active desire to renounce one’s Jewishness. The problem simply did not exist.”

In other words, in the early decades of the Soviet Union, the ruling class was so heavily a Jewish milieu, that there was no need to renounce a Jewish identity and no need to aggressively push for Jewish interests. Jews had achieved elite status.

But ethnic networking continued nonetheless. Indeed, Slezkine reports that when a leading Soviet spokesmen on anti-Semitism, Yuri Larin (Lurie), tried to explain the embarrassing fact that Jews were, as he said, “preeminent, overabundant, dominant, and so on” among the elite in the Soviet Union, he mentioned the “unusually strong sense of solidarity and a predisposition toward mutual help and support”—ethnic networking by any other name.

Obviously, “mutual help and support” required that Jews recognize each other as Jews. Jewish identity may not have been much discussed. But it operated nonetheless, even if subconsciously, in the rarified circles at the top of Soviet society.

Things changed. Slezkine shows that the apparent de-emphasis of Jewish identity by many members of the Soviet elite during the 1920s and 1930s turned out to be a poor indicator of whether or not these people identified as Jews—or would do so when Jewish and Soviet identities began to diverge in later years: when National Socialism reemphasized Jewish identity, and when Israel emerged as a magnet for Jewish sentiment and loyalty.

In the end, despite the rationalizations of many Soviet Jews on Jewish identity in the early Soviet period, it was blood that mattered.

After World War II, in a process which remains somewhat obscure, the Russian majority began taking back their country. One method was “massive affirmative action” aimed at giving greater representation to underrepresented ethnic groups. Jews became targets of suspicion because of their ethnic status. They were barred from some elite institutions, and had their opportunities for advancement limited. Overt anti-Semitism was encouraged by the more covert official variety apparent in the limits on Jewish advancement.

Under these circumstances, Slezkine says that Jews became “in many ways, the core of the antiregime intelligentsia”. Applications to leave the USSR increased dramatically after Israel’s Six-Day War of 1967 which, as in the United States and Eastern Europe, resulted in an upsurge of Jewish identification and ethnic pride. The floodgates were eventually opened by Gorbachev in the late 1980s. By 1994, 1.2 million Soviet Jews had emigrated—43% of the total. By 2002, there were only 230,000 Jews remaining in the Russian Federation, 0.16% of the population.

Nevertheless these remaining Jews remain overrepresented among the elite. Six of the seven oligarchs who emerged in control of the Soviet economy and media in the period of de-nationalization of the 1990s were Jews...

scrapper2  posted on  2006-08-30   16:10:56 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#18. To: scrapper2 (#17)

Peetie, while you are correct in identifying Lazar Kaganovich as being the Jewish commander that Stalin sent to implement the Ukrainian Holocaust you don't respond to the fact that the article I quote to you written by Eric Margolis also provides ample evidence that Jewish communist leaders were alive and well in Stalin's Soviet Union in the 1930's and continued to be power players for some time after.

What's to "respond"? I correctly identified the "Jewish commander" as Kaganovich. Nothing in my response even remotely implied that Kaganovich was the only Jew in the Soviet Communist hierarchy in the '30's, or for that matter, the only Jew in the security organs, or the only Jew to survive Stalin and his purges. I do deny that Stalin was Jewish, and I think Vaksberg makes a plausible case that Stalin never had the Judaeophilia of, say, Lenin, and throughout his tenure increasingly (especially after the war) targeted Jews for arrest and purges, even (if you believe the case made by Vaksberg in his book, which I doubt you've read) preparing for a wholesale removal of Jews eastward in 1953 and---who knows?---elimination of them.

But as for the disproportionate participation of Jews in the Soviet government, I don't know how you can try to concoct any differences between us on that. So kindly quit your shadow-boxing.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   16:29:57 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#19. To: scrapper2, bluegrass, Cynicom (#17)

Here is a link to a review of a 2001 book by Joshua Rubenstein (yes, I'll just bet he's Jewish---wouldn't you?) entitled "Stalin's Secret Pogrom: The Inquisition of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee." That post-war purge, and the campaign against "rootless cosmopolitans" (i.e., Jews) came well before the 1953 "Doctor's Plot."

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   16:52:11 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#20. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#19)

The late-1940's Soviet persecution of "rootless cosmopolitans" is described at length in a book I am reading now, A Writer at War, about and largely by Vasily Grossman, and edited by Anthony Beevor.

aristeides  posted on  2006-08-30   17:01:00 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#21. To: scrapper2 (#17)

After World War II, in a process which remains somewhat obscure, the Russian majority began taking back their country.

Nothing "obscure" about it to me---what's "obscure" is pretending that this process was due to "the Russian majority's" decision to "take back their country." (A "country" that just happened to hold in involuntary thrall dozens of peoples who weren't Russian and didn't want to be Russian---Soviet Russia like Czarist Russia was a "prison house of nations.")

A visit by Golda Meir to the Soviet Union after the founding of Israel and her lionizing by Soviet Jews---including Madame Polina Molotova's comment to her that she was a "yiddishe tokhter," which landed her in prison (another instance where her ethnic Russian husband and Stalin's right hand man, Vyacheslav Molotov, had to "grin and bear it")---raised Stalin's suspicions (never hard to raise), and was the catalyst that led to his post-war anti-Jewish purges.

Was he right to do so? Given the power of AIPAC in our country, I don't blame him at least for being concerned (though I'm never going to condone Stalin's crimes against anyone--not even his Jewish victims). But let's not pretend that the replacement of Jews by Russians in the Communist hierarchy post-war was the result of some public opinion surge, OK?

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   17:14:51 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#22. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#16)

Cite a few such non-Jewish scholarly works for me.

If I could recall everything I have ever read, I would not be here.

After his death, world Jews have been at great pains to deny he was Jew.

If you remember all you have ever read perhaps you could cite me anything that is definitive proof of the statement you made. I have never seen anything to prove he is or is not and I suspect that argument will never be satisfied either way.

Just as an after thought, In our recent time it has been an oddity of the Americans that have discovered they are Jewish. They all seem to be in politics and fear an outing when they "discover" what others had known.

Albright, Clark, Kerry, H. Clinton and a few others come to mind.

Cynicom  posted on  2006-08-30   17:28:50 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#23. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#18)

What's to "respond"? I correctly identified the "Jewish commander" as Kaganovich. Nothing in my response even remotely implied that Kaganovich was the only Jew in the Soviet Communist hierarchy in the '30's, or for that matter, the only Jew in the security organs, or the only Jew to survive Stalin and his purges...But as for the disproportionate participation of Jews in the Soviet government, I don't know how you can try to concoct any differences between us on that. So kindly quit your shadow-boxing.

I'm not "shadow boxing" ie. trying to create a debate about differences that do not exist, if that's what you mean by the phrase.

Perhaps I misunderstood what you stated in post #6:

"...In his book "Stalin Against the Jews," Arkady Vaksberg makes a plausible case that, despite the fog of his rhetoric against "anti-Semitism," Stalin's '30's purges were deliberately targeted at top Jewish members of the Party---such as Yagoda, Kamenev, Zinoviev, and of course his arch-enemy, Trotsky..."

I took your comments to mean that you believed that Stalin started separating himself from Jewish communist leaders and active members of the Soviet communist party in the 1930's.

That's why my susequent posts to you with links to articles by Eric Margolis and Dr. Kevin Macdonald pointed out that Stalin, in fact, was very tight with high profile Jews in the party and active Jewish members in the NKVD in the 30's and early 40's. The NKVD followed the Soviet troops so they could shoot any soldier who tried to desert or retreat in WWII. Stalin's purges of Jews in the communist party started in earnest after the war.

Whether Stalin was a Jew or not, I have no idea. In my opinion, Stalin was a shrewd man, a survivor, and he aligned himself with the movers and shakers of the communist party at the time and in those times many influential communist party members were Jews. Stalin turned on them later because he perceived them as a threat to his power.

But if I misunderstood your #6 comment, then I am sorry.

scrapper2  posted on  2006-08-30   17:47:03 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#24. To: Cynicom (#22)

If you remember all you have ever read perhaps you could cite me anything that is definitive proof of the statement you made. I have never seen anything to prove he is or is not and I suspect that argument will never be satisfied either way.

I've read extensively about Stalin and I've never seen any mention that he was even part Jewish. I'm pretty sure neither Tucker nor Conquest is Jewish, for example, and neither of their biographies of Stalin mentions that he was Jewish. Volkogonov (I don't believe he's Jewish either, though I admit I'm not as careful about that determination as some here purport to be) highlighted Lenin's Jewish ancestry in his Lenin biography, but didn't mention anything about Stalin's putative Jewish roots in his Stalin biography, and Volkogonov was granted privileged access to previously secret document archives. The really interesting mystery about Stalin is not whether he was Jewish, but whether he was a "double agent" before the Revolution for the Okhrana, the Czarist secret police.

I know there were lots of bad Jews in the Soviet Union helping Stalin out---I don't feel a bit sorry for the ones he turned on like Zinoviev and Yagoda. There were enough real Jews responsible for Soviet crimes without inventing more. Stalin was not Jewish.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   21:14:28 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#25. To: scrapper2 (#23)

I took your comments to mean that you believed that Stalin started separating himself from Jewish communist leaders and active members of the Soviet communist party in the 1930's.

Well, you can make the case that he was doing exactly that, though not as openly as he did after the war, when Jewish support against the Germans was no longer an issue, and in contrast the loyalty issues raised by the new State of Israel did become an issue. But again, I think we agree that the "Jewish comrades" were the "ethnic backbone" of the terrorist policies and organs of the Soviet Union in the 1930's---no question---just as Jews were disproportionately represented in the postwar East European regimes and especially the security organs.

But if I misunderstood your #6 comment, then I am sorry.

And I apologize for the "scrappiness" of my post to you. :)

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   21:20:25 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#26. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#24)

Stalin was not Jewish.

I would say that is your opinion and I accept that. It is my opinion that no one knows for sure either way and it has been a sore subject for Jews for sometime.

Cynicom  posted on  2006-08-30   21:45:18 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#27. To: Cynicom (#26)

it has been a sore subject for Jews for sometime.

None of the Jews I've ever known. You can get 'em worked up about Jews and Communism, Jews and Atomic Espionage, Jews and Immigration, Jews and Israel...but I've never seen one sore over whether Stalin was Jewish or not. I think any Jew I would ever have asked about that would have laughed at me, not got angry.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   22:00:28 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#28. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#27)

None of the Jews I've ever known.

Perhaps you need to enlarge your circle of Jewish friends. LOL

Cynicom  posted on  2006-08-30   22:04:37 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#29. To: aristeides (#20)

The late-1940's Soviet persecution of "rootless cosmopolitans" is described at length in a book I am reading now, A Writer at War, about and largely by Vasily Grossman, and edited by Anthony Beevor.

Grossman's "Life and Fate" is on my list of books to read. It's been compared favorably to "War and Peace," although I have a hard time believing anyone's come close to Tolstoy as a writer.

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   22:04:46 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#30. To: Cynicom (#22)

ust as an after thought, In our recent time it has been an oddity of the Americans that have discovered they are Jewish. They all seem to be in politics and fear an outing when they "discover" what others had known.

Albright, Clark, Kerry, H. Clinton and a few others come to mind.

It is striking, isn't it? Maybe not, really, when you consider the persuit of power...

tom007  posted on  2006-08-30   22:37:22 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#31. To: tom007 (#30)

It is striking, isn't it? Maybe not, really, when you consider the persuit of power...

There were two or three more but their names escape me..

Kerry was the most laffable one...The newspaper had to tell him he was Jew and he was astonished. Yet many knew the things his grandfather did to hide his race.

Cynicom  posted on  2006-08-30   22:41:46 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#32. To: Cynicom (#28)

Perhaps you need to enlarge your circle of Jewish friends. LOL

You have that many?

Peetie Wheatstraw  posted on  2006-08-30   22:49:33 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


#33. To: Peetie Wheatstraw (#32)

You have that many?

Family.

Cynicom  posted on  2006-08-31   5:19:17 ET  Reply   Trace   Private Reply  


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