Jews in the Russian Revolution

With the delicacy and elegance that were his hallmark, Tsar Nicholas II wrote to his mother on October 17, 1905, during the wave of pogroms that followed the promulgation of the “October Manifesto”: “the people grew indignant at the impudence and insolence of the revolutionaries and the socialists, and since 9/10ths of them are yids, all its anger came down upon them — hence the Jewish pogroms. It is striking to see with what unanimity and what simultaneity this happened in all the towns of Russia and Siberia […] But besides the yids, the Russian agitators caught it too: the engineers, the lawyers, and all sorts of other filthy people¹…”

This equally dubious conviction and arithmetic would lead Nicholas II, in 1907, to oppose the proposal advanced by his prime minister Stolypin to grant the Jews the same civil rights as the other subjects of the Empire, so as to detach them, if only in part, from the revolutionary temptation. His pathological hatred for the “Jewish clique” exacerbated a sentiment widespread within his government; when he received Theodor Herzl in 1903, the minister of the interior Plehve, reversing cause and effect, explained to his visitor:

“the Jews are in part responsible for their deplorable situation in the Pale of Settlement, because they affiliate themselves in ever-increasing numbers with subversive organizations²”.

It is an old theme of monarchist and White propaganda, current as early as 1917: the two Russian revolutions of February and October 1917 were made by (and of course for) the Jews. This myth is still not dead. Since the establishment of “democracy³” in Russia, a dishonorable flood of pamphlets and books crudely orchestrating it has been pouring forth. Its archetype can be found in the work of a certain Dikii, Les Juifs en Russie et en URSS (The Jews in Russia and the USSR), published in 1994 in Novosibirsk by the “Blagovest” press, and which is the translation of a book published in New York in 1967, printed in Russian in… Madrid, as though one had to go by way of foreign capitals to print a truth that one supposedly wishes to hide in Russia.

The objectivity of this “historical study” is allegedly guaranteed by the publication, in an appendix, of articles by Jewish authors (S. Lourié, V. Mandel, or Margoline…) and of scientific-looking tables on the percentage of Jews in the various revolutionary bodies, tables checked against those of a work published in Ireland in 1962 by the very Catholic Reverend Denis Fahey under the title The Rulers of Russia, with the imprimatur of Jeremias, Bishop of Waterford, and therefore presumed truthful.

It is stupefying reading. Thus, the Council of People’s Commissars was supposedly composed of seventeen Jews, one Georgian, one Armenian, and three Russians; the Military Commissariat of the Republic, of thirty-seven Jews, seven Latvians, and one German; the Commissariat of Internal Affairs supposedly counted twelve Jews, and the Cheka, twenty-three Jews, plus eight Latvians, one Pole, two Russians, and one Armenian. The Commissariat of Foreign Affairs was supposedly composed of thirteen Jews, one Latvian, one German, and a single Russian; the Commissariat of Finance, of twenty-four Jews, two Russians, two Latvians, and one Pole. The Commissariat of Justice supposedly counted eighteen Jews, one Armenian, etc. All these tables are in reality shamefully falsified: Dikii took the Councils of People’s Commissars across the years, mixed them together, eliminated most of the non-Jews, added Jews, named Zinoviev to the Interior, for instance — a post he had never held — so as to fabricate the table proving a genuine infiltration. And whoever says infiltration says organized force, clandestine or secret; from there, the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, the Jewish plot — now Zionist, now Judeo-Masonic — are the logical sequel (or confirmation) of these fanciful and fantastic figures, which recall the sinister joke of the satirical paper Le Vampire in 1906: “Warsaw. In the Citadel 11 anarchists were shot, 15 of them Jews⁴”.

Let us add to this the twenty-five works of the same ilk published to date by the “Vitiaz” (“the Valiant Knight”) press, which develop the same fables, or the reissue, as early as 1992, of Vasily Shulgin’s Ce qui nous déplaît en eux (What We Dislike in Them), a handbook of antisemitism in Russia, founded on the denunciation of the Jew as the bacillus of revolution.

This vision exploits the fact that a certain number of Jews held important places in various anti-monarchist and revolutionary parties, whereas their place was nil in the monarchist and “ultra” parties; it was more real in the Cadet party during the first revolution, but became modest there by 1917. On the revolutionary side of the chessboard, by contrast, the Jews abounded. Gershuni, then Azef, directed the terrorist Organization of the Socialist-Revolutionary party, while Gotz and Natanson were at its head; Dan, Martov, and Sukhanov were the best-known Menshevik leaders, alongside the Georgians Chkheidze and Tsereteli; Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Sverdlov played an eminent role in the Bolshevik party, etc. But to succeed in gathering all these men within one and the same entity, one must forget that in October 1917 and after, Gotz and Dan were adversaries of the Bolsheviks, or that in July 1918 Natanson’s Left Socialist-Revolutionaries rose up against the latter out of refusal of the peace of Brest-Litovsk!

The real figures in fact disprove the antisemitic arithmetic; thus in September 1918, out of seventy Cheka commissars there were thirty-eight Latvians (54.3%), twenty-two Russians (31.4%), seven Poles (10%), and finally three Jews (4.3%). At the end of 1920, the 50,000 agents of the provincial Chekas broke down as follows: Russians, 77.3%; Jews, 9.1%; Latvians, 3.5%; Ukrainians, 3.1%; Poles, 1.7%. The Jews then represented 2.11% of the Soviet population, and 5.20% of the members of the Bolshevik party⁵.

As much as on doctored figures, the myth feeds on crude analyses that equate the supposed Marxist messianism with Jewish messianism: just as religious Jews await the Messiah-liberator, Marx entrusts the proletariat with the role of liberating humanity: the two merge, or the second is merely a cover for the first. Shulgin sums up this accusation in an apostrophe to the Jews:

“What we dislike in you is that you took too eminent a part in the revolution, which proved to be a very great deception and a very great fraud. What we dislike is that you were the backbone and the framework of the communist party. What we dislike is that, with your spirit of organization and your coordination, with your tenacity and your will, you consolidated and reinforced, for long years to come, the maddest and bloodiest enterprise humanity has known since the creation of the world. What we dislike in you is that this experiment was carried out in accordance with the teaching of the Jew Karl Marx. What we dislike is that this experiment was carried out on the backs of the Russians. etc.”, and so on for twenty lines⁶.

This myth makes nothing of the profound social, political, and ideological differences that divided — that indeed set against one another — the Jews of the Russian Empire, just as they did the members of the other nationalities. The Jewish merchant bourgeoisie, as well as the Zionists, favorable to the February revolution that abolished the heavy anti-Jewish legislation, were in general hostile to the October revolution and to the Bolsheviks. Beilis’s former lawyer, Maklakov, thus gloated in private correspondence of December 23, 1919: “the Zionists have affirmed that they were ready to bring financial aid to the [White] Volunteer Army through the intermediary of their banking establishments⁷”. Trepov, the former president of Nicholas II’s Council of Ministers in 1916, built a whole fiction on this: in November 1920 he claimed that Baron Wrangel, who then controlled Crimea, understood “the necessity of the aid of Jewish capital in the future construction of Russia”: with a (secret!) agreement, he said, “we would have all the Jews, that is to say all of Capital, on our side⁸”. To the myth of a globally revolutionary Jewish people responds, here, that of the Jew as the incarnation of Capital, who of course commands the other within the fantasy of the Judeo-Bolshevik-Masonic plot.

The myth took shape in the bloody pogroms of the beginning of the century, fed by rumors spread by the Black Hundreds press about the Jews sucking — figuratively — the blood of the Russian people, and about ritual crimes meant to bleed — in the literal sense of the term this time — Christian children. From 1917 on, it is the vision of the revolution as the product of a plot with the Jews as conductors that feeds the antisemitism of the Whites in general and of the Ukrainian nationalists in particular.

This antisemitism was so powerful that Denikin, though eager to rally around his “Volunteer Army” the layers of the Jewish merchant and financial bourgeoisie hostile to the Bolsheviks, ended by prohibiting the recruitment of Jews in his army and by driving out the Jewish officers already serving in it, thereby alienating spontaneous social sympathies.

Every myth obviously rests on real elements, hypertrophied and caricatured. This one rests on two complementary facts:

1. The Russian revolution was the consequence of the First World War, which had set all of Europe ablaze. This internationalization of the conflict and of the revolution took very concrete forms: nearly 300,000 foreigners fought in the ranks of the Red Army (Chinese, Koreans, Hungarians, etc.), and were often its most determined elements. Now the Jewish diaspora, and the resulting presence of Jewish populations in both camps (in Germany and German Poland, in Austrian Galicia and throughout Austria-Hungary, and above all in the Russian Empire), favored internationalism. This internationalism, which Stalin would later stigmatize (at a time when the Soviet patriotism of the Jews of the USSR, reinforced by the Second World War, was nonetheless indisputable) under the label of “cosmopolitanism” — thus taking up the old antisemitic theme of the stateless Jew. In this case, that theme then reflected a measure of reality: if Marx and Engels’s Communist Manifesto had affirmed that “the proletarians have no country,” the same formula could indeed apply, during the world war, to a good part of the Jewish populations, above all those of Russian Poland, subjected to the pogroms of the Russian Army, to the exactions of the German Army, and finally to the pogroms of the Polish army⁹.

2. The revolution broke out in a mosaic-empire of nationalities subjected to various discriminations; the Jews there were reduced to the role of second-class subjects by a multitude of legal prohibitions. Now, oppressed nationalities often place themselves in the front rank of a revolution. Premonitory signs of this state of affairs: the first workers’ parties of the Russian Empire were the Proletariat group, created in Russian Poland in 1884, and the Jewish workers’ party, the Bund, proclaimed in 1897 — a year before the founding of the Russian Social-Democratic Workers’ Party (RSDWP).

It is this reality that a Russian publicist rendered by claiming that the Russian revolution was “a Jewish enterprise carried out on the point of Latvian bayonets”: that it was the revenge of the national minorities upon the Russians. Shulgin replaced the Latvians with the Georgians. For him the revolution is everywhere “Jews and Georgians, Georgians¹⁰ and Jews. Then there will be added Latvians, Chinese, Poles” who, he says, “will fade away soon enough,” but the Jews and the Georgians and the Georgians and the Jews “have remained to this day¹¹”. And he of course reduced the later developments of the revolution to the struggle between the Jew Bronstein-Trotsky and the Georgian Dzhugashvili-Stalin.

These variations underscore that the participation of many Jewish intellectuals and workers in revolutionary action was situated within a broader movement, which set many “aliens” first against the monarchist regime, then against a Provisional Government that prolonged the bloody, ruinous, and hopeless war into which the former had plunged the Empire. This movement flowed first of all from the situation of the oppressed and persecuted national minorities. Since the Jews were oppressed even more than all the others, and since certain regions of the Empire (Russian Poland, Lithuania, eastern Ukraine) contained a concentrated and active Jewish proletariat, their participation in the revolution was logically greater than that of the other groups.

Finally, while a number of nationalities held in systematic backwardness could give birth only to a very thin intellectual elite, a Jewish intelligentsia had formed as early as the end of the previous century, most often in rupture with the traditional and religious heritage of the “Jewish community,” but without possible access to State service, save in very subaltern posts; thus in the army the Jews, like French commoners under the Ancien Régime, could not attain the rank of officer. Every public career was, in fact, save for the rarest exception, forbidden them.

It is therefore not surprising that Jewish intellectuals should have held an important place in the parties opposed to the regime, above all in the revolutionary and socialist parties, and that Jewish workers should have been numerous in their ranks. At the second congress of the RSDWP, in August 1903, twenty-one of the forty-three delegates with deliberative vote, and four of the twelve with consultative vote, were Jews (whereas the Bund had only 5 delegates at this congress). The congress led to the split between Mensheviks and Bolsheviks. According to the Georgian Menshevik Arsenidze, Stalin is said to have then declared: “Martov, Dan, Axelrod are circumcised Jews… and the Jews are cowards and traffickers¹²”. In his report on the London Congress of the RSDWP in 1907, Stalin saw fit to relay “Aleksinsky’s joke” (this Bolshevik delegate who, in July 1917, on behalf of the French services, denounced Lenin as a German agent): according to him, the Mensheviks being a “Jewish faction” and the Bolsheviks a “Russian faction,” the latter “would do well to organize a pogrom within the Party¹³”. And a little later, in 1926–1927, at the start of the creeping reaction, Stalin did indeed make underhanded use of the weapon of antisemitism against the United Opposition led by Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev, which was presented as a Jewish tendency¹⁴.

These facts do not settle the question: did the Jewish intellectuals and workers who committed themselves to revolutionary activity do so as Jews? If the answer is obviously “yes” for the members of the Bund, it would certainly be “no” for those who enlisted in one of the parties that defined themselves as “Russian,” that is to say gathering all the nationalities of the Empire within centralized and non-federal structures (which would have coordinated national, even “communal,” groups): the RSDWP and its two factions, Menshevik and Bolshevik, the Socialist-Revolutionary Party and its various avatars (the Maximalists, the Left Socialist-Revolutionaries), the anarchists, etc.

When, in 1903, Medem, judging that one really had to belong to a “definite nation,” asked Trotsky: “Do you consider yourself Russian or Jewish?” Trotsky replied: “You are mistaken, I am a Social Democrat — and that’s all there is to it¹⁵”. Any Jew who was a member of the RSDWP and not a member of the Bund would no doubt have said much the same thing. But in October 1917, invited by Lenin to take on the functions of people’s commissar of the interior, this same Trotsky refused, so as not, he said, “to give our enemies the additional weapon of my Jewish origin,” and then defined a simply individual position that he did not generalize: “the question of nationality, so important in the life of Russia, played almost no role in my personal life¹⁶”.

Every myth tends toward the universal, and that of the role of the Jews in the Russian revolution underwent a mutation that ended by dissociating it from any link with real Jews. Decades of state and religious antisemitism having made the Jew the figure of evil, he can embody, at will, the revolution or its opposite, the Red Guard or the White Guard, the partisan of immediate peace or of war to the final victory. Thus, on October 25, 1917, Kerensky, fleeing the Winter Palace, read with stupefaction on a wall the inscription: “Down with the Jew Kerensky, Long live Trotsky¹⁷”! One of Beilis’s lawyers, Margoline, met that same month a group of deserter soldiers who were extolling the merits of Trotsky while cursing “Kerensky and his twelve ministers, all of them Jews.” He tried to explain to them that, of the two, the Jew was Trotsky and not Kerensky. The soldiers sneer: “So what? Maybe he’s a Jew, but he’s for peace; that means he’s one of us¹⁸” — that is, a Russian peasant. In short, they say, in the simplistic terms of a language ill-freed from a long obscurantist tradition, what matters is not race or religion, but political aims. They thus, in their own way, shatter the myth for the space of an instant — a myth nonetheless promised a fine future…

Notes