Jewish Bolshevism?

[Order a copy of Robert Spencer’s forthcoming book, Muhammad: A Critical Biography, by clicking here.]

According to today’s Jew-haters, leftism is Jewish and Jews are leftists. Yet the world’s first and foremost Marxist-Leninist state, the Soviet Union, would prove to be inhospitable for Jews to an extent that would have warmed Karl Marx’s ice-cold heart.

Alexander Nikolayevich Yakovlev, a longtime Soviet official who served as a member of the Politburo in the late 1980s, states that the Soviet dictator Joseph Stalin was obsessed with the Jews, and renewed persecution of them after he had attained full power.

On May 3, 1939, the Soviet leader sent troops from the People’s Commissariat for Internal Affairs (NKVD), that is, the secret police, to surround the Commissariat for Foreign Affairs. Stalin ordered one of his loyal courtiers, Vyacheslav Molotov, whose wife was Jewish, to “purge the ministry of Jews. Clean out the ‘synagogue.’” Molotov later remarked: “Thank God for these words! Jews formed an absolute majority in the leadership and among the ambassadors. It wasn’t good.” Molotov took over as foreign minister as a Jew, Maxim Litvinov, was replaced. Numerous Jewish officials of the foreign ministry were arrested and interrogated, in hopes of uncovering a Jewish plot against the state.

On August 23, 1939, as the National Socialist/Soviet pact was concluded, Stalin promised the National Socialist German Foreign Minister, Joachim von Ribbentrop, that he would put an end to Jewish “domination” in the Soviet Union. In removing Litvinov and the Jewish officials of the Soviet foreign ministry, Stalin had already begun to do this.

The Soviet Union’s pact with the National Socialists entitled it to occupy eastern Poland; once this was done, Stalin had the Jews there deported to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast, an ostensible Jewish homeland he had established in east Asia. When National Socialist Germany turned on the international socialists and invaded the Soviet Union, they were able to apprehend Jews who might otherwise have escaped them. About a million of the three million Jews in the Soviet Union perished in the Holocaust.

Stalin, now eager to distinguish himself from the man he had courted so assiduously in 1939, eased up on some of his antisemitic policies and even oversaw the creation of a Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee in the Soviet Union. He even briefly supported Zionism, assuming that a Jewish state would be socialist, and give the Soviets leverage against Britain in the Middle East. The Soviet Union accordingly voted at the United Nations in favor of the creation of the State of Israel.

Yet Stalin’s support for Zionism did not mean favorable treatment for the Jews in the Soviet Union. After the end of World War II, Stalin resumed deporting Jews from Eastern Europe to the Jewish Autonomous Oblast. He also turned against the Jews whose support he had worked to secure during the war. In 1944, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee had written to Stalin, requesting the creation of an autonomous Jewish Soviet republic in the Crimea, which Stalin had rendered largely depopulated in May of that year by deporting nearly 200,000 Crimean Tatars to Uzbekistan, on the grounds that some of them had collaborated with the National Socialist Germans. Several years later, Stalin seized upon this letter as evidence that the pro-American Zionists were attempting to establish a foothold for the United States inside the Soviet Union. On January 13, 1948, the chairman of the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee, Solomon Mikhoels, was murdered on Stalin’s orders. The other members of the committee were arrested and finally executed in 1952 after four years of torture.

The Soviet Union’s support for Israel, meanwhile, did not last long. As the world fell into the binary division of the Cold War, it was clear by the Fall of 1948 that Israel would be on the American side of the divide, and so the Soviets turned increasingly to aiding the Islamic jihad against the Jewish state. By 1951, the Soviet press was denouncing Zionism as a “reactionary national movement” that involved “Fascist methods of government and discrimination against the Arab population in Israel.”

Demonstrating the malleability of socialist theory, which proclaimed of itself that it was based on scientific analysis, Soviet propaganda began to assert that Zionism was a reactionary movement from its very beginning. In November 1948, according to historian Benjamin Pinkus, Stalin began “the liquidation of Jewish culture in the Soviet Union.” The Jews would become indistinguishable from all other citizens of the Soviet Union, no longer enjoying anything that would render them distinctive within the great workers’ collective.

This involved the closing of Jewish-oriented theatres, museums, and, indeed, all Jewish institutions aside from synagogues. Anti-Jewish propaganda began to be a common feature in the Soviet press. The Jews were portrayed as scheming exploiters who evaded military service and sponged off the hardworking non-Jewish citizenry. In December 1952, Stalin added to the propaganda by announcing to the Politburo: “Every Jewish nationalist is the agent of the American intelligence service. Jewish nationalists think that their nation was saved by the USA…They think they are indebted to the Americans. Among doctors, there are many Jewish nationalists.”

On January 13, 1953, all this propaganda having suitably prepared the ground, the Soviet newspapers announced that authorities had uncovered a counterrevolutionary plot of Jewish doctors; the plotters had already murdered two prominent Communist Party members, and planned to murder the chief officers of the Red Army under the guise of providing them medical care.

Not only Jewish doctors, but lawyers, shop managers, and others were accused of being part of the plot, along with a handful of non-Jews who were apparently only accused in order to make the claims appear less of an exercise in crude Jew-hatred than they actually were. Stalin was determined, telling Khrushchev: “The good workers at the factory should be given clubs so they can beat the hell out of those Jews.” He told his subordinates to “beat, beat and beat again” in order to wring concessions out of the accused doctors at their show trial.

The show trial, according to researcher A. Mark Clarfield, “was meant to initiate a carefully constructed plan in which almost all of the Soviet Union’s two million Jews, nearly all of whom were survivors of the Holocaust, were to be transported to the Gulag—in cattle cars. Between the January announcement and Stalin’s death a month and a half later it became clear that careful plans had been laid for the transfer and ‘concentration’ of Soviet Jews.”

Only Stalin’s death on March 5, 1953 forestalled all this and prevented what could very well have been the extermination of Soviet Jewry at the hands of the international socialists, eight years after the end of the National Socialist devastation of the Jews of Europe. Both National Socialism and international socialism were intrinsically hostile to the Jews, as both were totalitarian systems that were dedicated to the exaltation of the collective: the master race on the one hand and the proletariat on the other. There was no place in either system for a people that stubbornly maintained its own practices, perspectives, and priorities.