The Jewish Roots of the USSR and the USSA

The Soviet Union and Alexander Solzhenitsyn

Decades ago when I was in college and grad school I had a strong side-interest in the Soviet Union and its history. During those years I may have read as many as one hundred books on those subjects.

At that point, my views on most historical matters were almost entirely mainstream and conventional, closely conforming to what I had absorbed from our major media outlets and standard history textbooks.

During the last couple of decades my understanding of the world and its history has undergone the radical transformation that I have documented in my lengthy American Pravda series. But this tidal wave of revelations has left intact my view of the USSR, which has scarcely changed since the late 1970s. Indeed, the very title of my series drew upon the name of the leading Soviet newspaper, which then and now has been a watchword for dishonest government propaganda.

Much of my initial perspective on Soviet society was shaped by Pulitzer Prize-winner Hedrick Smith, the longtime Moscow bureau chief of New York Times, and his thick bestseller on the subject. Published a half-century ago in 1976, The Russians immediately attracted great critical acclaim and huge national sales, and I had read it a few years later.

I recently reread Smith’s book for the first time since my freshman year in college, and its portrayal of the Soviet Union still closely matched my current beliefs.

His 700 pages of text depicted a bizarre, dysfunctional society, irrational and very poorly designed. Soviet citizens had to spend endless hours waiting in lines to purchase ordinary products that any Westerner could so easily obtain within minutes at a local grocery or department store. Soviets carried string bags with them wherever they went so that they could scoop up any good shoes or good sausages if they chanced upon a sudden supply, thereby reducing highly-educated urban professionals to the existence of primitive hunter-gatherers. Even the impoverished Third Worlders of that era seemed to live lives free from the ridiculous daily inconveniences of the supposedly far wealthier and more advanced Soviets.

An economic system so strange and poorly functioning hardly seemed likely to permanently endure. Across our dining hall table my friends and I generally agreed that the USSR would eventually collapse though the date was uncertain. Predicting the likely trajectory of future events is usually far easier than determining the precise timing. In 1970 the prominent dissident Andrei Amalrik had famously published Will the Soviet Union Survive Until 1984?, but his boldly predictive timeline was off by a few years.

When the collapse finally came, I was hardly surprised except that it was almost entirely peaceful. As the Soviet Bloc and the USSR itself disintegrated I found it quite remarkable that such a vast ideological empire would fall with so little bloodshed. At the end, almost no one believed in the system enough to defend it.

The contemporary Soviet Union that Smith and others sketched out seemed a grim and gray place, dull and uninspiring rather than dangerous, and best exemplified by its elderly and doddering General Secretary Leonid Brezhnev and his equally decrepit Politburo colleagues. For those reasons, my interest and my readings instead focused upon the earlier decades of Soviet history, such as the Bolshevik Revolution that had established the system and the gruesome Stalin era that soon followed.

As I began to read serious works of Soviet history, I was initially a little intimidated by the massive thickness of the three volumes of Alexander Solzhenitsyn‘s renowned Gulag Archipelago and its 2,000 pages. But I finally read it in the mid-1980s, and just as the glowing reviews had suggested, the epic story that he told of the enormous system of brutal forced labor camps deeply impressed me.

I was studying at Cambridge University that year and I also read most of the author’s equally thick fictional works including The First Circle, Cancer Ward, and August 1914. In addition, I reread One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, the very short novel that had originally launched his meteoric literary career in the post-Stalin USSR.

Based upon all those works, I certainly regarded him as one of the greatest writers I had ever encountered, fully deserving of his Nobel Prize and all the other accolades he had received. Michael Scammell’s outstanding thousand page biography Solzhenitsyn told the fascinating story of his life, certainly making him one of the most impressive figures in our era.

As a helpless prisoner trapped along with millions of others within the enormous Gulag—a mere zek—he had decided that he would record his personal experience and thereby confront one of the most powerful tyrannies the world had ever known. His writings eventually played an important role in illuminating the horrors of that regime and thereby ultimately bringing it down.

My own verdict on his historic stature was then widely shared. Solzhenitsyn was hugely lionized by the West, including by its political and media elites.

Yet I also noticed some incidents at the time that I only much later understood in their proper context. As I wrote in 2018:

I remember in the 1970s the tremendous gusts of American praise for Solzhenitsyn’s three volume Gulag Archipelago suddenly encountered a temporary headwind when someone noticed that his 2,000 pages had included a single photograph depicting many of the leading Gulag administrators, along with a caption revealing their unmistakably Jewish names. This detail was treated as serious evidence of the great author’s possible anti-Semitism since the actual reality of the enormously large role of Jews in the NKVD and the Gulag system had long since disappeared from all the standard history books.

The following week I published an article expanding on that topic. I noted that a quarter-century later Solzhenitsyn finally dared to fully address that hidden history, with severe consequences for his remaining status in the West.

For decades most Americans would have ranked Nobel Laureate Alexander Solzhenitsyn as among the world’s greatest literary figures, and his Gulag Archipelago alone sold over 10 million copies. But his last work was a massive two-volume account of the tragic 200 years of shared history between Russians and Jews, and despite its 2002 release in Russian and numerous other world languages, there has yet to be an authorized English translation, though various partial editions have circulated on the Internet in samizdat form.

At one point, a full English version was briefly available for sale at Amazon.com and I purchased it. Glancing through a few sections, the work appeared quite even-handed and innocuous to me, but it seemed to provide a far more detailed and uncensored account than anything else previously available, which obviously was the problem. The Bolshevik Revolution resulted in the deaths of many tens of millions of people worldwide, and the overwhelming Jewish role in its leadership would become more difficult to erase from historical memory if Solzhenitsyn’s work were easily available. Also, his candid discussion of the economic and political behavior of Russian Jewry in pre-revolutionary times directly conflicted with the hagiography widely promoted by Hollywood and the popular media. Historian Yuri Slezkine’s award-winning 2004 book The Jewish Century provided many similar facts, but his treatment was far more cursory and his public stature not remotely the same.

Near the end of his life, Solzhenitsyn gave his political blessing to Russian President Vladimir Putin, and Russia’s leaders honored him upon his death, while his Gulag volumes are now enshrined as mandatory reading in the standard high school curriculum of today’s overwhelmingly Christian Russia. But even as his star rose again in his own homeland, it seems to have sharply fallen in our own country, and his trajectory may eventually relegate him to nearly un-person status.

A couple of years after the release of Solzhenitsyn’s controversial final book, an American writer named Anne Applebaum published a thick history bearing the same title Gulag, and her work received enormously favorable media coverage and won her a Pulitzer Prize; I have even heard claims that her book has been steadily replacing that earlier Gulag on many college reading lists. But although Jews constituted a huge fraction of the top leadership of the Soviet Gulag system during its early decades, as well as that of the dreaded NKVD which supplied the inmates, nearly her entire focus on her own ethnic group during Soviet times is that of victims rather than victimizers. And by a remarkable irony of fate, she shares a last name with one of the top Bolshevik leaders, Hirsch Apfelbaum, who concealed his own ethnic identity by calling himself Grigory Zinoviev.

The Concealed Jewish Roots of Soviet Communism

Applebaum’s effort to almost exclusively portray Jews as the unfortunate victims of the brutal Communist regime that they so heavily dominated and led was particularly grotesque. But throughout the second half of the twentieth century, mainstream American academia had made a concerted effort to airbrush away the true ethnic history of the Bolshevik Revolution and the many millions who perished under the brutal Soviet regime that it successfully established.

That project was assisted by the fact that many of our most influential Soviet historians came from that same ethnic background. But I explained that although the works of leading scholars such as Adam Ulam and Richard Pipes carefully sidestepped any mention of those facts, the true history remained readily apparent to any careful reader of their works.

I was not so totally naive that I did not recognize some of the powerful taboos surrounding discussion of the Bolsheviks, particularly regarding their ethnic composition. Although most of the books hardly emphasized the point, anyone with a careful eye for the occasional sentence or paragraph would surely know that Jews were enormously over-represented among the top revolutionaries, with three of Lenin’s five potential successors— Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Kamenev—all coming from that background, along with many, many others within the top Communist leadership. Obviously, this was wildly disproportionate in a country having a Jewish population of perhaps 4%…

I went on to note that all leading contemporaneous sources had acknowledged these obvious facts, and only decades later had our standard histories instead begun to exclude them.

The extent to which established historical facts can appear or disappear from the world should certainly force all of us to become very cautious in believing anything we read in our standard textbooks, let alone what we absorb from the more transient electronic media.

In the early years of the Bolshevik Revolution, almost no one questioned the overwhelming role of Jews in that event, nor their similar preponderance in the ultimately unsuccessful Bolshevik takeovers in Hungary and parts of Germany. For example, former British Minister Winston Churchill in 1920 denounced the “terrorist Jews” who had seized control of Russia and other parts of Europe, noting that “the majority of the leading figures are Jews” and stating that “In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews is even more astonishing,” while lamenting the horrors these Jews had inflicted upon the suffering Germans and Hungarians.

Similarly, journalist Robert Wilton, former Russia correspondent of the Times of London, provided a very detailed summary of the enormous Jewish role in his 1918 book Russia’s Agony and 1920 book The Last Days of the Romanovs, although one of the most explicit chapters of the latter was apparently excluded from the English language edition. Not long afterward, the facts regarding the enormous financial support provided to the Bolsheviks by international Jewish bankers such as Schiff and Aschberg were widely reported in the mainstream media.

Jews and Communism were just as strongly tied together in America, and for years the largest circulation Communist newspaper in our country was published in Yiddish. When they were finally released, the Venona Decrypts demonstrated that even as late as the 1930s and 1940s, a remarkable fraction of America’s Communist spies came from that ethnic background.

A personal anecdote tends to confirm these dry historical records. During the early 2000s I once had lunch with an elderly and very eminent computer scientist, with whom I’d become a little friendly. While talking about this and that, he happened to mention that both his parents had been zealous Communists, and given his obvious Irish name, I expressed my surprise, saying that I’d thought almost all the Communists of that era were Jewish. He said that was indeed the case, but although his mother had such an ethnic background, his father did not, which made him a very rare exception in their political circles. As a consequence, the Party had always sought to place him in as prominent a public role as possible just to prove that not all Communists were Jews, and although he obeyed Party discipline, he was always irritated at being used as such a “token.”

However, once Communism sharply fell out of favor in 1950s America, nearly all of the leading “Red Baiters” such as Sen. Joseph McCarthy went to enormous lengths to obscure the ethnic dimension of the movement they were combatting. Indeed, many years later Richard Nixon casually spoke in private of the difficulty he and other anti-Communist investigators had faced in trying to focus on Gentile targets since nearly all of the suspected Soviet spies were Jewish, and when this tape became public, his alleged anti-Semitism provoked a media firestorm even though his remarks were obviously implying the exact opposite.

This last point is an important one, since once the historical record has been sufficiently whitewashed or rewritten, any lingering strands of the original reality that survive are often perceived as bizarre delusions or denounced as “conspiracy theories.” Indeed, even today the ever-amusing pages of Wikipedia include an entire 3,500 word article attacking the notion of “Jewish Bolshevism” as an “antisemitic canard.”

• American Pravda: The Bolshevik Revolution and Its Aftermath
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 23, 2018 • 7,000 Words
• American Pravda: The Nature of Anti-Semitism
  Ron Unz • The Unz Review • July 30, 2018 • 5,500 Words

The extent to which Wikipedia and other standard sources of information have desperately sought to obfuscate the obvious facts is really quite remarkable.

In that same 2018 article I mentioned the striking omissions that could be found in the weightiest volumes on the subject.In 1999, Harvard University published the English edition of The Black Book of Communism, whose six co-authors devoted 850 pages to documenting the horrors inflicted upon the world by that defunct system, which had produced a total death toll they reckoned at 100 million. I have never read that book and I have often heard that the alleged body-count has been widely disputed. But for me the most remarkable detail is that when I examine the 35 page index, I see a vast profusion of entries for totally obscure individuals whose names are surely unknown to all but the most erudite specialist. But there is no entry for Jacob Schiff, the world-famous Jewish banker who apparently financed the creation of the whole system in the first place. Nor one for Olaf Aschberg, the powerful Jewish banker in Sweden, who played such an important role in providing the Bolsheviks a financial life-line during the early years of their threatened regime, and even founded the first Soviet international bank

Although the mainstream Soviet histories I read always carefully skirted the ethnic dimension, they agreed that at the time of Lenin’s declining health and eventual death in the early 1920s, his five potential Soviet successors had been Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, Stalin, and Bukharin. The first three of those individuals were Jewish, while Lenin himself had been part Jewish.

Moreover, one of the most powerful early Bolsheviks had been Jacob Sverdlov. He served as the first head of the Soviet government and had personally authorized the execution of the Romanov family, probably ranking second only to Trotsky in his influence. If not for his early death in 1919, he almost certainly would have been numbered in that select group of potential successors to Lenin, and he too was Jewish.

Although that Bolshevik hierarchy of influence was hardly exact and it shifted over time, all available evidence supported this same conclusion that the top Bolshevik leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish in a country in which Jews were only 4% of the total population.

For example, Trotsky’s biography mentions a conversation he had with Lenin in which Sverdlov, Bukharin, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Stalin were named as the most important Bolsheviks. Moreover, in Trotsky’s posthumously published 1941 book on Stalin, the exiled leader sought to undercut his bitter rival’s early importance by reproducing a postcard issued by the early Bolshevik government depicting the six leaders of the revolution as being Lenin, Trotsky, Sverdlov, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Lunacharsky, of whom only the last was non-Jewish.

Putin obviously possesses better current access to the Soviet archives than anyone else, and a few years ago he stated that Jews constituted perhaps 80-85% of the early Soviet government.

Given that the top Bolshevik leadership was so overwhelmingly Jewish, as Stalin consolidated his power during the 1930s and purged all his real or potential rivals, many of his victims were necessarily of that ethic background.

This has often led to the widespread impression that the resulting Stalinist government had few Jews near the top, but this was hardly the case.

During the Stalinist era, the dictator’s most powerful lieutenant was Lazar Kaganovich, who was Jewish, as was Maxim Litvinov, who served as foreign minister throughout nearly all of the 1930s. Stalin’s first NKVD chief Genrikh Yagoda was Jewish as was the wife of Nikolai Yezhov, the man who replaced him. Also Jewish was Lev Mekhlis, the top Soviet military commissar during World War II, who could order leading generals shot on his own authority and who went on to hold a variety of other very senior positions. Probably the most prominent Stalinist journalist and propagandist was Ilya Ehrenberg, who came from that same background.

And just as Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag trilogy had glancingly suggested with the captions to a single controversial photograph, throughout nearly all of the 1930s that massive archipelago of brutal prison camps had been run by a succession of three different Jews, Lazar Kogan, Matvey Berman, and Israel Pliner, with many of their subordinates having the same background.

So the Jewish skew of the Stalinist regime was small only by comparison with the earlier period of Bolshevik leadership.

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