The Sixty Million
Jews & Bolshevism, Part 2

Trotsky [1]6,160 words

Part 2 of 5

The October Revolution 

Inspired by the Balfour Declaration, 80 percent of Jews had voted Zionist in the Constituent Assembly elections. But Zionism = fanatical ethno-religious chauvinism + socialism, and that combination could just as easily transmute into leadership of Communism, thereby harnessing a largely Jewish-based universalistic ideology to a particularistic agenda. Jewish power could guide the state and protect Jews via influence within the higher ranks of Party, bureaucracy and secret police. For a great many Jews, Bolshevism was ‘Zionism in a hurry’, a Zionism with hegemony over a huge Gentile nation now, rather than hegemony over pint-sized Palestine, perhaps, someday in the distant future.

In September 1917, writes Trotsky biographer Dmitri Volkogonov, a Democratic Conference in Petrograd for those committed to government via dialogue not violence “. . . included all the socialist parties and the liberal Constitutional Democrats (Kadets). It might conceivably have succeeded had the [largely Jewish] Mensheviks and SRs [Social Revolutionaries] not wavered and finally opted for a compromise with the Bolsheviks in preference to a coalition with the Kadets.” Trotsky gave an impassioned speech and walked out with the Bolsheviks, basically saying that only armed insurrection could save Russia from the counter-revolutionaries.

Continues Dmitri Volkogonov, “It is not given to every intelligent or even talented person to strike a spark from a crowd, to make the crowd believe in a slogan, or to be able to divert hundreds and thousands of people by a few passionate phrases and to convince them to follow an idea. Trotsky was thus gifted, capable of using theatrical ploys, not as an end in themselves, but in order to make the fundamental truths of the revolution clear to the crowds. He was the orator-in-chief of the revolution.”

Sukhanov even suggests that each and every worker and soldier in Petrograd worker had encountered him and heard him speak. “His influence, both on the masses and at headquarters, was overwhelming.” He was of course a brilliant debater, but he was “also capable of expressing a clear and precise radical political position. For this he earned the title ‘the Danton of the Russian revolution’.” As the date of the uprising approached, Trotsky was called upon to speak more often, more so than any other revolutionary. His main insight was that the Soviets were the key: they were as broadly-based as the Bolshevik party was not. Their mobilization would be an unobtrusive way of turning revolution by a party seem like revolution by the people.

Lenin had thrice attempted (in April, June and July) to bring down the provisional government via street riots, writes Pipes. “In July he nearly succeeded but inexplicably lost his nerve at the critical moment . . . [P]ower was his for the asking, yet he faltered.” He needed a Trotsky.

Solzhenitsyn concurs: “. . . Trotsky was the autocratic genius of the October revolution . . . Lenin hid himself in a cowardly manner and played no essential role until after the revolution . . . ” With Lenin in hiding, “The October coup was, therefore, planned and managed by his associates . . . Trotsky . . . adopted a more cautious tactic, calling for physical force being concealed behind a smokescreen of Soviet pseudo-legality.” “Trotsky was far more courageous [than Lenin] and very much in evidence during these critical days, haranguing crowds, taunting the government, and helping in other ways to set the stage for the coup.” Summarizes Solzhenitsyn, “[T]he October coup [was] under general command of Trotsky and with energetic actions of young Grigory Chudnovsky [also Jewish] during the arrest of the Provisional Government and the massacre of defenders of the Winter Palace.”

Trotsky would write many years later that had neither he nor Lenin been present in Petersburg, no October revolution would have taken place. His biographer Volkogonov agrees. But given Lenin’s three prior failures, Lenin’s presence alone would not have sufficed. Thus it was Trotsky who was the indispensable figure of the Bolshevik coup. Even Stalin, Trotsky’s evolving foe, stated a year after the coup: “All the practical work of organizing the uprising was done under the direct leadership of Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet Trotsky . . . [as was] the rapid move of the garrison onto the side of the Soviet and the capable handling of the work of the Revolutionary Committee.” Trotsky also was foremost in the creation of the Petrograd Soviet in the first place.

Writes Volkogonov: “From 1917 to Lenin’s death, their collaboration was close and constructive. Trotsky became not only the second man of the revolution, but closer to Lenin than any other in his radicalism and determination. Together, they were the joint architects of the Soviet system” (my emphases: thus the system’s architects were 62.5 percent Jewish, Lenin being 1/4 Jewish and Trotsky fully Jewish). And when Lenin was wounded by an assassin in August 1918, Trotsky’s leadership skills became even more crucial. Writes Conquest, “Lenin only got his chance through a series of historical accidents, and thereafter barely held on.” Early on, says Volkogonv, it was “clear that had Lenin resigned, Trotsky would have been the chief candidate to succeed him.”

I.O. Levin writes: “There is no doubt that Jewish representation in the Bolshevik and other parties with respect to general Jewish membership and Jewish presence among the leaders, greatly exceeds the Jewish share in the population of Russia. This is an indisputable fact . . . [I]ts factual veracity is unchallengeable and its denial is pointless.” Indeed, “At the All-Russian Congress of Soviets in June 1917, at least 31 percent of Bolshevik delegates (and 37 percent of Unified Social Democrats) were Jews. Solzhenitsyn relates: “V. D. Nabakov, hardly known for anti-Semitism, joked that the meeting of the foremen of the Pre-Parliament in October 1917 “could safely be called a Sanhedrin”: its majority was Jewish; of Russians [we were only four].”

At the Bolshevik Central Committee meeting of October 23, 1917, which voted to launch an armed insurrection, 5 out of the 12 members present were Jews. Three out of seven Politburo members charged with leading the October uprising were Jews (Trotsky, Zinoviev, and Grigory Sokolnikov [Hirsh Brilliant]).” The All-Russian Central Executive elected at the [historic] Second Congress of Soviets — historic because it ratified the Bolshevik takeover with Lenin as chairman — was 5/8ths made up of Bolsheviks and more than a third were Jews, that number being more than for any other ethnic group including Russians.

Who debated the takeover? Fifteen speakers, 14 of whom were Jews. The first two heads of the Soviet state were Kamenev and Sverdlov (who was also the Party’s chief administrator), both Jews. The first Bolshevik bosses of Moscow and Petrograd were Kamenev and Zinoviev. Zinoviev, Jewish, also chaired the Communist International. “The first Bolshevik commandants of the Winter Palace and the Moscow Kremlin,” writes Solzhenitsyn, “were Grigorii and Isakovich Chudnovsky and Emelian Yaroslavsky (Minei Izraelovitch Gubelman), all Jewish. Yaraslovsky was also the chairman of the League of the Militant Godless. The heads of the Soviet delegation at the Brest-Litovsk negotiations were Adolf Ioffe and Trotsky. Trotsky was the face of the Red Army.” All Jews.

In fact, the charge was often made that Lenin was ‘surrounded by Jews’, as in the case of Boris Yeltsin 3/4s of a century later when the assets of the Soviet state were being auctioned off. Perhaps not surprisingly, one of the first acts of the Bolsheviks in power was to ban the agitating of anti-Semitism, now punishable by death. Suddenly the Kaiser’s Germany seemed positively medieval by comparison, and deserving of a toppling by fellow travelers of the Bolsheviks should the German army meet with defeat. And so it came to pass.

Jews were important among the Bolsheviks but far more so amongst the Mensheviks, Social Revolutionaries and Anarchists. Yet, as above, observes Volkogonov, “The Left SRs and Mensheviks-Internationalists were . . . prepared to collaborate with the Bolsheviks on social issues . . .” So the Jewish leaders in Bolshevism often garnered crucial support from the other even more-Jewish radical parties. Indeed, as Solzhenitsyn notes, “[J]ust before the uprising, Natanson, Kamkov, and Shteinberg on behalf of the left Socialist Revolutionaries had signed a combat pact with Bolsheviks Trotsky and Kamenev.”

Continues Solzhenitsyn: ‘“Some Jews distinguished themselves among the Bolsheviks in their very first victories and some even became famous. The commissar of the famed Latvian regiments of the 12th Army, which did so much for the success of the Bolshevik coup, was Semyon Nakhimson. [Wrote Aron Abramovich:] “Jewish soldiers played a notable role during preparation and execution of the armed uprising of October 1917 in Petrograd and other cities, and also during suppression of mutinies and armed insurrections against the new Soviet regime.”’

One slogan of that period was “All Russian life must be rebuilt from the roots.” A thousand years would have to be uprooted to accommodate the fantasies of the revolution’s intellectual elite! That in a nutshell is why most of Russia’s painters, poets, scientists and writers were hostile to the Bolshevik revolution. They respected and felt indebted to their predecessors, unlike so many Jews and other non-Russian ethnics who had hostile grievances with the Russian majority.

Such Jews at least pretended to obliterate their religio-ethnicity. They all were convinced that their combination of education, smarts, talent and revolutionary spirit — rare to non-existent amongst the Russian rabble — rendered them best-suited to arrange matters for workers, soldiers and peasants. Comments Solzhenitsyn: “For many Russians, from commoner to general, this sudden eye-striking transformation in the appearance among the directors and orators at rallies and meetings, in command and in government, was overwhelming.” And this transformation intensified exponentially as a gigantic Soviet bureaucracy swiftly took root, attracting by necessity an elite of educated Jews.

Here is an indication of just how incredibly improbable the consolidation of Soviet power was. It was akin to how in 1932 the German communists would let the Nazis attain power and then hopefully fall on their faces. In the early months and years, the Russian population at large did little to resist the Bolsheviks even though such resistance could have made all the difference. Why the passivity? Because the new regime could not last. It was perceived as made up of crazy utopians. These over-excitable dreamers would soon be swept from the scene and from the pages of history. Or so most people thought. Had they only foreseen the result of their inaction, they surely would have acted. But in truth no one could have foreseen the utter ruthlessness of Lenin and Co. That ruthlessness had to be invoked in order to sustain in power a gang that should never have come close to the levers of power in the first place. They had fluked their way in, and then nothing but nothing was going to dislodge them. (Hitler was a mirror-image German replay of this scenario.) Thus, laments the great author, “the October coup snowballed into a fierce three-year-long Civil War, which brought countless bloody calamities to all the peoples of Russia.”

Further observes Solzhenitsyn: “The February Revolution was a Russian revolution [that] did not aspire to burn down the entire pre-existing life, to annihilate the whole pre-revolutionary Russia. Yet immediately after October, the Revolution spilled abroad and became an international and devastating plague, feeding itself by devouring and destroying the social order wherever it spread — everything built was to be annihilated; everything cultivated to be confiscated; whoever resisted was to be shot. The Reds were exclusively preoccupied with their grand social experiment, predestined [in theory] to be repeated, expanded and implemented all over the world.” And the Jews amongst the Bolshevik leadership were absolutely indispensable to the spread of this plague, no less so than the Austrian Adolf Hitler would be indispensable to the spread of Nazism.

As for the ‘Great War’, Lenin would need to get Russia out of it to retain power, so the desperate Treaty of Brest-Litovsk was the result. The Bolsheviks signed away a third of Russia’s land and population, half its industry, and 90 percent of its coalmines. Poland, Finland, Lithuania and Ukraine became independent, but as German protectorates. Ferguson commends the German government’s “handsome return” on its investment in Lenin’s return to Russia. Of course, all this was undone as a consequence of U.S. involvement in the war, a situation that would repeat itself in World War II. Unbelievably in retrospect, America would rescue the USSR twice: for Lenin and then, even less deservedly, for Stalin. 

The Jewish ‘Otshchepentsy’

Who were the ‘otshchepentakh? (‘otches’ for short) They were revolutionary Jews who were not (religious) Jews in spirit. However, it could be said that their revolutionary fervour was merely an alternate expression of their ostensibly-abandoned religiosity. If one chooses to claim, as most Jewish authorities do today, that these weren’t ‘real Jews’, then one must also allow that the Russians involved were not real Russians, certainly not Russian in spirit, and in fact were typically both anti-Russian and anti-Orthodox. Yet Solzhenitsyn refuses to disown even Lenin. True, “everything Russian among which he grew generated inside him: hatred.” But he is nonetheless Russian and “we can in no way renounce him.” (Of course, isn’t it just possible that his hatred of the Russian derived mainly from the Jewish quarter of his grandparentage?) “We must accept him as a creation completely Russian since his national character — that which infused his spirit — was intertwined with the history of the Russian Empire.”

Contrarily, Germans could disown their nation’s Nazis, and point to modern Germans and pre-1930s Germans as the only authentic Germans. But this dodge simply avoids ‘manning up’ to disturbing qualities that blatantly manifested themselves during the era in question. Writes Solzhenitsyn: “We know about the Russian otshchepentakh . . . But how widely and actively did Jews participate in strengthening Bolshevik authority?” Very widely and very actively, is the only honest reply. While this reply is denied today, it was embraced at the time. Continues Solzhenitsyn, “The question is one of whether the people renounced their [otches], and whether the renunciation that did occur reflected the sense of the people. Did a people choose to remember or not to remember its [otches]? In answer to this question, there can be no doubt: The Jews chose to remember. Not just remember the individual people, but to remember them as Jews, so their names may never disappear” (my emphases). To deny that remembrance is to lie about complicity. If Jews insist there was widespread German complicity in the crimes of the Nazis 1933-1945, we can just as compellingly insist upon the fact of widespread Jewish complicity in the crimes of the Soviet Communists 1917-1953.

G. Landau, a Jew, would admonish several years after revolution:

Jewish participation in the Russian turmoil had astonishingly suicidal overtones in it; I am referring not only to their role in Bolshevism, but their involvement in the whole thing. And it is not just about the huge number of politically active [Jewish] people, socialists and revolutionaries, who have joined the revolution. I am talking mainly about the broad sympathy of the [Jewish] masses it was met with . . . [T]hey were still able to reconcile foreboding [of pogroms] with an acceptance of revolutionary turmoil which unleashed countless miseries and pogroms . . . [and] attracted Jews like moths to the annihilating flame . . . [S]trong motives push[ed] the Jews in that direction, and yet those were clearly suicidal . . .

(Of course, increasing enthusiasm in Germany for its Nazi revolution is judged in conventional wisdom as unforgivable; the equivalent of this phenomenon a generation earlier amongst Soviet Jews, when acknowledged at all, is judged as forgivable for its perhaps-misguided idealism.) Jews were acting like Russians; however, Jews as “city-dwellers, merchants, artisans, intellectuals” were inevitably “different from the . . . peasants, landowners, officials.” Pretend-communality would eventually give way to manifest inherent differences that would breed resentment amongst the Russian intelligentsia and people.

What of the Jewish otches at the center of the storm? As we have seen above, the Jews had not all been drawn to Bolshevism. Instead, they had been drawn to a myriad of revolutionary movements. For example, Jews made up substantially more than half the delegates of the Mensheviks at any given conference they were seated at.

By April 1917, among the nine members of the new Central Committee of the Bolsheviks, there were the three Jews: G. Zinoviev, L. Kameneva, and Sverdlova. At the summer congress, there were 11 members, among them were the five Jews Zinoviev, Sverdlov, Sokolniks, Trotsky, and Uritsky. On October 10, 1917, in the apartment of Gimmera and Flakserman, where the decision was made to launch the Bolshevik Revolution, among the 12 participants were [the same five plus one more unnamed Jew]. And who was chosen for the first politburo? Its seven members included Trotsky, Zinoviev, Kamenev, and Sokolniks. That is no small proportion: 57 percent. “In the first council of People’s Commissars there was, true, only one Jew, but the influence of this one Jew, Trotsky, Lenin’s second [in command], exceeded that of all the rest.”

Concludes Solzhenitsyn, “There can be no doubt — Jewish [otches] were present in the Bolshevik leadership in great disproportion to their numbers in the population — and they comprised too many of the Bolshevik commissars for a relationship to be denied.” And from that highly impressive base, Jewish participation in and leadership of the Bolshevik regime expanded rapidly. Comments Solzhenitsyn: “During the first years after the October revolution . . . the power of this enormous land was effortlessly slipping into the hands of those clinging to the Bolsheviks,” by which he means: primarily Jews.

He concludes: “[T]here is no doubt that these Jewish otshchepentsy for several years after the revolution dominated Bolshevism, headed the belligerent Red Army (Trotsky), the All-Russian Central Executive Committee (Sverdlov), ran both capitals (Zinoviev), the Komintern (Zionviev), the Profintern/Red Trade Union International (Dridzo-Lozovsky) and the Komsomol (Oscar Ryvkin, [with Lazarus Shatskin, also Jewish, his successor]).”

Red Terror and the Cheka 

Lenin, writes Solzhenitsyn, harnessed “the special bitterness of the Jews to the Tsar” on behalf of the revolution. But of course, the Bolsheviks were not fighting the Czar or Imperial Russia. These had already been vanquished by the February revolution and the democratic Provisional Government. No, the Bolsheviks were fighting against the February revolution and the Provisional Government. To attain and retain power, the Bolsheviks had to become the inverse of democratic, so what October wrought was in fact a counter-revolution propagandized as the fulfillment of the Russian Revolution. It was the scam of the century, but the leftists of the West — with so many Jews and philo-Semites among them — bought into it.

Ending permanent residency dispersed Jews as migrants to many cities throughout the USSR. The government didn’t accomplish this. “This was performed in large part by Jewish social security agencies and philanthropic organizations,” Solzhenitsyn informs us. It saved the regime. By January 1918, the Jewish-dominated unpopular Bolsheviks had to ask themselves whom they could trust. “[A] special people’s commissariat [was created from] the embers of the Jewish commissariat . . .” relates Solzhenitsyn. Why? For Lenin, the revolution survived “because of the role of the large Jewish intelligentsia in several Russian cities. These Jews engaged in general sabotage, which was directed against Russians after the October Revolution and which had been extremely effective. Jewish elements . . . saved the Bolshevik Revolution through these acts of sabotage. Lenin [even] emphasized this in the press. He recognized that to master the state apparatus he could succeed only because of this reserve of literate and more-or-less intelligent, sober new clerks” (my emphases).

Continues Solzhenitsyn: “Thus the Bolsheviks, from the first days of their authority, called upon the Jews to assume the bureaucratic work of the Soviet apparatus — and many, many Jews answered that call. They, in fact, responded immediately. The sharp need of the Bolsheviks for bureaucrats to exercise their authority met great enthusiasm among young Jews . . . And this was in no way compulsory for these Jews, who were non-Party members and who had been previously completely non-revolutionary and apolitical. This phenomenon was not ideological but a phenomenon of mass calculation by the Jews . . . [They] gushed out of their ghettos to join the Bolsheviks, seeing in them the most decisive defenders of the revolution and the most reliable internationalists, and these Jews flooded and abounded in the lower layers of the Party structure.” However, even Lenin did not foresee the extent to which “Jewish power within the Bolsheviks would lead the Jews, as a result of war scattered throughout Russia to take control of the apparatus of the Russian state during the decisive months and years . . .”

Solzhenitsyn insists that the notion “that Jewish young people joined the communist party in response to anti-Semitic pogroms conducted in White-controlled areas in 1919 has no basis in reality” (my emphases). The mass inflow of Jews into the Soviet apparatus occurred in 1917 and 1918 . . . [T]he pogroms of 1919 strengthened the allegiance of Jews to the communist party, but in no way created it.” The pogroms, inspired by both Ukrainian nationalism and anti-Bolshevism, were partly a response to the identification of Jews with the new regime as expressed by their onrush into the ranks of the Bolshevik bureaucracy.

Indeed, the organization of Bolshevism “was created through the activity of Jewish commissars . . . The transfer of the Russian Revolution from the destructive phase into the building phase was seen as an expression of the ability of Jews to build elaborate systems based on their dissatisfactions. And after the successes of October, how many Jews themselves indeed spoke about their role in Bolshevism with their heads held high.” The KRU Holocaust 1932-33 (aka The Terror Famine), to be considered a sign of the regime’s uncompromising ideological commitment, was still 15 years of preparation away.

As an indication of how welcome Jews would be within the new bureaucracy, consider the other groups of intellectual workers who were not welcome: the nobility, Christian clerics, Czarist bureaucrats, and proles (perhaps willing but as yet insufficiently educated). It was a gargantuan sign had been erected reading: ‘All educated Jews welcome. Other educated people accepted only if absolutely necessary’. How could Jews in such conditions not become the core of the Soviet bureaucracy?

The Bolsheviks enticed even more Jews to join the régime by originating in St. Petersburg “the Jewish division of the nationalities commissariat. In 1918 it was converted into a separate commissariat of its own.” In March 1919 it was folded into the Party “in order to integrate it into the Communist Internationale, and a special Jewish section was created in the Russian Telegraphic Agency.”

As noted above, the Bolsheviks valued Jews not only for their abilities, but for their alienation from and hatred of the Russian population, granted: a characteristic of many Latvians, Hungarians and Chinese as well. So, “after finding that the revolution granted them complete freedom, and that it welcomed a bloom of Jewish activity in the public, political and cultural spheres, the Jewish population threw themselves into Bolshevism; [especially those Jews with] a surplus of cruelty.”

A career in the Cheka was ideal for those harboring a surplus of cruelty. Lenin was up front regarding his racist dislike for Russians. Fools. Bunglers. Too soft to run a police state. He overtly preferred the Germans. But World War I had put the Germans out of the picture, so Jews took their place. With even greater hostility to the natives, and better educated still, it would be largely Jews whom Lenin/Stalin entrusted to harden their hearts and “to run an efficient police state.” G. A. Landau, himself Jewish, recalls being “amazed by what we had least expected to encounter among Jews: cruelty, sadism, and violence that had seemed alien to a nation so far removed from physical, warlike activity . . . [They] are now found among the executioners and cutthroats” (my emphases).

Solzhenitsyn scorns the argument of apologists who claim that it wasn’t the Jews who were so vicious in the Cheka but rather imperial holdovers who were trying to ingratiate themselves with a regime that questioned their loyalty. Ridiculous, counters Solzhenitsyn. Such holdovers were invited to join the Cheka in only one capacity — as executees.

The Cheka, recounts Solzhenitsyn, “was established in December 1917. It instantly gained strength and by the beginning of 1918 it was already filling the entire populace with mortal fear. In fact, it was the Cheka that started the ‘Red Terror’ long before its beginning was first announced on September 5, 1918. The Cheka practiced terror from the moment of its inception and continued it long after the end of the Civil War. By January of 1918, [as Hitler’s SS would], the Cheka was “enforcing the death penalty on the spot without investigation or trial.”

On August 28, 1918, Jewess Fanya Kaplan, then associated with the Socialist Revolutionary Party, shot Lenin in the neck, probably shortening his life but not by so much that Stalin did not have time to entrench himself as Lenin’s successor over Trotsky. Jewish Cheka chief Morris Uritsky was assassinated the same day — by a Jewish student! Thus were other largely-Jewish radically-revolutionary factions challenging the Bolsheviks for control of the revolution, a development that would generate a bloodbath for all.

The largely-Jewish-run Pravda would run an article warning that “for every one of our heads they will answer with a hundred of theirs . . . If they endeavour to destroy the people’s leaders, they will themselves be mercilessly destroyed.” It was a preview of the Nazis’ Kristallnacht response, which was in fact far milder. Trotsky’s Red Army publication ratcheted the vengeance theme several notches higher: “Without mercy, without sparing, we will kill our enemies in scores of hundreds. Let them be thousands, let them drown themselves in their own blood. For the blood of Lenin and Uritsky . . . let there be floods of blood of the bourgeois — more blood, as much as possible.” Perhaps, with rhetoric like this coming from the régime and aimed not at a foreign enemy but at fellow Russians, no one should have been surprised that said régime would go on to kill more than 20 million of its own. Of its own!

In the Cheka, Bolshevik Jews were capable of twinning ideological fervor with literacy. Who else could? Promotion through the higher ranks ensued. Jews were 6 of 12 of the investigators in the department for combatting counter-revolution. (In 1923 the OGPU would replace the Cheka, but 4 of 8 of its top brass would be Jews.) “The headcount of the ‘Cheka’ staff varied between 150 and 300 . . . percentage-wise, there was 75 percent Jews and 25 percent others, and those in charge were almost exclusively Jews.” Out of twenty members of the Commission, i.e., the top brass who determined people’s destinies, fourteen were Jews.

Now with an excuse for doing what it was already itching to do, the Cheka unleashed the Red Terror. Solzhenitsyn emphasizes the Red Terror’s premeditated nature: “It was a targeted, pre-designed and long-term terror.” Bradberry describe it as an “unrestrained orgy of rape, torture, summary executions and murder all over Russia . . . of independent farmers known as the Kulaks, ethnic minorities, the aristocracy, the bourgeoisie, the landed gentry, senior military officers, intellectuals, artists, clergy, opposition members and anyone who aroused the slightest suspicion.”

During the Red Terror, the Jewish head of the Ukrainian Cheka, Martin Latsis, declared: “We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class.” However, this excluded the Jewish bourgeoisie, which was protected by having been a persecuted group under the Czars. Jewish neocon Richard Pipes in 1990 wrote that “three quarters of the staff [of the Cheka] were Jews, many of them riff raff, incapable of any other work, cut off from the Jewish community, although careful to spare fellow Jews” (my emphases). Yikes! (Consider that the Red Terror was more deadly than the likes of the Nazis’ Kristallnacht by a factor of thousands — in fact, any comparison of the two is ridiculous. Kristallnacht does not register as having occurred at all when placed in such company, and yet a trumped-up media-hyperbolized Kristallnacht would put Western Europe and the Nazis on an unnecessary collision course.)

Solzhenitsyn quotes from a document from September 25, 1918 dug up by a Cheka-history researcher. ‘“[T]he Jews are quite noticeable, especially among “major and active officials,” i.e. commissars and investigators. For instance, among the “investigators of the Department of Counter-Revolutionary Activities—the most important Cheka department — half were Jews.”’ Russian writer Vladimir Soloukhin estimated that 50 percent of Cheka were Jewish with Jewish names, 25 percent Jewish but having taken non-Jewish names, and 25 percent other non-Russian minorities. Of the latter, many had Jewish spouses. Perhaps it was time to take revenge on Russian pogromists, in which case a Jewish Cheka operated as the enforcement arm of a largely Jewish-controlled state. Jewish historian Leonard Shapiro in 1988 wrote in his Russian Studies book: “Anyone who had the misfortune of 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.”

As noted above, the first Cheka head, the Jewish Morris Uritsky, was assassinated. He was followed by Felix Dzerzhinski, also Jewish. His second-in-command was I.S. Unschlict, a Jew. The torture department was headed by Genrik Yagoda and Yuri Andropov, the former a Jew, until Lavrent Beria, a Georgian like Stalin, took over. Sadistically torturing suspects to death was a common practice for the Cheka.

Continues Solzhenitsyn: ‘“[T]he country saw the snatching of hundreds and later thousands of absolutely innocent hostages, their mass execution at night or mass drowning in whole barges. Historian S. P. Melgunov (in Red Terror in Russia 1918-1923) writes: “There was not a single town or district without an office of the omnipotent Cheka, which from now on becomes the main nerve of state governance and absorbs the last vestiges of law . . . There was not a single place in the Russian Federation without ongoing executions . . . [A] single order of one man (Dzerzhinsky) doomed to immediate death many thousands of people.”’ And this was not yet a civil war. Again Solzhenitsyn quotes Melgunov: This was “just physical liquidation of a former adversary.” The blood had barely begun to flow. The Red Terror was a mere prelude. For example, terror in the Crimea, with 120,000 inhabitants murdered by Reds, would continue into the year 1921. In Sevastopol people would be publically hanged in the hundreds.

The Cheka’s condemnations were based on the “social class he belongs to, what his descent is, upbringing, education and profession. It is these questions that should determine the suspect’s fate,” wrote M. Latsis in the bulletin of Red Terror on November 1, 1918 and in Pravda on December 25, 1918. Of course, no one could alter their past any more than a Jew would be able to dismiss his roots in Nazi Europe. Pronounced guilty by virtue of what you are, not what you did — it was the age-old complaint of Jews regarding their tormentors. Shulgin remarks upon the success of the slogan “Death to the Bourgeoisie.” “[T]he smell of blood inebriates, alas, so many Russians, that they get into a frenzy like wild beasts.” That killing frenzy was encouraged and led by the Jewish-dominated Cheka.

Lev Krainy, a Jew, wrote in Red Sword: “Old foundations of morality and humanity invented by the bourgeoisie do not and cannot exist for us . . .” Substitute ‘Jews’ for ‘bourgoisie’ and it will be Hitler’s sentiment. A certain Schwartz writes therein: “If physical extermination of all servants of Tsarism and capitalism is the prerequisite for the establishment of the worldwide dictatorship of the proletariat, then it wouldn’t stop us.” Well. Snyder claims that Hitler was prepared to exterminate 30 million Ukrainians. That’s nothing compared to the impending toll that Schwartz’s comment would entail. Hitler could well have said: ‘If physical extermination of all Communists and Jews is the prerequisite of worldwide domination by the Aryan race, then it wouldn’t stop us’. Except that Hitler had really aimed only for East European not worldwide domination, so Schwartz’s Communist vision implied slaughter on a scale that would make World War II look like a picnic. Schwartz’s death toll would have been hundreds of millions.

The February Revolution led to the internment of the Czar and his family. The Bolshevik Revolution followed by the Red Terror led to their furtive slaughter. All three slaughterers were Jews: Chairman of the All Russian Central Executive Committee in Moscow, former assistant pharmacist Yakov Sverdlov (Yankel Solomon), who ordered the deed; former dentist Shaia Goloshchekin (commissar of Urals Military District); and Yokov (Yankel) Yurovsky, who directed the killings and shot the Czar personally.

The slaughter of ordinary Russians was no less thorough. Recounts Solzhenitsyn: “Entire wards of prisoners are escorted out and every last man is executed. Because of the large number of victims, a machine-gun is used . . .” Sparing only the very young, “they execute 15-16-year-old children and 60-years-old elders.” Typically, a special shed was fitted for executions at the local Cheka headquarters. An executioner and sometimes an assistant “escorted a completely naked victim into the shed and ordered the victim to fall face-down on the ground. [Revolver in hand] he finished the victim off with a shot in the back of the head . . . skull explod[ing] into fragments . . . The next victim . . . similarly escorted inside and laid down nearby . . . [At overcapacity] new victims were laid down right upon the dead or were shot at the entrance . . . [u]sually without resistance.” It was very much a lower-profile version of the Einsatzgruppen’s open-pit mass-shooting of Jews two decades later, when Jews and Gentiles switched perpetrator/victim roles.

The Jewish-dominated Cheka directed the Red Terror. Solzhenitsyn laments that it is unfortunately a “harsh certitude: incredibly-enormous power on an unimaginable scale had come into the hands of those Jewish Chekists, who at that time were supreme (by status and rank) representatives of Russian Jewry.” A 1926 pamphlet by émigré Dr. Gregor cites the Cheka’s ‘killed’ figures for that onslaught as including 8,800 doctors/assistants, 361,825 members of the intelligentsia (teachers, professors, engineers, building contractors, writers, judges) and 12,950 large landowners, etc. Certainly no one of any leadership capacity was left alive to head up a counter-revolution, and Jews could now more easily fill out the emptied ranks of the intelligentsia. Psychologist Kevin Macdonald summarizes that “when Jews achieved power in Russia, it was as a hostile elite with a deep sense of historical grievance. As a result they became willing executioners of both the people and the culture they came to rule . . .”

They weren’t nameless. Solzhenitsyn cites some Jewish Chekists of the highest rank: Veniamin Gersen (assistant to Dzerzhinski); Israel Leplevsky (eventually the head of OGPU); Zinovy Katznelson (a very high-ranking Cheka-ist; later the deputy head of the entire Gulag); Solomon Mogilevsky (a high-ranking Cheka-ist); Ignaty Vizner (later “special plenipotentiary of the Presidium of the Cheka-GPU on cases of special importance”); Lev-Levin-Velsky (a high-ranking Cheka-ist who ultimately became deputy Narkom of Internal Affairs of USSR); Natum (Leonid) Etington (the GPUer who would orchestrate the murder of Trostky); Isaak (Semyon) Schwartz (first Chair of the All-Ukrainian Cheka); Yakov Lifshitz (who succeeded Schwartz); Matvei Berman (a Chekist official who became the head of the Gulag and deputy Narkom of NKVD at same time); Boris Berman (deputy head of foreign intelligence section of NKVD); Boris Pozern (who co-signed the proclamation of the Red Terror with two other Jews, Zinoviev and Dzerzhinsky, on Sept. 2, 1918); Aleksander Ioselevich (who co-signed the Red Terror execution lists in Sept. 1918); Yakov Agranov (repressions being his specialty, he “directed cruel interrogations of participants of the Kronstadt Uprising”); and Yakov Blumkin (co-assassin of the German ambassador in 1918).

And one mustn’t overlook the female Chekist Revekka Plastinina-Maizel: “Infamous for her cruelty all over the north of Russia . . . [she] voluntarily perforated napes and foreheads . . . and personally shot more than one hundred men.” Those good works behind her, she became a Supreme Court Justice in the 1940s.

Russian Jews had a special longstanding grievance with the Ukrainians. Deliberately on Lenin’s part, in “the Ukraine, the Cheka leadership was overwhelmingly Jewish.” In Kiev the figure was 75 percent. A Cheka defector recounts that “in the autumn of 1918-1919 the Chekists in Kiev went on a rampage of random violence, rape, and looting . . .” When an exodus of 60,000 Ukrainians from Kiev occurred on Oct. 1, 1919, in the wake of the Soviet conquest of the newly independent Ukraine, Kiev’s population of 100,000 Jews stayed on.

Lindemann writes that, “the extent to which both Cheka and Gestapo leaders prided themselves in being an elite corps, characterized by unyielding toughness—unmoved by sympathy for their often innocent victims and willing to carry out the most stomach-turning atrocities in the name of an ideal—is striking.” And the former preceded the latter by a generation.

Jewish Participation in Communism as Acknowledged by even the Encyclopedia Judaica:

In some countries Jews became the leading element in the legal and illegal communist parties and in some cases were even instructed by the Communist International to change their Jewish-sounding names and pose as non-Jews, in order not to confirm right wing propaganda that presented Communism as an alien, Jewish conspiracy.” “[Jews took up] many responsible positions in all branches of the party and state machinery at the central and local seats of power.

            The Encyclopedia’s list of prominent in party or state: “Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), M. Liadov (Mandelshtam), Gigori Shklovsky, A. Soltz, S. Gusev (Drabkin), Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky), Lev Kamenev (Rosenfeld), Rosaliya Zemliachka (Zalkind), Helena Rozmirovich, Yameli Yaroslavsky (Gubelman), Serafima Gopner, G. Sokolnikov, I. Piatnitsky, Jacob Sverdlov, M. Vladimirov, P. Zalutsky, A. Lozovsky, Y. Yaklovlev, (Epstein), Lazar Kaganovich, D. Shvartsman, Simon Dimanstein, Leon Trotsky (Bronstein), M. Uritsky, M. Volodarsky, J. Steklov, Adolf Joffe, David Riazanov (Goldendach), Yuri Larin, an Karl Radek (Sobelsohn). Precisely 38 percent deploy a goy alias.