The Jewish Role in the Bolshevik
Revolution and Russia's Early Soviet Regime

Mark
Weber

In the night of July
16-17, 1918, a squad of Bolshevik secret police murdered Russia's last
emperor, Tsar Nicholas II, along with his wife, Tsaritsa Alexandra, their
14-year-old son, Tsarevich Alexis, and their four daughters. They were cut
down in a hail of gunfire in a half-cellar room of the Ipatiev house in
Ekaterinburg, a city in the Ural mountain region, where they were being
held prisoner. The daughters were finished off with bayonets. To prevent a
cult for the dead Tsar, the bodies were carted away to the countryside and
hastily buried in a secret grave. [Image: Tsar Nicholas, infant Olga,
Tsaritsa Alexandra.]

Bolshevik authorities at first
reported that the Romanov emperor had been shot after the discovery of a
plot to liberate him. For some time the deaths of the Empress and the
children were kept secret. Soviet historians claimed for many years that
local Bolsheviks had acted on their own in carrying out the killings, and
that Lenin, founder of the Soviet state, had nothing to do with the
crime.

In 1990, Moscow playwright and
historian Edvard Radzinsky announced the result of his detailed
investigation into the murders. He unearthed the reminiscences of Lenin's
bodyguard, Alexei Akimov, who recounted how he personally delivered
Lenin's execution order to the telegraph office. The telegram was also
signed by Soviet government chief Yakov Sverdlov. Akimov had saved the
original telegraph tape as a record of the secret order.

Radzinsky's research confirmed what
earlier evidence had already indicated. Leon Trotsky -- one of Lenin's
closest colleagues -- had revealed years earlier that Lenin and Sverdlov
had together made the decision to put the Tsar and his family to death.
Recalling a conversation in 1918, Trotsky wrote:

My next visit to Moscow
took place after the [temporary] fall of Ekaterinburg [to anti-Communist
forces]. Speaking with Sverdlov, I asked in passing: "Oh yes, and where
is the Tsar?"

"Finished," he replied. "He has
been shot."

"And where is the family?"

"The family along with
him."

"All of them?," I asked,
apparently with a trace of surprise.

"All of them," replied Sverdlov.
"What about it?" He was waiting to see my reaction. I made no
reply.

"And who made the decision?," I
asked.

"We decided it here. Ilyich
[Lenin] believed that we shouldn't leave the Whites a live banner to
rally around, especially under the present difficult
circumstances."

I asked no further questions and
considered the matter closed.

Recent research and
investigation by Radzinsky and others also corroborates the account
provided years earlier by Robert Wilton, correspondent of the London Times
in Russia for 17 years. His account, The Last Days of the Romanovs
-- originally published in 1920, and recently reissued by the Institute
for Historical Review -- is based in large part on the findings of a
detailed investigation carried out in 1919 by Nikolai Sokolov under the
authority of "White" (anti-Communist) leader Alexander Kolchak. Wilton's
book remains one of the most accurate and complete accounts of the murder
of Russia's imperial family. [Image: Yakov Sverdlov (Yankel Solomon),
chairman of the Soviet Central Executive, first Communist head of
state.]

A solid understanding of history has
long been the best guide to comprehending the present and anticipating the
future. Accordingly, people are most interested in historical questions
during times of crisis, when the future seems most uncertain. With the
collapse of Communist rule in the Soviet Union, 1989-1991, and as Russians
struggle to build a new order on the ruins of the old, historical issues
have become very topical. For example, many ask: How did the Bolsheviks, a
small movement guided by the teachings of German-Jewish social philosopher
Karl Marx, succeed in taking control of Russia and imposing a cruel and
despotic regime on its people?

In recent years, Jews around the
world have been voicing anxious concern over the specter of anti-Semitism
in the lands of the former Soviet Union. In this new and uncertain era, we
are told, suppressed feelings of hatred and rage against Jews are once
again being expressed. According to one public opinion survey conducted in
1991, for example, most Russians wanted all Jews to leave the country. But
precisely why is anti-Jewish sentiment so widespread among the peoples of
the former Soviet Union? Why do so many Russians, Ukrainians, Lithuanians
and others blame "the Jews" for so much misfortune?

A Taboo Subject
Although officially Jews have never made up
more than five percent of the country's total population, they played a
highly disproportionate and probably decisive role in the infant Bolshevik
regime, effectively dominating the Soviet government during its early
years. Soviet historians, along with most of their colleagues in the West,
for decades preferred to ignore this subject. The facts, though, cannot be
denied.

With the notable exception of Lenin
(Vladimir Ulyanov), most of the leading Communists who took control of
Russia in 1917-20 were Jews. Leon Trotsky (Lev Bronstein) headed the Red
Army and, for a time, was chief of Soviet foreign affairs. Yakov Sverdlov
(Solomon) was both the Bolshevik party's executive secretary and -- as
chairman of the Central Executive Committee -- head of the Soviet
government. Grigori Zinoviev (Radomyslsky) headed the Communist
International (Comintern), the central agency for spreading revolution in
foreign countries. Other prominent Jews included press commissar Karl
Radek (Sobelsohn), foreign affairs commissar Maxim Litvinov (Wallach), Lev
Kamenev (Rosenfeld) and Moisei Uritsky.

Lenin himself was of mostly Russian
and Kalmuck ancestry, but he was also one-quarter Jewish. His maternal
grandfather, Israel (Alexander) Blank, was a Ukrainian Jew who was later
baptized into the Russian Orthodox Church.

A thorough-going internationalist,
Lenin viewed ethnic or cultural loyalties with contempt. He had little
regard for his own countrymen. "An intelligent Russian," he once remarked,
"is almost always a Jew or someone with Jewish blood in his veins."

Critical Meetings
In the Communist seizure of power in Russia,
the Jewish role was probably critical.

Two weeks prior to the Bolshevik
"October Revolution" of 1917, Lenin convened a top secret meeting in St.
Petersburg (Petrograd) at which the key leaders of the Bolshevik party's
Central Committee made the fateful decision to seize power in a violent
takeover. Of the twelve persons who took part in this decisive gathering,
there were four Russians (including Lenin), one Georgian (Stalin), one
Pole (Dzerzhinsky), and six Jews.

To direct the takeover, a seven-man
"Political Bureau" was chosen. It consisted of two Russians (Lenin and
Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), and four Jews (Trotsky, Sokolnikov,
Zinoviev, and Kamenev). Meanwhile, the Petersburg (Petrograd) Soviet --
whose chairman was Trotsky -- established an 18-member "Military
Revolutionary Committee" to actually carry out the seizure of power. It
included eight (or nine) Russians, one Ukrainian, one Pole, one Caucasian,
and six Jews. Finally, to supervise the organization of the uprising, the
Bolshevik Central Committee established a five-man "Revolutionary Military
Center" as the Party's operations command. It consisted of one Russian
(Bubnov), one Georgian (Stalin), one Pole (Dzerzhinsky), and two Jews
(Sverdlov and Uritsky).

Contemporary Voices of
Warning
Well-informed
observers, both inside and outside of Russia, took note at the time of the
crucial Jewish role in Bolshevism. Winston Churchill, for one, warned in
an article
published in the February 8, 1920, issue of the London Illustrated
Sunday Herald that Bolshevism is a "worldwide conspiracy for the
overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society on the
basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence, and impossible
equality." The eminent British political leader and historian went on to
write:

There is no need to
exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the
actual bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international
and for the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great
one; it probably outweighs all others. With the notable exception of
Lenin, the majority of the leading figures are Jews. Moreover, the
principal inspiration and driving power comes from the Jewish leaders.
Thus Tchitcherin, a pure Russian, is eclipsed by his nominal
subordinate, Litvinoff, and the influence of Russians like Bukharin or
Lunacharski cannot be compared with the power of Trotsky, or of
Zinovieff, the Dictator of the Red Citadel (Petrograd), or of Krassin or
Radek -- all Jews. In the Soviet institutions the predominance of Jews
is even more astonishing. And the prominent, if not indeed the
principal, part in the system of terrorism applied by the Extraordinary
Commissions for Combatting Counter-Revolution [the Cheka] has been taken
by Jews, and in some notable cases by Jewesses

Needless to say, the most intense
passions of revenge have been excited in the breasts of the Russian
people.

David R.
Francis, United States ambassador in Russia, warned in a January 1918
dispatch to Washington: "The Bolshevik leaders here, most of whom are Jews
and 90 percent of whom are returned exiles, care little for Russia or any
other country but are internationalists and they are trying to start a
worldwide social revolution."

The Netherlands' ambassador in
Russia, Oudendyke, made much the same point a few months later: "Unless
Bolshevism is nipped in the bud immediately, it is bound to spread in one
form or another over Europe and the whole world as it is organized and
worked by Jews who have no nationality, and whose one object is to destroy
for their own ends the existing order of things."

"The Bolshevik Revolution," declared
a leading American Jewish community paper in 1920, "was largely the
product of Jewish thinking, Jewish discontent, Jewish effort to
reconstruct."

As an expression of its radically
anti-nationalist character, the fledgling Soviet government issued a
decree a few months after taking power that made anti-Semitism a crime in
Russia. The new Communist regime thus became the first in the world to
severely punish all expressions of anti-Jewish sentiment. Soviet officials
apparently regarded such measures as indispensable. Based on careful
observation during a lengthy stay in Russia, American-Jewish scholar Frank
Golder reported in 1925 that "because so many of the Soviet leaders are
Jews anti-Semitism is gaining [in Russia], particularly in the army [and]
among the old and new intelligentsia who are being crowded for positions
by the sons of Israel."

Historians' Views
Summing up the situation at that time,
Israeli historian Louis Rapoport writes:

Immediately after the
[Bolshevik] Revolution, many Jews were euphoric over their high
representation in the new government. Lenin's first Politburo was
dominated by men of Jewish origins

Under Lenin, Jews became involved
in all aspects of the Revolution, including its dirtiest work. Despite
the Communists' vows to eradicate anti-Semitism, it spread rapidly after
the Revolution -- partly because of the prominence of so many Jews in
the Soviet administration, as well as in the traumatic, inhuman
Sovietization drives that followed. Historian Salo Baron has noted that
an immensely disproportionate number of Jews joined the new Bolshevik
secret police, the Cheka. And many of those who fell afoul of the Cheka
would be shot by Jewish investigators.

The collective leadership that
emerged in Lenin's dying days was headed by the Jew Zinoviev, a
loquacious, mean-spirited, curly-haired Adonis whose vanity knew no
bounds.

"Anyone
who had the misfortune to fall into the hands of the Cheka," wrote Jewish
historian Leonard Schapiro, "stood a very good chance of finding himself
confronted with, and possibly shot by, a Jewish investigator." In Ukraine,
"Jews made up nearly 80 percent of the rank-and-file Cheka agents,"
reports W. Bruce Lincoln, an American professor of Russian history.
(Beginning as the Cheka, or Vecheka the Soviet secret police was later
known as the GPU, OGPU, NKVD, MVD and KGB.)

In light of all this, it
should not be surprising that Yakov M. Yurovksy, the leader of the
Bolshevik squad that carried out the murder of the Tsar and his family,
was Jewish, as was Sverdlov, the Soviet chief who co-signed Lenin's
execution order. [Image: Yakov Yurovsky, last commandant of the Ipatiev
House, the site of the murders. In his diary Tsar Nicholas euphemistically
called him "the dark man," an unrequited act of ethnic politesse --
Yurovsky personally fired the shot that killed the Tsar and personally
fired two bullets into his son's ear.]

Igor Shafarevich, a Russian
mathematician of world stature, has sharply criticized the Jewish role in
bringing down the Romanov monarchy and establishing Communist rule in his
country. Shafarevich was a leading dissident during the final decades of
Soviet rule. A prominent human rights activist, he was a founding member
of the Committee on the Defense of Human Rights in the USSR.

In Russophobia, a book
written ten years before the collapse of Communist rule, he noted that
Jews were "amazingly" numerous among the personnel of the Bolshevik secret
police. The characteristic Jewishness of the Bolshevik executioners,
Shafarevich went on, is most conspicuous in the execution of Nicholas
II:

This ritual action
symbolized the end of centuries of Russian history, so that it can be
compared only to the execution of Charles I in England or Louis XVI in
France. It would seem that representatives of an insignificant ethnic
minority should keep as far as possible from this painful action, which
would reverberate in all history. Yet what names do we meet? The
execution was personally overseen by Yakov Yurovsky who shot the Tsar;
the president of the local Soviet was Beloborodov (Vaisbart); the person
responsible for the general administration in Ekaterinburg was Shaya
Goloshchekin. To round out the picture, on the wall of the room where
the execution took place was a distich from a poem by Heine (written in
German) about King Balthazar, who offended Jehovah and was killed for
the offense.
In his
1920 book, British veteran journalist Robert Wilton offered a similarly
harsh assessment:

The whole record of
Bolshevism in Russia is indelibly impressed with the stamp of alien
invasion. The murder of the Tsar, deliberately planned by the Jew
Sverdlov (who came to Russia as a paid agent of Germany) and carried out
by the Jews Goloshchekin, Syromolotov, Safarov, Voikov and Yurovsky, is
the act not of the Russian people, but of this hostile
invader.
In the
struggle for power that followed Lenin's death in 1924, Stalin emerged
victorious over his rivals, eventually succeeding in putting to death
nearly every one of the most prominent early Bolshevik leaders --
including Trotsky, Zinoviev, Radek, and Kamenev. With the passage of time,
and particularly after 1928, the Jewish role in the top leadership of the
Soviet state and its Communist party diminished markedly.

Writing on
the Wall: The Heine Quotation
Lines adapted from the German-Jewish
poet Heinrich Heine (1797-1856) were found written on the wall, by
the window, in the basement of the Ipatiev
House, where the Romanovs were shot and bayoneted. The distich
reads: "Belsatzar ward in selbiger Nacht / Von seinen Knechten
umgebracht," "Belsatzar was, on the same night, killed by his
slaves."

Belshazzar -- the Gentile king
of Babylon who, in the well-known Old Testament story, saw "the
writing on the wall" foretelling his destruction (Daniel 5) -- was
killed as punishment for his offenses against Israel's God. In a
clever play on the Heine quotation, the unknown writer, almost
certainly one of the killers, has substituted "Belsatzar" for
Heine's spelling "Belsazar," in order to signal even more clearly
his intended symbolism. The Heine inscription described the
racial/ethnic character of the murders: A Gentile king had just been
killed as an act of Jewish retribution.

--Irmin

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