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

Mark
Weber

Put To Death Without
Trial
For a few months after
taking power, Bolshevik leaders considered bringing "Nicholas Romanov"
before a "Revolutionary Tribunal" that would publicize his "crimes against
the people" before sentencing him to death. Historical precedent existed
for this. Two European monarchs had lost their lives as a consequence of
revolutionary upheaval: England's Charles I was beheaded in 1649, and
France's Louis XVI was guillotined in 1793.

In these cases, the king was put to
death after a lengthy public trial, during which he was allowed to present
arguments in his defense. Nicholas II, though, was neither charged nor
tried. He was secretly put to death -- along with his family and staff --
in the dead of night, in an act that resembled more a gangster-style
massacre than a formal execution.

Why did Lenin and Sverdlov abandon
plans for a show trial of the former Tsar? In Wilton's view, Nicholas and
his family were murdered because the Bolshevik rulers knew quite well that
they lacked genuine popular support, and rightly feared that the Russian
people would never approve killing the Tsar, regardless of pretexts and
legalistic formalities.

For his part, Trotsky defended the
massacre as a useful and even necesssary measure. He wrote:

The decision [to kill the
imperial family] was not only expedient but necessary. The severity of
this punishment showed everyone that we would continue to fight on
mercilessly, stopping at nothing. The execution of the Tsar's family was
needed not only in order to frighten, horrify, and instill a sense of
hopelessness in the enemy but also to shake up our own ranks, to show
that there was no turning back, that ahead lay either total victory or
total doom This Lenin sensed well.

Historical Context
In the years leading up to the 1917
revolution, Jews were disproportionately represented in all of Russia's
subversive leftist parties. Jewish hatred of the Tsarist regime had a
basis in objective conditions. Of the leading European powers of the day,
imperial Russia was the most institutionally conservative and anti-Jewish.
For example, Jews were normally not permitted to reside outside a large
area in the west of the Empire known as the "Pale of Settlement."

However understandable, and perhaps
even defensible, Jewish hostility toward the imperial regime may have
been, the remarkable Jewish role in the vastly more despotic Soviet regime
is less easy to justify. In a recently published book about the Jews in
Russia during the 20th century, Russian-born Jewish writer Sonya Margolina
goes so far as to call the Jewish role in supporting the Bolshevik regime
the "historic sin of the Jews." She points, for example, to the prominent
role of Jews as commandants of Soviet Gulag concentration and labor camps,
and the role of Jewish Communists in the systematic destruction of Russian
churches. Moreover, she goes on, "The Jews of the entire world supported
Soviet power, and remained silent in the face of any criticism from the
opposition." In light of this record, Margolina offers a grim
prediction:

The exaggeratedly
enthusiastic participation of the Jewish Bolsheviks in the subjugation
and destruction of Russia is a sin that will be avenged. Soviet power
will be equated with Jewish power, and the furious hatred against the
Bolsheviks will become hatred against Jews.
If the past is any indication, it is unlikely
that many Russians will seek the revenge that Margolina prophecies.
Anyway, to blame "the Jews" for the horrors of Communism seems no more
justifiable than to blame "white people" for Negro slavery, or "the
Germans" for the Second World War or "the Holocaust."

Words of Grim
Portent
Nicholas and his
family are only the best known of countless victims of a regime that
openly proclaimed its ruthless purpose. A few weeks after the Ekaterinburg
massacre, the newspaper of the fledgling Red Army declared:

Without mercy, without
sparing, we will kill our enemies by the 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 bourgeoisie --
more blood, as much as possible.
Grigori Zinoviev, speaking at a meeting of
Communists in September 1918, effectively pronounced a death sentence on
ten million human beings: "We must carry along with us 90 million out of
the 100 million of Soviet Russia's inhabitants. As for the rest, we have
nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated."

'The Twenty
Million'
As it turned out,
the Soviet toll in human lives and suffering proved to be much higher than
Zinoviev's murderous rhetoric suggested. Rarely, if ever, has a regime
taken the lives of so many of its own people.

Citing newly available Soviet KGB
documents, historian Dmitri Volkogonov, head of a special Russian
parliamentary commission, recently concluded that "from 1929 to 1952 21.5
million [Soviet] people were repressed. Of these a third were shot, the
rest sentenced to imprisonment, where many also died."

Olga Shatunovskaya, a member of the
Soviet Commission of Party Control, and head of a special commission
during the 1960s appointed by premier Khrushchev, has similarly concluded:
"From January 1, 1935 to June 22, 1941, 19,840,000 enemies of the people
were arrested. Of these, seven million were shot in prison, and a majority
of the others died in camp." These figures were also found in the papers
of Politburo member Anastas Mikoyan.

Robert Conquest, the distinguished
specialist of Soviet history, recently summed up the grim record of Soviet
"repression" of it own people:

It is hard to avoid the
conclusion that the post-1934 death toll was well over ten million. To
this should be added the victims of the 1930-1933 famine, the kulak
deportations, and other anti-peasant campaigns, amounting to another ten
million plus. The total is thus in the range of what the Russians now
refer to as 'The Twenty Million'."
A few other scholars have given significantly
higher estimates.

The Tsarist Era in
Retrospect
With the dramatic
collapse of Soviet rule, many Russians are taking a new and more
respectful look at their country's pre-Communist history, including the
era of the last Romanov emperor. While the Soviets -- along with many in
the West -- have stereotypically portrayed this era as little more than an
age of arbitrary despotism, cruel suppression and mass poverty, the
reality is rather different. While it is true that the power of the Tsar
was absolute, that only a small minority had any significant political
voice, and that the mass of the empire's citizens were peasants, it is
worth noting that Russians during the reign of Nicholas II had freedom of
press, religion, assembly and association, protection of private property,
and free labor unions. Sworn enemies of the regime, such as Lenin, were
treated with remarkable leniency.

During the decades prior to the
outbreak of the First World War, the Russian economy was booming. In fact,
between 1890 and 1913, it was the fastest growing in the world. New rail
lines were opened at an annual rate double that of the Soviet years.
Between 1900 and 1913, iron production increased by 58 percent, while coal
production more than doubled. Exported Russian grain fed all of Europe.
Finally, the last decades of Tsarist Russia witnessed a magnificent
flowering of cultural life.

Everything changed with the First
World War, a catastrophe not only for Russia, but for the entire
West.

Monarchist Sentiment
In
spite of (or perhaps because of) the relentless official campaign during
the entire Soviet era to stamp out every uncritical memory of the Romanovs
and imperial Russia, a virtual cult of popular veneration for Nicholas II
has been sweeping Russia in recent years.

People have been eagerly paying the
equivalent of several hours' wages to purchase portraits of Nicholas from
street vendors in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other Russian cities. His
portrait now hangs in countless Russian homes and apartments. In late
1990, all 200,000 copies of a first printing of a 30-page pamphlet on the
Romanovs quickly sold out. Said one street vendor: "I personally sold four
thousand copies in no time at all. It's like a nuclear explosion. People
really want to know about their Tsar and his family." Grass roots
pro-Tsarist and monarchist organizations have sprung up in many cities.
[Image: From left, Grand Duchesses Maria, Tatiana, Anastasia, Olga. Click
photograph for enlargement.]

A public opinion poll conducted in
1990 found that three out of four Soviet citizens surveyed regard the
killing of the Tsar and his family as a despicable crime. Many Russian
Orthodox believers regard Nicholas as a martyr. The independent "Orthodox
Church Abroad" canonized the imperial family in 1981, and the Moscow-based
Russian Orthodox Church has been under popular pressure to take the same
step, in spite of its long-standing reluctance to touch this official
taboo. The Russian Orthodox Archbishop of Ekaterinburg announced plans in
1990 to build a grand church at the site of the killings. "The people
loved Emperor Nicholas," he said. "His memory lives with the people, not
as a saint but as someone executed without court verdict, unjustly, as a
sufferer for his faith and for orthodoxy."

On the 75th anniversary of the
massacre (in July 1993), Russians recalled the life, death and legacy of
their last Emperor. In Ekaterinburg, where a large white cross festooned
with flowers now marks the spot where the family was killed, mourners wept
as hymns were sung and prayers were said for the victims. [Image: Grand
Duchess Anastasia in 1917.]

Reflecting both popular sentiment
and new social-political realities, the white, blue and red horizontal
tricolor flag of Tsarist Russia was officially adopted in 1991, replacing
the red Soviet banner. And in 1993, the imperial two-headed eagle was
restored as the nation's official emblem, replacing the Soviet hammer and
sickle. Cities that had been re-named to honor Communist figures -- such
as Leningrad, Kuibyshev, Frunze, Kalinin, and Gorky -- have re-acquired
their Tsarist-era names. Ekaterinburg, which had been named Sverdlovsk by
the Soviets in 1924 in honor of the Soviet-Jewish chief, in September 1991
restored its pre-Communist name, which honors Empress Catherine I.

Symbolic Meaning
In view of the millions that would be put to
death by the Soviet rulers in the years to follow, the murder of the
Romanov family might not seem of extraordinary importance. And yet, the
event has deep symbolic meaning. In the apt words of Harvard University
historian Richard Pipes:

The manner in which the
massacre was prepared and carried out, at first denied and then
justified, has something uniquely odious about it, something that
radically distinguishes it from previous acts of regicide and brands it
as a prelude to twentieth-century mass murder.
Another historian, Ivor Benson, characterized
the killing of the Romanov family as symbolic of the tragic fate of Russia
and, indeed, of the entire West, in this century of unprecedented agony
and conflict.

The murder of the Tsar and his
family is all the more deplorable because, whatever his failings as a
monarch, Nicholas II was, by all accounts, a personally decent, generous,
humane and honorable man.

The Massacre's Place in
History
The mass slaughter
and chaos of the First World War, and the revolutionary upheavals that
swept Europe in 1917-1918, brought an end not only to the ancient Romanov
dynasty in Russia, but to an entire continental social order. Swept away
as well was the Hohenzollern dynasty in Germany, with its stable
constitutional monarchy, and the ancient Habsburg dynasty of
Austria-Hungary with its multinational central European empire. Europe's
leading states shared not only the same Christian and Western cultural
foundations, but most of the continent's reigning monarchs were related by
blood. England's King George was, through his mother, a first cousin of
Tsar Nicholas, and, through his father, a first cousin of Empress
Alexandra. Germany's Kaiser Wilhelm was a first cousin of the German-born
Alexandra, and a distant cousin of Nicholas.

More than was the case with the
monarchies of western Europe, Russia's Tsar personally symbolized his land
and nation. Thus, the murder of the last emperor of a dynasty that had
ruled Russia for three centuries not only symbolically presaged the
Communist mass slaughter that would claim so many Russian lives in the
decades that followed, but was symbolic of the Communist effort to kill
the soul and spirit of Russia itself.

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