Leather-Jacketed Coke-Snorting Jews in the Soviet Secret Police Torturing, Raping and Killing Gentiles: The Evidence

In “Ted Gold and the Jews of Weatherman” (September 2017 in TOO), I wrote, in describing a envisioned takeover of the United States by the Jewish radical group Weatherman, “Cue the return of leather-jacketed coke-snorting Jewish secret police rounding up the gentiles for rape, torture and murder in dank abattoirs. It happened, look it up.” This somewhat jarring historical reference left one commenter, “Jim,” nonplussed. He wrote, whether ironically or seriously (but amusingly), “Where can I find info on coke snorting Jews raping people.” Somewhat belatedly, I thought I would review some of the evidence for the separate elements of my statement: leather jackets, cocaine, and torture, rape and murder in “dank abattoirs.” And, of course, Jewish Cheka agents.

The Cheka

When the Bolsheviks seized the power that was so famously “lying in the streets” in early November 1917, they didn’t disguise the fact that they meant to rule by force and terror. Within weeks they established the coercive arm of their permanent revolution, the “Extraordinary Commission for Combating Counterrevolution and Sabotage,” Ve-Cheka for short or Cheka for shorter. Lenin placed the fanatical Pole Felix Dzerzhinsky in charge of it, and he in turn recruited a cohort of Latvians, Jews, and renegade Russians to help him devastate the Russian nation. The Cheka almost immediately launched into one of the most horrifying orgies of mass murder ever recorded, and men of Jewish blood, who like other Jewish leftists, retained their Jewish identity, played a very prominent role in it.

It is very well-attested that Jews were, for the first twenty years of its history, vastly over-represented in the ranks of the Cheka in proportion to their numbers in the population of the Soviet Union. A few citations will suffice. The historian Richard Pipes quotes a member of the early Kiev Cheka to the effect that three-quarters of its personnel were Jewish.[1] Another source shows that 37 of the top 96 NKVD (later nomenclature for the Cheka) officials in 1934 were Jews, an astounding number considering they made up only 1.7 percent of the population.[2] The Jews actually outnumbered ethnic Russians in these top positions all the way up to early 1937, when Stalin began purging them. The Soviet-born Israeli journalist Sever Plocker writes, “Many Jews sold their soul to the devil of the Communist revolution and have blood on their hands for eternity”—at a time, incidentally, when celebrating the Bolshevik Revolution was entirely mainstream in the Jewish diaspora community in the West. At the same time, Jews were underrepresented in the population of the Gulag, by roughly twenty-five percent.[3]

Within months of the institution of the Cheka, provincial Chekas were sprouting up throughout the territory controlled by the beleaguered Bolshevik dictatorship. Because the central Cheka was essentially an extra-legal body, and had for some time little bureaucratic control over the provincial Chekas, the latter often amounted to little more than local strong-arm groups, composed of criminals and Jews, whose motives were plunder and revenge. Central authorities did eventually succeed in bringing their Cheka franchises under discipline, but the murder, torture, and plunder continued, the only change being central direction and a better paper trail.

The prestige and élan that surrounded the early Cheka and its personnel is strange to evoke at this point in time, but it was significant, at least among some circles. The organization had no problem recruiting. They affected a hard-edged style that featured leather jackets or trench coats. Yakov Sverdlov, an important early Jewish Bolshevik commissar—Chairman of the Central Executive Committee and thus de jure head of state—apparently spread the vogue for leather jackets and even leather trousers.[4] Here he is, to the right of Lenin:

The Jewish functionary and terrorist Rozalia Zemliachka, best known for butchering 50,000 people in the Crimea after the Civil War, was also well-known for her fondness for leather jackets and a hardline persona: “In her forties when the Civil War began, Zemliachka dressed in the stereotypical garb of a Bolshevik commissar and killed with a vengeance.”[5] Another source relates that Dzerzhinsky commandeered a shipment of leather coats meant for air force pilots, and outfitted his men in them.[6] In the early days, every self-respecting Bolshevik commissar and Cheka officer sported leather jackets.

The Jews who flocked into the ranks of the secret police were burning for revenge on their Christian neighbors, and nobody nurses a grievance quite like the Jews—the pogroms, despite their exaggeration by Jewish activists at the time and since, were certainly a component of Jewish hatred toward the Russian Empire. A variety of sources confirm a sense of revenge as a motive. Yuri Slezkine reviews some of the works of early Soviet Jewish writers that illustrate the revenge theme. For example, the amorous advances of the Jewish protagonist of Eduard Bagritsky’s poem “February” are rebuffed by a Russian girl, but their positions are changed after the Revolution when he becomes a deputy commissar. Seeing the girl in a brothel, he has sex with her without taking off his boots, his gun, or his trench coat—an act of aggression and revenge:

I am taking you because so timid
Have I always been, and to take vengeance
For the shame of my exiled forefathers
And the twitter of an unknown fledgling!
I am taking you to wreak my vengeance
On the world I could not get away from!

 Igor Shafarevich, a mathematician and member of the prestigious U. S. National Academy of Sciences reviewed Jewish literary works during the Soviet and post-Soviet period, finding a prominent theme of Jewish hatred mixed with a powerful desire for revenge toward pre-revolutionary Russia and its culture. But Shafarevich also suggests that the Jewish “Russophobia” that prompted the mass murder is not a unique phenomenon, but results from traditional Jewish hostility toward the non-Jewish world, considered tref (unclean), and toward non-Jews themselves, considered sub-human and as worthy of destruction—a very reasonable interpretation given traditional Jewish ethics in which non-Jews have no moral standing. People with such beliefs have no moral compunctions about the torture, rape, and murder of their perceived enemies. Hatred toward the peoples and cultures of non-Jews and the image of enslaved ancestors as victims of anti-Semitism have been the Jewish norm throughout history—much commented on, from Tacitus to the present.

Finally, the Jewish hatred and desire for revenge was not confined to the USSR. Jewish members of the internal security force in post-World War Poland often appear to have been motivated by personal rage and a desire for revenge related to their Jewish identity:

Their families had been murdered and the anti-Communist underground was, in their perception, a continuation of essentially the same anti-Semitic and anti-Communist tradition. They hated those who had collaborated with the Nazis and those who opposed the new order with almost the same intensity and knew that as Communists, or as both Communists and Jews, they were hated at least in the same way. In their eyes, the enemy was essentially the same. The old evil deeds had to be punished and new ones prevented and a merciless struggle was necessary before a better world could be built. (Schatz, J. (1991). The Generation: The Rise and Fall of the Jewish Communists of Poland, 226)

“A ‘Continuous Spree’of Rape and Robbery.” And Torture and Murder

The Cheka official quoted by Pipes above said the early days in Kiev (1918–1919) amounted to a “continuous spree” of rape and robbery, though they were “careful to spare fellow Jews.”[7] For some reason, Pipes left out mention of horrific torture and murder, but I’ll fill in those details.[8] A major element of revenge has always been humiliation of the target group and rape of its women, and the Red Terror had plenty of both. The acme of vengeance, for the truly dedicated, is torture and murder: the infliction of terrible suffering directly on the object of hatred, flaunting one’s dominance, then the total destruction of the victim. The frenzied nature of the excesses of the Red Terror resulted from a combination of factors, including an atmosphere of brutalization brought on by revolution and civil war and a perverse ideology, but an ethnic factor was also clearly present.

A recent historian of Stalin’s executioners affirms the Jews “ruthlessly avenged the victims of a century’s pogroms.”[9] Another states that “the “ranks of the Cheka were filled with social elements anxious for revenge.”[10] A historian of the Russian Civil War states, “Always anxious to use national and racial hatreds to advantage, Dzerzhinskii placed Jews in seven of the Cheka’s top ten positions. . . . The victims of centuries of anti-Semitic abuse, the Jews of the Ukraine now had a chance to take revenge.”[11]

The Cheka officers, with literally nothing hindering their action, assaulted women on a mass scale. There is plenty of evidence for this.

“Convicted criminals and certified psychopaths appointed themselves officers of the Cheka and terrorized, raped, and murdered whom they liked.”[12] “Rapes of female prisoners by Cheka guards and interrogators were so commonplace that they occasioned comment from superiors only if performed in some particularly brutal or perverted fashion.”[13] Rape of Russian women by Cheka men “took on gigantic proportions, particularly in the second reconquest of Ukraine and the Cossack regions of the Crimea in 1920.”[14]

Sergey Melgounov wrote the classic account of early Bolshevik rule, The Red Terror. On page 136 he describes Cheka “food detachments” that plundered the food in the countryside to feed the cities, the base of Bolshevik power: “Whenever an expedition that was collecting the grain tax in the Khvalinsky district reached a village the peasants were commanded to surrender their best-looking girls to the officials.”[15]

A story from Ekaterinodar in the Caucasus, c. 1919:

Madame Dombrovskaya, an ex-school teacher, was tortured in her solitary confinement cell . . . . The Che-Ka had been informed that she had . . . jewelery . . . in her keeping: wherefore . . . she was ordered to be tortured until she should reveal where the jewelery might be. For a beginning she was raped and outraged generally—the raping taking place in order of seniority of torturers, with a man called Friedmann raping her first, and the others in regular sequence. And, that done, she was questioned further as to the whereabouts of the jewelery, and further tortured by having incisions made into her body, and her finger tips nipped with pliers and pincers. Until at last, in her agony, with the blood pouring from her wounds, she confessed that the jewels were hidden in an outbuilding of her house. The same evening (the date being November 6) she was shot.[16]

From southern Ukraine: “a witness testified before the Denikin Commission [an investigative body set up by the White Armies] that licentious orgies had been carried out systematically by the Che-Ka and tribunal of Nikolaev, and included even women who had come to beg for relatives’ release, with that inclusion as the price of their relatives’ freedom.”[17]

Some local Chekas were so atrocious that even Bolsheviks were outraged. One—a Serafina Gopner—complained to Lenin about the Cheka in Ekaterinoslav in Ukraine:

This organization is rotten to the core: the canker of criminality, violence, and totally arbitrary decisions abounds, and it is filled with . . . the dregs of society, men armed to the teeth who simply execute anyone they don’t like. They steal, loot, rape, and throw anyone into prison, forge documents, practice extortion and blackmail, and will let anyone go in exchange for huge sums of money.[18] 

Virtually all of these poor women were Christian Russians; a great many of the rapists were revenge-minded Jews. I imagine that Jews, with their strong sense of respect for their martyred ancestors, would wish us, too, to “never forget” these victims.

As for cocaine, it was used very widely in the decades before and after 1900. The coca plant grows only in South America, but its properties became known in Europe by the early 1800s. The chemical was isolated from the leaf by a German chemist in 1860, and its use as a stimulant and local anesthetic quickly spread. An early booster of the drug was Sigmund Freud, who wrote a glowing report of its effects and pushed it on his friends and patients. (His addiction lasted twelve years.) By the 1880s, pharmaceutical companies were producing hundreds of thousands of pounds yearly, and Parke-Davis in the U.S. was actually marketing a little kit with cocaine and a syringe and needle for convenient use, although it could also be snorted as a powder. The drug was one ingredient of early Coca-Cola, at least until 1903, when there began a reaction against it because of its addictive and harmful properties. There were an estimated 200,000 addicts in the U.S. at the turn of the century. In addition, Americans became alarmed at the prospect of Blacks committing violent crimes under its influence. One authority maintained that “most of the attacks upon the white women of the South are the direct result of a cocaine-crazed Negro brain.” In 1914 the government placed it under federal control, which did not, of course, eradicate its availability.

Cocaine was also readily available in Russia. The following passages show that Cheka men used it commonly, even maniacally. Some of them claimed that the constant bloodshed and strain necessitated a resort to drugs, but it probably fueled some of the atrocities as well. Whatever the case may be, it was clear that many Cheka men were out of their minds with drugs and sadism. The combination led to mental breakdowns among Cheka agents. A number of them were committed to psychiatric wards.[19]

From a 1919 report on the Cheka in Yaroslavl: “The Cheka are looting and arresting everyone indiscriminately. . . . They have transformed the Cheka headquarters into a huge brothel where they take all the bourgeois women. Drunkenness is rife. Cocaine is being used quite widely among the supervisors.”[20]

The White Armies freed Kiev from Cheka rule for a brief period in 1919. One of the resulting reports stated, “In almost every cupboard and, for that matter, in almost every drawer, we found empty cocaine bottles in piles.”[21]

The Cheka placed their men in all Red Army units. Here is a report from a supervisor on certain of these units: “No administrative norm is being respected by these people. . . . Orgies and drunkenness are daily occurrences. Almost all the personnel of the Cheka are heavy cocaine users. They say that this helps them deal with the sight of so much blood on a daily basis.” The man who composed this report, Rozental, concluded that although these units needed tighter control and were “drunk with blood and violence,” they nevertheless “are doing their duty.”[22] Well, that’s a relief.

Maks Deich, a Jew, was the head of the Odessa Cheka in 1920–1922. There “he earned [a] reputation for extreme cruelty, and suffered a neurosis and addiction to cocaine.”[23] What harrowing atrocities could have earned him notoriety for “extreme cruelty” in this milieu? A Cheka officer in Georgia named Schulmann, very likely a Jew, also earned notice. A prisoner witnessed “brutal executions . . . especially at the hands of a certain Schulmann, who was addicted to morphine and cocaine.”[24]

As for “dank abattoirs,” here is what the White Armies found in Kiev in late August 1919, after they drove out the Bolsheviks:

The place had formerly been a garage, and then the provincial Che-Ka’s main slaughter-house. And the whole of it was coated with blood—blood ankle deep, coagulated with the heat of the atmosphere, and horribly mixed with human brains, chips of skullbone, wisps of hair, and the like. Even the walls were bespattered with blood and similar fragments of brain and scalp, as well as riddled with thousands of bullet holes. In the centre was a drain about a quarter of a metre deep and wide, and about ten metres long. This led to the sanitary system of the neighbouring house, but was choked to the brim with blood. The horrible den contained 127 corpses, but the victims of the previous massacre had been hurriedly buried in the adjacent garden. What struck us most about the corpses was the shattering of their skulls, or the complete flattening out of those skulls, as though the victims had been brained with some such instrument as a heavy block. … And in every case the corpses were naked … [a grave in the courtyard] contained eighty bodies which in every instance bore almost unimaginably horrible wounds and mutilations. In this grave we found corpses with, variously, entrails ripped out, no limbs remaining (as though the bodies had literally been chopped up), eyes gouged out, and heads and necks and faces and trunks all studded with stab wounds. Again, we found a body which had had a pointed stake driven through its chest, whilst in several cases the tongue was missing.[25]

This happened in Kiev, where, you remember, three-quarters of the Cheka staff were Jews.

The Cheka rampage continued for decades. The Terror would reach crescendos, such as “The Great Terror” of 1937–1938, but it never died down until after the death of Stalin in 1953. Robert Conquest, speaking of early 1937, used this chilling description: “Russians who had thought that the country was already in the grip of terrorists were now to see what terror really meant.”[26] When I first read that sentence twenty-five years ago, I had a palpable sensation of horror, and profound sadness for the Russian people.

The German invasion of Russia in June 1941 lifted the curtain on later Bolshevik atrocities.[27] Nearly a quarter century of bloody vengeance had not quenched the Bolshevik/Jewish bloodthirst. The retreating Bolsheviks massacred their prisoners in the frontier prisons rather than transport them to the east, and the incoming Germans carefully preserved the evidence. They didn’t simply kill them, however. One witness, a German doctor, gives the following testimony concerning the scene in Lvov:

I ordered that the cellars [of Brygidky prison] should be immediately cleared, and in the course of the next three days 423 corpses were brought out . . . Among the bodies there were young boys aged 10, 12, and 14 and young women aged 18, 20, and 22, besides old women. . . . [At] the military prison in the northern part of the town . . . the stench of decomposition was so strong and there was so much blood under the mountain of corpses that we had to wear a Polish gas mask in order to enter the cellar. . . . Young women, men, and older women were piled up layer upon layer all the way to the ceiling. . . . The third and fourth cellars were only about three-quarters full. Over 460 corpses were taken out of these cellars. Many of the bodies showed evidence of serious torture, mutilations of arms and legs, and shackling.[28]

Another witness saw

a large space, filled from top to bottom with corpses. . . . The bottom ones were still warm. The victims . . . laid in various poses, with open eyes and masks of terror on their faces. Among them were many women. On the left wall, three men were crucified, barely covered by clothing from their shoulders, with severed male organs. Underneath them on the floor in half-sitting, leaning positions – two nuns with those organs in their mouths. The victims of the NKVD’s sadism were killed with a shot in the mouth or the back of the head. But most were stabbed in the stomach with a bayonet. Some were naked or almost naked . . .

Citizens of Lvov searching for relatives among the victims of the NKVD

More victims. It looks like they endured severe beatings, and the man in the foreground is partially undressed. Both of the above photos are from https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/pa1153801.

Other witnesses also stated that many of the dead were naked, which naturally leads to the question whether they were raped.[29] The Ukrainian Red Cross estimated that 4,000 people had perished in Lvov alone.[30] Another source says the victims numbered 10,000.[31]

When the local Ukrainian and Polish population saw the terrible scenes, they “immediately started to drag the Jews out of their homes and to abuse them in the streets.”[32] Thousands were killed. The locals pinned the atrocities upon the Jews, so deep-set was the impression that Bolsheviks = Jews. I have not found information on Cheka agents in Lvov for this period, but Jews composed thirty percent of the population of the city.[33] The top-ranks of NKVD officials by this time had a much-reduced Jewish contingent, but that doesn’t mean the middle and lower ranks were reduced in the same proportion. Arkady Vaksberg writes, “But the NKVD was not free of Jews, despite the . . . purges. Among the sadists who came to fill the emptied slots, including very high ones, were “more of the same.”[34] One source states that there were almost 600 Jewish officers in the Ukrainian NKVD in January 1945.[35] Certainly there would have been many more in June 1941.

When I wrote the sentence that introduced this short essay, I was predicting what a Weatherman takeover in America would look like. The communists in Weatherman had important similarities with the Bolsheviks: a smug and fanatical superiority complex, a messianic ideology, slavering hatred of Whites/Christians, and plans for “re-education” camps. The Weathermen have mostly passed away, but the spirit that produced them is far stronger than it was in the 1960s; it is the same ancient and murderous hatred that propelled the Bolsheviks. powerful desire to avenge the evils of the old social order.

The Weathermen were not alone on the Jewish left in the 1960s with fantasies of hatred and revenge. For many Jewish New Leftists “the revolution promises to avenge the sufferings and to right the wrongs which have, for so long, been inflicted on Jews with the permission or encouragement, or even at the command of, the authorities in prerevolutionary societies” (Cohen, P. S. (1980). Jewish Radicals and Radical Jews. London: Academic Press., 208; here, p. 85). Interviews with New Left Jewish radicals revealed that many had destructive fantasies in which the revolution would result in “humiliation, dispossession, imprisonment or execution of the oppressors” combined with the belief in their own omnipotence and their ability to create a non-oppressive social order (Ibid.). These findings are also entirely consistent with Kevin MacDonald’s personal experience among Jewish New Left activists at the University of Wisconsin in the 1960s (here, p. 103, note 13).

The body of this essay is a glimpse at a state of affairs that hovers over the horizon like a vast terrifying storm. No revolutionary overthrow will be needed at this point, for the levers of power are already in the hands of our enemies, awaiting only a situation where they can seize absolute power comparable to their power in the post-revolutionary USSR. Time is short; the great question of this generation is this: does the spirit of our ancestors, the warriors of the steppe, merely slumber in our countrymen? Or is it in fact dead? I’m not sure I want to know the answer to that question.

Notes

[1] Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (Vintage Books, 1991), p. 824.

[2] Paul Gregory, Terror by Quota: State Security from Lenin to Stalin (An Archival Study) (Yale University Press, 2009), p. 63.

[3] Terry Martin, The Affirmative Action Empire: Nations and Nationalism in the Soviet Union, 1923-1939 (Cornell University Press, 2001), p. 425. See also here, p. 1028.

[4] Yuri Slezkine, The House of Government: A Saga of the Russian Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 152

[5] W. Bruce Lincoln, Red Victory: A History of the Russian Civil War (Simon and Schuster, 1989), p. 386.

[6] Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (Random House, 2004), p. 69.

[7] Pipes, p. 824.

[8] I am aware that Pipes is Jewish.

[9] Rayfield, p. 75.

[10] S. Courtois, N. Werth, J.-L. Panne, Andrzej Paczkowski, K. Bartosek and J.-L. Margolin (eds), The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression (Harvard University Press, 1999), p. 102.

[11] W. Bruce Lincoln, p. 314

[12] Rayfield, p. 83.

[13] W. Bruce Lincoln, p. 383.

[14] S. Courtois et. al., p. 105.

[15] Sergey Melgounov, The Red Terror in Russia (Hyperion Press, 1976), p. 136.

[16] Melgounov, p. 163.

[17] Melgounov, p. 218.

[18] Courtois et. al., p. 103.

[19] George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Oxford University Press, 1981), p. 271. Donald Rayfield tells of a Hungarian female Chekist who had to be confined to a psych ward after she began shooting witnesses of crimes. Rayfield, p. 83.

[20] Courtois et. al., p. 103.

[21] Melgounov, p. 201.

[22] Courtois et. al., p. 103-04.

[23] Leggett, p. 447.

[24] Amy Knight, Beria: Stalin’s First Lieutenant (Princeton University Press, 1996), p. 236 note 12.

[25] Megounov, p. 176

[26] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1990), p. 181.

[27] An even later account, and more directly tied to Jewish perpetrators, appears in An Eye For An Eye: The Untold Story of Jewish Revenge Against Germans in 1945 (Basic Books, 1993) by John Sack. It is the story of Jewish secret police in the Polish Communist regime after World War Two rounding up Germans in concentration camps for even more rape, torture, and murder.

[28] Alfred M. de Zayas, The Wehrmacht War Crimes Bureau, 1939-1945 (University of Nebraska Press, 1995), p. 216.

[29] De Zayas, p. 220.

[30] De Zayas, p. 221.

[31] Courtois, et. al., p. 225.

[32] De Zayas, p. 223.

[33] Dov Levin, The Lesser of Two Evils: Eastern European Jewry Under Soviet Rule, 1939-1941 (The Jewish Publication Society, 1995), p. 54

[34] Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews (Alfred Knopf, 1994), p. 101. The reaction of the local population is also telling; they had no doubt that Jews were to blame.

[35] Amir Weiner, Making Sense of War: The Second World War and the Fate of the Bolshevik Revolution (Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 269.