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Alexandr Solzhenitsyn's “The 1920s.” Chapter 18 of 200 Years Together
Kevin MacDonald
July 5, 2010
The English
translation of Chapter 18 of 200 Years
Together, “The 1920s” is now available. (See
here, and notice the link requesting donations.) It has a very different
feel from Chapter 20, on the Gulag. Whereas Solzhenitsyn’s account of the Gulag
stresses his own experiences, this chapter relies on a wide range of academic
historical writing to paint his picture of the USSR during the critical decade
of the 1920s.
His
account is therefore based on mainstream scholarship and overall is similar to
other accounts, such as Yuri Slezkine’s
The Jewish Century. However,
it goes beyond other accounts in several important ways and provides a great
deal of new information for Western audiences.
Solzhenitsyn
recounts the migration of Jews to the urban areas of the USSR—the centers of
culture and of power. Well over 80% of ethnic Jews moved to urban areas, and
they were represented in the government at around their percentage of the urban
population and 6.5 times their representation in the population at large.
Russians
commonly perceived Jews as dominating the Soviet government, a situation that
resulted in anti-Jewish attitudes. A Jewish observer is quoted about the
situation in 1923:
"The
Jew is in all corners and on all levels of power.” “The Russian sees him as a
ruler of Moscow, at the head of the capital on Neva [Leningrad], and at the head
of the Red Army, a perfected death machine. He sees that St. Vladimir Prospect
has been renamed Naumson Prospect… The Russian sees the Jew as judge and
hangman; he sees Jews at every turn, not only among the communists, but among
people like himself, everywhere doing the bidding of Soviet power… . Not
surprisingly, the Russian, comparing present with past, is confirmed in his idea
that power is Jewish power, that it exists for Jews and does the bidding of
Jews.
Jews also
took full advantage of new opportunities for education, aided by the “social
origins policy” in which non-Jews who were children of the pre-revolutionary
middle and upper classes were expelled from the universities. Jews were not
subject to exclusion based on social origins because they were classified as a
“repressed nationality” under that Czar. The result was that the ethnic Russian
intelligentsia was “pushed to the margins.” Jews were then competing for
prestigious occupations with the children of proletarian Russians. Jews
therefore came to be overrepresented in the intelligentsia even controlling for
the percentage of the urban population. The Russian merchants and traders were
also subjected to a much harsher fate than Jews in similar positions: “The
Jewish bourgeoisie was not destroyed like the Russian bourgeoisie. The Jewish
merchant, much less likely to be damned as a “man of the past,” found defenders.
Relatives or sympathizers in the Soviet Apparatus … warned about pending
arrests or seizures. And if he lost anything — it was just capital, not life.”
This is a
speeded up version of what is happening via affirmative action in America and
other Western societies now. There is discrimination against higher IQ Whites in
favor of lower-IQ groups. Jews, however, continue to be
overrepresented in elite academic institutions on the basis of IQ, so
they are not suffering a similar level of discrimination. The only difference is
that the beneficiaries are non-Whites, not the White working class. Indeed, the
White working class is losing the most as a result of the multicultural
revolution and, not surprisingly, this is where most of the White anger is
coming from (see
here
and
here).
The Russians
were angry too. In 1926 a professor gave a “remarkable speech” in which he
described the dispossession of the Russians:
We
have isolated expressions of hooliganism…. Its source is hurt national feelings
of Russians. The February Revolution established the equality of all citizens of
Russia, including Jews. The October
Revolution went further with the Russian nation proclaiming self-renunciation. A
certain imbalance has developed with respect to the proportion of the Jewish
population in the country as a whole and the positions they have temporarily
occupied in the cities. We are in our own cities and they arrive and squeeze us
out. When Russians see Russian women, elders and children freezing on the street
9 to 11 hours a day, getting soaked by the rain in their tents at the market and
when they see relatively warm covered Jewish kiosks with bread and sausage they
are not happy. These phenomena are catastrophic …. There is a terrible
disproportion in the government structure, in daily life and in other areas….We
have a housing crisis in Moscow — masses of people are crowding into areas not
fit for habitation and at the same time people see others pouring in from other
parts of the country taking up housing.
These arrivals are Jews. A national dissatisfaction is rising and a
defensiveness and fear of other nationalities. We must not close our eyes to
that. A Russian speaking to a Russian will say things that he will not say to a
Jew. Many are saying that there are too many Jews in Moscow. This must be dealt
with, but don’t call it anti-Semitism.
Notice
particularly the comment that Russians were supposed to engage in
“self-renunciation” — precisely what we see now in the common expectation that
Whites are expected to accept their dispossession without complaint because of
their complicity in the pre-revolutionary, traditional culture of America. As
would also happen in contemporary America, the speech was quickly denounced as
nothing more than “anti-Semitism.” Those who opposed the dispossession of the
Russians or criticized the position of the Jews were framed as
counterrevolutionaries. “And for
counter-revolutionaries there is 9 grams of lead — that much is clear.”
The result
was that “the average person saw [quoting a Jewish author], ‘arrogant,
self-confident and self-satisfied adult Jews at ease on ‘red holidays’ and ‘red
weddings’…. ‘We now sit where Czars and generals once sat, and they sit beneath
us’’” “Judeophobia is everywhere in Russia today. It has swept areas where Jews
were never before seen and where the Jewish question never occurred to anyone.
The same hatred for Jews is found in Vologda, Archangel, in the towns of
Siberia and the Urals.”
Solzhenitsyn
cites a Jewish writer, Maslov:
“The
expression ‘Kike Power’ is often used in Russia and particularly in Ukraine and
in the former pale of settlement not as a polemic, but as a completely objective
definition of power, its content and its politics.” “Soviet power in the first
place answers the wishes and interests of Jews and they are its ardent
supporters and in the second place, power resides in Jewish hands.”
As in his
chapter on the Gulag, Solzhenitsyn stresses Jewish ethnic networking as a key to
their success, again citing Maslov: the “tightly welded ethnic cohesion they
have formed as a result of their difficult thousands-year-old history.”
“This is particularly noticeable when it comes to selecting staff at
institutions — if the selection process is in the hands of Jews, you can bet
that the entire staff of responsible positions will go to Jews, even if it means
removing the existing staff.” Jews were also aided by international Jewish
charities throughout the 1920s, and during the
New
Economic Policy period (1921–1928), when capitalism was encouraged, Jews
quickly came to dominate certain industries. Anger against Jewish success
stemmed from the perception that “their
commerce was routinely facilitated by their links and pulls in the Soviet
apparatus.”
Not only did
Jews favor their own, observers noted that they regarded the Russians with
contempt. Solzhenitsyn again quotes Maslov: “The preference for
their own is displayed in a sharp,
discourteous manner which is offensive to others”
(emphasis in text).
The
Parisian Zionist journal Sunrise wrote
in 1922 that Gorky essentially said that “the
growth of anti-Semitism is aided by the
tactless behavior of the Jewish Bolsheviks themselves in many situations.
That is the blessed truth!” And Gorky wasn’t speaking of Trotsky, Zinoviev and
Kamenev — he was speaking of the typical Jewish communist who occupies positions
in the collegiums, presidiums and petty and mid-level Soviet institutions where
they come into contact with large swaths of the population. They occupy leading
front-line positions which naturally multiplies their number in the mind of the
public.
Russian
concern about the overrepresentation of Jews at the highest levels of the party
(e.g., 3 of 6 Politburo members) led to a plan for an anti-Jewish revolt in 1924
at a Party conference. It was thwarted when the leader died, “literally on the
eve of the conference [as the result of] an unsuccessful and unnecessary
operation for a stomach ulcer by the same surgeon who dispatched [Mikhail]
Frunze with an equally unneeded operation a year and a half later” (see
Wikipedia’s account of Frunze’s death.)
Solzhenitsyn
makes the point that the Cheka held life and death power over all of the USSR:
“Each of them with the flick of a finger could destroy anyone of us!” Seventy
percent of its leadership positions during the
Red
Terror were non-Russian, but
this fell to around 40–45% by the mid-1920s. However, Jews became an increasing
percentage of the Cheka at this time; hence, Slezkine’s comment on Jews as “Stalin’s
willing
executioners.” “In the 20’s the
inevitable question hangs in the air that was posed many year later by Leonard
Schapiro: why was it ‘highly likely that anyone unfortunate enough to fall into
the hands of the Cheka would go before a Jewish interrogator or be shot by a
Jew.’”
Solzhenitsyn
is emphasizing the ethnic angle to mass murder in the USSR: Russians were
disproportionately victims, and non-Russians, and particularly Jews, were
disproportionately perpetrators. He also emphasizes that a prime motive for Jews
was revenge against the old order. Describing a family of Hasidic Jews who
became prominent in the Cheka, he notes, “They thirsted for revenge on everyone
— aristocrats, the wealthy,
Russians, few were left out. This
was their path to self realization.”
Again, the
analogy is striking. As
emphasized repeatedly on TOO,
Whites can expect to be increasingly victimized by non-Whites with historical
grudges as they sink to minority status and lose political power. The
difference, of course, is that because the Bolsheviks had totalitarian control,
they were able to carry out their war on ethnic Russians even though the
Russians comprised a dominant majority of the population.
But the
general Jewish reaction to this horror has been pride in accomplishment, not
guilt for having perpetrated mass murder against their perceived ethnic enemies.
Often
these Jewish authors thoughtlessly and meticulously comply and publish vast
lists of the Jewish leadership of the time. For example, see how proudly the
article “Jews in the Kremlin,” published in journal
Alef, provides a list of the highest
Soviet officials — Jews for 1925. It listed eight out of twelve directors of the
state Central Bank. The same Jewish representation was found among top trade
union leaders. And it comments: “We do not fear accusations. Quite the opposite
— it is active Jewish participation in governing the state that helps in
understanding why the affairs of state were better then than now, when Jews at
top positions are as rare as hen’s teeth.” Unbelievably, it was written in 1989.
As usual,
Jews themselves had self-serving and self-deceptive attitudes on the causes of
anti-Jewish attitudes. For example, Yuri Larin prepared a report asserting that
anti-Jewish attitudes were “dreamed up and spread among the masses by an
underground organization of counter-revolutionaries!” The closest Larin comes to
a reasonable interpretation is his assertion that the anti-Semitism of the
Russian intelligentsia comes from competition with Jews for government jobs, but
he denied that Jews in fact held an “excessive number” of government jobs.
The result
was a government-led campaign against anti-Semitism: “The battle to create an
atmosphere of intolerance of anti-Semitism was to be taken up in educational
programs, public reports, lectures, the press, radio and school textbooks and
finally, authorities were ‘to apply the strictest disciplinary measures to those
found guilty of anti-Semitic practices.’”
Again, the
analogies with the present are striking, although in the contemporary West there
is a greater role for non-governmental entities, such as privately owned media
and activist organizations, most notably the ADL and the SPLC. However, whereas
current propaganda about anti-Semitism emphasizes Jewish suffering, particularly
the Holocaust, in the USSR the ideology was that anti-Semitism was a cloak for
anti-revolutionary activities: “The masses
must regard anyone who shows sympathy to anti-Semitism as a secret
counter-revolutionary or the mouthpiece of a secret monarchist organization.”
Solzhenitsyn
alludes to a 1930 ruling that prevented the Draconian provisions of the law on
anti-Semitism (prison, confiscation of property, and in some cases, death) from
being used in cases of personal dispute. This suggests that at least prior to
this ruling, Jews at times made accusations of anti-Semitism in order to win
personal disputes with non-Jews.
Because Jews
had assumed a position of power and influence in the USSR, the USSR was regarded
quite highly in the West. Much of the West, including European and American
Jews, maintained feelings of good will towards the Soviets. The Soviet Union was
good for the Jews, and therefore received positive coverage in the West.
Positive relations with the Soviet regime were held not only because of European
intellectuals’ sympathy for any socialist movement but, to a large degree,
because world and American Jewry were satisfied with the status of Russian Jews.
Undoubtedly things would be good for Jews under the Soviets and no pogroms
threatened. Effective Soviet
propaganda further publicized the positive outlook for Soviet Jews.
International good will and sympathy helped Soviet leaders obtain Western,
particularly American, financial support. Without that support, the Soviet
economy could not have escaped the damage of the “war communism” era.
The fact that
the USSR was good for the Jews therefore had a major effect in bolstering and
motivating the Jewish left which was the backbone of the left in the US and
elsewhere in the West. This in turn had major implications well into the Cold
War era. Jews were vastly overrepresented as
targets of the McCarthy era, and Jewish intellectuals generally
continued to have rosy views of the USSR throughout the 1950s.
Most egregiously, the American
Jewish Congress — by far the largest Jewish organization in terms of membership
— continued to be associated with the far left and was formally affiliated with
organizations listed as subversive by the US Attorney General. The CPUSA viewed
members of the AJCongress as “democratic forces” in
their attempt to create “democratic and anti-fascist” policies in the World
Jewish Congress.
Writers like
Yuri Slezkine and Jewish activist organizations like the ADL claim that the Jews
who played such an important role in the USSR left their Jewish identity behind
and completely assimilated to Soviet culture. Solzhenitsyn rejects this myth
(see also
here, p. 79ff). Despite
government hostility toward all religion, Jewish ethnicity remained intact: “A
remnant of Jewish self-awareness was preserved and remained. Even in the flood
of the internationalism of the 20’s, mixed marriages (between Jews and Russians
or Jews and any non-Jew), as measured from 1924–1926, were only 6.3% of the
total marriages for Jews in the USSR, including 16.8% in RSFSR, but only 2.8% in
Byelorussia and 4.5% in Ukraine (according to another source, on average in
USSR, 8.5%; in RSFSR, 21%; in Byelorussia, 3.2%; and in Ukraine, 5%).
Solzhenitsyn
makes the important point that the public face of the USSR in the West was
Jewish, since such a large percentage of the diplomatic corps and embassy and
trade officials were Jewish: A Jewish
author notes that “‘In the publishing arm [of the People’s Commissariat of
Foreign Affairs] there is not one non-Jew’ and further, with evident pride, the
author ‘examines the staff in Soviet consulates around the world and finds there
is not one country in the world where the Kremlin has not placed a trusted
Jew.’”
This then fed
into the public perception throughout the West among conservatives that Jews
dominated the USSR, with far-reaching implications. Despite the fact that the
left continued to see the USSR as the promised land, at least partly because of
its treatment of Jews, this was not the case with a great many non-Jewish
intellectuals and political leaders, including Winston Churchill, Woodrow
Wilson, and the National Socialists in Germany (see
here,
pp. xxxix–xli).
Solzhenitsyn also presents an interesting discussion of the struggle for control of the Party between Stalin and Trotsky. Trotsky was joined by two other Jews, Grigory Zinoviev and Lev Kamenev. As a result, the “United Opposition” had a decidedly Jewish look, and many of its supporters, followers of Trotsky, were also Jewish. However, Stalin decided not to use the Jewish angle in his battle with the United Opposition because of the power of Jews within the Party and the need to preserve good relations with the West — a comment that says much about Jewish power in the West at that time. He also realized that he needed to continue to curry favor with Jews in his struggle with Russian nationalism and the collectivization of the Russian peasants. Nevertheless, there was an undercurrent of anti-Semitism in the opposition to Trotsky.
Particularly interesting is that Stalin continued to see the Jews as reliable allies in his opposition to Russian nationalism: “At the 26th Party Congress in 1930 Stalin declared 'Great Russian chauvinism' to be the 'main danger of the national question.' Thus, at the end of the 20’s Stalin did not carry out his planned purge of the party and government apparatus of Jews, but encouraged their expansion in many fields, places and institutions.”
This is a common theme in Jewish history from the ancient world into modern times—Jews as making alliances with oppressive elites in opposition to the great majority of the population. Stalin would continue this policy in post-World War II Eastern Europe, where Jews were often installed as a ruling elite in opposition to nationalist movements. (See, for example, the discussion of Poland here, p. 60ff). As ethnic outsiders, Jews had no allegiance to the native population and were "willing executioners" of the native peoples.
Solzhenitsyn makes clear the Jewish
role as ethnic outsiders who could be counted on to carry out the war on the
predominantly Slavic Russian peasants:
At the 25th Congress in December 1927, the time had come to address the looming
“peasant question” — what to do with the presumptuous peasantry which had the
temerity to ask for manufactured goods in exchange for their grain. Molotov
delivered the main report on this topic and among the debaters were the
murderers of the peasantry — Schlikhter and Yakovlev-Epstein (250). A massive
war against the peasantry lay ahead and Stalin could not afford to alienate any
of his reliable allies and probably thought that in this campaign against a
disproportionately Slavic population it would be better to rely on Jews than on
Russians. He preserved the Jewish majority in the Gosplan. The commanding
heights of collectivization and its theory included, of course, Larin. Lev
Kritzman was director of the Agrarian Institute from 1928. As Assistant to the
President of the Gosplan in 1931–33
he played a fateful role in the persecution of Kondratev and Chayanov. Yakov
Yakovlev-Epstein took charge of People’s Commissariat of Agriculture in 1929. …
And thus he led the “Great Change,” the imposition of collectivization on
millions of peasants with its zealous implementers on the ground. A contemporary
writer reports: “for the first time ever a significant number of young Jewish
communists arrived in rural communities as commanders and lords over life and
death. Only during collectivization did the characterization of the Jew as the
hated enemy of the peasant take hold — even in those places where Jews had never
been seen before”
Solzhenitsyn acknowledges that Russians could have been found who would have done the same thing. Nevertheless, “Jewish communists participated efficiently and diligently” in collectivization. It was a war against the Russian people — a war that was carried out with "a certain enthusiasm among Jews."
De-Kulakization was not a socio-economic measure, but a measure taken against a
nationality. The strategic blow against the Russian people, who were the main
obstacle to the victory of communism, was conceived of by Lenin, but carried out
after his death. In those years communism with all its cruelty was directed
mostly against Russians. It is amazing that not everything has perished during
those days. Collectivization, more than any other policy of the communists,
gives the lie to the conception of Stalin’s dictatorship as nationalist, i.e.,
“Russian.”
This was not only a war against
Russians. It was a war against the
concept of being a Russian. “The study
of Russian history, archeology, and folklore was suppressed — the Russians could
not have a past. …
Even the word ‘Russian,’ as in
‘I am Russian’ sounded like a counter-revolutionary cry which I well remember
from my childhood. But without hesitation everywhere was heard and printed “Russopyati”
[an
anti-Russian slur]!
Thus a Jewish writer demands the removal of “history’s garbage” from the city
square in Moscow — the removal of statues and other tokens of Russian historical
memory.
Russian patriotism was abolished forever. But the feelings of the people will
not be forgotten. Not how it felt to see the Church of the Redeemer blown up by
the engineer Dzhevalkin and that the main mover behind this was Kaganovich who
wanted to destroy St. Basil’s cathedral as well. Russian Orthodoxy was publicly
harassed by “warrior atheists” led by Gubelman-Yaroslavsky. It is truthfully
noted: “That Jewish communists took part in the destruction of churches was
particularly offensive… No matter how offensive the participation of sons of
Russian peasants in the persecution of the church, the part played by each
non-Russian was even more offensive.”
This makes psychological sense because the actions of an outgroup
member are always seen in a more negative light
— an aspect of evolutionary
psychology.
Despite all this, Jewish intellectuals and activist organizations
have attempted to sanitize the Jewish role in the darkest days of the USSR.
Solzhenitsyn notes that now there is a myth that
under Soviet power Jews were always second class citizens. … It’s very rare to
hear an admission that not only did they take part, but there was a certain
enthusiasm among Jews as they carried out the business of the barbaric young
government. “The mixture of ignorance and arrogance which Hannah calls a typical
characteristic of the Jewish parvenu filled the government, social and cultural
elite. The brazenness and ardor with which all Bolshevik policies were carried
out — whether confiscation of church property or persecution of ‘bourgeois
intellectuals’ gave Bolshevik power in the 20’s a certain Jewish stamp” (263).
In the 90’s another Jewish public intellectual, writing of the 20’s said: “In
university halls Jews often set the tone without noticing that their banquet was
happening against the backdrop of the demise of the main nationality in the
country. … During the 20’s Jews were proud of fellow Jews who had brilliant
careers in the revolution, but did not think much about how that career was
connected to the real suffering of the Russian people… Most striking today is
the unanimity
with which my fellow Jews deny any guilt in the history of 20th century Russia”
A similar comment could be made about the role of Jews in the erection of the current multicultural, anti-White climate in the US, and especially their role in bringing about massive non-White immigration and the erection of the “proposition nation” idea in place of the historical American nation with a sense of White racial and cultural identity. In the USSR Jews actively participated in the destruction of the idea that there was any ethnic or national basis to the USSR and they were eager participants in the destruction of the older culture as well as in the mass murder of millions of ethnic Russians. But Jewish intellectuals deny any special role for Jews in these transformations, and this line is rigorously enforced by Jewish activist organizations.
White
Americans must think long and hard about what this portends in a future America
where Jews are already a major part of the elite and are already active in
promoting alliances with non-White ethnic groups, many of which, like the Jews
themselves, have historical grudges against the traditional people and culture
of America.
Kevin MacDonald
is editor of
The Occidental Observer and a
professor of psychology at California State University–Long Beach.
Permanent URL:
http://www.theoccidentalobserver.net/articles/MacDonald-Solzhenitsyn-200-Years-Together-18.html
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