First published in July 1995 in Chronicles, but still relevant today,

The fact that roving squads of Jewish terrorists—atheistic, hate-filled, and revenge-minded—liquidated millions of people over a period thrice the lifespan of the Third Reich places twentieth-century history in much better perspective. … On November 15 Red troops moved into Sevastopol “led by an armored car marked with a red star insignia and in large red letters, the word “Antichrist,”[61] a flourish highly characteristic of Jewish commissars in the early days of Communist rule.

12,702 words

Introduction

It is well known in some circles that Jews were responsible for a long list of atrocities in the Soviet Union. The sheer magnitude of the enormities committed in that era is staggering. Between 1917 and 1953, millions of Russians suffered arrest, torture and murder, millions more perished in the Gulag, and yet more millions expired in state-engineered famines. Among the people responsible for these horrors were many Jews. Yet the connection between specific perpetrators and specific crimes is often vague.[1] This paper aims to delineate the connection between a certain group of Jews and a particularly notorious massacre: that in Crimea in late 1920. As background, we will take a look at the career of one of the main actors in this tragedy, an acutely fanatical Bolshevik named Rozalia Zemliachka. This woman, an odious hardline communist, had a lengthy revolutionary career. She entered the movement as a young woman in 1896, joined Lenin’s Bolshevik faction, participated in the revolutions of 1905 and 1917, acted as political commissar of armies during the Russian Civil War, and later thrived under Stalin’s regime, which corresponded so well with her own convictions. She garnered the highest of state honors, and died naturally—quite the accomplishment for the era—in 1947. She was buried in Red Square alongside other leading figures of the regime. She carried out the massacre that is the subject of this essay in 1920, at the close of the Russian Civil War, when Lenin sent her to the Crimea, with a group of other high-ranking Jews, to liquidate elements hostile to Communist power. Historians believe that the death toll—in only a few months—amounted to more than 50,000 people. Let us take a look at a vicious group of Communist Jews and the great tragedy they visited upon the people of Crimea.

Rozalia Zemlichka

Early Life. Rozalia Samoilovna Zalkind, who later took the underground name Zemliachka (“fellow countrywoman”), was born in 1876 into a Jewish family.[2] Her father, Samuil Markovich Zalkind, was a wealthy merchant based in Kiev. The family sympathized with the burgeoning Russian revolutionary movement—which was, to a remarkable degree, Jewish[3]—and all the sons and daughters joined revolutionary parties.[4] When Tsar Alexander II fell victim in 1881 to a conspiracy in which a Jewess played a key role,[5] the Zalkind family approved of the murder and may have had some distant connection with the regicides. “Later that year the police searched their house, looking for illegal pamphlets.”[6] As a young girl, Rozalia witnessed the arrest of two of her brothers for revolutionary activity.[7]

Rozalia attended Gymnasium in Kiev, graduating at fifteen. By this time the precocious revolutionary, under the influence of her older brothers, already viewed herself as a populist, but she soon switched to Marxism, delving into the required texts. It is quite likely she made the switch because the Populist movement stressed a connection to Russian culture and the peasants; as a Jew she would have sympathized much more with the internationalist and “scientific” Marxist model. She had also identified the industrial workers as more likely than the peasants to lend themselves to the destruction of the existing order.[8] Like Marx and many other radicals, she proceeded from the imperative of revolution to the plight of the workers, not vice versa.[9]

Rozalia as a young revolutionary, attractive and feminine

Revolutionary Career

Her father sent her to Lyon to study medicine, but by 1896 she was back in Russia; the sources conflict on whether she earned a degree. She committed herself body and soul to the revolutionary movement. In that year she “made her debut as a Marxist. She spoke to a clandestine meeting on “the workers’ movement in western Europe.” Shortly thereafter she was arrested and sent to prison, where she studied Marxism still more diligently. Zemliachka’s career as a Social Democrat had begun.”[10] (The Russian Social Democratic Labor Party later became the Bolshevik Party.) She spent over two years in prison (1899–1901) and emerged a hardened communist, a stance from which she apparently never wavered. She cultivated an implacable persona, and used the pseudonym Tverdokamennaia, “Hard as a rock.” Another underground name she used was “Demon,” which makes one wonder what the soul of this young woman was experiencing.[11]

Before long she came to the attention of Nadezhda Krupskaya, Lenin’s wife, who was helping direct Party operations. Lev Bronshtein, who soon began calling himself “Trotsky,” had forwarded a glowing report on his friend Rozalia, praising her revolutionary temper and energy, although cautioning that she was domineering and lacked tact. Krupskaya (the Lenins were in exile in Western Europe, the Party being illegal in Russia) sent Rozalia to organize the underground Party group in Odessa. Soon,

Zemliachka became a leader in the underground. By March 1903 the Odessa party committee was firmly in the hands of the [pro-Lenin group] and she had been elected their delegate to the upcoming Second Party Congress. . . . Zemliachka proved herself to be commanding, energetic, and hard-working.[12]

Zemliachka’s friend Lev Bronshtein-Trotsky

In mid-1903 Zemliachka attended the fateful Second Congress of the Russian Social Democratic Labor Party (RSDLP) in Brussels. (The founding congress had transpired in 1898 in Minsk, essentially under the auspices of the Jewish Labor Bund, which was by far the largest socialist organization in Russia. Four of that congress’s nine delegates were Jews.) Of the forty-three delegates attending the Second Congress, twenty were Jews.[13] At least until the Belgian police deported her, Zemliachka was able to meet Lenin and Krupskaya and take part in the debates in which she supported Lenin’s decidedly non-Marxist idea to form a small conspiratorial coterie of professional revolutionaries to “lead” the working masses to drink at the correct well: violent revolution. Lenin’s intransigence on the point led to a bitter break with the more orthodox Marxist moderates, who became known as Mensheviks (“the minority”).[14] Lenin seized upon a favorable vote during the debates to proclaim his faction the Bolsheviks, “the majority.” The split between the two groups became permanent, and Zemliachka committed herself fully to Lenin. Others adhering to Lenin were Joseph Stalin, Yakov Sverdlov, and Lev Kamenev (real name Rosenfeld), three men destined for major roles. Trotsky, however, drifted away with the Mensheviks, then struck off on his own (he was notoriously arrogant) until joining forces with Lenin shortly before the Bolshevik Revolution of November 1917.

After the Congress, the Central Committee co-opted her as a member, demonstrating her new prominence. She was one of the most important Bolsheviks working in Russia as an agent of Lenin. She did political work in St. Petersburg and attended meetings of Bolsheviks in Switzerland and London. She asserted herself forcefully in the debates on policy at these meetings, urging stronger measures to build up the Party and speed the revolution, not shying away from speaking sharply to those she disagreed with.[15] Meanwhile, the Revolution of 1905 was mounting steam. After a quarrel with party members in St. Petersburg, Rozalia moved to Moscow and became secretary of the Moscow Party Committee, making her one of the top Bolsheviks in the city. She argued against an uprising because she thought it would fail, but when a strike-cum-revolt began in December, she “fought on the barricades” and deployed armored street cars in the futile struggle against the powerful government forces sent to restore order.[16] (The sources on Zemliachka are frustratingly sparse; even Barbara Evans Clements, who utilized Russian sources, gives us few details: “fought on the barricades” is all we get. A Russian-language article says she fired weapons in the course of the revolt.[17])

In the government crackdown that followed, Zemliachka was arrested and imprisoned in St. Petersburg. She contracted tuberculosis (of which her husband, Schmuel Berlin, had died in 1902) and a heart ailment, and the government granted her a medical release. She then went abroad (1909) until the outbreak of the First World War, staying mostly in Switzerland. Barbara Evans Clements says she avoided any contact with the other émigré revolutionaries (thousands of whom were in Western Europe), but another source says she worked closely with Lenin.[18] She “was profoundly depressed by the outcome of the 1905 uprisings and blamed her comrades, who, in her opinion, had bungled the great opportunities the revolutionary year had offered . . .”[19] She only returned to Russia in 1914, quietly resuming party work in Moscow.

After the February Revolution in 1917 toppled the Tsar she supported Lenin’s radical demands for “all power to the Soviets” and an immediate withdrawal from the war against Germany. At this time virtually all the socialists, including a majority of the Bolsheviks, assumed that the goal was supporting the new democratic Provisional Government and preparing for a Constituent Assembly to form a constitutional republic. This would represent (in Marxist theory) the “bourgeois revolution” that Russia, with its small industrial establishment, needed to develop an advanced capitalist system and pave the way for a Marxist dialectical showdown between the “oppressed workers” and the “capitalists.” This might take decades, however, and Lenin was not prepared to wait; neither were Trotsky and Zemliachka. They could see that the Provisional Government was weak and power was there for the taking. Th preponderant weight they gave Marxist dogma in their writing and rhetoric evaporated when they whiffed the possibility of taking power. “By mid-summer [Rozalia] was calling on the Moscow party committee to gather weapons and organize a militia in preparation for a seizure of power.”[20] Lenin and Trotsky goaded the reluctant Bolsheviks in Petrograd to do the same. As soon as Trotsky seized power in Petrograd that November, the Bolsheviks in Moscow prepared a coup, erecting a Military-Revolutionary Committee (patterned on that of Petrograd) to direct it. The secretary of the Committee was Arkady Rozengolts, and he appears to have played the leading role in the uprising.[21] Zemliachka led the takeover in one of the districts of the city (again, no details). After a few days of fighting, they overcame the small detachments defending the Provisional Government, and the two main cities of Russia fell to the Bolsheviks, largely through Jewish initiative.

Zemliachka in the Revolution  

Zemliachka worked in the Moscow Party Committee for much of 1918. (Lenin had moved the capital from Petrograd to Moscow in March, and so all power coalesced there.) All that year, the Bolshevik regime faced immense problems: civil war was heating up on several fronts, the economy was virtually at a standstill, and there was massive domestic unrest. The populace was hungry and unemployed; they were also angry at being bullied and despoiled by commissars and Jews, and were not afraid of saying so. Incensed workers shouted down Grigory Zinoviev, Jewish boss of Petrograd (real name Radomyslsky), at mass meetings several times.[22] This was not an isolated incident, either. Lenin tried to placate the workers in the same city, but “he was booed off the stage, along with Zinoviev, to cries of “Down with Jews and commissars!”[23] Even units of the Red Army were mutinying, carrying out pogroms, and demanding the removal of Jews from the government.[24] All this contributed to produce a siege mentality among the Bolsheviks, who had, by late summer, already resorted to mass executions and concentration camps. Several assassinations of Bolshevik officials—both Jews—and an attempt on the life of Lenin, would provoke the regime to launch an extended bloodbath, the Red Terror, beginning in September.[25] This Red Terror would bleed into and exacerbate the Civil War that lasted well into 1920.

Zinoviev-Radomyslsky, boss of Petrograd

In this atmosphere, with the Bolshevik regime in grave danger, Zemliachka decided to join the fight to secure the future socialist Elysium. She requested a posting to the front to combat the White Armies taking the field against the Bolsheviks. At the age of forty-two, however, she was not going to lead men into battle. What could a middle-aged female Bolshevik do? Why, she could be a political commissar in the Red Army. That way, she could harangue the soldiers about politics, supervise operations, and boss the officers around. She could also order the execution of anyone opposed to the rule of “Jews and commissars.”

Because they did not trust the peasants and former Tsarist officers that made up their army, the Bolsheviks created a system of political control over military units: political commissars.[26]

They embedded trusted party men in major military units to carry out political indoctrination of the troops and exercise control over the officers. In fact, operations could only proceed with the approval of the commissar, who was equal in status to the commanding officer, and who countersigned all orders. Needless to say, a large number of the commissars were Jews.[27]

Between late 1918 and late 1920, Zemliachka filled the high-profile role of commissar of two armies: the Eighth and the Thirteenth (consecutively), both of which operated on the Southern Front in Ukraine. In this role she headed a “political department” of a dozen or more activists, and had great power over perhaps 80,000 fighting men, virtually equal to the commanding general. She had an opportunity to display her fanaticism and energy in the crucial arena of the Civil War, wearing men’s garb and a leather jacket to display her Bolshevik toughness: “[n]ow in her forties, the only vestige of her bourgeois origins was the pince-nez that she wore in grotesque contrast to her short hair, boots, pants, and leather coat.”[28] She was “[h]ardworking and efficient . . . a demanding commander who issued instructions on everything from speech-writing to personal hygiene.”[29] She was eager to destroy the enemies of Red rule, saying, “We need pitiless, unceasing struggle against the snakes who are hiding in secret . . . We must annihilate them, sweep them out with an iron broom from everywhere.”[30] This echoed the infamous call of Zinoviev, who stated in a public speech in September 1918 that “[w]e must carry along with us 90 million out of the 100 million of Soviet Russia’s population. As for the rest, we have nothing to say to them. They must be annihilated.”[31]

Zemliachka in the Revolution  

Heaven only knows how many men perished under Zemliachka’s orders in those two years, which were the height of the Red Terror and Civil War. Doubtless it was a great many. The terror would reach an apocalyptic phase when the Bolsheviks moved into Crimea in late 1920, after the evacuation of the last White Army. Then the world would see an example of pitiless Jewish blood-lust, exercised against a defenseless population, whose only sin was desiring a life free of Jewish domination.

The Massacre in Crimea

Baron Wrangel and the Evacuation from Crimea. By the fall of 1920, the Bolsheviks had secured their power; the Civil War was essentially over. There was, however, an enclave of White forces under Baron Wrangel holding out in Crimea. Peter Wrangel, scion of a renowned Baltic-German noble family with a history of service in Prussia and Russia, was a towering former Tsarist general, a man of ability and force of character.[32] Wrangel’s small force was not a threat to overthrow the regime in Moscow, but he did intend to hold a territory as a refuge for anti-Bolshevik Russians and as a political model for a future non-Communist Russia. Hundreds of thousands of political refugees, fleeing the Red Terror, gathered in Crimea under his protection. The Bolsheviks, naturally, had no intention of permitting Wrangel to hold any part of Russian soil. When the Civil War wound down and the war with Poland ended, the Reds gathered large forces to clear Crimea.

Peter Wrangel, the Black Baron

General Mikhail Frunze was the commander of the Southern Front tasked with clearing Wrangel’s forces from Crimea. His boss was Trotsky, Commissar of War since March 1918 and creator of the Red Army. A three-man Revolutionary-Military Council directed the operations of the Southern Front: assisting Frunze on the panel were the Jews Bela Kun and Sergei Gusev. (We will take a look at these men below; they were soon to direct the bloodbath that is the subject of this paper.) Frunze gathered over 300,000 men to oppose Wrangel’s 70,000. The Whites were confident because the only entrance to Crimea was the narrow Isthmus of Perekop, which they had heavily fortified. However, weight of numbers decided the issue, and after launching two offensives (October 28 and November 7), the Reds broke into the Crimea.[33] Wrangel had already carefully planned an evacuation, and he directed his army via a fighting withdrawal to various ports, where most of them, along with thousands of civilian refugees, were evacuated, using all available shipping, to Constantinople. “It was brilliant evidence of Wrangel’s ability to control troops and civilians that the evacuation took place with a minimum of panic and disorder.”[34] Almost 150,000 people were able to escape, but unfortunately—tragically—tens of thousands were stranded. Piteous scenes transpired on the docks as their last hope disappeared over the horizon and Red troops approached.

Bela Kun (left), Trotsky (center), Frunze (rear) and Sergei Gusev (right)

The Jewish Terrorists. To understand the role of the Jews who directed the Red Terror in Crimea, we must look at the organs of political and military control the Bolsheviks set up. The supreme body controlling Soviet military affairs was the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic, headed by Trotsky; his deputy was the capable, chain-smoking twenty-seven-year-old Jewish doctor Ephraim Sklyansky. A Bolshevik from 1913, Sklyansky participated in the November coup in Petrograd and caught the eye of Trotsky, under whom he exercised great authority, running affairs at the center while Trotsky was away directing armies during the Civil War. Trotsky and Sklyansky monitored the situation in Crimea closely, as it was the sole arena of combat at that time. Directly subordinate to this Council was the Revolutionary-Military Council (RMC) of the Southern Front, which directed the Red Army in the occupation of Crimea. Sergei Gusev continued to sit on this body, while Bela Kun stepped down to take a more direct role.

Ephraim Sklyansky  

The Bolshevik state erected various temporary regional Revolutionary Committees (distinct from Revolutionary-Military Councils), holding complete power to oversee the transition from war zones to regular civil administration. One was now set up for Crimea.[35] Two Jews sat on this panel: Bela Kun, who was chairman, and Samuel Davydovich Vulfson. This position made Kun the most powerful man in Crimea. Some sources list Zemliachka as a member of the committee, but the more scholarly ones do not; I follow the latter. There were also four non-Jewish members.

There were two other arms of the Communist regime active in Crimea: the Bolshevik Party Committee of the Crimea and various detachments of the Cheka, the dreaded secret police. Noteworthy components of the Cheka were “special departments” assigned to the Red Army at the divisional and army level; these were counter-intelligence units that had wide responsibilities, including suppression of counter-revolution. These detachments would have a large part in the looming massacre. Lenin named Zemliachka Executive Secretary of the newly-erected Party Committee, making her the top Party official in the region, and a number of Jews, including Semyon Dukelsky and Ivan Danishevsky, held important posts in the Crimean Cheka (although it appears that Jews were a minority in the leading positions).

Let us take a look at these men.

Bela Kun (real name Kohn) is the figure that most sources depict as the main driver in this episode, along with Zemliachka. This man had already garnered lasting infamy as the head of the brief Jewish dictatorship over Hungary in 1919, which historians call the “Hungarian Soviet Republic.”[36] Born in 1886 in Transylvania into an assimilated Jewish lower-middle-class family, he joined the Hungarian Social Democratic Party before the age of seventeen and began writing for the socialist press. He studied law but did not earn a degree. In the war he served as a lieutenant in the Austro-Hungarian Army before Russian forces captured him in 1916. When the revolution came, he immediately joined the Bolsheviks (the POWs having been radicalized in the camps by socialist agitators), went to Moscow, met Lenin, and founded the Hungarian Section of the Bolshevik Party. He commanded a Red brigade during the Russian Civil War, before Lenin sent him and 100 “comrades” to Hungary to make a revolution in November 1918. The bacillus of Jewish Communism, having ripened in Russia, now began to erupt outward. In Budapest he founded and led the Hungarian Communist Party, and in March 1919 entered a Social-Democrat-Communist coalition government, which he headed in reality though not in name. As Commissar of Military Affairs, he “pursued an ultra-Leftist line, nationalizing all property, attempting to create collective farms . . . instigating a regime of Red Terror, and invading Slovakia.”[37] This Red Terror claimed about 500 people in just a few weeks. The group responsible was the “Lenin Boys,” commanded by the diminutive Jew Tibor Szamuely. The government quickly lost all domestic support and fell to a Romanian invasion (August 1, 1919). Kun fled and eventually made his way to Russia, where he became political commissar of a division, then joined the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Southern Front, where we met him earlier. Now he would vent his spleen upon helpless Gentiles as Lenin’s man in Crimea—Chairman of the Revolutionary Committee of Crimea. 

Bela Kun-Kohn                                 

Kun could inspire visceral disgust. Angelica Balabanoff, a highly experienced international Jewish revolutionary,

I had heard so much of Kun’s devious personal and political record, that I had been surprised . . . to hear that he had been sent to Hungary to “make a revolution.” The mere fact that the man was said to be a drug addict seemed to me sufficient reason for not trusting him with revolutionary responsibilities. This first meeting with him confirmed my most disagreeable impressions. His very appearance was repulsive.[38]

Victor Serge, another veteran revolutionary who wrote copiously on the movement, wrote that Kun was “a remarkably odious figure. He was the incarnation of intellectual inadequacy, uncertainty of will, and authoritarian corruption.”[39] Serge relates an episode in which, after Kun botched an attempted revolution in Germany in 1921, Lenin excoriated him in a meeting, in his presence, repeatedly referring to him as an “imbecile.”[40] It appears, however, that his talents were sufficient to oversee a massacre.

Samuel Vulfson, born in 1879 in Vilna province, was a chemical engineer. He joined the revolutionary movement around the turn of the century and soon adhered to Lenin’s faction. He worked in the underground Party in Russia for years, organizing and writing, suffering arrest and exile. He retired from revolutionary work for a spell, but the February Revolution galvanized him and he resumed Party work in Moscow, where he would collaborate with Zemliachka. He also worked in Crimea in the first phase of Communist occupation, requisitioning food as regional Commissar of Food and Trade (1919), before the Whites drove out the Bolsheviks. With the fall of Wrangel he returned, working with Kun on the Revolutionary Committee, and with Zemliachka on the Party Committee.[41]

Sergei Gusev, born Yakov Davidovich Drabkin in 1874, was a very prominent Bolshevik. He joined the revolutionary movement in St. Petersburg in 1896, working closely with Lenin. He crossed paths with Zemliachka frequently, beginning with the Second Congress of the RSDLP in 1903, and continuing with political work in St. Petersburg and Moscow. During the Bolshevik seizure of power he was secretary of the original Military-Revolutionary Committee (of Petrograd) that had directed the November coup.[42] His daughter Elizaveta had been secretary to the very important Jew Yakov Sverdlov, who essentially ran the Bolshevik Party (and was titular head of state) until his death in March 1919.[43] The Hungarian historian Georgy Borsanyi gives a favorable opinion of Gusev: “a Bolshevik intellectual who had visited the libraries and museums of Western Europe, spoke several languages, and had his own opinion on theoretical and practical issues of the revolution. He was an instant military leader just like Kun.”[44] Victor Serge, on the other hand, wrote: “I heard Gusev speaking to big Party meetings. Large, slightly bald and well-built, he got at his audience through the degrading hypnotism which is associated with systematic violence. In order to argue in this particularly foul manner one must, first, be sure of having force at one’s elbow, and, secondly, make up one’s mind to stop at nothing . . . Not a single word of his won conviction.”[45] In the summer of 1920 Gusev was appointed to the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Republic alongside Trotsky and Sklyansky, and then joined the Revolutionary-Military Council of the Southern Front, from which post he would play a role in the Crimean tragedy, directing the Red Army in the conquest and occupation of the peninsula.[46]

Semyon Dukelsky, very prominent in the Crimean Cheka the autumn of 1920, was born in 1892 in Kherson Province, southern Ukraine. He studied music and played piano in theaters in various Ukrainian cities. He served in the Tsarist Army in World War One, apparently as a musician, and joined the Bolsheviks after the February Revolution.[47] Superiors assigned him to work in the administration of the Red Army despite a lack of military expertise. Before long, Sklyansky sent him packing, disgusted at his lack of qualifications. He was appointed, some sources say, “head of the Cheka” in Crimea, but the various Cheka units there were not gathered under central administration until the spring of 1921. A more detailed source indicates that he served as head or deputy head of the special department of the Southern Front.[48] This was a powerful position, one that could be construed as the leading post of the secret police in that area. From this position he could oversee the lower-level special departments over the whole of Crimea, although I found no description of his actions during that time.

Ivan Danishevsky was another high-ranking Jewish Chekist. Born in 1897, he joined the Socialist-Revolutionary Party in 1916. When the February Revolution broke out, he threw himself into action, helping create a detachment of Red Guards in Kharkov and fighting in various capacities in the Civil War in Ukraine. He joined the Bolshevik Party and the Cheka (October 1919), filling various roles in the Communist government of Ukraine. In September 1920 he became head of the special department of the Thirteenth Army, which occupied Crimea after the evacuation of White forces. He was thus the leader of one of the major forces carrying out executions, and we do have details on the role he played. He was only twenty-three years old.[49]

Sergei Gusev-Drabkin 

Semyon Dukelsky

Donald Rayfield, author of Stalin and His Hangmen, names two other Jews who were involved in the massacre: Lev Mekhlis, political commissar in the Red Army and friend of Zemliachka, and the sixteen-year-old Chekist Alexander Radzivilovski (given name Israel), who was born in the capital of Crimea, Simferopol, in 1904. Rayfield does not detail the actions of these men, saying simply that Radzivilovski began his career there, and that Mekhlis “helped Rozalia Zemliachka murder captured White officers in the Crimea.”[50]

Lev Zakharovich Mekhlis was born in Odessa in 1889, and worked as a teacher and clerk as a young man. After a spasm of anti-Jewish violence in Odessa in October 1905, he joined a Jewish self-defense unit, and then the revolutionary Zionist party Poale Zion. He was conscripted into the Tsarist Army and served in World War One. After the Revolution he deserted the Army, joined the Bolsheviks, and became a political commissar in the Red Army—nice work if you can get it—in which role he worked in Crimea under Kun.[51]

A sidenote: Donald Rayfield states that Zemliachka was Kun’s “consort” at this time, without giving a source.[52] Kun had married a Hungarian woman, Iren Gal, in 1913 and had two children, the second of which was born in early 1920.[53] However, after he fled from Hungary upon the collapse of his “Soviet Republic,” he was separated from his family, which only rejoined him in Russia in the autumn of 1921.[54] Zemliachka’s first husband, Shmuel Berlin, had died in 1902, and some sources say that she married again, to a certain Samoilov, but I have found no further reference to this man. No further comment seems appropriate here.

Other Jews played a role in these events—many of them lost to history, or hidden in archives—but a few have come into view: Moisey Lisovsky, N. Margolin, and Israel Dagin. We have some information about the actions of Lisovsky and Margolin, but not for Dagin. For Mekhlis, Radzivilovski, and Dagin, I found nothing more than statements that they were “involved.” Of two others, Dukelsky and Vulfson, we know the posts they held but have no details of their actions. Here is a list of the Jews who played some role, in rough order of importance:

Trotsky: Commissar of War, head of all armed forces
Sklyansky: Trotsky’s powerful deputy
Gusev: member RMC Southern Front, overseer of Red Army in Crimea
Kun: Chairman Revolutionary Committee of Crimea, top official in the region
Vulfson: member Revolutionary Committee of Crimea and Party Committee
Zemliachka: head of Bolshevik Party Committee in Crimea
Dukelsky: major figure in the Cheka
Danishevsky: major figure in the Cheka, killed thousands
Mekhlis: political commissar; specific actions unknown
Lisovsky: political commissar 9^th Rifle Division; organized executions
Dagin: Cheka officer; specific actions unknown
Radzivilovski: Cheka officer; specific actions unknown
Margolin: commissar, threatened Whites with “merciless sword of the Red Terror”

This group of Jews is noteworthy for loathsome personalities and a special aura of brutality. Descriptions applied to them by historians or acquaintances include “atrocious,” “odious,” “vicious scorpion,” “legendary for cruelty,” “sadist,” “arrogant,” “cretin,” and “monster.” And this group was just one of dozens—perhaps hundreds—of similar gangs (mixed personnel with Jewish leadership or a powerful Jewish contingent) operating all over Communist Russia for more than three decades. The fact that roving squads of Jewish terrorists—atheistic, hate-filled, and revenge-minded—liquidated millions of people over a period thrice the lifespan of the Third Reich places twentieth-century history in much better perspective.

Israel Radzivilovski as older Chekist    

    Lev Mekhlis, Zionist turned Stalinist hatchet-man

Jewish Treachery: A Fake Amnesty. Before Wrangel had completed his evacuation, Sklyansky played a dirty trick upon the White officers, offering them a false amnesty in order to capture and kill as many as possible. He used the prestige of General Alexei Brusilov as bait. Brusilov, one of Russia’s best generals of World War One, had come over to the Bolsheviks (hoping to outlast Lenin’s shaky regime and keep the empire intact). Brusilov

had been approached by [Sklyansky] . . . who claimed that a large number of Wrangel’s officers did not want to leave Russia and might be persuaded to defect to the Reds if Brusilov put his name to a declaration offering them an amnesty. Sklyansky offered him the command of a new Crimean Army formed from the remnants of Wrangel’s forces. Brusilov was attracted by the idea of a purely Russian army made up of patriotic officers. It would enable him to . . . save the lives of many officers. He agreed . . . Three days later he was told the plans had been cancelled: Wrangel’s officers, Sklyansky told him, had not proved willing to defect after all. Brusilov later found out that this was not true. During the final evacuation at Sevastopol the Reds had distributed . . . thousands of leaflets offering an amnesty in Brusilov’s name. Hundreds of officers had believed it and stayed behind to surrender to the Reds. All of them were shot.[55]

Soon after this, Sklyansky sent a telegram to the Bolsheviks in Crimea, urging them to get on with the killing: “Let the struggle continue until not a single White officer remains alive on Crimean soil.”[56] For his part, Trotsky let Kun and Zemliachka know that he would not visit Crimea as long as there was a single “counterrevolutionary” left on its soil.[57] Lenin also made his views known: “It is necessary to make short shrift of them . . . mercilessly.”[58] Kun and Zemliachka could not mistake what Lenin and Trotsky expected of them.

The Massacre Begins. By November 17, 1920 the Bolshevik occupation of Crimea was complete. The peninsula, about the size of Massachusetts, historically had a very mixed population; besides Russians and Ukrainians, there were Turkic Tatars (Muslims), Germans, Greeks, and Armenians. The population at that time was about 800,000, a number swollen by large numbers of political refugees. Roughly 50,000 White officers and troops remained behind after Wrangel’s evacuation; so did well over 200,000 political refugees. Bela Kun sealed off the peninsula and the entire population was at his mercy. Hardline Bolshevik cadres and Cheka forces poured in, ready to apply the Red Terror to a populace they feared and loathed.

Peninsula of Crimea

The first city the Red Army entered was Simferopol, the capital (November 12). For several days soldiers rampaged, looting, raping, and shooting. Within a week, Red Army and Cheka units executed 1,800 people, and within a few months, the number exceeded 10,000 in the city and surrounding area.[59] They repeatedly drove batches of several hundred White officers and leading citizens out of town, forced them to dig large graves, and mowed them down. They shot many others and dumped them into ravines. General Danilov, a former Tsarist officer who served with the Red Fourth Army, reported that the

outskirts of the city of Simferopol were full of the stench from the decomposing corpses . . . which were not even buried . . . The pits behind the Vorontsov Garden and in the Krymtaev estate . . . were full of the corpses of the shot, lightly sprinkled with earth . . . The total number of those shot in Simferopol alone from the day the Reds entered the Crimea until April 1, 1921, reached 20,000 . . .[60]

On November 15 Red troops moved into Sevastopol “led by an armored car marked with a red star insignia and in large red letters, the word “Antichrist,”[61] a flourish highly characteristic of Jewish commissars in the early days of Communist rule. The “remnants of the Russian refugees that got stuck in Crimea stood on the shores in the cold wind . . . when the Red cavalrymen appeared at the jetties. When these barefoot Red soldiers in rags met with this people, they could still feel in their nerves . . . the rattle of the machine-guns. . . . The troops . . . felt they deserved some reward. It was obvious what this reward would be.”[62] The author does not describe what this “reward” was, but we can assume it was the usual soldierly fare. Rape “took on gigantic proportions, particularly in the . . . Cossack regions of the Crimea in 1920.”[63]

The rapes, however, faded from memory because of the massive scale and horrific manner of the executions that soon began. Sergey Melgunov, a meticulous contemporary chronicler, says that 8,000 perished in Sevastopol in just the first week, and that the Reds arbitrarily hanged people on a mass scale: “Nakhimovsky Prospekt became simply festooned with corpses of officers and private soldiers and civilians who, arrested then and there in the street, had been executed on the spot of arrest . . . with no previous trial.” (testimony of a witness).[64] The Reds hung victims not just on Nakhimovsky Prospekt, but all over the city, on lanterns, poles, trees, and statues. The city became a hellscape with the citizens cowering in cellars and basements, afraid to appear in public.[65]

Communists took hundreds of sick and wounded—not only White officers—from hospitals and shot them. They did the same to the nurses and doctors because they had provided care to the White soldiers; the names of seventeen Red Cross nurses appear on one death-list published by the Bolsheviks. Hundreds of stevedores were shot because they had helped embark Wrangel’s men. Melgunov estimates that the Reds executed over 20,000 people in the Sevastopol area.[66] In late November the Red authorities in Sevastopol published two lists of victims (an occasional practice of the Cheka). Such lists were never complete, but these totaled 2,836 names. Disturbingly, 366 of the names were female.[67]

At Feodosia thousands of White soldiers surrendered in expectation of leniency:

After being disarmed, many White soldiers offered to join the Red Army, but instead, soldiers of the Red Army 9th Rifle Division, under the direction of [Nikolai] Bistrih’s Chekists, executed 420 wounded White soldiers and put the rest in two concentration camps. As it turned out, this was just the opening act in a five-month terror campaign.[68]

The political commissar of this 9^th Rifle Division was the Jew Moisey Lisovsky. He participated in the action just related, ordering the shooting of about a hundred wounded White soldiers at the railroad station on the night of November 16.[69] Heaven only knows how many others he had shot in the following months, but we have hints. We do know that thousands more perished in this city:

At first the corpses were disposed of by dumping them into the ancient Genoese wells; but in time even these wells became filled up, and the condemned had to be marched out into the country during the daytime . . . and there made to dig huge graves before daylight should fail, and then be locked into sheds for an hour or two, and, with the fall of dusk, stripped except for the little crosses around their necks, and shot. And as they were shot they fell forward in layers. And as they fell forward their own layer of quivering bodies speedily became covered with the following layer and so on until the graves lay filled to the margin.[70]

Many of these people would not have been killed by the gunfire, and faced an agonizing death after being buried alive amidst bloody corpses.

In Feodosia we also find the high-ranking Jewish Chekist Ivan Danishevsky. He headed the special department of 13^th Army, working in Feodosia and in nearby Kerch with youthful, demonic energy. In December alone he sentenced 609 people to death in Kerch, and 527 people in Feodosia. Extant documents make clear that he was responsible for the deaths of over 2,000 people. On November 27, he reported that “273 White Guards were detained and sentenced in a day, including: 5 generals, 51 colonels, 10 lieutenant colonels, 17 captains, 23 staff captains, 43 lieutenants, 84 second lieutenants, 24 officials, 12 police officers, 4 bailiffs.”[71] In a day.

In Kerch (and elsewhere) the Communists loaded people onto barges, drove them into the sea, and sank them. Some accuse Zemliachka of wanting to save the cost of bullets. This was a “technique” from the French Revolution that the Cheka had previously used, for example, by the demented Cheka Jewess Rebecca Plastinina-Maizel in the far north.[72] (She later sat on the Supreme Court of the Soviet Union.)[73]

The head of the Cheka in Kerch was a certain Joseph Kaminsky, of whom I have no further information; the name Kaminsky was common among both Russians and Jews. Some of the other executioners in Feodosia/Kerch include Zotov, N. Dobrodnitsky, Vronsky, Ostrovsky, and I. Shmelev, some of whom may well have been Jewish.[74]

Registration of the Populace

Within a few days, Kun issued an order for Crimean residents to register with the authorities. All adults were ordered, on pain of death, to

present themselves to the local Cheka to fill in a questionnaire containing some fifty questions about their social origins, past actions, income, and other matters, especially their . . . their opinions about . . .  Wrangel, and the Bolsheviks. On the basis of these inquiries, the population was divided into three groups: those to be shot, those to be sent to concentration camps, and those to be saved.[75]

The principle of action here was that already pronounced by Martin Latsis, a member of the ruling body of the Cheka (the Collegium), in November 1918:

We are out to destroy the bourgeoisie as a class. Hence, whenever a bourgeois is under examination the first step should be, not . . . to discover material of proof . . . but to put to the witness the three questions: “To what class does the accused belong?” “What is his origin?” and “Describe his upbringing, education, and profession.” Solely in accordance with the answers to these three questions should his fate be decided. For this is what “Red Terror” means.[76]

The results of this registration can be gauged in Feodosia, where “soldiers from the 9^th Rifle Division arrested 1,100 people who registered, of whom 1,006 were shot, 79 imprisoned, and only 15 released.”[77] Moisey Lisovsky, the political commissar of this division, certainly played a part in this particular massacre. In Kerch, Cheka patrols cordoned off the town during the registration, marked out 800 persons, and shot them. Townspeople thought the number was much higher than that.[78] In Sevastopol the Cheka turned a city block into a temporary guarded camp and filtered all the registrants through it; hundreds or thousands were taken outside the city, forced to dig mass graves, and shot.[79] In all the main cities of Crimea the Reds carried out mass shootings as a result of this registration. It later came to light that all these shootings were the result of a direct order countersigned by Kun and Zemliachka.[80]

Zemliachka the Demon. The Russian writer Ivan Shmelev, who lived through these events—the Communists shot his son, a White lieutenant—and penned the wrenching novel The Sun of the Dead about them, gave testimony about Zemliachka (with impressionistic touches) before a Lausanne court in 1923:

She rushed from village to village, with a sickly pale face, a lipless mouth, faded eyes; In a leather jacket . . . small in stature, with a huge Mauser. . . . It was her finest hour. Here Zemlyachka-Zalkind managed to surpass everyone. . . . “Shoot, shoot, shoot …” she repeated incessantly, receiving satisfaction of a long-accumulated passion for murder. . . . Rozalia Samuilovna showed herself in the Crimea as the most loyal dog of her master Lenin. She did all this not counting on [reward] – she had enough meat and blood – the process itself was dear to her. She organized such a brutal epic in the Crimea that “the mountains were drenched in blood, and the Black Sea near the coast became red.”[81]

This portrait of “the Demon” finds resonance from a top Bolshevik official sent to Crimea in the spring of 1921 to investigate conditions there. Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev, a Muslim Communist Party official, said about Zemliachka:

Comrade Samoylova (Zemlyachka) was an extremely nervous and sick woman, who denied any system of persuasion in her work. . . . Unnecessary nervousness, too high a tone in conversation with almost all comrades, extreme demands . . . undeserved repressions against everyone who had at least a little courage to “dare to have their own judgment.” . . . When Comrade Samoylova was in the Crimea, literally all the workers trembled before her, not daring to disobey even the most stupid or erroneous orders.[82]

I have refrained from retelling the more lurid descriptions of Zemliachka because they lack solid sources, but these two accounts give an indication of her homicidal madness. Some writers say that she manned machine guns, tortured captives, and fell into fits. Perhaps she did. A modern Russian-Jewish writer (Arkady Vaksberg) who knows a great deal about these Communist Jews calls her “a sadist and a monster,” without details, unfortunately.[83] We can only await deeper work in the Soviet archives.

The Massacre Proceeds. Meanwhile, on December 5 a certain N. Margolin published an article in the paper Krasny Krim (“Red Crimea”):

With the merciless sword of the Red Terror we shall go through the whole of the Crimea and purge it of all the executioners, exploiters and tormentors of the working class. But we will be smarter and will not repeat the mistakes of the past! We were too generous after the October revolution. We, having learned from bitter experience, will not be generous now.[84]

He calls the victims of this great massacre “executioners”! Was this the same “N. Margolin” that Solzhenitsyn describes as a ruthless Jewish commissar, a requisitioner of grain, “famous for whipping the peasants who failed to provide grain. (And he murdered them too.)”?[85] I believe it was.

The killing in Crimea ran all the way into the following spring. In addition, tens of thousands of people were interned in makeshift concentration camps before being sent out of Crimea to bigger camps. 50,000 Muslim Tatars were sent to Turkey or to camps in Russia. There are later reports that 37,000 men from Wrangel’s army were languishing in terrible conditions in camps in the Kharkov area.[86] Unfortunately, given the conditions in Russian camps, many of those men certainly died. When the local Cheka sent a missive to Lenin asking what could be done to improve the conditions there, he did nothing, merely noting on the paper, “to the archive.”[87]

Recall of Kun and Zemliachka. After a month of bloodletting, tensions among the killers rose to a breaking point. Some officials became discontented, believed the purge was spiraling out of control, with the murder detachments running amok, thieving, keeping harems, killing for personal reasons. These officials also chafed under the fanatical intensity of Zemliachka and Kun, who were liquidating the entire Crimean middle class, including experts the Bolsheviks needed to help run the area after they established order. One of the non-Jewish members of the Revolutionary Committee, Yuri Gaven, wrote a letter to a friend on the Central Committee in Moscow (December 14), saying that Kun had turned into a “genius of mass terror” and needed to be confined in a mental hospital. Gaven protested that he, too, was for mass terror, but too many useful people were being killed.[88] That same day Zemliachka wrote a long letter to Moscow, complaining about the “softness” and worthlessness of local cadres, saying she was forced to do all the work.[89] (She had been writing very similar letters to Lenin since 1904.[90]) She demanded the recall to Moscow of a number of local officials, not one of them a Jew (including Lenin’s younger brother, Dmitry Ulyanov, who sat on the Crimean Party Committee). There is a possible ethnic component to this controversy, with some of the non-Jews advocating a moderation of the terror, and the Jews supporting maximum terror. In the event, Moscow replied by recalling Zemliachka and Kun, in early January 1921. They had been in Crimea only seven weeks.

Zemliachka and Kun were thus not responsible for all the 50,000 deaths, since some of these killings occurred after their recall. However, the sources do seem to indicate that the bulk of the deaths did occur while they were in the Crimea.

There is no evidence that Lenin reprimanded the two homicidal maniacs, or that they fell into disgrace. They quickly found employment elsewhere, Zemliachka in the Party Committee in Moscow and Kun in the presidium of the Comintern. Zemliachka was awarded the Red Banner for exemplary “service” in the Civil War.[91]

Of interest is the account of the Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, published in New York in the 1940s, of Zemliachka’s activities during the Russian Civil War. Zemliachka, it said, “made herself useful at the front.” [Emphasis added] A nice piece of Jewish historiography.

The Aftermath

After arriving in Constantinople, Baron Wrangel struggled to keep order and unity among the White Russian exiles. In 1924 he established the All-Russian Military Union for that purpose, and to keep alive the possibility of overthrowing Communist rule in Russia. In 1927 he moved his family to Brussels, living in near-poverty. He wrote his memoirs, Always with Honor, which was published after his death. He died unexpectedly in April 1928, leading many to suspect he was poisoned by Bolshevik agents, who later kidnaped and killed the two men who succeeded him at the head of the All-Russian Military Union, Generals Kutepov and Miller.[92] Wrangel’s remains lie in the Church of the Holy Trinity in Belgrade.

In Crimea. Although the Communist authorities tightened up their organization and discipline, they continued killing into the spring. More Jews came in; Alexander Rotenberg took command of the consolidated Crimean Cheka in September 1921.[93] At that point, however, famine, often a concomitant of Bolshevik rule, was already beginning. The above-mentioned Mirsaid Sultan-Galiev reported to the Central Committee in April 1921:

The food situation is getting worse every day. The entire Southern district, inhabited mainly by the Tatar population, is literally starving at this time. Bread is given only to Soviet employees, and the rest of the population . . . receives nothing. Cases of starvation are observed in Tatar villages. . . . At the regional conference . . . Tatar delegates indicated that Tatar children are “dying like flies.”[94]

The overall situation in Crimea was terrible, but the main factor in the development of the famine, which killed about 100,000 people, was Bolshevik misrule, particularly food requisitioning and confiscation of landed estates to form (inefficient) state farms. By March 1922 the Crimean Cheka was reporting that cannibalism “is becoming common.” Meanwhile children were disappearing, and “in Karasubazar in April 1922, a warehouse with 17 salted corpses, mostly children, was discovered.”[95] Only in 1923 did a measure of normality return to Crimea, as much as was reasonably possible under Communist rule.

The Red takeover of Crimea was a horrific bloodbath that put the entire population of Crimea into a state of shock and horror, with a deep hatred of Bolshevik rule. Much of the population went over to the Germans in the Second World War, sparking further repression and waves of deportation when Stalin’s forces retook the area in the spring of 1944.

Here we must leave this unfortunate people and look at the later history of the butchers who had soaked their land in blood.

Later Lives of the Murderers. Of the figures introduced here, I found no further information about Lisovsky and Margolin.[96] Presumably they went on to careers as low-level apparatchiks, perhaps earning a bullet in the nape of the neck in the Great Terror.

Alexander-Israel Radzivilovski, the teenage killer, had a long career in the Cheka/NKVD, rising to the rank of Senior Major of State Security (a rank equivalent to army general) and deputy head of the Moscow NKVD, 1935-37. In 1936 he became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, ostensibly the highest body of the Soviet Government. He won the Order of Lenin in 1937 shortly before accompanying Lazar Kaganovich to Ivanovo, where they applied the Great Terror to the Communist leadership of that province, an event remembered as “the black tornado.”[97] (Here at least Communists were the victims.) He was arrested in September 1938, accused of being a Polish spy, and shot in January 1940.[98]

Israel Dagin, another Cheka officer active in Crimea, also had a long career in the punitive organs. He rose to even higher rank than Radzivilovski, Commissar of State Security Grade 3, equivalent to corps commander. He worked in many different cities, arresting, purging, killing—the constant routine for Cheka officers. In 1937, at the height of the Great Terror,

Dagin and his men were . . . to supervise one of the most notorious of the mass terror operations. On 28 July 1937 E. G. Evdokimov assembled the local Party leaderships [in the Caucasus] and gave instructions for the long-projected mass purge. Dagin, in close co-operation, carried out the police operation proper. . . . Dagin had long since elaborated a plan, with lists of names in every locality.[99]

In just the first small region of this large operation, Chechen-Ingush, “5,000 prisoners were crammed into the N.K.V.D. prisons in Grozny, 5,000 in the main garage of the Grozny Oil Trust, and thousands of others into various . . . buildings. [Altogether] about 14,000 were arrested, amounting to about 3 per cent of the population.”[100] All these people were either shot or sent to camps. Same perpetrators, different victims, more individual tragedies. Dagin won the highest state decorations, but was also arrested, in November 1938, and shot a few days before Radzivilovski.[101]

Lev Mekhlis went on to have a long career under Stalin as his personal secretary, editor of Pravda, deputy of the Supreme Soviet, and member of the Central Committee. (The Central Committee was the ruling body of the Communist Party; the Politburo, Orgburo and Secretariat were technically subdepartments within it.) He directed various purges at Stalin’s behest, inspiring terror especially in officers. In 1937 Stalin made him head of the Main Political Directorate of the Army (making him political commissar over the entire army), in which role he helped carry out the notorious purge of the Red Army. He “was able to find “enemies” everywhere and played a special role in the political repressions of that period.”[102] In the Second World War, Mekhlis “raced thousands of miles across the fronts, killing as many Red Army generals as the Germans. His cruelty was legendary . . .”[103] In September 1940 he crossed paths with his friend Zemliachka again, succeeding her as Minister of State Control, a watchdog body placed over the Party and government bureaus. Mekhlis can be summed up by the fact that he could serve Joseph Stalin loyally and also be chummy with the likes of Rozalia Zemliachka, two of the most evil people of the twentieth century. Mekhlis retired in 1950, holding the highest honors, and died of natural causes in February 1953, less than a month before the death of Stalin.

Ivan Danishevsky, the youthful Cheka executioner, was awarded a gold watch after his “work” in Crimea. Within months he was sent to the Caucasus on a similar assignment, liquidating people of intelligence and worth—the natural enemies of Bolshevik rule—in a region newly conquered by Red forces. Before the end of 1921 the Party moved him to civilian work, in trade and finance. By the 1930s he was an engineer working on aircraft engines, and head of a major engine plant (the Soviet industrial plants were massive). During the Great Terror, he narrowly escaped arrest, denounced many others, and was finally arrested in August 1938. Tortured, he confessed to bogus charges and was sentenced to death, but was unaccountably spared and sent to the gold mines in Kolyma, where he survived until 1955, when he was freed and allowed to return to Moscow. He wrote a number of books on Soviet history and worked energetically to defend pure Communist doctrine to the very end of his life.[104] He died in 1979.

As for Semyon Dukelsky, the musician and Cheka killer, he soon left Crimea to take command of the Cheka in Odessa, replacing the Jew Max Deich, who had earned a “reputation for cruelty and drug addiction” and had to be recalled.[105] He worked in various Cheka and governmental positions until 1938—several times being transferred or reprimanded because of incompetence—when the Politburo put him in charge of the Cinematography Department of the Central Committee; his predecessor, the Jew Boris Shumiatsky, was shot. People who worked under him have left their memories of his management style: stiff, eccentric, doctrinaire, arrogant. Conforming to the pattern of his career, he was there only a year. From 1939 to February 1942 he was Commissar of the Navy (or merchant marine; the sources are unclear); then, until his retirement in 1952, he was Deputy Commissar/Minister of Justice. He began to issue denunciations of other officials, which soon became more and more implausible, so much so that he was confined to a psychiatric hospital. He died in 1960.[106]

Samuel Vulfson, collaborator with Kun on the Revolutionary Committee of Crimea, returned to Moscow in 1921. He sat on the Moscow Party Committee (with Zemliachka) and, after 1924, he worked in the Commissariat of Foreign Trade and as a trade representative in Western Europe. In 1929 his tuberculosis worsened and he went abroad, dying in Berlin in 1932.[107]

Sergei Gusev-Drabkin continued working in the political administration of the Red Army, for a time as head of the department, before Trotsky got him removed—Gusev was Stalin’s man. Gusev then worked in the Party, as candidate member of the Central Committee and secretary of the Central Control Commission (1923), which was a disciplinary body placed over the Party and government. In the mid-1920s Stalin sent him to work in the Comintern, in which role he visited the United States to arbitrate a dispute in the U.S. Communist Party, under the name “P. Green.” Gusev entered the controversy over literature in Russia, arguing (with Zemliachka and other hardliners) that writers must propagate pure Communist doctrine at the expense of literary freedom. In a speech at the Fourteenth Party Congress in December 1925 he said, “Lenin used to teach us that every Party member should be a Cheka agent—that is, that he should watch and inform,” and concluded that “[i]f we suffer from one thing, it is that we do not do enough informing.”[108] Chilling. The main advocate of the opposing viewpoint, the writer Alexander Voronsky, fell out of favor and was shot in 1937. Gusev continued working in high positions in the Comintern until his death in 1933.[109]

Ephraim Sklyansky, Trotsky’s young assistant who lured thousands of White officers into captivity and death, did not live long. In April 1924 he lost his position in the Revolutionary-Military Council because of the hostility of Stalin, whom he had strongly criticized in the Civil War. He moved to the economic sphere, heading a textile trust. In 1925 he toured Europe and America to gather information on industrial production, but drowned in a suspicious boating accident. Arkady Vaksberg, among others, blames Stalin:

Sklyansky was drowned in a lake during a business trip to the United States along with the director of Amtorg (the Soviet-American trading corporation), Isaiah Khurgin. . . . The murder of two Jews whom Stalin hated had been organized by two other Jews, Kanner and Yagoda.[110]

Grigory Kanner was one of Stalin’s secretaries; Genrikh Yagoda was at this time de facto head of the OGPU, successor to the Cheka. Another historian notes that Kanner “had been in charge of [Stalin’s] dirty tricks against Trotsky and others,”[111] but there is no hard evidence of Stalin’s guilt; it was an accusation first made by Boris Bazhanov, Stalin’s erstwhile secretary. Whatever the case may be, we return to our two remaining killers, the two ringleaders.

Bela Kun, who was essentially dictator of Crimea during the massacre, went from Crimea directly to the Presidium of the Comintern (which was headed by Grigory Zinoviev until late 1926). Lenin then sent him, as Comintern agent, to Germany, along with another Jewish Hungarian Communist, Joseph Pogany (real name Schwarz), to direct the revolutionary takeover of Germany. Expectations were high; Lenin had always viewed the success of the revolution in Russia being dependent upon Germany joining the world revolution. Imagine that terrifying prospect—Communist Russia joined with a Communist Germany! The result was the March Action, a very badly-planned uprising that quickly met defeat. Kun was roundly criticized and sent to the Urals to work in a local Party committee, though without losing his place in the Comintern. In the 1920s he worked undercover as Comintern operative in Germany, Austria, and Czechoslovakia, until an arrest in Vienna in 1928, after which he remained in the Soviet Union, still heading the Hungarian Communist Party in exile. He continued working in the upper echelons of the Comintern into the mid-1930s.[112] In June 1937, his turn came for denunciation and arrest. His NKVD torturers, quite possibly Jewish thugs, beat him and forced him to stand on one foot for up to twenty hours; when “he returned to his cell after interrogation, his legs were swollen and his face was so black as to be unrecognizable.”[113] He was shot in August 1938, along with practically the entire contingent of Hungarian Communist emigres. After World War Two Communist rule was reestablished in Hungary under the repulsive Matyas Rakosi (who served in Kun’s Hungarian government in 1919), and again it was heavily Jewish.

We finally return to Rozalia Zemliachka. Forty-four years old in 1920, she lived another twenty-seven years, serving in many different capacities in the Soviet state. She was a natural Stalinist, and avoided arrest—indeed, she did the purging. She “had always been the sort of Bolshevik to whom Stalin appealed because she shared his Manichean view of the world as a place of deadly struggle between allies and enemies.”[114]

After “making herself useful” in Crimea, she returned to Moscow in January 1921, working as secretary of one of the district Party Committees. In the succeeding years she worked in the Urals and the northern Caucasus, “responsible for training subordinates, supervising the production of pamphlets, and holding lectures and classes among factory workers.”[115] She carried out this work largely on behalf of Stalin, supporting him against the opposition, whether Trotsky or Kamenev and Zinoviev. In 1926 Stalin made her a member of the board of the Central Control Commission, which meant that “she had achieved the rank of senior enforcer of party discipline. It was a role she would continue to play for the rest of her career.”[116] In this role she worked with the NKVD:

There is no question that Zemliachka worked closely with the NKVD. Her jobs required that she turn over reports of infractions to them. Moreover, it is likely that she was their willing ally. . . . A believer in the plots alleged to be menacing the party, Zemliachka became an adroit participant in destroying them. She also managed to protect herself from the Purges that swept through the ranks of the NKVD itself. . . . Instead of falling victim, Zemliachka won promotions. In September 1936 she was awarded the highest Soviet civilian decoration, the Order of Lenin.[117]

In 1937 she became a deputy of the Supreme Soviet, and two years later, member of the Central Committee. That same year she became Deputy Chairman of the Control Commission and Deputy Chairman of the Council of People’s Commissars (a post analogous to deputy prime minister). She was very near the pinnacle of power. She spent the war years in Moscow, writing polemical reminiscences of Lenin and carrying out various minor tasks. She retired in 1943 and died at the age of seventy in January 1947.

The Russia that existed in the year of her birth had been transformed utterly in the course of her lifetime. From a fruitful land of general peace and order and development, governed to a significant degree by the tiny German community,[118] Russia had been turned into a land of turmoil, fear, murder, denunciation, and concentration camps, governed to a large degree by its Jewish minority. Zemliachka serves as a great symbol of that transformation, embodying the power of Jewish hatred and perverted zeal.

The older Zemliachka

Zemliachka presiding at a purge trial

Summary

The question arises, how many more people did these Jews kill after Crimea? Most or all of them continued in their chosen profession—Communist terrorist—and they operated for many years in a system whose very basis was terror. It would be very difficult to obtain a realistic estimate of the number, but without doubt it is very large. The only mitigating factor is that their later victims included many Communists.

To properly appraise the Crimean tragedy, we must get an idea of the numbers involved. Estimates range from 12,000 to 120,000, but many researchers think the true number was 50,000—60,000, including modern Russian writers with access to at least some of the archives.[119] Crimea thus suffered 50,000 dead in the Kun-Zemliachka massacre, perhaps 20,000 dead in camps, and 100,000 dead in the famine, in the span of only eighteen months, and in a very small area. This pattern repeated itself literally everywhere the Bolsheviks ruled, and it continued from 1917 into the mid-1950s, with only periodic and brief lulls. Communist rule in Russia was a colossal, interminable tragedy, perpetrated by a criminal, deranged, largely Jewish clique, informed by ideology that was nothing less than satanic in its effects. It is highly disturbing to think that similar savage potentialities—driven by similar people—seethe in the midst of our society today, constantly threatening to erupt into a similar awful maelstrom, as is happening to the Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank.

[1] For instance, many assert that “the Jews” were responsible for the Holodomor, or the Katyn massacre of Polish officers. I do not doubt that Jews were involved in these episodes—respectively, Lazar Kaganovich and Leonid Raikhman, of course—but documentation is scarce, beyond the major figures. One example of a well-documented Jewish massacre is the murder of the Tsar and his family—the perpetrators being Sverdlov, Goloshchekin, Yurovsky, etc.

[2] The family was certainly Jewish; the sources are unanimous

[3] A perusal of Erich Haberer’s Jews and Revolution in Nineteenth Century Russia (Cambridge University Press, 2004) will amply demonstrate the fact

[4] Barbara Evans Clements, Bolshevik Women (Cambridge University Press, 1997), 37.

[5] Namely, Hesia Helfman. See Haberer, Jews and Revolution, 198-99.

[6] Clements, Bolshevik Women, 23-24. It is Clements’ speculation that the family may have had some tie to the assassins.

[7] Kazimiera Janina Cottam, Women in War and Resistance: Selected Biographies of Soviet Women Soldiers (Nepean, Canada: New Military Publishing, 1998), 426.

[8] Clements, 24

[9] Arthur Rosenberg, the German Marxist historian, says “Marx did not proceed from the misery of the workers to the necessity of revolution, but from the necessity of revolution to the misery of the workers.” The History of Bolshevism (Oxford University Press, 1934), 24. Among the radicals of the American New Left, this was an open secret, taking form in the slogan, “the issue is not the issue.”

[10] Clements, 24.

[11] Rozalia’s new idol Karl Marx also delved into demonic imagery and themes. When he was just eighteen his troubled father asked him in a letter, “That heart of yours son, what’s troubling it? Is it governed by a demon?” See Paul Kengor, The Devil and Karl Marx (Tan Books, 2020), chapters 2-4

[12] Clements, 76

[13] Arno Lustiger, Stalin and the Jews: The Red Book (Enigma Books, 2003), 17. At least one other delegate had some Jewish blood: his maternal grandfather was named Israel Moses Blank. I speak of Lenin, of course.

[14] The top leaders of the Mensheviks were Jews: Julius Martov (real name Tsederbaum), Fedor Dan (real name Gurvich), and Pavel Axelrod. Wikipedia lists eight founders/most important members of the Menshevik faction, and five were Jews. The others were Trotsky and Alexander Martinov (real name Pikker).

[15] Clements, 77-78.

[16] Barricades: Clements, 79. Armored street cars: Richard Stites, The Women’s Liberation Movement in Russia: Feminism, Nihilism, and Bolshevism, 1860-1930 (Princeton University Press, 1991), 275.

[17] Pyotr Romanov, Демон по имени Розалия Самойловна (“A Demon Named Rozalia Samoilovna”). Accessed May 20, 2025. https://ria.ru/20180817/1524692966.html

[18] Universal Jewish Encyclopedia, Isaac Landman, editor. 1943. “Zemlyachka, Rozalia.”

[19] Clements, 79.

[20] Ibid, 142

[21] See Slezkine, House of Government, 138-39.

[22] Richard Pipes, The Russian Revolution (Vintage Books, 1991), 564. This incident took place in the summer of 1918. Zinoviev was boss of Petrograd by virtue of his post as Chairman of the Petrograd Soviet, which was a revolutionary council that the Bolsheviks appropriated for their own use.

[23] This happened a bit later, March 1919, but is indicative of the growing feeling. The Black Book of Communism: Crimes, Terror, Repression. Edited by Stephane Courtois, Nicholas Werth, et. al. (Harvard University Press, 1999), 86.

[24] Pipes, The Russian Revolution, 611-12. In The Black Book of Communism, page 87, we read, “In Orel, Bryansk, Gomel, and Astrakhan mutinying soldiers joined forces with [striking workers], shouting “Death to Jews! Down with the Bolshevik commissars!”

[25] The assassinations were of powerful Petrograd-based Jewish Bolsheviks: Vladimir Volodarsky (real name Moisey Goldshtein) was commissar of the press, censorship and propaganda, a “terrorist” and hated figure according to his fellow Bolshevik Lunacharsky; he was shot down June 20. The head of the Cheka in the city, Moisey Uritsky, was shot and killed the same day as the attempt on Lenin, August 30.

[26] The “military commissar was one of the key military innovations of the Reds during the civil wars. These commissars acted as the representatives of the Russian Communist Party (Bolsheviks) and the Soviet government and were attached to military formations . . . at all levels, so as to ensure political control over them . . . When, over the course of 1918, the Red Army became a mass conscript army, dominated by peasants, the military commissars (or voenkomy) assumed also a larger ideological and agitational role . . .” Jonathan D. Smele, Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 1916 – 1926 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2015), 746. These were the political commissars that Hitler later targeted in his 1941 Commissar Order.

[27] “A Red brigade commander named Kotomin who defected in 1919 reported “that [the ranks of the commissars] included . . . ‘of course, almost a majority of Jews.’” Evan Mawdsley, The Russian Civil War (Pegasus Books, 2008), 62.

[28] Stites, Women’s Liberation Movement, 321

[29] Clements, 182.

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

[31] George Leggett, The Cheka: Lenin’s Political Police (Clarendon Press, 1986), 114.

[32] Alexis Wrangel describes the family and the Baron charmingly in General Wrangel: Russia’s White Crusader (New York: Hippocene Books, 1987).

[33] Lincoln, Red Victory, 443-48.

[34] Ibid, 448.

[35] For Revolutionary Committees, see Smele, Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 938 and 1378.

[36] The Frenchmen Jerome and Jean Tharaud wrote a book about it, giving it the apt title When Israel is King. It is back in print, available at Antelope Hill Books. A long review appeared on the Occidental Observer in April 2024. The man writing under the name “Karl Radl,” whose research on Jews is prolific, gives a detailed examination of the Jewish personnel involved here: https://karlradl14.substack.com/p/the-jewish-role-in-the-hungarian

[37] Most of the information in this paragraph comes from Smele, Historical Dictionary of the Russian Civil Wars, 640-41.

[38] Angelica Balabanoff, My Life as a Rebel (New York, 1968), 224.

[39] Victor Serge, Memoirs of a Revolutionary (New York Review of Books, 2012), 220.

[40] Serge, 163.

[41] “Samuil Davydovich Vulfson,” in Russian-language Wikipedia. Accessed May 17, 2025. https://fi.wiki7.org/wiki/Вульфсон,_Самуил_Давыдович. I do not have a source that identifies this man as a Jew, but I am confident he is, mainly because of the name. “AI Overview” states: “Vulfson is a surname of Jewish origin, specifically Ashkenazi . . .”

[42] Branko Lazitch and Milorad Drachkovitch, Biographical Dictionary of the Comintern, revised edition (Stanford: Hoover Institution Press. 1986), 160.

[43] Slezkine, The House of Government, 289.

[44] Georgy Borsanyi, The Life of a Communist Revolutionary, Bela Kun, (Columbia University Press, 1993), 236. Borsanyi was a Jewish Communist.

[45] Serge, 248.

[46] Clements, 184. Georgy Borsanyi also depicts him as taking an active role,  241.

[47] Wikipedia (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Semyon_Dukelsky) and A. N. Zhukov, Memorial Society, “Semyon Dukelsky.” https://nkvd.memo.ru/index.php/Дукельский,_Семен_Семенович

[48] From Russian-language Wikipedia, Дукельский, Семён Семёнович, “Semyon Dukelsky” https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дукельский,_Семён_Семёнович

And a Belarusian website on Human Rights: https://protivpytok.org/sssr/antigeroi-karatelnyx-organov-sssr/dukelskij-s-s

[49] Alexei Teplyakov, Иван Данишевский: чекист, авиастроитель, публицист (“Ivan Danishevsky: Chekist, Aircraft Builder, Publicist”) Accessed May 26, 2025.  https://rusk.ru/st.php?idar=57915

[50] Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, 311 and 396.

[51] Jews in the Red Army: “Lev Mekhlis.” Yad Vashem. Accessed June 6, 2025. https://www.yadvashem.org/research/research-projects/soldiers/lev-mekhlis.html

[52] Donald Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen: The Tyrant and Those Who Killed for Him (Random House, 2004) 83, 358. Rayfield is not a historian, but a professor in Russian and Georgian literature. This book is quite interesting, being larded with information about the men—often Jews—who killed millions for the Communist regime.

[53] Borsanyi, Bela Kun, 31 and 212.

[54] Borsanyi, 275.

[55] Orlando Figes, A People’s Tragedy: A History of the Russian Revolution (Viking, 1997), 720.

[56] Sergey Melgunov, The Red Terror in Russia (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1926), 76-77.

[57] Ibid, 76

[58] Vladimir Brovkin, Behind the Front Lines of the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 1994), 345-46.

[59] Russian-language Wikipedia, “Red Terror in Russia,” (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Красный_террор_в_Крыму) citing Авторский коллектив. Гражданская война в России: энциклопедия катастрофы (“Civil War in Russia: Encyclopedia of Catastrophe,” 2010) Editor D. M. Volodikhin. Volodikhin claims his estimates are based on official Soviet sources.

[60] Dmitry Sokolov, “Карающая рука пролетариата” Деятельность органов ЧК в Крыму в 1920-1921 гг (“The Punishing Hand of the Proletariat”: Activities of the Cheka in the Crimea in 1920-1921) Accessed May 28, 2015. https://ruskline.ru/analitika/2009/11/16/karayuwaya_ruka_proletariata/

[61] Robert Forczyk, Where the Iron Crosses Grow: The Crimea 1941-44 (Oxford, United Kingdom: Osprey Publishing, 2014), 24

[62] Borsanyi, 241

[63] Courtois, Black Book of Communism, 105.

[64] Melgunov, Red Terror in Russia, 81.

[65] Courtois, 107.

[66] Ibid, 80-81.

[67] Courtois, 106-07 and Melgunov, 81.

[68] Forczyk, Where the Iron Crosses Grow, 25.

[69] A. Bobkov, Красный террор в Крыму. (“The Red Terror in Crimea”). Accessed June 2, 2025. rovs.atropos.spb.ru/index.php?view=publication&mode=text&id=277

[70] Melgunov, 78.

[71] Alexei Teplyakov, Иван Данишевский: чекист, авиастроитель, публицист (“Ivan Danishevsky: Chekist, Aircraft Builder, Publicist”)

[72] For Kerch, Forczyk, 26. For Plastinina-Maizel, Melgunov, 200.

[73] Solzhenitsyn, Ch. 16.

[74] Russian-language Wikipedia, “Red Terror in Russia,” (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Красный_террор_в_Крыму)

[75] Courtois, 107.

[76] Melgunov, 39-40.

[77] Forczyk, 25-26.

[78] Melgunov, 80.

[79] Dmitry Sokolov, Месть победителей (“Revenge of the Victors”). Accessed May 27, 2025. https://rusk.ru/st.php?idar=112133

[80] Melgunov, 77

[81] Pavel Paganuzzi, Красный террор в Крыму (“Red Terror in Crimea”). Accessed May 25, 2025. https://www.belrussia.ru/page-id-3316.html. The court was trying the killer of a Soviet diplomat, Vatslav Vorovsky. The defense turned the trial into a referendum on Soviet atrocities.

[82] Dmitry Sokolov, “The Punishing Hand of the Proletariat.”

[83] Arkady Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews (Alfred Knopf, 1994), 23.

[84] Russian-language Wikipedia, “Red Terror in Crimea.” (https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Красный_террор_в_Крыму)

[85] Solzhenitsyn, Ch. 16.

[86] For the Tatars, Forczyk, 27. For Wrangel’s troops, Richard Pipes, Russia Under the Bolshevik Regime (Vintage Books, 1995), 135.

[87] Pipes, 135

[88] Russian-language Wikipedia, “Red Terror in Crimea.” Accessed May 17, 2025. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Красный_террор_в_Крыму

[89] Andrey Sorokin, “Красный террор омрачил великую победу Советской власти…”

(“The Red Terror Overshadowed the Great Victory of Soviet Power …”) Accessed June 3, 2025. https://rodina-history.ru/2016/08/10/rodina-krymu.html

[90] Clements, 77.

[91] Cottam, Women in War and Resistance, 434.

[92] Kutepov was kidnaped off the street in Paris by the Jewish Chekist Yakov Serebryansky and his wife, who posed as French police. His body has never been found. Pavel Sudoplatov, Special Tasks: The Memoirs of an Unwanted Witness – A Soviet Spymaster (Little, Brown and Co., 1994), 91.

[93] “Alexander Rotenberg,” Accessed May 20, 2025. https://www.hrono.ru/biograf/bio_r/rotenberg.html

[94] Mykola Semena, “A forgotten tragedy. One hundred years since the mass famine in the Crimea in 1921–1923.” Accessed June 4, 2025. https://holodomormuseum.org.ua/en/news/a-forgotten-tragedy-one-hundred-years-since-the-mass-famine-in-the-crimea-in-1921-1923/

[95] Ibid.

[96] Neither appear in Heinrich Schulz’s Who was Who in the U.S.S.R. (Scarecrow Press, 1972), which has data on 5,015 prominent personalities of the Soviet Union, nor in the on-line Jewish Encyclopedia of Russia, which has basic but minimal data on 8,500 Jews born in Russia: (https://www.jewishgen.org/Belarus/misc/JewishEncycRussia/a/index.html).

[97] Robert Conquest, Inside Stalin’s Secret Police: NKVD Politics 1936-39 (Hoover Institution Press, 1985), 38.

[98] Zhukov, Memorial Society, “Alexander Radzivilovski.” Accessed May 22, 2025. https://nkvd.memo.ru/index.php/Радзивиловский,_Александр_Павлович

[99] Conquest, Inside Stalin’s Secret Police, 38.

[100] Robert Conquest, The Great Terror: A Reassessment (Oxford University Press, 1990), 261.

[101] Zhukov, “Israel Dagin.” Accessed June 12, 2025. https://nkvd.memo.ru/index.php/Дагин,_Израиль_Яковлевич

[102] Boris Morozov, “Mekhlis, Lev Zakharovich,” in The YIVO Encyclopedia of Jews in Eastern Europe. Accessed May 10, 2025. https://encyclopedia.yivo.org/article/852

[103] Rayfield, Stalin and His Hangmen, 398.

[104] Teplyakov, op. cit.

[105] Leggett, 447.

[106] Russian-language Wikipedia, “Semyon Dukelsky.” Accessed May 13, 2015. https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/Дукельский,_Семён_Семёнович

[107] See note 41.

[108] Slezkine, House of Government, 291.

[109] Lazitch and Drachkovitch, Comintern, 160-61.

[110] Vaksberg, Stalin Against the Jews, 28

[111] Simon Sebag Montefiore, Stalin: The Court of the Red Tsar (Alfred Knopf, 2004), 234–35. Montefiore is Jewish, like most of the major historians of Soviet Russia. They really seem fascinated by Soviet history for some reason.

[112] Lazitch and Drachkovitch, 239-41; also Wikipedia, “Bela Kun,” Accessed May 12, 2025.

[113] Conquest, The Great Terror, 403.

[114] Clements, 242.

[115] Ibid, 242.

[116] Ibid, 243.

[117] Ibid, 286.

[118] Thomas Sowell says that the tiny German minority in Tsarist Russia accounted for forty percent of the high command of the Army, 57 percent of the Foreign Ministry, and nearly all of the St. Petersburg Academy of Sciences. These numbers would roughly flip in favor of the Jews after the Bolshevik Revolution. In fact, the Jews would drive out or exterminate the ruling German stratum. In Migrations and Cultures (Basic Books, 1996), 57.

[119] Melgunov—at least 50,000. Bruce Lincoln—about 50,000. Courtoi—at least 50,000. Volodikhin—at least 52,000.