“The only international ally on the battlefields of history Russia has is Israel, due to the Holocaust.”^[1]

As the Russia-Ukraine conflict rages on, it continues to act in the West as a kind of Rorschach test of general political attitudes. Broadly speaking, the Center and Left have adopted a strong pro-Ukrainian position, while elements of the hard or alternative Right have attempted to find common ground with Putin’s Russia, often using anti-Wokism and antipathy towards globalism and NATO as the preferred conduit for ideological solidarity. My own personal opinion is that it is difficult for Westerners to form valid opinions on the moral merits of each cause, since both causes (Ukrainian nationalist and Russian separatist) bear some validity. This is the harsh reality of multiethnic states where the population is divided on self-assertion and self-determination. Beyond one’s basic position on the right of one nation to wage war on another, most Western commentary on the conflict thus remains a Rorschach, divulging infinitely more about the politics of the commentator than the true nature of events on the ground. With this caveat, and since this website has dedicated much work to the question of Jews and their influence, the following essay offers not so much another ‘explanation’ of, or apologetic for, the ongoing war, but instead a spotlight on one of its stranger, but no less important, aspects: Vladimir Putin’s adoption, promotion, and use of the Holocaust narrative in pursuit of geopolitical goals.

The Rise and Fall of Russian Holocaust Propaganda

Russia was an integral part of the creation of the Holocaust industry from the very beginning. In the immediate aftermath of World War II, it was in Soviet interests to utterly delegitimize the governments and peoples of those Eastern European countries selected for absorption into the Communist mega-state. Accusing the peoples of Latvia, Poland, Lithuania, or Ukraine of being complicit in genocide or “crimes against humanity,” for example, was an easy way of both demoralizing them and suppressing anti-Soviet nationalism. The first Holocaust propagandists were of course Russian Jewish photojournalists like Samary Gurary, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Max Alpert, Semen Fridlyand, Mikhail Trakhman, and Georgy Zelma, who published posed and curated images that historian David Shneer has described as comprising a new “atrocity genre” of photojournalism. While their work proved incendiary in the Soviet Union, the Western response to Russian atrocity reports was initially muted and cautious, changing only thanks to the repeated efforts of Western Jewish journalists and the increasingly lurid nature of Soviet accounts. When the Los Angeles Times printed some Russian photos from Majdanek, for example, it warned its readers that the material it was publishing might be “propaganda.” In Britain, Jewish BBC journalist Alexander Werth later recalled that he was at first “continually frustrated by his editor’s unwillingness to run his stories of horror and atrocities.”^[2]

Buoyed by the prolific activities of Soviet Jewish propagandist Ilya Ehrenburg, the Holocaust narrative was initially pushed internationally as part of a funding drive, with key figures like Solomon Mikhoels (Chairman of the Soviet Union’s official Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee) and journalist Vasily Grossman tasked with developing propaganda to raise money for the Soviet war effort. Grossman, author of the well-known novel Life and Fate (reviewed by Spencer J. Quinn) was the creator of some of the first outrageous stories from Treblinka, for example, including a report on a camp guard of superhuman strength who was said to have ripped apart babies with his bare hands. Mikhoels, meanwhile was specifically instructed to appeal to the national sentiments of Jews and was sent to the United States in 1943 to fundraise.

Solomon Mikhoels

After the war, the Soviet need for a Holocaust narrative disappeared overnight. While it was soon adopted in the West as a methodology for the advance of multiculturalism and White guilt, in the Soviet Union Jewish atrocity propaganda, as a discourse, was more or less eliminated. By 1948, Grossman, the author of lurid tales, was marginalized and his works were suppressed. In January 1948, Mikhoels was invited to Minsk to judge a play for the Stalin Prize and was killed in a country house under the supervision of the chief of the Soviet Belarusian state police. His body was crushed by a truck and left in a street, fulfilling Stalin’s request that his death be attributed to a “car accident.” In November 1948, the Jewish Anti-Fascist Committee was formally dissolved.

The Soviet Union’s antipathy to the Holocaust narrative was directly related to the need to spread the message to new satellite states that the Russian nation had struggled and suffered like no other. International Jewry, at one time useful for funds and other forms of influence, could not be tolerated as a competitor. Stalin’s mood towards Jews declined further after the creation of Israel in 1947. He was personally shocked by public displays of Jewish identity in Moscow, including mass gatherings for Jewish high holidays and fawning affection for Golda Meir. The “nation within a nation” had made itself too obvious. In January 1949 Pravda published its famous article condemning “rootless cosmopolitans,” and by March the newspaper was purged of Jews. Jewish officers in the Red Army were then dismissed. Jewish activists were removed from the leadership of the communist party. Hundreds of Jewish writers were arrested, and, if they wrote under Russian pseudonyms, they suddenly found their real names appearing in parentheses. In August 1952, 13 Jews were tried, convicted, and executed for anti-Soviet espionage.

By the summer of 1949, the Holocaust narrative once again emerged as a matter of political contention, this time in Poland. The Soviet ambassador wrote to Moscow in July complaining that 37% of Polish Ministry of Public Security officers were Jewish in a country where Jews comprised less than 1% of the population. Jakub Berman, one of the Jewish leaders of the country and a former associate of Holocaust propagandist Solomon Mikhoels, hastily attempted to defuse the situation by offering a strange bargain — the assertion that six million people had died in “the Holocaust” but that this total involved three million Jews and three million non-Jews.^[3] With this gambit, offering a shared reward from Jewish propaganda efforts, Berman bought himself some time and managed to avoid the more severe anti-Jewish purges associated with the “Doctor’s Plot,” Stalin’s last attempt to curb Jewish influence in the Soviet Union. The Holocaust narrative, as a tale of special Jewish victimhood, then fell dormant in Russia for half a century.

Putin Revives “The Holocaust”

As indicated by his long speech announcing a “special military action” in Ukraine, Putin is a keen student of history and is highly sensitive to the way in which understandings of history, or rather the politics of history, influence culture, national identity, geopolitics, and even military goals. It’s therefore not all that surprising that he should reach into the past in order to secure a more dominant grip over neighboring nations. Putin’s intense utilization of the Holocaust narrative is of special interest because he has revived one of its original intentions: as a weapon against anti-Russian nationalism in what are now the former Soviet satellite states. Whether Putin is a “true believer” in the Holocaust story, or whether he is employing it purely for tactical reasons, is besides the point. The Holocaust narrative is critical to Putin’s ideological war in Eastern Europe and to his ongoing ambition to forge stronger links with Israel. One of the results is that Putin has emerged as one of the foremost promoters of the Holocaust narrative globally.

Writing in Putin’s Russia and The Falsification of History (2020), Anton Weiss-Wendt writes:

Within an international setting, Putin referred to the Holocaust for the first time during the official visit of the Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon to Russia in November 2003. Putin stressed the importance of building bridges to the Russian diaspora in Israel, and at one point proposed organising a Holocaust exhibition at the Victory Museum in Moscow. … Beginning in 2005, in the run-up to the sixtieth anniversary of the victory over Nazi Germany, formal references to the Holocaust proliferated. Since then, the Putin regime has firmly incorporated the Holocaust into its foreign policy, making it essentially an instrument of soft power. The Holocaust is now part of Russian history politics, coordinated at the highest government level.

If Putin is keen to revive the Holocaust narrative in Russia and to export it worldwide, we should be clear about which Holocaust narrative Putin prefers. Putin has adopted what we might call the “Berman model,” named after the Jakub Berman, described above, who tried to appease Stalin with his less ambitious death estimates shared equally among Jews and Soviets. In other words, Putin is interested in the Holocaust narrative only to the extent that it can be politically useful to the Russian state.

In April 2005, Putin visited Israel and said that “Jewish people, like people of our country, incurred massive losses during the Second World War.” He complained about former Soviet states erecting statues that glorified “anti-Semites,” “Nazis” and “the German Waffen SS.” It should be a point of common ground, argued Putin, that “Jews and Russians have the same [low] status” in nationalist, post-Soviet countries. The bottom line then, is that Jews and Russians should be seen as brothers in suffering. The more Putin can boost the alleged historical sufferings of the Jews, the more he can share in the resulting propaganda benefits, especially since one of the more potent side-effects of such a narrative is that the nationalisms of smaller, surrounding states can be disparaged, tarnished, and declared illegitimate. But sharing in these benefits, as we will see, is both crucial and contentious.

Memorials

There is a hurried and ill-conceived quality to Russian promotion of the Holocaust, perhaps best illustrated by the Kremlin’s comical donation of a Holocaust monument to Israel in 2005. By all accounts, the Russian government had commissioned the piece at short notice to Zurab Tsereteli, president of the Russian Academy of Arts. The speed of the commission is suggested by the fact Tsereteli appears to have reused models from an earlier statue now sitting in Moscow, resulting in Israelis puzzling over a monument supposedly depicting naked Jewish Holocaust victims, none of whom appear to be circumcised.

This hasty approach to Holocaust promotion doesn’t diminish its import. Russia has engaged in a “comprehensive Holocaust remembrance program.”^[4] In 2012, Putin intensified his approaches to Jews internationally using the Holocaust narrative as a vehicle for dialogue. Weiss-Wendt comments that during a visit to Israel in June 2012,

Putin raised [the Holocaust] nearly every time he met with the Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. Both Russia and Israel are sensitive to a biased interpretation of history, he said. … Netanyahu was happy to oblige, having on various occasions over the years emphasised that Russia and Israel see eye to eye on issues of history.

That same year, Putin established more formal relations with Russia’s Chabad movement, with Weiss-Wendt suggesting that “the Kremlin may not know how much their affiliation with Chabad is worth, but it is courting them on account of their international connections nevertheless, in the belief of the strength of international Jewry.” Also in the same year, Moscow witnessed the opening of the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. Putin was a major supporter of the project from the beginning, symbolically donating one month’s salary toward the construction costs. The FSB, successor to the KGB, supplied the center with a number of historical documents, a move illustrative of a much broader relationship between the Russian government and the organized Jewish community in Russia, since the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia has a special department dedicated to ongoing privileged co-operation with the ministry of defense and law-enforcement agencies.

Putin’s “Berman model” remains a sticking point with Jews, however. While Russia’s two most prominent rabbis “stressed the tolerance aspect” of the new museum, Putin made sure that Russian interests can continue to hitch a ride on Jewish atrocity propaganda. In a public speech Putin suggested that the museum be renamed the Russian Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center. “It’s located in Russia, right? And we made it happen together.” His comments were reminiscent of a 2012 incident in which Russian authorities replaced a memorial plaque in Rostov-on-Don that had claimed 27,000 Jews were killed in a nearby gorge (even Yad Vashem suggest such a figure is a gross exaggeration) with a plaque stating only that “Soviet citizens” had been killed in the area.

The Russian ADL

As well as investing in Holocaust memorials, the Kremlin has also worked to develop and promote its own version of the ADL. One of the central figures of the Federation of Jewish Communities of Russia is the Ukraine-born Jewish oligarch Boris Spiegel, founder and former chairman of World Without Nazism, and former president of the World Congress of Russian Jews. World Without Nazism is styled as an “international human rights NGO” and closely follows the ADL playbook. The organization’s stated objectives include “consolidation of anti-fascist forces, mobilisation of world public opinion in annunciating the significance of the Nuremberg judgment, promoting “denazification” of countries of Eastern and Central Europe, opposing the glorification of Nazism, safeguarding minority rights, and countering Holocaust denial.” Spiegel was a harsh critic of “extremism and neo-Nazism” in Ukraine, and World Without Nazism endorsed the Russian annexation of Crimea. Putin’s own claims to be presently engaged in the “denazification” of Ukraine illustrate some of the influence of this kind of rhetoric, even if tactical rather than sincere.

Anton Weiss-Wendt describes an increasingly integrated Russian-Jewish effort to promote the Holocaust narrative, and Russian-friendly historical interpretations of it, globally:

Since 2009, Russian Jewish organizations have been increasingly incorporated into Moscow’s designs. On January 27, 2009, the foreign ministry, in collaboration with the UN Committee on information, organized a panel, “Lessons of the Holocaust and Modernity,” in New York. According to a Russian diplomat, the event featured “leading Russian and American nonprofit organizations,” Moscow Human Rights Bureau, and the American branch of the World Congress of Russian Jews. In December 2009 in Berlin,  the latter organization—in cooperation with unspecified Jewish and antifascist entities from Europe and CIS—held a conference with a modified title. “Lessons of the Second World War and the Holocaust.” Next, the foreign ministry deployed big guns, the government proxy World Without Nazism. On February 10, 2011, at the UN headquarters, the World Congress of Russian Jews and World Without Nazism (both headed by Speigel) put together a roundtable, “World Without Nazism: The Global Goal of Mankind Today and the Sixty-Fifth Anniversary of the Nuremberg Trial.” The roundtable proclaimed the Nuremberg judgment to be the ultimate truth, condemned the “glorification of Nazism,” and decried an attempted falsification of history. To spread the truth about the Second World War, the roundtable participants proposed carrying out educational and “media propaganda” campaigns.

Spiegel has had other lasting influences in Russia. In Spring 2013 he introduced a draft in the Duma of what would eventually become the Law Against the Glorification of Fascism. The world Holocaust is used 53 times in the draft, and explicitly mentions “Holocaust denial” as a form of “propaganda of Nazism.” Putin’s insistence on the “Berman model” remained strong however. No mention of Jewish deaths occurs anywhere in the final, enacted legislation. Spiegel eventually outlasted his usefulness to Putin. He was imprisoned last year, and there are rumors that his Big Pharma business has been taken over by the FSB.

Despite its pursuit of a “Berman model” that is only halfway useful to Jews, Russia has increasingly presented itself as a “natural ally” of Jews against antisemitism and Holocaust denial. In January 2016, Putin met with leaders of the European Jewish Congress and told them they were Russia’s “natural ally” in “fighting antisemitism, safeguarding the memory of the Second World War, and consistently standing up against ‘glorification of Nazism’.” Putin was thanked for his remarks by Moshe Kantor, presently one of the only major Russian Jewish oligarchs to have escaped Western sanctions, who suggested that the situation of Russian Jews was the best in all of Europe. Putin, beaming with delight, suggested that any Jews wishing to leave Western Europe should “come here, to Russia. We are ready to accept them.”

Culture and Education

Russia has also invested in promoting the Holocaust narrative culturally, most notably in the 2018 release of the big budget motion picture Sobibor. The film, which trades graphically in the usual lurid tropes (one review describes it as including the death throes of hundreds of naked women in a gas chamber, a rape scene, immolation, savage beatings, floggings, stabbings, a bludgeoning to the head and firearm executions), was the brainchild of the Russian minister of culture Vladimir Medinsky, whose ministry financed its production. According to Times of Israel, Sobibor “made a huge splash in Russia thanks to a government-led commemoration campaign that culminated this year.” The Kremlin put a viewing of the film on the agenda of President Putin and Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu’s Moscow summit in January 2018. In April, Valentina Matvienko, chair of the Duma’s Federation Council, organized a joint screening and discussion via videobridge with her counterpart at the Israeli Knesset. Special screenings of the film were arranged around the world, encouraging a Holocaust binge not seen since Schindler’s List.

Mikhail Ponomarev, of Russia’s Federation Council, has proposed a state policy on history that would be coordinated at the federal level. Among a package of legislation, he includes laws against “the revival of Nazism,” laws promoting organizations that monitor manifestations of neo-Nazism, calls for intensive lobbying of the Council of Europe for “a joint curriculum on the history of the Second World War and, specifically, the Holocaust,” and offers sponsorship to any scholarship “on Nazi mass crimes, especially the mass murder of Jews.” The Russian Historical Society was suggested as a useful vehicle for countering “anti-Russian” historical narratives such as the Holodomor famine in Ukraine, 1932–3. Russian multiculturalism, meanwhile, was to be enforced through the Ministry of Culture, with demands that all presentations of the history of Russia’s many ethnic groups would have to “aim at reducing interethnic tensions” and build nationwide solidarity.

Denazification

The primary rationale for promotion of the Holocaust narrative by the Russian state appears to be an attempt at negative soft power targeting former Soviet satellite states. While Ukraine is the most well-known target of current Russian “denazification” efforts, the incorporation of the Holocaust narrative into Russian foreign policy has resulted in very similar accusations and rhetorical attacks in recent years against Poland, Latvia, Lithuania, and Estonia. History politics, especially those linked to the Holocaust narrative, have become an integral part of Russia’s diplomatic and political technology.

In 2019, Putin lashed out at Poland after the European Parliament passed a resolution in September identifying the 1939 Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact as the immediate cause of World War II and accusing Russia of whitewashing Stalin’s crimes. Putin, by way of response, “blamed Poland for interwar antisemitism” and pointed to its destruction of Soviet monuments to the Red Army which has “liberated the European countries from Nazism.”^[5] Backed into a corner in terms of its historical interpretation, Russia in Global Affairs, a Kremlin-linked foreign policy journal,

divided the world into friends and foes. The only international ally on the battlefields of history Russia has is Israel, due to the Holocaust. … Russia should be reaching out to the ‘Jewish lobby’ in the United States, suggest Dmitry Efremenko, of the Academy of Sciences. Perhaps to Jews generally, adds Alexander Philippov, professor at the Higher School of Economics in St. Petersburg.^[6]

The journal suggested that Russia should focus a soft power attack on Poland as the main adversary, based heavily on accusations of antisemitism, and seek allies “in the countries of South Europe with a historically strong left, such as Spain and Greece.”

Strange as it sounds, a Kremlin notion of Russians and Jews bound together by history and surrounded by Nazis has become entrenched in Moscow. In 2015, when Putin was ‘accidentally’ not invited to attend a ceremony at Auschwitz, he went to the Jewish Museum and Tolerance Center in Moscow instead. There, he

spoke in one breath of antisemitism and Russophobia, nationalism and terrorism. Of the different ethnicities that fought within the Red Army ranks he mentioned just two — Russians and Jews. In the opposite camp he put Bandera followers in Ukraine and Baltic Nazis. … Putin craftily linked this ‘lesson in history’ to the ‘coldblooded destruction of the peaceful population of Donbass.’ … The point Putin is making is hard to miss: bound by the tragic experience, Jews should join Russians in pushing back violent nationalism of the Ukrainian and Baltic kind.^[7]

Sergey Lavrov, Russia’s foreign minister and now a household name thanks to the war in Ukraine, has spent much of the last ten years pushing the UN for resolutions designed to stop or condemn Baltic states from erecting statues to nationalists, some of whom fought in German divisions during World War II. In this effort he has worked closely with the World Jewish Congress and (Moshe Kantor’s) European Jewish Congress. Both organizations were only too keen to add vocal support to Lavrov’s General Assembly Resolution 67/154, which attempted to smear Latvia’s annual march of former Waffen SS soldiers by “collectively implicating all Waffen SS members in war crimes and crimes against humanity.” The United States voted against the resolution, and EU countries abstained. Much to the anger of the Kremlin, Ukraine voted with the United States and opposed the measure.

As well as introducing measures designed to vilify nationalist statues and commemorations, Russia has “never failed to air any new episode in history or politics playing out between Russia and its East European neighbors in connection with the Holocaust.”^[8] When a monument to the Soviet soldier was vandalized in Tallinn, Estonia, in May 2006, for example, Russia’s foreign ministry complained to the Organization for Security and Co-operation in Europe that this “extremist incident” goes “against the grain of raising awareness about the tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust.” Anton Weiss-Wendt concludes that “Russia’s modus operandi is molding the Holocaust to fit any new twist in regional memory politics it regards as adversarial.”

Conclusion

Much like an earlier essay I wrote on “Jewish subtexts in Ukraine,” what is offered here is not an ‘explanation’ of the Russia-Ukraine war but a clarification of some of its stranger and muddier edges. Try as I might, I find it difficult to find much in either side, Ukrainian or Russian, that I can give firm backing to. Both sides are a morass of corruption, subversion, and layers of interests that are impossible for outsiders to untangle.

Who benefits from Putin’s Holocaust obsession? Jews, but only to an extent. Massive investment from Russia in the promotion of the idea of the Holocaust will do something to revive the narrative at a time when its historicization is beginning to gather pace. There’s no question that Jews will benefit more greatly from legislative proposals ancillary to the promotion of the narrative itself, especially when Putin seems keen only on a “Berman model” of the narrative that deprives Jews of its foremost benefit — the concept of Jews as unique victims. In other words, Russia’s worldwide lobbying for mandatory education programs and criminalization of Holocaust denial will be infinitely more useful to Jews than nausea-inducing showings of Sobibor.

Will Russia benefit from its adopted role as world-wide promoter of the Holocaust? This remains to be seen, though it strikes me as utterly foolhardy and contemptible. Russia’s approach to Jews has had middling, even poor, results thus far. Jewish oligarchs have been jumping ship since they started feeling the pinch of Western sanctions, prompting Putin to lash out at a “fifth column” of “scum and traitors” who will be spat out “like a gnat that accidentally flew into our mouths.” Will Putin have his “Stalin moment”? I doubt it, because Putin has gone “all in” with his pro-Jewish strategy despite its lack of benefits. Israel, always seeking to have its cake and eat it too, is currently pursuing an awkward neutrality between the US and Russia. Russia’s claims to be fighting Nazism in Ukraine haven’t provoked the slightest response from the international Jewish community, while missile strikes on Kyiv, resulting in damage to Jewish memorials, have prompted outrage. The world has more or less rejected Russia’s Holocaust narrative or, even worse for Putin, simply doesn’t care about it.

This is perhaps the most scathing criticism that can made about Putin’s Holocaust obsession — that out of desperation for moral legitimacy and soft power in the Eastern sphere he has hitched Russian foreign policy to something that should have been left to die with Mikhoels and the other propagandists after World War II. What a strange and lonely hill to die on.

---

^[1] Anton Weiss-Wendt, Putin’s Russia and The Falsification of History: Reasserting Control Over the Past (New York: Bloomsbury, 2020).

^[2] D. Shneer, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes: Photography, War, and the Holocaust (New Brunswick: Rutgers University Press, 2011), 164.

^[3] See T. Snyder, Bloodlands: Europe Between Hitler and Stalin (New York: Basic Books, 2010).

^[4] Weiss-Wendt, Putin’s Russia and the Falsification of History.

^[5] Weiss-Wendt, Putin’s Russia and the Falsification of History.

^[6] Ibid.

^[7] Ibid.

^[8] Ibid.

Jewish diaspora fiction has always been problematic for me, largely because the authors I have read will either champion an overtly Jewish perspective without taking competing gentile ones into account (Saul Bellow, Chaim Potok, Isaac Bashevis Singer) or perceive themselves as ethnic outsiders and attempt to subvert gentile societies which are, of course, inherently bad (Franz Kafka, Philip Roth, Nathaniel West). As with anything, the quality varies, and there is much more to the crude categorizing I resort to above. Arthur Koestler’s excellent Darkness at Noon bucks the trend, as does Stanislaw Lem’s Polaris in the science fiction genre. And what to make of Ayn Rand? But if I had to distill my feelings for Jewish diaspora fiction in one sentence, this, unfortunately, would have to be it.

These two author types rely on the spurious Jew Good/Gentile Bad dichotomy which is essentially opposite sides of the same shekel, so to speak. The classic example, of course, is Sholem Aleichem’s Fiddler on the Roof (and I am referring to the popular musical and film adaptations and not so much to Aleichem’s Teyve the Milkman stories). In Fiddler, Jews are portrayed as charmingly innocent salt-of-the-Earth types who are at best heroic and honorable, and, at worst, eccentric in their picadilloes. In such a worldview, the anti-Jewish wrath of gentiles resembles natural disasters in that they attack without warning or reason, and leave devastation in their wake. Unlike natural disasters, however, this is the work of Man, and so can be ascribed to Evil and therefore dealt with. That Jews commit deadly sins of their own which cause equal devastation among the gentiles never enters the plotlines of these stories. Neither does any good resulting from self-identifying, nationalistic non-Jews. As a result, much of Jewish diaspora fiction amounts to little more than libel of the goyim.

Very few Jewish fiction authors can overcome this dichotomy. Better they forget their Jewishness and write simply to enthrall gentiles, or keep their Jewish identity and write strictly for Jews, preferably in Hebrew.

Jewish author Vasily Grossman’s epic novel Life and Fate fails to escape this dichotomy and yet retains a great deal of value for its realistic depiction of the enforced conformity of mid-century Soviet life. It also deserves note for its narrative reporting of the Battle of Stalingrad and depiction of the Soviet gulag. Completed in 1960 and suppressed by the KGB, it was smuggled to the West and published in 1980 to instant acclaim, sixteen years after the author’s death. Fortunately, it avoids the trap of modernism, and weaves its many plots and subplots together in a complex yet comprehensible fashion. Stream of consciousness, fragmentation, Freudianism, nonlinear storytelling, and other postmodern tricks are thankfully eschewed. So is all hint of degeneracy. This makes Life and Fate one of the breeziest long novels I have ever read. That it is uneven, tendentious, strident, overpopulated, and lacking the majestic story arc worthy of its 870-odd pages keeps it from the ranks of great novels. It also tells almost as much as it shows, which sucks much of the power out of the story. For example, when one of our female protagonists decides to toss over her lover (a brilliant tank commander) for her ex-husband (a disgraced commissar languishing in the Lubyanka prison), we learn about it after the fact from the narrator. But we don’t get to see it. Grossman glosses over several important plot points in the same manner.

Even worse, when the author speaks as a Jew—directly to his readership, which he does several times—he’s little better than a bad poet lecturing us on the evils of anti-Semitism. His gnashing of teeth over the poor, noble-hearted Jews being sent to their deaths are as manipulative as anything in Schindler’s List. For example, upon entering a German concentration camp, the saintlike Sofya Levinton realizes she could save herself because she has medical training, but chooses not to. She opts instead to remain by the side of a little orphan boy named David as they tragically get gassed together.

From Part Two, Chapter 46:

Death was standing there, as huge as the sky, watching while little David walked towards him on his little legs. All around him there was nothing but music, and he couldn’t cling to it or even batter his head against it.

As for the cocoon, it had no wings, no paws, no antennae, no eyes; it just lay there in its little box, stupidly trustful, waiting.

David was a Jew…

Grossman, editorializing transparently through his narration, is also quick to dishonestly condemn fascism and Nazism, while failing to condemn the demonstrably greater evils of communism and Bolshevism just as directly. (To be fair, Grossman does do this, but through character and plot over hundreds of pages—that is, appropriately, and never in the didactic manner with which he dismisses fascism.) For example, in Part One, Chapter 2, he writes the following series of lies:

National Socialism had created as new type of political criminal: criminals who had not committed a crime. [Tell that to A.I. Vipper, the prosecutor of the 1913 Menahem Beilis trial who was shipped off to a concentration camp by the Bolsheviks in 1919 and never heard from again.]

The detainment of prisoners-of-war in a concentration camp for political prisoners was another innovation of fascism. [Apparently, Grossman had never heard of the Solovki prison camp, which was established in 1923 by the Soviets to detain perceived enemies of the newly formed Bolshevik state.]

Giving common criminals power over political prisoners was yet another innovation of National Socialism. [A falsehood repeatedly exposed in Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. The Soviets were doing this as early as the 1920s, before the rise of National Socialism.]

Here is my favorite, from Part One, Chapter 42—lurid, hysterical, and impossible to refute:

If fascism should ever be fully assured of its final triumph, the world will choke in blood. If the day ever dawns when Fascism is without armed enemies, then its executioners will know no restraint: the greatest enemy of fascism is man.

Yet when Grossman forgets his Jewishness and gives us the nuts-and-bolts narrative of how the Soviets emerged victorious at Stalingrad, he’s first rate. He presents a splendid array of characters: from a true-believing commissar with a dark secret, to a skeptical and reticent tank commander, to a war-weary power station director, to a womanizing staff officer, to an independent-minded soldier fighting fearlessly in the rubble. His mastery of geography and scenery is complete as well, from the dusty Kalmyk steppes, to the dingy apartments of Kazan, to the demolished city blocks of Stalingrad. His sympathetic portrayals of German General Friedrich Paulus and other officers of the Wehrmacht while they were locked in deadly struggle over that nearly-conquered city were some of the most moving for me. And this all makes sense, given that Grossman was a war correspondent who was in Stalingrad and many other places during the fighting. For the war scenes of Life and Fate, he certainly wrote what he knew, and what we get is punchy, insightful, gripping historical fiction, which serves almost as much as a critique of the oppressive groupthink associated with communism as it does of the German invasion itself. But this is about half the novel.

The other half, which is dominated by the drama surrounding Jewish physicist Viktor Shtrum and his family, focuses on Stalinism and how it tempts ethnic Russians to commit the twin sins of nationalism and anti-Semitism. This predictably evokes the stereotypically Jewish fear of the vengeful gentile so prevalent in Fiddler on the Roof and other diaspora works. And as translator Robert Chandler admits in the novel’s introduction, this makes Grossman a liar since the Russian pushback against Jewish dominance didn’t occur until the late 1940s and early 1950s—not as early as 1942 as Grossman depicts. Shtrum’s story also has little to do with the battle of Stalingrad, and could have been culled out of Life and Fate to constitute a completely different novel. As such, we’re left with a disjointed narrative which is much longer than it needs to be.

But this is one of the novel’s lesser flaws. Its greatest (and the one likely to be of most interest to Occidental Observer readers) is how Grossman, try as he might, cannot overcome Aleichem’s Curse. Gentiles remain tainted in Life and Fate. They are the source of all evil, while Jews maintain their existential innocence in the face of injustice and oppression.

In Grossman’s USSR, Jews never willingly identify as Jews. Instead, they are simply honest and industrious participants in the Soviet experiment. They self-identify only when they are betrayed by anti-Semitic gentiles who remind them of their Jewishness. This happens first by the Nazis, then by the Soviet leadership, and finally by ordinary Russians who, according to one Jewish character, enjoy not having to smell garlic now that all the Jews are gone. This, of course, is pure Judeophilic cant. Given the complicity of Jews in the bloodiest years of the Soviet Union as well as their well-documented ethnocentrism and xenophobia, this reviewer will never disbelieve that Jews are at all times keenly aware of themselves a distinct ethnic group—which is indeed why gentiles everywhere have anti-Jewish feelings to begin with.

Often in the novel we are reminded that Viktor Shtrum never once thought of himself as a Jew until he came face to face with Fascism. Part One, Chapter 18 is the (admittedly heartbreaking) text of Shtrum’s mother’s final letter to her son before being herded off to the camps, and in it she writes: “That morning I was reminded of what I’d forgotten during the years of the Soviet regime—that I was a Jew.”

This is the first key to Jewish innocence in Life and Fate. The second is that while Jews are pure Soviets, Russians are either Russians in Soviet clothing or they are willing to bow down when their co-ethnics exhibit such insidious nationalism. Of course, not all Russians in Life and Fate are like this—not Shtrum’s estranged wife Lyudmila, who’s mourning the loss of her son in battle; not her first husband Abarchuk, who’s languishing in a gulag; not Mostovskoy, an old Bolshevik who’s about to stage a hopeless rebellion in a German prison camp; and certainly not Marya Ivanovna, the wife of Shtrum’s colleague for whom he has deep feelings. Grossman handles all of these characters (and others) impeccably. What isn’t impeccable is how he depicts only the villainous, the cowardly, and the ignorant as expressing the gentile nationalism which he as a Jew finds so threatening.

Here is Getmanov, a calculating and menacing commissar complaining about affirmative action (Part One, Chapter 52):

A frown suddenly appeared on his face. ‘Quite frankly,’ he went on angrily, ‘all this makes me want to vomit. In the name of the friendship of nations we keep sacrificing the Russians. A member of a national minority barely needs to know the alphabet to be appointed a people’s commissar, while our Ivan, no matter if he’s a genius, has to “yield place to the minorities”. The great Russian people’s becoming a national minority itself. I’m all for the friendship of nations, but not on these terms. I’m sick of it!’

Here is Sokolov, Shtrum’s colleague (and Marya Ivanovna’s husband) who ultimately fails to stand by Shtrum when he’s about to be arrested for anti-Soviet thoughtcrimes (Part One, Chapter 64):

‘Allow me to love Tolstoy—and not only because of what he wrote about the Tartars. We Russians, for some reason, are never allowed to be proud of our own people. And if we show such pride, we’re immediately taken for members of the Black Hundreds.’

It should be noted that this speech occurs in a conversation with a wholly sympathetic Tartar named Karimov who calls for the banning of Dostoevsky because “[a] great writer in this country has no right to persecute foreigners, to despise Poles and Tartars, Jews, Armenians and Chuvash.”

Here is the internal monologue of tank commander Novikov on the nationalistic Russian apparatchiks who force him to promote Russians over non-Russians (Part Two, Chapter 4):

… his superiors had always been men who were ignorant of the calibres of different guns, men who were unable to read without mistakes a speech that had been written for them by someone else, men who were incapable of making sense of a map or even of speaking proper Russian. Why had he had to report to them?

And here is the internal monologue of Lieutenant Bach, a well-meaning and thoughtful German officer who’s warming to the idea of the Final Solution (Part Two, Chapter 11):

The law that determines the birth of a nation-state is something miraculous and wonderful. A state is a living unity; it alone has the power to express what is most precious, what is truly immortal in millions of people—a German character, a German hearth, a German will, a German spirit of sacrifice.

And speaking of Germans, who can forget the gratuitous chapter Grossman includes on the young Adolf Eichmann who was sidelined into the Nazi Party because he simply wasn’t smart or talented enough to compete with Jews for work or for acceptance into universities? Such people Grossman summarily condemns in Part Two, Chapter 31 as “fools, reactionaries and failures.”

The final key to Jewish innocence in Life and Fate is that there are no Jewish villains. Grossman does absolutely no Jewish soul-searching. Yes, Genrikh Yogoda gets mentioned a few times as a bugbear of the Great Terror from the 1930s. But he is never outed as a Jew. Grossman (to his credit) discusses terror famines, dekulakization, and other Soviet atrocities in his text, but never does he even hint of Jewish culpability in these crimes. The closest he gets is stating in Part Two, Chapter 31 that “during the epoch of revolutionary struggle, many of the most important revolutionary leaders were Jews.” That’s not enough.

In Life and Fate, Jews are portrayed as victims more often than not. For example, a Jewish fighter pilot who gets harassed by an anti-Semitic comrade ultimately gets shot down. Rubin, a friend of Abarchuk’s, gets murdered in the gulag—and having read Chapter 20 of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 200 Years Together, it’s hard to believe that Jews were murdered as often as gentiles in similar circumstances. Further, Shtrum’s junior colleagues, all of whom are smart, competent, and Jewish, fail to get promotions for dubious reasons.

Meanwhile, Shtrum is portrayed as downright sublime as he solves an important problem of theoretical physics. What lands him in trouble with his narrow-minded superiors is how he refuses to renounce Einstein and how he speaks of science in Part Two, Chapter 6 “as though it were a religion, an expression of man’s aspiration towards the divine.” He rejects the Party understanding of his field and instead insists that he keep his mind free from dogma. And when such scandalous individualism puts him on the brink of arrest, not one gentile colleague stands by him.

Ultimately, Vasily Grossman wishes to impress upon his readers that ethnonationalism is bad and that Jews would never indulge in a such a sin. Instead, we must worship individualism, as he states plainly in Part One, Chapter 53:

Human groupings have one main purpose: to assert everyone’s right to be different, to be special, to think, to feel and live in his or her own way. People join together in order to win or defend this right. But this is where a terrible, fateful error is born: the belief that these groupings in the name of a race, a God, a party or a State are the very purpose of life and not simply a means to an end. No! the only true and lasting meaning of the struggle for life lies in the individual, in his modest peculiarities and in his right to these peculiarities.

Yes. This is how Jews like their gentiles: atomized, isolated, and unprotected from predatory minority groups—such as the Jews—who have no intention of relinquishing their common identity and agenda. If Grossman had addressed this fatal flaw of the Jews as well, his novel may have achieved greatness. But that would have required reversing Aleichem’s Curse and transcending the Jew Good/Gentile Bad dichotomy which defines so much Jewish diaspora fiction, something Grossman was unfortunately not strong enough to do. (He was strong enough to defy the Soviet authorities, but not this.) This kind of overt political messaging also has nothing to do with the Battle of Stalingrad and reinforces my point that Life and Fate would have been better as two novels: one about the war and the other about Viktor Shtrum’s struggles against the Soviet Machine. Further, the latent anti-Russianness of the latter undercuts the accuracy of former since, as Solzhenitsyn pointed out in Chapter 19 of 200 Years Together, calls to Russian nationalism during the darkest days of the war were what helped the Russian people ultimately defeat the Germans.

There is much that is worthy about Life and Fate. Aside from its substantial literary qualities, it pre-dated The Gulag Archipelago by over a decade in its unveiling of the Soviet Union’s horrific crimes. It also superbly portrays the communist republic’s oppressive cultural atmosphere. The KGB had good reason to suppress Life and Fate, since the book did speak truth to power at a time when such an act could prove lethal for an author. The problem, however, is that we only get half the truth from Grossman. Sadly, he’s too much of a Jew to give us anything more.

Parents have recently discovered that the education establishment—the odious class of persons consisting of professional school administrators, teachers certified by our social-justice-warrior education schools, and, often, disconnected boards of education “representing” gigantic swaths of voters, often representing districts the size of a small State—have inserted a program of so-called “critical race theory” into the K-12 curriculum.

The program typically has content similar to the mandatory diversity sessions at major corporations, in which Whites trudge into a large conference room and hear why they are all racist.

Parents are rightly outraged that their children are being subjected to anti-White propaganda instead of an actual education.  However, parents are making a big mistake.  They are reacting as if this is something new, as if only a few years ago all was well with modern public education.

Not so.  Critical Race Theory, or “CRT”, is simply the latest propaganda program snaking its way through the school system.  In fact, it seems reasonable to say that elites have been progressively attempting to use the public school system for more than 100 years as a method to anaesthetize successive generations, to acclimate them to automatic obedience to authority, and to reduce over time the actual educational content in the schools themselves.  Then, with the Federal Aid to Education Act of 1965, came an acceleration:  the centralized push of anti-White, pro-pre-marital sex, pro-globo-homo programs, one by one, through the system.  At first the propaganda was “justified” as a way to force southern Whites to “buy into” racial integration.  A form of revived reconstruction for the much-loathed Southern States.  Very quickly, however, the true intentions of the masters and commanders in Washington and compliant state capitals became evident:  a full scale “reconstruction” a la 1871 being forced on the entire country.  No one, it seemed, was sufficiently pro-Negro, pro-gay, pro-abortion, or pro-condoms and pro-pre-marital sex.  And the schools had damn well better take care of that.

We start from the beginning.

As John Taylor Gatto, a New York City school teacher for 30 years, set forth in his multiplicity of books on this topic (see, e.g. John Taylor Gatto, Weapons of Mass Instruction: A Schoolteacher’s Journey Through the Dark World of Compulsory Schooling, 2008) in the mid-nineteenth century the purpose of “public education” turned from the traditional colonial idea of producing an independent-thinking citizenry capable of participating in and supporting a free democratic republic into a system whose ultimate purpose was to regiment the vast majority of the population into a Prussian sense of passivity.  This program accelerated when, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, the foundations founded by large manufacturers and mineral extractors like Carnegie Steel and Standard Oil realized that the old-style education would produce people unwilling to work long hours at boring jobs for a single employer, such as the factories run by the giant capitalists of the day.  In fact the old-style school system would undoubtedly produce nothing more than a bunch of hell-raising troublemakers (think “give me Liberty or give me death”) that would continually disrupt production lines.

The program developed by the foundations picked up a number of wack-job pseudo intellectuals to put an acceptable cover on their intentions, the most well-known of whom was the infamous John Dewey.  Dewey’s basic premise, set out in his 1897 book, My Pedagogic Creed (available on Archive.org), effectively was that schools should stop teaching anything—i.e.,  facts, history, geography, grammar, arithmetic, Latin; rather, schools would teach children to cooperate with each other and, most importantly, with the teacher.  The intent clearly was to produce generations of students so ignorant of their own history and unable to function independently that they would generally be amenable to the absorption of any propaganda pushed their way by government or private industry so that they could become mere cogs in someone’s big wheel.

The big blocks to the implementation of such a program were that virtually every school was controlled by a separate school board, and public schools were financed by local taxes, not by the state or federal governments.  In 1880, for example, the U.S., with a population of approximately 50 million, had 140,000 school boards.  Thus, local parents and taxpayers—essentially the same thing in that era of big families (often farm families)—hired and fired the principals and the teachers, approved the textbooks, and controlled the curriculum.  The likelihood that they would knowingly subvert their children’s education at the behest of the Rockefellers was slim indeed.  This posed a big problem.

How was one to force a centralized program through such a fractured system?  The methods were many, and, over time, stunningly effective.

• First, school district “consolidation” always sold on the basis of “efficiency” and expanded opportunity. Hence the mega high schools of today and the mega school districts.  Today, the number of school districts has been reduced to 14,000, many comprising such mega districts as Loudon County (60,000 in 1960, now 400,000); or New York City (8 million).  The larger a district becomes, the less accountable to local parents and taxpayers.  Effectively, many school districts have become what in the U.K. are called “quangos”—self-perpetuating entities like the FDA or the SEC virtually unaccountable to elected authority.
• Second, a nationwide system of “teacher certification” that would require—or at least strongly encourage—public schools to hire only teachers that had been certified as professional teachers, mainly through attendance at soon-to-be formed teachers colleges.
• Third, the funding of a whole series of teachers colleges, each of which would, over time, push the desired centralized dogma onto the teachers. Some turned out to be worse than others, but, they gradually became what could be called propaganda centers, with less and less educational content and more whipped cream stirred up by centralized bureaucrats.
• Fourth, the flip-side of steps two and three—the consequent elimination of normal college graduates from the certified teacher rolls. Out goes the Yale history or mathematics graduate, in comes the SJW educated in very little from a mediocre teacher’s college.  The low IQ, uneducated mass of teachers was picture perfect for a system intentionally designed to eliminate educational content and maximize the teaching of docility and, later, outright propaganda.  Attempts to change certification to provide that all college graduates should be automatically certified have been fought tooth and nail.  Befuddled conservatives can’t figure out why, since the proposal is so logical, but of course this could not be done!  Doing so would undermine the whole program!

Things were moving along, but then the whole program got a jet-fueled boost by the Federal Education Act of 1965.

Contrary to what one might think, the Federal Aid to Education Act of 1965 did not provide ONE DOLLAR to schools or classrooms.  The sole permissible use of the money was to fund and keep in place vast state-level education bureaucracies.  Such centralized bureaucracies, whose employees would undoubtedly be staffed by “professional” school administrators educated at the crappy teacher’s colleges, were custom-designed to assist the federal government in substantially centralizing state education through the imposition of detailed state-wide rules on curricula and hiring, as well as to assist in pushing through the system the propaganda favored by the elites in Washington D.C.

From 1965 on, the entire educational bureaucracy has been grindingly waging a war against Whites, and a war in favor of “sex education”—read, the promotion of pre-marital sex, homosexuality, and now transgenderism.  Old books in school libraries not furthering the narrative were quietly stripped out of school libraries and curricula, propagandistic “new” books pushing a pro-Negro, pro-homosexual, and pro-free sex program were inserted into school libraries and curricula.

Only in the latest twist has CRT been introduced.  However, CRT is no more than a modest extension of the anti-White, anti-family curricula that has been pushed through the system since 1965—another indication that the countercultural revolution of the 1960s has been a watershed even in American history.  In that sense, “educators” who state that “CRT is nothing new” have a valid point.  But the real issue is: will parents unite to strip away the whole disastrous system and its already-imbedded programs to start anew?

Here are some modest suggestions that might be implementable:

• Subdivide school districts so that each school has its own school board (may require state legislation). If it cannot be done officially, do it unofficially.
• Along with (i), over time, work to reduce substantially the size of any one school. The mega-school of three to four thousand children needs to be replaced gradually with much smaller schools.
• If permitted under state law, NEVER hire another “certified” teacher; if state law does not permit this, work to change state law.
• Never hire a “certified” “professional” school administrator. They hate you, your race, and your family.  Instead, hire administrators—principals and district superintendents only from the local community, and make sure they are people who can be trusted.  Again, if state law does not permit this, work to change state law.
• Demand that a detailed syllabus and reading list for every course be posted on a school’s website. Have a parent’s committee—assisted by independent scholars selected solely by the parents—select the books and design the midterm and final exams and make the teachers teach to your test, not someone else’s.  In that way, teachers—even if “credentialed” social justice warriors—will be forced to teach your curriculum, not someone else’s.
• Work to change law to end statewide mandates such as (a) mandatory bus transport, (b) mandatory nurses and psychiatrists on staff, and (c) mandatory school lunch. These programs can almost double the cost of local education and provide no educational benefit.
• Avoid where possible the use of textbooks, particularly in history or English courses. The textbook industry is as corrupt and woke as the federal Department of Education. Use original works wherever possible.  If not possible, except perhaps with math textbooks, use only textbooks 50 years old or more.  Using old textbooks, especially those out of copyright, can substantially reduce the cost of books at a local school.

Depending on the state, not all, but much of this can be done by a local school board.  If these steps are taken, a lot of the John Dewey/1965 Act system will literally be swept away at the local level.

If, instead, school boards restrict themselves to rules prohibiting CRT, the result will be failure.  The already corrupted system will just fall back on the pre-CRT anti White curricula—not to mention the globo-homo-trans curricula—it was already promulgating.

The real question, thus, is not the students but the parents.  Have they been so anesthetized by THEIR public education that they cannot act?

If so, perhaps CRT—and what will inevitably follow—is a well-deserved punishment.

As the Peruvian author Nicholas Gomez Davilla noted in his Schola to an Implicit Text:  “the modern age will not be punished; it is the punishment.”