Dr. James P. Wicktrom
BOLSHEVISM AND THE JEWS
The
unprecedented catastrophe of the Russian revolution required an
explanation… For very many this lay in the coming to power of the Jews,
and their hatred for the Russian people. For after the revolution of
February, 1917 the Jews acquired full rights with the rest of the
population, and the (already very porous) barriers set up by the 'Pale of
Settlement' were destroyed. Jews poured from the western regions into
the major cities of European Russia and soon acquired prominent
executive positions in all major sectors of government and the economy.
As
Alexander Solzhenitsyn has written, February brought only harm and
destruction to the Russian population. However, “Jewish society in
Russia received in full from the February revolution everything that it
had fought for, and the October coup was really not needed by it,
except by that cutthroat part of the Jewish secular youth that with its
Russian brother-internationalists had stacked up a charge of hatred
for the Russian state structure and was straining to ‘deepen’ the
revolution.” It was they who through their control of the Executive
Committee of the Soviet – over half of its members were Jewish
socialists – assumed the real power after February, and propelled it on –
contrary to the interests, not only of the Russian, but also of the
majority of the Jewish population, - to the October revolution.
Nevertheless,
at the time of the October revolution only a minority of the
Bolsheviks were Jews (in the early 1900s they constituted 19% of the
party). “At the elections to the Constituent Assembly ‘more than 80% of
the Jewish population of Russia voted’ for Zionist parties. Lenin wrote
that 550,000 were for Jewish nationalists. ‘The majority of the Jewish
parties formed a single national list, in accordance with which seven
deputies were elected – six Zionists’ and Gruzenberg. ‘The success of
the Zionists’ was also aided by the Declaration of the English Foreign
Minister Balfour [on the creation of a ‘national centre’ of the Jews in
Palestine], ‘which was met by the majority of the Russian Jewish
population with enthusiasm [in Moscow, Petrograd, Odessa, Kiev and many
other cities there were festive manifestations, meetings and religious
services]’.”
The
simultaneous triumph of the Jews in Russia and Palestine was indeed an
extraordinary “coincidence”: Divine Providence drew the attention of
all those with eyes to see this sign of the times when, in one column
of newsprint in the London Times
for November 9, 1917, there appeared two articles, the one announcing
the outbreak of revolution in Petrograd, and the other – the promise of
a homeland for the Jews in Palestine (the Balfour declaration).
This
coincidence was reinforced by the fact that the theist Jews who
triumphed in Israel in 1917, and especially in 1948 after the foundation
of the State of Israel, came from the same region and social
background – the Pale of Settlement in Western Russia – as the atheist
Jews who triumphed in Moscow in 1917. Sometimes they even came from
the same families. Thus Chaim Weitzmann, the first president of Israel,
points out in his Autobiography
that his brothers and sisters were all either Zionists or Bolsheviks.
M. Heifetz also points to the coincidence in time between the October
revolution and the Balfour declaration. “A part of the Jewish generation
goes along the path of Herzl and Zhabotinsky. The other part, unable
to withstand the temptation, fills up the band of Lenin and Trotsky and
Stalin.” “The path of Herzl and Bagritsky allowed the Jews to stand
tall and immediately become not simply an equal nation with Russia, but
a privileged one.”
Indeed,
the Russian revolution may be regarded as one branch of that general
triumph of Jewish power which we observe in the twentieth century in
both East and West, in both Russia and America and Israel. The mainly
Jewish nature of the Bolshevik leadership – and of the world revolution
in general – cannot be doubted. Such a view was not confined to
“anti-Semites”.
Thus
Winston Churchill wrote: “It would almost seem as if the Gospel of
Christ and the gospel of anti-Christ were designed to originate among
the same people; and that this mystic and mysterious race had been
chosen for the supreme manifestations, both of the Divine and the
diabolical… From the days of ‘Spartacus’ Weishaupt to those of Karl
Marx, and down to Trotsky (Russia), Bela Kun (Hungary), Rosa Luxembourg
(Germany) and Emma Goldman (United States), this worldwide conspiracy
for the overthrow of civilization and for the reconstitution of society
on the basis of arrested development, of envious malevolence and
impossible equality, has been steadily growing. It played, as a modern
writer, Mrs. Nesta Webster, has so ably shown, a definitely recognizable
part in the tragedy of the French Revolution. It has been the
mainspring of every subversive movement during the nineteenth century;
and now at last this band of extraordinary personalities from the
underworld of the great cities of Europe and America have gripped the
Russian people by the hair of their heads and have become practically
the undisputed masters of that enormous empire. There is no need to
exaggerate the part played in the creation of Bolshevism and in the
bringing about of the Russian Revolution by these international and for
the most part atheistical Jews. It is certainly a very great one; it
probably outweighs all others.”
Douglas
Reed writes: “The Central Committee of the Bolshevik Party, which
wielded the supreme power, contained 3 Russians (including Lenin)
and 9 Jews. The next body in importance, the Central Committee of the
Executive Commission (or secret police) comprised 42 Jews and 19
Russians, Letts, Georgians and others. The Council of People’s
Commissars consisted of 17 Jews and five others. The Moscow Che-ka
(secret police) was formed of 23 Jews and 13 others. Among the names of
556 high officials of the Bolshevik state officially published in
1918-1919 were 458 Jews and 108 others. Among the central committees of
small, supposedly ‘Socialist’ or other non-Communist parties… were 55
Jews and 6 others.”
Richard Pipes admits: “Jews undeniably played in the Bolshevik Party and the early Soviet apparatus a role disproportionate to their share of the population. The number of Jews active in Communism in Russia and abroad was striking: in Hungary, for example, they furnished 95 percent of the leading figures in Bela Kun’s dictatorship. They also were disproportionately represented among Communists in Germany and Austria during the revolutionary upheavals there in 1918-23, and in the apparatus of the Communist International.”